Page 21 of Veil of Death and Shadow (Order of Reapers #1)

21

MAREENA

Approximately Eight Years Ago, Two Years Before The Undoing

“ H ey!” A white woman with long, red hair and impeccably applied eyeliner reached out for Sora as we made our way towards the back door of the bus. “It’s you!”

She had a gentle twang to her voice that was rare to hear this far north.

“Oh hey—” Sora paused, pursing her lips, her eyes narrowed as she tried to place the girl, “you.” I bit back my grin. Sora was many things, but a good liar was not one of them. She clearly had no fucking clue who this woman was. After a long moment, she gave up. “Sorry, my memory is shit. Do we know each other?”

“I thought so, maybe,” the woman said, her face twisted in confusion. “You look so familiar. I just can’t quite place your face.”

“It is the kind of face you remember,” Sora responded with a teasing smirk. “You live in the area? Maybe we’ve run into each other somewhere in the neighborhood.”

“No,” the woman’s face fell, “I don’t. Visiting family.” She studied her, thinking for a second, then shook her head. “Weird, I could have sworn we’ve met before. Church, maybe?” she snapped her fingers, realization softening her expression. “That big, culty one just outside of Portland, right? My family was sucked into it for a few months a while back.”

I snorted. Sora hadn’t been to church a day in her life. This was either the most awkward pick-up attempt I’d ever seen, or she had the wrong woman.

“Sorry, that definitely doesn’t sound like me,” Sora said, waving a quick apology to the bus driver who was sending us a death glare through the mirror above him. We were the ones who’d requested this stop and now we were holding up the route. “Must be somebody else. Sorry, this is my stop but enjoy the rest of your visit!”

He started to close the doors, so I grabbed her arm and tugged her between them before the bus took off with us still on it.

“Rude,” she said, her eyes dancing with amusement as she straightened her dress and got her bearings. “I don’t see your boyfriend.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” I said, a little too defensively.

She shot me a snarky look and shrugged. “Whatever you say. Wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, would it?”

“I don’t do?—”

“Relationships,” she sighed. “Yes, Mars, I know. I’m just saying, maybe this time you should reconsider. What are you going to do, be alone forever?”

“Course not,” I bumped my shoulder into her. “I have you.”

“Obviously. Till death do us part, but you know what I mean.” She narrowed her eyes, studying me. “Unless you’re not attracted to him, of course?”

“I’m not.” Though I knew we both heard the lie in my voice.

“Well,” she scuffed her sneaker against a gap in the sidewalk, “I’m just saying, it would be okay if you were. I just want you to be happy.”

“I am happy. I don’t need anyone to be happy.”

“Clearly.” Deciding to be magnanimous for once, Sora let it slide, then looked down the street. “Where is he anyway?”

“Right here,” a deep, gravelly voice echoed behind me.

I flinched, then spun around to find Levi a few feet away from us.

How long had he been there? And was it long enough that he’d caught the last few seconds of our conversation?

Fuck. Heat crawled up my neck.

“Assuming it was me you were looking for.” He glanced at me for a moment, concern on his face. “Everything okay? You seem tense.”

“Yeah,” I said, relaxing a little. If he’d heard us, he was doing a damn good job of pretending otherwise. “You should know better than to sneak up on someone like that though. I know how to throw a mean right hook now. If I had,” I pinched my pointer finger and thumb together, “even slightly slower reflexes, you’d be knocked out on the sidewalk right now.”

“Hello to you, too,” he said, his face splitting into a bemused, crooked grin that made my stomach dip.

Sora wrapped her arms around him in one of her vise-like hugs. “Good to see you again, Levi. You ready to go to the best place in all of Seattle?”

When she disentangled herself from him, he shifted towards me, arms open like he expected me to step into them.

“She doesn’t do hugs,” Sora said, swatting his arms down.

“I don’t do hugs,” I confirmed.

“Noted.” He nodded, his mouth dipping down at the corners briefly, before he studied the intersection. “So,” he scratched his head, “this is the most magical place in Seattle?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Sora beamed up at him, “this is just near where we catch our next bus. I had a class in Columbia City earlier.” Sora ran her fingers through my dark waves, a devious expression on her face. “Mars was my model today. Doesn’t her hair look great?”

My cheeks warmed under his appraisal, and I found myself trying to look anywhere but at the clear approval on his face.

I shoved Sora’s hands away from my head.

“It does,” he said.

“Not that she let me do anything particularly fun,” she sniffed, “only cut a few inches.”

“I let you near my head with scissors,” I narrowed my eyes at her, “that’s all the fun you get for now. We can talk again when you graduate.”

She’d spent half of our trip to her studio today trying to convince me to let her dye my hair ten different shades of pink or try out the rainbow stripes a friend of hers recently got done at a local salon. And it took the second half of the trip to settle on a compromise—only a trim, but if she stopped arguing with me about it, then she could come hang out with me and Levi afterwards, since he’d be in town for a few hours this afternoon.

Never mind that Levi had already asked me to invite her.

Since we’d spent most of her house party a few months ago avoiding the actual party, she’d been endlessly begging me for a chance to get to know him better.

“You know,” she said, steering us in the direction of our connecting stop, her eyes sliding deviously over Levi, “I could give you a quick trim later, too, if you’d like.” She clicked her fingers together like scissors. “I need to bring in more practice models. But I promise that I’m actually pretty decent.”

“I can see that,” he said, slowing his pace to match mine. “I’ll mull it over next time I’m in need of a haircut.”

“Just be—” I stopped, forgetting whatever it was I was about to say, my focus locked on a small bar. There was something strange about it, something I couldn’t quite place. I had the oddest urge to walk in, even though I had no desire for a drink and knew they couldn’t serve me one even if I did.

“Mars?” Sora waved her hand in front of my face when I didn’t respond. “Hey, what’s up?”

“You okay?” Levi asked, his brows furrowed.

“Yeah,” I nodded, “yeah I’m fine.” I glanced over at Sora, though tugging my eyes away from the bar required an unusual amount of effort. “Sor, you know this place?”

“Uh,” she arched her brow, studying me, “what place?”

“This bar?” I asked, gesturing at the very large, very obvious building in front of me. “I don’t think I’ve noticed it before.”

“You mean the janky looking abandoned building with boards over the windows?” She squinted, then shrugged. “No.”

I processed Sora’s words, then did a double take. What was she talking about?

The building was maybe a little divey, but it looked clean. Far better off than Mac’s or Frank’s or any of the other local holes-in-the-wall where we spent our time.

A man with dark red hair walked out, lit a cigarette, and then leaned against the wall, studying us with mild interest.

“We should go.” Levi cracked each of the knuckles in his left hand, his shoulders tense. “Don’t want to miss the bus.”

“Huh,” Sora blinked a few times, frowning. “I guess it is a bar. Weird. Never noticed it.”

“You coming in or what?” the man asked, his eyes scraping over me in a way that made me suddenly feel naked.

“No,” Levi said, his tone clipped. “She’s not.”

“Suit yourselves.” The man shrugged, snuffed the cigarette he’d taken maybe two puffs of out on the bottom of his heel, and went back inside.

“Let’s go, Mareena,” Levi said, his voice low and urgent, as he pressed his palm to the small of my back.

Normally, I would bristle at the contact, but I found that I strangely needed it. I couldn’t quite pull myself away.

With quick steps, Levi ushered me towards Sora, who’d already resumed her walk as if we were never interrupted, completely oblivious of the creepy dude.

We reached the stop in relative silence.

Levi was oddly tense, and uncharacteristically focused on his phone, while Sora checked her app for the next arrival.

The bus pulled up after a few minutes, and once we were seated, Levi relaxed a bit, though he kept darting glances out the window.

“So,” he said after a few more minutes of silence, “where is it we’re going again?”

“It’s a surprise.” Sora was in the row of seats in front of us, but she’d twisted around so that she was facing us, her chin resting between two headrests. “You’re not afraid of dogs, are you?”

Levi shook his head, an amused look on his face.

“Good. Then it won’t be a bad surprise.”

I snorted, then leaned back, feeling suddenly exhausted and deeply grateful to get a chance to sit for the next twenty or so minutes.

I closed my eyes, listening with amusement as Sora drilled Levi with questions. He was a good sport about it and surprisingly answered most of them, only occasionally steering her gently away from whichever topics he wasn’t comfortable discussing. Which, for Levi, was anything that got too personal.

More surprising, though, was the fact that Sora didn’t fight him on his caginess or push for more information.

She liked him—I knew the dips in her tone well enough to tell—and something in me eased at that realization. I found that I wanted them to get along—a realization that then fucking terrified me.

Because that meant that I was getting used to Levi’s presence. Growing fond of it, even.

After a few minutes of silence, I felt him leaning closer to me, his breath warm against my cheek.

“Truth for truth?” he asked, his voice quiet.

I opened my eyes and noticed Sora’s head pressed against the glass.

I chuckled. She was asleep. This wasn’t an entirely surprising feat for her—she had a habit of burning hot and bright with excitement one second, and then crashing the next. Kind of like a toddler. Or a golden retriever.

“Okay.” I turned towards Levi, suddenly very much aware of how close he was. His shoulder brushed against mine every time the bus driver took a turn, and my stomach made an annoying lurch each time that it happened. “But I need to think of one.”

“You don’t like hugs,” he said, the sentence on the tip of his tongue, like he’d been doing his best to hold it in all this time. “Can you tell me why?”

I shrugged, dropping my eyes. It was too hard to focus when he was looking at me like that, all wide-eyed and curious, close enough that I could see the different shades of gray bleeding into each other.

“You don’t know, or you don’t want to talk about it?” he asked. “I can come up with a different question, if you’d rather something else.”

“No,” I shook my head. “It’s not that. I’m just trying to nail down the reason.” Truthfully, I couldn't quite identify the boundaries of the preference. It had changed over the years, becoming an uninterrogated fact about me. My memory bubbled with a vision of Blake, the way he’d often hold me down or lock me in somewhere, just to press Rina’s buttons—the acerbic terror that would crash through me like an unrelenting tide when he’d do more than simply hold me there. “In part, I think I don’t really like feeling restrained or being touched when I’m not expecting it.”

His expression shifted, eyes widening with concern. “That day, when I taught you how to fight . . . when I grabbed you?”

I nodded.

“I’m sorry,” he hissed. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

Many people said the words ‘I’m sorry’ like an afterthought, an impulsive phrase used to brush their own discomfort away. Levi said the words like he meant them, down to the marrow of his bones.

“That wasn’t your fault,” I said, blinking away the closeness of him and shifting my focus to the worn plastic on the seat in front of me. “You were teaching me to defend myself. It was a very expected next step, I’m just not . . . normal about that sort of thing, I guess.”

“Normal is relative,” he said, then added after a beat, “But you said in part. Is there another reason? Other than feeling restrained, I mean?”

A moment that felt impossibly long stretched between us like taffy.

My chest tightened as the edges of something much sharper than Blake’s cruelty curled into me—a truth I hadn’t whispered into life maybe ever. One I’d hardly even acknowledged to myself before now. “Yes, but you can’t laugh.”

“I wouldn’t,” he said, his voice dripping with earnestness.

“I didn’t used to hate hugs.” I kept my voice even, clinical—as if I was dissecting someone else’s memory. “I think I started associating bad things with hugs the day my aunt died. It was my birthday,” I added, as if the specificity of the date added distance to the pain. But then I remembered the smell of her, the waft of rosewater and mint that clouded her embrace, and clinical distance suddenly became more difficult to perform.

Levi’s fingers brushed against mine, the touch so featherlight and soft, there and then gone, that it could have been nothing more than an accidental brush, the natural result of the bus’s winding path along the bend in the road.

“She’d just given me my present, a family ring,” I continued, fiddling with the skin around my nail beds as if they held the key to compressing the imperceptible waver in my voice locked down. “The last thing I did was give her a giant hug. I ran to put the ring away, too afraid to wear it right then, like I might lose or damage it somehow, and when I came back into the kitchen, she collapsed. That’s . . . when she died.” I took a deep breath, dispelling the tightness in my chest and let out a forced laugh. “In the chaos of the aftermath, I didn’t even grab it—the ring I mean.”

Truthfully, other than the clothes that fit in one suitcase, I hadn’t brought anything when I was taken from her house. It was like, on some level, I knew that anything I held onto would carry the weight of those memories—the reminder of everything I’d lost.

“Anyway,” I exhaled, sinking deep against the stiff bus seat, “I know it seems ridiculous, and I know that my hug didn’t literally kill her. Of course, I understand that’s impossible.” I glanced up at him briefly, then turned away, trying to brush off the intensity of the moment, the way he so clearly hung on every word—as if he cared about this story as much as if it were one of his own. “But I think after that day, I just sort of internalized it on some level. That’s when I started really fixating on the whole curse thing. I’d more or less ignored the whispers of it before then, not really focusing on the family members who’d discarded me or overthinking about my parents. But once I lost the one person in my life who mattered, everything just sort of . . . shifted. Amto Amani wasn’t there to brush away the fear, to tell me I was being ridiculous. And I guess I just felt like I was, I don’t know—poisonous or contagious or something. And if there was even the slightest chance that I was?—”

He nodded, then finished the thought where I left it. “You’d rather not risk it.”

“Exactly. And after a while, hugs just felt so . . . heavy, I guess.” I glanced out the window and swore. “This is us.”

The trip had flown by so much faster than it usually did. Talking to Levi always had a way of making time feel like it was warped.

He pulled the string, requesting the stop, and I nudged Sora awake.

She jumped up, disoriented, but it took her less than a moment to realize where we were—and when she did, she grabbed mine and Levi’s hands, tugging us eagerly towards the exit.

I laughed, allowing her to pull me along, her excitement contagious.

The bus let off at a seemingly unremarkable park, and Levi shot me a confused, this-is-supposed-to-be-the-most-magical-place-in-Seattle look.

“Just wait,” Sora said, catching onto his doubt. “We’re not there yet.”

She led the way, then spun around when the trail opened up to the main event, so she could soak in his reaction.

Loud barks echoed around the parking lot, as we made our way through the gates.

Four giant dogs greeted us when we entered, a Great Dane leaving a trail of drool along Levi’s thigh.

“Isn’t it great?” Sora bent over to pet a pug who sounded like he was snoring, despite being wide awake.

“Your favorite place in the entire city is a dog park?” Levi tried to keep his expression flat and critical, but I could tell from the teasing tug at his lips that he was deeply amused by the turn of events.

“It gets better,” Sora said, with a squeal. She waved us towards her, an assortment of dogs following along after her as if she was the leader of their pack.

I scratched behind the pug’s left ear. He’d found a spot in the shade, and I had a feeling he wouldn’t be joining for the next leg of our journey.

“It’s kind of hard not to love this place,” I said, soaking in the warmth of the sun on my face. It was the first week of May, and the weather was just starting to get good. Another month or two, and it’d hopefully be hot enough to go for a non-arctic swim in the lake.

A large gray dog slid between us, and when I reached down to pet him, I accidentally found myself running my hand over the back of Levi’s.

I shifted quickly, patting the dog awkwardly on the head instead.

“Yeah.” Levi cleared his throat, then smiled, his dimple out in all its glory. “Yeah, I get that.”

We didn’t speak for a few minutes, and I was suddenly aware of how, even here, surrounded by dozens of dogs and their literal shit, my brain still seemed to find and focus on the scent that I was beginning to think of as distinctly Levi—woodsy and spicy, with just a touch of citrus.

The dog park opened out into a long trail, and we followed it, making friends with each of the dogs along the way, their zoomies taking them in every direction imaginable—some even carving paths directly through their humans. At least one guy’s ass was covered in dirt from a fall.

No one minded though. This place belonged to the dogs; we were just lucky enough to be a part of it for the afternoon.

Levi’s excitement dipped when he checked his phone, the line of concern between his brows deepening a bit before he slid it back in his pocket. This was the most I’d ever seen him use it before.

“Um,” I glanced over at him, trying not to be nosy, “everything okay?”

He nodded, his lips pressed in a tight line. “Yeah. Work stuff.”

He seemed to carry a peculiarly heavy load of work stress for someone his age. Part of me felt like that sort of adulting wasn’t supposed to come into play for another decade or so. But I also knew that his life outside of our . . . diet friendship was kept locked down pretty tight, so I nodded and let it drop. His life was truly none of my business, and I needed to keep reminding myself that I was the one who wanted it that way.

“This is the best part,” I said, not bothering to hold back my smile when we reached another set of gates.

The trail opened to a small beach, and there were at least ten dogs hopping and swimming in the lake. One had even gone so far as to greet a kayaker passing through the area.

Levi laughed, any visible tension he still carried shedding away instantly. “Dogs and the water?” The corner of his mouth twitched. “I can see why you love this place.”

When we reached the gravelly shoreline, I kicked off my shoes, peeled off my socks, and rolled my jeans up as high as they would go. Sora tossed her shoes on mine, and we waded into the water up to our mid-calves. Neither of us minded the biting chill of the water as a black retriever of some sort dropped a ball in front of us, begging Sora to toss it farther out.

Levi joined us, and we stayed out there watching the water and dogs frolic against the mountain line in the distance, soaking in the chaos of the scene for as long as we could stand—until well after we’d lost all sensation in our feet.

The walk back to the bus was chillier than it had been on the way out, but Sora kept us laughing through most of it and we made plans to grab an early dinner nearby, before heading back to our part of town.

But when we closed the gate behind us, leaving the happy dogs to their play, and walked towards the parking lot, the laughter dried up on Levi’s face, instantly, like some invisible hand had just turned off the tap, drought imminent.

His crooked grin transformed into something hard, and his posture went rigid, as a woman walked over to us, the expression on her face just as tight.

“Mom.” The word came out clipped, tinny, his jaw clenched. “What are you doing here?”

Mom? She didn’t look old enough to be his mother—unless she had him when she was absurdly young. Her hair was reddish brown; her skin a shade or two paler than Levi’s.

She was an inch or so shorter than me, and quite slim, but there was a severity in her posture that oozed control—power. If Levi told me she was an action figure model or the newest cast member in a superhero movie, it wouldn’t entirely shock me.

“You stop answering my texts and ignore my calls during a time like this, and what do you expect? Something’s changed and we need to go—now. There’s a chopper waiting for us.”

A chopper?

Who the hell were these people?

As if just noticing us, the woman—his mother apparently—studied us, the look in her eyes flat, like she found Sora and I decidedly unimpressive. She flared her nostrils, before drilling him with that terrifying stare of hers, some silent conversation passing between them that I wasn’t privy of.

“Really, Levi,” she said, her sheer exasperation finally breaking it. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately.”

“Mom—”

“Everything in the state that it’s in—and this is what you’re up to?” She gestured behind us. “A dog park with,” her eyes slid to us before gripping him in her stare again, “with these girls? Stealing into the night, disappearing for days on end. You’re getting sloppy?—”

“How did you find me?”

“You were supposed to be prepping for a mission. You weren’t. And then you stopped responding to your phone, so I tracked it.”

A mission? Who the fuck did she think he was—James Bond?

“Thought something might’ve happened to you, or gone wrong, or—” She took a deep breath and straightened her posture, her voice quiet but firm when her eyes met his again. “We don’t have time for this. Wipe them, and let’s go.”

Wipe them?

Sora’s questioning gaze met mine and I offered a barely perceptible shrug in return.

I had no fucking clue what this was about.

“Mom,” he snapped, his expression dark and so unlike anything I was used to seeing on his face.

“Now, Levi. This isn’t a discussion.” She shot him a look of disbelief, like whatever she was asking was the most obvious thing in the world. “I’ll see you at the car. We’re down the block. Two minutes. Take care of it.”

Without so much as another glance in our direction, she spun on her heels and left.

He watched her silently until she disappeared around a corner, the lines of his back rigid.

“I’ll uh,” Sora glanced between us, “give you guys a minute. See you later, Levi. We’ll do dinner another time I guess.”

She walked back towards the fence to greet the new dogs making their way inside, until it was just me and Levi and a static silence that seemed to suck the air from around us.

“You okay?” I asked, not entirely sure where to start.

“Yeah.” He scratched the back of his head, the movement stilted with frustration he was trying his best to contain. “Fine.”

“Levi,” I said, shifting slightly until his eyes met mine. “What was that about? Your mom?—”

“Sorry about that, she can be . . . intense.”

“Yeah, that’s one word for it.” I tried to map what he’d told me about her onto the woman I’d just met—the person he spent most of his time with. She was definitely intense, a bit terrifying if I was being honest, but she’d seemed legitimately concerned about him—worried enough to track him. Which was both peculiar and . . . intense. “What exactly does your family do, Levi? And what did she mean—” I searched for the phrase she’d used, “wipe us?”

“She didn’t mean anyth—” he started to say, but then he thought better of it when he saw me readying to call bullshit. “Some secrets are good, necessary, even,” he said instead, echoing my words from months ago back to me. “Can you just trust me on this, Mareena? The less you know, the better. I don’t want to lie to you, but I can’t tell you this truth either.”

I took a deep breath, studying him, trying to decide what that meant—trusting someone who had the kinds of secrets that he and his family clearly had. At the silent plea in his eyes, any hesitation I had dissipated when I exhaled.

I’d kept impossibly big secrets—to keep myself safe, to keep Sora safe.

Maybe Levi was protecting someone he loved, too.

“Fine,” I said, “but you still owe me a truth next time I see you. And you better make it a good one, or no deal.”

“I can do that.” His lips curved into the start of a smile, but then they dipped back down into a straight line just as quickly. “I should probably go.”

I nodded, not sure what else to say into the unusually awkward void now gaping between us.

He turned to leave, took two steps, then turned back. “Can you do me one more favor?”

I arched my brow in question.

“Can you—can you not go to that weird bar we saw today? The one earlier, on the way to the bus stop?”

“I, uh—” Confusion stole any chance I had at coherence. I wasn’t sure what favor I’d been expecting him to ask for, but that was as far from a possibility as it could get. “Huh?” was all I landed on.

“Promise me, Mareena.” His eyes were dark and urgent, and they drilled into me with relentless desperation. “Please.”

“Okay,” I said, not bothering to ask, because I knew I wouldn’t be getting any more information if I did. “I won’t. Promise.”

“Good.” His shoulders relaxed slightly. “Thank you.”

I held his gaze for an impossibly full moment, all of the new, unsaid strangeness churning question after question in my mind.

“I think my two minutes are up,” he said, looking suddenly exhausted and so much older and more worn out than he had ten minutes ago. “I better go.”

He was a few feet away before I found myself calling out his name.

When he turned back, my chest tightened at the sight of him, like something big had shifted, but I didn’t understand what.

“Promise me you’ll be careful,” I said, hating how vulnerable my voice sounded, how vulnerable I suddenly felt.

His lips twitched. “Deal.”