Bewitching Sloth

  Bewitching

  Sloth

  Seven Deadly: Book One

  Michelle Gross

  copyright © 2018 by Michelle Gross

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Artwork –© 2018 L.J. Anderson of Mayhem Cover Creations

  Editor: Shantella Benson at Avanturine Press Author Services

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Jackal’s Pride

  About the Author

  BEWITCHING SLOTH (Seven Deadly, Book One)

  Reapers are the peacekeepers—the balancers of life and death, good and evil. They’re the police of the Underworld in a way. They keep both worlds balanced just enough so that the King of the Underworld can never escape his prison.

  For the day his reign stretches into the human world, all things good will come to an end.

  This is the story of a dark king who cursed seven siblings with sins, and how far those seven went to protect both worlds from the end of days when an old entity challenged the Dark One’s very reign.

  Isabella Wen has spent the last decade in the human world hiding from the one that turned her touch deadly, made her body a weapon for his own gain.

  Sebastian Reaper—bearer of the sin of sloth and the eldest son of the revered Grim Reaper—has spent his entire life fighting to stay awake because of his curse.

  When the witch finds the sleepy sloth passed out in the human hospital, they touch and sparks fly. Her touch should have hurt him. Instead, it’s the one thing he’s after.

  She thinks her darkness is her undoing. He thinks she’s his cure.

  When her past and her future collide, he must choose between duty and heart.

  The world or her?

  Each book in the series is about a different sibling and their sin, so the romance has an ending in each book. As for the storyline, it’s just getting started.

  For all the weirdos that like action and dirty details.

  Prologue

  A very, very long time ago, a skeletal being came to be. A savior for mankind, he became a cloud of darkness fighting against blacker darkness. Death was his existence, so it became his name. He walked alone, ridding the world of evil and guiding the dead to their afterlife.

  The Grim Reaper craved flesh, watching people from a distance. He discovered love between humans—the beauty in flesh, and all the ways a body could feel. So he merged with an incubus demon and forever would be known as Killian—the Grim Reaper.

  He was still lonely…for it took a very long time for his Melanie to be born, but then she came to him as a human. They met and fell in love…

  But this wasn’t a story about them. This was about seven siblings cursed because of their parents.

  This was one dark king’s decision, an evil deed, that set into motion future events shaking both the human realm and the Underworld.

  That’s where our story began…

  Be careful of the darkness, for what lies in it will drag you in and keep you. In its depths, the Devil reigned. On the outskirts of this domain, a bothersome entity resided who had destroyed the Devil’s evil time and time again. He was called the Grim Reaper, and though he used to be a man without weakness, he wasn’t anymore. His wife delivered him seven beautiful, healthy children. The Devil saw them as his chance for retribution for keeping his evil at bay, for he could never reign over the human world until the day people were more bad than good.

  On the day the seventh child was born, the Devil came to them with curses. Each one representing the seven deadly sins.

  Grim’s three sons were playing outside the castle when they looked up and saw the Devil beside them. He started with the closest one, uttering the word, “Sloth,” as he pressed his finger against the blond boy’s forehead. He dropped to the ground in a deep sleep. The Devil turned to his dark-haired brother and grinned. “Greed.” The boy’s eyes lit up with the curse. The Devil smiled and went to the third dark-haired brother. He pressed his finger against the boy’s forehead and said, “Wrath.”

  Chuckling, the Devil slipped into the house and found three daughters. He went to the brunette, touched her forehead, and whispered, “Pride.” He continued with the remaining girls, cursing each “Lust” and “Envy.” Lastly, the Devil made his way to the seventh child tucked away in her room resting. Leaning over the crib, the Devil grinned and pointed his finger at the child, but the baby reached out and grabbed it. The Devil revealed his horns and red eyes hoping to scare her. She giggled instead. He studied her curiously before placing his finger on her forehead and whispering, “Gluttony.” Only the second time he touched the newborn, images flashed behind his eyes, visions of him on his knees before an entity he recognized immediately. In the mists of those haunting images was the woman the newborn would one day be. It was all of those apparitions combined that had him retreating from her smile rather quickly, rubbing the place her tiny fingers touched as he did so. The Devil vanished, vowing to make sure that what he saw never came to pass. He took his secret and kept it in his thoughts only.

  Sadly, by the time their parents felt the Devil’s presence it was too late. He came and went, leaving behind curses that couldn’t be broken no matter how hard anyone tried.

  And so, the Devil’s retribution began. Over a hundred years later, the game of sorts, begged for an end.

  Every good story starts off with a man meeting a woman, in this case, a sleeping Reaper succumbed to his curse, and an unlucky someone stumbled across him.

  Or should we say lucky?

  Sebastian, you sleepy sloth, you are where we will begin…

  One

  Sebastian

  Did you know how many people died in a day?

  ‘Cause I sure as shit didn’t know. I knew it was a hell of a lot because I was stuck in the human world more than I cared for, guiding the dead to their afterlife, whether it be ascending them to Heaven or descending them to Hell.

  I was one of many working as a Reaper under the Grim Reaper who happened to be my dad. It was a very busy job…

  A damn frustrating one too.

  My eyes nearly rolled back into my head and I groaned watching the ghost. He sprinted out of his newly dead body and ran for dear life—from me. I hated when they did this. Why would you want to stay with the living when you were a ghost? I could understand the ones that were being sent to the flames, but this guy? He was going to the pearly gates, yet here he was running through hospital walls to get away from me, all the while screaming, giving himself away.

  Not that it was hard for me to fi
nd him. I could find him anywhere with my Reaper senses.

  I yawned, covering my mouth. So tired. Always so damned tired. I stood there a minute and tested my weariness. I was pretty sure I was good for now, but you could never be too sure with a curse.

  I had better get this over with, just in case. That was all I needed—to pass out in the human world. I’d have to hear Barron bitch for a century if he had to come fetch my sleeping body in a human hospital. He already hated everything, doing anything, being anywhere; he was just the fun-sucker of the family. Not that he could help it.

  Rolling my neck, I faded to where the ghost was hunched down in a janitor’s closet. Fading was something only our family could do. We had our own portal network—a speed travel that could pop us in and out wherever we wanted, literally. If I wanted to pop in on the other side of the wall where the hallway was, I’d fade from here and re-fade to there all within the same second. Or I could go to the Underworld in the same second. It could be anywhere. I could fade in and out of time just to stand behind someone while previously standing in front of them. Typically, it wasn’t ideal to do that in front of humans since they tended to freak out when shit disappeared and reappeared somewhere else. But ghosts were a different story. They were dead already and understanding there was indeed an afterlife.

  Now every other demon or monster—whatever, was stuck using a portal chip to transport where they wanted. We were superior that way. HAHAHAHA. Just kidding. I wasn’t that kind of asshole. I could be kick-ass though when I wasn’t sleeping.

  “Don’t take me,” the dude screamed, holding his hands up to his face. “I don’t want to leave.”

  Sighing, I bent down and removed the hood that was attached to my cloak. Yes, cloak. Dad thought it was a Reaper’s job to wear one. He was also as old as time itself, so there’s that. “Is it the hood?” I asked him. “I try to tell Grim that it freaks you guys out, but I think that’s why he keeps it mandatory.”

  He kept screaming. “I want to stay here!” He threw himself onto the floor. I realized what he was doing and grabbed him by the back of his shirt before he slipped through the tiles.

  I hauled him to his feet and opened the passage with my scythe. The bright light had him completely mesmerized. “Only good things from here.” I think. I didn’t know what Heaven was like. Never would. “Time to let go of this life,” I told him. “In ya go.” I gave him a smile right before he snapped out of it.

  “Wait! No!”

  I gave him a push, then a kick. There he went. I watched as the passage closed, swallowing him whole. I groaned. “I need a fucking nap.”

  Right when I was about to fade the hell out of this human hospital, my Reaper senses started tripping again. Someone else was dying here… What the bloody hell? This hospital was tiny, in the middle of nowhere. How many people could die in this small town?

  I slipped through the door, stepping back out into the hallway that was quiet and empty. I walked to where the dying man was instead of fading, wondering why I wasn’t fading to get to him instead of walking the hall. Wait, a second… as I got closer I felt the guy’s aura more. This wasn’t a dying man, more like a dying werewolf. A lot of vampires, werewolves, and otherworldly creatures lived in the human world, so it wasn’t weird for us to come across them dying while working, but this one wasn’t meant to die today. Some lives were cut short by unexpected tragedies, or rather hiccups in Heaven’s perfect plan of life and death for humans. I could tell what kind of death everyone was having. This was one of those hiccups, but most of the time when a demon died prematurely it had something to do with another demon taking him out.

  Curious, I faded into the werewolf’s room. He was already dead; a nurse was unplugging him from some sort of machine. Nothing looked wrong with him on the outside. I watched as the foggy soul stretched out of his body. Humans were the only ones that actually came back as ghosts, everyone else looked like this floaty-cloud-blob thing like this werewolf here. His soul was angry too, screaming and roaring at me while I pinched a part of the fog between my fingers and opened a passage to the flames.

  “Looks like you weren’t so friendly in life,” I told him before tossing him inside.

  Still, it was weird I couldn’t sense how he died. I should be able to… I guess it didn’t matter. He probably deserved it.

  I staggered forward, a dark tunnel clouding my vision. “Shit,” I hissed, grabbing my head and reaching out with my other hand to grab onto something. I let my scythe dematerialize as my vision came back into focus, but the drowsiness stayed. It wasn’t a normal tiredness either, it was the kind that swallowed me up. It was a dark abyss I could never escape— my curse. The sin and curse of sloth.

  I couldn’t focus as the sleepiness took all my senses, all coherent thoughts, leaving nothing but the bone-deep feeling of slumber. I couldn’t even fade from the hospital. No humans could see me but the idea of being stuck here asleep…

  There it was, I felt it seeping further into me, digging deeper.

  I started tipping forward.

  In my head, I could hear my asshole siblings yelling what they always did when this happened, Reaper down! Reaper down! Reaper—

  Two

  Isabella

  “That’s a good girl, Isabella.”

  “Kill, kill, kill. Absorb, absorb, absorb.”

  I heard that person’s words as I rounded the corner of the hallway at Shelly Valley Hospital, the place I’d been working the last few months. This one mistake, this one occurrence filled my head with memories I wished to forget.

  The werewolf’s eyes seared into my memory as he accidentally bumped into me when I was talking to a patient. I turned around and grabbed his arm to see if he was all right—then he was on the floor—dead. I hadn’t known he wasn’t human until he was already dead, or I would have never touched him.

  I was a nurse, and I stood there while my coworkers—some of them friends—screamed at me to do something. They shoved me aside and hauled him onto a bed, trying to revive what I killed. I backed away and hurried out of the room with one of our doctors yelling at me. Only, I had to go back to that werewolf. I had to erase the evidence of my tainted magic, or else—the monster would find me.

  “Breathe in the darkness, pour out the light.”

  “I don’t need your good, I want your bad.”

  “Hurt or be hurt.”

  “Harvest it all for me—”

  I sucked in a breath and ignored the voice inside my head that would forever haunt me. I turned on my heels, whispering an enchantment to hide me from everyone’s view as I made my way to where the werewolf was. A cold waft of darkness wrapped around me. My worry turned to terror. I’d been found because of this idiot werewolf. I didn’t want to kill anything, but I was angry that because of this careless werewolf bumping into me, he lost his life and I’d been found.

  That wasn’t fair, Izzie, I told myself.

  The werewolf hadn’t known he’d die, and I hadn’t known he was a werewolf when I turned around and grabbed—

  “What the—”

  I almost fell over a large someone crumpled up on the floor… At least I thought it was a someone. I spotted long legs peeking out of the black clothing covering up his entire body. I poked his body with my shoe. He didn’t budge.

  Something wasn’t right. My body had a certain twitchiness to it, almost like I needed to reach down and touch the person beneath all the black. Inside me, magic and darkness mingled and collided over and over. I backed away immediately. This person wasn’t a human, and my insides were begging for me to touch and lay claim to whatever power he was harnessing. I didn’t want to, but my magic was doing so for me, peeling away at my armor preventing me from seeing people’s energy so I could see the color of his.

  Blue. So blue. So strong. So much of it.

  Ignoring the need to touch the unconscious someone, I hastily made my way to the werewolf, hovering my hand above his body to take back the traces of my magic while trying my
hardest to give back what I’d stolen. Only it wasn’t easy. The dark magic that ran through me didn’t like to give, it liked to take. As it was taught to do.

  After I was positive I erased the traces on the dead werewolf, I turned back to the person on the floor.

  Twitchy fingers, twitchy fingers.

  Just walk past him… That was all I had to do.

  Just what was he?

  I couldn’t read him at all. I was trying, and so was the darkness crawling through me. Whatever he was, the darkness wanted it. Whatever he was, I should get far, far away for his sake and mine.

  So why was I on my knees next to him?

  Twitchy fingers, twitchy fingers.

  Oh, God. So powerful.

  Need it. Want it. So, I’ll take it.

  He was lying on his stomach. I rolled him over, removing the black material that covered his entire body to see him. My hands found his cheek, and the moment our bodies connected, a wave of heat—nothing like the familiar darkness licked over me. The hair on the nape of my neck stood on end as I bit back a sound that would have been embarrassing.

  He jerked immediately, gasping, then he raised forward, way, way, too fast.

  Our heads collided. I saw stars, quite possibly the Big Dipper as I continuously rubbed my forehead trying to ease the pain coursing through it.

  “Ow!” I cried the same time he said, “Fuck!”

  With the pain, I landed back down on Earth. I could remember what I had been doing and jumped away from him so quickly I tripped backward, falling on my butt.

  Our eyes met. Blue. The ocean. Help… I’ve fallen and I can’t get up. That was the effect I was having from staring at this man. Looking into eyes like those, you were going to get lost. Dark, dirty blond hair. A perfect jawline that would probably make the angels sing… Just who was this crazy, beautiful man?

  “What are you?” I breathed out. “Who are you?”

  Those translucent, ocean eyes studied me, up and down they roamed over my scrubs before taking in the room and the werewolf behind him. “I’m already… awake?” He sounded surprised.