Kissing fate, p.1
Kissing Fate, page 1
KISSING FATE
By
J.E. Taylor
Kissing Fate © 2024 J.E. Taylor
2nd Edition
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
KISSING FATE
Kissing Fate Chapter 1
Kissing Fate Chapter 2
Kissing Fate Chapter 3
Kissing Fate Chapter 4
Kissing Fate Chapter 5
Kissing Fate Chapter 6
Kissing Fate Chapter 7
Kissing Fate Chapter 8
Kissing Fate Chapter 9
Kissing Fate Chapter 10
Kissing Fate Chapter 11
Kissing Fate Chapter 12
Kissing Fate Chapter 13
Kissing Fate Chapter 14
Kissing Fate Chapter 15
Kissing Fate Chapter 16
Kissing Fate Chapter 17
ABOUT J.E. TAYLOR
KISSING FATE
Heaven screwed with the wrong girl.
In their lust to destroy me, the angels made a grave mistake.
They chose Zane Bradley to be the hand of their twisted justice. The guy who chose to be Death in a bid to try to save me from their wrath.
It took them ten years to eradicate the memory of why he chose to become Death.
Ten long years to brainwash my boyfriend into believing I am the enemy.
Ten years to convince him he was justified in reaping me.
I waited ten years to see him again, but this was not the reunion I had hoped for.
Can I break through the wall between Heaven and his memories before he kills me? Or will I end up on the wrong side of the reaper realm, at the angels’ mercy?
If Heaven wins this battle, not only will I lose all that I love, the world will understand the true meaning of the End of Times.
Kissing Fate Chapter 1
THE PHONE RINGS AND Papa Ryan’s number flashes on the screen. He knows I’m working, so it has to be urgent. My heartbeat picks up, and I swipe the screen of my cell before putting it to my ear as I hold my breath.
“He’s awake.” That’s all he says. That’s all he needs to say.
My heart does a double tap in my chest. “I’m on my way.” My hands shake as I end the call. My workstation is littered with chemicals and instead of just swiping them all into a bucket like I’m tempted to, I carefully stow each one in their proper storage compartment, taking deep breaths to stop my compulsion just to leave it all where it is. Abbott Laboratories would not take kindly to me leaving a mess and God knows we’ve had a few scares over the years of spilled chemicals combining into a toxic mix.
Once everything is stored properly, I cross to my boss. His greasy hair is combed back, and he adjusts his horn-rimmed spectacles as I wait for him to acknowledge me. He takes his sweet time and I’m nearly bouncing on my feet by the time he looks up at me. His sneer is all I need. It flares my festering wound. He has made it clear he doesn’t like me, despite graduating at the top of my class in chemical engineering. He just thinks I got the job based on who my relatives are. He has no idea that I interned with one of the top executives, who then offered me a way to work my way up in the company.
I think he believes I am a threat to his job. I have no aspirations to manage people. This was just a way to pass the time. If he knew that, would he stop being defensive and maybe appreciate my creativity in the lab a little more?
“What do you want?” he snaps.
I take a deep breath, pushing my irritation down a notch. “I have a family emergency. I’ve cleaned up my workstation and need to leave.”
I can see his argument launching and I mentally push the decision not to give me shit this one time onto him. I hate manipulating people, but it was better than starting a yelling match.
He blinks and then nods as my influence settles into him.
I’m out the door before he can come to his senses. I also avoid people on my way out because I do not want to get locked in some benign workplace conversation.
It’s been ten years since Zane Bradley last took a mortal breath. Ten years of his body stowed in Papa’s panic room. None of us thought we’d ever see him again, and I wondered whether he was ever coming back in my mortal lifetime.
Even the reapers didn’t know where the angels were keeping him.
With Levi still locked and guarded by Heaven’s griffin, I didn’t have a prayer of finding him. I couldn’t step into Heaven while I was still breathing, and none of us thought the angels would actually take Death to Hell.
We hadn’t tried the jump to Purgatory, not with angels monitoring all the entries. While I’m still alive, if I choose to jump to Purgatory, I need to be touching either a reaper or Death, and neither of those were possible. One because touching Zane would kill me, and two because the reapers did not want to take the chance.
Even with my soul-sucking curse broken, they still did not want to bring me there to help search for Zane. Correction: Mandy didn’t want to take the chance, and the reapers agreed with her.
Mandy warned me if the angels got a hold of me, while they had Zane stowed away somewhere, then their version of Armageddon wouldn’t be far off on the horizon, and Zane’s sacrifice would have been for nothing. So, I spent my days in college classes and my nights learning magic from Raven Ryan and studying sigils with Kylee Andreas.
I’m more highly trained in the dark arts than either of the Fates before me.
With Death and Leviathan in lockdown, Mandy had become my second-in-command. After all these years, she has been successful in recruiting reapers and strengthening the federation. She rules over the reaper federation with an ease that makes me proud. They are as loyal to her as they are to me. And Heaven has left the rest of my death collectors alone since Zane disappeared. Without Zane at the helm, I certainly need someone I can trust.
Zane’s supposed to work for me, but I can’t even call on him the way I can still call on the reapers. My mother says willing him to me is supposed to work, but it fails every time.
Even when we attempted to call him while we were in the panic room where Papa had placed his body—nothing. Not even a twitch. He remained dead but didn’t decompose. There was zero loss of muscle tone; if anything, he seemed to bulk up. Zane Bradley remained suspended in time in a body that seemed to age, against all logic.
Ten years turned his boyish face into a man’s, with stubble and all. And it was a face I dreamed of every night. I longed for those intense green eyes, and I could not wait to see him. My foot presses harder on the pedal, moving the car faster as the adrenaline kicks into my veins.
Zane is awake.
That thought brings both excitement and dread to the surface and I tap the steering wheel, weaving through traffic like a racecar driver. The angels aren’t done with me. Not by a long shot. For ten years, I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to slam me in the head.
As I pull off the highway, Mandy appears in the passenger seat, and her hand trembles as she runs it through her hair. The sun hits her mechanical arm, sending golden prisms through the car.
“They’ve completely wiped his memories.” She glances at me with haunted brown eyes.
I swerve at her comment and then take my foot off the gas to slow us down. “Explain,” I say, but my heart is already pounding in my throat. I cannot imagine Zane not remembering me. I have never once considered an alternative. I had gotten so many invitations to date over the years, but I was waiting for him to come back to me, even with the underlying irritation of his choice chewing at my nerves.
“He’s here to kill you and everyone you’ve brought back,” she says and my heart stops beating in my chest. “He didn’t even know he was Death.”
That proverbial shoe nearly knocks me out. “Then we can’t let him get out of that room.” My mind rushes through the scenario and my stomach knots. What the Hell did Heaven do to him?
“Before all this, did Zane have a tattoo on the inside of his right wrist?” Mandy asks.
“No. Why?”
“He does now, and I think that’s how they are controlling him.” Mandy resumes chewing on her lip as she watches the scenery pass. “I think I’ve seen it in Kylee’s book of sigils.”
“Describe it.”
“It’s a little circle with dots around it, like the four points on a compass.”
It sounds vaguely familiar. My mind shuffles through the sigils that Kylee drew for me, and I think I remember something that looks like what Mandy described. “I need to swing by Alex’s house before I head to Papa’s.”
Mandy cocks her head.
“Kylee’s book of
Considering the angels breached our reaper realm to get to Earth, what’s a few escaped demons in the scheme of things? Especially if showing Zane the past makes him remember.
Besides, a little more supernatural activity would be good for the Ryans’ family business. Tom Ryan, Faith’s brother-in-law, runs a paranormal investigation agency and according to him, things have been slow.
As soon as I pull into the driveway of the house I grew up in, I glance at Mandy. “Make sure he doesn’t get out.”
“I’m on it,” she says and disappears.
Kissing Fate Chapter 2
I PULL THE KEYS out of the ignition and shove them in my pocket as I climb out of the car. The cool sea air hits my face, tingling as the fall winds tear over the water and wrap around the house. I glimpse the ocean as I jog to the front door. As much as I love York Beach, it had too many stark reminders of the horrors I dealt with ten years ago.
Holly and I moved to our own apartment in Portland after I graduated college and got the job at Abbott Laboratories. Our visits to York have become less and less frequent as our lives have become busier.
Besides, I needed some breathing room from the suffocating reminder that my future hung in limbo right along with Zane in the basement of Papa’s house. Even now, visiting home splayed open the wounds that had partially healed with time. But seeing Zane in suspended animation hadn’t allowed me to get on with my life. When we lived in York, it was a constant daily struggle.
Truthfully, I ran away from the pain. But no matter what I did, it always remained at the pit of my stomach, like some cancer eating away at whatever brief happiness I found.
My key slides into the lock and I pause, letting myself feel the full brunt of the situation before I enter the house and put it on my adoptive mother. My heart thunders at the thought of Zane awake. I wonder whether Papa has called them. That thought trips my adrenaline. I enter the house, praying they don’t know. Praying they are safe.
The house is quiet and a lump forms in my throat. I shake the dread out of my mind. The house would be quiet, with only Alex and Faith living here. Still, my heart doesn’t let up. It’s almost as if a bomb is ticking and I have a finite amount of time before my world blows to bits.
I cross into the family room and my anxiety drops a notch at the sight of the redhead curled up on the couch with her nose buried in a book. She twirls a strand of her hair around her finger, announcing that either the book has her on edge or life in general does. Faith Ryan is a doppelgänger of my roommate Holly, which makes sense, considering Holly is her natural daughter. The fiery red hair and flawless cream complexion, along with their bright-blue eyes, and their propensity to twirl their hair on their finger when they are both unsettled, makes them seem more like twins than mother and daughter.
She looks up from her book as I head toward the stairs leading to my old bedroom. Her eyebrows arch and she glances at the clock. “What are you doing here?”
There’s really only one thing that would bring me home during work hours. “He’s awake.” I head for the stairs. “And I need Kylee’s book of sigils.” I take the stairs two at a time and enter the room I used to share with Holly.
I rummage through the boxes in the closet until I find what I’m looking for. Moving the spell books aside, I pull out the sigil binder Kylee Andreas made for me. I haven’t looked at it since Holly and I moved out a few years ago. But as I stand in the room, shuffling through the pages, I find exactly what Mandy described and my heart drops.
“Christ,” I whisper as the sigil’s description sinks in. It’s a binding sigil that makes Zane Heaven’s bitch. The only way to break the binding is to break the circle or sever the limb.
I carry the open book downstairs and fall into the chair across from Faith in defeat.
“That bad?” Faith asks.
“Mandy told me Zane remembers nothing.” I rub my face and stare at the sigil in the book before meeting Faith’s questioning gaze. “And he isn’t the one in control.”
Her face hardens and her lips press together. The last time the angels informed Faith Ryan of their intentions, she closed the only portal to Heaven that existed, blocking the angels from getting here so easily to carry out their plan. Being Lucifer’s daughter put her high on Heaven’s hit list, as well as those I brought back from the dead. Unfortunately, when she shut down Heaven’s ability to get through to our realm, the heavenly host rammed through the reaper realm to get here and almost destroyed the entire reaper federation in their bid to destroy me.
The mama-bear part of her rears her head and her fingertips spark. She curls her hands into fists. “I won’t let him harm you.”
I let out a soft laugh. “I’m not worried about me. But I need your help.” I take a deep breath and close my eyes, forging ahead. “I don’t need your protection. I need your time jump thing to show him the night he became Death.” I open my eyes and see her lips soften.
She shakes her head. “You know what happens when I do that.”
“Lucifer doesn’t exist anymore, and I promise, I’ll help close whatever breach opens and help you gather the demons that escape.”
“Missy—” she starts.
“If we can’t jog his memory... I can’t put him down. Killing him kills me, and leaves both posts open. You know what happens then.”
The end of the world happens, which is the angels’ end goal and the reason she closed the only portal to Heaven.
“I won’t let you die.” She flips her hair over her shoulder, looking more like her daughter Holly. It’s an arrogant move, and I understand her reasoning, but it won’t stop the end from being upon us all.
“If the angels win, you know the price.” I don’t want to impart my influence on her the way I had to on my boss earlier. She raised me and loved me like her own, so doing that will violate all the trust we have built over the years. “Please. If we can jog his memory, that may be enough to stop him without having to maim him, and without anyone dying.”
She sighs. “If demons get out, people will die.”
I close my eyes and lean back in the chair. “As shitty as it sounds, are their lives worth more than the world?” I look up at the ceiling, hating myself for the possibility of trading lives for the good of the world. It’s not fair, and it’s not right, but it’s the only hand I have to play.
When I look at her, her lips are pinched in an unhappy frown. “Fine.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” she snips.
Before I can say anything to appease her frustration, Mandy pops in with her eyes wide and wild. “He’s going berserk.” She holds up her mechanical arm I created for her years ago. There’s a clear dent in the metal and my heart drops.
I point to the book just to be sure, even though in my heart I already know. Heaven’s betting on my unwillingness to harm him. “Is that the sigil?”
She turns the book toward her and nods.
Which means Heaven is in control of Zane unless I can break through to him. If not, I’m going to have to cut his wrist deep enough to sever the sigil, which will probably tear through all his ligaments, or chop his arm off completely. I shiver at the thought.
“Damn it all,” I mutter and slam the book closed, tossing it onto the coffee table. I thought about astral projection like Papa taught me, but that would leave my body vulnerable to attack. “I’ll be there as fast as I can.”
Faith gives me a nod, gathering up her things. I don’t even have to ask her to come. She heads to the garage as I jog out to my car. By the time I back out onto the street, the garage opens.
Thankfully, it’s early November and the seasonal folks have bugged out of town. I bury the needle on my little sports coupe and mentally clear the road ahead of me as I drive. My left foot taps on the floor with impatience, even though I’m driving so fast I’m almost airborne. Holly would be proud of my driving skills today.
