Page 1 of Paris and the Reaper

PART ONE

PARIS

ONE

Paris and painwere old friends.

His first memory was of pain, his lungs burning as his mouth and nose filled with water, as he struggled against the hands that held him under. That was the first time his father had tried to kill him.

Pain had accompanied every encounter with his father since.

The force of his closed fist, the sting of his open palm, the pointy tips of his loafers that pummeled him when he was down.

The sharper sting of his words that buried him deeper.

Why are you such a fool?

You’re too soft.

Put away those stupid brushes.

I can’t believe she gave her life for you.

The last was his father’s favorite, a constant reminder of the guilt Paris lived with every day and that his father never let him forget.

They were also the last words Vincent had uttered when he’d shoved him into the seemingly frail arms of the small, bearded man in a waist apron. Paris tried to run but barely made it twosteps before the stranger had stopped him in his tracks with nothing but his glowing red eyes.

Paris had known then that this was another of Vincent’s attempts to kill him. And as he lay spread eagle on a cold hard altar, his hands and feet bound, blood seeping from searing cuts along the insides of his arms and thighs, Paris thought maybe his father had finally succeeded.

Beside the altar, the once small man stood taller than any person Paris had ever seen. No, not a person. A monster—a giant—with those same glowing red eyes, but where he’d had a coarse, curly beard before, he now had a nest of writhing snakes that feasted on Paris’s open wounds. As they sank their fangs into his muscles and sucked his blood, their master sucked more of his life—his soul—to feed the shimmering orbs of magic that grew bigger and brighter in the air above his hands.

He spoke in tongues Paris didn’t recognize, but as his voice escalated into louder more urgent chants, the pain escalated too, the snakes biting harder. Paris’s soul cried out in his ears, joined by other souls crying out too. Each new one like a knife carving up through the altar beneath him, into his skin, creating a path for the souls to burrow inside and chilling him to his core. Magnifying the pain. All those souls being ripped through him. It was torture beyond anything his father had ever inflicted on him.

I can’t believe she gave her life for you.

Except that.

He opened his eyes and blinked through the pain and tears that clouded his vision. He searched for the stars above, for that place a nanny had once told him his mother had gone to the day he’d been born. Bright, shining hope was there for one brief instant, the fog breaking long enough for him to glimpse the only love he’d ever known, the love he’d finally get to meet soon,before the dense gray clouds rolled back in and took the light away.

And brought something dark with them.

Something darker even than his father’s hands holding him under the water. Something that intended to take his soul and all the other souls screaming with his. Something that intended to wreak chaos on Yerba Buena and beyond.

The orbs in the monster’s hands burned so bright that Paris had to squint against their blinding glare.

New voices—words he recognized—cut through the chants.

“Does anyone see him?”

“He’s on the altar!”

KRAA.

Roaring, the monster hurled the relatively dimmer of the two balls of fire the direction of the voices.

And then another, different kind of darkness flew at the altar—an undulating mass of black, the fluttering of wings sending a cool breeze wafting across Paris’s prone body. The flock of black birds dive-bombed the monster, plucking away his snakes one by one. Paris shouted with each painful yank of their fangs out of his skin; the giant shouted louder with each subject ripped from his body and cast aside until none were left.

Until the biggest black bird of all, a giant raven, flew talons-first at the monster’s eyes.

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