Page 1 of Reaper's Pack

1

Hazel

“Place your scythe on the table and register your identity in blood, please.”

Please. Rather polite for a demon. My grip tightened around the handle of the weapon gifted to me ten years ago by Death. I knew it better than I knew myself, every groove of the yew staff, the glyphs carved into the shimmering curved blade forged from a star—one of the Corona Borealis constellation, unique to my scythe and mine alone. There was literally no greater weapon in the universe, a herald of doom, the deliverance of death, a reaper’s right hand.

And this little boy wanted me to hand it over?

Ha.

I drew a breath, ready to tell him, no, in fact, I would hang on to it, when Alexander placed his scythe on the onyx table before us without a second’s hesitation.

“Just a formality, Hazel,” he mused, flashing me a handsome smile. My reaper mentor, the one who had been minding Lunadell for nearly a decade on his own as the human population exploded from a suburb to a bustling metropolis, had a knack for quieting my concerns with nothing more than a grin. With the looks of a sinner but the mind of a saint, he probably had human souls swooning over him when he showed up. None of the screaming, wailing, begging that I had dealt with for the last ten years.

Still. My scythe was a piece of me—my only true companion since I had been chosen by Death to reap. And this was the first time someone—a demon, specifically—had asked me to just hand it over. I nibbled my lower lip for a moment, indecision gnawing at me, before finally delicately placing my weapon on a surface that looked better suited as a sacrificial altar than a check-in station at one of Hell’s top hellhound breeding facilities.

Beside me, Alexander flipped open an enormous tome, swiping through yellowed pages until he reached the last used. Golden fingerprints gleamed back at us, catching the light of the gaudy crystal chandeliers above. I glanced up, scanning our new locale with raised eyebrows. White marble stared back, floors, walls, ceiling, flecked with grey and gold, smooth and cold. While I had only ventured into Hell a few times since I’d gone from human soul to grim reaper, it always amazed me how similar it all looked to Heaven.

Well, sort of a black mirror reflection, actually. The architecture had its similarities, but statues of saints and angels and beautiful women down here were grotesque ghouls and screaming demon princes and gore. So, not quite the same, but Lucifer had dragged that love of white marble from paradise down into the pit. The interior of every building drowned in the stuff, while the exterior walls… Well, Hell had a knack for staining everything it touched.

“Now you,” Alexander muttered, a full head and a half taller than me, wide and robust and blond, his elbow catching me just below the shoulder when he nudged me. Swallowing thickly, I pricked my finger on the tip of my scythe’s blade, then pressed the bleeding digit to the book, taking the spot directly below his. Like angels and the gods of old, reapers bled gold, and when I pulled back, a perfect fingerprint glimmered in the breeder’s ledger—my first step toward acquiring my very own hellhound pack.

The thought of which still terrified me.

“Alexander, do I—”

Tortured shrieks erupted from the young demon behind the table, the agonized pitch launching my heart straight into my throat. Horror bounced off the marble walls, and I whipped around to find the poor sod hurling Alexander’s scythe back onto the table, his hands shredded down to the bone. The noises he made—like he was still a human soul being ripped apart in the deepest circles of this awful place, no longer the demon they had made him. Broken.

I lurched forward when he collapsed, instinct kicking in: stem the oozing black blood, wrap his bony fingers, find a way to keep them from further deterioration. Alexander caught me by the shoulder with an annoyed huff, his expression bored and utterly unmoved by the sight before us, like he had seen it a thousand times before.

“Idiot boy,” he grumbled, flicking his wrist to examine his watch. “Honestly.”

No one had ever been stupid enough to touch my scythe, but blood and screaming men were nothing new to me either, and the desire to help, fix, resuscitate was one I couldn’t shake. I’d died a nurse on the Western Front in 1943; even some seventy-five years later, having died and come back, my life very different from what it once was, it was difficult to ignore the call to action inside me.

The wall opened to our immediate left, and out strode the demon in charge—Fenix. While we reapers almost always dressed in black—Alexander in a pair of tailored trousers and a collared shirt, me in a floor-length, shapeless dress—demons embraced all manner of fashions. Today, Fenix strode forth in a burgundy suit, his black hair slicked back, sinfully attractive. Most demons had an air of dark beauty about them, just as angels were blessed with unnatural loveliness; physicality truly was the best way to damn and save humanity.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Fenix boomed, crocodile-skin shoes clicking across the marble floor, his strides as long and lean as his physique. “Apprentices… what can you do? Some just aren’t cut out for the work.”

Before either of us could get a word in, Fenix cuffed the sniveling demon apprentice by the back of his neck, hauled him up, and tossed him in the general direction of the door from which he’d emerged. Black blood droplets stained the floor behind him as he shuffled along, this nameless boy who had lost his hands in a single moment of stupidity—who, now useless, would probably be stripped of his demon status and hurled back into the torture pits as a damned soul.

I watched him go, an ache in my chest as he shuffled through the door. In my periphery, Alexander and Fenix clasped hands for a stiff shake. It shouldn’t matter to me what happened to the boy. He was a soul condemned to eternal torment; he didn’t deserve my pity.

None of them did.

Yet he received it all the same. I bit the insides of my cheeks as hard as I dared, using the brief flash of pain to refocus, then faced the towering pair at my side with a thin smile.

Fenix offered his hand to me now, long fingers reaching, reaching, reaching, as if drawn to my throat. I acquiesced to the formality, his flesh hot and his grasp hard. His smile almost matched Alexander’s, handsome and sultry and striking—damning, to the right eyes. Unnerving to mine. But no matter my personal feelings about him, this demon was one of the top hellhound breeders in the realm. He was the only one Alexander would work with and had produced champion lines of shifters for centuries.

His hounds had one purpose: to serve grim reapers charged with large territories. After all, in a population of a few million, there were countless deaths each day. A sole reaper, even two like Alexander and me in Lunadell, simply couldn’t handle the numbers. We needed a hellhound pack to control wayward spirits, to corral them, to keep them, to catch them so that we could do our job and get them to Purgatory for judgment.

Every soul lost was a poltergeist in the making.

And the angels responsible for hunting and destroying violent spirits were a bunch of lazy assholes who preferred we reapers let as few slip through our nets as possible.

“Hazel, I presume?” Fenix arched a perfectly waxed black eyebrow at me, and I forced my smile to stretch a hint farther across my face.

“Yes.” My hand ached when he released it, but a few flexes in and out of a fist behind my back soothed the pain away. Contrary to popular belief, we reapers could feel the same as demons, angels—any supernatural creature. Not as intensely as humans, of course, but we weren’t robots.

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