Page 15 of Reaper's Pack

Halfway down the hall, the weight of the day quashing me brick by brick, I paused and looked down at the chipped wood floor, feeling all of it again after a day of distraction.

The crushing loneliness.

The emptiness inside.

That’s what we reapers were: empty.

And nothing in this world, the next, or the beyond, was ever going to change that.

6

Declan

This was paradise.

Why couldn’t Knox and Gunnar see?

A clear blue sky above, unfettered sunshine warming our skin. A balmy breeze and fresh, real, honest to goodness grass at our feet. Scents galore—and not just brimstone and shit and death and blood. A house of our own. A territory that stretched to the horizon in every direction, safe and secure inside a ward. Birds in the trees, chattering. A circling hawk. Creatures with no connection to Hell, not a demonic inkling in their body.

A gorgeous reaper whose smile could set the world on fire.

A reaper who smelled like fresh dates and agarwood bakhoor, who made the three of us four—who sent my mind back to a time of endless roaming and full bellies and kind eyes. A time gone by. Fleeting. Painfully fleeting. A time my packmates no longer remembered, probably, but I still felt in my marrow, still longed for in the dead of night after the nightmares ripped me awake.

This was what I imagined Heaven to be like, smell like, feel like. This place was everything we had always wanted, reaper or not, and it was their own stubbornness that kept my fellow hounds from realizing it.

But I would follow them wherever they went, even if it was away from here. If—more like when—Gunnar found a way around Hazel’s ward, I’d walk with them into the great wide world, dragging my feet, a new hole in my heart. Because they were my brothers, my soulmates, my pack. The two stubborn assholes meandering about in front of me now, trailing too far behind Hazel, squinting in the afternoon sunlight, were a part of my essence.

No other pack had so openly accepted me before.

No one else had loved me.

I had the scars to prove it.

Their unwillingness to see paradise, however, was starting to get under my skin. We were only a day into our training as Hazel’s hellhound pack, but already their inability to make nice had me ready to scream.

I didn’t.

Because I understood.

Gunnar and Knox had suffered through the same fucked-up bullshit as I had in Hell. Knox came away wearing those tribulations on his skin, flesh that usually healed from any injury slashed and torn and scarred. Gunnar carried it all on the inside, whether he’d admit it or not—I saw the agony in both of them. I’d recognized kindred spirits from the moment we were introduced through the bars of our kennel, me on a leash with that spiked collar cutting into my throat, Knox and Gunnar on the other side, sniffing me out, more intimidating in looks than any alpha-beta pair I’d suffered before.

Their spirits were softer, however.

I owed them my life.

And if I could, I’d pay that debt by making them realize just how fucking great we had it here—even if we were, technically, collared again. Hazel was our new mistress. She hadn’t given us physical collars like my last reaper had, but the ward was basically one giant collar, and it would be a monumental battle to make my packmates look beyond that.

Although nearly impossible to see in the mortal realm, if you caught it at just the right angle, you might detect the rainbow-colored shimmer of the magical barrier. Gunnar and Knox would test its strength as soon as Hazel left us to our own devices, but I just appreciated its beauty—the security it offered.

She offered it too—security. Beauty. I’d sensed it the moment our eyes first met in Fenix’s cage, and that feeling amplified here. Hazel had fed us twice today already, at regular intervals, my hunger properly satiated for the first time in years. Between our meals, we had learned about modern human devices; Hazel had taken us to the third-floor study, the only room on that level without a hole in the roof, where she introduced us to television, computers, and touchscreen tablets. The importance of understanding the souls we were set to reap had been stressed, and much of this month would be dedicated to studying modern-day humans.

The electronic devices were supposed to help with that, each one like a library that fit in the palm of your hand. It had been a little difficult to navigate at first, but overall the devices were fairly intuitive. Gunnar picked it up the fastest, as usual, while I preferred watching human behavior on the television.

Knox just tapped around distractedly on his tablet screen, staring Hazel down like he wanted to eat her.

Not that I could blame him, really.

Alphas were born, not made. Knox came into this world with instincts none of us could ever touch—and one of those was the intense need to protect his pack. Although Hazel had been nothing but good to us so far, her voice sweet, her smiles lovely but short-lived, we all struggled to shake the shackles of our pasts.

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