Hallowed (The Soulbound #4)

Chapter 1 The Present

My head spins like I’ve been shaken by the shoulders one too many times.

Cold creeps into my fingertips, and for a second I can’t tell if it’s coming from the woman in front of me, her Grim Reaper aura doing its ice-queen thing, or from the dread cracking straight through my bond with Talon.

I look at him.

And Talon… Talon is just gone.

He’s standing there like something inside him shut off without warning, like a switch got flipped and all that’s left is the body waiting for the rest to catch up. His face is blank in the worst way, the way a room looks after someone packs up and leaves.

The bond doesn’t let me misread it.

It drives the feeling straight into my chest: disbelief first, sharp and bright, and then guilt, pitch-black and thick. It’s so heavy it nearly knocks me back a step.

Rhea.

I don’t know her. But Talon does. Painfully so. And the way he’s looking at her makes one thing sickeningly clear:

She shouldn’t be here.

“Rhea?” he croaks again.

She blinks once. Her kind brown eyes crinkle at the corners.

“Talon,” she breathes. Soft as a feather.

And it would almost be funny—almost—if it didn’t feel like someone just poured salt straight into my open ribs.

It hasn’t been even a day since I was loudly, stubbornly insisting I wasn’t jealous.

I acted like the idea of her was nothing.

Just a background noise and a chapter already closed.

How could I know it would open again?

He told me whatever he’d had with her belonged to the past.

But watching her look at him—

There’s warmth behind her dead eyes. It suggests that she loves him.

“Rhea.” Talon swallows, and I feel it like it’s my own throat closing because our bond is being a cruel little funhouse mirror right now. “You… you’re—“

“A Grim Reaper,” she offers. “Yes. Your new love and I share that in common now.”

His new love.

Something hot flares low in my belly, sharp enough to make me nauseous.

Well… yeah. She does love him. She absolutely does love him.

My fingers twitch at my sides.

I want my scythe so badly my palms ache. Because this girl hasn’t technically done anything to me yet, but my body is already voting on the situation.

Remove. Problem. Now.

Too bad I’m standing here empty.

Death took my power like a plug ripped out of the wall, and Pain isn’t here to bend the rules for me. Which means I’m stuck in my own skin, watching a stranger with history flutter eyes at my man.

Rhea finally tears her gaze off Talon. Then she looks at me. And it’s not just her eyes that land. Her power does, too.

Ice races up my arms, sharp enough to sting.

“Ah,” she muses. “That split of yours is nasty, Skye.”

My stomach drops.

“Didn’t realize it was advertising itself,” I manage. “What are you, some supernatural x-ray machine, or something?”

“You’d be surprised,” she replies. “A lot becomes visible once you’ve mastered your power.”

My skin prickles.

Pain said something similar once.

We’ve already established that I hate feeling powerless. It’s the kind of thing that sticks with you after someone kills you and you wake up on the other side with rules you didn’t agree to. But this isn’t just pride flaring and making me itchy in my own skin.

This woman has leverage.

I don’t know what she wants or why she’s here, but I owe her. And she just proved, in the span of three sentences, that she’s light-years ahead of me in Grim Reaper proficiency.

The realization lands with the same graceless thud as Talon’s guilt in my chest.

They tangle together, tight and ugly, until I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.

And my brain does what it always does when it’s cornered: it reaches for the simplest solution.

Get rid of the threat.

Just… find one of the guys’ daggers and slash her into oblivion. Because in what universe is it allowed that I can’t kill my murderous son-of-a-bitch ex-husband, but I do have to fulfill a promise to my new man’s ex-girlfriend?

“Don’t look at me like that, Skye,” Rhea says. “I did not come here to be malicious toward you.”

Oh, really?

Is that why she sent a flock of crows to try and bite my eye out like they were straight from a horror movie?

I shift my weight and the burn under my bandages pulls tight. My body supplies the answer my mouth doesn’t.

This girl hates my guts.

And maybe that’s why Talon makes that tiny, broken sound in the back of his throat. His guilt surges so hard through our bond that it slams into my chest and, for a heartbeat, it’s like I’m the one who feels it. Like I am him.

I draw in a breath to steady myself, and reach for the bond to calm it down. Instead, it drags me under.

Blood.

So much blood it turns the air metallic on my tongue.

The crunch of bone under my hands. The wet, sick sound of someone gurgling around broken teeth. Rage so blinding it burns everything else to white around the edges.

There are men on the floor in front of me. Plural. I can’t catch their faces—just impressions: a tattoo curling up a neck, the glint of a ring, a boot scraping across concrete. They’re begging. Or maybe that’s my brain filling in the sound, because my focus is a tunnel narrowed to one thing.

I hurt her.

This is all my fault.

I watch their chests go still. I wait for the last breath. The last twitch. The last whimper.

And then the only thought that matters:

At least she’s avenged now.

The memory shudders out of me and I nearly sway. My knees wobble. My stomach rolls. For half a second my hands still feel wrong, and I have to curl my fingers into fists just to convince myself they’re mine again.

Rhea’s murderers. Talon thinks he killed every last one.

“Talon,” I whisper.

His head jerks slightly, like my voice reaches him through whatever he’s holding himself inside of. He doesn’t look at me. He looks at her.

“Why the hell are you a Grim Reaper?” he asks. “I—“ His jaw clenches so hard I hear it click. “I killed the ones that hurt you.”

Rhea doesn’t answer right away.

Her mouth opens. Shuts. Opens again. She looks… small, suddenly. Which I’m sure is an act. It has to be.

“I know,” she says. “I know you did.”

“You disappeared,” Talon continues. “I looked for your killers. I made them pay.”

“And I’m grateful you tried,” she breathes. “But the ones who took me weren’t the ones who killed me.”

Her throat works. She swallows, hard.

“That’s…” Another swallow. “A longer story than I can’t tell right now.”

A sepulchral silence drops.

Talon inhales halfway and holds it there. He goes so still the fine hairs on my arms rise.

My instincts scream at me to back up, to give him space, to not be the idiot who pokes a wounded animal. But the air in the room feels too tight. Somebody needs to burst this awful bubble. So I swallow my own panic and reach for the obvious question in the room.

“Who killed you then?” I ask.

My voice comes out steadier than I feel. Rhea’s expression softens even more and somehow that makes everything worse. She looks at me. Then she turns away like I’m a piece of furniture.

“The men you killed were far from innocent,” she tells Talon. “They did hurt me. They abducted me.”

Talon squeezes his fists.

“But after a while,” she continues, “they let me go.”

I blink.

My brain stalls out for a second, trying to make that fit.

“So who killed you then?” I repeat. “Was it someone Talon knew?”

My patience is thin as paper. I hate myself for it, but I can’t help it. Not while Talon stands there like a statue that’s about to shatter. Maybe I should be more empathetic. Handle this better. Speak gently. Give her room.

But I can’t.

“Answer Skye’s question, Rhea,” Talon says.

“Don’t feel guilty,” she says. “That is the last thing I want.”

Talon’s breath finally leaves him in a harsh rush, and it doesn’t sound like relief. It sounds like he’s been punched.

“Just… explain,“ he says.”

“I will. I promise,” she says. “I will explain everything. Just… not now.”

“Not now?” I echo.

The words come out sharp, incredulous, too loud in my own ears. Not now is what you say when someone asks you what you want for dinner. Not when someone is standing in front of you dead and calm and full of secrets that are actively shredding the people still breathing.

“‘Not now’ is the last thing you should be saying,” I bite out before I can stop myself.

For a second, I expect her to do what she’s been doing the past couple minutes: look through me like I’m a smudge on glass.

Instead, she finally turns.

Her gaze slides to mine, and the chill of her Reaper aura brushes my skin like cold fingertips down the back of my neck.

It’s intimate in the worst way. I don’t know how my guys ever liked it when I was still a full Grim Reaper.

How did I ever wear that kind of cold and didn’t notice the way it made them feel?

“It is not why I’m here now,” she says. The pitiful tremor she’d used on Talon is gone like it never existed. Her voice is all clean now, business style. “You promised to help us.”

Us.

The word hits and sticks.

“Us?” I repeat. “Who’s us?”

For a heartbeat, her expression shifts. Some crack in the marble appears. And that’s when Mark chooses to scream from the basement.

“SKYE!”

The sound punches straight up through the floorboards. My whole body jumps.

Great.

It must be my curse: I can’t ever have one problem at a time. If something is horrible enough to distract me—horrible enough to drag my attention away from the fact that Death literally forbid me from killing my murderer—then the universe makes sure it comes with a bang.

I swallow hard, throat burning.

I was stupid when I said Mark had had enough torture.

Weak, in the spur of the moment. Delusional enough to think being “better than him” would make me feel less like a monster.

I’m severely regretting it now.