Unreap My Heart (The Reaper Series)

Cover

Title Page

UnReap My Heart

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Kate Evangelista

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Omnific Publishing

Los Angeles

Copyright Information

UnReap My Heart, Copyright © 2013 by Kate Evangelista

All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.

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Omnific Publishing

1901 Avenue of the Stars, 2nd Floor

Los Angeles, California 90067

www.omnificpublishing.com

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First Omnific eBook edition, September 2013

First Omnific trade paperback edition, September 2013

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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

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Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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Evangelista, Kate.

UnReap My Heart / Kate Evangelista – 1st ed

ISBN: 978-1-623420-50-5

1. Love—Fantasy. 2. Paranormal—Fiction. 3. Young Adult—Fiction. 4. Romance—Fiction. I. Title

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Cover Art by Liliana Sanches

Cover Design by Micha Stone and Amy Brokaw
Interior Book Design by Coreen Montagna

Dedication

To Dom,

my co-pilot, big little bro.

Everyone deserves a second chance.

Chapter 1

WTF

D
AMN
, I
T’S
G
OOD
to be back.

Balthazar took a breath of the dank and stagnant air. In the Underverse, the place parallel to the human world where all good things came to die, the air could never be considered fresh. Anyway, fresh always meant something other than air. Bad things.

One side of Balthazar’s lips pulled up.
Yup, good to be back.

Time to mess things up.

He’d been running nonstop for a day and a night. A barren wasteland separated his destination from the rest of the Underverse. As he neared the border of the Crossroads, the place where reaped souls were processed, he stopped, taking in the place his nemesis called home. A millennia ago, before his banishment to the Nethers—basically hell on steroids—he would have gone into the Crossroads guns a-blazin’.

He smiled at his empty hand.

Not guns.

A scythe.

Yes, he would have crashed through the entrance and marched his way into that tacky room D called an office and challenged Death for his seat at the Crossroads. He had dreamed of becoming the Master of Reapers every miserable day he spent in the Nethers. When not fighting to survive, Balthazar worked out the sequence of events.

First, he’d rip open the invisible barrier protecting the Crossroads using the Keeper’s Key—he had thought its existence a myth until an enterprising demon gave him the deets to its location. It was a total bitch to retrieve. Balthazar had to fight through a horde of soul-sucking Wraiths. Nasty things, Wraiths, with their dot-sized ruby eyes, skeletal arms and clawed fingers, tattered black robes, and—the worst part—their wrinkled faces and rows of serrated teeth. One bite burned like a thousand needles injecting acid into the skin. Imagine having twenty of them chomping down on you. Not exactly a day at the spa.

The soul-sucking had actually been the least of his worries when he’d gone up against the horde. Wraiths liked to torture their food first. To keep them alive as long as possible. Not that Balthazar had much of a soul to give. He just hadn’t wanted to stick around so the Wraiths could find that out about him. He winced at the memory. His left shoulder still ached some nights from a particularly nasty bite. Never again would he let his guard down against the creatures.

But totally worth it
.

He returned to his to-do list as he ran the last few miles to the border of the Crossroads. He imagined releasing his scythe and fighting his way to D. He didn’t care if he had to go through Tomas, D’s right hand and the Reaper of California. Balthazar could take him. He could take all of them in his sleep.

The only hard part in this fool’s mission involved fighting D. He’d be a tricky opponent on good days and a deadly one on the worst. He hadn’t held the title of Death for countless millennia for nothing. Balthazar grudgingly respected D for it.

Ah, to be the new Death.
He could taste it on his tongue already. His scowl turned into a full-blown smile. In the barren land surrounding him, nothing stirred other than the dust kicked up by his feet. In the distance, a tall wall rose. Balthazar’s skin prickled. The ominous electric charge emitted by the barrier protecting Death’s home said he’d arrived at the border of the Crossroads.

He stopped running a couple of feet away from the invisible barrier and knocked. It rippled under his knuckles. He pulled on his fingerless gloves and grinned. He’d have control of the place by sunup. He felt it in his gut. Even that prick Nikolas would bow down before him.

Balthazar patted down his leather overcoat then reached into his countless pockets. Nothing felt like the Keeper’s Key. Where had he put the damn thing? Eventually, the dull ache in his ankle reminded him. He cursed himself as all kinds of stupid for forgetting. He took a knee and reached into his boot. He’d stuffed the key in there in case he ran into trouble on the road. He pushed back to his feet and studied the tiny black skull missing its jaw. In its eye sockets gleamed with a pair of blood red diamonds.

“All that trouble for this ugly thing,” he said and huffed a laugh.

Well, the key did have the power to open any door in existence, so of course it would be guarded within an inch of its life. And, yes, it lived. Balthazar felt its life force pulse against his fingertips. In the Underverse, powerful beings could infuse their life force into inanimate objects and bring them to life. Some used the objects for protection, like his scythe and Death’s cloak, while others created artifacts like the key.

With his other hand, he summoned his scythe—a black staff, with an obsidian stud on one end and a gleaming black blade on the other. Simple. Black on black. Balthazar admired it like he would a lover. It was the only weapon he trusted with his life, and it had saved him enough times to merit that exception. On principle, Balthazar trusted no one, not even his mother—and she’d died long ago.

Shaking off memories of her, he affixed the skull to the base of his scythe’s blade. Energy sparked at the first contact, almost causing Balthazar to drop the key. It hurt like a bad migraine. His whole arm went numb from the pain. Electric shocks danced over his skin. His silver hair stuck out in every direction. At one point, Balthazar thought he would have preferred being struck by lightning.

He bit down hard until his jaw locked and tried again. The resulting electric shock rippled out of him like a bomb detonating. The burn began to stretch all the way to his legs, the numbness spreading fast, but he didn’t stop. He pushed the key into his scythe until it was embedded halfway.

Once the key was attached, he leaned on his scythe’s staff for support. Breathing hard, he healed himself with every inhalation. He cursed the demon seven ways till Sunday for not telling him about the effects of melding the key with the scythe. He needed all the strength he could spare for the fight of his life. A small voice in his head begged him to rest before entering the Crossroads.

Balthazar pushed away his annoying conscience. He never listened to it. Why it bothered to keep warning him against anything escaped his understanding. He shook away the last of the excess energy zinging through his body and twirled his scythe like a baton.

He touched the tip of the blade against the barrier. It tore through it like gel. Laughing like a maniac, he created a rip big enough to pass through. The key worked. Barely surviving the great Wraith massacre had actually paid off.

“Oh, D!” he called when he stepped into the Crossroads. “I’m home.”

Not waiting for a response, Balthazar took off into a flat out run, balancing his scythe behind his back with both hands. He couldn’t wipe away the smile on his face no matter how hard he tried. Today he would become all powerful. A smile wouldn’t hurt. Sure it made him look like a crazed psychopath—and maybe he’d become one in many ways—but he didn’t care. He reserved the right to be the bad guy in this story.

The high walls of the sprawling compound grew taller the closer he got to it. He didn’t slow down. His eyes darted along the perimeter. No sentries. The clenched fist of suspicion in his gut almost stopped his progress. There should have been shadow guards posted along the walkway.

Balthazar sprinted up the wall, his back parallel to the ground. At the top he stared down at the compound. The seven buildings within swarmed with movement. Instead of the usual calm and order, the Reapers’ minions—in all shapes and sizes, some humanoid, some creatures made to scare children at night—ran in all directions around the two-story main brick building at the center. The shadow guards scrambled in the yard beside the barracks like they’d been given conflicting orders. There was not a Reaper in sight near the processing warehouse at the back. And the souls. Where had they gone? The four buildings that usually housed them looked dark and empty.

Interesting.

Balthazar planted his scythe beside him and crossed his arms, trying to make sense of the chaos. What could have disrupted the order of the Crossroads? D maintained the place like a well-oiled machine. He liked everything in its place and on time. He stuck to a strict schedule. Judging from the chaos below, something must have broken his OCD tendencies.