Naomi Grim (The Silver Scythe Chronicles) Part 1



  Naomi Grim

  Book One of the Silver Scythe Chronicles

  (Part 1)

  Naomi Grim

  Book One of the Silver Scythe Chronicles

  (Part 1)

  Other books by Tiffany Nicole Smith:

  Book 1-4 of the Fairylicious Series

  The Thing About Scorpions (Scorpions 1)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2013 by Tiffany Nicole Smith All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be copied or reproduced in any matter whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Printed in the United States of America.

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  Twisted Spice Publications

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  Look out for updates of future serials

 

  Naomi Grim

  Book One of the Silver Scythe Chronicles

  (Part 1)

  Tiffany Nicole Smith

  Part 1

  The Assignment

  Chapter l

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter l

  Screeching tires followed by the sickening sound of metal colliding with something solid, prevented me from almost dozing off. I had been propped up against the tree when I heard the crash. My dispatching device had directed me there to wait. Falling asleep would’ve been a drastic mistake. This time I had been dispatched to Saint Paul, Minnesota.

  I peered from around the thick trunk of the pine and sucked in a breath. It was a gruesome scene. Although I was used to death and witnessing dead bodies, it was still hard to look at it. And it never got any easier. I'd known from the winding roads that an accident would likely take place. Spring showers had made the ground slick, which didn't help.

  “Where is she? Where is she?” The blond girl, Haley, screeched. “Aiden, do you see her? She flew headfirst out of the car!”

  I grabbed the scythe lying next to me, stood up and prepared myself.

  The kid called Aiden, had gotten down on all fours, and felt the asphalt for his glasses. “No. I can’t see a damn thing.”

  After brushing the dirt from my clothes, I walked out of the shadows.

  “Jessica!” Haley’s screams sounded more urgent now.

  The dying girl, Jessica lay sprawled on the concrete. Jessica was obviously the one, the Fated I was sent here to retrieve because she had that death glow about her. Silent as a ghost, I stood over her. Thankfully, no one except the Fated could see me when I was in full-on Grim mode. Jessica’s green eyes widened when she saw me. I could only be seen by the one I was supposed to take. She was definitely the one.

  “Jessica!” Haley screamed, running to her best friend’s side.

  But Jessica’s gaze didn’t leave mine. The girl squinted. She was fighting hard, but it was no use. Her time had come.

  What a terrible way to die. Thrown from a car. Bleeding to death on the road. I cringed at the sight of the bright red pool that had formed around her head, soaking her brown curls. I wondered what it felt like to bleed. Grims didn't bleed. My father thought death was a beautiful thing, but I never saw it that way. Nothing was worse than watching a human taking their last breath.

  Jessica’s lips trembled as if she were trying to say something.

  “Call 911!” Haley yelled to Aiden as he crawled over to them.

  I would be long gone with Jessica’s life by the time an ambulance arrived. A long, bloody gash stretched across the side of Aiden's face. He moved slowly as if something else was hurting him. Haley held her side, but she was too concerned about Jessica to worry about her own pain.

  I had been following this trio of friends for almost two weeks. At the time of the accident, they had been coming home from a study group. I'd been watching them in the library until my dispatching device transported me to the side of a dark deserted road. There I had waited for the group to appear. They seemed like good kids. I’d grown a little fond of them. They were good-hearted and genuinely cared for one another. The Fated, the one who was to die, had only been revealed to me at that very moment.

  With my scythe in my right hand, I squeezed my left fist tight, holding Jessica’s stare. Something warm formed underneath my fingers. Her life was in my hands. I opened my palm and a black stone that looked like a lump of coal rested in my hand. The lifestone.

  Haley was hysterical as Aiden yelled poor directions at the 911 operator.

  My job was done. I closed my eyes and waited to be taken back. A transporting chamber magically appeared as it always did when a job was complete, and I stepped inside. The chamber looked like a large bullet-shaped elevator. A strange sensation flowed through me as I became absorbed in a whirl of invisible wind. Transportation back to my dimension only took seconds.

  When I opened my eyes, the transporting chamber opened, and I found myself in my kitchen. The chamber was how we traveled from home to our assignments. It took us from the kitchen to anywhere we needed to go and then back to the kitchen again. Paradoxically, the chamber also served as our pantry. I stepped out of the pantry and almost collided with my brother.

  “Hey sis, you were gone a long time,” Dorian said. He was munching on a bag of chips and he hadn’t bothered to turn around. No one could sneak up on a Grim.

  “This one took longer. She was a fighter…” I swallowed a lump in my throat. In my sweaty palm was the lifestone. I just had to hand it over to my father, and he would turn it in to Mr. Dunningham, our ruler, for a nice sum of money.

  Dorian walked out of the kitchen and down the hallway toward his bedroom. I trudged along behind, my sneakers squeaking on the hardwood floor. Looking at the back of his head, I realized my little brother had suddenly gotten taller than me.

  The scent of cinnamon, fresh cut flowers, and laundry detergent greeted me. Home. It always felt good to return. And I seriously missed sleeping in my own bed. Our house was located in what humans would call a middle-class neighborhood in an alternate dimension, which existed on an undetectable world separate from Earth. But our life closely resembled that of the human world, and we even did many of the same things such as, eat, sleep, love, and raise families. But humans didn't know that we existed.

  As I walked down the hall, I looked around me. The home I was raised in consisted of four bedrooms, a living room, one bathroom, a modest dining room, my father’s study, and a rather big kitchen. (Because of the extra-large pantry aka transport.) The living room was the most used room in the house and decorated beautifully by my mother. Picturesque canvases hung on the walls, and at night, a fireplace increased the coziness of the room. It was there, on Sundays that my father usually spent his time playing chess with my brothers. I was the only girl. And let me say that living in a male dominated household really sucked. When mother was around it wasn’t so bad. Then it was the two of us against them.

  Dorian entered his bedroom and sat at his desk, then adjusted his microscope lens. “I don’t know why humans bother. You can’t fight death.”

  �
�It’s in their nature, Dorian. Most people don’t want to die.” Images displayed before me: the dead girl, her pleading eyes, her broken body. My body shuddered at the memory. I didn’t tell my brother that death made me sad, he would just tease me and call me weak. “There was…um, a lot of blood, though.”

  He looked up. “Yeah? How’d she die?”

  In a horrible accident, lying in a pool of her own blood.

  Instead, I said softly, “A deer ran into the road. Her friend hit it, and the girl was thrown from the car.” I didn’t add how awful it was to watch her die and her friends crying.

  He nodded. “Nice, I love the bloody ones. Dunningham will be happy with that.”

  I went to my own bedroom to hang my scythe on its hook. I’d missed the comforts of being in my own room, but that was the Grim life. A quick glance in the mirror told me that my long, ebony hair was still wind-blown from the trip and that circles had developed under my sable eyes. My skin looked pale and my clothing rumpled. I had my mother’s cute, upturned nose and Father’s long legs. And I’d always been a good runner. After running a brush through my hair. I slipped off my T-shirt, shoes, and then tugged off my jeans. Digging around in my dresser, I found a comfy old sweatshirt and PJ bottoms. Much better.

  After changing my clothes, I tiptoed down the hall to Father’s study. I didn’t want to disrupt him if he was concentrating on something. He sat at a large oak desk, his broad shoulders hunched over a book. Biting my lip, I watched him for a few seconds. He ran his fingers through his charcoal hair, which was always cut short.

  “Hello, Darkness. You made it back.” Darkness was my parent's nickname for me. If we were human, they would probably call be Sunshine or some other silly name.

  “Yeah, Father.” I walked to his desk and handed him Jessica’s lifestone.

  After taking it, he opened a silver box and placed the lifestone inside. “Good job. How old was she?”

  “Seventeen,” I said. I knew that she had just turned seventeen the week before. I’d even had to endure her very rowdy birthday party. I had to admit, it kind of looked like fun. Grims never had parties like that.

  Father smiled. “So how many years does that make for you, honey?”

  “Four hundred and thirty-two.” I was only sixteen, so I had a long way to go.

  Father made a note on a page in his notebook so we could keep track of our years.

  That’s how it worked, being a Grim. We not only collected lifestones, but we collected years of life. Weird, I know. When we brought back a lifestone, Mr. Dunningham paid us. That was how we survived in our world. And the younger the person, the more money we got. In addition to that, the person’s age was added on to our own lives. For example, Jessica just added seventeen years to my life, so it was a catch twenty-two. The younger the life, the less years, but more money. The older the person, the more years a Grim received and less money. It sounded strange, but it was all we knew.

  We were Grims by birth. We had done nothing to earn this job and there was nothing we could do to escape it. I didn’t think we were monsters. We were just doing our jobs. What we had to do. We never got a chance to pick our own profession, because we were born into the business. And yeah, it sucked. Although death was a necessary part of the cycle of life, Grims didn’t cause deaths—we were just there to pick up the lifestones. It was a common misconception that we collected souls. Souls were totally different. What happened to a human’s soul was between God and Satan.

  I lifted the picture of my mother from the desk. She had the same features as all the Grims—black hair and black eyes. Our family in particular had pale skin, but Grims came in all colors. When duty called, we had to leave our families and follow the human who was about to die. Sometimes we could be gone for weeks or months. At that moment, my older brother Bram and my mother were away on assignments. It was very rare that our entire family was ever together at once.

  “You miss her, don’t you?” Father asked.

  “I do. It feels like I haven’t seen her since forever," I answered wistfully.

  Mother had been on an assignment for two months at a military camp.

  “Well, she actually came home last week,” Father said. “Then she got called out again. But I think your brother, will be back later tonight," Father offered, as if Bram were a suitable replacement. Bram had just turned eighteen and thought he ruled the world.

  I rolled my eyes. “Great,” I muttered. I had actually been looking forward to a Bram-free night.

  Father turned his attention back to his book so I left him alone. I wanted to catch up on some reading before dinnertime.

  Father had made salmon and steamed vegetables for dinner that night. We were all seated at the table and Dorian was retelling a story about how he’d discovered yet another new life-form. According to him, he had done an experiment with a beetle and turned it into some sort of mutant. Dorian was pondering what he should name the mutant-beetle when a familiar bumping sound let us know that Bram would be coming through the transportation chamber at any moment.

  Bram entered the dining room and threw his scythe to the carpeted floor. I waited for Father to say something about Bram’s disrespect toward the sacred scythe, but he only looked concerned. Being Father’s Golden Child, Bram got away with a lot more than Dorian and I. A few inches taller than Father, Bram towered over the rest of the family. His body was lean and toned from working out consistently and he kept his dark hair in messy spikes like most guys did.

  “What’s the problem, son?” Father asked, putting his fork down.

  Bram's brows lowered into a scowl. “It was a suicide.”

  Suicides were no fun. We got almost nothing for those. When a person commits suicide, it’s not really their time to go, so we’re not prepared in advance. If the person took their own life before we could get to it, then the lifestone was virtually worthless. I never really understood why a human would do that. Human life seemed pretty nice. What could be so bad that someone would want to die? I thought about all the lifestones I'd collected from the Fated and how many of them wanted to continue living, but couldn't. It didn't seem fair. I concluded that suicide was one of the things about humans I'd never understand.

  “Waste of time!” Bram growled. He jerked out a chair, and shook the entire table as he sat, almost spilling my glass of water.

  “Calm down, Bram. We all get those occasionally,” I said softly. He glared at me and I looked away. I knew better than to talk to him when he was angry.

  Bram and Father were alike in so many ways. For one, they were both money and power hungry. They’d do anything to stay in Mr. Dunningham’s good graces. All they cared about was moving up in society and living in some stupid mansion in the Upper Estates. I couldn't care less about those things. I didn't see what the big deal was. I felt like we already had more than we needed.

  Right now, we lived in the middle of Nowhere. Really. Our colony of Grims lived in a world named Nowhere, it was just that, too—nowhere. Our world served as our waiting area as we travel back and forth between the world and home. There were three sections of Nowhere. Litropolis was the lower end, and the people who lived there were poor. Mr. Dunningham rarely gave them assignments. It was sad because they died early for lack of earned years and the Grims who didn't live there wanted nothing to do with them. We lived in a city called Farrington, the middle-class zone. I loved it here. Farrington was a tiny, quiet city filled with gothic homes, small shops where we could purchase food, clothes, and luxury items, and a few restaurants. Everyone knew everyone in Farrington. I loved our home complete with its sharp pinnacles, rounded windows, and intricate geometrical designs. The buildings in Farrington reminded me of the European cathedrals I'd seen in books. Some of our buildings even had towers. Even though all our friends lived in Farrington, it wasn’t good enough for Father or Bram. Mother once told me that a Grim man’s worth was measured by his riches and his home. That was the reason Father would never be satisfied until we made it
to the Upper Estates, where Mr. Dunningham and all his favorite families lived. They had thousands of years and anything they dreamed of and desired. They looked at us like we looked at the Grims of Litropolis—like we were nothing.

  It was a simple process. Dunningham decided who lived and died. If he didn’t like you, he didn’t assign you deaths and you eventually expired.

  Bram threw the lifestone onto the table. Instead of the rich, black color it should’ve been, the rock was white and crumbly. That was what happened when a lifestone didn’t fall into the hands of a Grim immediately. It dried out. If the lifestone were left too long, it would evaporate completely. We always had to be prepared to grab those stones. Bram shook the table again as he pushed back his chair and stood up. I forced myself not to comment. He’d stormed toward his bedroom. But before he made it out of the room, Father whistled and pointed toward the discarded scythe. Bram huffed, but he stomped back and picked it up.

  Scythes were precious. They were given to Grims on their thirteenth birthdays, the year we began collecting lives. Each Grim had his name engraved on his scythe along with the words “Long Live Death.” We all had a hook in our bedrooms where our scythes were to be hung, and we were never to leave Nowhere without them. One of the many rules of being a Grim.

  Bram slammed the door to his bedroom so hard the windows in the kitchen shook. I wondered what made him so angry all the time. As usual, the rest of us ignored his behavior and went back to eating our dinners.

  I awoke the next morning to the smell of potatoes frying. That meant only one thing—Mother was home. Usually we had fruit and oatmeal for breakfast, but when she had been gone a while, she’d treat us to a special, not-so-healthy breakfast.

  I pulled on my black sweatpants and matching hoodie. Father would have had a fit if he knew I’d slept in my underwear. I liked to do that because it was more cool and comfortable, but it wasn't proper protocol. Grims had to be prepared for being dispatched at any moment. I slipped a pair of fuzzy black socks on my feet and ran downstairs, taking two steps at a time.

  Mother flipped potato cakes at the stove. My brothers sat at the table, already starting their daily reading. All young Grims had to study the Covenant and other subjects for hours each day.

  "Mother!" I squealed.

  She turned slightly, keeping her eye on the food.

  "Hello, Darkness," Mother said as I kissed her cheek.

  I wrapped my arm around her neck. She smelled sweet, like lilac. "It's been absolutely dreadful living with the boys." Mother and I always joked about how awful it was being the only female in the house when the other was gone. "I missed you so much."

  She kissed me on my cheek. "I missed you too, my love. Set the table, please."

  After fighting with the boys to get them to clear their things from the table, I finally managed to get place mats, napkins, and silverware in everyone's spot.

  Father came in, scrolling his finger across his tablet.

  "Uh-uh, not at the table, Nox," Mother scolded.

  "I'm in the middle of some important research, Eleanor." Father was always studying death statistics, leading causes of casualties, and other things Dunningham wanted Grims to stay up-to-date on.

  Mother set a stack of plates on the table. "This is the first time we've been together as a whole family in a few months. Your research can wait."

  Father sighed, leaving his tablet on the counter to join us at the table.

  "So, Mother, tell us what happened," Dorian said, grabbing a plate.

  Mother placed the bowls of food on the table so we could help ourselves. "I had to follow a family around. Father, mother, and an infant. I kept wondering which one I was supposed to take, but there wasn't a glow until the last minute."

  It was that way sometimes. Our dispatching device would take us to a group of people to follow, but sometimes we didn't know who the Fated would be until right before the end, like with Jessica and her friends. That person would be surrounded by faint yellow light. The glow was how we knew the person was one of the Fated.

  "Who was it?" I asked.

  "All of them," Mother replied. "The father drove his family off a bridge on purpose. Just slammed on the gas and took them over."

  There was silence for a moment. Well, except for Bram's loud chewing. I observed my family's expressions. None of them seemed bothered by Mother's story, but I was. I especially hated when babies were involved.

  "So," Mother continued, scooping scrambled eggs on her plate, "I'm not sure how this will work. The father committed suicide, but technically the mother and child didn't."

  "Three deaths at once. Either way, Dunningham should be pleased," Father said.

  "Why would somebody do that?" I asked.

  Everyone stared at me, causing me to squirm a little.

  "I mean to their family. Why would someone want to kill the people they loved? Were they having problems, Mother?"

  Bram scoffed and shook his head.

  Mother buttered a piece of bread. "It doesn't matter, dear. You know we don't get involved in their affairs."

  "What do you care?" Bram asked bitterly. He always accused me of being too soft. He said I didn't have the heart of a Grim.

  I shrugged. "I'm just curious, that's all. I'd like to know what would make a person do that. I mean, Father would never do anything like that to us, right?" It was impossible to kill a Grim unless their time was up or they had less than one hundred years, but I needed to know that he would never want to.

  Father cut into his potato pancakes. "Of course not, dear. There's no point in trying to understand them. Just collect their lives and move along. That's our job."

  Just then, Father's dispatching device rang. I sighed to myself. We couldn't even have a full twenty-four hours together.

  Father pressed a button and held the device to his ear. "Mr. Dunningham!" he said, sounding a bit too eager.

  That was strange. When we got an assignment, it was usually a robotic voice from the system, not Dunningham himself. There must have been something wrong.

  "Okay . . .Yes, sir . . . Sure, I understand."

  Father hung up and looked at us, wide-eyed.

  "What was that about?" Mother asked.

  Father looked down at his plate and took a deep breath. "Mr. Dunningham is going to pay us a visit. Right now."

  I felt a queasiness in my stomach, wondering which one of us had broken a rule. Mr. Dunningham never came to Farrington unless he was delivering a speech or someone had done something wrong and needed to be punished. The last time he came to our house was almost a year ago. Bram had kissed a girl, and they had both gotten fifty years subtracted from their lives. Dating and any kind of physical affection was forbidden until a Grim's eighteenth birthday, when they were to become engaged. Father had been thoroughly embarrassed and didn't speak to Bram for two weeks. Bram didn't seem to care.

  Father hopped up from the table, putting on a brave smile. "Okay, let's straighten up. Children, get properly dressed. He wants to speak to all of us. Chop, chop."

  My brothers and I went upstairs while our parents straightened up. "Properly dressed" meant wearing the Sacred Cloak. We didn't wear it much—only in Dunningham's presence and on special occasions. I hated it. The cloak was hot and heavy. Hopefully, Mr. Dunningham wouldn’t stay too long.

  Chapter 2