Page 56 of Right Hand Of The Reaper
For what?
He leant closer, his hands threading through my hair. “This is going to hurt.”
Then he pressed his lips to mine and pain like I’d never felt exploded through my body. Like knives slicing the skin from my bones and Hellfire searing my veins.
The world faded to black.
And then there was nothing.
The first thing I noticed was the weight on my chest. It felt like there was a bloody anvil sat on there. The second thing I noticed was that I wasn’t breathing.
Fuck. I was dead.
Panic crept in. I’d never panicked like this in my life but all of a sudden, I was falling into a full blown panic attack.
Hands wrapped around my face and the angel appeared above me again. “Take a deep breath. In through your nose and out through your mouth.”
Shit. Why was this so hard? A whimper left my mouth, and I realised I was actually terrified. Me, a nightmare demon, was scared.
“You can do it,” the angel said. “Just breathe with me.”
I held his stare, those sky-blue eyes calm and his voice soothing my frazzled nerves. I took a deep inhale and instantly felt my body relax.
“That’s it,” he encouraged with a small smile, his thumbs stroking across my cheekbones. I don’t know how long we stayed like that, just breathing, but I was grateful to whoever this guy was for bringing me back from the edge.
“Who are you?” I asked when I finally felt in control of myself.
“Thanatos, or Thane for short.”
So this was the Grim Reaper. The guy we’d all been searching for.
“You’re not what I was expecting,” I mused aloud.
Darkness filled the room and the temperature dropped. Thane’s form elongated until he loomed over me, shadows surrounding him and forming the cloak that hid his skeletal form. His eyes burned bright silver in the depths of his hood, and I could sense his smile, even though I couldn’t see it.
“Is this better?” he said, his voice impossibly deep and guttural.
“Meh, you’re not that scary.”
He laughed, a wet and raspy sound, before morphing back into the angelic version of himself. I still couldn’t wrap my head around how someone who looked like him, could be Death personified. It just didn’t seem to make much sense.
A silence developed between us, both of us looking at the other. I knew I had to ask what had happened. I felt different and I could tell something about me had changed. I just didn’t understand what and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know.
Thane just stood there, casually by the side of my bed looking like he’d stepped off the front cover of a magazine. His hands were tucked into the pockets of his dark slacks and his white shirt sleeves were rolled up to the elbow.
“Ask the question, Atticus,” he said calmly, my name rolling off his tongue as if it belonged to him.
I swallowed past my nerves and looked Death straight in the eye. “Am I dead?”
“Yes,” he replied with a nod.
Well, at least that answered that question. “How am I here?”
“I saved you.”
“Why?”
He fixed me with a hard stare. “Because you called me at the moment of your death, and I saw the brand on your soul. You belong to Roux. After everything she’s been through, I couldn’t let you cease to exist.”
