Page 52 of Reaper's Pack

My praise brought the same flush to her cheeks as my scorn, but I still took it as a win. Lush red carpets and gold bannisters greeted us inside, the hum of countless human conversations in the foyer positively deafening. Despite looking the part, Hazel made no move to step off the celestial plane, and I stayed with her as we cut quite literally through the crowd. I lingered a half step behind, and it wasn’t until we had cleared the curved staircase that I realized my hand, of its own volition, now hovered over her lower back.

Protectively, almost.

Possessively, certainly.

I shoved it in my pocket before she noticed, following her through curtained corridors, opulent and classist in every sense, until we reached a roped-off seating area.

“I came in during the night to put the sign up last week,” Hazel admitted with an impish gleam in her eye, her cheeks dimpling as she sidled around the Out of Order post. “Wanted to make sure we got the best seats in the house… Pretty sure nobody knows why it’s unavailable, but no one’s removed it.”

“Clever girl,” I crooned, following her lead into the small arched balcony, a pair of perfectly useable seats waiting. Velvet warmed beneath my fingers as I gave the back a cautious stroke, and I waited, again, for her to cross over into the mortal realm.

Only she didn’t.

Hazel sat in her seat, and I sat in mine, both of us hidden from the viewing hall. To our left and right, guests filtered into the other balconies, just as patrons below filled the red seats. Gold angels, seraphim with their harps and archangels with their swords, cut up the walls and across the ceiling around the stage, which remained curtained off in more red velvet. A bit much, really, but for my first operatic experience, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Only I would have preferred to experience it on the human plane. After all, that was the point of these outings—to walk among humans, to see the souls we were bred to reap. To know them. To feel them. Every element would have been so much stronger out there, off the celestial, so much more grounded and real.

Still she made no move to cross over.

The reaper to my right merely studied those around her with a familiar intensity.

“Hazel?”

“Yes?”

Below, nearly every seat had been taken in the twenty minutes since we sat down. Above, a gaudy, over-the-top chandelier crept from the ceiling toward the audience like a groping hand, crystals shimmering, the gold arms looking especially polished.

“Why do you hide from them?” I asked frankly, shifting my intensity to her, to her elegant updo and her beautiful dress. Looking like that, Hazel deserved to be seen—worshipped, really, just as I worshipped music.

Beyond that, the men here ought to know what they couldn’t have. Just the thought brought forth an immense satisfaction in my chest, a pleasurable tightness in my core.

The reaper shifted back and forth in her seat under the guise of making herself more comfortable, yet I knew it was just a distraction to hide her discomfort.

From me.

Possibly even from herself.

She offered a half shrug, unzipping her purse and rooting around inside for fuck knows what—nothing, most likely.

“Because I’m dead,” Hazel said after the silence between us became positively excruciating.

It was the answer I’d expected.

But it felt wrong—just as wrong as it had felt that day, when I watched her reach out for passing children, weeping. No matter what she said, how vehemently she denied it, Hazel longed to be among them again. She craved humanity. While she took great pride in her profession, her dedication to reaping souls a beautiful thing, she carried with her a hollowness that nothing but humanity itself could fill.

And that pained me more than I would ever admit—to Knox, to Declan, even to myself.

Frowning, I snatched up her delicate wrist, holding it between us, right up for her to see as her weak pulse fluttered against my palm.

“You don’t feel dead,” I stressed. Cold, yes, her flesh a delectable contrast to the ever-present fire of a hellhound. But she ate and drank, laughed at Declan’s antics, sagged under Knox’s ire—she sang in the shower, the rare time she took one, her voice lovelier than any of her old records. Hazel was the furthest thing from dead I could ever imagine.

The auditorium lights flickered from bright to dim and back again, almost in time with her fluttering lashes as her gaze danced from my eyes to my lips, then to my hand snapped tight around her wrist. Hazel said nothing, but she didn’t need to; her eyes insisted that she didn’t believe me, that my words didn’t put so much as a dent in her opinion. When the lights dimmed once more, slowly this time, I released her, and by the time blackness blanketed the hall and the stage curtains peeled open, she had both hands in her lap—and mine buzzed from the cool caress of her skin and the slow, tender waltz of her heartbeat.

Not dead.

Not with a beating heart.

Shaking my head, I sat up straight with a sigh and focused on the opera. Stage lights burst to life just as the pit orchestra started, and soon enough I, like all present, was lost to the music, to the story.

---