Page 1 of Saved By Her Guardian
Aralyn Lethe, newly graduated reaper, stared at the message from her uncle.Grim, the most powerful of all reapers, had summoned her to him, sending her a pin to his location.
He was pissed.
And rightly so.
She’d refused her assignment.
Upon graduation, all reapers were given assignments related to the ferrying of souls to their final resting place.Because reapers were magical and used said magic to ferry souls, they replenished their magic by the very souls they reaped.A reaper who didn’t ferry souls would eventually just not have magic anymore and would no longer be a reaper.
So shehadto ferry souls.
While reapers weren’t filled with dark magic, they weren’t necessarily good either, straddling the magicalneutralline.Going to the Well of Magic at the top of the world for replenishment—something that a reaper did when they weren’t employable—was seen as abackdoorof sorts.Once she graduated from reaping school, she’d essentially been forbidden from going to the Well of Magic because working as a reaper would more than suffice for replenishing magic.
Except in Aralyn’s case.
Because she absolutely didn’t want to take the assignment.
She looked around her little room in her apartment at the reaper school and knew that her whole life was about to change if she didn’tget on the trolley, as Grim had suggested.
But she simply refused to take the assignment.
She looked at the message again.
Pack a bag and report to my location in ten minutes or there will be hell to pay.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what Grim’s version of hell to pay was.She was certain it wasn’t good.
She’d never heard of a reaper refusing an assignment before, and perhaps she only felt confident in doing it because Grim was her uncle and her only living relative.She didn’tthinkhe’d kill her, but he sure could make her life miserable.
The door to the apartment opened and an excited squeal was followed by her ever-perky roommate, Deidre, who bounced into the room with blonde curls swinging and blue eyes glittering.
“Oh!I can’t believe this is it!We grad-u-ate-ed!”she practically howled, exaggerating the syllables of the last word.Flopping onto the bed, she clutched her graduation cap to her chest and sighed dramatically.
“Yep.”
Deidre lifted her head and looked at Aralyn with an arched brow.
“What’s up your butt?This is the day we’ve been working for!All these years of hard work have paid off.We’re officially reapers!”
She stared at her roommate for a long, quiet moment.They’d been paired together as first-year students, and while they were friendly, they weren’tfriends.Deidre was way too opposite of Aralyn.Too MaryJane and sunshine to her pessimism and clouds.
It didn’t help that Aralyn had a famous relative.People tended to treat her with kid gloves and not want to get too close.
“I got my assignment.”
“Yeah, so did everyone in our graduating class.”She sat up fully and reverently set the cap on the neatly made bedspread.They were supposed to have been packed up and ready to leave the apartment after graduation, but Deidre hadn’t packed a single sock yet.Aralyn was fully packed and had been for a while.She just hadn’t had the courage to leave yet, even though graduation had concluded hours ago.
“I refused my assignment.”
Deidre leaped to her feet with a screech of alarm.“Are you kidding me?Have you gone completely insane?Your uncle willkill you.”
Something in Aralyn’s chest felt like it dropped into her stomach.Maybe her heart?Was that possible?She touched the space on her chest where her heart was and found the familiar thud-thud of the beat, but it wasn’t comforting.It would probably be better if her heartdidfall into her stomach.
“What’s your assignment?”Aralyn asked, putting her phone in her pocket and ignoring the way it felt very heavy in her hand.
“I’m off to Maui.I’ll be ferrying souls in the tropics.”
Of course she would be.
