Don't Fear the (Not Really Grim) Reaper Read online

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Text

  About the Author

  By Carole Cummings

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  Copyright

  Don’t Fear the (Not Really Grim) Reaper

  By Carole Cummings

  When unassuming college student Emery Sutton wakes up in the morgue, it takes him a few minutes to remember he has magic (superpowers, damn it!) and free himself from the refrigerated drawer. And the body bag. (God.) It doesn’t take long, though, for him to remember the hot guy with wings he ran into just before a city bus ran into him.

  Junior Reaper John must explain to his supervisor how his first solo assignment went so wrong. All he knows is that he happened upon Emery quite by accident, that Emery saw John when he shouldn’t have been able to, and when they accidentally touched, a bus came out of nowhere and plowed Emery under. (John really does feel bad about that.)

  Hot angels, annoying demons, hijinks, absurdity, drunk siblings, a dash of silly romance, an inordinate attachment to wings, and a highly disorganized bid for world domination—Don’t Fear the (Not Really Grim) Reaper follows Emery and John down the rabbit hole where they find that moms are scarier than demons from hell, a goat is not a puppy no matter what Emery’s sister says, and awkward romance can happen anywhere.

  To the DSP/DSPP/HI Editing Team, who always have my back. (And who always let me argue with them until I figure out they were right in the first place, and really, why don’t I just save us all the time and make the freaking changes already!)

  Author’s Note

  FARCE (NOUN):

  a light dramatic composition marked by broadly satirical comedy and improbable plot

  Sooooo… y’know. Just so we’re clear.

  xoxo

  Carole

  THE FIRST time Emery dies, it’s kind of a shock.

  Well, not the dying part, since he doesn’t see that coming until after it’s all over anyway. Too preoccupied with the shockingly hot guy who’d just walked up to him and touched him on the arm—just walked up and touched him—and Emery just gapes into eyes that are bottomless electric green and thinks holy shit, wings, black and gleaming like raven feathers and sprouting right out of the guy’s back like they belong there.

  And then a city bus plows him under.

  Which also isn’t the surprising part because Emery’s life is a bit on the absurd side in the first place; of course his death would be a clichéd punch line.

  So, since he’d kind of been crossing a busy street—who knew jaywalking was a real thing?—and then just standing in the middle of it, staring at a man he swears walked right out of his best wet dream ever, having been run over isn’t really all that surprising. Well, the wings were surprising. Because, you know—wings. But then again, wings—angels—Angel of Death—duh. So yeah, that’s not as surprising as it would have been to someone else either, at least in retrospect.

  It’s actually the “retrospect” thing that gets him, the fact that there even is “retrospect,” because waking up after all of it—that’s the surprise.

  And, since he’s Emery and his life is clichéd and absurd, he has to do the waking-up part in the city’s morgue in the dead of night like some kind of bad vampire B-movie plot. Except vampires probably don’t whack their heads on the inside of the refrigerated drawer or take about twelve endless hours—or three panicked minutes, whichever—to figure out how to unzip a body bag from the inside. And then another twelve endless hours—maybe four minutes this time; he’s a little hysterical—to try to understand where he is, what he’s doing here, and what happened. Also, figuring out how to get out of the refrigerated drawer would be nice, since it’s cold and also not meant to be opened from the inside.

  God.

  He’s luckier than most—actually any—who might find themselves in this ludicrous situation, though, because Emery is a little bit magic—

  God, Dad, they’re superpowers, okay?

  Emery, turning your sister’s hair green and purple is not a superpower.

  —and though it takes longer than it should for him to remember that not insignificant fact, and then longer still for him to calm down enough that he can concentrate and use it, he does eventually manage to open the drawer and climb out. Right into the morgue’s theater, complete with sheet-draped gurneys and shiny dissecting tools. Emery does not start crying for his mother.

  It takes some courage, but Emery does eventually find enough of it to inspect his—meh, naked—self for pokey-out bones and horrible gaping wounds. Bus, after all. But even though he can see several smears of what must be his own blood in various places on his body, and he does have a bit of a headache that probably doesn’t count, he’s remarkably unmarred.

  He’s surprised, and he’s not. He’s always healed quicker than he should. He’d broken his leg once and had to keep the cast on for four weeks longer than necessary, because his mother refused to take him to her clinic to get it off until the miraculous healing could believably be passed off as not miraculous at all. Emery had sulked all four weeks because he’d been thirteen and already a nerdy social pariah and waddling around on crutches and calling attention to himself—AKA: metaphorically spreading chum in the shark-infested waters of junior high school—had been as bad as implied by every John Hughes movie ever.

  Still, none of that has prepared him for the fact that he has apparently been dead and is not any longer. It’s… disturbing. In a “yay, not dead!” sort of way. But still. Even though it’s him and he knows he’s not some kind of ghoul or something—he stops to feel his heartbeat and check that he’s breathing, just to be sure, and… okay, super, he’s apparently not Patient Zero of the zombie apocalypse.

  And now he’s actually creeping himself out. The morgue probably isn’t helping.

  Also—toe tag. Jesus.

  He calls out one “Hello?” because he’s seen all the bad horror flicks, and it’s just what you do. You hear a noise coming from the creepy haunted house in the middle of the night on Halloween, and you go alone and unarmed to investigate while wearing six-inch pumps to make running away from the insert-scary-thing-here as difficult as possible. Thusly, you find yourself alone in a morgue after apparently having just been dead, and you call stupid attention to yourself and wake all the zombies so they can shuffle over and eat you while you inexplicably lose the ability to move faster than really slow dead people.

  None of that actually happens. Which is lucky, because, among other things, Emery can’t tell which scenario would appall him more: the one where the dead people get up and eat him, or the one where he suddenly finds himself in six-inch pumps.

  …Yeah, that’s probably something that doesn’t need to be in his head right now.

  It is the dead of night, though, so maybe clichés aren’t all that bad, because this one at least lets Emery creep away from the remnants of his “death” without raising any alarms except the one that’s bleating steadily inside his own head.

  See, other people would probably go wandering out into the hallways and find someone to help them. And then there’d be a big hubbub about how they probably hadn’t been dead at all, and the doctor who’d declared them so would have to have an inquiry, and lawsuits would fly and heads would roll and the not-actually-dead person would end up with a story in the news and a nice little nest egg, courtesy of the city. That won’t happen for Emery for several reasons:

  1) Obviously, he’s been declared dead, and knowing the way his life works, it’s most likely because he probably was. His life is kind of ludicrous—has he mentioned that? Also, it
’s full of bizarre stuff other people only see in fantasy movies. Still, though, nothing like this has ever happened before. He’d had no idea until five minutes ago that the term “dead” does not apply to him, so he thinks maybe he needs to keep this newest twist to himself just as stingily as he’s kept his magi—superpowers. Damn it, Dad.

  2) He’s avoided hospitals and the authorities his whole short life for a reason. “Waking from the dead” will only be the tip of the iceberg if he lets them subject him to the batteries of tests that must surely follow someone who’d been dead one minute and not so much the next.

  3) His father’s voice is ringing in his ears, as it tends to do when Emery finds himself in absurd situations and apparently isn’t scared and embarrassed enough, and it keeps repeating They’ll take you away, Emmie—oh yeah, his dad calls him Emmie, because, clearly, naming him Emery wasn’t quite close enough to dangling raw steak in front of the noses of the junkyard dogs who masquerade as the high school football team—Emmie, the Dad-voice in his head says, you’ll be a goddamned lab rat and we’ll never see you again because once they have you, they’ll never let you go. And then his mother nodding along in doctorly conviction like she’s seen it all before. Because there’s nothing like a little parentally instilled unreasonable paranoia to warm your little boy heart with antiauthoritarian mistrust and a healthy fear of anyone with a clipboard.

  4) Oh crap, he has to call his parents.

  5) And, the last and most important reason Emery will not be wandering the halls of whatever hospital this is: he’s naked, and no way is he presenting himself to strangers without even a pair of boxers. They’ve probably seen enough already. Also, it’s cold, and… well. George Costanza kind of ruined the whole “shrinkage” thing for everyone.

  Transporting is not something with which Emery has ever felt confident. He’d seen a movie once wherein the whiney, entitled, bratty “hero”—who’d also played a whiney, entitled, bratty pre-Darth Vader, and hadn’t that just sucked all respect for the name “Skywalker” out of Emery’s geeky preteen heart—the bratty “hero” could just sort of picture a place in his head and flip there with cool whooshing sound effects and a few CGI ripples.

  Totally not how it works.

  It’s more like slipping right into the vastness of the cosmos, then finding the needle of where he wants to be inside the infinite haystacks of time and space—like, all the space—and then just sort of… shifting his molecules into the available gaps. And if whatever entity that gives him his superpowers isn’t being particularly dickish that day, he won’t end up a moaning smear of formless matter like that guy who had an unfortunate encounter with a transporter beam in that crappy Star Trek movie.

  Emery sighs and looks down at his naked self.

  “Well,” he says and squares his shoulders. “I suppose waking up dead could’ve been worse. At least I’m not a White Walker.” He shudders. Nobody looks good in exposed tendons.

  And with that happy thought, Emery shuts his eyes and wills himself back to his dorm.

  ADMINISTRATOR DAGMAR pinches her lips down tight and peers at her clipboard. “How would you characterize your first solo mission?” she asks blandly, silver pen in hand and poised over what John suspects is blank paper. Not because Administrator Dagmar is engaging in pretense, but because everything here is blank, nonexistent, until it’s given form by purpose.

  John flicks a look around at the white walls backing the white furniture lit by white light that comes from… somewhere. He clears his throat.

  “I located the subject with no difficulty, ma’am. She went peacefully.”

  Actually, she went with a smile on her wrinkled face and an arthritic but still very strong hand set firmly to John’s backside. But Administrator Dagmar doesn’t need to know that.

  “Hmm,” says Administrator Dagmar, thin eyebrows rising, but she merely makes a note John can’t see on her clipboard and asks, “No troubles, then?”

  John lifts his chin. “Troubles, ma’am?”

  “Problems? Disturbances? Concerns?”

  “Concerns?” John shifts a little and tries not to shuffle guiltily. “What kind of concerns might you mean, ma’am?”

  Administrator Dagmar’s mouth twists to the side. “The kind that might be of concern, I should think.” She still doesn’t look up, pen still stroking, only loudly enough now that John can hear the scritch-scratch of it over the paper he still can’t see.

  “Well.” John clasps his hands behind his back where she can’t see them fidgeting. “The city’s changed quite a lot since I’d last seen it. I took a moment to find a newspaper and check the date.” He pauses and not-really-pouts. “You didn’t tell me it’s been so long.”

  Administrator Dagmar slides her silver pen along the page in a loopy flourish, then stops writing. She pulls the clipboard against her chest and levels John with a flat look.

  “You remember when you were last There?”

  There, meaning the world. Humanity. Life. Not Here.

  John shrugs and looks down. “Enough to get by, like anyone else.”

  It’s not entirely true. There are things he remembers now he knows he shouldn’t. Things he knows the other Reapers don’t. Things Administrator Dagmar would make sure John forgot if he lets on he knows them.

  Things he hadn’t remembered before… whatever it was that happened, about which he has no intention of informing Administrator Dagmar.

  He remembers his name isn’t John. He doesn’t remember what his name actually is, but he knows it’s not John.

  “Hmm.” Administrator Dagmar gives her head a sharp shake and retreats to her desk. She sits and lays her clipboard to the side. It still looks blank and white to John. Nonetheless, Administrator Dagmar peers down at it with a little squint and says, “So the name Emery Sutton means nothing to you, then?”

  Emery. So that was his name.

  John tries to make his frown look suitably confused. “No, ma’am. Should it?”

  Administrator Dagmar gives him a long, hard look. “I should think it would, yes, since you apparently allowed him to see you in your true form and then transitioned him with no sanction from this office or orders from the Head Office.”

  “Oh.” John does fidget this time. He’d figured someone would notice, but he’d hoped the oddity of the circumstance would fly somewhat under the radar. It had been his first solo assignment, after all, and he hadn’t wanted to come back and report he’d messed it up. And certainly not how. Since he still doesn’t really understand that part, he merely says, “Well, ma’am, that was unintentional.”

  “Unintentional.” Administrator Dagmar looks supremely unimpressed.

  “Yes, ma’am. You see….” John pauses. Because it had all been very strange, and there are things about it he doesn’t want to tell. “I had finished with Martha Greenway quite promptly. And everything did go very smoothly. I had time left over, you see, and I was curious, since everything had changed so much since last time I was There. No flying cars, though.” John can’t help the disappointed frown. They’d been promised flying cars! “And no cities in the clouds or anything like that. Cloud City, that’s from Star Wars. Lando Calris—”

  “Yes, John, I am aware.” Administrator Dagmar’s tone is sharp.

  John shuts his mouth and takes a breath. “Right. Well. Anyway, I wanted to look at a newspaper, find out the date, so I was crossing the street, and then he was crossing from the other side, and….”

  And he was just so pretty. And okay, John hadn’t meant to touch him, or at least not Touch him. But those pale blue eyes had latched onto John, had seen him when no one is supposed to see him unless he tells them to, and the guy had looked over John’s shoulder and those amazing eyes widened and John had heard Holy shit, wings. So John may have snapped his wings out and preened a little, but then… well. John’s not really sure what happened next. He kind of remembers reaching out, something inside him seeking contact, human touch. Except then a surge of something had c
ome from the guy, and John’s Reaper reflexes kicked in, and touch turned into Touch, and next thing he knew, he was almost, almost remembering things.

  And then there was a bus.

  Which might have been a little bit John’s fault, since he was doing the don’t notice me thing, and since that kind of leaks out all over whoever he’s dealing with at the time, the bus driver couldn’t be blamed for not seeing the pretty guy standing in the middle of the street staring at an angel no one was supposed to be able to see in the first place. And since John was there and all, and it was sort of his fault—and he really does feel bad about that; no one should go out that young and via bus, it’s like a bad joke—and it’s pretty much his job anyway, John pushed the guy through to the Transition queue and hoped no one would notice.

  His first real mission and his first big blunder.

  John doesn’t say any of that. He says, “Well, ma’am, I encountered a young man, this Emery Sutton”—Emery, Emery, Emery, his mind singsongs, with hair as black as my wings and eyes like a mountain lake—“and there was, um… some inadvertent touching, and the—”

  “I do not care to hear about the courting rituals of the young and untried,” Administrator Dagmar intones, thick with warning. “What I do care about, however, is what any of this might have to do with Emery Sutton meeting a demise that was not on my schedule.” She taps the pen against the blank clipboard with crisp little ticks. “In fact, it would seem Mr. Sutton is not on any schedule. Ever.”

  John blinks. “Is that even possible?”

  “No, except in the case of—” Administrator Dagmar scowls. “But it would seem possibility is not a factor here.” She sets the pen aside and sits back, eyeing John with a speculative gleam. “Emery Sutton was not in the Transition queue.”

  John tries not to deflate in disappointment. He’d been hoping to find the guy—Emery—before he moved on to Intake and Assessment, maybe apologize for transitioning him before he was scheduled… maybe think of other things to talk about. Fraternizing is not against the rules. And John thinks he might remember how to date. Maybe. Probably. There’s flowers and stuff, right?