Page 22 of Veil of Death and Shadow (Order of Reapers #1)

22

MAREENA

Present Day

“ W hat the hell are you doing here?” Kieran asked, his voice low and laced with an edge I hadn’t encountered from him before.

The man walked towards us.

Like Kieran, his arms were covered in ink, the edges of some design on his chest peeking out from beneath the collar of his shirt. His eyes were so dark that it was almost impossible to discern between iris and pupil, and there was a jagged scar etched through his right eyebrow.

He was attractive, but as he studied Kieran, his face was carved in what seemed to be a permanent scowl. He’d spared me only the briefest of glances before deciding I was apparently not worth his interest.

But it was his hands that had my blood running suddenly cold. Looped around his fingers was a set of rings. Rings that were identical to Kieran’s. Was this guy another guardian angel? He looked even more dangerous and menacing than Kieran did, which meant that angels were clearly nothing like the ones in the stories we’d all been fed.

“What do you mean what am I doing here?” he snarled in a subtle British accent. “You were supposed to report to the Order days ago. Rafi sent me to see what the holdup was.” His dark gaze slanted in my direction again, before shifting back to Kieran. “And apparently, you’ve just been wasting our time, gallivanting with the living. Really Kieran,” he shot him a look of disgust, “didn’t have you pegged as someone who’d risk the Order’s wrath for a plaything that can see the dead. Are you truly that desperate for a taste of this world?”

“Watch it, Thorne,” Kieran snapped. “I mean it.”

“Or what?” He smirked, which somehow only made him look more threatening. “We don’t have time to pander to your every whim. You were given a job, and you haven’t completed it. You don’t belong here, you don’t control the fates, and you should’ve been back two days ago.”

The fates? What the fuck was he talking about?

“You’ve checked up on me like a good little soldier,” Kieran said, inching in front of me, like he wanted to keep me out of sight. “Now go home and tell Rafi that I’ll return when I’m done with my assignment.”

The man, Thorne apparently, bared his teeth. “I was ordered not to return without you.”

“Since when do you follow orders?”

Thorne’s hands flexed into fists.

“I’ve seen you before,” I said, stepping out from behind Kieran’s shadow, attempting to dispel the visceral tension building between the two men. “A few days after The Undoing. There was a vampire and a werewolf.” I took a deep breath, steeling myself under the weight of Thorne’s stare now that it was burrowing into me instead of Kieran. “They couldn’t see you though. Neither could my friend.”

There was a woman heading in our direction, but she only shot me an alarmed look, before crossing the street to give us a wide berth.

“So,” I said, glancing between the two men. “I take it that means you’re dead, too?” Which meant that, to the rest of the world, I was in the middle of a dark street, talking to myself. Great.

Well, that was one way to keep people at a distance.

Something flashed in Thorne’s eyes—a watered down version of surprise, maybe. He studied me again, with slightly more attention this time. Not like I was someone worthy of his attention, but like I was gum stuck to the bottom of his shoe. A nuisance he was trying to figure out how to rid himself of as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Kieran stiffened, inching closer to me.

“I’m Mareena,” I said, awkwardly extending my hand out to him.

Thorne only scowled at it.

“This is Hawthorne,” Kieran said, his jaw tight. “But everyone calls him Thorne.”

I gave him a tight smile, offering the vitriol he served up right back to him. “Suits you.”

“Exactly.” Kieran grunted, before adding a mumbled, “Been nothing but a thorn in my ass since the moment I met him.”

“Are you a guardian angel, too, or another ghost-phantom-thing like Claudine?” I asked, fidgeting with my ring, as I tried to assess if this guy was a legitimate threat, or just a friend of Keiran’s whose factory setting came with a stick shoved so far up his ass that it addled his brain. “Or . . . something else, maybe?”

“Fucking hell, Kieran,” Thorne spat out, his eyes shining with venom as they lasered in on Kieran’s hand. It was getting worse, the veins black as tar as they branched up his forearm. “You can’t be serious.”

“Hawthorne,” Kieran said, his voice dipping into a warning growl. He adjusted his sleeve until it covered his arm.

Instead of answering me, the two of them got caught in some silent staring version of a pissing contest. That, or maybe they could communicate telepathically. Kieran hadn’t exactly been expansive when describing his powers or the various forms and occupations of the dead.

“Stay here for a minute, Agony,” Kieran finally said. “Thorne and I need to have a brief chat in private.”

Without waiting for my response, they walked off.

So . . . apparently, they couldn’t telepathically communicate then. At least that was one answer down. More than I usually got out of Kieran.

For five minutes I watched the two of them argue down the block, just out of earshot.

They were tense, the silent threat of aggression baked into every line of their bodies.

I glanced down at the business card Villette had so reluctantly parted with, my focus split between the shady new arrival and devising the fastest route to the address. Thorne was not part of tonight’s plan. We didn’t have time for this.

Kieran’s gaze sought me out every minute or so, almost like he didn’t trust that I would listen to him, that I would wait. And honestly, maybe I shouldn’t.

Judging from Kieran’s absolute refusal to stop stalking me, I’d been under the impression that guardian angels were supposed to stick to their charges like glue. He’d said as much, hadn’t he? That we were bound, and he couldn’t leave until his job was finished?

Not that I knew what finished even looked like for a guardian angel on duty. He hadn’t been particularly forthcoming about that either.

But Thorne made it sound like Kieran’s constant presence wasn’t actually necessary. Maybe he was just supposed to check in occasionally, see how I was doing—watch from afar. If Kieran had other things to do, he was free to leave. It wasn’t like I’d asked for a perma-stalker.

I ignored the hollow dip in my stomach when I thought about the possibility of him doing just that. I knew he wouldn’t be around forever or anything, but I’d kind of grown used to his hovering, incessant presence over the last couple of days. And after what had just happened in Incendiary . . .

Fuck, was I getting attached to a dead guy now?

What the hell was wrong with me?

Maybe it would be better if I just left now, while they were distracted—saved us all the trouble before things got messier.

Sora was missing; I had my own stuff to handle. I most certainly did not need to get caught up in the drama of the dead. And, judging by their posture and the deep snarl on Thorne’s face, they weren’t any closer to working out their disagreement.

Soft, laughing voices echoed down the street as a group of people, each of them dressed to the nines, made their way towards Incendiary. The night was still young, which meant that if I moved quickly, I could probably make it to the bar before last call.

Decided, I spun on my heels and started walking away, doing everything in my power to ignore the heavy pang in my chest at the thought of leaving without saying goodbye to Kieran.

I brushed the guilt away with a deep, steady breath. We were tethered. If he wanted or needed to find me whenever they were done hashing their shit out, he could. In the meantime, I had a best friend to track down.

Sora was the thing that mattered above all else. Kieran was just a temporary fixture in my life. Sora was my home.

I’d only been walking for a few minutes when I felt a presence at my back. With as much subtlety as I could muster, I slid my apartment key between my fingers and spun around, holding the makeshift claw up in front of me.

Kieran’s brow arched in vacant amusement that melted into a small frown. “Thought I said don’t move.”

Thorne stood next to him, staring down at me like I was gum again.

“You clearly have stuff to do,” I said, hating the rush of relief that flooded me at his nearness, “and I need to go find Sora. We can check in,” I glanced at Thorne, “you know, later.”

“No can do, Agony,” Kieran shook his head, then wrapped his arm over my shoulders, turning me back in the direction I’d been walking. “I’m your shadow until my job is done.”

We started walking, Thorne following behind us a few paces like a storm cloud.

“You did your job,” I said. “I’m sure you’ve got other charges to track down and haunt. I can take things from here.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” he said.

“And your friend?” I glanced back at him, flinching at the dark look in his eyes.

Thorne made a deep rumbling sound. “Friend is not the word I’d use.”

“He’s free to do as he wishes,” Kieran said. “I’m not his keeper. I’m yours.”

“So,” I said, after a long, drawn-out minute of silence that was starting to make me itchy from the discomfort of it, “are you a guardian angel, too, Thorne?”

Kieran started to answer, “More or le?—”

“No,” Thorne said, cutting him off. “I’m a reaper.”

Kieran rolled his eyes, a muscle ticking in his jaw.

I stopped my stride, letting that world roll over me. “As in, like,” I tried to form the shape of a scythe with my hand, but it ended up looking more like a bad impression of Captain Hook, “grim?”

Thorne, who’d apparently only momentarily forgotten that I wasn’t worthy of his attention, went back to glaring at me in a silence that screamed rage.

“We’re part of the same order,” Kieran said, chewing over his words slowly. “I protect and guide people. He devours them.”

Thorne snorted.

“How,” I glanced up at the ominous figure, “lovely.”

Thorne narrowed his eyes, and I shivered under his stare. His vibes definitely suited his career path, that much was clear.

Sensing that I’d gotten all that I was going to get out of either of them, I focused on navigation, and we spent the rest of the journey in relative silence. And in that silence, I felt the heaviness of the unspoken closeness between Kieran and I fall over us both. We couldn’t exactly talk about it now. Something told me that would only sour Thorne’s mood more, if such a thing was possible.

Kieran made it very clear early on that any kind of relations were forbidden between a guardian and his charge, and I had a feeling that Thorne wouldn’t take sex-club magic as a solid excuse for rule-bending.

Truthfully, I was almost thankful for the discomfort of the situation. It slowed my anxiety spiral that had been deepening every second since we’d left Incendiary.

Between Rex and Lav, what the hell had Sora gotten herself twisted up in? And how the fuck was I going to get her untangled from it?

Why hadn’t she come to me about it?

Probably because she knew me well enough to know that I’d do everything in my power to stop her. But now look at the mess we were in. Best case, I’d show up at this bar and find her casually sipping on a beer beside Lav the vampire. Worst case . . .

I did my best not to linger on it.

When we finally found ourselves outside of the bar, exhausted and sore from an unexpectedly long walk, I froze, the sudden flare of recognition like a knife to my chest.

Kieran glanced down at me. “Everything okay? You change your mind?” Then, after a beat, “We can go home—maybe Sora came back? Or we can try again tomorrow.”

“No.” I swallowed, trying to bring some moisture back to my tongue. It had been years since I’d even thought of this place, but now the memory came flooding back at full force. The bar hadn’t changed much, but I didn’t feel that strange, intense draw to it that I remembered feeling all those years ago. “It’s just . . . I’ve been here before. It,” I licked my lips, “took me by surprise is all.”

A burly redhead burst through the door, the loud bang of the door echoing in the otherwise empty lot. There were two men with him. He dragged them both by the collars of their shirts, as if they were a pair of unruly school boys.

“You know the rules,” the redhead said with a snarl, “not in here. Lucky Claude is in yet, or he’d slap a ban on you both. That, or he’d just take your heads for pulling this shit in his bar.”

He tossed them with the sort of casual force one might use to toss a bag of trash into a dumpster. A cloud of dust and gravel softened their landing. Not wasting a moment, the two men locked into a wrestling match with each other, moving with a speed and ferocity that no human could ever manage.

The redhead nodded in our direction, his eyes roving over me in a way that was very obviously assessing me beyond my threat level. “You coming in or not?”

I tugged at my dress, wishing it covered up more of my body than it did.

“This is a bad idea,” Kieran said, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. “I can’t protect you in there.”

“We’re not leaving.” I whispered the words out of the corner of my mouth. The last thing I needed was the bouncer thinking I was talking to myself.

“Agony—”

“You said I needed to find my joy,” I said. “There’s no joy without Sora. Feel free to wait out here if you want.”

I stepped around the fighting muscle tornado and smiled up at the bouncer. “I am.”

He gave me another weighty appraisal and opened the door.

“Well,” Thorne said, breaking his silence, “at least this should move things along nicely.”

A low growl vibrated in Kieran’s chest as I stepped over the threshold into a bar I’d promised years ago that I would never enter.