Page 36 of Reaper's Pack

And unsurprisingly, I still had no clue what to do with Knox.

But Declan’s destination brought a smile to my face, and as I crossed through the tear in the ward, I hoped it would bring one to Declan’s too.

Once the hellhound joined me on the other side of the magical barrier, I sealed it immediately. Before I’d learned Gunnar had followed me, had perfectly mapped my routine from morning to night, I made the trek to Lunadell daily. Since then, I’d stayed in the house, unable to go out there when the pack knew precisely what I was doing.

It was just too humiliating.

A grim reaper—sobbing in front of a kindergarten class, in a mall food court.

Pathetic. Alexander and the others would never let me live it down if they found out.

But never mind.

There would be no tears today if I could help it.

When I touched him this time, I went for somewhere safe: his shoulder, my hold featherlight and fleeting. The forest faded around us as I envisioned our destination, and in a flash of black, we were there. Declan staggered away before I could, a hand to his forehead, his cheeks flushed. Apparently, he still needed some time to adapt to teleportation—not that I could blame him. It had taken me a few weeks to find my footing at first, hopping between places, standing in one spot and materializing in another.

While we had left behind one forest, we faced another now, standing in a gravel parking lot at the cusp of a national park. Every spot in the lot had a car in it, typical for a Sunday afternoon, the trails and beaches full of families and nature enthusiasts trying to make the most of the mild weather before the rainy season. An outing into the city wouldn’t have suited Declan; while the nature reserve was technically still within Lunadell’s jurisdiction, it was vast. A full parking lot hardly meant anything with acres and acres of park at our disposal. Forest. Mountains. Sandy beaches dotted along the Pacific. It would be far less overwhelming than the downtown hospital where Declan had first reaped, and that was the point. His confidence had grown in the last month, but I didn’t want to push him way out of his comfort zone.

A wall of pines, birches, and aspens greeted us, swaying in the coastal breeze, while wooden poles staggered along the rocky edge of the parking lot, connected by chains and broken only at the mouths of various forest paths. Behind me, Declan took it all in cautiously, eyes darting about, shoulders slumped—unsure.

“I thought we could spend the afternoon at the beach,” I told him. “Humans come here to swim and relax, tan a little, kayak. It’s really mellow… Something easy to start us off.”

“The smell is overwhelming,” Declan noted, nudging at the gravel underfoot with the toe of his Chucks. The pack seldom wore any of the shoes I’d acquired for them, but Declan had made an effort to put on every stitch of clothing possible for our outing today.

“Is it the forest?”

“Everything.” He motioned to the nearby cars with a jut of his chin, then out to the mountains soaring up from a hazy horizon. “I smell the salt, the rust, the bark.”

“It’ll be stronger when we get off the celestial plane, so, you know, prepare yourself.” I flashed a reassuring smile before drifting toward the nearest trail. The sign just out of the parking lot showed the paths we ought to take to the beach, a sandy playground that stretched for miles up and down the coast, cut into quarters by hills that jutted out into the ocean. For now, I decided on one of the smaller beaches, a spot that was bound to have a few clumps of humans, but, again, nothing to set Declan off.

The hellhound followed behind me at a distance, even along the dirt path through the trees. This time, however, it didn’t strike me as purposeful; Declan stopped here and there, admiring certain sprigs of green drooping out of the forest, noting the slight changes in the autumn leaves, and pointing out shadows of woodland critters scurrying as far away from us as possible. I indulged him because it felt good to do so, and what should have been a twenty-minute stroll to the beach doubled before we knew it, and forty long minutes later, we paused at the end of the trail, the landscape an open canvas ahead.

A landscape that seemed to take Declan’s breath away. He stood at my side, silent, lips parted, features slack as he took it all in.

“Have you ever seen the ocean before?” I asked, nudging at the rocky beach with the base of my scythe. About fifteen feet from the forest, the rocks gave way to soft, powdery sand, sand that eventually met the tide. Blue water rushed up the slope, tipped with white foam, the Pacific relatively calm today. Although it had been nothing but clear skies since this morning, black clouds gathered over the ocean way in the distance, a storm rolling in and finally giving the day’s humidity some purpose.

“I’ve seen the Nile once,” Declan told me after a brief pause, his gaze jumping between the humans scattered across the beach. They sat on blankets and folding chairs, couples and families and singletons. A pair on kayaks perched just beyond the shallows, their neon boats rising and falling with the waves. This was nothing new to me—watching humans just be. When I glanced up at Declan, surprised that he had seen such a famous river in person, he shrugged. “Back with my first reaper… You could see it from the house he stole for us.”

Jealousy prickled in my cheeks at the thought of another reaper working with Declan, seeing what a beautiful creature he was inside and out. “What happened there—with your first reaper?”

“Fenix sort of shoved me into the pack just before they were chosen,” Declan admitted, his lightly accented voice almost hollow as he surveyed the beach, the humans, the scraggly hills sandwiching it all in to the north and south. “The pack put up with me in Hell, but once we were out and had to prove ourselves, they turned on me.”

“Turned on you? But—”

“I’m a runt, Hazel,” he said with a cold chuckle. “Hellhounds don’t tolerate weakness, and I think they assumed I’d make the pack weak. They didn’t accept me, and they all made that known pretty, uh, violently.”

I’d seen the scars up and down his sides, like more than one had ripped into him. Hellhound teeth were nothing to sneer at, their jaws powerful, their bite probably fatal to lesser beings. No one had confirmed it, not Knox with his scarred, rugged face, and not Declan now—but apparently the only thing that could scar a hellhound was another hellhound. From my understanding, they healed like shifters, but they weren’t shifters, not in the traditional sense of this realm. Earth’s shifters had been stolen and dragged to Hell, forcefully bred with the native hounds.

Hellhounds were another beast entirely.

And I couldn’t imagine an entire pack closing in on all sides, no escape, fear immobilizing every limb…

Tears stung at my eyes, but I blinked them back before they surfaced. At no point did Declan need to think I pitied him, because I didn’t.

But I could still grieve his past, what those monsters had done to him.

“Declan, I’m so sorry to hear that,” I said, fighting to keep my words even and smooth, like this was any other conversation—fighting to keep my feelings a secret, one of the few I had left with this pack. “I’m so sorry for what they did to you.”

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