Page 48 of Reaper's Pack

So, I arched and rolled, finally turning the tide in my favor, flipping the squawking spirit onto her back. My teeth found her throat in an instant, but no matter how I tore at her flesh, tasted dirt on my tongue, felt a rush of cold over my teeth, I couldn’t harm her. And from the quirk of her mouth and the look in her black eyes, she knew it.

“Knox, move!”

The command made me bristle, but I followed it all the same, rolling to the side, pain blooming over my ribs, and shot up onto four paws again.

Just in time to see Hazel strike.

She was on the spirit in a flash, an executioner in black as she raised her scythe above her head, then brought it down like a gorgeous, deadly axe. The blade cut clean through the spirit’s warped face, her elongated black mouth, her wild eyes, and the forest trembled when the celestial weapon clunked into its floor.

Silence exploded around us. The spirit remained for a moment, head split in two, limbs twitching, until finally her unearthly body dissolved into a white mist, then disappeared as the morning fog broke beneath the first few rays of sunlight.

Splat. Splat. Two droplets of blood fell from the tips of my stained fur onto the stone embedded in the dirt beneath me. As the skirmish became just another violent memory, the pain sharpened, made itself known in the various slashes across my abdomen. I winced with the slightest movement—no need to whine about it, for the pain was temporary.

Always temporary.

And more to come in the future.

“This is why our job is so important,” Hazel remarked shakily, scythe still stuck in the ground. She stared at the spot the spirit had once lay screaming, everything about her tensed. “No one deserves to become that… That is agony. That is eternal torment. She could have gone to Heaven for all we know, but she’s been stuck here.”

I didn’t discount the role of reapers in the grand scheme of things—just the brutal rearing of hellhounds destined to serve underfoot. No soul ought to become what I’d just seen: a shell of their former selves, all the light gone, nothing but black emptiness inside.

But this changed nothing. Not between her and me, and not my plans to get the fuck out of here.

Hazel removed her scythe from the ground with a soft grunt, shouldering it like it weighed as much as a galaxy. When she finally faced me, her pinched expression remained until her gaze blazed across my sides. Then it all fell away, replaced by a swift and sudden concern that just couldn’t be real.

“Oh, Knox…” She started toward me. “You’re bleeding—”

My low growl stopped her dead in her tracks, and her arms fell to her sides, her throat dipping with a noticeable gulp. While deep down I craved her touch, longed to feel those willowy fingers stroke my sides and heal my wounds, there was a bigger game in play…

I just couldn’t give in.

Finally, my skin stitched itself back together, shifter genes kicking into high gear. I’d never been attacked by a soul before; would her broken talons scar me too? Or would the marks fade in this form and the other, left only to harden to scars in my mind?

The reaper’s lovely features twisted with hurt at my rebuff, her cheeks flushed. And that hurt me too—pained me like it did to see Declan suffer under the hands of a demon, to witness Gunnar beaten and whipped for disobedience.

But she schooled her expression just as the wind returned to the trees, and I did the same, quieting my heart’s longing and burying all those fucking feelings deep, deep inside.

“I’ll be back for lunch,” Hazel said stiffly, dressed for one of her morning excursions into Lunadell. Off to cry in a sea of human children, to weep in a half-full food court. We both knew where she was headed, which made the color in her cheeks brighter before she turned away and marched through the opening in the ward. Moments later, she sealed it behind her, and then she was gone.

In her absence, I rubbed myself against brambles and trees, rocks and underbrush, smearing the red on my fur across the forest.

Marked up my territory with blood and piss.

Made it my own.

Because after defending it for the first time, it truly belonged to me, and while we were here, no one and nothing would try to take it from me again.

Thanks to a vengeful spirit and a reaper’s scythe, the land within the ward had begrudgingly become my home.

Our home. Me, Declan, Gunnar…

And Hazel.

For now.

16

Gunnar

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