by Rhea Watson
Blood. Sirens. The crackle of walkie-talkie relay between first responders.
And screams.
So many screams. Seventy-six dead, but how many more were injured?
How many would never recover from this day?
On the celestial plane, much of the calamity was muffled, but combined with the onslaught of new souls, snapping and sparking and sizzling inside the demolished building, it was a lot to take in, even for me. I swallowed hard, assessing the damage quickly, clinically, assuming most of the newly departed were clustered in the eight exposed floors near the base of the tower. With the structure weakened, the levels above had toppled too, the building much like a stroke victim.
Horrible. Just awful.
My pack clustered around me, sniffing the smoke-ridden air that filtered from the human realm to the celestial plane. Knox had situated himself between us and Alexander, looking taller and more regal than I’d ever seen—like a true alpha.
“Now, you, beta…” Alexander snapped his fingers at Gunnar, then pointed to the yellow police tape stretched down the street. Ambulances and cruisers filled the space on this side of it, humans sprinting about and carrying bodies. Distantly, the roar of incoming firetrucks drowned out a nearby woman screeching on a gurney, her leg shredded to the bone, paramedics tending to her as they rushed her away from the disaster. A young officer ran clear through Alexander as the reaper said, “I want you on the perimeter. Send the little one in with my four—”
“Alexander.” I planted my scythe so that the staff cut in front of Knox, creating a little barrier of my own. “You don’t give orders to my pack. We’ll contain and subdue so that you can reap.”
We faced off for a moment, two celestial beings with nuclear weapons at our sides. Even now, months after I had been promoted to Lunadell, he still wasn’t thrilled to have me here. I might have looked to him for help with the hellhounds at first, but I knew how to reap—I was damn good at it. And these days, I knew my pack. Mostly. He might have had more experience in this territory, his pack over twice the size of mine, but he wasn’t my superior. No fluffy white wings, no cowl and skeletal hand—no bossing me and mine around.
Behind him, his pack was already at work, immense black hellhounds moving through the wreckage. Two had a gaggle of human souls sequestered at the base of the tower, and they circled the sobbing figures like sharks.
“Fine,” Alexander muttered, shouldering his scythe. He took a half step back, then paused. “But consider pairing your alpha with mine… so he can see a real alpha at work.”
Knox flashed a hint of teeth, a low warning rumbling in his chest. Alexander shot him a pointed look, then me a smirk before disappearing into the fray.
Smug twat.
“Ignore him,” I said as I stepped in front of Knox and faced my pack, waving off the rest of the wandering hellhounds as well. “Ignore all of them. We’re here to do a job, just like Alexander’s pack, and we’re here to help lost souls. Period.” I focused on Knox, pushing last night out of my mind as best I could. “I want you patrolling the perimeter. Nothing gets in or out. If you see a soul past that yellow tape, you bring them back.”
Much to my surprise, Knox sat. Literally just… plopped down, waiting, staring at me without a hint of his usual boredom. Maybe he had learned his lesson—and the anxiety knotting in my gut could just fuck off already.
“Gunnar, Declan, you’re with me,” I carried on, glancing between the pair. Gunnar studied the building, red eyes darting this way and that, no doubt cataloguing every minute detail. Declan, meanwhile, shuffled in close to me, tail wagging ever so slightly. Good. That was the attitude I needed from both of them. “Declan, I want you with frightened souls. The ones who are too scared to even move. Find one, sit with them, wait until they are reaped. Don’t leave their side.” He offered a little yip and a snort, tail wagging faster. I nodded, sensing his eagerness. “Okay then, Gunnar, you’re on runners. Anyone who starts to bolt, herd them back in. I know Alexander’s pack will be doing something similar, but this is where you shine. Nobody gets beyond the lobby on your watch, clear?”
The hellhound tapped his huge front paws, claws clacking on the pavement, his lean figure brimming with jittery energy. Ready to work. I swallowed my smile, pleased to see each one heeding the call in their own way.
“Okay then… Let’s do this.”
Knox trotted off without a backward glance, headed straight for the yellow Caution tape, the white and orange cones along the perimeter of the accident site. With the other two watching me, waiting for the go-ahead, I lingered just a few moments to watch him pad around the outskirts. Knox sniffed at the ground, at the cones, at the first responders, then disappeared behind a few police cruisers.
You have to trust him. That’s all you can do.
I sighed softly, tapping my finger on my scythe’s staff.
Please, Knox… Please don’t screw this up.
“Right.” I motioned to the crumbling tower just as another fire broke out, flames bursting through a tenth-story window. Humans screamed and ducked for cover. “Let’s get to work, boys.”
And work we did. For their first venture into the gritty world of reaping, Gunnar and Declan needed no guidance beyond my initial instructions. Two floors up, Declan sniffed out a terrified soul under a desk, her human body crushed beneath an array of collapsed office equipment and ceiling. Shock and fear made her incapable of speech, incapable of any movement at all, and without hesitation, Declan crawled under the desk and plunked his head in her lap. It was a tight squeeze, but he did it.
Best of all, he did it with the confidence of a hellhound who had been doing this for centuries, not weeks. Even with Alexander’s pack roving about, muscular pit bull-looking hounds who never met my eye but whose tails shot up around my pack, Declan didn’t show so much as a whiff of his previous self. The Declan of ten short weeks ago would have hidden behind Knox, low to the ground and whining, searching for the best escape route available.
Today, he just got to work.
And it left me beaming.
Gunnar, meanwhile, strutted about the wreckage as I’d expected: snooty, assertive, calculating. He left my side only a few minutes after Declan, vanishing from sight and reappearing in the lobby—half of which you could see into from the upper floors, the rubble piled high and crawling with human rescuers. One of the souls herded into the group by Alexander’s circling hellhounds had slipped free, and before either of the bulky hounds could respond, Gunnar was just there, guiding the soul back with gentle nips to the heels. He lapped the whole group, souls and hellhounds, with a few assured barks, then vanished again.
I nibbled my lower lip, grinning when I caught Knox’s distant figure still patrolling the outskirts, moving at a steady clip around the wreckage.
Who needed a pack of eight, ten, twelve hellhounds when three perfect ones would do?
Unfortunately, even with all of us combing through the tower, skirting fires and sidestepping corpses, ignoring wounded humans because we had to, the task was monumental. Alexander could only reap one soul at a time, which left a lot of management for the rest of us at the site. With our brief bit of tension shoved aside, he and I fell into a competent rhythm without ever once going over the game plan. I spoke with each and every soul, calming them, assuring them, informing them what had happened and where they were going. It saved Alexander time when he reappeared, took their hand, and whisked them down to Purgatory.
For the better part of an hour, we reapers and our packs were a well-oiled machine, shuttling some fifty fresh souls away for judgment. Twenty-eight to go—two more had died from their injuries since we’d arrived. Declan had found one of the most recent dead down at a gurney; I spotted them in passing, the soul on an empty stretcher, numb, vacant, staring at the thickening clouds overhead, and Declan snuggled in beside him, his head on the soul’s chest.
Despite the catastrophic nature of the accident, everything on this side seemed to be going smooth
ly—until Knox caught my attention. Insistently. Noisily. Barking, barking, barking, the sounds rougher and more aggressive with each passing second. A howl erupted from somewhere down below, and as Alexander grabbed the most recent soul I’d soothed, he shot me an annoyed look.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” I ground out, refusing to badmouth my alpha in front of him, all the while hoping that Knox hadn’t lost control again.
Another hoarse howl. My confidence in him plummeted, and I teleported from the fifteenth floor to the street, scanning the organized chaos.
And finding him nowhere.
“Knox?”
Heart in my throat, I jogged around a few bulky vehicles. Since we’d arrived, police had pushed the crowds way, way back, well beyond the initial cordoning, allowing a few blocks of space for them to work.
“Knox!”
At the far end of the interior accident zone, I finally found him in a sprint, headed straight for an alley between two brick apartment buildings. He moved effortlessly, like a great black shadow, paws barely touching the ground with each stride, and I cursed under my breath when his snarl reverberated across the celestial plane.
What now, for goodness’ sake?
I cut the distance between us in an instant, teleporting to the mouth of the alley, fury in my chest and fire on the tip of my tongue that he would do this to me again.
“Knox!” I shouted, scythe at the ready. His name bounced off the brick walls, buildings looming tall on either side of the narrow corridor. The hellhound slowed, and just as I was about to rip him a new one for abandoning his post, for ignoring me, I saw it.
Saw him, actually. A man in black—dragging one of our newly departed souls down the alley. His thin arms locked around the squirming soul’s waist like a bear trap, and when she shrieked, eyes wide and wild, he clapped a hand over her mouth.
A hand with a symbol cut into it, too bloody now to identify with any certainty. In fact, he was covered in runes, every exposed bit of flesh artfully sliced and diced and bloody beyond repair. My arms fell to my sides, stunned.
What…?
Who…?
Knox shot off in a burst of speed, powering down the alley at a gallop, leaping at the figure just as he had Christopher.
Only he didn’t make contact this time, didn’t tackle the villain and rip open his chest with claws tougher than steel.
Because the ground opened up and swallowed the bloody creature and the soul whole. Gone. A familiar eerie ripple shuddered across the celestial plane, and a shiver cut down my spine, the cold hand of fear gripping me once more after weeks of quiet.
Confounded, I staggered deeper into the alley, eventually breaking into a run and coming to an abrupt halt where I had last seen that terrified soul. A huge red symbol had been painted across the concrete at our feet, stretching the width of the alley, intricate in its design and bloody in its origins. Brows furrowed, I crouched down and traced the circle with my eyes, inside of which was a smattering of runes from a number of cultures, many of which even I didn’t recognize.
This was old magic. Very old.
And totally not in my wheelhouse.
Panting, Knox stalked to my side and shifted back, the heat rising off his body hitting me like a hurricane.
“What the fuck was that?” he demanded, voice low and harsh. Sweat beaded on his forehead and trickled down his handsome face, steam coiling between us. I shook my head, totally at a loss.
“I have no idea.”
“I saw him walk her out of the wreckage by the hand,” he growled as I tentatively pressed my fingertip to the markings at my feet. Hot and wet, the metallic tang was so painfully obvious that it made my stomach turn. A quick sniff confirmed it: blood.
“Was he a reaper?”
“He was dressed like one,” I muttered, wiping my finger on the ground with a grimace. “But no, he wasn’t. Reapers don’t… We don’t deal in blood magic.” I nudged at the nearest sigil with the base of my staff. “We don’t need to.”
“But he could touch the soul. Carry her. Take her.”
“Yeah…”
“Demon?”
I looked up at him, at the storm in his black eyes and the hardness around his mouth. “I don’t… I don’t know.”
Beneath the blood and the carvings, that thing was attractive enough to be a demon, but that was hardly definitive. Plenty of supernatural creatures were gorgeous; it was a predatory advantage.
Speaking of gorgeous predators…
Still radiating heat, Knox shuffled closer to the sprawling bit of floor art in front of us, nostrils flared through a few deep sniffs. He then swiped two fingers through the circle, effectively breaking it—and most likely its magic—and licked his fingers.
“Oh, Knox, no…” I tugged at his wrist. “Don’t—”
“It’s human,” he rumbled, bringing his fingers closer for another sniff. “Human blood.”
My belly flip-flopped, the heat rising off him suddenly a little too hot for comfort. “That familiar, eh?”
Knox rolled his eyes and smeared the blood on the ground. “Is that really what you’re worried about right now?”
“Well—”
“It smells like them,” he said dryly, which pushed the nauseating churn inside me down to an unsettling tremor.
“Tastes like them?”
“Like Christopher, yes,” the hellhound stated without hesitation. Ah. Right. Last night. Knox sat up on his haunches as he surveyed the alley. “These markings… They’re on the celestial plane.”
“Seems that way.” I couldn’t imagine something like this lasting long in the human realm, not when it looked so obviously Satanic—in a pop culture-y, horror movie sort of way, at least. Based on the empty metal trash bins lining the corridor between the two buildings, I assumed someone had been by today to empty them; something this large, so obviously in blood, so palpably wicked even to humans, wouldn’t have survived long.
“So that bastard was celestial?”
“Probably,” I said with a sigh, tapping my scythe on the pavement as I worked through the very limited list of beings capable of utilizing this cosmic pathway. Angels, demons, gods, reapers, hellhounds… It certainly narrowed the list, but there were still thousands in the demonic category alone, and searching through them would amount to searching for one specific needle in a mountain of identical needles.
Knox shot up with a snarl, his powerful thighs in my peripheral view briefly before he stalked away. “Fuck. I should have gotten to her sooner.”
“This isn’t your fault,” I insisted as I stood, wiping my finger one last time on my flouncy black sweater. While there were bigger issues afoot now than Knox mentally berating himself, I couldn’t let that slide either. He might have been completely at fault last night, but this… This was something else entirely.
The hellhound made it halfway down the alley before I caught him by the arm.
“Hey.” I planted my scythe and held tight, using it to anchor us when Knox tried to just barrel on ahead. He stopped with a growl, and I pressed my fingertips hard into his forearm, into the sweat and corded muscle, around the twisting and twining veins. “This isn’t on you, Knox. You did everything right.”
Slowly, he turned in place, wearing the same guilty look that he had last night when I returned to the house. “I watched him drag her beyond the tape. I should have stepped in sooner.”
“You didn’t know.”
“But I should have.”
“No, you shouldn’t have,” I argued, digging my nails into his flesh until he finally met my eyes. “It’s nobody’s fault. Well. I mean, it might be…” Someone set that thing loose on the celestial plane, and if he was a free agent, then he was responsible for whatever devilry he committed. “But not you. So, stop it. Right now.”
His lips twitched. “You think an alpha obeys commands, reaper?”
I smirked. “I think an alpha can listen to logic, yes. And what’s logical, going forward, isn’t beatin
g yourself up… It’s working together to make this right.”
The tension in his shoulders lessened, as did my hold on his arm, when he finally nodded. “Yes. We need to find her.”
“We need to find him.”
Whether we was me and the pack or someone actually sanctioned to tackle this kind of thing was a different issue. I had zero experience with another celestial being stealing souls, but suspected it was something for Heaven to handle. They had the resources, after all, and a whole arsenal of bored angels just chomping at the bit for a good hunt. Once we had reaped the final soul from the collapsed tower, I’d be headed upstairs—twice in less than twenty-four hours, at that—to file an official report.
A brief silence blanketed the alley, and before I knew it, my hand had slid down his forearm, over his wrist…
And then his fingers tangled with mine, loosely threaded together.
“How are Declan and Gunnar doing?” Knox asked as we both studied the sudden turn of events, neither of us pulling away.
“Great. Perfect, actually,” I told him. “You’re all naturals at this.”
Knox scoffed, his hand more open than mine, so big and firm, like he was scared he’d crush me if he squeezed back.
“You’re a protector, Knox.” My skin was so pale next to his, so deathly white, faint gold veins a stark contrast to the deep blue wisps weaving along his arm. “You had a moment last night, and you learned. We both did. And now it’s done.”
Shattering glass and screeching tires punctured the silence, and we broke apart in unison. My hand wrapped around yew. His fell to his side, tensed, as if purposefully stretched open. I swallowed hard, then nodded toward the street.
“Come on. Twenty-seven souls to go before we can call it a day.”
I’d just crossed onto the sidewalk when he called my name.
“I am sorry,” Knox said, lingering right where I’d left him when I looked back, “for the position I put you in at that house. It won’t happen again.”
A flush warmed my cheeks. “Forgiven.”
