A Reaper Made (2 page)

As it turned out, Tully was right about that “whole other world” part. The wealth of knowledge I’d gained about my new existence was almost frightening. Reapers were nonthreatening, peaceful, and stayed neutral on all terms. We had to; we weren’t the only things that harbored souls and it was our job to make sure we got to them before anything else - like demons - could.
 

Made Reapers worked a little differently from True Reapers. Mades like me didn’t have quite as many powers as the Trues. We were all naturally invisible and able to appear to both souls and humans, but Mades couldn’t change their appearance at will. We didn’t get telekinesis either, though Tully said most Reapers don’t even bother using it.
 

 
Despite being neutral between the two worlds, all Reapers had emotional moments, even the Trues. We saw lifetimes of death, the awful ways in which humans behaved. For Mades, it took years before human habits wore off and even after hundreds of years, it wasn’t unusual to still get emotional. As prior humans, emotions sometimes snuck in even though we obviously needed to remain neutral (Tully often reminded me I smiled a bit too much.) Most of the newer Mades like me still felt human, even blinked and breathed. It was the little things we’d taken for granted while we were alive that were the hardest to forget after you died.
 

CHAPTER THREE

Reapers were loner types, busy with helping all the souls, but those of us who’d started out human often craved companionship. Being turned Reaper didn’t mean we instantly became neutral. According to Tully, the average time it took to purge every last one of your human emotions took anywhere from one to three lifetimes. We still felt sadness or anger, we laughed or rolled our eyes (too much in my case if you asked Tully) and most of all, we felt lonely. I didn’t know what happened if a Made Reaper stayed emotional, but I guessed the theory was after all your friends and family die, once you see so much death and your world is no longer the one you knew, you lost the emotions.
 

In any case, Tully had never taken anyone under his wing before, but he was a Made like me. He’d wanted to help and introduced me to my now-best friend Tessa, who also happened to be a witch. Lucky for me, witches were immortal.
 

 
I did my rounds at the retirement home, but no lives teetered on the brink of life and death. No soul pulled at my core, not even a twinge - no one would need me here for a few hours. Sometimes even Reapers need a break. I closed my eyes and thought of Tessa’s apartment.
 

“Christ on a stick!” Tessa’s voice cried out. In her surprise, her eyes flashed purple, a witch’s true color. “Can you please stop doing that?”

I grinned as I flopped down next to her on the comfortable suede couch. She hated when I popped in unannounced and scared her half to death. Tessa wasn’t easily startled, which made it that much more entertaining for me. It’d been a while since I’d shaken her eye color spell; that one pretty much stuck for every witch if they knew the basics.
 

“Sorry, Tess.”
 

“Gonna have to make a spell to keep you from teleporting in here all willy-nilly,” she mumbled. Despite her irritation, she offered me the bowl of popcorn she’d been munching on. I shook my head. Reapers could eat all day long, and often loved to snack, but I didn’t feel like it right now.

“Haven’t seen you in a few days. How’s it going in the world of soul-collecting?” she said through a mouthful of popcorn.

I shrugged. “Same as usual. Had thirteen already this week.”

“Lucky thirteen,” she said with a smile playing on her lips.
 

Along with the magicked brown eyes, Tessa had given herself a cute button nose (she claimed her old nose was “hideously stereotypical”). Unlike Tully, who still clung to his old Irish roots, she had adjusted to each passing era. She dressed, talked, and acted like a regular human girl, as opposed to a witch who’d been around for a few lifetimes. Low-key and quick-witted, she was the total opposite of the shallow girlfriends I’d had when alive. I loved her for it.
 

“Don’t you get tired of doing the same old thing every single day?” she asked me.
 

“Uh, well, I’m dead, so that doesn’t affect me much anymore. And it’s sort of my job or whatever.”
 

Tessa sighed loudly and I raised an eyebrow at her. “I’m bored, Grace. I mean, look at me - I’ve been around since the Salem Witch Trials and I still look eighteen! You know how many times I’ve done a spell on a bouncer to get in a place? More than an old woman should do.”

“You’re definitely the only woman in existence to complain about getting carded.” I bit a grin back at her dirty look.
 

“It’s not about how I look, though, not really. I can’t grow old which isn’t normally a terrible problem to have, but you’ve only been dead for a few years. Wait until you watch your loved ones grow old and die. Then you’ll see how mundane everything truly is,” she pouted.
 

“That’s sort of why we’re not allowed to go back to our old lives after we die,” I said. This wasn’t the first time I’d had to make this argument with her. “Kind of why I’m here, remember?”
 

Reapers could travel anywhere they liked - except home. Since we couldn’t change our appearance, Mades weren’t supposed to visit our past until after the people we used to know and love were long gone. The risk of being seen was too great. Besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted to reap a soul I knew in life.
 

You had to cut off contact from all your living friends and family after you became a Reaper. Tully had warned me of too many horror stories for me to mess up my mom that way, no matter how much I missed her. My family might have been typical and boring - happily married parents, little sister, twin kid brothers, cute dog - but they were
my
typical and boring. My heart ached for them and not a day went by I didn’t think of them and wish for their health and happiness. I refused to think about what would happen to them in sixty to ninety years.
 

Tessa ignored me. “But it’s the same thing every single day from then until eternity. I’ll be making potions and healing wounds and casting spells forever. Sometimes I just wonder if that’s all there is.”

I gave her a bewildered look. “All there is? At least you’re still sort of human! Potions and magic, you can do whatever you want. No day has to be the same for you. I’m a Reaper - literally, what I do
is
all there is for me. Some drunk idiot killed me and now I’m going to be a soul-collecting ghost until the end of time. I’m even stuck in bright pink nursing scrubs for eternity.”

Tessa’s eyes widened as I ranted, my voice growing louder and angrier with each word. Reapers didn’t complain or explode. At least, no others Reapers did. My emotions always felt like they were at the surface; Tully said it was normal for the first decade, but perhaps being a teenage girl forever added a little oomph to the burn.
 

“Grace, whoa, sorry. I thought Reapers were great therapists because of their emotionless logic. I was only bending an ear, I didn’t know it’d hit a nerve or seven.”

I caught my breath. “No, I’m sorry. That was not very professional of me. Get back to me in a few decades and I should have it under control.”

Tessa chuckled in her good-natured way. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell Tully.”

We shared a grin. Tessa thought Tully was nice enough, but incredibly uptight. If you asked me, had Tully been human, he might’ve been sweet on Tess. He never scolded or rolled his eyes at her the way he did with me. She always waved me off when I teased her.
 

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate what I do,” I told her. “I’m not bored, not the way you describe. I guess it’s more that I still have my humanity and that makes me different from other Reapers.”

Tessa’s brow furrowed. “You don’t want your humanity?”
 

“Yes - I mean, no - I don’t know,” I said, shoulders slumping as I looked down at my lap. “I’m still pretty new. Mades aren’t good enough like the Trues, you know what I mean?”
 

She wrinkled a brow, puzzled. “There’s no hierarchy.”
 

“No, we’re all equal in the eyes of most, except each other. Even Tully still gets crap from Trues, and he’s been around for like, what, two centuries now?”

“Sounds about right.”
 

I played with the fringe on a couch pillow, not looking at Tessa. “Can I ask you a question?”

“I’m an open spell book.”
 

“How did you and Tully meet? I mean…he introduced us knowing we’d hit it off, but that’s all I know.” After a long moment, I glanced up to see Tessa’s lips twitch with amusement.
 

“Tully tried to reap my soul.”
 

My jaw dropped. “What?”
 

She laughed at my expression. “Here’s your brief history lesson of the day. I wasn’t around when Salem and their Puritans went after so-called witches, but you know they got their ideas from the Europeans, right?”

“Makes sense, we all migrated from that direction.”
 

Tessa nodded. “And so did their ideas of how to kill those who were different from them. Man, those guys loved a good stoning.”
 

My brow furrowed. “I thought tons of witches died in Salem by fire.”
 

She shook her head. “No fire and not as many as you think. Only twenty, one of them crushed to death by stones and the others hanged. Others died in prison. Europe, however, was a little bitchier about the whole witch thing. They burned people at the stake. I was minding my own business, living in Northern Europe in, I dunno, 1740-something? This guy - claimed he was some traveler, but I suspect he was a witch-hunter - caught me performing magic and turned me into the witch police, aka the Christians.”
 

I couldn’t help but be enthralled by her history lesson, having never heard it. As a kid of the modern era, it was hard to believe that sort of persecution had existed. I leaned forward as she spoke.
 

“After those stupid pilgrims thought they burned me alive, I had to wait it out so they’d leave. Pain in the ass, really - the fire destroyed my clothes, so hanging around on that post naked wasn’t exactly comfortable.” Tessa rolled her eyes and I smothered a grin.
 

“Where does Tully come in?” I asked.
 

A smile played on the corners of her mouth. “Well, it’d been a while since I’d slept, so I dozed off while biding my time. I woke up to find that damned Irish ginger in front of me, surprised as hell. I tried to keep my cool because I thought he’d come to cut my throat, but he assured me murder wasn’t his style.”

“But we sort of get that pull when souls are ready to leave this plane, how did he not realize you weren’t dead?”
 

Tessa shrugged. “He said he’d been walking through the area and saw the fire dying out around me, thought there was no way I could’ve survived. He’d only been around for like five years at that point, so I guess he didn’t realize witches don’t have that little dying problem.”
 

“Or that witches even existed,” I surmised.
 

She paused long enough to smirk. “He tried to disappear on me; when I could still see him, he revealed his Reaper status and I told him the truth. He had the gall to suggest witches had no souls.”
 

“He’s pretty old-school,” I said, almost apologetically. It didn’t surprise me that Tully would say such a thing. He was a great Reaper, sensitive to passing souls, but his blunt personality could sometimes, at least the way I saw it, be taken as rude.
 

“In any case, I gave him a hard time about it. He was the first Reaper I’d met and after he cut me down, we became pals. Or at least the closest thing to pals Reapers can have.”
 

I snorted. Tully didn’t have “pals.” He barely had acquaintances. I mean, I barely knew a thing about him and I’d been his mentee for the last three years.
 

Tully was one of the most serious people I’d ever met, even after I kicked the bucket. He’d died in 1740 from an Irish famine; I’d never prodded, but got the feeling his family had died around the same time as well. Once, when I asked about his own mentor, he’d pursed his lips beneath that bushy beard and said he’d rather not discuss it. I’d kept the personal questions to myself after that.
 

“You wanna watch a movie or something?” Tessa asked.
 

Before Tessa and I could decide on romance or comedy, a knock sounded at her front door. She went to open it and found Tully patiently waiting.
 

“We were just talking about you,” Tessa told him. “Ears burning?”
 

He gave her the side eye, choosing to ignore her statement and instead greet her as usual.
 

“You knock on doors when you can just teleport anywhere?” I asked him as he walked into the living room.
 

“Some people are polite,” Tessa mumbled under her breath. I stuck my tongue out at her and Tully sighed. I braced myself for the usual reprimand and wasn’t disappointed.
 

“What have I told you about maintaining composure, child?” he asked.
 

I grimaced. He was a stickler for rules, far worse than any doctor or teacher I’d learned from in life. He never hesitated to correct my errors. In fact, he was doing it right now.
 

“You’re off daydreaming again, aren’t you?” Tully asked, snapping me out of my thoughts.
 

“Only a little bit,” I responded, keeping a straight face when Tessa laughed. “What are you doing here anyway?”
 

“If you’d care to listen, you’d know,” Tully said, his tone a bit frosty. I managed an apologetic expression; he waved a hand at me as he leaned against the doorway. “I need to meet up with someone at the bar. I wanted to know if Tessa would accompany me.”