Page 33 of Veil of Death and Shadow (Order of Reapers #1)

Present

“ K ieran?” I asked, my voice strangely hollow as I pointed to the all too familiar body at my feet. My fingers felt heavy, weighted by the new, odd metal caging them. “Am I . . . am I what I think I am?”

His face shifted in surprise, and for a moment he didn’t say anything. Just stared, as if he saw me and yet didn’t.

I took a step towards him, frustrated by his sudden silence. “You literally never shut up. Now is not the time to start. In case you couldn’t tell,” I gestured at my dead body on the ground, “I’m kind of freaking out here, and could really use that snarky voice of yours to clarify that I am not, in fact, what these,” I shoved my ringed hand forward, “suggest that I am. Thorne said it was impossible. That when I died, I’d go into the beyond or—whatever. I don’t know, he very stubbornly refused to get into specifics. But suffice to say, he was very fucking clear that I would not become one of you.” I glared at him, then took another step closer when he continued his silence. “Speak. Say something. Anything. Please. I’m literally begging you. Tell me I'm wrong?—”

But he only closed the distance between us and tugged me to him in an embrace that was both warm and comforting. One of his hands wrapped around my waist, holding me close, the other laced its way into my hair, tugging my face against his chest.

He felt . . . strangely warm. And it wasn’t until confronted with the surprising solidity and intensity of his body against mine that I realized how different he’d felt before. How, though corporeal to me, he’d been like a shadow of the man I’d encountered that first night at Incendiary.

After a moment of resistance, I fell into his embrace, molding to him like clay. Tears formed along my waterline as the truth of it all crashed into me like a freight train, but for just a few seconds, I let his presence comfort the swell of overwhelm clawing against my brain.

Sora was gone. I didn’t even get to say goodbye.

And Menace? What would become of him?

Or Frank?

The absolute deluge of grief threatening to suffocate me if I looked at it for another moment became too difficult to linger on, so I took a deep breath of Kieran, letting the familiar mint and morning dew settle around me, grounding me. I wasn’t alone.

Apparently, the dead could in fact breathe, which was an oddly comforting realization. A small piece of this life I could take into the next.

He hadn’t released his hold or moved even a single muscle since pulling me into his embrace, but I tilted my head back, straining to get a look at him.

His eyes were laced with a film of liquid, and wild with shock, the sharp lines of his features rigid and tense.

“Kieran? Are you okay?”

He made a deep sound in the back of his throat, then pressed his nose to my neck, as if he, too, needed to ground himself in scent to prove that I was here.

“You remember me?” he asked, his words muffled against my skin, cracking with emotion at the surface. “Do you—” he cleared his throat, “Do you have all of your memories?”

“I—” Right. Reapers were supposed to wake up detached from their former lives. I searched my thoughts, cataloguing what I did and did not remember, but it proved a futile, useless pursuit. I wouldn’t remember what I couldn’t remember, and while I wasn’t certain that I held onto every single detail of my life, I certainly remembered all of the important ones. The ones I’d carried with me up until my death, at least. “Yes, I think I do.”

He let me pull back from his hug a few inches, compromising by cupping my face in his hands as his eyes searched mine.

Kieran wasn’t an easy person to maintain eye contact with. Besides the fact that his eyes were just obscenely beautiful, there was always the threat that he’d see too much. More than I could see, even. And after safely locking away all the pain and panic I wasn’t ready to deal with right now, I didn’t want anything else tugged to the surface.

“Okay,” he nodded, as if convincing himself of something, “this is going to be difficult, but we’ll figure out how to get you through the trials. How to keep you safe. Whole.” His thumb stroked my cheek, the gesture oddly adept at calming the simmering fear in my gut. “You can’t tell anyone that you can remember your life, okay? That will spell instant death for you. The permanent kind.”

I nodded, finding words difficult with his stare and hands and all the rest of him surrounding me in all the intensity I’d been protected from the last few days.

“I mean it, Agony.” His eyes hardened, his grasp on me gentle, though every muscle in his body seemed coiled tight. “Not a word to anyone. It will be the end of you. Promise me.”

“I . . . ” I licked my lips, my stomach dipping as his gaze fell to my mouth. “I promise.”

A low, pained groan pierced the tension.

We both turned to Thorne, who was just starting to rouse.

“Not even Thorne,” Kieran said, as if answering the question before it could even fully form in my thoughts. “Not until I decide if we can trust him. He won’t be himself. And I’m going to have to figure out what all of this means. How best to protect you.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’ll be familiar with himself,” Kieran whispered, his lips pressed close to my ear, “his tastes, his skills, the way of living in our world, but he won’t retain any memories of the people, relationships, or various things that have happened in his life. Either in the mortal realm or the Between. It might be a bit disorienting for a bit. But his memories will come back; faster than they do for most new reapers. Don’t let on that you’ve met his former self.”

Thorne’s eyes sprang open, their dark depths holding me in their stare for an uncomfortably long time. I felt almost like a rabbit meeting a lion, the way he slowly uncoiled his body and stood—not once blinking or breaking his stare.

“So,” he said, arching his brow. I took a deep breath when he finally severed the intense eye contact long enough to stretch and scan our surroundings. “I take it I’ve refreshed, then? Bloody hell, that’s disorienting.” There was something lighter in his tone than I was used to, playful almost, and when his eyes found me again, the corner of his lips curved into a soft hook. “Please tell me that you’re part of my pack, beautiful?”

I opened my mouth to respond but had apparently been struck momentarily incapable of words.

“No?” Was all that I managed, the word more a squeak than anything used to convey meaning.

The rakish grin on his face deepened. “Do you want to be?”

“Leave her be, Thorne,” Kieran growled, “she’s newly awakened.”

“Well then in that case, there’s still a chance.” Thorne scanned me from head to toe, as if reassessing this new information, his expression almost a challenge. Then his focus darted to Kieran, his body tensing. “And who are you?”

“Unfortunately,” he muttered, more to himself than the other reaper, “I am part of your pack.”

“No offense, mate,” Thorne’s expression curled in distaste, “but I would definitely prefer her.”

I turned to Keiran. “Pack?”

He took a deep breath and sighed. “I’ll explain the ways of our world later. First, we need to get you back there and I need to get shit settled with Rafi.”

“Rafi?” I asked again, ignoring the dip of fear in my stomach at the prospect of leaving this world.

“Never mind him either,” Kieran said. “Just don’t forget what we discussed, okay?”

I nodded, side-eyeing Thorne who’d moved significantly closer to me.

“Just saying,” he said, tossing another feral-looking smirk at me, “she smells like she could be mine.”

“Thorne,” Kieran groaned. “Enough. Let’s go.” Then, with his ringed hand, he made a gesture in the air, revealing a door that hadn’t been there before. When it opened, it was as if he’d created a tear between worlds all on his own.

There was the oddly quiet street we stood in, the sun sparkling down on the splatters of blood that belonged to . . . well, me, but beyond the doorway, there was also an untarnished view into the world I’d occasionally caught glimpses of since The Undoing.

Only it was more solid and real than it had ever been before, no longer the dark, willowy phantom-image of a ghostly world projected onto my own.

Thorne stepped through first, then Kieran gave my hand a squeeze of encouragement, before following suit.

For a moment, I almost considered staying here, though I didn’t know how long I could actually linger. Stepping forward meant shifting into a new world, leaving everything I knew behind.

But then Kieran turned around and offered me a soft smile, his eyes encouraging. Well, maybe not everything.

I stepped through, and the door slammed behind me.

We were in what appeared to be an entryway. There was a chill in the air, though I thought I heard the familiar crackle of a fire in the room ahead.

I clung to Kieran’s back, like a shadow as I adjusted to the strangeness of this place.

When he paused outside a doorway, a soft light emanating from the room, I nearly ran into him.

“You’re finally back,” a deep voice said, an ember of familiarity curling in my stomach. “The hell took so long? Rafi’s ready to kill you both at this point.”

“Who are you?” Thorne asked, the muscles in his back tightening.

The owner of the deep voice groaned, the sound low and grumbling. “Fucking hell, Thorne’s wiped? This is seriously the last thing we need right now. Kieran, what the fuck happened out there?”

“There were,” Kieran glanced back at me, then took a step to the side, nudging me into the room, “a few complications.”

My breath caught at the familiar figure in front of me. He was dressed head-to-toe in black, as always, his dark hair curling slightly into a pair of gray eyes that made me dizzy with relief to see again.

Levi.

His mouth pressed into a firm line when I shifted closer, but he otherwise didn’t move or react at all.

He was . . . dead?

For how long?

Tears clouded my vision as I ran to him, wrapping my arms around his middle.

“No fair,” I heard Thorne mutter behind me. “I definitely didn’t get that greeting.”

Levi stiffened at the contact, but otherwise kept still, his arms pressed down at his sides. For a moment, I thought I felt his face bend towards me, the barest pressure of his hands moving to meet my waist, but then Kieran clapped my shoulders and pulled me back.

“Sorry, Levi,” he said, his eyes meeting mine briefly, wide with warning, “new recruit. You know how disorienting it can be. Can you please go find Rafi? We need to talk.”

Kieran pulled me to his side, his arm wrapping around me as if preemptively protecting me from whatever was about to come next.

When Levi’s focus shifted to where Kieran’s hand met my waist, he instantly dropped it, before carving a few inches of distance between us.

Levi didn’t move at first. His expression was almost blank. Though there was a flicker of something in his eyes—anger, maybe—when they took me in again, before shifting back to Kieran. A muscle in his jaw pulsed, some silent challenge playing between the two of them as my heart raced loud and angry in my chest.

He was here. He was alive.

Well, sort of.

“And might as well take Thorne with you, too,” Kieran said, his tone clipped. “I’ll need to speak with Rafi privately.”

In a hurried and desperate attempt to catalogue all the differences between this Levi and the one I knew, my attention immediately landed on the dark rings adorning his fingers. Like Thorne and Kieran, he had quite a few tattoos now, though not nearly as many as they did.

But then my stare caught on his wrist, and I had to swallow back a gasp.

A small, black band circled it.

My hairband.

As if sensing my stare, he inched his sleeve down, until the band was covered, then left the room without another word, not even sparing me another glance.

Thorne—who’d been watching the scene unfold with a kind of calculating focus, as if combing for bits of information—turned one last, lingering stare on me, before following on Levi’s heels.

“Levi’s only been dead for two years,” Kieran whispered, when we were finally alone, his voice gentle. “If you knew him in the mortal realm, he won’t remember you. You can’t do that again, Agony—don’t draw attention to yourself. Whatever he was to you, you have to sever it. He’s not the boy you once knew. Erase him in your mind altogether if you can. For his sake and yours.”

I nodded; my throat tight.

“And—” He ran his hand through his hair, the movement frustrated and tense, then pinched the bridge of his nose as if resisting the next part. “Same goes for me.”

My head shot up, searching his face. “What do you?—”

“Blank slate. If you’re going to survive the trials,” he exhaled, his tumultuous gaze burning into me, “and this place, I’m going to need to stay away from you as much as possible. And you’re going to have to pretend like we didn’t meet until you crossed into the Between.”

I nodded, fighting desperately to hold onto the final strand of composure I had left. All I wanted to do was hole up in a room and cry. Ideally with Sora and Menace. “Okay.”

“You’ve got a world of explaining to do, Kieran,” an unfamiliar voice barked into the room.

I turned around, searching for the voice’s owner, and that final strand of composure snapped.

Standing in the doorway was the man who’d haunted my dreams for more than a decade. The man who’d ripped Amto Amani from me with an unflinching callousness.

His bright amber eyes were wild with barely constrained rage as he stepped into the room.

And when that fiery gaze fell on me, I knew that the time had finally come.

I was staring into the eyes of Death himself.

To Be Continued…