Storm Grant Quirky fiction that's pretty, witty, and gritty.

  Home     Bio     Blog    My Delicious    Contact    Online Fiction    Nonfiction   Links   My Amazon.com Store    My Amazon.ca Store (Cdn)

Note: Cover is placeholder only.

SCYTHE DOES MATTER, Book 1 in The Reluctant Reaper series

High Concept: Reaper Boot Camp—and you thought high school was Hell!

Excerpt: Chapter 1. Death is what happens while you’re making other plans.

The Reaper brandished the scroll exactly as he had his scythe back in the men’s room at the Copa dance club. Grimacing, he said, “Know ye, Kirsty d’Arc, that I, Dante Phere, take no pleasure in holding you, I mean thee, to your contract.”

He snapped his wrist, causing the parchment to unfurl, mostly. The bottom curled back up. Even though the contract couldn’t be more than a few days old, the Goddamn humidity down here caused everything to curl and frizz.

“What’s with the sudden Darth Vader act?” I ran a shaky hand over my curls, wondering if I was a big ball of frizz like Barbra Streisand in A Star is Born. To be honest, I was afraid to touch the cursed thing: the parchment, not Barbra Streisand’s hair. Still, I had to know. I leaned in, struggling to read the old fashioned gothic letters. Betty the typesetter in the Art Department at Iver Public Relations Inc., where I worked — correction, had worked — always said readability was the most important thing. Maybe she could enlighten whatever long-dead monk had prepared this design atrocity. “Is this even English?”

“Gheramaic,” Dante answered. “It was the language of the… never mind. But you should be able to read it. Try unfocusing your eyes a little.”

“I should be able to read a dead language I never even heard of before?” I squinted at the document, trying to see past it like one of those op art paintings. “Know ye, Dante Phere,” I intoned. “That I, Kirsty d’Arc flunked high school French.” The curlicues and serifs (Betty taught me that word, too), floated before my eyes like ants in a puddle. “What a crappy typeface. You’d think you’d use hell-vetica.” That little bit of levity must have helped because the fancy letters suddenly coalesced into words that read like English to me. I read it aloud, my voice sounding scratchy and weak to my own ears.

I wiped sweat from under my wispy bangs, one large drop escaping and rolling down my cheek. I tasted blood where I’d chewed my lip, and bile from… well, we know where bile comes from. I had to see. I had to know. I reached up slowly, hand trembling like it was 30 below and I’d been waiting at a bus stop for 40 minutes. Dante chewed his own lip, eyes ever leaving mine. Slowly I uncurled the bottom of the parchment. Oh my God! (Could I even still say that?) There was my signature, written in a bloody but recognizable scrawl. I unrolled the parchment a little more. Under the word: “Acquiesor:” Conrad’s autograph stood out in bold, red-black letters. I pulled the paper down the rest of the way, shocked to see who had witnessed it: Beatrice Trayor.

“Not Bea,” I whispered. “She was my best friend.” I raised my eyes to meet Dante’s. “And she’d helped send me to an early grave.”

“Oh, you’re not dead. What made you think that?” He dropped his hand, letting the parchment dangle by his thigh.

“Uh, I dunno. The fact that you reaped me with a scythe? The fact that we’re about to journey into hell? The fact that it appears I sold my soul?”

“Oh, that. Well, it’s a funny story, actually. It seems there was a bit of a mistake— Oof.”

Interesting thing about being in hell. Dead or not, I could still kick a guy in the groin pretty effectively.

“All I wanted was a nice job working in a fun industry with some cool people. I liked working at Iver P.R. I could have stayed there for the rest of my life. They were like a family to me.” Until my faux father figure used me as a shield to save himself from being reaped. And my best friend betrayed me. Well, maybe that was what a real family was like. How would I know? I’d never had one.

I reached down to where Dante rolled around in the glowing red dirt and yanked the scroll from his hand. No longer shaking, I studied it carefully. “It’s a fake. A forgery.” I told the writhing reaper. “I mean, sure, it looks like my signature, but I never signed it. I need to speak to someone in authority. So, like, who’s in charge here?” Realizing what I’d just asked, I bit my tongue. Maybe Dante was preoccupied enough not to have heard me.

I stood around, checking my cuticles and wishing I had a nail file. Or my purse. Or my Sony Walkman. Or anything other than the clothing I’d been wearing. Which wasn’t so bad, since I was wearing my favorite acid washed Sergio Valente jeans and a crop top with the sleeves torn out and great shoulder pads. After a couple of minutes (although I’m sure it seemed much longer to him), Dante levered himself up into something that could be called a sitting position. “You can,” he gasped. “Apply for an appeal.” He pushed himself up, using his glowing green scythe that looked like a cross between a light sabre and a hockey stick. “Might take a while, though.”

“What? Where?” I asked. Okay, so I wasn’t at my best. Would you be?

Because we hadn’t quite completed our descent into hell, we had a nice aerial view of the place. Dante pointed to a long queue of people. The line-up snaked around buildings, extending along the river and off into the distance. “That’s the line-up for people wanting to appeal their sentences. It seems there’s always ‘extenuating circumstances’.” He made annoying little air quotes around “extenuating circumstances”. Can you kill a reaper, I wondered. He gusted out a huge sigh, deactivating his scythe and hanging it back on his belt. Now it looked exactly like a light sabre at rest, or one of those nifty folding umbrellas.

“Okay, I guess.” I was kind of out of options. “I got nothing but time, right?”

Setting his feet carefully, Dante led the way downhill. “Careful, watch where you put your—”

“Whoa!” I cried, flailing my arms like a demented windmill. Dante grabbed my elbow to keep me upright. “Watch out for those grey, slimy things. Those G.I.s will slip away when you least expect them to.”

“G.I.s?” I asked, placing my feet where he did.

“Good intentions. The road to hell is paved with them. It’s a slippery slope.”

Great. Puns. Now I knew I was really in hell.

Chapter 2. Today is the last day of the rest of your life.