Page 70 of Reaper's Pack

“But he could touch the soul. Carry her. Take her.”

“Yeah…”

“Demon?”

I looked up at him, at the storm in his black eyes and the hardness around his mouth. “I don’t… I don’t know.”

Beneath the blood and the carvings, that thing was attractive enough to be a demon, but that was hardly definitive. Plenty of supernatural creatures were gorgeous; it was a predatory advantage.

Speaking of gorgeous predators…

Still radiating heat, Knox shuffled closer to the sprawling bit of floor art in front of us, nostrils flared through a few deep sniffs. He then swiped two fingers through the circle, effectively breaking it—and most likely its magic—and licked his fingers.

“Oh, Knox, no…” I tugged at his wrist. “Don’t—”

“It’s human,” he rumbled, bringing his fingers closer for another sniff. “Human blood.”

My belly flip-flopped, the heat rising off him suddenly a little too hot for comfort. “That familiar, eh?”

Knox rolled his eyes and smeared the blood on the ground. “Is that really what you’re worried about right now?”

“Well—”

“It smells like them,” he said dryly, which pushed the nauseating churn inside me down to an unsettling tremor.

“Tastes like them?”

“Like Christopher, yes,” the hellhound stated without hesitation. Ah. Right. Last night. Knox sat up on his haunches as he surveyed the alley. “These markings… They’re on the celestial plane.”

“Seems that way.” I couldn’t imagine something like this lasting long in the human realm, not when it looked so obviously Satanic—in a pop culture-y, horror movie sort of way, at least. Based on the empty metal trash bins lining the corridor between the two buildings, I assumed someone had been by today to empty them; something this large, so obviously in blood, so palpably wicked even to humans, wouldn’t have survived long.

“So that bastard was celestial?”

“Probably,” I said with a sigh, tapping my scythe on the pavement as I worked through the very limited list of beings capable of utilizing this cosmic pathway. Angels, demons, gods, reapers, hellhounds… It certainly narrowed the list, but there were still thousands in the demonic category alone, and searching through them would amount to searching for one specific needle in a mountain of identical needles.

Knox shot up with a snarl, his powerful thighs in my peripheral view briefly before he stalked away. “Fuck. I should have gotten to her sooner.”

“This isn’t your fault,” I insisted as I stood, wiping my finger one last time on my flouncy black sweater. While there were bigger issues afoot now than Knox mentally berating himself, I couldn’t let that slide either. He might have been completely at fault last night, but this… This was something else entirely.

The hellhound made it halfway down the alley before I caught him by the arm.

“Hey.” I planted my scythe and held tight, using it to anchor us when Knox tried to just barrel on ahead. He stopped with a growl, and I pressed my fingertips hard into his forearm, into the sweat and corded muscle, around the twisting and twining veins. “This isn’t on you, Knox. You did everything right.”

Slowly, he turned in place, wearing the same guilty look that he had last night when I returned to the house. “I watched him drag her beyond the tape. I should have stepped in sooner.”

“You didn’t know.”

“But I should have.”

“No, you shouldn’t have,” I argued, digging my nails into his flesh until he finally met my eyes. “It’s nobody’s fault. Well. I mean, it might be…” Someone set that thing loose on the celestial plane, and if he was a free agent, then he was responsible for whatever devilry he committed. “But not you. So, stop it. Right now.”

His lips twitched. “You think an alpha obeys commands, reaper?”

I smirked. “I think an alpha can listen to logic, yes. And what’s logical, going forward, isn’t beating yourself up… It’s working together to make this right.”

The tension in his shoulders lessened, as did my hold on his arm, when he finally nodded. “Yes. We need to find her.”

“We need to find him.”

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