Page 161 of Veil of Death and Shadow

“Sora!” My chest lightened at the sight of her. She looked like she was sleeping, cowered in a cage with only a bucket and water bowl for company, the door latched with a padlock.

When I tried to open the main entrance into the room, the knob wouldn’t budge.

Ben and Jason got to work on their lock picking, but I nodded to Kieran when they started bickering over who was better at it. From here, I could see a ring of keys hanging inside the room, on the opposite wall.

Kieran turned to me, brow arched in disgust at Jenson’s antics, then nodded. “I’ll get her out.”

A moment after he disappeared through the other side, a loud bang pierced the silence. Almost like a door had been swung open too harshly and crashed into the adjacent wall, the crash echoing through the empty floor.

“Hey, what are you doing down here?” A loud voice barked.

My neck pinched when I jolted it to the side. Three guys were running down the far end of the hall, all carrying blades of various sizes.

“Fuck.” I nudged the two Wrath recruits, and they sprang to life at the sight of them, both taking off in their direction, lock-picking instantly abandoned. Clearly more amped for the chance to break some bones.

The hall itself was long, which meant that we had a good thirty seconds for Kieran to unlock the door and let me in, assuming Jenson could handle their primary job.

I glanced at Kieran.

He held up the keys, a crooked grin twisting his lips, but that grin melted into a look of horror as he made his way back towards the door and saw the commotion.

When I spun around to follow his stare, I found Ben and Jason trading blows with only two of the armed men. The third guy was gone.

Until a fraction of a second later when he, quite literally, rematerialized next to me. He took advantage of my shock, knocking Rina’s switchblade across the floor before I even had a chance to open it, the clang of its echo on the linoleum floor, an ominous addition to the soundtrack down the hall.

The guy was magic-touched. And with a damn powerful ability. I didn’t even know teleportation was actually possible.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

This was very much not in the plan.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Kieran rushing towards me, his eyes wide with panic, but just as I raised my fists hoping to defend myself against the man’s very large blade, my attention snagged on Thorne.

He stood just behind the man, his eyes darting between me and Kieran. He muttered a quiet, almost begrudging, “Bloody hell,” then, with a frustrated groan, he shoved his ringed-hand through the magic-touched man’s chest, just as the blade cut deep into my right forearm.

The man dropped to the ground, as if stunned, his knife pulling back from my flesh before clattering on top of him.

With trembling fingers, I quickly swiped up both his and Rina’s knives, but one look at the wide vacancy in the man’s eyes, made it abundantly clear that he wouldn’t be using either of them against me any time soon.

He was dead.

How was he dead?

And when I turned to look behind him, I saw that Thorne had collapsed to the ground as well.

My stomach clenched. Was he dead, too?

I side-stepped the corpse, then folded to the ground, trying to find the reaper’s pulse, but I wasn’t sure if he’d even had one to begin with. As I shook his shoulders, and tapped his cheeks, trying to rouse him, I did my best to ignore the sharp pain in my arm and the deep splatters of blood I was trickling all over his pale face.

When I glanced up, I found Kieran hovering above me, his eyes sparkling with an emotion I couldn’t decipher, the lines of his face simmering with tension.

He crouched down, his eyes quickly cataloguing the blood on my arm, then every inch of my body, his eyes frantic and mouth pinched into a tight line.

“Agony, are you okay?” he asked, a low growl riding his tone.

“I’m fine, but?—”

“Thorne will be okay,” he muttered, though it sounded almost like he was trying to convince himself of that as much as he was me. His stare darted briefly to the reaper, before finding me again to continue his assessment. “He’s not dead. I mean, he is, but no more dead than he was two minutes ago. It’s just . . . he fecking killed the human.”

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