by Marie Hall
Times were so different from when he’d first roamed Earth, and a part of him missed the day when mortals had sense enough to fear others, when they worshipped the beauty of nature and the fae. But those days would never return again. Humans had adapted, just as the monsters had.
The black inside the ramshackle house of crumbling wood did not hinder his ability to see. The walls were covered in scratch marks, profanity-laced phrases written upon them with red and black spray paint. Decaying leaves and used needles littered the floorboards.
More than likely the vamps had stumbled upon a user too doped up to realize the type of danger she’d been in to flee in time.
Moon filtered in through cracks in the paned kitchen window. The female was bathed in shadow and weakly clutching onto her white robe, now stained a deep shade of crimson.
Standing in the doorway, Frenzy took his time studying the pathetic creature. The vampire, likely Lucian, had done a number on her. Her legs were splayed apart in an unnatural position. The feet were pointing in the wrong direction, but not only the feet: the hips were no longer even aligned.
Her chest cavity had been cracked open. Not unlike what he’d done to Vanity, but unlike the walking dead, the woman before him was a mortal and her very essence pooled around her in a large band of red. Pale fingers clutched almost spasmodically against the edge of her robe.
What must have once been a stunning face was now ribboned open at both cheekbones, the eyelids having been sliced off. There wasn’t much in death that offended him; death was simply a fact of life. He’d killed many in his long life—vampire, shifter, witch, and human. But the savagery of this attack made the muscle in his jaw tick. A strange sensation filled his limbs, one he was not used to feeling often.
The emotion was pity. Much as he despised the mortals, the act of violence against this woman was an atrocity. Kindness was not an emotion inherent in him. So as much as he felt…something, it didn’t change what he’d come here to do.
“Look at me, mortal.”
A horrible snuffling sound, like she was trying to draw breath through a ruptured nose, issued from between her cracked lips.
Her head began a slow roll in his direction.
“What in the hell did those vampires want with you, little one?”
Flexing his bony hand, he placed it over her broken form, ready to harvest the soul from her body, when a pair of eyes stole the very words from his tongue.
Eyes the color of sun-warmed honey, a golden brown so rare he’d only ever seen the likes of it once before. Jerking his hand away from her chest as if burned, he sat back on his heels.
“Who are you?” he growled, as a strange sort of numbness infiltrated his limbs and brain.
Adrianna was the name running like a mantra through his head. His Adrianna. The only woman in the world he’d ever loved, ever needed, wanted, desired, adored…
A horrible grinding sound emanated from her as her lips flopped open, as if she was trying to speak. Disbelief kept his feet rooted to the spot. He needed to finish this, to get away from her and the memories surfacing like a bitter friend.
But he couldn’t look away; the vision of his Adrianna kept merging with the battered face of this nameless woman. She was gazing at him with pain and fear, with hope. But not the hope that he would save her; she wanted death. He read it clearly. Her eyes were shrouded, angry, and screaming at him to hurry. To end it now.
“Who are you?!” he roared, even in his fury careful not to touch her with the bones of his hand.
Her eyes kept boring into him, accusing him, but there was something else in her eyes: pain. She was shrouded in it and barely hanging on to any last vestige of sanity.
“Kill…me,” she croaked.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
He moved his hand, circling her head.
“Cannot…become…that.”
Her broken voice scraped his nerves, set his teeth on edge, made a blanket of fury creep like a shadow across his mind. Fury at her for reminding him of a long-dead ghost, fury at the vampires for destroying her the way they had.
“It’s too late, mortal. You already are that. Me taking the soul will not negate it. They’ve envenomed you.” And they’d gone to great lengths to do it. She was covered head to toe in bite wounds.
Her head shook painfully slowly. “Then finish,” she gasped, body shuddering as she tried to speak around the pain, “what…they…started.”
Her eyes rolled back, and he could think again, because she didn’t look so much like his Adrianna anymore. She was just a woman, a nameless, faceless woman. A human who’d destroyed and hated and lied and cheated and stolen…She was the worst of all creation.
Flexing his fingers, he flung them over her chest, ready to harvest the pulsing blue orb that was her soul, when there was a blinding flash of light followed by the unmistakable sharp and biting scent of frost.
Shielding his eyes against the brilliance, he turned to the side, but knew instinctively who’d intruded.
“Lise?” He jumped to his feet when the light finally turned down.
Lise was always a surprise. None knew of her true form or who she really was, always referred to as the Ancient One. All he did know for a fact was that even The Morrigan had to do what the old battle-ax said, which in his book meant that she wasn’t one to mess with.
Dressed in a gown of sparkling sheer white, she reminded him of the frost he still felt shivering through the air. Strange, luminescent eyes hooked his, making him wonder all over again what she was.
After what Lise had done with Cian, all of faedom wondered what she was and why she’d taken such an interest in death. He narrowed his eyes.
“To what do I owe this honor?”
Quirking a snowy brow, she simply shrugged. “Must I have to have a reason to visit?” A vein of ice skated across the floor with each step she took.
“Do not tell me you’ve taken an interest in me now, Ancient One,” he said with a thread of sarcasm.
A prim and small smile curved the edges of her petal-pink lips. “And if I have?”
“Good goddess”—he cast his gaze heavenward for a brief moment—“I’m not in the market, so if you’re trying to get me to play patty-cake with a human the way you did with Cian, I’m not interested.”
She was no longer looking at him. Lise was studying the woman, whose breathing was now a faint wisp of air.
“She hasn’t got long in this world.”
“Obviously.” He knelt again. “Which is why I’m here.” Extending his hand, he made to snatch up the glowing blue orb that was her soul, but a surprisingly warm hand latched on to the bone of his finger.
Brows gathering into sharp slashes, he shook off Lise’s hand, surprised to note her skin still gleamed, almost glowed, like moonlight was trapped and filtering through her pores from within.
“You should have fallen to your knees in agony from touching that.” His tone was accusatory. What bothered him most wasn’t that Lise was unaffected by his touch, but that none were immune to death. Especially not an other, as indestructible as they sometimes seemed. Everything died. It was the continued mystery of who Lise was, why she interfered in the lives of the reapers, and what she could possibly want with him that really irritated him most.
“Do not try to make sense of me, boy. You never will.” There was no malice in her words, merely amusement.
It made his teeth gnash.
“You must not allow Mila to become a vampire or to be taken by one of them.”
Now that the real purpose of her visit was revealed, he still found himself just as confused.
“O-kay. She is covered in bite wounds. The venom has spread through her system. Are you suggesting I drive a stake through her heart?” He pointed at her still body; the bump of her heart was barely discernible now. She had literally milliseconds before human death occurred, at which point she would become the walking dead.
Crossing her arms she pinned him with a glacier glare. “Thank y
ou, Captain Obvious.”
His lips twitched despite himself.
Then everything stopped. Literally halted. The squeak of mice, the hollow scraping of a door creaking open and shut in a gentle breeze. The world was quiet and still, except for him and Lise.
The human was no longer breathing, but she wasn’t dead either. She was in stasis along with the rest of the world.
Lise wore a smug grin. “Now then, as I was saying, she must not become one of them.”
“And how do you plan to stop the inevitable, Ancient One? Keep her catatonic for the rest of her life?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Of course not. I already thought of that, but it really doesn’t work for my endgame.”
Nodding, he leaned against a fridge that’d been partially moved away from the wall. “What is it with immortals and their endgames?”
“Like you’re one to talk, reaper. And what were you planning to do? Hmm?” The whites of her eyes glowed as she tapped her finger against her chin. “Tell the queen you were through being master of death? Is that not an endgame? Though a minor one, still an endgame.”
He remained silent, refusing to rise to the obvious baiting.
“We are all the same; we all have a goal in mind. My goal involves you and this woman.”
“No.” A swift shake of his head didn’t stop her from nodding as if he’d agreed.
“Oh yes.”
Pinching the bridge of his nose, Frenzy licked his front teeth, counting slowly to three before speaking. “I do not think you heard me correctly. I’m not in the market for an Eve, especially not a human one. Cian at least got a witch. This…” His nose curled as he pointed to the broken shell lying before them.
Rolling her eyes, she looked at him as if he were merely a bug under a microscope and not the creature in whose hands rested life or death. She had no fear of him whatsoever. It was rather novel, and slightly off-putting.
“Well, as you succinctly stated just moments ago, she’s no longer really human, now is she?”
“What?” He winced, trying to make sense of her nonsense. “You just said she couldn’t be allowed to become a vampire—”
“Yes. And?”
“Aaaannnd…” He dragged the word out as he rolled his wrist, looking to her for a cue, some sign that she might have realized she’d spoken in riddles, but she was giving him a wide-eyed, totally innocent stare. “You confuse me.”
She laughed. “I confuse them all, do not worry. Now, you and I will get along just fine if you listen to everything I tell you to do.”
“Even if I agreed to this, whatever it is, it doesn’t mean that The Morrigan would. She nearly killed Cian last time and—”
“Yes, yes, I handled that one. The kitten has been declawed; you work for me now. An arrangement the queen and I have made, if you will.”
“What?” He jerked off the fridge, glaring at her now. “When did this happen? I work for the—”
“Not really. No.” Her smile was laced in sugar. “You work for me. Memos may not have been handed down yet, but ownership has been overturned. Now listen up because we haven’t much time.”
And just like that all humor vanished from her face; she was intensely serious. The air between them shivered with the rawness of her power, like getting caught outside during an electrical storm. Waves of heat and ice and suffocating magic gripped him so tight he could do nothing but take a stuttering breath around the sudden pounding of his heart.
“From the moment that I release time she will have half a second before death. She cannot become a vampire, which is why you will not take her soul.”
“Lise”—he shook his head—“I have to take her soul. If I do not, my hand will remain this way indefinitely.” The dry bone clacked together as he opened and closed his fist.
“Then it shall. You are death, Frenzy.”
Trying to breathe around the suffocating anger choking him, he willed himself to calm. Raging at Lise would only get him killed, in a likely gory and horrific manner at that.
“Point being that if it remains bone I will have—”
“A minor inconvenience. Wear a glove, not that it will matter around her anyway. She will die.”
Again with the riddles. Trying to rub the sudden tension headache creeping up the back of his neck, he sighed. “So she is going to die?”
“Of course, death.” Her eyes bugged and she was staring at him as if he was beyond stupid.
Smothering the growl that desperately wanted out, he settled for taking a deep breath instead. “When she dies I must take her soul. That is the way of things in my world, Lise.”
She shook her head. “Not this time. I will make it so that no matter how often you touch her, she will never suffer death’s caress. She will be immune to your charms.”
He frowned. Was that even possible? But with Lise he supposed anything was possible. There was so much about her that was a complete mystery. “What am I supposed to do with this human?”
“Guard her, protect her.”
“No.” There wasn’t even a point in thinking it over. There was no way he’d be saddled with guarding a human being.
“And honestly, stop thinking of her as human. She will no longer be once I wake her up. But you’ll have to teach her how to survive what she will soon become, and I doubt she’s going to enjoy the transition much. She’ll need your support.”
Powerful as she was, Frenzy was certain it was her mind that’d cracked centuries ago and not his. “I don’t think you heard me; I said no.”
Taking a step closer, she peered up at him with those unsettling white eyes. The Morrigan could cast glamour like none he’d ever known before, but she had the type of magic that made whoever her prey was unable to look away. To become ensnared and entranced in her predatory gaze, even while she ripped you limb from limb.
Lise had it too, but this was so much more.
Unease moved through his body and again his heart fluxed, banging hard against the cage in his chest. Rubbing at it, unable to tear his gaze from hers, he knew he’d never really had a choice in the matter.
She might be approaching him as a matronly figure of sorts, but the power in her seemingly frail body was vast and far superior to his own. She’d never had any intention of making this a democratic decision.
“Are you done sassing me, reaper?”
The sweetness of her voice did not hide the edge of steel buried inside the words. This was an ancient, a being of such terrifying power that she would get what she wanted one way or another.
Nostrils flaring, knowing he was bested, he clipped his head.
“Good. You must take her to George.”
His lip curled up. “George is an outcast.”
She shrugged. “I’ve run through all scenarios, and it’s really the only way. If I send her to Lootah, king of the shifter clans, his bite will reveal the truth of her, causing her to be in more danger than she is even now.”
Truth of her?
What exactly was this human? Was that why Lise was taking such an interest? Because she was more than another mere mortal? Turning, he glanced back down at the body. She was still frozen, limbs distorted, face a repulsive mass of bruises and slits, and he couldn’t fathom the importance of her.
“Vampires have obviously figured her out. They tasted her blood. They already know; in fact, you’ll barely have a minute to escape before they return in bigger numbers.”
“I put down all but one of them. And that one should still be stunned for a while yet.”
She rolled her eyes. “Frenzy, how long has it been since you’ve been out in the world and not suckling at the queen’s teat?”
He clamped his lips shut.
“The world has progressed, child. What you think you know about others, humans, all of it…it’s all so very different now. The vampire was merely stunned, apart from the one you shared death’s kiss with, of course. That one is definitely d-e-a-d.” She laughed and then shrugged, as if not in the least
bit bothered by the death of a vampire. “And the one who shattered too”—she flicked her wrist—“you really should have destroyed the leader. Getting a little sloppy in your old age, death.”
Lise ran Club X, a club that catered to all others. Be you witch, vampire, shifter, demon…She was Switzerland in a city overrun by monsters; she did not judge and she did not take sides.
Usually.
But she seemed to be doing so now.
“What’s in this for you?” His voice dipped, because trying to make sense of this thing was going to give him a massive headache.
“Balance. Order. Same as you, reaper. The powers she possesses, they must not be manipulated by any other. To prevent another Great War, you must protect this woman.”
“By taking her to George?!” He couldn’t hide the disbelief from his voice; a low chuckle spilled from him. “Is the bastard still hiding out in the same cave I found him in all those centuries ago?”
She nodded. “He is.”
Snorting, he shook his head. Might be good to visit George. It’d been a millennium at least. But honestly, wasn’t death better for the woman than what Lise was suggesting? It had to be.
“No, it’s not,” she said, obviously reading his thoughts. “Her role in history is vital. In fact, my sisters and I have considered grooming her for future duties, but we haven’t had enough time to study her lineage. In order for us to have that time, she must be protected. There is none more powerful than death to perform that duty.”
There was definitely more to the story than what Lise was sharing. He knew that. He also knew she wasn’t likely to give him more than she had.
“Who is she?”
She shrugged. “Just a woman.”
That was a lie of epic proportions and he knew it; if she’d really been just a woman Lise would have let him reap her soul a long time ago.
“And why must I be the one to see to her? Isn’t there another reaper available? Tariq, or Aeidin? Anybody?”
“Feral” was the word that immediately came to mind when her lips split into a wide grin and, licking her front teeth, she shook her head. “None have the history you do.”
