Page 25 of Veil of Death and Shadow (Order of Reapers #1)

25

MAREENA

Present Day

C laude’s car was one of those that didn’t require an actual metal key for the ignition. There was a large button next to the wheel, but no fob in sight. After checking the glove compartment, the small little compartment under the rearview mirror, and under the seat, I was quickly losing confidence that Claude had been cavalier enough to leave it here for easy swiping.

“Well,” Kieran sighed from the backseat. “This was a good, not at all batshit idea and all, but I think we’re going to need a Plan B. Preferably one with a little more rationality fueling it, if you don’t mind?”

There was a lone water bottle in the cupholder. It sat tilted at an awkward angle, like there was something beneath it, keeping it from sitting flush against the bottom.

I held my breath, with one eye closed, and picked it up.

The fob. I lifted the small piece of plastic with a triumphant cheer.

“Um, Agony?” Kieran scooched forward, extending his arm between me and Thorne. I followed his finger to its point—the front of the bar, about twenty feet away. Claude stepped out with the bouncer, the two of them locked in what appeared to be a friendly, business conversation—any anger I’d induced in the vampire, already seemed like a distant memory. Until he looked up. Claude’s eyes landed on mine, his expression moving swiftly through shock, then straight to rage. “Assuming you want to keep living, we need to leave. Now.”

My stomach clenched as I started the ignition. The gentle rumble of the engine jolted the car to life.

Right. What came next?

Thorne grunted beside me, clearly amused by the situation as Claude started marching towards us.

The vampire was surprisingly collected and in no evident rush, which worked in our favor. He didn’t think I was actually going to go through with it.

Then again, maybe I wasn’t. When I tried tugging the stick into reverse, it didn’t budge.

“Hit the brakes, shift to reverse, then step on the gas. Now,” Kieran screamed in my ear.

For once, I did as he demanded, no questions asked. The car shot backwards with surprising speed as I pressed the pedal to the floor. There was a loud crunching noise as the back bumper ran into what I could only hope was an abandoned fire hydrant, before I managed to hit the beaks again.

Claude’s restrained anger cracked into something fiercer, his neck and cheeks flushing as he assessed the damage to his car.

Kieran’s hands gripped the back of my seat. He was clearly trying to shake it, though his hold on this world was tenuous, and the cushion hardly even budged under the pressure. “Do the same thing but shift to drive. Go!”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I muttered. Just as Claude reached for Thorne’s door, the car went tearing forward down the street. I kept my foot on the pedal, grateful for once that this wasn’t the Before.

We were the only ones on the road, which made it easy to speed through, and my odds of accidentally killing someone were very low. My turns were, putting it gently, quite rough. Each one was accompanied by a loud, squealing soundtrack, as the rubber fought for purchase against the pavement.

Claude chased after us for a few blocks, his vampiric speed fast enough to get him within reaching distance of the back door a few times, but not quite enough to outpace his car’s full throttle. And so long as I didn’t slow down, there wasn’t much of a chance for him to grab hold of anything with enough purchase to hang on long term. When he finally gave up, I glanced in the rearview mirror. His perfectly pressed shirt was wrinkled and untucked, his impeccably combed hair now falling listlessly over his eyes. And there, clear as day in the anger pulsing from his face, was the explicit promise of my death at his hands—to be carried out the very moment he found me.

That would be tomorrow’s problem.

It took me a little while to get the hang of easing on and off the pedals, but once Claude was no longer chasing us, I grew comfortable enough to slow down a bit. Turns were a lot easier to handle when they weren’t taken at full speed.

By the time we made it back to my neighborhood, I’d only hit two curbs, which I considered a reasonable success for a first-time driver. Of course, we did lose the passenger side mirror to a rogue sign I didn’t spot quickly enough, but I figured that at the end of the day, it didn’t really matter. Claude was going to murder me, whether I returned his car perfectly intact or not.

Ideally, I’d find and get the stuff with Sora sorted before he came calling.

When I parked the SUV outside of Frank’s—poorly, judging by Thorne’s condescending smirk—the brief flare of hope I’d allowed myself deflated. The diner was still dark and locked. It was past midnight though, so I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting. Even if Sora had made it back tonight, she wouldn’t still be serving downstairs.

Thorne stayed by the car while Kieran and I ran upstairs. The apartment was just as I’d left it before, no sign that Sora had been by in my absence at all. Swallowing my disappointment, I went into my room to change. There wasn’t time to wallow or worry more than I already had. The more leads that dried up, the more convinced I became that something was very, very wrong. Whatever Sora was caught up in, something told me that I was better off facing it in something a little more stealth than a short dress.

“Mareena?” Kieran asked, startling me with the use of my actual name. His back was turned to me as I buttoned up my jeans and threw on a dark T-shirt. “What exactly is the plan here?”

“What do you mean? Claude said he saw Sora at House of Wrath’s compound today. So, we go there and either find her or someone who can point us in the right direction.” I walked past him, into the kitchen. The food I’d left for Menace was gone, which meant he’d been back for his dinner already and was probably already camped out for the night. I tossed a flashlight, old map, and whatever else looked like it might be useful into my bag, making a mental note to grab a knife from the diner before I left.

When I turned to head back down the stairs, Kieran’s arm reached forward, stopping me. “I don’t like this.” He shook his head. “This is dangerous and reckless and you’re going to get yourself killed.”

I shot him a look. “Good thing I have a guardian angel then, isn’t it?”

“What are the odds that she’s even there?” He turned away from me, then scrubbed his hands over his face, tugging at his hair with frustration. He winced, then dropped the ringed hand back to his side. Then he let out a deep breath before facing me again, his eyes imploring as they met mine. “Even if that Claude bloke was right and telling you the truth—which, I’m sorry, is a giant fecking leap in the first place—do you have any idea what it means if she’s actually mixed up with the Seven Sons? Or the odds that if they do have her, she’s still alive?”

My jaw clenched as I met his stare, the gravity of his words sinking in my chest like an anchor. “And what would you have me do? Just stay here and continue playing Operation Joy with you? Pretend that my best friend isn’t in trouble?”

“Yes,” he begged. “At least for tonight. I’ll convince Thorne to leave in the morning, and we can figure out a plan tomorrow. When we’re thinking straight. For fuck’s sake, Agony, you’ve already broken into a demon club and carjacked a vehicle from a vampire—how much more luck do you think you have before you wind up dead?”

“Like I said, I’m out of leads and I’m not going to just sit on my thumbs hoping the problem mysteriously goes away by morning.” I sidestepped him, then took the stairs two at a time. “Besides,” I called back without turning around, “some of the people in the compounds are reasonable. If I show them the photo and explain Rex’s ridiculous ritual scavenger hunt, they might know how to help.”

“And tell me, Agony, what the hell’s going to stop them from killing you the moment you step foot on their territory?” Kieran asked, hot on my heels.

When we reached the door, I locked up.

“I don’t know.” I gestured behind me, where Thorne was still brooding in the front seat. “I’ll offer them Claude’s car as a bargaining chip or something. I’ll figure it out when the time comes, okay?”

Kieran was still arguing with me when I got back into the car, buckled myself in, and started it up.

“She’s my family, Kieran.” I unbuckled myself and spun around, staring at him until the last of his protests fizzled into silence. “Okay? I don’t care how ridiculous you think this plan is. It’s happening. You can either continue haunting me or leave, but there is no more finding my joy or whatever it is you think your job with me is exactly, until Sora is safe and back home. Period.”

Kieran’s jaw muscles ticked, his eyes broadcasting his seething anger, but he didn’t say anything more.

I felt Thorne’s stare drilling into the side of my face when I turned back around and buckled up again, but I kept my focus on the road. Tossing the old map I’d grabbed into the back, I caught Kieran’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “If you want to help, we’re headed towards West Seattle. From what I’ve heard, that’s where Wrath’s homebase is.”

It wasn’t the greatest truce, but it was all I could offer him right now—some small semblance of control. For a moment, I didn’t think he’d take the olive branch, but then he unfolded and dropped his gaze from me to the map.

As the crow flies, West Seattle was only a couple of miles from our apartment, but it always took a decent, winding trip to make it there on land.

The drive was bumpy and stilted at first, but I slowly grew more confident behind the wheel. By the time I pulled onto I-5, with the windows down and the summer breeze rushing through my hair, I couldn’t help but enjoy the feeling of it. We drove by parts of the city I rarely got to visit anymore. And it had been so long since I’d been in a car that I’d forgotten how much fun it could be, how alive I felt when the wind cut against my skin.

Kieran spent most of the drive quietly stewing, but he broke his silence every now and then to whisper instructions and driving tips whenever his worry outweighed his rage.

Thorne, meanwhile, was significantly less tense than he’d been all night. The wind whipped through his hair, making him seem more human and alive than he was. At one point, I could’ve sworn that I’d even caught what might have passed as a crooked smile on his lips from the corner of my eye, but it disappeared as soon as I turned to get a better look.

After an hour of driving in circles and stopping two drunk strangers to point me to the right neighborhood, we were finally there.

I parked Claude’s SUV a block away in a random driveway, making sure to lock up and pocket the key fob. Kieran and Thorne followed as we made our way towards what had been a community college many years ago. The once-welcoming campus was now almost completely fenced in, the tops of the fence accessorized with curling barbed wire. Signs warning against trespassing were plastered every few feet.

I’d never actually been inside one of the compounds before, and I wasn’t exactly sure how to go about gaining entrance. But of all the Sons to pick a fight with, Wrath was certainly one of the worst. For a fraction of a second, I considered my options. Did I just climb the fence and hope that, once I was on the other side and showed enough people the picture, they might point me towards Sora?

Of course, that option also required that if Sora was, in fact, really here, she’d come of her own volition. I didn’t actually think that she was working with the compound or working with their fighting circuit. I’d been serious when I told Claude that he’d been given bad information. Apart from the fact that Sora had no way of getting to this part of the city with any semblance of regularity, the tenets Wrath stood for were as divorced from her personality and values as it was possible to get.

But it was possible that she was here, that Claud really did see her today, that she’d gotten pulled into a dangerous situation while trying to collect everything she needed for Rex’s necromancy ritual. If she legitimately thought it was possible to communicate with Rina, there were very few limits to the risks she might take.

Because there were also very few limits to the risks that I would take for Sora.

And if things turned south, which it sounded like they had, it was also possible that any connections she’d made along the way might turn on her.

“What’s the plan here, Agony?” Kieran’s gaze traced the fence along the road, stopping at a small post set up for security watch. Wrath had made enough enemies through the years, that I was sort of shocked to find the area otherwise undefended. “You don’t really think she’s here, do you?”

“I don’t think Claude is the type of guy to tell a bald-faced lie,” I said. “And we don’t have any other leads.”

The area was unusually silent, the kind of silence that didn’t feel natural. It was still the way that a vampire was still, the illusion of safety just before the bubble popped . . . along with the nearest vein.

When I turned back towards Kieran, his eyes were round with fear. He pulled me towards him, and rolled us down to the ground, just as an arrow shot through Thorne, exactly where I’d been standing just a second ago. Thorne looked just as surprised as I felt, his face twisting with confusion briefly, before settling back on its factory setting: anger.

Okay, apparently Wrath was well guarded, they were just also good at discretion—and clearly went with a shoot first, ask questions later approach to guarding their perimeter.

Kieran tugged me back to my feet with surprising strength for a dead guy who only had limited corporality. “Run!”

For the second time tonight, and a new record, I didn’t challenge Kieran’s order. Instead, I took off at a blistering pace, my boots pounding a steady drum that kept pace with my heart rate, as I wound through the neighborhood, not stopping until an angry stitch shot through my chest and my lungs screamed for a break.

Kieran, not appearing winded at all, threaded his hand through mine, then pulled me behind what looked like a mostly vacant apartment building.

The street was dark, nothing but the soft glow of the moon highlighting the generally drab scenery around us. If people were living in the area, they’d likely be asleep.

“Thanks.” I hunched over, trying to catch my breath. “That was close. Good, you know,” I waved my hand in his general direction, “guardian-angeling and what not.”

When I looked up, expecting to catch Kieran’s familiar smirk, I found his face a blank mask instead. His attention was locked on Thorne, the two of them tense and coiled like predators just before a strike.

“What the fuck were you thinking?” Thorne shoved Kieran, his face contorting in disbelief. “Never mind,” he shook his head, “you’re clearly not thinking at all.” He started to walk away, then, after a few paces turned back, one hand buried in his hair as the other reached out in front of him. “That was it, Kieran. That was the bloody moment. You just had to stand there and let her fucking die. Better yet, she’s right there—” He flung his extended arm in my direction, an exasperated look in his eyes. “Just shove your hand into her chest and end it now. You’ve done it a hundred times before. What the hell is it about this girl that you suddenly can’t complete one simple job?”

“Kieran.” My mouth went dry, and my stomach dropped as I watched the two of them square off. My lungs refused to let me take a full breath, like my whole body knew before I did where this was heading. I licked my lips and tried again. “What is he talking about?”

Kieran opened his mouth, searching for an excuse that wouldn’t come. He saw the realization crystalize on my face as he took a step towards me. “Agony?—”

And for once, I felt the full force of that nickname, like a dagger buried deep in my back.

The silence was broken by a dark, ragged chuckle. It lingered in the air between us for a moment, before I realized it was my own.

“You’re not a guardian angel, are you?” The question sounded ridiculous to my ears as I asked it. “No—” I shook my head, the truth suffocating me with every passing second, “there’s no such thing as guardian angels.” I fell back against the apartment building, letting it hold up the weight my legs no longer seemed willing to. My breaths came out loud and harsh as I studied the two of them. “Of course not. I’m just an absolute idiot.”

I tilted my chin towards Thorne, his frustration with Kieran making so much sense now. “You’re like him, right?” What had he called it? “A reaper?” My voice didn’t even sound like my own anymore. It was hollow and tinny as it echoed inside of my head. “You’re not here to protect my life.” When I finally brought myself to look up, Kieran wouldn’t meet my eyes. “You’re here to end it.”