Free Await by Viola Grace

An agent of time with antlers and hooves, a dead Terran in need of a job and a timeline awry make walking for the dead seem easy.
    Orphia has spent her life waiting for life to start. She ends up being a Walker for the Dead, and during a funeral reception, a dagger finds her. Waking in a bubble between time and space isn’t nearly as unsettling as the man who is holding her hands and helping her through the agony of reanimation.
    Xeric is a Hirn and one of the Nameless. He is doomed to see his people living and thriving at all points in time, knowing that their death and extinction is inevitable. He bonds to Orphia the moment that he sees her, and at the moment of her death, he is there to catch her and carry her off to a new world with new challenges.
    Who could resist a man who carries off their body to a world outside of time?

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    This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
    Await
    Copyright © 2012 Viola Grace
    ISBN: 978-1-77111-232-1
    Cover art by Martine Jardin
    All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.
    Published by eXtasy Books
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    Await
    A Terran Times Tale
    By
    Viola Grace

Chapter One
    Orphia Kardin sat next to her charge and waited. Her life had turned into endless rounds of hurry up and wait for the last five years. She had been to fourteen new planets with her clients, and on each, she had walked, swam and shot them into the final rites to allow them into their afterlife.
    Today’s assignment would be a battle, her armour told her that. Her Alliance training had given her skills that life as a waitress on Earth had not prepared her for.
    A Walker for the Dead was the formal title that she had been granted. Death Escort, Corpse Runner and Body Tripper were the less formal tags that she had heard over the last five years.
    Her job was simple. When a high-ranking official died off world, a Walker was sent to escort their body back home if their culture decreed it. Orphia would stand in for the death rites and carry out any business that the deceased needed to have carried out.
    It was a right and a duty to take part in the end of a life, but some days Orphia wished that she had something a little more active to engage in rather than simply waiting for someone to die.
    “Walker Kardin, we are making landfall. Are you ready?”
    She checked her weapons and placed her hand on the casket of the dead Teio Representative, Arcathan.
    She had four hours of meditation ahead of her while she walked Arcathan to the death pool of Teio. It was a lava swirl that would consume him and her duty was to defend him while she walked and guard him when he burned. Normally, family would have taken on this duty but Arcathan had no surviving children or spouses.
    The Alliance was paying her to risk her life, and she did it to give these folks the dignity in death that their cultures demanded. What one culture decreed to be appropriate, others deemed desecration. Learning the methods and reasons behind the rituals was her favourite part of the job. Physical