The woman’s eyes were as dark as my own when she met my gaze. For the first time, she spoke to me. It was then that I realized she’d never talked to me before. Her voice came to me in my mind as if she’d been inside my head all along.
“I am a ferryman.”
The woman in the black coat, who could talk inside my mind and didn’t have to walk to go from one place to another, terrified me in ways I had never experienced, not then, at any rate. I learned later that my fear was unfounded, but at that moment, I didn’t realize she was kind and caring.
“The afterlife is waiting for you.” Hence, our bodies floating down the river.
The prince began to cry. “But Father hasn’t sanctioned my death.”
“Your father will have his day. Three years, four months, and twenty days from now.” She met my gaze. “You will ferry him into the afterlife.”
I sucked in a breath. “What? Why me?”
The prince scowled. “Yes. Very good question. Why him? I am a prince. Worthy of being someone of such importance.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You find him unworthy, then?”
“He is but a mere stable hand.” The prince seemed to recover faster than I did, having figured out what the hell was going on. He held his chin high and wrinkled his nose as if he smelled something foul. Looking back on the moment, I found him utterly ridiculous in that posture, with his cock hanging flaccid between his legs.
I was still stuck on my lifeless body, floating dead, not even ten feet away. Was I an it, since my soul had left the rest of me stranded in the river? I was still walking and talking to a woman who called herself a ferryman, as if that were an ordinary job.
I’d been born into my station. Some might say the prince was luckier than I, simply because he was the son of a king. I would disagree. He died in a river because the king had forbidden him to enter it, and therefore, he couldn’t swim. His longing for the kind of freedom I, as someone in a lower station, had was what killed him. While I still died, I understood, even then, that it was the woman in the cloak who had ended my life by keeping me stationary, not my own failure.
“Grymley is my heir. My blood, the only one left to ferry souls in Region Twelve. He also risked his life to save you. You would not have returned the favor.” I wanted to correct her and say Irisked my life for the prince’s stellar backside, but that sounded too crass, even in my own head.
“I’m a descendant of death?” That was news to me. Not that I knew much about where I’d come from. My mother had died giving birth to me, having never informed anyone of my paternity. The castle cook and the stableman raised me from a young boy. I liked to think they did a damn fine job. I find my own company satisfactory, after all.
“That you are, boy. Should you want the job, of course.”
Before I could say another word, she snapped her fingers. “Off you go, young prince.”
The prince protested, but it was short-lived. He stared at something to his left. I saw nothing beyond the strand of trees that marked the start of the Handgrave Forest. The forest was a dangerous place. No one with a lick of sense went inside. Many had died. It seemed the prince and I didn’t even have to do that to meet her.
The prince smiled as he walked toward the forest and a door that had suddenly appeared. “A carnival. I’ve always wanted to attend one.”
He disappeared a moment later. The air around him shifted, becoming visible for a brief moment before settling again.
She took my arm next and waited for me to speak. It took me a moment to realize she was waiting for me to accept the job.
“There must be a catch.”
She smiled as if delighted by my statement. “There is. If you accept the position, you’ll never see the afterlife. I will return your body to you, and you will live in it forever.”
Saying I was insecure in my skin would have been an understatement. I wanted lily-white skin like Prince Jasper's, not hands with calluses and skin tanned from too much time in the sun.
“Dying isn’t the worst thing.” Even then, I knew it wasn’t as bad as people made it out to be.
“Ferrying souls can be tiring.” Was that another catch?
I bit my lip, weighing my options. “Immortality sounds like a long time on Earth.”
What I didn’t realize at the time was that eternal life could be incredibly lonely.
Chapter One
Grymley Reaper
Yeah, my name was Grymley Reaper. Pretty ironic, wasn’t it? I changed my last name to Reaper a hundred twenty-five years ago, mainly because everyone else in the reaper department was doing it, and I didn’t want to be left out. I knew that following along was a stupid reason to do just about anything, but that was what I did.
