Page 87 of The Reluctant Reaper
“I—you—I?—”
“You know, in all the years we’ve been ‘friends,’ I’ve never heard you raise your voice. But look at you. You’re a seething shitpile right now.”
And Amara saw it. Saw the second Skye decide to stop dancing and go all in. “Yes, well. I didn’t think it would take much effort, since you have a documented history of being a spoiled, oblivious idiot.”
“Only two of those are true,” Amara sniffed. “And I’ll take ‘spoiled idiot’ over cowardly poisoner.”
“Watch your mouth, girl.”
She ignored the warning. “Not just my father, either. You’ve been poisoning me for years. Every chance you got, you dripped vitriol in my ear. Like with my migraines. Outwardly sympathetic, while telling me they were just another reason I wasn’t suited to Death’s mantle.
“And for what?” Amara spread her hands. “None of this was necessary. There’s plenty of room here. None of us have to reside in our physical territories to do our work. I can be Death in Minot or Missouri or Moscow. And you know my parents would have let you stay as long as you?—”
“I am not a guest and I donotaccept charity! This territory and all souls in it should be mine by right.”
“Should? No,” Amara said quietly. “That’s only what you told yourself. The blunt fact is, it’smineby right, and you know it well. It’s why you can’t stand it. You never could. So when you saw me at my lowest—the painful fogs of migraine, my despair at family obligations, my refusal to return home—you stopped fucking around and set your cowardly coup in motion.
“And you probably told yourself it wasn’t wrong, that you weren’t betraying me. ‘Saving me.’ I’m betting that’s how you rationalized it. Well, I have woeful news for you, Skye: I don’t need saving.”
“Utter bullshit! You need saving almost as much as your father does.”
“My father. Mmmm.” Amara studied Scáthach like she was a bug under a microscope the likes of which had never been seen. “It was your idea, wasn’t it? Presented out of concern for my mother and me. ‘Let yourself be poisoned; when Amara fails at least she won’t die and poor Brunhilde won’t suffer the loss of another daughter.’ And Death listened. Of course he did. And for love of my mother and me, agreed. And so here we are. A stupid, reckless plan, like something out of a nineties sitcom. And now this mess.”
“It’s mine,” Skye said defiantly. “The territory and everything in it. Your mother. You. The grounds, the buildings, the hundreds of thousands of souls.”
“You’re off: seventy million. You want to rule over a territory of people you don’t understand? You couldn’t even be bothered to Google the population. I’m beginning to see why you’re down to six hundred miles and a population of ten thousand. You just... half-ass everything. I can’t believe I didn’t see it sooner.”
“It all belongs to me. You could never have held it.”
“You’re a broken record. And how very Darwinian of you. The polite thing to do would be to wait until I failed before launching Project Treacherous Bitch.”
“No, I?—”
“But you couldn’t wait, and once you started, you couldn’t go back. You’d made your decision, you talked Death into making himself vulnerable to ichor. Once you crossed that line, it was either go back or go on. And it’s not in you to go back, so: more poison. More faux understanding. What you didn’t count on was my competence.”
Skye pressed her lips together but said nothing. Amara was more than a little surprised no one in the room took the easy shot, either. The only sounds were the snuffling of houndlets, the crackling fire, and La Croix’s chattering teeth.
“I not only came when called, I brought a loved one along for the ride and we took up the scrolls. So now you had two problems: You had to make Death sicker and you had to make the Reaps harder. Drive me away so you could heroically step in. So you manipulated the list, giving me the worst first.”
“But I thought that was impossible,” Gray said.
“Forbidden,” Hilly said, glaring at Skye. “Only a handful of people on the globe would even be able to make the attempt. And it would be difficult—not impossible—even for them.”
“Manipulating the list contradicts the point of death gods: No one can avoid their fate and it’s not okay to try. But what’s a little blasphemy when you’re going for a land grab, right, Skye?”
“You’re talking to me about blasphemy?” Skye muttered. “That’s rich. And I didn’t manipulate the list. I switched out the faxes.”
Amara held herself still so she wouldn’t slap her own forehead.So simple it never occurred to me. I assumed she was utilizing death-god shenanigans to fuck with the list, but all she had to do was get to the fax machine first. Bad enough that anyone could have done it. Worse that we made it easy.
She might have half-assed everything, but my family hasn’t exactly been behaving like rocket scientists, either.
“You also hid the ‘easy’ Reaps,” Amara continued. “That’s when La Croix noticed; his followers knew some of the missing, and came to him for help.”
Before she could elaborate, La Croix jumped in. Fair: Skye had fucked with his people. “It did not take overlong to see what you’d done, lending credence to Amara’s point about your... inefficiency.” He seemed to get taller and darker with every word, and if Skye had any sense, she’d be mildly terrified right about now. “And however events shake out now, you have made an enemy, Scáthach, warrior maid of shadows. And there will be a reckoning.”
Amara cleared her throat. “Anyway. You didn’t anticipate La Croix noticing your little practice runs. To be fair, what were the odds? I was supposed to have fled back to Minnesota by now. Your improvisations shouldn’t have been necessary. But you decided to make lemon meringue from lemons; La Croix’s running around town just added to my stress, and the missing people gave me yet another thing to worry about.
“They’re fine, by the way. If you care. The ones you hid. Well, not fine; they’re dead because it was their time. La Croix tracked the last one down a couple of hours ago. You hid them on the base, where it would be almost impossible for civilians to look for them. But in a common area, where their discovery, while delayed, was always inevitable. Because you half-assed it.
