21. Chapter Twenty-One
~Kalo~
The chill hit me the moment I stepped onto the porch. Not the ordinary cold of an October night, but something more piercing, as if something had reached inside my chest and brushed its fingers against my soul. I drew in a breath that felt too shallow and lifted my gaze instinctively.
And there it was, standing next to the car, half-submerged in shadow, the hood of its cloak drinking in the dim glow of the streetlight. No face was visible beneath it, only darkness where features should have been.
Before I could say a word, Leo moved.
Without hesitation, he stepped in front of me, his broad shoulders blocking my view of the figure and his body angled protectively even as every instinct I had told me the gesture was futile. If the reaper had come to claim me, there was nothing Leo, or anyone else, could do to stop it.
And yet, the simple fact that he tried sent a warmth through me that fought back against the cold.
“Stay back,” Leo snapped over his shoulder, his voice edged with command as he addressed not me, but the two guards with us. “Both of you. Away from the car.”
The men froze, clearly confused by the order as their eyes scanned the street. Apparently, they couldn’t see it. From their perspective, nothing stood there but an empty stretch of road and a parked vehicle. One of them opened his mouth to protest, then thought better of it and did as he was told.
I leaned slightly to the side, enough to glimpse the reaper again from behind Leo’s solid frame. The hood shifted as though it were looking not at me, but at Leo.
“What do we do?” Leo asked quietly, his voice softening as it usually did when he spoke to me.
“Maybe we can try to talk to it? Since it’s here, we can skip the step of trapping it.”
Leo inhaled slowly through his nose, then nodded once before taking a step forward, keeping squarely between me and the nightmare figure. “I am the Gamma of the Crimsontooth pack. The man behind me is under my protection. What do you want with him?”
A cool wind whistled through the trees, rustling the reaper’s dark cloak, and slowly, it lifted one arm.
A hand appeared, not skeletal as I’d half-expected, but disturbingly human. Long fingers with pale skin, almost ordinary except for the way the streetlight seemed to slide off of it.
One finger extended, pointing straight at Leo.
Or maybe it was meant to be at me, but he was in the way.
It silently held that pose for a long moment before the being vanished completely.
There was no flash or sound. One moment, it was there and the next it simply wasn’t, leaving behind only the night and the echo of that unnatural cold.
Leo turned instantly, his eyes wide and a little wild until he saw that I still stood there, completely unharmed. “Are you alright? Did it touch you?”
“I’m fine,” I said, doing my best to ignore the way my heart raced. “It didn’t come near me.”
He frowned, glancing back over his shoulder towards the empty road. “What did that mean?”
As was so often the case over the past few days, my answer was simply, “I don’t know.”
With the reaper gone, we all got into the car and began the long drive back to Leo’s home.
While he sat behind the wheel, I opened the book that Brendan had given us, the pages crackling softly as I read by the glow of the dashboard lights.
It took about twenty minutes to find the section he’d referenced, talking about the reaper trap.
It involved several things that didn’t surprise me, like iron and salt to create a binding circle. There were a few less-common ingredients too.
“Do you happen to keep goat’s blood in your kitchens?” I asked Leo.
He snorted. “I’m afraid not, but I’m sure Felix and Calista will know exactly where to get some.”
His fingers tightened on the steering wheel and I waited, recognizing that he had something else he wanted to say.
“I don’t like that it’s not doing anything,” he finally confessed. “If it wanted you, it could have taken you.”
“I thought you didn’t want it to,” I teased lightly.
He scowled in my direction. “Of course I don’t, but the unpredictability is frustrating.”
“Life is unpredictable,” I pointed out, and he huffed in annoyance.
“I’ve always hated that about it.”
The complete earnestness of the statement made me laugh, and Leo glanced over at me, surprise gradually giving way to a rueful smile.
“I guess that’s a weird thing to say?”
“Not coming from you.”
The usually bustling pack house was dark and quiet when we finally pulled up in front of it.
Most of the occupants were asleep, and the guards who’d accompanied us headed to their homes while Leo and I headed inside.
Despite the long drive and even longer night, I wasn’t really tired.
The earlier nap and the adrenaline from our encounter had left me wired.
It didn’t escape Leo’s notice. “You don’t look ready for bed.”
“I’m not,” I admitted. “But you can go if you’re tired. Use my room if you like.”
“We’re supposed to stick together,” he reminded me, his eyes dropping down my body just enough to remind me of what else had happened in my room that afternoon.
Clearing his throat, he glanced away.
“Come on. You haven’t seen the media room yet. We can hang out there.”
He led me down the dim hallway to a large room filled with oversized couches and a massive screen. I could imagine it full of people relaxing and socializing, but in the middle of the night, it sat empty.
“Do you want to watch a movie?” he offered.
“I’m not sure. I’ve never watched one before.”
Leo’s jaw went slack as he stared at me in utter disbelief. “Never?”
When would I have? I knew what they were, the same way I knew most modern things, but my knowledge remained only theoretical. “Before Amanda summoned me, my last master lived in the 1800s.”
Leo blinked. “You missed the whole 20th century?”
“Apparently. I was last summoned by a prospector who bought the necklace in California. He wished to find a massive gold deposit, so I took him to the mountains near the Ravenstone pack land. There was gold there, all right, but when he went into the cave for a closer look, he got stuck in a narrow passage and couldn’t get out.
He died there, still holding the necklace. ”
“Goddess,” he muttered. “So, that’s how you ended up in that area?”
I nodded. “Eventually, a werewolf came into the cave and found his remains, and the necklace. It ended up in the Beta’s hands, who planted it for Amanda to find. He thought the curse would kill her too. I didn’t see any of that happening, you understand, but I knew it when I awoke.”
Silence settled between us as Leo considered my story.
“I don’t fully understand, I have to admit, but you must have seen the worst of what greed does to people.”
“No one could resist the power of a wish, and it always found a way to hurt them in the end.” I exhaled slowly. “Maybe the reaper is my punishment, the final consequence of my own wish.”
Leo reached for my hand, his touch sending warm sparks skating across my skin. “You paid for it long ago. You don’t owe anyone anything else. You’re free.”
His words were an unconscious mirror of the ones haunting my dreams, and I smiled weakly, ready to change the subject. “Are we going to watch a movie, then?”
Leo nodded, grabbing a remote control from the table. “I have an idea what we can watch.”
Together, we sat down on the couch, and as images filled the screen in front of me, I put everything else aside, allowing myself to simply exist in the moment, as free as I’d ever been.