Grim Business

Chapter One

Phoebe Thanatos had had enough of people making fun of her name. The joke had gotten old years ago, when she was about five years old and still hanging on to her mother’s purse at stores so she wouldn’t get lost. Yet somehow, people still found the joke hilarious.

“Watch out, here comes Death!”

“Don’t stare, or she’ll take your soul!”

“Hey, Thanatos, how’s ol’ Hades this time of year?”

You see, her last name was the name of some antiquated vision of death from the Greek days, a name that her family had passed on to her. She wasn’t even sure how the kids at school had known back then—they hadn’t gone over Greek mythology yet—but she supposed the fact that her family had lived in Raven’s Landing for six generations had something to do with it. Somewhere along the line, someone found out about Thanatos and from then on out, it was relentless teasing for anyone belonging to the name.

She supposed the town itself wasn’t so bad. It was a mid-sized town, home to about 20,000 citizens. Portland was just a quick fifteen minutes up the road, and the Pacific Ocean glimmered peacefully in the not-so-distant distance, providing the Raven’s Landing citizens with endless opportunities for entertainment. In essence, the town was perfectly normal and ideal in every way, except for the disproportionate number of ravens that tended to appear, lending the town its name. The ravens also lent the town some of its best scary stories, and those stories had kept the town going for many generations. People took their scary stories very seriously in Raven’s Landing, especially this time of year—Halloween. Unfortunately, Halloween was also the time of year that Phoebe was teased even more relentlessly than usual.

Phoebe shrugged off the teasing, rolling her dark green eyes and spinning the dial on her locker. The books in her bag were pulling on her shoulder, creating an annoying ache that persisted long after school had ended and never let up until she stood in the shower, the hot spray showering relief with every droplet. Until then, she had to just keep on going.

“Phoebe!” a shrill voice called, and Phoebe turned to find her best friend running towards her through the crowded hallway, floppy red curls bouncing on her thin shoulders. She was dressed brightly in a loose-fitting cream shirt with crimson and magenta roses plastered all over it, salmon-colored skinny jeans and classic brown shoes. Drusilla Harkins was her name, though she’d kill you if you called her anything other than Dru. She looked flustered, her freckled cheeks flushed red as she came to a stop beside Phoebe. “Have you seen Rambo?”

Zane “Rambo” Rambosini was Phoebe’s other best friend—he was a bit of a goof, tall and lanky with dark brown hair that was a little too long and expressive brown eyes. He was seldom without his beloved headphones, and had lofty dreams of being a music producer after he graduated. He and Dru had been dating for nine months, but between the relentless arguing and Dru’s demanding nature, Phoebe wasn’t sure how they were making it work.

“No, why?” Phoebe said, spinning the locker dial one last time. A soft click sounded, letting her know that it was unlocked, and she pushed up on the latch, swinging the locker door open. Loose papers suddenly cascaded out of her locker, and her eyes widened comically as she struggled to catch all of them before they hit the floor. Bending over in this hallway was basically a death sentence, and any papers she dropped would quickly be kicked away, so it was important that you stopped them before that happened. Dru moved to help, catching three of the wayward papers and holding them up to examine them.

Her face immediately scrunched up in confusion as she held one of them up. “What’s this?”

Phoebe reached up and grabbed the paper, turning it over to take a look at it herself. It wasn’t her chemistry homework, as she had originally thought, but rather a picture of the Grim Reaper hanging from a noose. ‘Hang Dead!’ was written in stylized letters at the top of the page, and Phoebe felt anger surge up in her as she moved to look at some of the other papers—they were all the same.