Dying shouldn’t bother me still. I knew what happened after death. Souls lived very happily and comfortably, just on another plane. I knew this, but whenever I delivered the death touch, a part of me pinched with regret and sorrow for the person’s life I was ending.
Simon had always told me that feeling went away the more people I reaped, but for me, it didn’t. Why couldn’t I just be like Simon and do my job? Not feel anything? Death was just another part of the process. Everyone had to do it. There was nothing to be sorry about. At least that was what Simon had tried to drill into my head during his mentorship, yet it never stuck.
With death, there was still loss, wasn’t there? Sean had lost his father, the only person he had left in his life to love and be loved by. He had already lost his mother. Cole had lost a long-time friend and confidante. Hell, maybe even a fatherly figure. And even though I’d only known Wyatt for a short time, I felt the sting of his departure, too. It hurts still.
Maybe I wouldn’t ever be able to void myself from grief when doing my job. Maybe I was defective that way.
All I did know as I stared at the spirit door pulsing with some ancient power I didn’t understand was that I wished I could have saved him.
Now, I had to go back, look his son in the eye, and tell him it was done. He’d never see his father again. Not until his own death, anyway.
Using the palm of my hand, I smudged the chalk markings on the rough tree trunk, closing the door, and began my short walk back to the group. Kay’s comforting words floated from the edge of the forest, and when I approached, I saw her rubbing Sean’s shoulders and assuring him that I knew what I was doing, and if his father ever decided to visit the living world, she’d have no problem channeling for him. Of course, she didn’t know spirits crossing over without a reaper guide was a rarity, but I wasn’t going to ruin their moment together. It seemed Kay’s soothing touch was doing its job and calming Sean. Why hinder a good thing?
Besides, maybe once this whole mess was over and I returned to the afterlife, I could find a way to pass Wyatt between worlds for some kind of earthly visits. A spirit vacation, if you will. It had never been done before, as far as I knew, so there was a good chance it was against the rules.
But I had never been someone to follow the rules, now had I?
This was all based on the idea that I was safe to return to home and work, that is. I still didn’t know why Azrael had hired Cole to track me down and gone through this elaborate dance to keep me “distracted” and away from demons. I had never wanted anything to do with demons if the first place. Whatever his reason, it had something to do with this white light I possessed and the marking on my chest.
It was almost as if he didn’t want me to find out what they were.
Who I really was.
Maybe I’d stay low for a little bit. Not go back into the afterlife until things blew over or I figured out more about myself.
Sean turned to me the moment I stepped out of the concealment of the trees.
To my surprise, he said, “Thank you, Jade. I’d rather it was you who got to help him cross instead of anyone else.”
“You’re welcome,” I replied with a small smile.
I glanced around, finding Laurence and Cole were gone. So was Wyatt’s body. I could put two and two together there, and I didn’t blame Sean for not being able to take part in the burial of his father. I still hated that we couldn’t have done anything for Marla’s body. All I could do was hope that when the police came to the residence the next day on a suspected break-in call, they would take good care of her. Maybe call family and let them know.
“We’ll stay over here tonight with you, if you want,” Kay suggested. “Or you can come over to my apartment. I have a pullout couch and tons of food in the fridge. Angel’s invited, too, of course.”
Sean scratch the dog behind the ears. “Thanks, Kay. I appreciate it.”
A couple minutes later, Laurence and Cole trudged back through the darkness. A floating ball of light hovered in front of them, illuminating their way. Must have been another one of Laurence’s level one spells. Pretty useful.
“We made a temporary marking with two sticks that we found. He’s by his old Buick like you wanted,” Cole said.
“Okay.” Sean looked up at me. “You know, he used to say that when he died, I better not make it a big deal. He didn’t want the wake and lavish coffin and all that. He would say he didn’t care if I put his ashes in a coffee tin and set it on the mantel.” A hiccup of a laugh escaped. “I figured his beat-up old Buick was a better place. Could you ask him if that’s okay when you see him?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just nodded.
“Did you find his hat?” Sean asked the two men. “He must have lost it during the fight.”
“Yes. He has it again.” Cole walked over and grasped him by the shoulder. “Let’s get out the dark. We can talk more inside.”
“Good idea,” Kay chimed in and began walking toward the trailer.
As the group strolled ahead, I slowed my pace, lingering at the place where the crater had opened up and the Halflings had crawled out of. Just like before, the ground had rematerialized over the hole, the earth zipping back together again as if nothing supernatural had happened at all.
The ground there was still muddied and darkened by the tarlike blood Xaver had used to draw his Hell circle. I needed his blood, didn’t I? For the ritual to save Kay and possibly Cole? And Xaver wasn’t alive anymore to get it.
Would it matter if I collected whatever I could from the ground and used that? Hopefully not. There weren’t any other options at this point.
Before I got closer, I examined the sky for any glowing orbs suddenly appearing out of nowhere. No glowing light balls. Nothing but twinkling stars and swaying tree branches. A rather peaceful night, despite all the chaos that had happened earlier.
Maybe I would never know what that thing was that had saved me from selling myself to a demon. Maybe I could find something more about it in some of Wyatt’s books or the box he’d gifted to me with the angel mark. Or I could just let it be and be thankful that it had intervened when it did.
I mentally added it to my Things to Do list for another time. I still had this night to get through and tomorrow to prepare the ritual for Kay. Then there was the whole mess with going back to the afterlife and Styx Corp.
Yeah, my plate was kind of full right now.
The sound of someone approaching stiffened my spine. “Er— Jade?”
I turned to see Cole walking towards me as the others entered the trailer and shut the door.
Oh boy. This wasn’t going to be good.
“Came to collect your bounty?” I said. The instant shock and confusion on his face was priceless, and I soaked it in—a little too happily, I’ll admit. When he didn’t reply, I added, “I know. You don’t need to keep on lying through your teeth. I know our entire meeting wasn’t accidental. I know I’m one of your assignments.”
He blinked, obviously not expecting this conversation yet. Or this bluntly. But since we were all almost dragged into the deepest pits of Hell only moments ago, now felt like a good time to lay it all out.
At first, I thought he might deny it and try to go on with the ruse, but to my surprise, he said, “How did you figure it out?”
“Honestly? I was suspicious from the beginning. But I didn’t know fully until I overheard you talking with my boss in the motel room.”
He rubbed the side of his face. Then after a few seconds, he sighed. “Yes, Azrael hired me to keep you away from the afterlife plane until the solstice. He was adamant about it but didn’t tell me why other than he had business to attend to. Apparently, your friend getting attacked by Xaver wasn’t part of his plan. I didn’t think much of it because it seemed like a good reason for you to stay on this side of the spirit door, but once Azrael found out you were caught up in demon business, he wasn’t too thrilled. As I’m guessing you heard.”
I had. But what
I didn’t understand was why.
“What was he paying you?” I asked.
“It was more like the other way around. He threatened me,” he said. “Said that if I didn’t do this, he could speed up my change. Make me a Halfling and deliver me personally to the full-blood responsible for me.”
“Can he do that?”
“Hell if I know. I’ve worked with a lot of supernaturals in my day but never with an actual angel. And not just any. The Angel of Death. I wasn’t about to risk it.”
Okay, I could understand that somewhat. I had worked for Azrael for a year, and I still didn’t know what power the angel really possessed. He was the only one I had ever met, too, so there wasn’t anyone else I could compare him to.
“I’ll tell you this, though. He put me in a death-like sleep pretty quickly before you came and found me in the alley. And the dreams I had… Bizarre.” He went on. “Why do you think Azrael wanted to keep you away from the afterlife, anyway? Or out of demon affairs? What does it matter to him?”
“That’s what I’m still scratching my head about, too. I have no idea. He was the one always telling me to stick to my job. Not get involved in human stuff.”
“Be a mindless worker bee, huh? And when you couldn’t stick to that, he tried finding another way to keep you busy,” Cole said. “Seems like he needs you out of the picture for some reason.”
“But why?”
Cole shrugged. “It must have something to do with your light power thing. And that you can read ancient dialects. I mean, that tattoo on your chest and the box can’t be a coincidence. Neither can that glowing ball of light swooping in to rescue us. It all has to mean something. Azrael must be scared of you.”
I almost laughed out loud at that one. “Scared of m-me?” I sputtered. “He’s the Angel of Death, for Pete’s sake. Why would he be worried about me? I’m just one of his reapers.”
“Not just a reaper, Jade. You can’t be.”
I shook my head frantically. “I don’t know what the hell I am, but it can’t be anything crazy enough to be a threat to an ethereal being.”
“I saw you make a full-blooded demon explode from the inside out. And send all his hellions back to their hole.”
He was right. I had done that. But what was power if I didn’t know the cause of it or how to use it properly so it didn’t drain my energy whenever I needed it.
“You’re a force to be reckoned with, Jade,” he said. “You just have to learn how to control that power of yours and—”
“This, coming from a half-blood who almost turned Halfling on me because he couldn’t control himself from using his corrupting Hellfire.”
He held up his hands in surrender. “No judgement there.”
“And besides,” I began. “I don’t like what you’re hinting at.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not one of your magical weapons that you store in your backpack. I won’t be used as one.”
One eyebrow lifted, like he was impressed. Had I read his mind? Had he been thinking about using me in that way for his mercenary work?
At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised.
How had I felt anything for this man before? Now I was seeing the real Cole Masters. The clever, ruthless, work-driven assassin, and I wasn’t liking who I was seeing at all. He was something else.
I gritted my teeth. “So, you obviously weren’t doing your job efficiently enough. Azrael sounded mad when he visited you in the motel.”
“Oh, he was,” Cole said. “I had every intention of doing the assignment. It was probably one of the easiest jobs I’ve ever had. And his threat was read loud and clear. A specialty trained supernatural bounty hunter babysit a woman for a few days? It was almost insulting.”
“Wow, thanks.”
Asshole.
He held up a hand. “Then I met you and saw the power you had, saw the way you blasted Xaver out of the store, and I kind of got it. You weren’t just a reaper like he said you were.”
“Was Azrael the reason you could see me in my reaper spirit form?” I asked. “Did he do some kind of angel voodoo on you to make that possible?”
“No, actually he didn’t do anything. I still don’t know why I could see you.”
Still another mystery I had to figure out.
“When I brought you here and we discovered the demon cure—the very thing I’d been searching for most of my life—I got a bit sidetracked. Azrael’s mission suddenly didn’t matter anymore. You were the key I had been waiting for to get this demon part of me off my back.”
“As flattering as that is, Cole, it doesn’t excuse the fact that you lied to me all this time,” I said. “I trusted you.”
“I never asked you to trust me.”
Ouch. Good point. But ouch. That had been all me. Me and my naivety.
It still was a douchey thing to do.
“I have to admit, I expected you to be madder if you somehow found out the truth,” he said. “You knew all this time, and you still saved me from Xaver?”
I had expected to be angrier, too. It had come so quickly before, but now, all that fury and feeling of betrayal had fizzled out. Maybe it was because I found understanding in his explanation. He hadn’t asked me to trust him. I had done that on my own, and it had been a mistake. I couldn’t fault him for that. He was just doing his job, one he had been threatened to perform. If I had been put in that situation, could I say I wouldn’t do the same? Especially when my assignment was a complete stranger?
The answer was a common sense one. Of course I would take the job.
Cole let out a long, dramatic sigh. “Even so, I should say thank you. For saving my life, that is. And for what you did for Wyatt.”
“I liked him,” I said, which was the wholehearted truth. I would have said the same thing about Cole, but now, I wasn’t too sure how I felt about him. I didn’t know him. That was for sure. “He helped me a lot. I owed it to him, too.”
Cole ran his fingers through his hair nervously and stared out into the darkness. “I definitely owed him more than a quick, shallow grave burial and a cross made of some dead branches. I’ll miss that son of a bitch.”
“Yeah…”
We stood like that for a while, saying nothing.
In the stillness, I pulled out the velvet bag I had gotten from Marla.
“What’s that for?” he asked.
I walked over to the place Xaver had once stood, bent down, and scooped as much of the blood-soaked dirt into the bag as I could find. Just in case. The magical bag held about three pounds of the stuff, even though it was the size of a silver dollar.
“What are you doing?” Cole asked.
“We need Xaver’s blood for the cure. I’m hoping the fact that it’s soaked in dirt won’t matter much.”
“Xaver’s blood? Why do we need his blood?”
“We need the blood of the one originally damned. The one responsible for giving the curse. For Kay, that’s Xaver.”
“How did you find this out?” he asked, brows pinched. “I thought it was just ‘damned blood.’ Like mine.”
I hesitated. I didn’t want to tell him my information had come from another demon. And not just any demon. One responsible for one of the seven deadly sins.
“I’m not sure if it’s true, but I figured we’d try all options. Can’t be too safe, right?” There. Didn’t actually answer his question but didn’t lie either.
“Right…”
Tying the drawstrings, I closed the bag and put it in my back pocket. “We should get back to the others and figure out what we need to do to get this right. It’s a big day tomorrow. For all of us.”
That was an understatement, wasn’t it? My anxiety kicked up a notch, knowing that realistically, we only had one chance to save Kay.
Possibly Cole, too. Who knew how much longer he had before the demon side of him took over and he was lost completely? He had come pretty damn close to that point before.
Too close.
As the fiery pinks, golds, and blues painted the sky, Sean, Cole, Laurence, Kay, and I gathered in Fairport Cemetery under the bare branches of an old oak tree. After consulting a few lost spirits, we discovered the first grave here predated the Revolutionary War and wasn’t actually marked by a headstone at all. A family—a husband, wife, and their three children—had all been buried beneath the giant oak after a fire had wiped out their entire farm and claimed their lives. So, under the crooked, naked-looking thing was where we had set up the ritual altar and laid out the other ingredients.
Because I couldn’t help but notice that Kay looked a little paler today, a little more sickly, I was more than thrilled today was the solstice. Who knew how much longer she would be able to hold on. It was something I hoped we never had to find out.
We had all spent the night in Wyatt’s and Sean’s trailer, partly to review the instructions for the demon cure and discuss our plan, and partly to reminiscence about a great man we were all going to miss. Cole and Sean loved telling stories about Wyatt’s life. Each one had us hooting with laughter, especially the tale of the one time Wyatt had joined Cole on one of his missions. After being shot in the arm, he’d decided his butt was better off behind a desk, reading a book and searching for information rather than on the front lines.
Could have fooled me, the way he came out guns blazing to fight the Halflings and Xaver. But Cole assured me that when his property or family was threatened, that was just the way Wyatt was. As for a job in mercenary work—not so much.
With the Breath of Life herb, Xaver’s blood, and a scoop of dirt from the Holiest ground, or in our case the soil near the oak tree’s roots, all on the makeshift altar Sean had set up, we waited eagerly for the setting sun to hit the horizon. According to the cure I’d found in Wyatt’s wife’s box, the sun’s positioning was just as important as the ingredients. And we would only have a few seconds to throw all the pieces together for the magic of the ritual to work. Cole stood at the ready, hands out, for his part in it.
Death Wish (Reaper Reborn Book 1) Page 24
