A Reaper Made Read Free

a grin back at her dirty look.  
    “It’s not about how I look, though, not really. I can’t grow old which isn’t normally a terrible problem to have, but you’ve only been dead for a few years. Wait until you watch your loved ones grow old and die. Then you’ll see how mundane everything truly is,” she pouted.  
    “That’s sort of why we’re not allowed to go back to our old lives after we die,” I said. This wasn’t the first time I’d had to make this argument with her. “Kind of why I’m here, remember?”  
    Reapers could travel anywhere they liked - except home. Since we couldn’t change our appearance, Mades weren’t supposed to visit our past until after the people we used to know and love were long gone. The risk of being seen was too great. Besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted to reap a soul I knew in life.  
    You had to cut off contact from all your living friends and family after you became a Reaper. Tully had warned me of too many horror stories for me to mess up my mom that way, no matter how much I missed her. My family might have been typical and boring - happily married parents, little sister, twin kid brothers, cute dog - but they were my typical and boring. My heart ached for them and not a day went by I didn’t think of them and wish for their health and happiness. I refused to think about what would happen to them in sixty to ninety years.  
    Tessa ignored me. “But it’s the same thing every single day from then until eternity. I’ll be making potions and healing wounds and casting spells forever. Sometimes I just wonder if that’s all there is.”
    I gave her a bewildered look. “All there is? At least you’re still sort of human! Potions and magic, you can do whatever you want. No day has to be the same for you. I’m a Reaper - literally, what I do is all there is for me. Some drunk idiot killed me and now I’m going to be a soul-collecting ghost until the end of time. I’m even stuck in bright pink nursing scrubs for eternity.”
    Tessa’s eyes widened as I ranted, my voice growing louder and angrier with each word. Reapers didn’t complain or explode. At least, no others Reapers did. My emotions always felt like they were at the surface; Tully said it was normal for the first decade, but perhaps being a teenage girl forever added a little oomph to the burn.  
    “Grace, whoa, sorry. I thought Reapers were great therapists because of their emotionless logic. I was only bending an ear, I didn’t know it’d hit a nerve or seven.”
    I caught my breath. “No, I’m sorry. That was not very professional of me. Get back to me in a few decades and I should have it under control.”
    Tessa chuckled in her good-natured way. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell Tully.”
    We shared a grin. Tessa thought Tully was nice enough, but incredibly uptight. If you asked me, had Tully been human, he might’ve been sweet on Tess. He never scolded or rolled his eyes at her the way he did with me. She always waved me off when I teased her.  
    “It’s not that I don’t appreciate what I do,” I told her. “I’m not bored, not the way you describe. I guess it’s more that I still have my humanity and that makes me different from other Reapers.”
    Tessa’s brow furrowed. “You don’t want your humanity?”  
    “Yes - I mean, no - I don’t know,” I said, shoulders slumping as I looked down at my lap. “I’m still pretty new. Mades aren’t good enough like the Trues, you know what I mean?”  
    She wrinkled a brow, puzzled. “There’s no hierarchy.”  
    “No, we’re all equal in the eyes of most, except each other. Even Tully still gets crap from Trues, and he’s been around for like, what, two centuries now?”
    “Sounds about right.”  
    I played with the fringe on a couch pillow, not looking at Tessa. “Can I ask you a question?”
    “I’m an open spell book.”  
    “How did you and Tully meet? I mean…he introduced us knowing we’d hit it off, but