Page 33 of Reaper (Quincy Harker Demon Hunter #10)

T here was a cat on my chest when I woke up, so I guess I wasn’t dead.

Pretty sure there aren’t cats in Hell. At least, I’ve never seen any on my trips there.

But there was very definitely a large gray ball of floof sitting on me now, and as I took in more of my surroundings, I was in my own bed.

Alone, unfortunately, except for Nameless, who once he saw I was awake, jumped off and sprinted out of the room, as if he didn’t want me to know he was concerned. Cats, man.

“Did we win?” I asked, my voice barely more than a croak.

Unfortunately, Nameless doesn’t speak English, and I was alone in my bedroom.

I heard voices on the other side of the door, so I threw the covers off and got unsteadily to my feet.

My everything hurt, and I was disgusting .

I had sand caked to my body with sweat, blood, and some bodily fluids that I didn’t recognize but probably weren’t mine, there were bruises on my bruised spots, and something in the left side of my chest grated when I moved, sending spikes of pain radiating all up and down my side.

I held onto the bed and made my way to the bathroom, hoping that it was Becks and not Luke who’d undressed me.

Not that Luke hadn’t seen me naked more than once, but it’s a little embarrassing when you’re more than a century old and your uncle still has to peel your clothes off and help you into bed.

No more embarrassing than having him show up and fight your battles for you, but since reinforcements arriving when they did meant I was still alive, I figured I’d let that one slide.

I managed to get to the toilet, without peeing all over myself, and in even better news, I didn’t piss blood, so either there wasn’t any internal damage, or it had already healed.

I sat on the toilet, took a deep breath, and shoved my ribs back into place, biting down on a towel to keep my screams from waking up the three floors below me.

You okay in there? Becks sent across our link.

Hurts like a motherfucker, but I’m not dead, so I’ll heal. Did we win?

Oh yeah. Luke and your hot friend Tony went through the rest of those assholes like a tornado through a trailer park after you dropped. I just kinda stood over you and shot anybody that got too close.

My hot friend Tony?

You know, Black, trim, neat beard, dazzling smile, muscles, pointy ears. Hot.

I’m gonna need a lot of booze to get that image outta my head, thanks.

That’s what you get for thinking naughty thoughts about Titania. Damn, this woman had a memory like an elephant. I make one remark about a smoking Faerie Queen, and she’s never letting me live it down.

Not in a million years, babe , she replied. You gonna shower?

Yeah, I need to wash the blood off before I sit on the white sofas. I’ll be out in a few.

Try not to pass out. Luke’s got some kind of gross whiskey concoction waiting for you when you get done, and I made bacon.

Okay, I’ll get cleaned up and we can plan our next move.

I stood up, glad for all the grab bars I’d installed when we moved in.

I never intended to live long enough to become an invalid, but I had a bad habit of getting beat to shit, and a lot of mornings it was really useful to have things in the bathroom to hang onto.

I turned the water on just one notch below scalding and got inside, rinsing off for a minute before I sat on the wide bench and let the double shower heads pour soothing heat onto me.

After about ten minutes, I felt as close to human as I could get, so I cleaned up, toweled off, and went into my room to get dressed. Nameless was curled up on Becks’ pillow, and he raised his head a little when I came in.

“Mrowr?” he said, staring at me with way more intelligence than I was used to in a pet. Not that I’d had many pets in my life. As a matter of fact, this might be the first one, now that I thought about it.

“I’m okay, pal,” I said, scratching behind his ears. He wrapped both paws around my wrist and nipped at my thumb, not hard enough to break the skin, just kind of a “glad you’re home” bite. Maybe I could get used to having a cat.

I pulled on boxer briefs, my most comfortable jeans, and an Avett Brothers t-shirt and walked out into the living room, stopping in the doorway when I saw a faerie knight sitting on my couch. “Tony?”

He stood up, in very much better shape than me after last night’s battle, and crossed the room to give me a big hug. “Glad you’re okay, Murr—um, Quincy.”

“Thanks, pal. And you can call me Q. Or just Harker. Most of my friends do.”

“I’m honored to be considered your friend.” He pulled back and extended a hand. It felt oddly formal after the big hug, but I shook it, and something in the back of my head clicked, like we’d cemented an alliance of sorts.

“You know being my friend isn’t going to do you any favors with Oberon, right? He kinda hates me.”

“A lot of people hate you, Harker, usually the most powerful people in any room,” Becks said, coming around the kitchen island into the living room with a mug in her hand.

She handed me the mug then wrapped her arms around my neck, molding her body up against mine and laying a kiss on me that made me forget I’d ever laid eyes on Titania, or any other woman ever.

“Welcome home. Now don’t ever do anything like that without telling me first!

I had no idea where you were, you asshole! ”

“That’s my love,” I said, smiling and stepping back a little. “All the kisses, and all the ass-kicking, rolled into one.” I held up the mug. “What’s this?”

“No idea,” Becks replied. “Luke brought it over and said you should drink it as soon as you woke up. Then he went back to his apartment and crashed.”

I smelled the concoction. Definitely whiskey, and the good stuff, but there was a hint of something else in there, too.

But Luke had kept me alive for more than a hundred years by never steering me wrong, and by frequently pulling my ass out of the fire when I got in over my head, so I drank it down.

Fire coursed down my throat, and heat exploded out from my belly to every extremity.

It felt like someone had plugged me into a live electrical outlet as power flowed into me, and I knew exactly what Luke had added to the booze—his blood.

Luke’s blood can turn humans into vampires if they’re drained, but for me, someone who already has a sliver of his demon Skyffrax inside me, it was like drinking from the Fountain of Youth, if the Fountain’s water was laced with uncut cocaine.

My healing powers were immediately sent into overdrive, and all my already heightened senses were supercharged.

I handed the cup back to Becks and grabbed the back of a chair for balance.

After a few seconds, I steadied myself and looked around the room. Tony and Becks were staring at me with concern, and Nameless sat on the back of a sofa, licking a paw and smoothing the fur around his head with it. “I’m okay,” I said. “Just a little pick me up from Uncle Dracula.”

“What the fuck was in that whiskey, Harker? Luke just told me not to touch it because I wouldn’t like what it did to humans,” Becks said.

“Vampire blood,” I replied. “About three drops, if I’m any judge.

” They both looked at me like I was crazy, so I walked around and sat down in one of the armchairs at the end of the two facing sofas.

“Luke and I discovered a long time ago that my blood can heal injuries in humans, although with certain unanticipated side effects.”

“Yeah, like you living rent-free in my head, literally, for the rest of my life,” Becks said, remembering a time almost ten years ago when I’d given her my blood to keep her from bleeding out on a case.

“Your probably very long life, by the way,” I said.

“Another side effect. But we also learned that if I take in any of his blood, it has a similar effect on me, except without the mental link, thank all the gods.” The idea of my uncle hitchhiking in my head, especially during my years at Studio 54, was not a pleasant one. For either of us, probably.

“So you can drink vampire blood and be healed instantly?” Tony asked. “Why didn’t you just take a bite out of Eleanor during your bout and cure yourself?”

“Because she’s not close enough to the source,” I said.

That led to an explanation about how Luke turned by taking a piece of a demon inside himself, and how all the vampires we knew about today were in one way or another descended from Luke, but how I was more closely descended than most of them even though I wasn’t exactly a vampire, just the eldest son of two people who got snacked on by vampires, thus altering my DNA somehow.

“So basically, I can heal with just a couple of drops of Luke’s blood, but I’ve never found any beneficial effects to drinking the blood of other vampires.

At least not in the quantities I’ve been able to make myself consume.

It’s possible that if I drained an entire vamp, I could heal, but have you ever tried to drink that much blood?

It’s nasty . Also, dead vampires begin to dissolve very soon after they’re slain, so you have to drink them very fast.”

“I have questions,” Becks said. “But I don’t think I want the answers, because the questions are gross enough.”

“It was a long time ago, and the experiments were at least as unpleasant as you think they were,” I said. I decided it was well past time for a subject change, so I asked, “Did we get the Boss when we shut down the fight club?”

Becks looked chagrined. “No. We didn’t get the Boss or any of the handlers. They must have had some kind of escape route pre-planned. By the time we finished up in the arena, and the rest of our team had processed the spectators, anyone in management was gone.”

“Well, shit,” I said. “At least they won’t be running any more fights to the death until they can rebuild and start to get the word out about a new location.

But we need to be more on top of this shit.

They were running these blood fights right under our noses, and we had no idea.

How do we find them before they get a new arena online, and how do we make sure nothing like this happens again? ”

“I have an idea for that,” Becks said. “But it’s going to mean we bring somebody else into our inner circle.

” We worked for the Department of Homeland Security’s Paranormal Division, which was already a super-secret government agency within a pretty secretive government agency.

But the fact that I was Dracula’s nephew and a real-life wizard was even more secret than that , and practically no one outside the room we were in knew that Becks’ boss was actually a naga, a mystical half-snake creature in the guise of a human.

“I guess if it’s somebody you trust, then I trust them, too,” I said. I glanced at Anthony, who raised both his hands as if in surrender.

“Not me,” he said, standing and heading for the door.

“I’m still trying to get home. I just came by to see if you were going to be okay, so now I’m off to continue redeeming myself with the Queen.

The second Titania will let me cross over, I’m back to the Summer Court.

This world is way too weird for me.” Too weird for the fae—maybe Charlotte’s tourism board could put that on a flyer somewhere. Like maybe the Eighth Circle of Hell.

I stood and hugged Tony, then turned to Becks as the door closed behind him.

“Okay, who do we have?” I asked, hesitant.

I didn’t love the idea of bringing anyone new into our inner circle, but ever since Dennis, my last tech guru, had turned into an Archangel (yes, really), we had been lacking in that department.

Becks pulled out her phone and pressed a button. “You can come in now.”