Page 1 of Veil of Death and Shadow (Order of Reapers #1)

1

MAREENA

Six Years Ago: The Day of The Undoing

D eath began haunting me long before I took my first breath.

And he’s been nothing but enduring ever since.

First, he ripped my father from me when I was nothing more than a bundle of cells nestled deep in my mother’s womb. I was told it was a trucking accident, an unexpected snowstorm, that sent him barreling over the curve of a mountain a few hours east of our home.

Then, the day I entered this world, Death took my mother for himself, too.

There’d been others over the years—my mother’s sister, who I’d stayed with until just before my first birthday, my father’s aunt, who I’d lived with for a decade after that, friends, lovers, neighbors—more than I liked to think about or linger on. Death never let me forget his presence, caging someone else in his dark embrace whenever I got too comfortable, whenever I let my defenses down even a little.

But today, I felt him more acutely than most; his breath trembled deep in my bones, carving anticipation and promise into every twitch of every muscle.

My phone vibrated in my back pocket.

I flinched, then plucked it out and put it to my ear, not even bothering to check the name. I knew who it was. I was late.

“Where are you?” Sora’s voice crackled in my ear, deep and whispered, but layered with her barely contained excitement and the soft bustle of a busy room.

I froze, focusing on my surroundings for the first time since I’d left our apartment.

Fuck. Where was I?

I’d taken a wrong turn. Several wrong turns, in fact.

This wasn’t a totally uncommon occurrence. I often got lost in my thoughts and meandered through the streets, only half paying attention to what I was doing, but this was particularly bad timing.

“We said we were getting started at the diner today,” she continued, as I quickly searched for an intersection so that I could mentally recalibrate my directions. “Early. You promised. I had a few errands to run this morning, and I still somehow beat you here. Frank even agreed to let me spike the coffee. Do you have any idea how much convincing that took? You know he’s extra crabby in the morning.”

I winced, nodding even though she obviously couldn’t see me. “I know, I know. I’m sorry. It’s just . . .” I exhaled, relief flooding me as I recognized a burger stop down the road. I wasn’t too far from where I needed to be at least. “My alarm—I was up late and then this morning, I—” I sped up, boosted by the slight chill in the air. This June felt more like a belated January. “Lost track of time. Good work on Frank though, that’s impressive. Truly.”

Still, as impressive as it was, part of me wished that Frank stood stronger in his resolve. For both of our sakes. If anyone could win a battle of wills with Sora, it was him.

My stomach churned at the thought of starting the party this early. I had a late shift last night and hadn’t been able to turn my brain off until nearly dawn.

Something told me that if I started drinking this early, I wouldn’t make it past noon.

Sora was silent for a moment, and I could picture her expression in my head as if she was standing right in front of me, frustration curling into something softer and so much worse—concern.

She sighed. “You mean it’s been happening again.”

“No,” I lied, the word getting half-stuck in my throat, a rock coated in molasses. “Not like before, at least.” I winced, pinching the bridge of my nose. “I mean, I have a handle on it.”

And I did, more or less.

At the very least, I refused to tell her that I’d spent the last twenty minutes trying to convince myself that the stovetop was off even though I knew damn well that neither of us had cooked something in our stingy apartment in over two weeks.

Or that I’d had a live-action video broadcasting in my mind of Mrs. Odette, our shy, elderly neighbor, being violently burned alive for the last hour.

“We can find someone, another therapist?—”

“No.”

Therapy helped, but only so much.

It was hard to convince my brain that the intrusive thoughts weren’t real.

Not when, occasionally, they were.

Four years ago, one of our apartments had in fact burned down because the guy on the floor above us left a paperback on his stove. And while Mrs. Odette was most likely safe and sound in her favorite oversized nightgown right now, last year, my coworker’s real-life death played out exactly like the version I’d seen churning on repeat in my dreams the whole month leading up to it. He’d choked on an apple, a strange, symbolic visual that had planted a seed of fear in my veins that rooted and bloomed until it actually happened.

No amount of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or pills could bring him—or the stuff in our old apartment—back.

Superstition? Maybe. Coincidence? Probably. But that lingering “what if” was far more vicious than any binary explanation could ever be. Death enjoyed his games far too much, and my inability to recognize the difference between one of his bouts and just another Tuesday was one of his cruelest tricks.

“Mars,” her voice was lower now, tender and unguarded—the specific tonal licks she reserved only for me.

She was worried.

Fuck, I didn’t want her to be worried. Not today. This was her day as much as mine. Maybe even more. She’d been looking forward to it for weeks.

“With what insurance?” I snorted, ignoring how flat the joke fell, even to my ears.

“We can scrape by. We always do. I can add an extra shift?—”

“No,” I said, the snap of the word harsher than I’d intended. I took a deep breath, curling the edges of my jacket tight around my chest. The zipper broke last week and I hadn’t bothered trying to fix it. “I should be there in twenty minutes,” I added, hoping desperately that she’d drop it. Just for today.

“Mars, this is important.”

“You know how I get this time of year. My symptoms aren’t back back. It’s just today. It brings stuff up is all.”

It wasn’t a complete lie. My anxiety had never fully left in the first place, it just sometimes got quieter, my mind bestowing a brief reprieve before splicing my day-to-day activities with visceral scenes of my few-and-far-between loved ones dying. And the compulsions—the checking, the counting, the silent chanting loop I recited in my head—always ramped up to full effect this time of year, like the shifting calendar pages sent a direct signal to my body to get to work fighting me. On everything.

My brain was like a fucked-up Santa Claus—one who only ever brought coal.

You’d never catch me waiting up all night, eager for his arrival.

“Do you want to cancel?—”

I shook my head, again, for an audience of no one. “Absolutely not. This is our one day. Anniversary Extraordinaire, remember? We go all out. From dawn until dusk.” Though more often than not it ended up being from dawn until dawn the next day. “No matter what’s going on in our lives, it all goes on pause for today. Those are the rules. We’ve written them into the bylaws and everything. Pretty sure I even signed in blood at one point.”

She exhaled, long and drawn out, and I could practically see her head tilted against our favorite booth, fingers massaging her temple as she weighed the merits of pushing the discussion further or dropping it. Would I fight her or give in? How far could she push before I shut down altogether? Honestly, she read and understood my moods better than I did. “Mars, we could celebrate tomorrow if you’re not into it today. If you want to relax, or talk it out?”

She meant it, but that only thickened my resolve.

Today was the most important day of the year.

The day we escaped.

The day we survived.

The day, as Sora dubbed it, my supposed ‘curse’ was broken.

Today was for Rina and it was for us. We remembered, we forgot, we celebrated. It was the one absolute we lived by. There was no way I was letting my anxiety and baggage break that tradition. Death wasn’t allowed to win. Not today.

“No. Just—” I swallowed, scanning the quiet street, stifling my shame from any strangers who might be able to read it—pluck it from my skin and stare into the bits of myself that I tried like hell not to see, let alone examine. The bits that only Sora seemed able to parse. “Not today. Can we table it? Just until tomorrow. Please?” I felt her warring with herself in the silence. “I promise. Fun today, real talk tomorrow, okay? I won’t even fight you on it. If I do, I’ll do the dishes for a month without a complaint.”

“Liar.” There was no malice in the word, just aggressive affection and an eye roll I could sense from over a mile away. Her sigh crackled against my ear, ending in a soft groan that let me know I’d won before any words followed to confirm.

I pinched my eyes tight, waiting for her to give in.

“Twenty minutes? You’re farther than our apartment. You got lost again.” It wasn’t a question, and there was no accusation in her tone. She grunted, then let out a string of curse words, her voice both louder and more distant, like she was holding the phone a few inches back from her face. “Make it ten,” she said. “There’s a group of feral frat boys here trying to milk their sloppy night out well into the morning. Truly repulsive behavior.” Her voice curled with disgust. Never mind that we’d likely be in the same shoes as them twenty-four hours from now. “They don’t seem to understand, or care,” her voice grew louder now, her words for them as much as they were for me, “that each cringey attempt to get into my pants is just inching them closer and closer to my fist.” I heard a low whistle and Sora groaned. “I can’t promise more than ten minutes before I throat punch one of them. Their fates are in your hands. Can you handle that responsibility?”

“Deal.” I picked up my pace, knowing that she was only half kidding. Sora was slight and unassuming to the unpracticed observer, a good half-foot shorter than me—absolutely no match for a table of drunk-off-their-ass frat boys—but the girl had a penchant for striking first and asking questions later.

Especially on a day like today, when nostalgia and excitement warred with grief. As cool and calm of a mask as she liked to wear, I knew that today messed with her head too.

Sora’s temporary silent frustration was eclipsed by Frank’s low rumble threatening to toss the guys out on their asses if they didn’t shut up and eat their food.

There was a brief banging sound, like she was clapping her hand on the table, before she added in a half-hushed whisper, “Maybe the old lug doesn’t hate me as much as I thought.”

“Oh yes I do.” The familiar tenor of his voice trailed over the din and into my ear. “Just hate them more.”

I bit back my grin. “I’m hurrying, promise.”

“You want your usual? I’ll have Frank put the order in now so it’s ready when you’re here.”

“Yeah, usual sounds good.”

Sora snorted. Good was perhaps generous.

The over-easy eggs with too-firm yolks and half-frozen hash browns would be tolerable at best. He’d inherited the restaurant from his father, but his father’s instinct for cooking apparently wasn’t part of the package. Especially not when it came to breakfast foods.

But it didn’t matter. We didn’t frequent Frank’s for the tasty omelets. It was close by, never busy, and, most importantly, cheap as fuck. In Seattle, cheap as fuck was about as rare a find as spotting Sasquatch out in the mountains.

“And Mars?” she sighed, and I could all but see her sinking back into the booth that was more duct-tape and cracked laminate than cushion. “Happy Birthday, my dude.”

“Thanks, Sor.”

“My girl’s finally twenty-one,” she said, raising her voice again, this time without threat. The frat boys whooped in the background, followed by a gruff groan that I was certain belonged to Frank. “Hurry up and help me celebrate. This whiskey—” She paused a beat, and I could feel her light buzz melting away any of the lingering tension with its warmth. “Bourbon?” She chuckled. “I’m going to be so fucking for real, I don’t actually know the difference. Whatever it is, it’s not going to drink itself.”

“Ten minutes.” I grinned, ending the call and sliding my phone back into my pocket.

My hurried walk transformed into a light jog, Sora’s contagious enthusiasm enough to hush some of my own tension and exhaustion?—

Until the breath was pulled from my lungs, and I jolted backwards, my arms flailing wildly in an attempt to avoid following the rest of me to the ground.

But a force pulled me back, straightening me before my ass hit the pavement.

I grunted from the whiplash, frozen as a bus slammed into the crosswalk I should have been standing in.

My heart beat loud and angry in my ears as I processed the close miss.

I tried to take a breath, but my chest still felt tight, my body sizzling with adrenaline. My ears buzzed with the sound of my blood rushing, like I was suddenly acutely aware of every molecule I was composed of.

Close was an understatement. I’d been half a second away from delivering up corpse pancake.

When I looked down, I found a large, pale hand wrapped around my forearm like a vise.

It was, perhaps, strange to describe a hand as beautiful, but that was the immediate thought my just-rescued brain plucked and served up for me to linger on. The fingers were thin and smooth, and I felt their warmth sear my skin through my jacket. The hand’s porcelain skin looked soft and velvety, save for the light puckering of veins that appeared unusually dark in comparison.

I glanced up.

The hand was attached to an equally beautiful man.

Messy but stylish silver-white hair, dark brows, pale skin covered in intricate tattoos that snaked up his neck. And the eyes—they were a color I couldn’t quite decide on. Dark green, flecks of amber, almost hazel, but unlike any hazel eyes I’d ever seen. If mesmerizing came in a shade, this was it.

Those eyes were also not looking at me but staring down at where the beautiful hand gripped my arm.

Still.

The man’s brows were bent in confusion, the corner of his mouth pinched in some expression I couldn’t decipher.

I opened my mouth, intending to thank him for the save, but instead loudly barked, “I don’t really like being touched.”

I felt heat crawl up my neck and bloom across my cheeks.

My brain was so far from being on my side today.

The man blinked a few times, shifting as if he’d just woken from a daydream. With a so-brief-I-might’ve-imagined-it squeeze, he peeled his perfect fingers away.

“Sorry . . . I . . .” I shook my head, turning to stare at the now very gone bus, feeling absurdly grateful, but still more than a little shocked, that bits of me weren’t currently whirring unpleasantly through its wheels like a baseball card in a ten-year-old’s bike spokes. A dark, heavy laugh tugged from my throat at the image. “I should be so beyond dead right now. I . . . Thank you.”

But when I turned around, I found myself alone.

I scanned the intersection. Tall, tattooed men didn’t exactly just blend into their immediate surroundings, impossible to pick out.

Except for this one.

Right.

“Thank you,” I yelled, louder this time, hoping the wind might carry my gratitude to wherever he’d disappeared to.

An older man across the street shot me a confused look while he tugged his terrier’s leash to hurry away.

“I’m fine,” I yelled to him, then again, quietly to myself, “I’m fine.”

I took a deep breath, my fingers still shaking with adrenaline and my forearm still tingling with the memory of the man’s touch, before I remembered the frat boys and Sora.

The street was quiet and still; the man nowhere in sight.

But for some reason, even as late as I was, I couldn’t let it go.

On the left corner, I noticed a small alley carved into a tangle of trees. It was a path that eventually led down to Ravenna Park.

Had he turned down there?

I weighed the possibility. Sora’s rule was to never walk through the park alone, but it was daylight and hardly anyone was around.

I turned towards the trees, following the twists and turns. My boots gracelessly snapped twigs and decaying plant matter in my path, until it eventually opened up into a familiar view.

It was a stunning park, and I loved how small I always felt walking down the steep steps to the main loop.

Even with the sun out, the stretch of forest felt dark, the trees tall and twisting in a way that could only be described as enchanting. Down here, it was hard to believe that I was in the middle of a big, bustling city.

A squirrel chittered nearby, winding up a thick trunk, its tiny claws scratching into the bark.

A loud caw reverberated through the air, punctuated by the response of another crow and the soft whir of the creek.

Other than the furry and feathered creatures, it appeared like I was completely alone. The man’s silvery hair should be easy enough to pick out of the dark foliage if he’d come through here.

I wasn’t sure why I was so intent on finding him, on making him hear and accept my thanks. He’d obviously been in a rush, had thought nothing of it. As if casually saving a stranger was just par for the course.

But it was a big deal.

Not just because I was, you know, alive, but because it was today, and I was alive.

Today was my birthday, but it was also the anniversary of my mother’s death.

And Amto Amani’s.

And Rina’s.

And, as of six years ago, it was also the anniversary of the one and only time I’d ever intentionally taken someone’s life.

The same day Sora and I escaped to our freedom.

We’d been celebrating a birthday I’d otherwise tried to forget ever since. Her rule, not mine. She’d dubbed six years ago the official breaking of my curse—Anniversary Extraordinaire. Not that she’d ever really believed that I was cursed in the first place.

Her theory was that my fixation with death was just a manifestation of unprocessed trauma and bad luck. It was a theory my old therapist shared as well, and one I tried desperately to believe.

“Their deaths were a coincidence, Mars. They had nothing to do with you. Curses and bad omens aren’t real.”

Never mind that everyone I’d ever let myself get close to—except for Sora—had kicked the bucket.

But, more or less, she was kind of right.

Not because people I knew stopped dying.

I couldn’t seem to get away from death—not entirely.

We were all susceptible to his call, eventually, weren’t we?

But no one particularly close to us had died on my birthday since we’d escaped. As absurd as it might have seemed, I clung to that truth with every fiber of my being. A truth that Sora spent the other three-hundred-sixty-four days of the year drilling into me.

This was the one day I let myself think that she was right.

My brain believed things far wilder than broken curses after all, there was no reason I couldn’t force it into believing this reality as well.

And, well, I wasn’t currently roadkill, so maybe there was something to her half-baked theory.

“Right,” I whispered to myself, tugging the collar of my jacket close against my jaw. A dark chill carved along my neck, striking down to my feet.

As beautiful as it was, there was something unsettling about being down here alone, like I was in another world altogether. Sunlight crept through the foliage in iridescent stripes, highlighting dust and particles in the air until they looked almost like fairy dust. The air tasted strange—metallic and briny—and pulsed with a strange static that had the hair on my arms lifting with anticipation.

And then time seemed to stop.

My fingers grew stiff, my vision slightly blurry, and I felt the familiar current run through my body that preceded most panic attacks. The energy coursing through me was at odds with the general peace of the park—like my body was having a deferred reaction to the bus that nearly ran me over.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, waiting for my still-racing heart to realize I was fine and regulate itself back to a normal beat.

“Ground yourself, Mars.”

Sora’s frequent words echoed through my mind, as if she was here. Normally, I’d roll my eyes and ignore them. But now, I latched onto them as if they were the final thin ledge keeping me from toppling over the cliff.

Pressing the pad of my right thumb against the cool metal of my ring, I focused on the light, minty taste of toothpaste lining my tongue, on the soft, musical bird calls floating around me.

After a few minutes, it worked. My body regulated its way back to functionality.

I grabbed my arm, placing my fingers over where the man had held onto me, forcing myself to unbraid the strange feeling that his touch had rooted. I’d never seen him before; there was really no reason for me to be so shaken by the encounter.

It was probably just emotional transfer and gratitude from the rescue.

He didn’t just stand there and watch me die.

The bar for men was truly on the ground.

I shook my head. I didn’t have time for this.

Frank’s.

I was late. Thanks to this distraction, I was definitely way past my ten-minute promise to Sora.

Opening my eyes, I turned back towards the path.

Before I broke out into a run—effectively undoing the whole calm-heart-thing—I froze.

A few feet away, half-hidden next to a pile of leaves, was a small, black, furry lump.

One that had just risen and deflated, as if taking a breath.

I squinted, trying to focus on it as I crept closer.

Not a lump.

A crow.

I crouched down, my fingers hovering a few inches away from the small head, unsure of what to do.

I waited, staring at the bird’s chest, hoping for it to take another puff of air.

The feathers of its right wing were ruffled, the appendage bent at a strange angle as if it had recently been injured.

Its eyes were closed, beak scarred and slightly parted so that it looked like it was simply trapped in a peaceful dream.

But I knew it was a dream it wouldn’t wake from again.

The poor little guy was dead.

My chest tightened at the realization, and I fell back on my ass until I was sitting next to the unfortunate thing.

So, Death had reared his ugly head again after all—just when I thought I’d pulled one over on him.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered to the bird, feeling only slightly ridiculous. “This—this is probably my fault. Somehow.”

The limits of my curse were a little unclear, but something told me the crow got caught in the crosshairs.

I cleared some of the debris away from the crow, a sorry attempt at making its resting place a bit nicer, more intentional.

Was this the cost of sparing my own life today?

Would this bird have died if I hadn’t followed the strange pull that led me into the park?

It felt wrong to simply leave it here—not when I’d watched it take its last breath, the final witness to its existence.

While I’d grown accustomed to Death’s haunting, I was never sure how to handle the aftermath.

It didn’t make sense, and hardly seemed fair, that this bird was alive one second ago and now it was just gone—empty—with no one here to properly mourn it. To say goodbye.

I searched around, looking for something, though I wasn’t sure what.

I fiddled unconsciously with the silver beads of my ring. I paused, warring with myself for a moment before I tugged it off.

“Crows like shiny things, don’t they?” My voice was loud and rough, at odds with the quiet solitude of the woods. I was suddenly hyper aware of the fact that I was an interloper here.

I set the ring down on the bird’s chest, feeling suddenly absurd and ridiculous.

It was one of those cheap fidget rings. I found it in a resale shop last week.

I wore a much nicer one on my other hand. Someone had given it to me awhile back—an attempt to keep me from picking at my nails and fingers. Now, I felt naked whenever I left the house without it.

It didn’t cure my anxiety or anything, but it did give it something to do , and sometimes that was all I needed to push through the particularly restless moments.

I didn’t have a sentimental attachment to this new one. In fact, I’d half gotten it as a sorry attempt to divorce myself from the sentimentality of the other one. It hadn’t worked. I still couldn’t leave the house without the original ring.

This one though, I could leave behind with the crow—a final offering of sorts.

With a hesitant finger, I pet the smooth feathers along the crow’s neck, marveling at the range of colors reflected against them—black, teal, and blue, like an oil slick. “Rest easy, little gu?—”

There was a loud, resounding crack that reverberated through my skull as if it had originated there.

The world went sharp and then hazy, until my vision blurred away altogether.

What felt like a hook curled beneath my ribs, ripping and pulling something from me as a scream pierced the woods.

The sharp, broken sound echoed around me, until I realized it was coming from my throat.

All air rushed from my lungs, and I was jerked up and away from where I’d been seated, the fresh pricks of twigs and thorns scraping against my arms and cheeks wherever I landed.

Pain lacerated through me as I choked on something thick and liquid, tasting of metal.

I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak, couldn’t move.

Couldn’t even see a goddamn thing.

Panicking, I mentally thrashed at whatever strange power held me in its grasp.

In the emptiness, my mind conjured up images of a man with ink-black hair that curled over amber eyes. It had been eleven years since I’d last seen him in person, but his features were tattooed behind my eyelids with crystal clarity, an ever-enduring promise that we’d meet again.

Death.

He was here.

It was finally time.

Liquid fire coursed through my veins as I suffocated on my own blood. I fought desperately against him, spitting and cursing at the cruel fate that had already stolen so much from me.

It was a futile fight; the strain did nothing but drain me faster.

I didn’t care. I fought harder.

Death was relentless, but so was I.

Rage boiled and gurgled in my blood, as I fought inside a body that disobeyed every order I gave it—until, all at once, everything went silent.