A sneak peek of "Life After Death" (Return to Limbo City Book One)

The Gospel of Lana

A grim summary of the original Lana Harvey, Reapers Inc. series.

 

In the beginning…

Let’s be real. It was a train wreck.

A few thousand years ago, a handful of original believers willed the deities and afterlives of Eternity into existence. The gods have been at odds ever since, bickering over the fates of the deceased and the soul matter that shapes our world beyond the grave.

The boundaries of the heavens and hells shifted at the whim of believers, encouraging wrathful deities to smite one another. It was a bloody affair. The War of Eternity raged on and on, for the longest time.

But then, in the early seventh century, when my not-so-dearly departed ex-boss was out doing his thing, reaping souls and whatnot, he came across one of those original believers. Khadija.

Grim showed her the chaos and suffering beyond the grave, and she was compelled to help. As a rare original believer, Khadija had the power to stabilize the borders of the afterlives. She also forged the secret Throne of Eternity—an intangible connection to and command over the soul matter that flowed from the mortal realm to the afterlives. The lifeblood of Eternity.

Through this new bond, she created Limbo City, a neutral territory where Grim could broker peaceful negotiations between the gods. While he was at it, he also decided to take full credit for the feat and hid Khadija away in a secret pocket realm.

For her own safety, I’m sure. Such a peach, that Grim.

Anyway, the gods signed the peace treaty and agreed to end the War of Eternity, and the Afterlife Council was formed—with Grim in a neutral leadership role as their president. A yearly date was determined where the excess soul matter could be distributed in an organized and agreeable fashion, an event that came to be called the Oracle Ball.

A few centuries later, Grim convinced the council to repay his generous and mysterious efforts by allotting him a smidge of soul matter every hundred years to create extra reapers to help with his growing soul harvesting business. And thus, Reapers Inc. was founded.

It was a cushy gig for ol’ Death.

Until I came along and mucked things up.

Though I suppose that blame really belongs to Khadija. After a thousand years, she was ready to retire from the throne and turn it over to another original believer. By then, Grim didn’t go out in the field anymore, but he certainly wasn’t about to entrust such a delicate—and advantageous—task to anyone else.

Cue the feet-dragging… for a few centuries.

Khadija, being the wise and intuitive soul that she was, took matters into her own hands. While whipping up the eighth generation of reapers in 1709, she baked a little something extra into my soul matter. I wasn’t simply made in Grim’s image—I was his equal.

Like other reapers, I was immortal and had the innate ability to harvest souls. But unlike the others, I could see the potency of a soul in their aura. It was a neat little trick, helpful in identifying original believers. A skill Grim definitely didn’t want anyone else to have. And also one that made my existence a breach of the peace treaty, which stipulated that no new deities would be created with the excess soul matter.

Deity felt too strong a word for someone with a skill that barely rivaled Superman’s X-ray vision. But it made me other. Something more than the council had agreed to, which would put Grim and me both in a sticky situation if anyone found out.

It seemed like something that should have been easy enough to hide. Hell, I hadn’t even known I had this ability until three hundred years after the fact, when Khadija was good and sick of Grim’s shit and losing hers.

The soul matter was becoming harder to control. She was slipping, and a rogue island had popped up in the Sea of Eternity. An island that rebel demons were using as their base.

There was also the issue of Khadija’s husband losing patience in Jahannam. He sent the angel Maalik, the Keeper of Hellfire himself, to Limbo City to join the Afterlife Council and look into the matter. I don’t suppose breaking my heart had been on the list, but he managed that well enough, too. At least I got full custody of the pair of hellhounds he’d gifted me early in the relationship.

Back to the rebel demons and leaking soul matter.

When Grim realized he was between a headstone and a hard place, Khadija finally told him about me. I mean, he knew about me. Just not that I was special. I wasn’t there to see his reaction, but I imagine it was probably a lot like one of those Jerry Springer episodes where the guy finds out he’s the father and is not thrilled about it.

And, of course, Grim still tried to keep the truth from me when he dropped the promotion of the century in my lap with no explanation. It was made all the more jarring by the fact that I ranked somewhere near the bottom of the reaper barrel. I was a low-risk harvester with a questionable number of soul violations due to my penchant for slipping souls bound for the Sea of Eternity into more desirable afterlives.

My BFF, Gabriel—yeah, that Gabriel—says I have a savior complex. Artemis calls it stray dog syndrome. I find any spark of goodness redeemable. And why not?

Atheist and agnostics had no afterlife to claim them, so their souls were dumped into the ghostly sea that surrounded Limbo City, where they awaited being sucked up by the Three Fates Factory and reinstalled in the mortal realm. It seemed like such a waste—and an inconvenience, seeing as how reapers then had to sail across said sea to deliver the rest of their charges to the afterlives.

These less than Death-like tendencies of mine made a promotion sound more like an April Fool’s joke. Nevertheless, Grim tasked me and a small team of reapers that included my sailing partner Josie Galla, his second-in-command Coreen Bendura, and Coreen’s apprentice Kevin Kraus with harvesting an extra high-risk soul. The job went sideways when demons pushed our mark’s bus off the San Francisco Bay Bridge, and we had to take a little dip to retrieve his soul.

After that, Grim finally let Maalik introduce me to Khadija to get the explanation I deserved. It also became clear that the demon rebels were in on our little mission to find a new soul for the Throne of Eternity. And the Egyptian god Seth, a member of the Afterlife Council, was heading up the opposition.

Not everyone had been happy with the terms of the peace treaty, and the fading pantheons with shriveling territories were especially bitter. Some of the old gods handled the transition with more grace, merging lands and sharing their obligations to subjects and souls. Others resisted fiercely.

The Summerland Society had been after the Sphinx Congress for centuries to unite their subcommittees and share their seats on the Afterlife Council. Horus managed to postpone this fate in exchange for working with Grim to seek out souls of ancient Egyptian origin. The flow of spirits to Duat, the Egyptian underworld, had all but dried up. Grim agreed to turn over the unsuitable souls for the Weighing of the Hearts Ceremony, and Horus agreed not to ask any questions about the one Grim intended to keep.

To Horus’s disappointment, and Grim’s relief, it only took three harvests to find a replacement for Khadija. Unfortunately, the casualties included Coreen Bendura—gutted by hellcats during a demonic battle at sea—and Wosyet, a minor Egyptian goddess slash spy for Seth. Beheaded by me with my fancy new battle axe.

That’s what she got for trying to nab my soul. Well, not my soul. Reapers don’t have souls. The soul I was tasked with collecting. Winston, formerly known as Tutankhamun. King freakin’ Tut.

So, Khadija drank Meng Po’s special memory-erasing tea and headed off to Firdaws Pardis for her long-awaited retirement, and Winston drank a tea to peel back his past lives so he could take the reins of Eternity. Mission accomplished.

You’d think my life would go back to normal, right?

Ha.

No such luck.

Turns out, when the boss gives an undeserving peon a fancy new job description, people notice. Important people.

Before I could roll a coin, I was in over my head.

Horus did not like that Grim had one of his favorite pharaohs on a leash. And while he didn’t exactly know what had happened to Wosyet, he made an educated guess.

My giving her the literal axe was another ruh-roh regarding the peace treaty and reaper rights—or lack thereof. Not surprisingly, Grim decided to sweep this little mishap under the rug and failed to report it to the Afterlife Council.

Horus didn’t give a crap about Wosyet, but knowledge of her demise made it super easy for him to blackmail me into an illegal side job. What can I say? I like my head attached to my neck.

That two-faced son of a jackal tasked me with seeking out more original believers—on the down-low—with some banned tracking bracelets. The idea was to have a new soul ready to replace Winston in a hundred years when Horus wanted to take the kid home to Duat.

Horus also campaigned for my promotion to the Posy Unit, a specialty group of reapers that harvested mass souls from natural disasters, warzones, and epidemics. This move would put me in contact with the most souls to comb through in search of original believers. Though it wasn’t a great environment for training an apprentice—which I was in no way qualified to have. But with Coreen gone, Kevin in need of a new mentor, and Grim hating my guts, I was a prime target.

Luckily, Josie was there to pick up my slack and helped school Kevin in all sorts of things. All sorts of things.

Their canoodling was a welcome distraction. With Horus making my placement on the Posy Unit a council matter, many were eager to secure a favor for their vote. This attention did not escape the notice of the rebel demons.

Which is how my apartment ended up in flames, and I found myself recovering from a nasty burn at Meng Po’s temple along the wooded coast of Limbo. She took the opportunity to barter her favorable vote in exchange for me speaking to Grim on her behalf, to remind him of her desire to alter the Three Fates’ soul recycling process with her tea.

Soon after, another council member, Jesus’s sister Holly Spirit, extended an invitation to take up residency in one of her lush condos at Holly House. Because landlord is just a page before leverage in the dictionary.

And then there was Cindy Morningstar, Lucifer’s daughter who was also on the council and looking for good press. Which, reapers being attacked by rebel demons on the job, was most definitely not. Cindy requested that I take a two-week demon defense training course with Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies.

I’d been blowing off the prince of demons since I was already swamped with homework from the Reaper Academy. I’d let Josie talk me into Grace Adeline’s wandering souls course—that my creep of an ex Craig Hogan was also taking. Plus, there was the mentoring class that Grim had signed me up for. Still, the blistery handprint around my neck made me think it was time to give demon defense the old college try.

I hadn’t counted on falling in love with Bub. But I did. Hard.

At the same time, I was falling out of love with Maalik. The angel was a firm believer in rules, and my very existence broke too many of them. I couldn’t tell him what I was doing for Horus, nor why I was fighting for a fancy promotion I clearly did not want. And I was so beyond his patronizing damsel-in-distress treatment.

To top it off, the demon rebels weren’t done with me yet, and they’d recruited Craig.

I passed my classes with flying colors only to be attacked in the street by the fury Tisiphone and my douche of an ex. I took quite the beating before discovering another grim talent when my hands lit Craig up like a Christmas tree and pulled him straight out of existence.

Pop goes the weasel.

Nothing more than soul matter scattered into the ether.

Even more alarming, no one seemed to remember him. If only I could have forgotten Craig, too. His death—unexistence, whatever—rattled me. His face haunted my nightmares.

But I sallied forth, and when the Afterlife Council voted, I landed the Posy promotion… and was named the unit’s new captain.

Totally unheard of for an eighth-generation reaper.

Clearly a fluke.

If Josie’s roommate, Jenni Fang, hadn’t immediately been announced as Grim’s new second-in-command, I shudder to think what rumors could have grown fangs and taken a bite out of my ass.

The new gig as captain was an adjustment, but I put my scythe to the grindstone and made the most of it. Did a bang-up job too, if I do say so myself. It was an easier feat to manage without Gabriel dragging me off to Purgatory Lounge every other night.

My angelic drinking buddy was not thrilled with my new brimstone beau. Which made him a big fat hypocrite since he was dating a demon himself. Both of our hellish heartthrobs were on the Hellfire Committee, working directly under Cindy Morningstar, a detail that would later cause problems for us both.

Once again, I expected my world would return to some semblance of normal. For a minute there, it did, despite all the changes in my life—the fancier job title, swanky living situation, apprentice, lusty demon consort.

But the calm before the storm never lasts long.

The rebels sank their talons into everything, infiltrating the city, luring reapers and deities to the dark side. They abducted Jenni Fang and put the shapeshifting trickster god Loki in her place. They stole Hades’ Cap of Invisibility, Atropos’ shears, and Ammit’s crocodile headdress.

But we prevailed. We rescued Jenni from literal and figurative hell. We reclaimed the stolen goods, and we brought a mountain down on the heads of those who tried to stand in our way.

There was hardly time enough to lick our wounds before Eternity threatened to rip apart at the seams once again. The rebels took Grim’s brother Hypnos hostage. Though the boss man acted as if it were the end of the world, that one was waaay down my list of things most likely to launch the apocalypse.

Turns out, King Tut was not an original believer, after all. He’d only restored the faith after his predecessor had tried to destroy it. As a result, Winston was already slipping, losing his hold on the soul matter.

Good thing I’d finally stumbled upon a suitable soul to take his place.

Only… I really wasn’t looking forward to being terminated once Grim found out. He’d seemed perfectly content going back to pretending like he was the ringmaster of this circus and letting the peanut shells pile up on the tent floor for another millennia.

Without consulting anyone—me, Grim, or otherwise—Winston gave up the throne to the new soul, Naledi. But as luck would have it, he was smitten with her. He decided to stick around and play interference with Grim. Which meant I got to keep breathing, at least for a little while.

I liked breathing.

Though maybe a bit less so after Beelzebub ripped my heart out by joining the rebels and Josie was killed by Lorelei, a hench-siren of Eurynome. The Greek mermaid goddess had been recruited by Seth and made a general among the water-dwelling rebels.

Josie’s death and Beelzebub’s betrayal almost did me in. At least Gabriel had been there to catch my fall. But there wasn’t enough Ambrosia Ale or John Wayne in the world to erase the hurt this time.

My misery was mildly lessened by the revelation that Bub was only working undercover with the rebels, on Cindy Morningstar’s orders. That hadn’t prevented his summer home in Tartarus from being demolished, or his houseboat on the Styx from being torched. It hadn’t kept his demon butler Jack from being accosted and having to be taken to Meng Po’s with a cracked horn. Nor me from having to take over instructing his demon defense course at the Reaper Academy.

Then there was Kevin’s hellfire addiction.

My apprentice had not handled Josie’s death well. I didn’t have a lot of room to talk. I hadn’t even noticed that one of my hellhounds was pregnant until she popped out three helljack puppies—fathered by one of Anubis’s jackals.

I was lacking as a mentor, and without Josie’s help with Kevin, I couldn’t seem to find a middle ground between paralysis and tough love for my apprentice. It had seemed insignificant with demons breathing down my neck and Eternity swirling around the proverbial drain. Especially after Naledi went missing, and Winston lost his mind.

To make matters worse, the tracking bracelets Horus had given me to tag original believers with weren’t working. Anytime Naledi’s pinged on the tracking compact, I arrived in time to find a different original believer, but not her.

Soon, Winston’s hysteria drew the attention of Maalik. Because I really needed his nose in my business again. The overbearing angel threatened me into turning over the tracking compact in exchange for not telling Grim about the ol’ switcheroo with the soul on the throne. Which meant my hands were tied.

With nothing more pressing to distract me, I was finally forced to take a hard look at what my negligence with Kevin had cost. I thought I’d seen rock bottom before. I hadn’t even come close. The situation boiled to a head when the captain of the Nephilim Guard brought him home after he’d ransacked the condo and sold Jenni’s and my valuables for drugs.

I did my best to set Kevin straight and give him the attention and direction he clearly needed. Right before I ran off to make a trade with the rebels, Winston for the Lord of the Flies.

Bub’s cover had been blown, and now he was their captive. The Witch of Endor had delivered a cryptic message, just for me, revealing the rendezvous location.

I didn’t want to use Winston—and it hadn’t been my idea. He was convinced the rebels had Naledi, that they just didn’t know who or what she was. Why else would she have disappeared and not told him? This was the only way to find out for certain, and it was the only way to get my demon back. It wasn’t an opportunity I could afford to turn down.

Though I still regret what happened after.

Winston and I met with the rebels. We made the trade-off, narrowly avoiding an ambush, and I managed to get Bub to safety on one of the sacred Faerie isles in the Sea of Avalon. We were only granted sanctuary for a single night, but it was just as well.

The Oracle Ball was the next evening, and Seth and the Witch of Endor had big plans for Winston, the soul they assumed would give them absolute control of Eternity. The witch was a powerful necromancer, and with the Seal of Solomon, she could also control demons. In no time at all, the guests gathered on the rooftop of Reapers Inc. for the ball became her hostages.

That’s when Naledi finally made a reappearance and announced herself to the world. She was too late to save Winston, but she stopped the Witch of Endor’s reign of terror by ripping the heart from the woman’s chest. And as soon as Grim put the pieces together, he almost ripped the heart from my chest.

Jenni Fang saved me from a grisly fate, and Grim fled the city to escape the consequences of his secret having been exposed. The power he’d once held over Eternity now had a name and a face he didn’t recognize. It was no longer his to wield.

Gloating would have been petty. I’d love to say that’s the reason I didn’t, but the truth was, I had my own music to face.

Naledi’s debut came with lots of questions, and soon my role and unsanctioned soul vision was revealed. There were other ways to discover the potency of a soul, but none so convenient as my natural talent. Which made me a threat. Not because I had any phenomenal cosmic powers—but because I was the only one who could glance at a soul and tell if they did.

The Afterlife Council demanded that Naledi strip me of my gift. Then, to prove I was worthy of their trust, I was tasked with dismantling the ghost market. The number of CNH—Currently Not Harvestable—souls spiked after the Second War of Eternity had officially ended with Seth’s disappearance and the Witch of Endor’s death. Displaced rebels were making their living by stealing valuable souls and selling them on the ghost market. If I couldn’t stop them, the council was ready to terminate me the same way Grim had wanted to.

Bub’s solution was to take our new houseboat through a portal to the mortal side and live on the lam, at large but together. Like Bonnie and Clyde. Such a romantic. It seemed his name had been cleared just in time for mine to make Eternity’s Most Wanted list.

But I was never one to go down without a fight. Besides, one of the missing souls was Jai Ling, Meng Po’s assistant. In my many recent stays at the temple, after getting the crap kicked out of me by demons, I’d grown fond of the girl. There was also Warren, the nephilim I’d purchased my fancy battle axe from, who was dying for me to try out the new soul gauntlet he’d designed.

Even so, my face had been in the news too much lately, plastered on the cover of Limbo’s Laundry and the Daily Reaper Report. There was no way rebel demons were going to talk to me. A rebel reaper, on the other hand…

Tasha Henry, a soul harvester from my own generation, had joined the rebels early on. Now she was living on the streets of Limbo City, scavenging out of dumpsters and hunted by the Nephilim Guard. Enlisting her help was no easy feat—especially after our paths had crossed the winter before, when she’d sabotaged a holly jolly, high-profile harvest in Alaska.

The council did not approve of Tasha’s involvement, but she proved essential in taking down the ghost market and saving the missing souls. So, when the council gathered to decide her fate—right after they nearly voted off with my head, despite my success—I had no choice but to help her escape.

I got away with it too, though the powers that be had their suspicions. Things became… chilly in Limbo City.

I put in my notice at Holly House and shacked up with Bub in Tartarus. The manor had been rebuilt, and the hellhounds preferred roaming the surrounding desert to being cooped up in the condo anyway. Plus, I liked having my demon all to myself. It didn’t matter if home was where the hellfire burned, as long as I had the Lord of the Flies in my bed.

Kevin moved into the captain’s cabin of our ship, and our third roommate, Jenni Fang, now made enough to afford the condo by herself. She’d taken over as Reapers Inc.’s new president, since Grim hadn’t returned, and she was ready to make some waves. I just wished I hadn’t been in the splash zone.

Since so many reapers had joined the rebels or died in the war, there was a surplus of harvests the rest of us were working overtime to keep up with. Jenni and Naledi had petitioned the council to create a new generation earlier than scheduled, but in the meantime, Jenni had another brilliant idea.

Ellen Aries, a first-generation reaper whom Grim had made his secretary when she proved ill-suited for harvesting, was ripped from behind her desk and thrust into the field. And since the council had decided to dissolve the Special Ops Unit I’d been put in charge of for the ghost market assignment, who better to shadow Ellen during her first week on the job?

Babysitting duty was made even more tedious by Ellen’s whining and incompetence. Just when I’d resigned myself to a mind-numbing week—or three, considering how things were going—I came face to face with Vince Hare, a reaper who had reportedly been terminated a hundred years earlier. I was so shocked, I didn’t realize until it was too late that he was there to steal one of my harvests. The prick.

Relaying this information to Jenni Fang proved useless. She didn’t believe me. Or maybe, she didn’t want to believe me.

Things were peaceful. The city was rebuilding in the aftermath of the war, and the council was finally assimilating to Jenni’s and Naledi’s presence. Digging up graves was a bad idea right now, and one Jenni assumed I was suggesting just to reinvent the Special Ops Unit that came with more pay and prestige.

That didn’t stop me from digging around on my own time. Of course, everything I found only led to more questions. More heartache.

My late mentor, Saul Avelo, had been tasked with hunting down Vince Hare. Instead, he’d let him go. Shortly after, Saul had died in the line of duty. Or so the papers had claimed. The truth was much messier.

When the ghost market had been rounded up, not all the missing souls from the factory had been accounted for. It turned out, many of them had defected and hitched a ride with Vince to the mortal side where they were preparing for a rebellion against Limbo City. But before Vince, their leader had been Saul.

It hurt, realizing how little I’d known my mentor. After my apprenticeship had ended, we’d grown distant. But I would have never imagined Saul capable of this. Gabriel hadn’t known either, and they’d been friends even longer.

Like Jenni, Naledi had been making some changes of her own, gathering more original believers in the throne realm to form her Apparition Agency. The council was resisting this move, though it seemed even more necessary after learning what Vince and his army of souls had planned. But Naledi was less concerned with Vince. Grim Thanatos was paving the way for his return.

Seth had been found—or what was left of him.

Naledi feared a similar fate for the souls in Vince’s care. She begged me to find them and bring them to her in the throne realm where they could negotiate their terms without violence. And she wanted me to take Maalik as backup. Of course, that wasn’t happening after he confessed to killing my mentor. That it had been an order didn’t make me hate him any less for it.

Before I could coin off to take care of business on my own, Grim ripped open the sky to the throne realm and began slaughtering original believers, devouring their soul matter. Naledi and I barely escaped with one other—Morgan, an original believer of the Fae.

After taking them to safety, I hurried to the mortal side where Tasha Henry had made contact with one of Vince’s souls. I followed him back to Vince’s hideout where I was caught and tied up for interrogation. Before I could convince him to meet with Naledi, Grim struck again.

I was bound and gagged in a lofted office above the warehouse where Vince had gathered the souls, safe but useless as I listened to the massacre happening downstairs.

Thankfully, Bub found me after Grim had left to rain his terror elsewhere. We discovered that elsewhere when we returned to Limbo and encountered a cyclone in the city park. It spiraled above the memorial statues of Saul and Coreen, spewing forth from a rift in the sky that matched the one in the throne realm.

Grim was soon at the center of it, drunk on soul matter, crushing the life from anyone who came within his reach—Jenni, Kevin, Gabriel, my hounds, Maalik. There was nothing I could do to stop him. Until Naledi carved an opening by offering herself up to the demented god.

While she’d stripped my ability to see a soul’s aura, the other gift I shared with Grim remained. She’d said I still needed it. Now I knew why.

As Grim sucked the soul matter from her, I slipped in behind him. By the time he noticed me, it was too late. I plunged my hands into his chest. But instead of pulling him out of existence, I absorbed the soul matter he’d stolen, taking it into myself until my head was full of so many voices, I nearly forgot who I was.

With my last sliver of focus, I used the potent energy to resurrect those slain in the park. Then Naledi’s voice led me to the Sea of Eternity, directing me to surrender the soul matter into the ghostly waters, along with the throne’s spiritual bond to the mortal side.

A short distance off the coast, a series of small islands rose in response. Then several souls gained corporeal consciousness and crawled ashore, celebrating their liberation from the sea. There was finally an afterlife for the faithless do-gooders. Ironic, maybe, but it was a beautiful sight, nonetheless. One that came with an epiphany.

This was my life’s purpose. And it was complete.

Of course, the gods still bicker. There’s just less to fight over these days, now that the Throne of Eternity is broken and the excess soul matter flows into the sea.

But the Afterlife Council isn’t my problem anymore.

I’m just a freelance soul harvester with two apprentices.

Right before Grim’s last stand, the council approved that new generation of reapers Jenni was after, and Naledi whipped them up lickety-split. Good thing, too. Without the excess soul matter or a soul on the throne, there would be no new reapers created in the future.

This was it. The end of the line for our kind.

Not quite the way of the dodo or anything. I mean, we are immortal, after all.

But something about it felt so… final. Like we were hitting some collective, cosmic puberty. Or leveling up.

Either way, ten years passed without much in the way of blood or tears. Harvesting souls was a less grim ordeal with the new afterlife on the Isles of Eternity. I managed to keep my apprentices and hellhounds alive, and I savored the good life with my demon in the Greek hell.

I no longer questioned my existence, because my destiny was fulfilled.

I never considered that I might have more than one.

"Life After Death" will be available December 21st, 2021.

Find it at your favorite e-bookstore today! 

https://angelaroquet.com/books_life_after_death