by Rhea Watson
Together, we hurried back to the carnage, more souls in need of our care—and a mystery gnawing at my insides, the fear in that kidnapped soul’s eyes threatening to haunt me for the rest of my days.
21
Declan
The pack stilled at the sound of the front door gently shutting downstairs. Scattered across Knox’s bedroom, the three of us looked to the doorless opening. Hazel had been gone for most of the day; after we had cleared the crumbling skyscraper of all its departed souls, she dropped us off here, then vanished. Knox had been the one to fill us in on what they’d seen—on that fucked-up creature who had stolen one of our souls.
She had gone to Heaven to make a report, apparently, and now, almost nine hours later, she had finally returned, the sweet little tip-tap of her flats echoing through the house. Weeks ago, she would have left us to our own devices after our evening meal, but none of us had eaten, the pantry untouched in her absence. Dread frayed at the pack bond for hours, and now, as her scent thickened in the air, her footsteps grew louder, relief flooded my connection with Gunnar and Knox instead—from all sides. Relief, excitement, worry.
Because something foul was wandering the celestial plane. Hazel had sensed it for weeks, all the way back to my training at the children’s hospital. She had chalked it up to that rogue spirit, but from what Knox had described, the bloody beast today was much, much worse.
And the thought of her, out there, alone, had us all on edge.
Never mind that she had her scythe. Never mind that she was an immortal being, celestial, divine in her own right. The three of us fretted over her like she was made of glass—and that was fucking telling.
Gunnar and I knew it: Hazel was our fated mate—we three were destined to find her, claim her, love her. The physical intimacy shared between us and Hazel had sealed it. At this point, we were just waiting for our alpha to stop being a stubborn ass and get with the program already.
Knox shot to his feet as soon as Hazel appeared in the doorway, and concern pounded through our pack bond at the state of her. She had never looked so exhausted, dark rings around her eyes, her hair staticky and wild. Traveling up to Heaven seemed to take a greater toll on her than the usual teleporting, and she had done it twice now in less than two days.
Leaning heavily on her scythe, she shuffled into the room with a sigh, and before anyone could tell me otherwise, I was at her side, an arm around her waist.
“Are you all right?”
She nodded, stabbing the end of her scythe to the floor so that it could stand tall and proud without her. “Just tired.”
A low throb of longing rippled through the pack bond, and Gunnar and I did our best not to look at its source. Even though we had both tasted Hazel, caressed her bountiful curves, kissed down to her marrow, there wasn’t even a whiff of jealousy between us. That was the way with bonded hellhound packs like we three—or so I had always been told. I’d never been fortunate enough to have a mate for myself, but now I finally understood why: fate had been holding off until I met the reaper nestled to my side.
Gunnar had proven to be less physically affectionate than me, preferring to verbally spar, his tone snarky but flirtatious. The only one still desperately craving her—and fighting it hard—was Knox.
“What did they have to say?” our alpha demanded as I walked Hazel to his bed. For the first time since we had mated, she let me hold her, as if just too wiped out to fight it anymore. While her reluctance hurt, I understood it: humans didn’t share mates, and she was sensitive to both my and Gunnar’s feelings. It was all unnecessary, of course. There was no bad blood between him and I, no tension, no competition. Innately, we each understood how the other responded to our mate, how we longed to care for her.
Hazel just needed time to accept it.
Seated on the end of his bed, she rubbed at her cheek and shook her head. “They think it was most likely a demon, even without the blood being black.”
“A demon collecting souls from Earth—directly?” Gunnar’s eyebrows shot up as he settled on the bay window ledge, arms crossed. Seconds later, his foot—wrapped in fine Italian leather, a gift from Hazel for his successful first field test—started to tap, a tell that his mind had begun to race. “Is that usual?”
“I’ve never seen it,” Hazel told us. She inched away from me when I sat beside her, and I swallowed the pinch of hurt, instead easing back on my elbow and stretching the other arm out behind her on the bed. Her gorgeous mane unfurled down her back in an explosion of white, and she fidgeted with it absently, bringing it over her shoulder, then fluffing it back. “Demons can collect souls directly after death, but only if they’ve made deals… Humans can sell their souls for something in life. I always thought it was rare, but apparently not.”
“That thing wasn’t a demon.” Fire poker in hand, Knox crouched in front of the hearth and stabbed at the dying embers inside. One harsh breath sparked a flame, and he fed it with the kindling from the nearby basket. “I know demons… He wasn’t one.”
Well, that settled it. If Knox said it wasn’t a demon, it wasn’t a demon. I certainly needed no further proof, though Gunnar appeared lost in thought—like he hadn’t even heard our alpha’s declaration.
“I didn’t think he was a demon either,” Hazel admitted softly. “He didn’t feel like a demon. Maybe kind of looked like one, but—”
“Did you tell them about the carvings?” Firelight danced across Knox’s scarred face, sparks exploding in the hearth as the flames gobbled up the little twigs and bits of crumpled paper. A blazing dot of orange settled in his beard, and he extinguished it with a flick. “The symbols on his body? The blood sigil on the ground?”
“Yeah, yeah, all of it.” She shuffled back deeper into the crook of my arm as she readjusted her position, seated on one bent leg, the other hanging over the bed’s edge—not touching the floor, probably, the short little thing. Affection squeezed my heart at the thought, danced along our pack bond, my feelings eliciting something similar from Gunnar. Our alpha exhaled sharply—did he think we were both struck by puppy love now?—but remained focused on Hazel as she said, “I had to fill out a ton of paperwork. Heaven is so ridiculously bureaucratic. But, yeah, I wrote everything down. I even drew whatever I could remember…”
She tucked her hair behind her ears, shoulders slumping, folding in on herself. I swallowed hard, fighting the urge to just grab her and yank her against me—because I could hold her up. Last night with Knox had taken a lot out of her already, and now this? Let me shoulder the burden, sweet.
“I don’t know,” she muttered. “I did what I could. They said they’ll take it from here, so…”
“But you have doubts?” Gunnar asked, to which Hazel sighed again, as if at a loss.
“I just don’t know how to feel right now. This is something I’ve never seen before, and I’ve been reaping for ten years. I don’t think it was a demon. His blood was red.” She shook her head, frowning. “But I have no clue what else it could be. All I know is that he stole a soul, and he could be… hurting her, and I just… I want…”
Justice. Her heart was too big to carry this darkness alone. I finally sat up and pressed a firm hand between her shoulders, then slowly stroked up and down, massaging her.
“I’m sure the angels will find her,” I insisted, wishing I could drain away all the fear and stress with my touch alone. “They’ll make it right.”
Knox scoffed, sliding the iron poker back into its cannister noisily as the fire snapped and hissed. A warm orange hue filled the room, paired with the white lamplight from either side of the alpha’s bed, and shadows danced across all our faces—mine the only hopeful expression present.
“Agreed,” Hazel said, her gaze tangling with Knox’s, the pair locked in a private, wordless conversation while Gunnar and I smirked at each other. Good. It was nice to see them bonding, slow and laborious as the process might be.
A monstrous gurgle suddenly echoed through the room.
&n
bsp; Three sets of eyes whipped to me, and Gunnar rolled his.
“For fuck’s sake, Declan, just go eat something already.”
My face ripened with embarrassment. We had worked through our usual lunchtime today at the tower, and after we’d returned, the whole pack had been too anxious about Hazel to do much more than pace and speculate. Apparently, mine was the only belly to complain about it.
“Oh, sorry…” Hazel stood in a hurry. “I should have realized that you—”
“We are more than capable of feeding ourselves,” Knox interjected before I could. Female hounds in Hell usually minded the young and patrolled the internal territory; males were solely responsible for providing food. Hazel’s concoctions tasted way better than anything I’d ever eaten, but she wasn’t expected to wait on us anymore. We knew the layout of the house, where to find everything. We could feed ourselves. She just… She made everything taste so fucking good.
“We wanted to wait for your return,” Gunnar added. “Food has been the last thing on our minds today.”
Hazel nibbled her plump lower lip for a moment, slowly looking between the three of us as color blossomed in her cheeks. Fuck, did I ever love her blushes. For a deathly pale reaper, she was so wonderfully prone to them. That lone left dimple suggested she was fighting a smile, and interest throbbed through our pack bond. All three of us delighted in making her happy.
No denying it anymore.
“Okay, well, I should probably get started on something anyway—”
“I was thinking…” Shuffling to the end of the bed, I ignored the sudden rush of saliva at the thought. “Pizza.”
“And what, pray tell, is pizza?” Gunnar asked, nose crinkling.
“It’s that round bread with the cheese and tomatoes,” Knox said absently, nudging at the fire with his foot, pushing a log an inch to the right—like that would make a difference. Grinning, I scrambled across my alpha’s bed and grabbed his tablet off the little side table. A few swipes of my finger and I had the most appetizing pizza imaginable on the screen: Meat Lover’s Extravaganza.
“We can order it online from one of the shops in Lunadell,” I said as Gunnar crept closer. As soon as the tablet’s screen light illuminated his features, I could almost sense him drooling. “Then we go and pick it up.”
After all the shit we had been through in the last twenty-four hours, I figured we could do with a treat—something out of the ordinary, something new and exciting. When I looked to Hazel, I found her mirroring my grin, her gaze warm.
“Yeah,” she murmured. “It seems like a pizza sort of night, doesn’t it?”
Reaching out, I snatched her hand and tugged her back to the bed, where she plopped down beside me in a flourish of silvery-white hair and a whoosh of the sweetest dates. Gunnar joined us a moment later, the pair of us like sentries on either side of our reaper. As we scrolled through the online menu, Knox abandoned his precious fire, and soon enough loomed over the three of us, arms crossed.
Not a hint of a scowl anywhere.
In fact, when I peeked up at him—stealthily, briefly, not wanting him to know that I was studying him for a change—I swore I saw a smile. It was faint, barely there through his coarse black facial hair, but real.
And in that moment, our pack felt whole.
Complete.
Comfort pulsed through our bond; the others must have sensed it—that feeling of belonging. A piece had always been missing, and now we’d found it.
Now we’d found her.
“I think we should make yours an extra-large,” Hazel mused, dragging a delicate finger across the tablet screen, oblivious to the moment unfurling around her. “And we should probably get a couple… Four at least.”
“I rather like cheese,” Gunnar said as we built our own pizza through the website—the first of many, it would seem. “Can we double it?”
“What is Brooklyn pepperoni?” Knox demanded, reading it all upside down, totally invested for once, his head cocked to the side and black brows furrowed.
Gunnar snatched up the tablet. “Fuck me, we can put cheese in the crust?”
“Is it different than the regular pepperoni?” Knox huffed, his question still unanswered.
“Hazel, are anchovies what I think they are?” I asked, hesitating over the little button that would add them to our pizza. Fish, were they not? Blegh.
“Oh my God, you guys…” Hazel giggled, the sound sweeter and more beautiful than anything in this realm or the next. Warm, raw affection thrummed through our bond in response. “One at a time.”
An eternity later, Knox, Gunnar, and I had eight extra-large, extra-cheesy, extra-meaty, Brooklyn-pepperoni-laden pizzas to split between us, while Hazel had a single small, thin-crust, cheese-and-onion pizza to her name. Then, for the hell of it, because no one—including Hazel—had sampled a molten chocolate mud cake before, we tacked four of those onto the order as well.
What followed felt so… natural. Hazel and I venturing into Lunadell, strolling along the human plane to the pizza shop—hand in hand. Paying for the enormous stack of boxes, boxes that I insisted upon carrying by myself. Slipping back onto the celestial path to steal four eight-packs of beer for all of us to share. Laughing. Talking about anything so long as it had nothing to do with reaping or that creepy fuck from earlier today.
Coming home to find Gunnar and Knox had set the dining table with plates and cups—which were forgone immediately for the chilled cans of beer. For the first time, Hazel sat with us for a full meal, Knox at the helm, the rest of us bunched around him at one end of the long table. Sharing slices. Clinking beer cans for a toast. Rehashing the day’s huge reaping—gossiping about Alexander and his pack of stuck-up hellhounds.
Hazel’s rare and beautiful laughter filling the room.
And as I polished off my tenth slice, nowhere near full, I realized that in all my long life, I couldn’t remember a time I’d been happier.
22
Gunnar
I had never seen so many humans in one place before.
Sure, the tower had been crawling with humans, dead and alive, but this was something else entirely. Wall-to-wall people packed into the dimly lit space, music pounding to the point of pain, its bass reverberating in the red brick walls. Sweat mingled with the vast and varied scents of alcohol—both of the sweet and acrid varieties—and then the perfumes, the body odors clashing and colliding, blending and growing into something pungent. How anyone came here for fun was beyond my understanding, but that was the purpose of tonight.
Fun.
To celebrate Knox’s first successful reaping—an incident that had been so standard, so pedestrian, that even Hazel hadn’t all that much to say about it when they returned. An old woman had died in her bed, and there was Knox and Hazel to escort her safely and comfortably to Purgatory. Apparently, she had been a dear, sweet and uncomplicated, greeting death as a friend with a peaceful smile on her crinkled features. The one tidbit that had sent Declan and I into fits of laughter was the fact that this old soul had had the audacity to grab Knox by the face—red eyes, huge teeth, and all—and squish it, then kiss it like she did with her tiny Pomeranians.
Hazel hadn’t been able to contain herself either when she’d shared that delicious moment with us, much to Knox’s chagrin.
Still, our alpha had completed an important part of his training—and we as a household had bonded deeper over the last few days than we had in the last two months. Thoughts of abandoning our reaper were becoming faint, few and far between, yet Knox still wasn’t ready to drop it completely. He would. As soon as he tasted her, he’d never want to leave.
I would have thought the turn of events sinister, witchcraft of the highest order, if Hazel wasn’t so fucking sweet. And personable. And perfect for us.
She was wearing red tonight.
My cock rather liked the color on her, standing at full attention the moment she had drifted shyly into Knox’s bedroom while we were getting ready for the outing. Even no
w, an hour later, desire scorched through my veins, and every sensual sway of her hips promised that I wouldn’t get through the night without at least half an erection tenting my trousers.
Mind you, most of the human men present must have been plagued by something similar—because fuck me, all these females in short, tight little outfits, their hair styled, their faces dewy with makeup… It was a delectable tease that no man could resist. Nightclub had to be code for a mating pit; I was sure of it.
Standing on the outskirts of the writhing mass of humans, I couldn’t recall how we had settled on this particular venue. Sampson’s Corner. The most popular club in Lunadell, according to its website. All I remembered was that yesterday Hazel wished to celebrate the fact that her entire pack had passed the most important step in our training: the first field tests. Knox had suggested pizza again. Declan had proposed an outing into the city. I had requested something with music.
And now here we were. This certainly was music by its most basic definition, but I could hardly understand the jumbled words—though what did come through was overtly sexual.
At least the drunken humans seemed to like it, occasionally screaming along to the lyrics, especially the females. While it wasn’t a locale I would frequent, the building itself was suitable enough. After waiting in a line outside on the sidewalk for about twenty minutes, Declan insisting we get the full human experience, we had been granted access to Sampson’s Corner, a three-level nightclub in the heart of Lunadell. The main floor had been just as packed as this, only it served as a spot to drink and chat—if one could even hear conversation over the din. Above that was a rooftop patio illuminated by countless strings of light, and this here, in the basement, was the pulse of the club—its dance floor, its busiest bars, and a few shadowy corridors spiderwebbing off into fuck knows what.
Not my scene. Certainly not Knox’s either. Declan only seemed to enjoy it because Hazel hadn’t stopped smiling since we’d arrived. But, at the very least, the drinks were tasty; loitering near one of the brick walls under an obnoxious black speaker, I gulped down half the mixed cocktail in my plastic cup. Vodka and some other concoction, something sweet and tangy, a smooth blend that oozed inside and warmed my gut. Knox was already onto his third scotch; I spied my alpha at the bar, towering over the humans around him and sticking out like a sore thumb with all that hair.
