Page 5 of Reaper’s Ruin (Reaper’s Ruin Trilogy #1)

I stumbled backward, tripping over a rock and nearly falling into one of the lava flows. Not that it would hurt me, apparently. Nothing seemed to affect my strange, inexplicable form.

I concentrated again, desperate to escape, and the world dissolved around me.

When it reformed, I stood in the middle of my house.

My normal, messy house I still shared with my mother since I couldn’t afford my own place while I was in nursing school.

The house I’d grown up in and loved, even with its leaky faucet and drafty windows that made us bundle up beneath extra blankets on cold, winter nights.

“Home,” I breathed, relief washing over me.

Was it over? Was this strange dream, this strange experience, finally done?

It felt so comforting to be somewhere familiar after being in so many unbelievable places since this all began.

But as I began walking through the living room I’d spent countless hours in during my twenty-four years living here, I immediately sensed something was wrong.

The colors seemed slightly faded, the edges of everything almost imperceptibly blurred.

The living room was just as I’d left it—Netflix still paused on the TV, my blanket in a heap on the couch, but the kettle corn. .. it was spilled across the floor.

When I tried to touch the back of my couch, my hand passed through it like it wasn’t there.

I moved toward it, but before I could reach it, I froze in my tracks, my gaze dropping to my feet at the blood spreading across the carpet in front of the couch.

I backed away, a scream building in my throat as I saw my body lying on the floor.

I stared down at myself—at the bloodied pajamas identical to what I was wearing now, at the vacant eyes staring at nothing, at the multiple stab wounds that had torn through fabric and flesh.

“This isn’t real,” I whispered, backing away. “This can’t be real.”

But I knew it was. The memories still too fragmented to piece together but I remembered more now—the man who’d suddenly appeared behind me, the strange dagger in his hand, my screams, the burning pain as the blade had plunged into my chest again and again.

“Oh my God.”

I sank to my knees, the realization crashing over me with devastating clarity. The blood on my clothes. The fragmented memories of pain and fear. The way no one could see or hear me.

I was dead. A ghost. And this... this must be some sort of afterlife.

A mixture of sorrow and rage and confusion surged through me. I was so young. Only twenty-four. My whole life had been ahead of me. I suddenly felt robbed, overwhelming grief racking through me over the life stolen from me.

The career I’d never have.

The husband I’d never have.

The children I wouldn’t rock to sleep at night, reading them the same stories my mother used to read to me.

I wrapped my arms around my waist, rocking myself as I sobbed, trying to accept this impossible reality, but a reality I could no longer deny.

But if I was dead, why was I here? Why wasn’t I in Heaven?

I’d been a good person, hadn’t I? Or was that place, the one with all the lava and the ice and the strange people and trees and flowers, was that Heaven?

Hell? Something else I’d never learned about in Sunday school?

And who was the shadowy man who kept hunting me?

“I’m dead,” I whispered, tears sliding down my cheeks. “I’m dead. I can’t believe I’m dead.”

Suddenly, a new memory of that night broke through, and this one sent an icy sliver of terror slicing through me.

My mother’s scream.

I rose abruptly, spinning around in the room as if I’d just heard it. But only silence met me. I stood in that room, the one that should feel like home, but now felt eerie and terrifying, listening. Waiting.

Nothing.

“Mom?” I called out, equal parts hope and terror colliding in my chest. “Mom, are you here?”

Silence answered me. I moved through the house, my bare feet making no sound on the hardwood floors. The kitchen was empty, dishes from our last meal together still in the sink. Her jacket was on the hook by the door, her purse on the kitchen table next to mine.

“Mom?” I called again, moving now toward the hallway.

Then I froze.

Blood. A dark trail leading from the living room toward the bedrooms.

“No,” I whispered, doom piercing my gut. “Please, no.”

I followed the trail, though every instinct screamed at me to turn back. It led to my mother’s bedroom door, slightly ajar, more blood smeared on the white paint.

With trembling hands, I turned and looked inside, my whole world shifting at the sight before me.

My mother lay crumpled against the wall, her body bloody, her eyes—eyes so like my own—staring sightlessly at the ceiling .

“Mom!” The cry tore from my chest, a sound of pure anguish. I fell to my knees beside her, trying desperately to touch her, to hold her, but my hands passed through her body like smoke. “Mom, please! Please wake up!”

But she wouldn’t wake up. None of this was a dream. We were both dead, murdered in our own home by a man with a strange dagger and cold, determined eyes.

Grief overwhelmed me, crushing my chest until I couldn’t breathe. I curled in on myself, sobbing with my whole body, wishing I could feel my mother’s arms around me one last time.

“This can’t be real,” I gasped between sobs. “Please wake up. Please wake up.”

But I didn’t wake up. This wasn’t a dream. In this horrifying reality, my mother and I were both dead.

I don’t know how long I knelt there, crying beside my mother’s body.

Minutes. Hours. My entire existence shifted into question while I sobbed beside her trying to process this new reality.

A reality where I was dead. My mother was dead.

Our lives cut short in terror. But eventually, the grief hardened into something else—a desperate need to escape this scene of horror, to be anywhere but here with these broken echoes of the life I’d lost.

I squeezed my eyes shut, willing myself away from this nightmare, needing to escape even though I had nowhere to go.

The falling sensation washed over me, and when I opened my eyes, I was kneeling in the middle of a marketplace—back in that other world, the one filled with almost-humans and impossible landscapes. People moved around me, oblivious to my presence, to my pain.

I remained on my knees, too shattered to rise, tears still flowing freely down my cheeks. People walked past me, some through me, and none ever saw me kneeling there, shattered. Destroyed. The reality of my situation crushed down on me with the weight of mountains.

I was dead. My mother was dead. And I was trapped in this strange half-existence, visible to no one except a shadowy figure who had been hunting me across impossible landscapes.

“I’m dead,” I whispered, the words falling from numb lips. “I’m really dead.”

When the weight of my grief and shock finally subsided to a pounding ache rather than raw, slicing pain, I wiped my eyes, trying to pull whatever semblance of sanity I had together. This was my reality now, and I had to figure out where I was and what was happening to me.

But then, before I could pull myself back to my feet to figure out my next steps, I looked and saw him there. He stood at the edge of the marketplace, hood pulled back now to reveal his full face. He was staring at me with those storm-gray eyes, his expression unreadable.

I was too tired to run. Too tired to fight. Too tired to try to escape to another place where he would only find me again.

“What do you want from me?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.

He began to move toward me, his steps deliberate, his gaze never leaving mine.

He was... beautiful. Devastatingly so. Strong jawline, high cheekbones, full lips pressed into a tight line.

His hair was black as midnight, falling in tousled waves around a face that could have been sculpted by a master artist. And those eyes—stormy gray, intense, powerful—were fixed on me with an expression I couldn’t read.

He wasn’t like the other shadow figures I’d glimpsed briefly in the marketplace. They had been vague, indistinct, barely more than shapes in the mist. He was solid. Real. Terrifyingly present .

Fear at his approach rose in me again. I tried to summon that falling sensation, that shift that had carried me away from him before. I concentrated, desperate to escape.

Nothing happened.

I tried again, panic rising in my chest.

Still nothing.

Whatever power had been carrying me from place to place had deserted me. I was trapped here, in this strange marketplace, with this dangerous, beautiful predator approaching.

He stopped a few feet away from me, towering over my kneeling form. Up close, he was even more imposing—broad-shouldered and powerful, with an aura of lethality that stole the breath from my lungs.

Slowly, deliberately, he crouched down so that our eyes were level. For a moment, neither of us spoke. He seemed to be studying me, his brow furrowed slightly as if I were a puzzle he couldn’t quite solve.

In his eyes, I expected to see triumph—the hunter finally capturing his prey.

Instead, I saw something that made my breath catch: confusion, uncertainty, and beneath it all, a flicker of recognition. Like he was seeing something in me that he hadn’t seen in a very, very long time.

I considered trying to disappear again, to run once more from the beautiful, terrifying man now just inches away.

But despite everything—despite the fear, despite the grief crushing my chest, despite knowing he had been hunting me—I found myself desperate to hear his voice.

To talk to him. To connect with someone, anyone.

Because in a world where I was a ghost, where I couldn’t touch or be touched, where my mother was gone and I was lost, this terrifying being was the only one who could see me.

The only one who knew I existed at all.