Reap & Reveal (The Reaper Series Book 3) (3 page)

The only sound remaining was the shambling of the survivors as they bumped into tables and chairs, clattering around in mindless forward motion.

Camael laughed, pleased with the progress. Taking no chances, he opened a slight chasm beneath the dance floor. The wood cracked and splintered as the ground tore open to reveal a temporary exit portal to Hell. Steam and sulfur rose from the slim fissure and the demons stepped into the chasm one by one with their bounty: nearly a hundred and fifty souls.

It was all very efficient. Camael smiled before closing the portal behind them.

Maeve screamed silently.

Nate woke, gasping for air as he thrashed about, trying to disengage himself from his covers. His heart galloped painfully in his chest. He panned the room, trying to assure himself he wasn’t in the crypt, wasn’t still in Maeve’s mind.

How the hell had that happened?

Through his connection with Maeve, he now knew that Camael planned to hit every bar downtown, grid by grid, while the pickings were still easy. He could probably have two more nights of success before people stopped going out and stayed home out of fear or by decree. Collecting souls from door to door would be much less efficient, but he had no doubt Camael could make it happen.

Dammit.

Things were about to get a whole lot worse.

This wasn’t his first lucid dream. Nate had experienced them before. But it was the first one he’d somehow shared with Maeve, and it was more intense than any of the visions he’d ever experienced before.

While he had seen inside more than a few Meridian crypts during his patrols with the Authority lately, he didn’t recognize this particular one. From what he could remember, there was no way to determine her location. The nameplates attached to the various stone urns and boxes hadn’t been discernable in the darkness. There were hundreds of cemeteries dotting the Arkansas countryside, twenty-eight in Meridian alone. She could be anywhere.

Nate took some comfort in knowing she was still nearby, relatively speaking, and not in Hell. He’d been to Hell before, and he didn’t need a repeat performance. The only thing that could drag him back there was if he had a snowball’s chance of bringing Maeve back with him, alive and without Camael. But he knew that fighting Camael on his home turf would be a suicide mission. Camael commanded legions of demons in Hell on behalf of Lucifer and now thousands on Earth.

Here. In Meridian.

With a population just north of half a million, the initial demon impact hadn’t been noticed immediately, but now? After an entire bar clientele had been obliterated tonight, the city’s finest wouldn’t be able to contain the collateral damage any longer.

Nate dragged a hand through his hair, pushing it out of his eyes as his other hand twisted his sheet into a tortured ball. His stomach growled as his sight adjusted to the pitch-black interior of the trailer.

How many meals had he slept through?

Still wired from his dream, he went through the motions of battle prep and was dressed and armed in record time.

When he pushed his trailer door, it met with immediate resistance. A tuft of black fur curled around the edge of the door, and then a fist-sized black nose followed as Bo rose from his guard position in front of Nate’s trailer door. A smile curled up the corner of Nate’s mouth. He was starting to dig that dog. The dumb beast had better not get himself killed in all this mess. That was, if a hellhound
could
be killed.

Seemed like every other damn thing around here was immortal, or nearly so. Everything except for him. He was plain old vanilla human compared to the rest of this motley crew. Well, vanilla with some sprinkles maybe. A human with benefits. A human deluxe. A human…
Oh, shut the hell up already
.

He stroked Bo’s ears and was rewarded for the gesture with a hot, pink tongue snaking around his wrist, leaving a Pacific-banana-slug-sized trail of drool along his arm.

Nice.

Wiping the dog sludge onto his black tactical pants, he made his way to the shared kitchen in the growing darkness. Now that the leaves had fallen from the trees, there was no ground foliage to hinder his view. His eyes followed the landscape behind the house, up the Ozarks Mountains to the horizon and the last vestiges of the setting sun.

Another night of hunting ahead of him.

Another chance to find Maeve.

Chapter Three

Camael had rested his still-new body for long enough and was up and moving again. It took an ungodly expenditure of energy to open a portal to Hell. He was just as spent as this body, or he wouldn’t have stopped to rest for the night, particularly not in this dank crypt. He was far too high on his success to want to take a break. Unfortunately, rest had been
very
necessary and a vexing concession of his current condition.

Meridian National Cemetery was the closest place to downtown where he could seek respite after wreaking his beautiful chaos. He could have traveled through the fresh Hell portal he’d opened for the demons, but his lingering angel essence made it agonizing for him. The last time he had tried it after possessing Maeve’s body, had led to several days of painful recovery in his suite in Hell. Thankfully Maeve’s body was unaffected, but his lingering angel essence had been fried. It had felt like he was being skinned alive.

Recovery was pure torture.

Not a problem for the demons since they were born for this, their essence woven from the very fabric of Hell. They shed their hosts as soon as they arrived and then awaited their next opportunity to arise topside. Camael, on the other hand, didn’t have time for another long recovery. He wanted to preserve this body for as long as possible without toasting it, or himself, to oblivion, so he had decided not to take any more one-way trips to Hell than were absolutely necessary. He was so close to his goal. He couldn’t afford any more delays.

As a result, Camael had to travel the old-school way, through the consecrated subway, then through the more stable Hell portals formed on freshly desecrated ground like the one Grim and Deacon had destroyed at St. Agnes Catholic Church. Since his fall, he was a mutant combination of light and dark, which he supposed made him at least fifty shades of gray. It was one of the many infuriating limitations he’d encountered after his fall.

Changing teams had not been without its consequences.

The body he now inhabited was one of those consequences. As a punishment for falling, his body had quickly been corrupted. His wings had been the first to go.

While he was in Hell, he could manifest any form he wanted, but above ground he needed to borrow or steal a physical body. His go-to animal form was the leopard, which he could still manifest in Hell. It was the form he spent most of his time inhabiting there, prowling the labyrinth of corridors and levels. He was very comfortable in that skin. Only on occasion did he indulge himself in his old form.

He’d spent a great part of the past twenty-seven years after his fall down below, settling in and feeding his grievances. Lucifer had been more than happy to take him in and add another fallen angel to Team Dark, but he had not pushed. Lucifer had coddled and groomed him instead, letting his need for vengeance fester and build until it demanded an outlet. Only then had he made his offer and tapped Camael for this mission.

He had gotten lucky with this host; she was the only way he could complete his undertaking. Another piece of luck had come his way too: Meridian was ripe for the picking. The city was so spiritually porous that the line between consecrated and desecrated was easily dissolved. Of all the possible locations, the Earth’s vital energy flowed through the pathways of Meridian like no other place in the world. The consecrated subway used by reapers was made up of ley lines, the spiritual and mystical channels along which energy surged. And Meridian was full of them, in fact, it was the hub. So what better breeding ground to corrupt those lines, open a permanent portal and unleash Hell’s legions?

Geographically isolated by mountains, Meridian, Arkansas was still populous enough that his first few test releases had been all but unnoticed both inside and outside the city. It was the larger second wave of releases that brought down the wrath of Heaven and the reactivation of the Authority. It didn’t matter. By the time his full assault was under way, which would be very, very soon, ten reapers and the seraph Grim wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing about it.

In fulfilling Lucifer’s dream for
his
children—created from the ruined souls of his utmost rival’s offspring—to inhabit the Earth, Camael would also find his own revenge. Luckily there was enough wrath to go around. As a matter of fact, it would be the most bounteous resource of the new world order.

Camael dusted the crypt dirt and dust from the fitted, black cargo pants his host body wore. He liked black, but it was notoriously difficult to keep clean. Every little speck stuck to it and stood out. It was maddening. He sighed, this place was well below the standard of luxury he had come to expect. He much preferred his accommodations in Hell. And what was that smell? Perhaps his host was due for some maintenance. He’d forgotten how much work it was to take care of a body in the long term. It would have to wait, but not for much longer.

His days of discomfort were numbered.

For mankind, however, they were about to begin.

***

Maeve would give anything for a shower. For a toothbrush. For her freedom.

It wasn’t like she’d been suicidal or worse—a Hell groupie—when she’d agreed to the current situation. She certainly hadn’t sought out this fate. What she had been was in the wrong place at the wrong time. For Ruth and most of the people in St. Mary’s Hospital, she’d been in the
right
place at the
right
time. Camael had demanded a new body since his own was visibly failing. He’d planned to make a run for the pregnant reaper, Ruth, and her burn-damaged body, sensing an easy target.

At the time, Maeve had been all that stood between Ruth and the determined fallen angel. Camael had threatened to open a portal and let the entire hospital fall into it if one of them didn’t agree to his demand for a reaper body. Knowing there was only one decision that could be made, Maeve had made it.

Camael hadn’t opened the portal completely, but the damage had already been done and the hospital began to crumble around them anyway. It was the first of many atrocities she’d been responsible for under her new incarnation. No telling what fresh horrors awaited her this night.

From her unusual and precarious vantage point, she watched and waited for her chance. She didn’t have a hundred years to endure. Camael was very close to making his big move and she had to find some way to warn the reapers.

She’d sensed Nate in her dreams, but she had no idea how or why. Damn guy was like a fly that wouldn’t leave her alone, buzzing in and out of her thoughts, which of course she had to keep suppressed from Camael. It was wearing her out. She was obsessing. The more she tried to keep thoughts of Nate at bay, the more insistent they became.
He
became.

Ever since their unexpected energy exchange, things had been strange between them. Not that they’d had much of an opportunity to explore any of that.

She’d expected her energy to kill him like it had her brother, but instead it had snapped Nate back from death. He’d come out on the other side staring at her with his big, brown puppy-dog eyes like she was his long, lost owner. And Maeve, who wasn’t used to feeling soft, had felt something too. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the guy was built like a WWE wrestler, which was fairly okay for a puny human. And he did have some formidable skills. But still…

What. The. Hell.

Her skin crawled involuntarily now even thinking about it, and she snuffed that line of thought before her physical reaction got Camael’s attention. This body-snatching gig was insufferable, but she had managed to gather vital recon that none of them would ever have been capable of procuring any other way.

Somehow she was going to have to overcome Camael’s hold and break through for long enough to warn the others, or all of this…would be for nothing. And they would all be damned.

Her body’s physical activity shook her to awareness. They were on the move and out of the cemetery. She shuddered inwardly as she realized they were heading back downtown for another round.

Well, of course they were.

Camael needed a few more elements for Lucifer’s plan—which he now shared—to fall into place. In the meantime, collecting a few thousand more souls would keep the reapers plenty distracted while he worked toward his goal. One soul in particular was the key. Camael was excited to have recently turned and nudged the puzzle piece until it fell into place. The last piece would seem so obvious when the time came because like all good plots for world domination, this one would need that same age-old catalyst.

The sacrifice of a pure soul.