Page 28 of Veil of Death and Shadow (Order of Reapers #1)

28

MAREENA

Present Day

I t would have been less shocking if I found myself staring at a talking unicorn, than my best friend’s dead twin. Who, unlike my two reaper stalkers, was clearly not dead at all.

“How?” I asked.

Rina shot a glare at someone behind me. “Let her go. I said I’ll vouch for her.”

The feeling returned to my arms as the guy I’d all but forgotten about released them with a sudden shove.

Kieran caught me before I fell, his chest vibrating with a low growl.

I regained my footing, then asked, “How are you alive?”

“Rina, you can’t just bring in outsiders,” one of the Wrath guards said, their tone laced with frustration.

Everyone, Rina included, seemed deeply uninterested in helping me make sense of the current situation.

She took a deep breath, then scanned the masked figures still surrounding us. Several of them were whispering, though I couldn’t make any of their words out clearly. “Is there a room available?” she asked. “In one of the neighboring buildings, maybe? I won’t bring her inside the fence line.”

One of the masked guards, a few inches shorter than me, stepped forward. “Danvers won’t be happy about?—”

“Danvers is asleep,” Rina shot back, her jaw tight. “So unless you want to wake him, or one of the others up, you’ll respond to my command. I hold rank here. And,” she continued, brow arched, “seeing as how you’re intimately aware of how Danvers tends to respond to non-emergent disturbances, I suggest you follow my lead and stop challenging me. Just this once.”

“But the girl could be from Lust or—” someone else in the cluster started, but their words dissolved when Rina shifted her glare on them.

“She’s certainly a lot more terrifying than your roommate,” Kieran said. His face was an unreadable mask, his posture rigid, though he kept shooting glances at the people circling us, like he expected one of them to attack at any moment—whether Rina sanctioned it or not.

Wrath was known for being rash, for killing first and asking questions later, so his concern wasn’t exactly unwarranted.

“She’s not part of the Seven Sons.” Rina’s focus darted to me briefly, the corner of her lips twitching as she considered her next words, “And she’s not one of the magic-touched either. She’s just a girl. She works in a diner in Wallingford, for crying out loud. I can assure you, this woman is harmless.”

The breath collapsed in my lungs, and I ran my hand over my chest, half-expecting that the man behind me had run his blade through it after all.

Not only was Rina alive, but she was also apparently aware of the fact that Sora and I were, too. She knew where to find us and she’d chosen not to. Why?

My vision blurred, and I felt a cool pressure against my arm.

I flinched at the touch, finding Kieran next to me, his brows furrowed with concern.

“Don’t touch me,” I whispered.

Rina glanced at me, then took a step back, as if she was the one I’d admonished. And, honestly, maybe she should have been.

Sora and I had spent more than a decade mourning her, and she’d been alive this whole time? Climbing her way up in House of Wrath, of all places?

I licked my lips, then buried the hurt as I stepped closer to her. “Sora?—”

The masked minions all inched forward as well, like they expected me to attack.

“Easy, Agony,” Kieran said, keeping close despite my protestations.

Rina raised her hands, calling them off, her attention locked on me now. “What about her?”

“Is she here?” I asked. The casual disinterest in her voice was gutting. “That’s why I came. She’s missing and when the trail led to Claude, and I showed him a picture, he pointed me here.” Realization settled like a stone in my gut. “He thought the girl in the picture was you.”

Of course. Sora would never have joined Wrath, would never have kept this secret life from me.

Rina’s eyes widened, her brows softening in surprise, but the momentary concern was gone in a flash—back in its place, was a hardened mask.

Then, she turned away from me, clustering with a few of the other members of her house, their words whispered and hurried, impossible for me to decipher.

The man behind me grabbed my arms again, linking them behind my back, as if expecting me to try and run now that their cluster had dispersed. As if I stood a chance against a dozen armed guards.

As if I could just walk away, knowing what I knew now.

Rina was alive. And, more than that, she’d been living nearby.

I watched her, clocking her militant posture, the lean lines of muscle running over her body. Small scars freckled her face, her hands, the visible patches of skin on her arms. She still looked like Sora of course, but the differences between them were so much starker now than they’d ever been growing up.

Gone was the bubbly personality of my first real friend.

There was a hardness encasing her now, edges where Sora was soft.

“People just can’t stop saving you, can they?” a voice whispered in my ear.

I flinched, then found Thorne standing by my side, his expression trapped somewhere between frustration and reluctant curiosity.

“At this rate,” he continued, arching his brow at Kieran, “I’m starting to suspect we’ll see the death of your guardian angel before we see yours.”

Tension lined Keiran’s face as the two men squared off in a silent conversation.

“What do you mean?” I asked, keeping my voice all but silent. “He’s already dead.”

Thorne’s gaze dipped to Kieran’s hand, which was now hidden behind his back.

Before he answered, Rina was back in front of me. With agile fingers, she tied my hands together with a zip tie and grabbed my upper arm with a grip tight enough to bruise. Then, not so much as even meeting my stare, she tugged me away from my captor and started ushering me down the street.

“Rina—”

“Not here,” she whispered, her voice cold, her lips barely moving.

“Rina, not so fast,” someone from the group yelled, and she froze. “The keys?”

The tension in her shoulders eased slightly as she tightened her grip. “Where did you put the vampire’s keys?”

“In my front pocket,” I responded, though her fingers deftly located the fob before I’d even finished speaking.

She tossed the keys back, then pushed me forward, both of us locked in heavy silence until she ushered me into a small house.

Only when she closed the door behind me, Kieran and Thorne materializing through the wall, did she ease up. She fished a switchblade from her pocket, and I flinched when the knife sprang open a few inches from my face.

“Relax.” She rolled her eyes, then moved behind me, the zip tie cuffs breaking free with a soft snap.

Rubbing my wrists, I looked around. We were in a small house, standing in a kitchen that looked like it hadn’t seen visitors in months. A thin layer of dust coated everything, the scent of must inescapable.

Rina jutted her chin towards the dark green table in the corner, one that looked like it had been rescued years ago at a vintage shop, the hardware relatively new and polished. “Sit down.”

But I waited until she sat in the opposite chair, her dark eyes somehow both familiar and not as they tracked me.

“Where’s my sister?” she asked, her voice hard, curving strangely over the word sister, like she hadn’t used it in years. “Why did Claude point you here?”

“I don’t know.” I shook my head. “We’ve tracked?—”

“Who’s we?”

Fuck, that’s right. She couldn’t see the two reapers currently studying her—one with an expression of absolute distrust, the other with abject boredom.

“Me,” I corrected. “I mean, I reached out to her friend at the market—a guy named Rex. He told her about some ritual that he’d heard about, one that could bring back the dead.” I shot her a look, letting the meaning of those words sink in. “That led me to a vampire at a club, who led me to Claude’s bar.”

“Why would she be at a vampire bar?” she asked, looking for all intents unaffected by the suggestion that her sister was trying to commune with her dead self.

“So, it wasn’t you?” I sank back into the chair, trying to piece it all together. “At least that gives us some information.” Sora was definitely seen last night at Claude’s. “She needed to exchange blood with a vampire, it was part of the ritual.”

She grunted. “And he assumed that it was me there last night?”

I nodded. “He pointed me to House of Wrath.” I studied her, trying to fill the gaps between the Rina in front of me and the Rina I knew. “Said you were high up in the fighting rings. That he kicked you out of the bar.”

“That explains why he flew in here today, lobbing accusations. Fuck.” She sighed, then leaned her elbows on her thighs, head bowed. “I didn’t want her sucked into this shit, that’s why I never?—”

“What happened?” I asked. “How long have you been in Seattle? Why didn’t you find us—” I let out a humorless chuckle. “Well, never mind, you clearly knew where we were. You just chose to let us believe you were dead. All this time. Do you have any idea what Sora’s been through?—”

Her head shot up, her eyes beaming into me with anger. “Do you have any idea what I’ve been through?”

I met her stare. “Obviously not, but that’s because I’ve spent the last decade mourning you.”

Though Rina looked a lot stronger, tougher than I remembered her, for the first time I noticed the dark rings beneath her eyes, the fact that every single one of her fingernails was bitten down to the skin, so far that it looked painful.

“Rina,” I let some of the anger, the hurt, bleed away, “what happened to you that night? He—” I bit my lip as the memory of that night lurked in my periphery, fighting to keep everything that came attached with it at bay. “He said you were gone. I—” I could feel the warmth of her blood as I tried to stem the flow, as if she was lying there before me now, an inch away from death. “There was so much blood, we were so certain.”

But the truth of it unfolded before me. It was Blake who’d confirmed that she was dead. And while she certainly looked as if she was, had Sora and I actually checked for a pulse? Or had we been so terrified, so fucking filled with grief, that we believed that monster at his word?

“It was bad.” Her eyes were hard, and it felt more like she was looking through me than at. “Doctors were apparently shocked. I should’ve been dead, but I wasn’t. Cheryl took that as her little miracle, her second chance.”

Cheryl and Joe—our foster parents.

“You stayed.” It felt like I’d been gutted. “With them? All this time?”

“Recovery was a long process. My memory of that night wasn’t great. Cheryl and Joe told me that you and Sora tried to run. That you died in a car accident. They did what they do,” she shrugged, her expression void of emotion, “they fixed things, made it okay. Promised to protect me, assured me your deaths, Blake’s death, weren’t my fault. Then Joe won his election. And Cheryl—she turned all her focus on me. I was her second chance. After her son . . .”

“Are they,” I wet my lips, “are they still here? Part of Wrath?”

Rina snorted. “Fuck no. They used their son’s death, and my miraculous recovery, to usher in their religious awakening. They opened a giant mega church in Oregon, started carting me around. I think she legitimately believed I was a sign from God, a true miracle—the girl who should’ve been dead but wasn’t. A chance to atone for her failures with Blake. And, for a while, I bought into it, too. The attention. The illusion of family.” Her eyes cut to me, but only briefly, like she couldn’t bear to look at me for too long. “That kind of belonging can be addictive when you’ve been starved of it your whole life.”

“What changed?” I asked, after a drawn silence.

“For years, I didn’t think of Sora, or you. I tried to let that part of my life die, like I’d assumed you both had. That it was God's will or whatever. There wasn’t any trace of you on social media, the news, anywhere. I assumed that was because Joe had wiped everything after your deaths, to protect me. But then, after The Undoing, things took a turn.” She traced the edge of her switchblade along the table, lost to her thoughts for a few moments. “All of their faith from before,” she glanced back up at me, “when there was suddenly confirmation of demons and the supernatural—when it started to become clear that they might have lived amongst them in the Before, they started to see my little miracle in a different light.”

“They turned on you,” I said, my voice soft.

She nodded, the corner of her mouth curving into a dark smile. “Thought I was the devil. That I was to blame for ushering in the Apocalypse, that I was the reason they weren’t raptured into the beyond. Joe came after me first,” she shook her head, her expression dark, “and I just lost it. Killed him. Then her. Then I took out a few of the members of their congregation who’d witnessed my rage, who tried to finish what Joe and Cheryl started. I escaped and lived on my own for a while, just fighting day-to-day, trying to survive.” She shrugged. “And then one day, I met a guy. Danvers. He brought me into a group that didn’t shy away from the rage that I harbored. From my aggression. That didn’t try to make me into something that I wasn’t. I found a home here, with the House of Wrath.”

“How long have you known about me, about Sora?” I asked.

She looked up at me, holding my stare for once. “A few years.”

It felt like she’d punched me. “Why didn’t you ever . . .”

“The girl you knew, the girl my sister would have wanted me to be—she was gone.” She closed her knife and leaned closer. “And I didn’t want to become that girl again either. Seemed better to let her stay dead. For you two to go on living your cozy little communal life, none the wiser. I looked in. You were doing well for yourselves. I didn’t want to ruin it.”

My jaw ached from clenching it, from forcing myself to swallow down anger that she’d taken that choice from us all. Now wasn’t the time. Maybe when we found Sora, we could have that conversation.

Assuming I was still alive long enough to be present for it, of course.

I glanced at the two reapers hovering next to us, their presence now a cloying reminder that Death was close.

“Do you know where Sora might be?” Finding Sora was the only thing that mattered right now. “Will you help me find her?”

Rina studied me, silent and unreadable, for what felt like forever. Then finally, she nodded. “Tell me everything you learned from Claude. And that guy . . . Rex, did you call him?”

Relief shot through me.

Burying the baggage of our past, I combed through our visit to the market, then to the bar—Rex, Lav, Manny, Claude, every detail that I could remember.

And then, the second time through rehashing it all, when my memory snagged on Manny, my words died away.

He’d been the last to see her. The one to escort her out, according to Claude.

The realization settled in my chest, a cloak of fear.

“He mentioned something.” I glanced up at Rina. “There’s a bounty on you, right?”

Her lips pursed into a thin line.

“House of Lust?”

She nodded.

That calcified it.

Manny, who’d bought everyone’s drinks tonight, an uncharacteristic occurrence, judging by the bartender’s reaction.

Manny, who was upset that his sister was getting involved with the Seven Sons.

Who’d handed over one sister, thinking that she was the other.

“What if one of the vampires called in that bounty?” I said, my body vibrating with the sudden certainty of it. “Is it possible they took her, thinking she was you?”

Rina cursed, then stabbed her knife into the edge of the table.

Her fingers shook—with rage, with fear, maybe both.

“Stay here,” she said, then shot me a look when I started to argue. “I mean it, Mareena. Do you want my help?”

I nodded.

“Then do not leave this property. I need to get in touch with Danvers to see what resources he’ll let me take. This war’s been brewing between Wrath and Lust for a while now, and Danvers is hungry for blood. If I can frame it properly—as a reason to escalate things—then we might stand a chance with Wrath’s backing. Otherwise, we don’t have any shot at getting her out alive.” Her eyes were wide, pleading, and I thought, for a moment, that I saw a flicker of the old Rina in their depths. “I’ll come back for you. I promise. If all goes well, we’ll head out at dawn.”