Matt/Chaise (for those of you who have read Original Grim Dead)MiaMichaelHarriet EllaTitle: Grim Dead
Summary: Mia Summerfrost is kidnapped by the Grim Reaper (aka Matt) to settle a debt with her father. Will she walk away unscathed?
Genre: Fantasy/Suspense
Rating: PG (for suggestive scenes and much-deleted material, including a different ending)
*This is a little (edited) something I wrote over the summer. The unedited copy is over 50 pages long on Microsoft Word, single-spaced. This is the PG-rated, short-story version of that. I'm taking out all my favorite characters () but hey- I want people to see this!!!*
My name is Mia. That’s short for Miacoda Francesca Summerfrost. Last year, something happened to me that changed my life.
I never had time to guess if anything was going to happen to make my life fall apart like it did. I was one of your average teenage girls: a spunky, sweet, just-hand-me-a-margarita-I’m-almost-21-anyway kind of girl. My life was too perfect.
I was living with my mom and my dad. Both my parents were legendary sages, or masters of magic (my mom more so than my dad). Everyone thought that I would develop magic skills, too. They were wrong. I had no more magic than the average sea squid.
My mom’s magic was… well… happy stuff. This fit her, too. She had red hair that seemed to fan out behind her whenever she did magic. Its real, scientific name is light magic, or (if you want to get into the whole religion part of it) divine magic. My mom often lit candles with her finger when the power went out, or made it rain just hard enough for a rainbow to appear in the sky.
My dad (who had longer, fashionable blond hair that shielded his blue eyes) used less cheerful magic. He used necromancy. He resurrected things from the dead. At first, this was a little bit disturbing, and some of my friends whose parents had light magic confused me for trailer trash, but I got over it, and they didn’t. Freaks.
I was learning a lot about both kinds of magic. For example, my mom taught me that artificial fire is always created at 550° Fahrenheit. Dad taught me that a dead person always loses thought, memories, and free will when they are buried. Looking back, I really don’t understand how my parents never fought.
They were (unexpectedly) the perfect couple.
I don’t really remember being afraid of my dad’s magic when I was little, except for one occasion. And that was for good reason, too. I was five years old. It happened when Dad was working on something in the basement. I didn’t realize that anything was wrong. He just said, very slowly, “Mia, go upstairs, very quickly. Tell Mommy to come down h-”
He never finished the sentence. There was a rush of cold wind, and a stench of something dead. I screamed and ran up the stairs, yelling, “MOMMY! DADDY NEEDS YOU! NOW!” At first, my mom just thought that Dad needed help pushing a dead body or something, but when she saw how nervous I looked, she picked me up, and we went down the stairs together. Once my dad was in sight again, Mom and I realized he wasn’t alone. Nine people wearing the same color of drab gray, and one tall man wearing black surrounded him. They all had hoods pulled over their faces, but they were obviously all men, and the man wearing black was the most important.
When my mom and I saw this scene, she gasped, and let me down to the ground. I was only five (going on six), so I had no idea what was going on, but I heard the man wearing black say, “You have a large debt to pay, Michael Summerfrost.” Then, the man and his followers (I could only assume that they were his followers) saw my mom, and me standing next to her. I still couldn’t see their faces. Their hoods covered their eyes in a Darth Sidious kind of way, but I saw that they all had the same evil look of delight on their faces.
“Mia,” my mom said to me in the same tone my dad had used a minute ago, “I want you to go upstairs and lock yourself in the closet near the stair door. You know, the one that locks from the inside. Go!”
I did as I was told. It seemed that nobody else but my parents noticed that I was leaving. When I locked myself in the closet, I realized that I could hear the conversations taking place downstairs. The stranger said, “You don’t belong here, Summerfrost,” and my sharp, fiery mother responded, “You shouldn’t be here either!”
“Quite the temper, I see.” The stranger laughed. “Harriet Bloodvale Summerfrost. I take it, your husband hasn’t told you yet?”
I was confused. Told her what? I could hear my dad screaming, “You filthy-”
My mom remained cool, though. She didn’t seem mad at my dad at all, which is what normally happens when one parent doesn’t tell the other something. “Now would be an excellent time for me to find out.” she told him. My dad was still cursing at the stranger. Now that I think back, I bet he was trying to throw himself at the man, but his followers were holding him back.
“I’m sorry, Harriet,” Dad told her. “I really made a stupid mistake in not telling you. It was… twenty years ago. Twenty-one, actually. I… I died… of influenza… twenty-one years ago.”
I heard my mother gasp and begin to speak, but my father overrode her. “I learned it from my grandfather, who was also a great sage. I never told my mother at all. I was going to… but… then I died. Of course, I needed to tell her. I needed to tell her that I had made a mistake in my short life. So… I attempted to resurrect myself. Normally- ninety-nine times out of one hundred- the caster of the self-necromancy spell is reduced to blood and ashes. But I did it.”
The stranger interrupted. “You know of the price for escaping death, Summerfrost?”
Dad ignored him. He continued talking to my mom, “When you die, you go to this place… and it’s decided whether you go to heaven or hell. But,” His voice became sharp. “Ever since Adam’s fall, the man standing in front of us has abused his power. He was never going to send me anywhere. He was going to-”
The stranger cut him off. “Summerfrost, I’ve decided to lengthen your stay in this world. But I’ll be back in ten years, and then you’ll get the pain you deserve. Are we agreed?”
Both my parents were silent.
“Are we agreed?” the stranger repeated, a note of impatience in his voice. Then, there was a sound resembling a sword being drawn from a sheath, and my dad’s yell of pain, along with my mom’s startled shriek.
Then, I heard my mom calling me. “Mia? Mia, honey, it’s safe now.”
I unlocked myself from the closet and came rushing down the stairs. What I saw nearly made me faint. My dad had a large X across his shirt in blood, each line stretching from his shoulder to his waist. I could only assume that the wound was deep.
After that, I can’t remember anything else.
But then, ten years later, it happened. I was sixteen at the time. There was a loud crash downstairs that woke me from my sleep. I was having a nightmare about… what I had seen ten years before. I rushed downstairs and saw, to my horror that, standing in the kitchen, was the same man. I could just tell. Even though he still had the hood on, I could tell. Then, I noticed that my father was in handcuffs. His hair was matted over his eyes. My mom seemed ready for a fight. She would kick and punch every bit of the stranger she would reach (but she wouldn’t be able to use magic. Light magic is impossible to wield in war). Suddenly, the stranger and his men saw me. After a few moments of staring at me, he said, “Let Summerfrost go, gentlemen. But take the girl.”
My father screamed, “No!” My mother gasped and began to cry, pleading at the man. I was so stunned that the men were able to catch me in a few seconds. Soon, I was the one in handcuffs, although my parents (who were putting up a courageous fight) were also being restricted by the other men.
“Stop!” my mother ordered. “She doesn’t have any idea what’s going on!”
“I’ll tell her, Harriet,” responded the man in a teasing voice. “Eventually.” He stared into my eyes, and threw back his hood, revealing a face that would have looked handsome, had his eyes not reflected cruelty. His hair was auburn, fashioned in short, tiny spikes, and his teeth were perfectly white, which somehow made him look more menacing. He put his hand around my waist with so much gentleness it made my skin crawl, and said to me, “Now, Mia- yes, I know your name- if you behave well, then you just might be able to see your parents again. You don’t behave well, and your parents die. Got it?”
I got it. I just didn’t want to.
The man said, “Now, we will return to Mirror Rim!” And with a flash of light, my parents disappeared, and I felt totally lost.
“Take me back!” I screamed to the man. “I’m going home now! And… if I can’t, I’m going to just… kill myself!” I said that to try to scare him. It didn’t work.
“No, you’re not.” he told me. “Want to know why? Because I control who lives and dies. Every second of the day. You try to kill yourself? The only thing you’ll get out of that is a lot of pain. ‘Cause you’re too valuable to die. The only way anybody can really die is if they get hit with this.”
My captor took something out of his robes. It was about a yard long.
It was a scythe.
He leaned into me and whispered, “I’m the Grim Reaper.”
I screamed. Well, actually, I shrieked. He just put a hand over my mouth, smiling in a satisfied way. “We’re in the palace of the dead now.” he said. “Mirror Rim. I'm sorry for any inconvenience I caused through this, but this, in fact, has nothing to do with you. The reason I have kidnapped you is because your father is in my debt."
"What?" It was too mch for me to comprehend. "In your debt? How?"
The Grim Reaper said, "Well, Mia, there is a code of dark magic dealing with death, darkness, shadows, and everything else dark magic controls."
I nodded. That was one of the first things my dad had ever taught me.
"Part of this code," he continued, "states that when one mage kills another, then the one who was killed is then the other mage's property. If, however, the killed mage manages to resurrect himself and return to Earth, then they owe the other mage their dearest possession. You may remember the time I visited your house ten years ago. Well, I was reminding him that his debt still had to be paid. Mia, in your father's eyes, you are his most valuble possession. According to the code, your father has forty-eight hours to reclaim you. If he doesn't make it in that time..."
"Yes?" I urged him. "What happens?"
"You belong to me."
I stared, wide-eyed. There was no way that this was happening.
"Sit down," said the Grim Reaper politely, taking off his cloak and throwing it onto a desk. "It'll be all right."
I ignored him and continued to gaze into space, pondering what he had just said. "And what happens to me if I do fall into your possession?"
He shot me a look of curiosity and interest from his seat behind the desk. "I'll kill you, of course. I thought you understood that."
"How does my dad 'reclaim' me?"
"He simply shows up in the next forty-eight hours, and takes you back home with him. Not very hard."
I thought for a moment about this. Something didn't seem... well... right. "What's the catch?"
The Grim Reaper laughed sullenly, his features exposed in an odd grimace. "Well," he said, "I have set up a... maze of sorts for your father to overcome. Sort of like an obstacle course. Only much more deadly. If he survives that in the next forty-eight hours, then he is truly worthy to reclaim you."
