Chapter Twenty-Eight
~Leo~
The sky had darkened enough when we made it back to the pack house that lights glowed warmly through the tall windows. The familiar scent of smoke from the fireplaces inside greeted us as we got closer.
It should have been comforting, but I couldn’t shake the memory of the reaper standing silently in the cabin corner, next to that fireplace. The door had been locked and all the windows shut tight. I’d suspected it could move through walls, but seeing it confirmed didn’t make me feel any better.
“I’m going to take these to the kitchen,” Evalina told us, holding up her basket of berries as she veered off to the right from the back door. “I’ll see you both later.”
Kalo and I said goodbye before heading for Vaughan’s office, where voices were already drifting out the open door.
We found Vaughan behind his desk with Felix, Calista and Darius gathered around.
Several hand-drawn diagrams were spread across the wooden surface, though I couldn’t get a good look at them as we walked in.
Felix looked up first. “Ah, good. We were wondering when you’d get back.”
“Were you waiting? You could have mind-linked me. We would have come immediately.”
“We didn’t want to interrupt,” Calista said delicately, her gaze sweeping over me and the man next to me, lingering for just a moment too long. “Did something happen?”
For a quick, panicked moment, I thought she somehow knew what had happened between me and Kalo in the cabin, that it was branded across my face as clearly as my mark on Kalo’s neck, but Kalo answered before I got a chance.
“We’re both safe.”
Right. She meant the reaper, which was where my mind should have been focused too.
Darius leaned back in his chair. “The package from Ravenstone should be arriving within the hour.”
“Already?”
“Apparently those drones of theirs are just as good as they suggested.” He let out a low whistle filled with admiration. “I looked up the specs that Sav sent over. They’re impressive.”
Calista nodded thoughtfully. “They can be incredibly useful. I used drones during my hunting years. Not the same level as these ones, but even just for scouting terrain and tracking movement, it’s amazing how much ground they can cover.”
Darius turned towards Vaughan, clearly energized. “We should get a few for ourselves.”
Vaughan didn’t even look up from the papers in front of him. “Leo manages the budget. Talk to him.”
Everyone’s eyes shifted towards me, and I held up both hands. “You know how it works: submit a proposal and I’ll look at it.”
Darius groaned while Felix stood up and offered Kalo his chair. He and I both grabbed extra chairs from the back of the room, widening the semi-circle formed around Vaughan’s desk.
“So, what did you two get up to all day?” Felix asked good-naturedly once we were settled.
Heat instantly climbed the back of my neck as my memory replayed flashes from the cabin: Kalo’s smile, the firelight on his skin, the way he’d whispered my name and the feel of him when I slid inside…
I coughed hard into my hand, and Kalo once again stepped in.
“We went swimming in the lake.”
“The lake?” Calista repeated in surprise.
“In October?” Darius added.
Kalo shrugged easily. “Leo was very prepared.”
A quiet chuckle rumbled from Vaughan. “He usually is.”
“We used wetsuits,” I added quickly, so nobody could read anything else into Kalo’s statement.
“That explains why you’re not hypothermic,” Felix said dryly.
“Well, that, and warming up in the patrol cabin afterwards,” Kalo continued, still sounding a hundred percent more composed than I felt. “We fell asleep by the fire, which is when the reaper showed up.”
The easy, conversational tone vanished from the room immediately.
“Showed up where?” Darius asked. “In the cabin?”
I nodded. “It was standing in the corner when we woke up.”
“You both saw it?” Calista clarified.
“We did,” I confirmed. “And Kalo saw it in his dream too. He tried to speak to it.”
Felix’s brows lifted. “Did it respond?”
“Not really,” Kalo admitted. “It repeated the same phrase it always does but wouldn’t say anything else.”
“Interesting.” Calista leaned back in her chair, clearly working something out. “We’ve established that Kalo’s magical sensitivity hasn’t completely disappeared, right? The experiments we did proved that.”
“Right,” I agreed warily. “And?”
Felix continued the thought. “If he can still sense magical signatures, he might be detecting the reaper’s presence subconsciously, even when he’s asleep.”
My stomach tightened as I followed that thought to its logical conclusion. “You mean, the reaper has been nearby every time he’s had the nightmare?”
Felix and Calista exchanged a glance before he nodded. “It’s possible.”
“I’d say it’s likely,” Calista amended. “The supernatural energy might be ‘leaking’ into his dreams, for lack of a better word.”
“So, it isn’t the reaper itself I’m seeing, but something like an echo of it?” Kalo mused. “Maybe that’s why it couldn’t answer me in the dream.”
“Maybe,” Calista agreed. “But more than that, it answers the problem we were trying to solve when you walked in.”
She reached over to the pile of papers on Vaughan’s desk and pulled out one that showed a map of the pack house and the immediate area.
“Since we almost have all the ingredients for the reaper trap, we were trying to decide where we should set it up. We thought there might be a way to use the detection system to track its movements, but it would take some time. This might narrow things down considerably.”
I didn’t immediately see what she meant, but Kalo did.
“We set it up in my bedroom. If it’s coming to me when I’m asleep, we can set the trap where it wants to be.”
My entire body tensed. “No. You’re too vulnerable when you’re asleep.”
I could picture it too easily, the reaper standing at the foot of his bed, just as it had appeared in the corner of the cabin: silent, unresponsive, and deadly.
Kalo’s amber eyes met mine calmly. “I’m vulnerable whether I’m asleep or not. We can’t control when it comes, but we might be able to anticipate it. That gives us an advantage, however small.”
I hated how infuriatingly logical that sounded. “I don’t like it.”
Felix gave me a sympathetic shrug. “You’re allowed not to like it.”
“But you agree it makes sense,” Vaughan pointed out.
Reluctantly, I nodded. “It does.”
We’ll stand guard over him, Silo stated in my head, doing his best to sound tough even though we both knew it wouldn’t make any difference.
Good thing we already had a nap, then, was all I could say in reply. We won’t be sleeping tonight.
A soft knock on the door drew everyone’s attention, and Evalina entered with one of the kitchen staff in tow. “You all get so busy, you forget to eat. So, we brought dinner to you.”
Felix held out his hand, beaming at her as she went over to sit on his lap. Kalo and Darius rose to help distribute the food to the room, but as long as the prospect of using my sleeping mate as bait loomed ahead of me, I had no appetite at all.