When I was growing up, my entire neighborhood thought I was the girl who liked to play with dead things. Now, that wasn’t quite true in my opinion, but it was true enough for me to be shunned at the tender age of six. The shunning hadn’t quite stopped, even at the age of 25, but now people paid me to be weird. Quite a lot, actually, even though you couldn’t tell by my mostly moderate surroundings.

As trade-offs for a social life went, I considered it mostly a win.

With a name like Reaper, it was inevitable that someone would wind up being the family necromancer. I had two sisters and a brother, and while both were blessed with magical talent, mine was the only one that caused people to cross the street to avoid me.

I’d consider that to be mostly a win, too. People were inherently selfish and when they realized my services could mean that death was not the end, they were lining up at the door begging for my help.

I turned down seventy five percent of the people who showed up at my house. Death was technically the end, which is why it was so important to live every day like it could be your last. But it was easy for people who’d never been touched by the icy hand of the Reaper (the real Reaper, not little ol’ me) to feel like they deserved more time. I was merely a minion of the Reaper. Or so I liked to tell myself when I had too much time to think about it.

I politely shut the door on people who demanded I bring back their 85-year-old grandparents. I also shut the door on people who were pissed about their share in the will and wanted me to resurrect people so they could get one last ass-chewing in. Or, the even more popular option, to beg them to reconsider. That usually went over like a lead balloon.

I did, however, quietly work for the Midnight Cove court system when someone contested their family will, only when meticulous research couldn’t definitively prove the inheritance one way or the other. Nine times out of ten, this meant I usually found myself in the middle of a massive family brawl. I hated those cases, but they paid well, so I kept getting reeled back. Plus, as raisings went, they were pretty easy and straightforward. Awkward nine times out of ten, but sometimes pretty karmic. I always liked seeing karma in action. Some people thought karma meant getting even, I thought it meant hahahahahahaha. But that was just me. And sometimes I could be petty. I guess it was part of the package when you were surrounded by dead things all the time.

That wasn’t to say I didn’t like the living, thank you very much. It was more that the living had a bit of a problem with me. Being the town’s necromancer didn’t endear me to a lot of people. Not to say they were all terrified of me. There were a few I considered friends, a lot who were polite, and some who didn’t seem to care one way or the other. The only time I got some really ugly looks was when I went to the local plant nursery. As if someone like me should dare touch beautiful living things like plants.

The ugly stares were so bad, I’d taken to calling the store and asking them to pull my plants for me so I could just run in, pay, and get out of there. The owner, Hank, was a grumpy old cuss, but he didn’t seem to care what I was or what I did. Actually, he wasn’t old, but he was about as personable as a bear during mating season. He said little to me, but he never judged. All he seemed to want was my money.

Good enough for me. Plus, he had a real eye for picking out the best plants. Way better than me. So now it wasn’t as annoying as it would normally be because ever since Hank had started picking out my plants, they didn’t die as often as they used to.

The knock on the door startled me out of my thoughts. Tea sloshed over the top of my cup, making me hiss as the hot liquid splashed my thighs. I didn’t have any appointments today, but that didn’t mean people wouldn’t intrude on my days off. Death stopped for no man. And I, Helen Reaper, had to remind them the dead weren’t going anywhere and Saturdays were my days for Netflixing, leggings, and eating too many cookies while lamenting my love life. Not necessarily in that order.

I thought for a second about not answering the door. That thought died a quick and painful death when the bell buzzed twice more. Whoever it was, they thought the need was urgent. I sighed, set my mug down, and got up to answer the door still wearing my pajamas.

I peeked out the privacy hole but no one was there. Weird. Maybe they were standing off to the side. “Hello?” I asked.

No response.

A strange whimpering noise caught my attention. I whipped open the door to give the person a piece of my mind, but my porch was empty. My gaze swept the area, but whoever it was had already left. I was about to slam the door when the noise came again. I frowned but I still couldn’t find it when something wet nudged my toe.

“Aagh,” I yelled, jumping back in horror.

I looked down.

An adorable, golden retriever puppy stared up at me. Deep brown and intelligent eyes gazed into my soul. A red bow adorned its neck. Attached to the bow was a note with my name on it. I looked at the puppy again. “I hope you know how to get home,” I said.

The puppy gave me an annoyed yap. I took the note, gave the puppy a side-eyed stare, and flipped it open.

Okay, first of all, it was super presumptive to get someone a puppy. You just drop a living thing into someone’s lap and expect them to just willingly do all the work needed to keep it alive? Second, it was even more presumptive to assume I was lonely. Seriously. Maybe I was happy with my Saturday Netflix binges and scattered stacks of paperbacks littering my coffee table. And even if I wasn’t happy, wasn’t it super rude to comment on it?

I glared at the puppy. It was the only living thing available for me to be angry at. The puppy immediately flopped over for a belly rub. Its tongue lolled out of its mouth.

A smile peeked out from the side of my mouth. Cute dog couldn’t help but be cute. But I couldn’t keep it. Could I? Apparently cute dog had no such qualms because as soon as I reached down and gave its belly a rub, it bounded up and flopped its way into my house.

“You better not pee on my good rug,” I screeched as I ran after it.

There were a lot of things no one ever considered when confronted with an animal they never expected to have. First, there was the matter of not having a clue what it ate or when or how much. Second, was the business of...business. Animals couldn’t clean up after themselves, so that left the gross task to me. As much as I was annoyed with the meddling of the dating service, part of me was unsurprised.

The Deadication Dating Agency had a checkered history of getting involved in the residents of Midnight Cove’s business for longer than I could remember. But the thing was...they had a spotless track record. I knew of at least two couples who were set up by them who were going strong but the agency’s methods were not without their issues.

The residents here weren’t...typical. The large majority of folks here were in some way magical. And the few humans residing here were usually possessed with unusual talents. We had several witch clans, warlock groups, sorcerers and sorceresses...honestly I never figured out the difference but call one of them the wrong name and you’d be burping frogs for weeks. I tossed myself into the somewhat human category even though it made my parents see red. We were born and raised here, and all of us had some sort of magical talent. My older sister had talents similar to a Valkyrie. Although she got very annoyed with us when we told her that.

“First of all,” she would sneer, “we have no Norse in our bloodlines. Second, Midnight Cove hasn’t had a war in 2,000 years. So kindly adjust your presumptions.”

It made us all laugh because the speech was always the same, but she had such a light, airy voice, it made her sound like a really ticked off cartoon character. Plus she was lucky if she was five foot tall on a good day. So none of us were scared of her wrath.

Ronnie, my sis, could sense when someone was about to die. It was a talent that no one in Midnight Cove knew about. If they did, she would be bombarded with visits all day long. It helped that she was also a gifted herbalist, so that was what she made her living doing. If someone came into the shop that she knew might kick the bucket, she could whip up something and convince them to take it with one of the many wild stories she was clever at crafting off the cuff. Sometimes it saved their lives, sometimes Ronnie came home morose. As talents went, I thought hers might be worse than mine. At least my people were already dead.

So far she had been able to avoid any visit from the Dating service, but my parents weren’t so lucky. Or maybe I should say they had been so lucky. After all, they’d been together for almost three decades thanks to the secretive meddlers. But I could honestly say, I’d never knew anyone who’d been given a puppy as a gift.

To make it even worse, the dog either didn’t know how to make its way home or didn’t care enough. The traitorous little monster was curled in my lap and my fingers were curled in her silky coat as I read about potty training and puppy care.

“I don’t like you,” I told the dog. “You’re going home right after I feed you.”

The as of yet unnamed dog snored and moved its little paws like it was involved in the best dream ever.

I steeled my heart against the adorableness. Also, according to the wisdom of the internet, puppies were ridiculously hard work. I guess I needed to ask the right questions.

Was I too busy for a puppy? Considering I was still in my pajamas at 11:30 on a Saturday, had no children, and stayed up at least three times a week until the wee hours of the morning reading, I was going to have to say no.

Did I want a puppy? The answer to that as of about five hours ago would have been a resounding no. Now? With the adorable bundle resting on my lap snoring to its heart content, my answer was a hard maybe.

I sighed and clicked off the internet. I wondered if maybe the dating agency was trying to distract me from what they were trying to do. With my love life. I shook my head. I hadn’t met a single person in town who’d turned my head.

The one time I had, he knew exactly who I was and treated my awkward conversation making efforts like I was speaking Swahili and he was late for open heart surgery. In other words, rejected before I’d even opened my mouth.

So I treated the vast majority of the townspeople like we were merely existing in the same space. I nodded hello when I made eye contact and breezed right on by. That seemed to work for everyone, so it worked for me as well.

My cell phone rang with the sounds of a Chewbacca rant. I tried to scoot the puppy off my lap, but it opened one eye and gave me a scary stare. I reached over, grabbed my cell, and slid the button over without checking to see who it was.

“Hello?” I said, slightly out of breath from trying to move the moose puppy.

“Miss Reaper?” a soft baritone rumbled in my ear. Not unpleasant.

“Yes?”

“This is Hank from Midnight Blooms. You were supposed to be here an hour ago to pick up your order.”

It wasn’t a question.

“Oh, yes!” I slapped my forehead. “I’m sorry. I had an incident -”

“Don’t care,” he said abruptly. “If I have to hold these overnight, there will be a 10% upcharge. If you need me to put these back, there’s a 25% restocking fee. If you want me to deliver, I charge for gas and thirty cents per mile.”

A smile made its way unbidden to my face. Hank was always at one speed. Grumpy as hell. “A 25% restocking fee?” I asked. “That’s a little steep. You must think awful highly of your plants to charge that much.”

The reaction was immediate. One thing people in Midnight Cove knew was the epic rivalry of the two nurseries in town. Hank was a traditionalist. He liked blooms and veggies in their proper seasons. Nothing too outrageous. Nothing too tropical. Nothing that had the potential to suffer outside of its zone. This made Hank both a reliable gardener and plant provider, but it also made him a little bit boring.

The other nursery in the area, Pepper’s Perennials, had no such qualms. Ran by an uber friendly, adorable hedgewitch, she didn’t give a whit about the seasons, the zones, the kinds of plants she sold or anything else. She also didn’t care about Hank. Pepper was one of my few friends in this place and she was one of the most powerful hedge witches I’d ever known. Pepper didn’t have to care about that stuff because her plants never died. This, of course, enraged Hank. But it also helped him, too, because Piper tended to specialize in the exotic and unheard of, while Hank had the familiar beautiful blooms most of us knew and loved. Pepper also provided most of the herbs for my sister’s shop, so she was multi-talented.

“Pepper?” Hank practically spit through the line. “She wouldn’t know an azalea if one reached up and bit her in the ass,” he grumbled.

“Well,” I drawled, “she is my best friend so I’m sure she’d make a special order if I asked her to. And she would deliver too, if I asked her, for free, and probably show up with pizza or dessert or something like that.”

The line was silent for a moment. “Twenty cents per mile and gas for delivery,” he barked.

“How about ten cents per mile, half the gas, and you bring me a cookie from Sam’s?” I grinned knowing I’d gone too far, but honestly, screwing with Hank had been the highlight of my day.

“You can get your own cookie. I agree to the other part.” His voice trailed off but not before I heard, “and you should be offering me a cookie for accepting this sham of a deal.”

“Accepted!” I crowed. “But I’m not giving you a cookie for trying to take advantage of me.”

“Fine,” he barked. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Wait!” I looked down in horror. I was still in pajamas. My hair was up in one of those hair scrunchies that had gone out of style in 1990 and I was currently covered in dog hair. The phone clicked in answer.

I tried to move the moose again and as the dog flopped over, I noticed it was a she. Figured. Once I got her off and left her in my office chair, I rushed to my bedroom, slapped on a pair of leggings, a long white t-shirt, and a pair of ratty old flip flops. It was too late to do something with the rat’s nest that on some days was considered to be my hair, but I still took it down from the Saved By the Bell scrunchie look I had going on, quickly twisted it and pinned it into a messy bun. I scrubbed my teeth but didn’t bother with makeup.

This was Hank we were talking about, but I had a pretty steadfast rule about knowing guests were coming over and pajamas. As in, I changed. Minimal effort, but I looked like I had my life game together. Mostly.

As soon as I stepped out of the bedroom, my doorbell rang. Hank was a dirty liar. That was more like eight minutes, not twenty.

The puppy jumped off the couch, skidded around the corner on her too big paws and ran to the door where she promptly sat and looked back at me like, “hurry lady. There’s a visitor!”

I peeked out the privacy hole and saw Hank standing there, his face twisted into his familiar perpetual scowl. But as soon as I opened the door and the massive puppy let out an adorable “woof”, a miracle occurred.

Surprise flickered over Hank’s face only to be followed by genuine amusement. He gasped and the puppy stood on her hind legs, looked at him for a split second, and deciding he might be okay, jumped right into his arms. He let out an oof of surprise but managed to catch her and immediately started to laugh as she bombarded his face with numerous puppy licks.

I stared at him open mouthed and a little weirded out. Where was the grumpy Lurch clone who barely grumbled two words? Puppies and babies, man. They could turn anyone around.

He ignored me, turned, and headed down the stairs, the puppy still in his arms. With one hand holding her, he used the other to open his tailgate. Hank gently set the puppy in the back of his truck, pointed at the plants, and grumbled something at her.

She sat right down, turned her head as if listening intently, and woofed. Hank laughed again.

I was having a very weird day.

He turned back to look at me and, lo and behold, the scowl was back in place. “I guess delivering wasn’t good enough. Now I have to unload this all by myself?”

I glared at him and headed down to his truck. Jerk. Now that we were on more familiar ground, I wasn’t feeling so discombobulated. Hank frowning? All was right with the world. Hank smiling and laughing? World tilted and stomach felt like a tilt a whirl. Because smiling Hank was drop dead damned gorgeous. Not that he wasn’t handsome even with the scowl, but seriously, who wanted to be around a perpetual grump? Not I. Life was too short to have permanent PMS, and living with a guy like that would be like that, minus the cramps. Well...except for once a month. And Hank on top of literal PMS? No thanks.

But tack on dark hair, eyes like caramel on a hot fudge sundae, and a grin that showcased one perfect little dimple on the side of his mouth? Plus his well manicured hands that handled plants like they were newborn babies? Well…yes, please with a cherry on top. Hopefully mine. Because my cherry was dehydrated and kept on the shelf for way too long.

I cleared my throat and my thoughts about Hank because it was weird. Way weird.

I glared at his back just to make the world start spinning the right way again and went to lift out a pallet of plants. It was the tail end of March, the perfect time to plant, and Midnight Cove was perfect for gardening. The weather was almost always agreeable unless the gods were angry. We were all very careful not to anger them, but every once in awhile, someone managed to bring down their wrath and we had to deal with hurricane, tornadoes, all the fun things that a small, enclosed town should never have to deal with. However, most times, the gods focused their weather wrath right on top of the naughty person so there wasn’t much collateral damage. Most of the time, and depending on who the god was.

But barring all of that, the weather usually stayed from 55 to 65 degrees most of the year. From November to February we had occasional light dustings of snow, which was gorgeous, but we lost most of our plants. Thus the reason Hank and Pepper were still in business.

The first pallet I lifted out was creeping thyme. I crushed one of the leaves in my hand and leaned down to inhale the herbaceous scent. Every year I redid my landscaping. I had seven acres of land here even though I kept it pretty quiet. Most of the town thought the land belonged to the Dating service. The founder of it owned the vast majority of Midnight Cove. But she didn’t own this. When I first started my necromancy business, I put almost every penny away. I existed on packaged noodles and those salty packs of seasoning and water, and also dry cereal. It was a meager existence, for sure. In the first two years, I had raised enough money to buy the house and the acreage around it. Even my parents had no idea how much land I actually had. I could buy all the plants I wanted and never run out of room to grow them.

I put the creeping thyme down by the pile of landscaping pavers I’d left in the front because they were heavy as hell and I was both lazy and weak. Hank didn’t ask where to put his pallet so he set the Wave petunias next to the creeping thyme. It would be plant sacrilege to plant those together and I gritted my teeth as he walked away for the next. I thought I caught the hint of a smile on his face, but that would be impossible. Only puppies made Hank smile.

Speaking of the little she-devil, she hadn’t moved from her spot in the back of Hank’s truck. She watched him intently as he lifted pallet after pallet off his truck, but she never tried to chew or jump. She was weirdly obedient.

After the fourth pallet of Wave petunias were unloaded, all right next to my creeping thyme, Hank finally spoke. “What are you going to do with all of this?” he asked, his gaze sweeping across my yard.

“I re-landscape every year,” I told him.

Instead of looking impressed, a look of horror slid over his face. “What about all the plants from the year prior?”

I shrugged. “That’s why I buy mostly annuals.”

He eyeballed the creeping thyme. “That will come back next season.” His gaze swept the Wave petunias. “And so will those.”

I waggled my fingers. “Necromancer,” I whispered. “If it doesn’t, I can bring it back to life. Woo wooooo!”

Hank rolled his eyes. “Or...you could not kill it at all.”

I took umbrage to that. “I don’t kill things. Some things just die.”

He shook his head. “Are you familiar with the concept of permaculture?”

I shrugged. “I’ve heard of it. Why?”

He motioned for me to walk with him. We both grabbed another pallet and headed back toward the porch. “It’s a state of gardening where everything is beautiful, but also functional. You can have a rainwater collection system, but why not use it as a place for koi? Or you could grow an herb garden that’s both functional and delicious. If you need a fence to keep the deer out, you could turn it into a trellis for squash or cucumbers.” He set the pallets down and looked at me. I blinked, taken aback by his direct stare. His eyes. Gorgeous.

“Are you tilling the soil every time you replant?” he asked, taking a few steps closer to me.

I nodded.

He shook his head and sighed. “That’s terrible for the land. Try planting perennials. They’ll last longer. Take me around to your backyard.”

He was close enough for me to breathe in his citrusy scent. But the smell of fresh dirt and something else…

I took one step back and studied him closely. “Hank?”

He was looking at me with a confused expression. “Yes?”

“What are you?”

Hank’s expression turned back into the familiar scowl except this time it was heaped with a whole lot of anger. “That’s extraordinarily rude.”

It was. I reddened and cursed my word vomit. “I - I’m sorry.”

But Hank? He was dead. I’d never stood close enough to him to notice. But the dead always had a certain hint of smell to them. Now, don’t get me wrong. The walking dead didn’t have an unpleasant scent, but all of them had a certain hint of...moss to them. Vamps smelled like graveyard dirt and black moss. Zombies had more of an earthy, wet grass smell. And ghouls...ghouls smelled just like Hank.

Except Hank also smelled like sunshine and life, but the hint of moss was enough to make me wonder. And, since he’d never been to my house before, nor had I ever seen him smile, I also wondered about the note from the dating agency. The cryptic words came back to me: “He’s already dead.”

If Hank was a ghoul, he was dead. Technically.

Hank shook his head and made a disgusted noise. “I’m a ghoul,” he snapped. He headed back to the truck, apparently no longer wanting to see my backyard.

Or me.

I rushed after him. “Hank, I’m sorry. That was rude.” I shoved my hair out of my eyes. “It’s just been a weird day. Something happened -”

He abruptly turned back to me. “What does that have to do with me being a ghoul?”

“I -” I clamped my mouth shut. If he wasn’t the guy the agency was talking about, I was going to look like a big ol’ idiot. From what I knew about them, they didn’t discuss their matches with either of those clients. Things just sort of fell into place. But not always easily.

He huffed out an annoyed breath. “Thought so,” he said. Hank gently lifted the puppy out of his truck and gave her a gentle pat on the head. “Bye girl.” He set her on the ground, gave me a final long stare and got into his truck.

“But I wanted to know about permaculture!” I yelled to the truck peeling out of my driveway.

If a puppy could give a disgusted huff, that’s what happened. She walked right past me and up to the porch.

“Fine,” I muttered. “I’m a jerk.”

I let us both inside the house and thought about Hank for the rest of the day.