The Reaper's Vengeance A Sister's Wrath Unleashed

I was once the White Reaper, harvesting souls for five hundred years, until I'd earned enough merit to trade it all for one mortal life.

But I was reborn as a baby girl, left beside a dumpster the moment I drew my first breath.

My brother found me when he was seven. He raised me on goat's milk, scraping together everything he had to give me a life worth living.

Years later, he rescued a famous heiress from human traffickers.

She pledged herself to him in gratitude, and he married into the Morton family, rising to a life of unimaginable privilege.

Their wedding was the most extravagant the city had ever seen.

I drained my glass of celebration wine and set off to wander the world.

Two nights ago, walking a mountain road after dark, I found a tattered soul curled inside a crack in the rock, weeping.

It had no limbs. Only half a face remained, and where the eyes should have been there were only two raw, bloody hollows.

I crouched down and began mending the soul, piecing it together from the throat bone up through the jaw, but the face that took shape sent ice down my spine.

It looked exactly like my brother, Sylvester Delgado.

I recoiled so hard my back slammed against the rock wall.

Moonlight fell across the half-formed remnant. Its mouth opened soundlessly, the black pit of its throat gaping toward me.

If this was my brother, then who was the man living the golden life as the Morton family's son-in-law back in Ashford City?

……

I stood frozen, my Soulfetch Chain clanging against the ground at my feet.

The remnant soul before me had no limbs. Both arms and both legs had been ground away while he was still alive, the stumps a mangled pulp of flesh and sinew and splintered bone, as though someone had fed them through a millstone again and again and again.

The lower half of the face was more or less intact. But that face.

Why was it identical to my brother Sylvester's?

“White Reaper, it's getting late. We need to move.”

Brutus Thornton hefted his Soulfetch Lasso and called out behind me.

“He's right, my lady. That's just some stray ghost from who knows where. Don't bother with it.”

Solomon Hansen chimed in.

Their voices dragged me back. A dull, bitter ache spread through my chest.

I had worked the depths of the Netherworld for five hundred years. The horrors I'd witnessed numbered in the millions.

What kind of hatred could do this to a person?

Grief welled up from somewhere deep inside me, and I couldn't stop the soft, shaken breath that escaped my lips.

I forced down the nameless panic clawing at me, told myself over and over not to spiral.

Everyone knew. Sylvester Delgado was the Morton family's prized son-in-law. He'd nearly died saving Nellie Morton, and she had defied every whisper and sideways glance to marry him. That wedding had been the talk of every elite circle in the city.

He was living in splendor, basking in glory. The most fortunate man alive.

How could I look at half a face and decide it was my brother?

I missed him too much. That was all. I was seeing things.

I drew a long breath and smoothed the ripple of dread back down where it didn't belong.

Still, to cross paths was its own kind of fate. I would finish mending this broken soul and send it on to be reborn. That was enough.

I steadied myself, gathered spectral energy at my fingertips, and reached slowly toward the remnant's lumbar spine.

The instant I touched that bone, every muscle in my body locked. My fingers shook so violently the gathered energy scattered into nothing.

This soul had one more vertebra than any human should.

My brother had been obsessed with fighting since he was a boy. At fourteen, he took a blow that nearly killed him. His lumbar spine was shattered beyond repair, and the doctors said there was nothing left to save.

I knelt before the Hall of the Dead for three days and three nights, cracking my forehead against the stone until it bled, begging, until at last I was granted a sliver of Celestial Bone to fuse into his spine.

That extra vertebra was something I had placed there with my own hands.

No one in this world knew about it except the two of us.

I forced myself to stay calm, made myself look at the half-ruined soul again with clear eyes.

The mangled stumps still seeped dark, ghostly blood. The torso was covered in marks of every depth, lash welts layered over crushing wounds, the soul itself torn so badly it was barely holding together.

Whatever had been done to him before death had been beyond endurance. Even now, the soul was still trembling with the memory of that pain.