Page 68 of Reaper's Pack

Blood. Sirens. The crackle of walkie-talkie relay between first responders.

And screams.

So many screams. Seventy-six dead, but how many more were injured?

How many would never recover from this day?

On the celestial plane, much of the calamity was muffled, but combined with the onslaught of new souls, snapping and sparking and sizzling inside the demolished building, it was a lot to take in, even for me. I swallowed hard, assessing the damage quickly, clinically, assuming most of the newly departed were clustered in the eight exposed floors near the base of the tower. With the structure weakened, the levels above had toppled too, the building much like a stroke victim.

Horrible. Just awful.

My pack clustered around me, sniffing the smoke-ridden air that filtered from the human realm to the celestial plane. Knox had situated himself between us and Alexander, looking taller and more regal than I’d ever seen—like a true alpha.

“Now, you, beta…” Alexander snapped his fingers at Gunnar, then pointed to the yellow police tape stretched down the street. Ambulances and cruisers filled the space on this side of it, humans sprinting about and carrying bodies. Distantly, the roar of incoming firetrucks drowned out a nearby woman screeching on a gurney, her leg shredded to the bone, paramedics tending to her as they rushed her away from the disaster. A young officer ran clear through Alexander as the reaper said, “I want you on the perimeter. Send the little one in with my four—”

“Alexander.” I planted my scythe so that the staff cut in front of Knox, creating a little barrier of my own. “You don’t give orders to my pack. We’ll contain and subdue so that you can reap.”

We faced off for a moment, two celestial beings with nuclear weapons at our sides. Even now, months after I had been promoted to Lunadell, he still wasn’t thrilled to have me here. I might have looked to him for help with the hellhounds at first, but I knew how to reap—I was damn good at it. And these days, I knew my pack. Mostly. He might have had more experience in this territory, his pack over twice the size of mine, but he wasn’t my superior. No fluffy white wings, no cowl and skeletal hand—no bossing me and mine around.

Behind him, his pack was already at work, immense black hellhounds moving through the wreckage. Two had a gaggle of human souls sequestered at the base of the tower, and they circled the sobbing figures like sharks.

“Fine,” Alexander muttered, shouldering his scythe. He took a half step back, then paused. “But consider pairing your alpha with mine… so he can see a real alpha at work.”

Knox flashed a hint of teeth, a low warning rumbling in his chest. Alexander shot him a pointed look, then me a smirk before disappearing into the fray.

Smug twat.

“Ignore him,” I said as I stepped in front of Knox and faced my pack, waving off the rest of the wandering hellhounds as well. “Ignore all of them. We’re here to do a job, just like Alexander’s pack, and we’re here to help lost souls. Period.” I focused on Knox, pushing last night out of my mind as best I could. “I want you patrolling the perimeter. Nothing gets in or out. If you see a soul past that yellow tape, you bring them back.”

Much to my surprise, Knox sat. Literally just… plopped down, waiting, staring at me without a hint of his usual boredom. Maybe he had learned his lesson—and the anxiety knotting in my gut could just fuck off already.

“Gunnar, Declan, you’re with me,” I carried on, glancing between the pair. Gunnar studied the building, red eyes darting this way and that, no doubt cataloguing every minute detail. Declan, meanwhile, shuffled in close to me, tail wagging ever so slightly. Good. That was the attitude I needed from both of them. “Declan, I want you with frightened souls. The ones who are too scared to even move. Find one, sit with them, wait until they are reaped. Don’t leave their side.” He offered a little yip and a snort, tail wagging faster. I nodded, sensing his eagerness. “Okay then, Gunnar, you’re on runners. Anyone who starts to bolt, herd them back in. I know Alexander’s pack will be doing something similar, but this is where you shine. Nobody gets beyond the lobby on your watch, clear?”

The hellhound tapped his huge front paws, claws clacking on the pavement, his lean figure brimming with jittery energy. Ready to work. I swallowed my smile, pleased to see each one heeding the call in their own way.

“Okay then… Let’s do this.”

Knox trotted off without a backward glance, headed straight for the yellow Caution tape, the white and orange cones along the perimeter of the accident site. With the other two watching me, waiting for the go-ahead, I lingered just a few moments to watch him pad around the outskirts. Knox sniffed at the ground, at the cones, at the first responders, then disappeared behind a few police cruisers.

You have to trust him. That’s all you can do.

I sighed softly, tapping my finger on my scythe’s staff.

Please, Knox… Please don’t screw this up.

“Right.” I motioned to the crumbling tower just as another fire broke out, flames bursting through a tenth-story window. Humans screamed and ducked for cover. “Let’s get to work, boys.”

And work we did. For their first venture into the gritty world of reaping, Gunnar and Declan needed no guidance beyond my initial instructions. Two floors up, Declan sniffed out a terrified soul under a desk, her human body crushed beneath an array of collapsed office equipment and ceiling. Shock and fear made her incapable of speech, incapable of any movement at all, and without hesitation, Declan crawled under the desk and plunked his head in her lap. It was a tight squeeze, but he did it.

Best of all, he did it with the confidence of a hellhound who had been doing this for centuries, not weeks. Even with Alexander’s pack roving about, muscular pit bull-looking hounds who never met my eye but whose tails shot up around my pack, Declan didn’t show so much as a whiff of his previous self. The Declan of ten short weeks ago would have hidden behind Knox, low to the ground and whining, searching for the best escape route available.

Today, he just got to work.

And it left me beaming.

Gunnar, meanwhile, strutted about the wreckage as I’d expected: snooty, assertive, calculating. He left my side only a few minutes after Declan, vanishing from sight and reappearing in the lobby—half of which you could see into from the upper floors, the rubble piled high and crawling with human rescuers. One of the souls herded into the group by Alexander’s circling hellhounds had slipped free, and before either of the bulky hounds could respond, Gunnar was just there, guiding the soul back with gentle nips to the heels. He lapped the whole group, souls and hellhounds, with a few assured barks, then vanished again.

I nibbled my lower lip, grinning when I caught Knox’s distant figure still patrolling the outskirts, moving at a steady clip around the wreckage.

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