Page 7 of Reaper's Pack

My eyebrows rose, my smile incredulous.

Had she a problem with nudity?

Did it embarrass her, my cock—Knox’s, Declan’s?

Well. She had better get over it fast; clothes never survived a shift.

Not that any of us had been gifted so much as a scrap of fabric under Fenix’s care.

“So, I don’t know what they told you,” she started, her voice slicing through the tension with the ease of a blade through flesh. My jaw went slack for a moment, taken aback by the melodious lilt of her words, paired with that delicious, breathy rasp…

Surely the choruses of Heaven could never sound so fucking angelic. Knox and Declan fell quiet beside me, visceral interest from all three of us echoing through our pack bond. They heard it too—the beauty, the softness, the rich inflection. Had any of us experienced something so exquisite in our lifetime?

Certainly not in Hell.

“But, uh, my name is Hazel,” she continued, her cheeks flushed again—as if she too sensed the shift between us, the way we locked onto her as a predator homed in on its prey. “I’m a grim reaper. I’ve been reaping for ten years…”

Knox kept his back to her, still and silent, but out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Declan keenly peering around our alpha, his anxiety quieted, his interest piqued. She might have been a grim reaper, but there had to be some siren in the mix too. How else could she ensnare all three of us with but a few meaningless words?

“I died in 1943,” Hazel remarked, fidgeting with her scythe now as she glanced between me and my packmates. “I was a nurse in France on the front, and I was killed during a bombing. I was born in Britain, but we’re in North America now… West coast Canada, specifically. The year is 2020, and we’ll be reaping a coastal metropolis called Lunadell alongside another reaper and his pack.”

None of that mattered. We wouldn’t be here long enough to set foot in Lunadell or to cross paths with this other pack. I digested her sentiment, sure, but for once, my racing mind fixated more on the melody than the content.

No one said a word, and Hazel cleared her throat softly in the hush that followed her little speech. Did she wonder if we could understand her? All three of us had been schooled in the English language, but I also had the Nordic dialogues at my disposal. Declan was fluent in Arabic and Hebrew, while Knox had Spanish, Portuguese, and old Aramaic and Latin under his belt—should he need to eavesdrop on angels, of course. We understood every damn word that came out of her mouth, but it was the way she said them that knocked us on our asses.

At least, it did for me.

And that worried me more than I cared to admit, but it was a distraction I could master, just like everything else.

“No one told me your names,” the reaper said, her wide, imploring eyes falling to me, the only one who seemed to be giving her any real attention. “Just your pack ID number…”

Pathetic, her unspoken plea. As I’d suspected, she wasn’t alpha quality. Maybe a decent beta, but I wasn’t willing to give up my position anytime soon.

Still, catering to her had its benefits. I placed a hand over my heart. “Gunnar.”

Her whole being seemed to lift at the introduction, and something in me bloomed right alongside her. Heat flooded my body, similar to the fire of every shift, but I swallowed it down, ignored the pleasurable tingle ghosting along my flesh. After all, it wasn’t pity that made me speak to her—and it sure as fuck wasn’t her beauty either. There were benefits to lowering her guard, and a polite smile and a few choice words would likely do just that.

“This is Knox,” I continued with a wave toward my alpha, “and behind him is Declan.”

“Okay… Okay, good. Gunnar. Knox. Declan. Hi.” Her little pink tongue swept across her full, lush lips, a damnable distraction that had me weak in the knees again. She nodded and pushed her braid over her shoulder, the movement unleashing a cloud of her natural scent into the air. I clenched my jaw hard when she smiled, longing for the usual rush of smugness that hit whenever I’d bested someone, worked my way under their skin. Instead, I was off-kilter—distracted.

A moment later, she vanished, and I exhaled sharply, like that would rid her smell from my nostrils for good. The next inhale brought it all back, and when she reappeared out of nowhere, scythe in one hand, a pile of black material balanced on the other, her scent struck with the force of a fucking tempest.

Once, an old trainer had dragged me and my then pack to the Elysian Fields to practice herding human souls. The resting place of the ancient Greeks had been the one bit of brightness in an otherwise bleak, black past—the closest to paradise a hellhound would ever experience. In those fields blossomed thousands of wildflowers, aromatic, intoxicating, beautiful; they were my one and only frame of reference for sweetness, for a fragrance that wasn’t blood and shit and raw flesh.

Hazel’s scent reminded me of sweet alyssum. Subtle. Delicate. The little bunches of blooms grew in clusters, with soft white petals and a warm golden center. A human soul enjoying his afterlife had told me they smelled like honey.

Not that I knew what honey was, but from that moment, I craved it—lusted after it, ached to taste whatever produced that scent on my tongue.

Back then, I’d tried to whisk a few precious blossoms back to the pit with me, hidden under my collar, but my efforts had earned me a severe beating.

Today, just for a moment, I allowed myself to breathe her in, to relish the sweet alyssum, to remember in vivid detail one of my very few pleasant memories, not reacting in the slightest even when she offered me the pile of folded cloth.

“I wasn’t sure of your sizes,” Hazel admitted with a pointed look at the stack, willing me to take something from the top, “but I’ll have a better wardrobe for you guys tomorrow now that I’ve, er, seen you.”

Now that she’d seen us, eh? My smirk had color pluming back into her cheeks.

Oh, she was going to be such fun.

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