The Revolt (The Reapers: Book Two)

The Reapers: Book Two

By

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2014 by Katharine Sadler

All Rights Reserved.

I pulled my hair back and studied my face in
the mirror. It had been three weeks since Reid stuck a knife in my
cheek and cut me open. Cat had done a good job with the stitches,
and the scar was a smooth thin line from my cheekbone to about an
inch from my mouth. Most days I could look in the mirror and not
even see it. Most days I could almost forget it was there, but I
thought I was ready to look more closely and accept the damage Reid
had done. As I ran my finger along the scar, memories flooded
me.

I started to shake and sat down on the closed
lid of the toilet. Even after three weeks, the memories threatened
to crumble me. I had been beaten up, knifed, sleep deprived,
betrayed, and I had destroyed the soul of a man. Most days I just
tried to stay busy enough, working at the bookstore, training with
Cat and running her errands, that I didn’t have time to think about
it and, now that I did, I was finding it hard to breathe. It felt
as though a heavy weight was pressing on my chest, my throat ached,
and my eyes burned with unshed tears. I tried to fight it, but I
didn’t know how.

“Breathe, Kelsey, just breathe.”

I looked up to see Tucker standing in front
of me. Tucker had been dead for 135 years and, for some reason, had
helped me out when my dead boss, Landon, tried to permanently take
over my body. I took a deep breath and swallowed the tears that
threatened. I took another deep breath and another and managed to
stop shaking.

“I wish I could hug you.” I felt someone
touch me and jumped to my feet. Tucker backed up, his hands in the
air. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. His blue eyes were
brighter than I’d ever seen them, his smile radiant enough to
distract me completely from my own misery. He took a step toward me
and placed his hands on mine. His hands became as real and warm as
my own, while the rest of his body remained a bit hazy and
insubstantial.

“How…?” I asked.

“I don’t care, I’m just glad it worked.” He
didn’t meet my eyes. “I’d been hoping that between my energy and
yours, we might be able to… but it doesn’t matter. You need to
focus on you right now.”

“I’d rather not.”

He sat down on the edge of the tub. His hair
was sticking out all over his head, but still looked carefully
styled, and he was wearing skinny jeans and a t-shirt with the
words “Punk you.” “You really are doing amazingly well, Kelsey.
After everything… I’ve seen well-seasoned mediums lose it under
less.”

“From what Cat and Jed and…” I couldn’t bring
myself to say Caleb’s name. He had pretended to help me and protect
me, but he had only been using me and my dead boss, Landon, to help
himself. “From what they said, no medium has ever done what I’ve
done.”

“Maybe not,” he said. “But people have been
through worse and survived. You need time, to process everything
that’s happened and to regain your strength. Cat doesn’t want to
give you that time, but you have the right to insist on it.”

“I’m not sure I want it. I just want to
forget any of it ever happened.”

He frowned, but he didn’t argue. “I’ll do
what I can to help you, whatever you decide.”

“Why?” He had told me himself that he didn’t
get involved with the reapers or the corporations. He was a neutral
party. I still didn’t understand why he’d changed for me. He’d
never explained why he helped me when Landon attempted to reap me,
even when his assistance exposed him to danger and the attention of
other reapers.

He moved his eyes over me from my toes to my
face and back down again. I shivered, despite my best efforts to
pretend his gaze had no effect on me. He was a good-looking dead
guy and it had been too long since someone had looked at me the way
he just had. Tucker claimed he was searching for his soul mate, but
I was sure he just wanted to get laid. It didn’t seem to bother him
that I wouldn’t be able to sleep with him until I died, or he
figured out how to maintain a physical connection to me on the
living plane. Instead of handing me a cheesy pickup line, he got
serious. “There’s a war coming, and I want to be on the winning
side. That will be whatever side you’re on.”

“I’m hoping I’ll be on the side of the
living,” I said with a smile.

He didn’t return it. “I’ve got to be going
out of town, but I won’t be gone long. If you need me, just
call.”

His words echoed something Alice, the ghost
of a little girl I’d known since childhood, had said to me many
times before. Cat had called her my guardian angel. “How? Are you
an angel?”

He laughed. “Not by a long shot. But you and
me, we’ve got some sort of connection. I could feel you freaking
out just now, even though I was across town.”

“How can you be here at all, with the wards?”
In the months since I’d met him, I’d seen Tucker when I was out,
but that day was the first time I’d seen him inside the warded
condo.

He shrugged. “The safeguards the witches put
up to prevent ghosts from entering a building are imperfect.
Reapers can’t enter uninvited but, if the medium inside wishes to
allow a reaper to enter, then…” Tucker gestured to himself and
smiled.

“But I didn’t even think your name…” I had
been thinking of him, though. He had become someone I depended on
lately, to help me when I thought I might lose it.

“The subconscious is powerful and
unpredictable. Be careful how you use it.”

And he was gone, leaving me with more
questions than answers.

I went back to the mirror. I ran a comb
through my hair, still damp from my shower, and headed out to face
Cat.

She was waiting for me on the couch, dark
hair in a neat ponytail and face made up, wearing crisp slacks and
a lilac sweater set. “Morning, Sunshine,” she said without a smile.
“Hurry up and eat, we’re closing our deal in an hour.”

Cat worked for a corporation called Harvest
One. The deal we were wrapping up would more aptly be called a con
job. Cat’s partner, Avis, a 300 year old reaper, had been haunting
a rich, elderly lady who lived across town. Avis had been
terrorizing the old lady for five months and Cat had been “working”
to exorcise Avis for the past three weeks. Cat was paid by the
hour, so the longer it took her to get Avis to leave, the more
money she made for the corporation.

I was her apprentice, and Harvest One hoped I
would decide to turn con artist and go to work for them. I was
working for free, Avis worked for credit. When Avis had enough
credit, she would be given permission to permanently possess, or
reap, the body of a living person.

I headed toward the kitchen. “Yeah, I know.
And I have to be at work at 10, so let’s wrap it up quick.”

“This shouldn’t take long.” Cat followed me
into the kitchen and sat down at the table as I pulled a bowl from
the cupboard and filled it with cereal and milk. “This is just my
follow-up. Avis hasn’t bothered Mrs. Freeman all week. We go in,
make sure she’s satisfied, and pick up the rest of the money.”

I nodded, sat down at the table, and dug into
my cereal. “I really don’t understand why I need to be there at
all.” Mrs. Freeman was sweet and I felt awful about tricking
her.

“You need to know how the process works from
beginning to end. You only have until the end of the week.”

What she meant was I had until the end of the
week to choose to work for Harvest One or the other guys, Varius,
or I had to find a new place to live. I felt oddly calm about the
whole thing. “I’ll just pay a witch to ward my new apartment.”

“Unless you won the lottery and didn’t tell
me about it, you can’t afford it. You’ll be completely exposed,
Kelsey. You should come with me. You don’t have any real friends
here anymore. All you’ve got is that lame job at the
bookstore.”

I glared at her and continued eating. It
wouldn’t do any good to argue. It wasn’t the first time we’d had
this conversation and I knew she was right. I’d managed to convince
Varius not to send someone to woo me until I was done here with
Cat, but I’d had numerous phone conversations with them and I knew
they were getting impatient. “Have you heard from Jed?” I’d wanted
to ask that question for a few weeks, but I was afraid of the
answer. I hadn’t seen or spoken to him since his brother tried to
kill me and I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to see him again.

She didn’t meet my eyes. “He still feels the
same, Kelsey. He gets that it wasn’t your fault, but…”

“But he can’t help hating me a little bit?” I
had been the one to tell Jed that his brother, Caleb, had set me up
and lied to us both. Caleb had worked with reapers to kill Landon
and orchestrate his attempt to reap me, all in an effort to impress
my father, Len. Caleb had even threatened to kill me if Len didn’t
allow us to join his team of reaper fighters.

“He doesn’t hate you, Kelsey. He calls me to
check in on you all the time.”

I didn’t know that. Still, it didn’t mean he
didn’t hate me. He had plenty of reasons to want to know how I was
doing, not the least of which that Varius still wanted me to come
work for them. And I wasn’t sure I wanted Jed on my side, because I
couldn’t quite convince myself he hadn’t known what Caleb was up
to. “Uh-huh,” I said.

Cat ignored my sarcasm. “But everyone at
Varius thinks Caleb is some sort of hero. They don’t believe your
story. Jed is staying close to Caleb to make sure he doesn’t try to
cause more trouble.”

“He and Caleb are partners?”

She looked down at the table. “Varius knows
my gig is up here and they’re sending someone to tell you how
wonderful Varius is and why you should work there. You might be
able to stretch out your stay here another two weeks, if you tell
them you’re interested.”

Her words almost worked to distract me, but I
needed to hear her say what I already suspected. “Cat? Are they
partners?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know all the
details, but Caleb isn’t working with Jed. From what I can gather,
Caleb is keeping his distance.”

“You think he’s up to something?”

Cat snorted. “I think he’s breathing, which
is pretty much the same thing. Caleb’s always been a schemer.”

I let go the fact that Caleb had fooled Cat
into believing he was harmless so well that I’d had to explain his
betrayal several times before she believed me. “We’ve all got our
schemes,” I said, thinking of the con I’d been watching Cat and
Avis work.

“Speaking of that,” she said without the
slightest hint of embarrassment or guilt. “We should get to
it.”

Our mark’s house was only two blocks from the
condo, and the day was sunny and in the low thirties, so we bundled
up and walked. Mrs. Freeman was a seventy-five- year-old widow, and
I referred to her as the mark, especially in Cat’s hearing. Cat
never admitted to being bothered by what she did, but it annoyed
her when I used con artist terms to describe her gig. At least, I
used terms that I assumed con artists’ used, they were actually
just what I remembered from
The Sting
.

We walked together silently, careful to avoid
the icy spots on the cleared pavement. If I stepped off the
sidewalk, I knew I would sink into snow to mid-thigh. Even after
living in Briarton for seven years, sinking into deep snow still
felt novel and I did it every once in a while. I hadn’t seen Cat do
it once. She said I was acting like a child whenever I jumped in
the snow.

Cat marched up to Mrs. Freeman’s front door.
Her one-level ranch style house was modest compared to the
mcmansions in the neighborhood and suited Mrs. Freeman, who was a
frank, no-nonsense woman. Despite her down-to-earth nature, I kind
of think she liked all of the fuss and attention of our visits even
if she didn’t particularly care for being haunted. I found myself
feeling a bit sad that I was going to see her for the last
time.