“What exactly is ‘Reaper 101?” I asked.
“You’ll find out,” Fletcher said ominously.
I wanted to hit him. Hard.
Fletcher reached down, pulling something out from behind the couch. It took a moment for me to realize that he had packed me a bag from all of my clothes that I had left back at the suite.
He shook the bag when I didn’t take it immediately.
“You should shower and get changed,” Fletcher advised. “You stink.”
I bared my teeth. “I was just about to thank you for being sweet and getting my stuff, and you had to ruin it.”
Fletcher waggled his eyebrows. “I can’t let anyone else know I have a softer side. They might expect me to do adult things—like regulate my emotions and stop playing Pokemon Go.”
I rolled my eyes and rummaged through my bag. “There’s no panties in here.”
Fletcher took the opportunity to spring up from the pull-out and dance away. “That sounds like ayouproblem.”
“What am I going to do without panties?” I growled.
Fletcher didn’t reply as he fled the room.
“Pervert,” I called out.
The sound of his laughter drifted through the arch, and then he was gone.
Once I was showered and changed, wearing a pair of bikini briefs to rectify the pantie situation—I made my way down to the basement.
The house looked lived in and loved on the surface, but the basement was a different story.
I associated basements with darkness and dirty air, but the second I started down the steps, my eyes were assaulted with a light so bright that I thought I’d walked outside by mistake.
I trailed my hand down the wooden rail and studied the room. Each of the guys was doing their own thing but somehow in sync.
Rome stood by a wooden dummy with so many nicks in the torso that it looked like it had been gnawed on by a beaver. His flick knife rested in his hand as he twirled the blade before elongating the weapon into a scythe quicker than I could blink and slicing into the dummy.
Rome stepped back and retracted the weapon before repeating the process again—practicing the draw time of his blade, from tiny knife to fuck-off massive Reaper scythe.
Fletcher and Maddox were drawing runes on the other side of the room. Maddox barked out words that I had no hope of understanding, and Fletcher reacted in record time by drawing random shapes with his arms. Both stood by a door, which at first, I thought belonged to a closet, but when Fletcher opened the door and revealed what looked like sand dunes, I realized they were practicing demonic magic for traveling using doorways.
Frowning, I squinted at the open door. The sand was red, and the sky was a tumultuous grey.
I didn’t profess to know every inch of the earth, but the sand dunes on the other side of the doorway didn’t look like anything I had ever seen.
Was that Hell?
Maddox slammed the door closed, but neither man came over to me.
Jamal bent over one of the benches, winding some kind of tape over his knuckles. The moment our eyes connected, his lips broke into a grin.
“Late for class, love.” Jamal tsked. “What is it you yanks say?Being tardy?”
I shrugged and kicked the edge of the crash mat. “Are we going to work out?”
“I thought we’d do some sparring.” Jamal finished taping his hands. “I’m not sure how physical you were in a previous life, but an affinity towards screens does lend itself to‘not very.’”
“I did go to the gym,” I told him. I reached for my wrist as I searched for a hair tie. It was easier to wrangle the fine copper hair into a ponytail, but somehow I had the feeling it wouldn’t hold.