Page 10 of Reaper's Pack

“I hope this is okay,” Hazel said as I crossed to the enormous window and ripped open the curtains—literally. The frayed material came apart in my hands, and I tossed the slip of useless fabric aside; it fluttered to the ground, pooled at my feet. Hazel said nothing to that, only sighed when I positioned myself in front of the window to glare at the grounds.

Greenery glared back, first the scraggly, overgrown gardens at the base of the house, then the muddy grass that stretched outward to the forest. For miles and miles, tall trees reigned, proud and thick and ancient. Thorny green leaves splayed out on thin branches. Hardly the most welcoming sight, but it was a far cry from the arid nothingness of Hell, of black rock as far as the eye could see, of jagged earth and angry plants hell-bent on eating you if you got too close.

We might have been in the middle of nowhere, the land in need of a caring hand, the property made up of a vast, endless forest—but it was safe. Child’s play compared to the harsh landscape I knew better than I knew myself.

“I’m going to make something for you to eat,” Hazel told me. Now that we were alone, I really felt each of her words, my body responding as it never had before—willing me to concede, to approach her, to touch her. A rush of interest prickled down my frame and settled in my core, but I ignored it, keeping my back to her. The floorboards creaked when she stepped into the room; did she even realize how she smelled, how her scent made her a ripe temptation for a hellhound twice her size?

“I don’t… I don’t have to eat,” she continued, babbling hurriedly as I glowered at nothing and everything. “I mean, I can eat, and drink and sleep and, you know, have… Anyway. I can do it all, I just haven’t for a long time, so if I forget to feed you guys, let me know.”

Because it had to do with the well-being of my pack, I offered a curt grunt of acknowledgement. Her reflection snagged in the window, dwarfed by mine, those full lips demanding my attention.

“So… I’ll just go do that,” she said after a long beat of silence. I forced my gaze to the forest, searching for an out and only finding the very faint rainbow shimmer of the ward caging us in. Against my will, my traitorous stare dropped down to her reflection again when she huffed, her glare somehow both lovely and terrifying—the best kind. “Okay. Cool. Well, great talk.”

This time, I allowed my grin to surface, tracking her in the windowpane as she stalked out of the room in a snit. There it was: the whisper of fire I’d sensed earlier when she disparaged Fenix. While I could appreciate a passionate female, a creature with a spine, bark, and bite, it didn’t matter. None of us would be here long enough to enjoy her spirit.

If anything, that fire would make our situation more difficult.

Because already her absence affected me—and that was a fucking problem.

Hazel took her scent with her, but it still lingered, still toyed with my heightened senses—my memories. She smelled like coastal air, like a bright morning and stormy seas. In my youth, I’d been assigned to a pack along the ridges of Hell’s Sea of Lost Souls. My time there had been fleeting, as I’d refused to yield to any alpha at the facility, but sometimes the demons in charge took us outside to the rocky shores, worked us beside the sweeping tide, our paws swallowed by wet sand, our bodies battered by gale-force winds. In the savagery, there was beauty. The sea was wild but free, strong, resilient, and constant.

Staring out at the whitecaps, at water so deep and dark it was nearly black, had been a happy moment for me—a time when I’d realized there were more powerful forces in my world than the bastards who cracked the whip.

Now here was this reaper who smelled like that memory, who could very well be as wild and free and resilient as the sea.

And I had to leave her.

Tonight.

Or I would never be free. My pack would never be free.

Declan’s presence hovered at my doorway, and I finally abandoned the window, drifting over to the brick hearth, beckoning him inside with a casual toss of my head. He strode in slowly, hungrily drinking in the room, eyes darting about, memorizing every detail. Gunnar followed soon after, though he offered nothing more than a cursory sweep of the place before joining me at the fireplace, perching on the rounded armrest of the nearby chair with a shake of his head.

“Well? Do we have a plan?”

“I was about to ask you that very question,” I mused, tracking Declan as the pup wandered over to the window, taking in the outdoors with the same vibrant curiosity as he had with everything else. “Do you know how to break a ward?”

The muscles along Gunnar’s jaw rippled, as though clenching his back teeth. “No. We’d need a specialist. From what I understand, only the caster can dismantle their ward.”

“And it’s very unlikely we could hire outside assistance.”

“Agreed.”

“The trees are so big,” Declan murmured, perhaps not intentionally aloud. His face flushed when Gunnar and I fell silent, and he finally joined us, taking a seat at the end of my bed. “She seems nice—”

“That doesn’t matter,” I told him. “She could be the nicest reaper in all the realms, but we were not born to serve, Declan. We have a right to be free.”

“We can’t kill her.” Gunnar stood, fingers steepled as he paced back and forth in those too-short trousers. “At least, I have no knowledge of how to kill a reaper…” His deep blues slid to me, and I shook my head. We were made for reapers, and yet most of us knew almost nothing about them. My beta’s lips thinned, brows furrowing in thought. “I figured as much. Whether she has the scythe or not, we can’t… I mean, we could possibly overpower her physically if we separated her from the scythe, maybe force her to lift the ward—”

“I’m not torturing her,” Declan insisted, his expression more serious than I had seen in quite some time. Her safety mattered to him—but if I ordered it, he would do as he was told.

Still, I had no interest in torturing her either, no desire to hear her screams echo through the empty halls of this house. We might have been born and bred in Hell, but we were better than demons. This pack of miscreants was better than all of them.

“We’ll track her movements,” I said before Gunnar could argue for brute force. “Research the modern world so we don’t go into it blind. Wait for a moment of weakness, then exploit it. She’ll leave at some point, and that will require her to pass through the ward. Everything has a soft spot, even magic.”

“So, for now, we, what, humor her?” Gunnar stammered out. “I’m not playing fetch for some fucking reaper—”

“I’m not saying we have to make it easy on her,” I told him, holding his glare until he calmed down. “Or pleasant. But we can use what hospitality she offers in the meantime. When was the last time any of us slept in a bed? Had running water? Clean clothes? Hmm?” I looked between Gunnar and Declan, who said nothing—not when the answer was so fucking obvious. “This is less than ideal. We didn’t expect a ward, and we should have, but we’ll adapt. It’s what we do best.”

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