Chapter 1
One
Sebastian
Did you know how many people died in a day?
‘Cause I sure as shit didn’t know. I knew it was a hell of a lot because I was stuck in the human world more than I cared for, guiding the dead to their afterlife, whether it be ascending them to Heaven or descending them to Hell.
I was one of many working as a Reaper under the Grim Reaper who happened to be my dad. It was a very busy job…
A damn frustrating one too.
My eyes nearly rolled back into my head and I groaned watching the ghost. He sprinted out of his newly dead body and ran for dear life—from me.
I hated when they did this. Why would you want to stay with the living when you were a ghost?
I could understand the ones that were being sent to the flames, but this guy?
He was going to the pearly gates, yet here he was running through hospital walls to get away from me, all the while screaming, giving himself away.
Not that it was hard for me to find him. I could find him anywhere with my Reaper senses.
I yawned, covering my mouth. So tired. Always so damned tired. I stood there a minute and tested my weariness. I was pretty sure I was good for now, but you could never be too sure with a curse.
I had better get this over with, just in case.
That was all I needed—to pass out in the human world.
I’d have to hear Barron bitch for a century if he had to come fetch my sleeping body in a human hospital.
He already hated everything, doing anything, being anywhere; he was just the fun-sucker of the family. Not that he could help it.
Rolling my neck, I faded to where the ghost was hunched down in a janitor’s closet.
Fading was something only our family could do.
We had our own portal network—a speed travel that could pop us in and out wherever we wanted, literally.
If I wanted to pop in on the other side of the wall where the hallway was, I’d fade from here and re-fade to there all within the same second.
Or I could go to the Underworld in the same second.
It could be anywhere. I could fade in and out of time just to stand behind someone while previously standing in front of them.
Typically, it wasn’t ideal to do that in front of humans since they tended to freak out when shit disappeared and reappeared somewhere else.
But ghosts were a different story. They were dead already and understanding there was indeed an afterlife.
Now every other demon or monster—whatever, was stuck using a portal chip to transport where they wanted. We were superior that way. HAHAHAHA. Just kidding. I wasn’t that kind of asshole. I could be kick-ass though when I wasn’t sleeping.
“Don’t take me,” the dude screamed, holding his hands up to his face. “I don’t want to leave.”
Sighing, I bent down and removed the hood that was attached to my cloak.
Yes, cloak. Dad thought it was a Reaper’s job to wear one.
He was also as old as time itself, so there’s that.
“Is it the hood?” I asked him. “I try to tell Grim that it freaks you guys out, but I think that’s why he keeps it mandatory. ”
He kept screaming. “I want to stay here!” He threw himself onto the floor. I realized what he was doing and grabbed him by the back of his shirt before he slipped through the tiles.
I hauled him to his feet and opened the passage with my scythe.
The bright light had him completely mesmerized.
“Only good things from here.” I think. I didn’t know what Heaven was like.
Never would. “Time to let go of this life,” I told him.
“In ya go.” I gave him a smile right before he snapped out of it.
“Wait! No!”
I gave him a push, then a kick. There he went. I watched as the passage closed, swallowing him whole. I groaned. “I need a fucking nap.”
Right when I was about to fade the hell out of this human hospital, my Reaper senses started tripping again. Someone else was dying here… What the bloody hell? This hospital was tiny, in the middle of nowhere. How many people could die in this small town?
I slipped through the door, stepping back out into the hallway that was quiet and empty.
I walked to where the dying man was instead of fading, wondering why I wasn’t fading to get to him instead of walking the hall.
Wait, a second… as I got closer I felt the guy’s aura more.
This wasn’t a dying man, more like a dying werewolf.
A lot of vampires, werewolves, and otherworldly creatures lived in the human world, so it wasn’t weird for us to come across them dying while working, but this one wasn’t meant to die today.
Some lives were cut short by unexpected tragedies, or rather hiccups in Heaven’s perfect plan of life and death for humans.
I could tell what kind of death everyone was having.
This was one of those hiccups, but most of the time when a demon died prematurely it had something to do with another demon taking him out.
Curious, I faded into the werewolf’s room.
He was already dead; a nurse was unplugging him from some sort of machine.
Nothing looked wrong with him on the outside.
I watched as the foggy soul stretched out of his body.
Humans were the only ones that actually came back as ghosts, everyone else looked like this floaty-cloud-blob thing like this werewolf here.
His soul was angry too, screaming and roaring at me while I pinched a part of the fog between my fingers and opened a passage to the flames.
“Looks like you weren’t so friendly in life,” I told him before tossing him inside.
Still, it was weird I couldn’t sense how he died. I should be able to… I guess it didn’t matter. He probably deserved it.
I staggered forward, a dark tunnel clouding my vision.
“Shit,” I hissed, grabbing my head and reaching out with my other hand to grab onto something.
I let my scythe dematerialize as my vision came back into focus, but the drowsiness stayed.
It wasn’t a normal tiredness either, it was the kind that swallowed me up.
It was a dark abyss I could never escape— my curse. The sin and curse of sloth.
I couldn’t focus as the sleepiness took all my senses, all coherent thoughts, leaving nothing but the bone-deep feeling of slumber. I couldn’t even fade from the hospital. No humans could see me but the idea of being stuck here asleep…
There it was, I felt it seeping further into me, digging deeper.
I started tipping forward.
In my head, I could hear my asshole siblings yelling what they always did when this happened, Reaper down! Reaper down! Reaper—