Page 11 of Reaper's Ruin
“This can’t be real,” I gasped between sobs. “Please wake up. Please wake up.”
But I didn’t wake up. This wasn’t a dream. In this horrifying reality, my mother and I were both dead.
I don’t know how long I knelt there, crying beside my mother’s body. Minutes. Hours. My entire existence shifted into question while I sobbed beside her trying to process this new reality. A reality where I was dead. My mother was dead. Our lives cut short in terror. But eventually, the grief hardened into something else—a desperate need to escape this scene of horror, to be anywhere but here with these broken echoes of the life I’d lost.
I squeezed my eyes shut, willing myself away from this nightmare, needing to escape even though I had nowhere to go.
The falling sensation washed over me, and when I opened my eyes, I was kneeling in the middle of a marketplace—back in that other world, the one filled with almost-humans and impossible landscapes. People moved around me, oblivious to my presence, to my pain.
I remained on my knees, too shattered to rise, tears still flowing freely down my cheeks. People walked past me, some through me, and none ever saw me kneeling there, shattered. Destroyed. Thereality of my situation crushed down on me with the weight of mountains.
I was dead. My mother was dead. And I was trapped in this strange half-existence, visible to no one except a shadowy figure who had been hunting me across impossible landscapes.
“I’m dead,” I whispered, the words falling from numb lips. “I’m really dead.”
When the weight of my grief and shock finally subsided to a pounding ache rather than raw, slicing pain, I wiped my eyes, trying to pull whatever semblance of sanity I had together. This was my reality now, and I had to figure out where I was and what was happening to me.
But then, before I could pull myself back to my feet to figure out my next steps, I looked and saw him there. He stood at the edge of the marketplace, hood pulled back now to reveal his full face. He was staring at me with those storm-gray eyes, his expression unreadable.
I was too tired to run. Too tired to fight. Too tired to try to escape to another place where he would only find me again.
“What do you want from me?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
He began to move toward me, his steps deliberate, his gaze never leaving mine. He was... beautiful. Devastatingly so. Strong jawline, high cheekbones, full lips pressed into a tight line. His hair was black as midnight, falling in tousled waves around a face that could have been sculpted by a master artist. And those eyes—stormy gray, intense, powerful—were fixed on me with an expression I couldn’t read.
He wasn’t like the other shadow figures I’d glimpsed briefly in the marketplace. They had been vague, indistinct, barely more than shapes in the mist. He was solid. Real. Terrifyingly present.
Fear at his approach rose in me again. I tried to summon that falling sensation, that shift that had carried me away from him before. I concentrated, desperate to escape.
Nothing happened.
I tried again, panic rising in my chest.
Still nothing.
Whatever power had been carrying me from place to place had deserted me. I was trapped here, in this strange marketplace, with this dangerous, beautiful predator approaching.
He stopped a few feet away from me, towering over my kneeling form. Up close, he was even more imposing—broad-shouldered and powerful, with an aura of lethality that stole the breath from my lungs.
Slowly, deliberately, he crouched down so that our eyes were level. For a moment, neither of us spoke. He seemed to be studying me, his brow furrowed slightly as if I were a puzzle he couldn’t quite solve.
In his eyes, I expected to see triumph—the hunter finally capturing his prey.
Instead, I saw something that made my breath catch: confusion, uncertainty, and beneath it all, a flicker of recognition. Like he was seeing something in me that he hadn’t seen in a very, very long time.
I considered trying to disappear again, to run once more from the beautiful, terrifying man now just inches away. But despite everything—despite the fear, despite the grief crushing my chest, despite knowing he had been hunting me—I found myself desperate to hear his voice. To talk to him. To connect with someone, anyone. Because in a world where I was a ghost, where I couldn’t touch or be touched, where my mother was gone and I was lost, this terrifying being was the only one who could see me.
The only one who knew I existed at all.
CHAPTER THREE
Rhyker
Was it possible? Was it truly possible?
I crouched before the girl, watching tears slide down her face, looking for confirmation of what my instincts had told me the moment my eyes had first locked onto her.
Fae and humans looked similar enough at first glance that most couldn’t tell them apart. But there was always a tell—in the eyes of every fae, no matter which court they hailed from, lay a faint shimmer of magic, like starlight caught beneath glass. Sometimes it manifested as subtle color shifts, or tiny flecks of gold or silver that appeared when they used their powers.
