Free Reap & Repent by Lisa Medley Page A

business was slow. Finding them was like combing a beach for pirate booty with a metal detector. Slow, laborious and rarelyfruitful. Of course, there hadn’t been too many slow times in the business of death since he’d become a reaper.
    War after war had kept them all occupied. But World War One was the last war that he’d actively participated in. He put a lid on that memory and stuffed it back down where it belonged. This was no time to indulge in bitter memories.
    Deacon strode the halls of the hospital. While he should track down the stale souls first, the pull here was too strong to ignore. He entered the room of a middle-aged female patient who lingered near death, clinging to life at the precarious mercy of tubes, wires and machines. The quiet whoosh of a breathing machine mimicked the beat of her long-dead heart. It wouldn’t be much longer.
    He sat in the chair across from her bed, watching her white glow pulsate, and waited.
    Impatiently.
    God, he was a dick sometimes.
    Was he really too busy to sit for a few minutes and wait for this woman to pass?
    The real problem with any sort of downtime was it was the perfect opportunity for way too much
introspection.
    It wasn’t like the future of the universe depended on him or that he was the only reaper who could do these things.
    That would be ridiculous. Reapers weren’t some sort of Santa of Death, delivering the sweet or terrible hereafter one night a year to everyone on theplanet. Death came often and in a variety of ways. It amused him that the normals still thought, after all these millennia, that there was one Grim Reaper.
    As he’d told Ruth, there
was
a Grim Reaper, but he was more of a figurehead now. Grim had been the first reaper. When Eve persuaded Adam to eat the forbidden fruit and they gained knowledge, God decreed that mankind and all of his creation would suffer for their indiscretions and eventually die. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust and all that.
    But something had to be done with their souls.
    Purgatory was formed. Grim was designated as the middleman, ferrying the souls there to be sorted, naughty and nice, and then sent on to their destiny. It all worked splendidly. Until the population got out of hand.
    Now, Grim had lots of help.
    The reapers had needed to grow exponentially with the proliferation of mankind. And today? With nearly seven billion people on the planet? Yeah, they were busy.
    Then there were the
other
creatures, as well. God was such a hoarder; he couldn’t part with his wonderful and terrible prototypes for man. Not to mention the results of various matchups gone haywire. A whole new class of monsters and abominations emerged from
their
unholy unions and aligned with one side or the other.
    Good or evil.
    The results were wraiths, shifters, vampires, gremlins, giants and all manner of creatures. God had once halfheartedly tried to destroy them with theflood, along with the world’s wicked humans, in the hopes of starting fresh. But most of them were resilient, and when they survived his efforts, he promised them salvation…
if
they earned it through obedience and service to him.
    Regardless, everything had a soul.
    Except demons and imps, which were born of Hell. Lucifer’s creations.
    And every soul had to be reaped, including the monsters. Each species had their own reapers—one or thousands, depending on their population. And each reaper had his or her own territory.
    He liked Meridian because there was less reaper political drama here than…well most everywhere else he had ever worked. He deserved the rest. But the past few weeks had been anything but calm and restful… And now Kylen was back again.
    He had stayed away longer than usual this time. Deacon had almost suspected his death, and wouldn’t that have been a relief after all these years. Especially if it wasn’t by his own hand.
    But he was certain he would have known. Sharing energy formed a connection over time, and throughout the years Deacon and Kylen