Page 14 of Saved By Her Guardian
Be safe, Aralyn.
Aralyn thought she was simply too keyed up to sleep because something good had actually happened to her when she’d been assigned to the cemetery.She was still floating from the searing kisses of the sexy, sexy Maverick.
But it was more than just being excited about finding her truemate, when it hadn’t even been on her radar, it was that she was worried.She was a reaper and that meant she needed to reap souls.If she didn’t, if she just stayed at her current assignment, then she’d eventually lose her magic entirely.And she couldn’t imagine what that would even be like.Once she’d come into her powers as a teenager, she’d gone right to training so she could reap souls and keep her magic replenished, but a reaper who didn’t reap was unheard of.
She threw back the covers and sat up.She’d been tossing and turning for a couple of hours and was no closer to figuring things out than when she’d started.But the only thing she knew for sure was that she wanted to see Maverick.
With her magic, she could open a portal and go to Northernmost and see him, returning at sunset for her shift watching over the cemetery.
Plan in mind, she got up and went to the armoire to get her warmest clothes since the North Pole was freaking cold.
After gathering her clothes from the armoire, she set them on the bed and looked for her boots, finding one by the door but the other missing.She looked around the room and didn’t see the boot, so she moved things around, wondering where the heck it had gone and why it wasn’t with the other one.She saw it sticking out from under the bed and ducked to grab it, her fingers brushing against something.
She peeked under the bed, which, judging by the amount of dust, hadn’t been cleaned in a decade or better, and found a thick book.
Pulling it from under the bed, she sat down on the lumpy mattress and looked it over.It was several inches thick and had a worn leather cover.There was a symbol carved into the cover, but she didn’t recognize it.There were no identifying words on the spine or the cover to tell her what kind of book it was, but she had the distinct feeling that it was magical.
Undoing the latch that kept it closed, she slowly opened the book, the spine creaking as she turned to the first yellowed page.
There was a sigil that shimmered like molten silver, and it was one she actually recognized—a complicated mass of curves and sharp points—the mark of a reaper.Reapers before her uncle’s time used to create a sigil for themselves and leave their marks when they had claimed a territory to reap souls.She didn’t know whose sigil it was, but a shiver lit over her skin, and she was drawn to see what the pages held.
Words are a lantern to light the path for those who have no choice, she read in an elegant script in an ink so dark black that it seemed to be highlighted with red.
Turning the page, she read about a reaper who’d been assigned to the church as punishment and had found a way to choose another path.
Blinking a few times as her eyes burned from staring at the pages as she’d read, she realized that what she was holding was an old spell book belonging to a reaper who’d been stuck at the church in punishment, like she was right now.But this reaper, whoever he was, had found a spell to allow him to petition for an assignment that aligned with his personal convictions and to remove himself from the punishment.
Essentially, the spell went over the head of the lead reaper—in her case, Grim—and sought the ancient reapers in a place called The Realm of the Forgotten.
She couldn’t remember ever hearing about ancient reapers or a realm for them.When they died, they were reaped just like any other creature, weren’t they?She’d never actually given it any thought.Who the heck would reap her?Or Grim?
As she lost herself in the book, reading about the ancient reapers and the Realm of the Forgotten, she grew more and more convinced that fate had led her not only to the church so she could meet Maverick, but to the book so she could petition ancient reapers to change her assignment.
When Maverick crossed her mind, she looked for her phone and found that several hours had passed.While she could go ahead and perform the spell to go to the realm for her petition, she’d rather see Maverick first.Then when she came back to the church, she’d give it a try.Because she wasn’t really sure itwouldwork.It was possible that nothing would come from the spell and then she’d be no better off, and she didn’t want to tell Maverick about it in case it didn’t work.
She tucked the book into the armoire and sent a text to Maverick while she finished dressing for the cold of Northernmost.When he hadn’t returned her message to let him know she was coming to see him, she decided to just head up there anyway to surprise him.
Her stomach fluttered at the thought of seeing him again.
Those kisses had only inflamed her and made her want to be with him more.
Finding that book had been damn near prophetic.
She walked out of the abbey and zipped up her coat, pulling a stocking cap on as she made her way to the gate.Once she was outside of the gate, she opened a portal to Northernmost.While a portal could be opened anywhere in the world to Northernmost, portals only opened at the Portal at the top of the world, inside the safe perimeter of Santa’s magic to keep Jack Frost from capturing good magic users and stealing their magic for his evil purposes.
As the portal opened and she saw the Northern Lights, she breathed a little easier now that she knew she was going to see Maverick again.Stepping out into the brutally cold darkness, she gasped at the way the cold felt like it immediately leeched into her bones.
Someone yelled, “Stop right there!”and she froze.
Crap, she should have made sure Maverick knew she was coming.
* * *
Maverick returned to Northernmost, his thoughts a jumble of conflicting emotions.He hated leaving Kentucky and having Aralyn nearby, but they both had duties to attend to.He hadn’t asked her to give up her job as a reaper, which he wasn’t sure she could actually do anyway.Being a reaper was part of her identity, a supernatural part of her DNA, the same way that he was a shifter.He couldn’t stop being a shifter, and he suspected that was how it was for her.She’d mentioned that her magic would eventually disappear if she didn’t reap souls, and she seemed so despondent about it all that he’d wanted to do anything to change the situation for her.But it was entirely out of his control.It wasn’t as if he could talk to Grim and ask him to change her situation just because they were truemates.
“I need to talk to Santa,” he said when he’d stepped through the portal.
“Already missing your mate?”Chase asked.
