Scarlett Reaper

By E.V. West

Travelling across time and space, Scarlett and the other Reapers deal with the worst of the worst. Called to find those Obscure who manage to evade hell's death waif's, Scarlett is normally more than happy to rid the world of these abhorrent humans who stain the earth.

When she's tasked to reap Zachary Graham though, things just don't make sense. The attractive veterinarian from London, seems like a normal family man and not at all like her normal clientele of drug dealers and mass murderers. There's more though – he makes her feel.

As if she doesn't have enough to deal with, experiencing these emotions for the first time in her life spanning millennia, Scarlett and the other reapers are at risk of being exposed by Hunters. Working for the wealthy Aiden Walker, the Hunters are tasked with the capture of the Reaper, believing that the being has the ability to return Mr Walker's beloved wife and child from the other side.

In an attempt to coerce her into fulfilling their mission, Zach is captured by the Hunters. Little do they know that Scarlett isn't alone. Death cannot be trapped and it will not be strongarmed into doing anything but removing the blight of evil back to hell where it belongs.

But everything has a price and the devil with not be denied.

• Language: English
• Publisher: E.V. West
• Release date: Aug 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201237769

Book preview

A person holding a sword Description automatically generated with low confidence

SCARLETT

REAPER

E.V. West

COPYRIGHT

This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters and their experiences are all the work of the authors imagination.

While some parts of this novel may bear resemblance to real-life places, events or persons, this is not meant to be historically accurate. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, locations or events past, present or future, is purely for fictional purposes.

Copyright © 2022 E.V. West

All rights reserved.

DEDICATION

To Freddie

You are always supportive when the pressure gets too much and you understand me when no one else does.

Thank you for the space you allow me.

I love you.

Mom, Dad, Alwyn & Nick

There may be oceans between us but you’re always close by, in my heart and in my thoughts.

I love you.

TRIGGER WARNING

This novel contains adult content that may be disturbing to some readers and is not suitable for mature book lovers only.

It mentions several topics such as, but not limited to depictions and references to death, Hell, demons, drug use, stabbing, crimes against humanity and child trafficking.

While this is a work of fiction and is purely meant to be an enjoyable read, it is about the Grim Reaper who is tasked with transporting damned souls to Hell, so please understand that this may not be right for you if you are sensitive to this kind of topic.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

TRIGGER WARNING

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

A WORD FROM E.V. WEST

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

1

1989 AD

Medellin, Columbia

From her perch on the far corner of the desk, Scarlett surveyed the scene in front of her. With an elbow resting on her knee drawn up to her chin, she buried her face in her arm and wrinkled her nose against the smell of body odour combined with the sweetly pungent smell of ether. The thought crossed her mind that if people actually watched the process of cocaine being cut, they would never even consider putting it into their body.

She had seen it cut with everything from talcum powder to other cheaper street drugs like fentanyl, all in the name of squeezing out every blood-soaked cent. Every time someone used cocaine, they spun that wheel of life or death and she would never understand why people took chances with something so precious as their life.

Then again, Scarlett knew enough about mankind to know that no matter what the consequence, there would always be people willing to risk everything to get away from their mundane, stress-riddled lives, even for a brief moment. Life came with worries and pressures that were just too heavy a load for some to carry and drugs meant a reprieve from it all. However, the cost was often higher than expected and soon they spiralled and crashed.

Around her, the ivory-coloured drug was being filled into brick-sized clear bags, silver duct tape sealing the bags ready for transport. Through the white powdery haze, she was tempted to just vanish the whole shipment and watch the packers’ faces as they looked around in confusion. That would bring a smile to her face, although she knew that anyone in the room and their families, would end up being suspected of theft and no doubt pay with their lives. They weren’t the ones she was after. Juan Martinez was the one she had come for.

As if on cue, a door opened and two heavily armed men stepped inside. AK47 assault rifles poised at the ready, their stern faces scanned the room for any sign of a threat and a moment later, confident the room was secure, they stepped aside and the biggest drug dealer in Colombia strolled in. As if the stench in the room wasn’t already making her eyes water, Scarlett rolled her eyes at the sight of this man, rolling a huge Cuban cigar between his chubby, yellowed fingers. The sight of his putrid tongue licking the dark brown torpedo-shaped cigar tip, was almost more than her stomach could take. Standing in the doorway with the light streaming in from the outside, he looked almost angelic. She scoffed. Nothing could be further from the truth and today his luck would run out.

Short in stature, his dark eyes were framed by thick black eyebrows while the hair on his head and across his top lip, was now salty-white, flecked with a few errant black strands. In another setting, an onlooker could have been forgiven for mistaking Mr Martinez for an average grandfather, who stood proudly by, watching his grandchild pedal their first few solo meters, handlebar tassels blowing in the wind. But here and now, Scarlett knew what lay hidden behind his black eyes and she felt nothing but disdain for him.

Mr Martinez strode among the lines of packers, mostly women clothed only in their skimpy underwear, to reduce the likelihood of them stealing from him. His wondering eye was not on the flesh in the room, but rather on the off-white powder that was being weighed and packaged. His taste in women was more expensive and less desperate.

Scarlett watched as he dipped a finger into a mound of powder, before touching it to his revolting, slimy tongue. A gold tooth was revealed as he nodded and pulled his lips back in a grin, happy with the mediocre quality.

Don’t waste my product hey, Mr Martinez said to the man who had been following him. The sweaty chemist wrung his hands, bobbing his head in deference.

Scarlett could tell from his hunched back and constant blinking that the chemist was terrified. Probably coerced into working for the drug dealer, his very life was likely at stake; one mistake working with the ether would have seen him blown to bits, but just as lethal if not even more volatile, was not keeping the boss happy.

We need to push up production, Mr Martinez said.

But sir, cowered the chemist, I’m going as fast as I can but I risk losing the whole batch if we’re not careful.

Mr Martinez glanced over to one of his bodyguards and before the chemist knew what was happening, Scarlett watched as the tall brute of a man, grabbed the skinny chemist by the throat and lifted him off the ground, feet dangling in mid-air.

The chemist struggled against the vice-like grip on his throat, unable to breathe or beg for his life. Scarlett could take no more and in one quick motion, she hopped off the desk and stood facing the Colombian drug lord. He looked right through her as he proudly scanned the room to make sure everyone witnessed his power.

Only a few feet away from her target now, panic erupted in the room as she materialised as if out of thin air. Packers scattered like rats in a sinking ship, as bodyguards raised their weapons and began firing at her. Mr Martinez ducked behind the pack of armed men, as bullets rained down and the sound of gunfire reverberated off the walls of the small room.

Scarlett faced them without flinching. Looking down at her torso, she was unable to contain her amusement as the bullets flew straight through her and slammed into the wall behind. Despite clearly having no effect on her, the thick set guards kept firing until all they heard was the sound of the click-click-click of the firing pin against an empty chamber. The guards stared blankly at her; mouths gaping in disbelief.

You done? she mocked.

Who are you, Mr Martinez asked as he popped his head out from behind the chunky chest of a suited bodyguard.

Mr Martinez, I am Scarlett and I have come to collect your debt.

Collect what debt? What are you on about, woman, he yelled, still cowering close to his shield.

Well now, that’s an interesting question. Collect what, you ask? Well sir, she said slowly walking around the room as all eyes trailed her every move. I am here on business and the person I work for, just won’t take ‘No’ for an answer. She stopped and stared at him, her eyes burrowing into his blackened soul.

Wh-who do you work for? he stammered. We can make a deal, I’m sure. I have a lot of excellent product and its good quality too. Your boss can sell it for a huge profit. Let’s talk, he almost yelled.

I’m afraid the time for talking is over, Mr Martinez. You see, the person I work for has allowed your operation to go on for as long as you served your purpose. However, your time is up and El Diablo is closing you down.

Juan Martinez stood up straight and looked around. His laughter filled the room and Scarlett could tell that he thought she was merely high on drugs or that she’d lost her mind. They always did. She never understood why people prayed every night to a god they never saw and yet, when the devil came calling, they thought it was a joke.

El Diablo? he asked, licking his yellow tobacco-stained teeth. You work for the devil?

I do, she replied.

Well then, what’s the problem? He and I are old friends. I’ve made an empire doing things that he would no doubt love. Invite him around – we’ll smoke a cigar and have a drink.

Scarlett’s patience was wearing thin. You’re actually not wrong, Mr Martinez, she said taking a step back. El Diablo knows you well and he has condoned your actions since they served his bidding, but the time has come for a change of management.

More laughing.

And who’s going to retire me? Mr Martinez questioned with a foul grin. A little thing like you?

Indeed, she dipped her head. "You see, for many years now, we’ve watched as you’ve sold your drugs far and wide. Despite your previous statement, your product has become sub-par and because of that, you’ve had a hand in thousands of deaths across several continents, over and above the acceptable normal loss from your trade. Now, while El Diablo is not unaware of the risks of a business such as yours, your costs have become too high and it’s time to bring in someone else who has a better... work ethic shall we say. When he blinked back at her, she couldn’t resist adding, You with me so far, mi amigo? I’m not going too fast for you, am I?"

His face turned red and the smiled disappeared. Good. She was getting through. Now, as you will remember, a few weeks ago you were raided by the police, but what you may not know, is that you were supposed to die that day. Like a fish out of water, he gaped back at her.

She continued. "Yes, I know it’s shocking but it’s true. However, the scum that you are, you threw one of your own men into the line of fire and he took the bullet meant for you. Since then, you have been living on borrowed time. We call people like you Obscure because, for one reason or another, you have been hidden from El Diablo’s death waifs, or Hell hounds as some people call them. In your case, you got lucky once and since then you have used the luck of others to stay alive and it is why I am here. I am called in on special cases and, while I’ll admit it took me a while to find you, no one escapes the reaper, Señor, not even you."

His mouth dropped open as if unhinged. His eyes like saucers and his pupils dilated,  Scarlett didn’t need her superhuman hearing to know that his heart rate just went up.

Kill this woman, he bellowed and a fresh torrent of artillery hurtled toward her.

Enough, she roared and lifted her arms up in the direction of Mr Martinez and his guns-for-hire. The sound was deafening as the floor vibrated, the walls shuddered and Scarlett released a shockwave of energy. As it surged toward them, weapons were ripped from their owners’ hands and bodies were hurled across the room. Several guards slammed against the wall before crumbling to the ground, brick and mortar being smashed to dust, covering their motionless bodies.

Others in the room, were sent cascading through the nearby window, just moments after the glass blew out into a million glistening pieces, shimmering like shards in a suncatcher, each reflecting the colours of the rainbow.

Standing her ground, Scarlett stood at the epicentre and waited for the haze of dust and drugs to settle. One by one, as people came to their senses, they rushed from the room bewildered and coughing. She was nothing if not patient and time was always on her side.

Peering through the white cloud which still hung heavily in the air, Mr Martinez popped his cocaine covered face out from behind the chair, like a ferret checking its surroundings. Scrambling to his feet, he scanned the room, searching for an opportunity to make a dash for the door, but Scarlett was quicker and in one swift wave of her hand, the door slammed in his face.

He spun around to face her as she took a step toward him. Back pressed hard against the door, he held his hands up as if pushing against the air between them in a vain attempt to keep her at bay.

Not so brave without your foot soldiers, are you? she hissed in perfect Spanish.

What do you want demon? he demanded, as his legs gave way and he slid to the floor with a sweaty squelching thud.

Demon? the corner of her mouth tugged into a grin. No, I am not a demon, merely an enforcer for those who hide from El Diablo.

The banging on the door as his men tried to get in, grew more fervent, their raised voices filled with desperation. Mr Martinez could not tear his eyes away from hers as he struggled to his knees, turning his body away from her just enough to beat his fists against the door. Sweat dripped from his forehead and the stains under his armpits grew darker.

You’re wasting your time Mr Martinez. No one can save you now.

With another step toward him she opened her hand and a scythe appeared. Standing as tall as she was, the round, wooden snath of her scythe was adorned along its length with jet-black leather strips, plaited into grips to prevent the hand from slipping. At its head, arching just above eye level, the silver-grey blade glinted in the sunlight streaming in through the window, which seemed strangely far away. The top edge of the scythe was like a straight-edged razor perfect for slicing, while the edge underneath was curved in a number of wave-like serrated edges and could rip and tear through anything found in its path. These edges culminated at the tip which could stab through even the toughest material. As if not foreboding enough, the gold inlayed hilt on the opposite side of the deadly blade, belied its deadly hammer-like capacity.

The haze cleared and the room disappeared into nothingness as Scarlett changed. In the blink of an eye, she was dressed in a midnight-black hooded robe which seemed to absorb all light, while locks of her blood-red hair escaped the hood, in an ominous warning of what was about to take place.

The air seemed to close in around them as the drug dealer who, having given up the futile attempt at breaking down the door, now knelt in front of her with hands clasped as if in prayer. Scarlett’s face was shadowed by the image of bare skull bones, flames burning in her eyes at the intensity of her stare, as she bore into his soul. As she closed the gap between them, the mirage-like images of a reasonably beautiful woman, merged with a fleshless skull, made Mr Martinez swallow hard.

Cowering at her feet, Mr Martinez put his face to the ground.

Please, I will give you anything your heart desires. Surely there must be something you want?

Still bargaining until the very end, Mr Martinez? Scarlett shut her eyes for a heartbeat. Sadly, for you Señor, what I most desire you cannot give me. The time for talking is now over.

Straightening her back she raised her left arm and held out her scythe with the right. As if a puppet on unseen strings, Juan Martineze rose from his slumped position and hovered above where the now invisible ground would be.

Juan Martineze, your time on Earth has come to an end.

Gripping her weapon with both hands, Scarlett slashed across Mr Martinez’s chest, in a diagonal whoosh. The blade sliced through him like a hot knife through butter and in a flash of flames and ash, the reaping of Mr Martinez was done. His heart stopped and in what would have been his next heartbeat, he stood shoulder to shoulder with Scarlett in the bowels of Hell.

Although Scarlett did not feel the scorching temperatures, the almost pulsating waves of heat energy were palpable and told her enough to know that Mr Martinez was already regretting his life choices. He crumpled in a heap at her feet as every ounce of life-giving moisture was being evaporated from his body. Before her eyes, his upturned face became drawn and hollow.

There was nothing left to say. Scarlett bent down, her scythe disappearing from her hands and replaced with matt-grey shackles that clanged against its heavy chain. As soon as the shackles were clapped onto his wrists, his arms slammed to the soot and rock covered ground, under the unnatural weight of the metal.

Looking down on him, she lifted her scythe once more and a dark vapour-like mist was pulled from his body. She flung the soul into the nearby raging lake of fire and with a sizzle sound it was consumed. His eternal resting place would not be peaceful but she felt no remorse. Not for a man like him who had the blood of so many on his hands.

Turning back to where Mr Martinez had knelt only moments before, now in his place was a dark form of unrecognisable shape. He was forever chained to this place and in the so-called real world, all they would find is a life-less body of a bad man who, an autopsy would show, died from a drug overdose.

Scarlett couldn’t resist that little dig at him and his life-destroying trade.

2

Beyond Time

Everywhere and Nowhere

Time was a construct of the human conscious. With the need to put everything into a neat little box, people relied on time to tell them what they were meant to be doing and when. Scarlett could understand it, but it saddened her that people lived within the confines of always rushing to be somewhere or doing something, instead of living in the moment and making the best of every heartbeat.

The reapers were not confined by such boundaries and time didn’t work the same for Scarlett, as it did for mankind. With the ability to travel beyond the normal conventions of time and space, for the reapers, the clock did not work in only one direction, but could be spun backward, forward or halted as needed.

Just because someone died in the 1700’s, didn’t mean they would die or be reaped before someone in the 2100’s. Time just didn’t work that way. Each dimension or plane was like a strand of time-string and there were more strings than anyone could count. The limited understanding and expectation of a single timeline was given to humans by the Creator because, to give them anything more, would be too much for them to fathom and it would drive them insane.

Despite having done this job for longer than she could remember, there was still so much that Scarlett didn’t yet understand, given only enough knowledge to do the devil’s bidding. Trying to think back to a time beyond this life, brought only darkness with brief snippets of random scenes. She had lost count of the number of times that she had tried to pull her memories from the abyss, but each time she was rewarded with nothing more than a headache.

Over the lifetimes that she had been reaping, Scarlett’s heart had hardened and she had become callous. She felt it some days more than others, but there came a point in life, where you had to just accept your fate because choice is an illusion people create to make fate easier to swallow.

Seeing the ink-black souls pulled from those she reaped, often left her wondering if she even still had a soul and, if she did, was what she was doing blackening hers more and more? Was her soul salvageable? But what choice was there? It’s not like she could just say ‘No, sorry not today’ to the devil, hence the dichotomy between choice and fate; she had no choice and was therefore locked into her fate.

Scarlett felt secure in the one fact that gave her solace – the people she reaped deserved it. Yes, when one bad person was removed, often two took their place but that was not her concern. She was not in control of the entire human race, and frankly, she didn’t want to be. People were hard work and she was happy to interact with them as little as possible. Until something changed, which it hadn’t done in thousands of years, Scarlett preferred to remain busy and just get on with the job, which meant receiving new targets; new Obscure to be found and reaped.

When the devil summoned, she was happy for the distraction. Quicker than a thought entering her brain, Scarlett found herself in a dimension where there was no time and no discernible place. There was no sense of up or down, no ground and air, nothing. It was beautiful though as the cosmos danced in front of her. Colours of every hue flashed against an onyx black drop and lights dashed across her view. Whirlpools of star-like images swirled and danced around each other in a tango of unimaginable beauty and sensuality in their deafeningly silent world.

Scarlett wasn’t sure where this dimension lay or whether it was even real but each time she came, she was left mesmerised. She had tried many times to reach it on her own, but had always ended up somewhere else and so, whenever she was brought here, she drank in the sights as if they were her last.

The arrival of the four other reapers broke the spell as nods of greeting went around. None of them felt comfortable in this place, perhaps because it was the only dimensional space out of their control, but there was never much in the way of conversation or banter.

Nīkau was the big brother of the group. A stocky Māori man born in 1546 AD, he had taken on the role of protector. While the reapers didn’t really need protecting since they were immune to harm, Nīkau was all about family and honour.

If he had an opposite, it was Piper. She was as free and excitable as Nīkau was stern and contained, which sometimes meant that her thick Russian accent got in the way of anyone understanding what she was rambling about, when she started talking about her day in her usual animated way. Like an annoying little sister, her innocent sweetness and zeal for life you loved to hate, but a better listener no one could ask for and Scarlett had more than once, sobbed into her shoulder.

Mira was the reserved mother, who kept a watchful eye on everything. She was a woman who seldom spoke and who’s emotional scars ran deep, although she seldom mentioned her long-lost family. Arguably the best tracker of them, her Maasai heritage stood her in good stead, despite the women of her time not being encouraged to join the men on hunting parties. She was not one to conform to anyone’s standards and even now, she wore the clay-red markings on her face and beads around her neck as