Reap & Reveal (The Reaper Series Book 3) (6 page)

Nate landed outside his trailer, thankful to have bypassed the commons area again. No way was he ready to explain how he’d come by Maeve, and how he intended to help her to Oreo and the women. Not yet.

Honestly, he didn’t have a plan.

It had all happened so fast. Hell, he didn’t even really understand any of it.

Maeve’s soul flitted inside him, alternately making him euphoric and nauseous, looking for a place to land and clearly uncomfortable in its new environs.

His heart hurt. Both a physical and emotional pain beat against his ribs with each constriction of the treacherous muscle.

What had he done?

He snugged Maeve’s body against him tightly, holding her frail form with his left arm as he grabbed the door handle with his right hand, flinging the door wide so he could carry her inside. Shuffling, he side-stepped through the narrow passage to his bed and eased her down onto the still tangled covers. By force of habit, he slid two fingers along her slim throat searching for the reassurance of her still beating heart.

Yes. She lived.

Barely.

The door slammed shut behind him and he heard Bo settle outside it. They were safe.

For now.

Nate pulled off her boots one by one, and then hesitated, staring down at her. He had no right to undress her any further. She wasn’t in any immediate medical distress and had only the most minor physical scratches and injuries, but she obviously hadn’t bathed in weeks. Her once silky hair lay in tangled, jet-black ropes around her head. Her pale, porcelain skin was translucent and seemed thin and unsubstantial to protect her from the elements, let alone contain the powerful force of her soul, which still fluttered for escape inside
him
.

He traced a finger across her slack cheek, a sputtering trail of turquoise light sparking along its path while his embattled heart pounded inside his chest.

Weariness filled him. It would take time to recover from whatever they had experienced together. His own eyes grew heavy with lassitude.

What he
could
do for her now was make sure she had nutrition, and as soon as the other reapers returned, they could offer her their healing energy, too. The best he could hope to do was to maintain her physical body until he found a way around their unusual dilemma.

Reluctantly, he left the side of the bed and pulled the plastic storage crate from the couch on the other end of the trailer. Finding what he needed, he unwrapped the IV nutrition bag and dragged the hook from beneath the couch. They hadn’t needed to use his purloined supplies since the house had burned to the ground.

He walked back to his bed and fastened the hook over the bookcase style headboard, then unraveled the tubes and needle, hanging the bag from the hook. Gently parting her eyelids, he shined his pen flashlight into her eyes to check her pupils. Without her soul, her brilliant green eyes had faded to a light gray color.

She still wore the sleeveless black tank from the end of summer. A human would have died from exposure. While winter in Arkansas wasn’t as extreme as other parts of the country, it got below freezing many nights and she hadn’t been well maintained. Maeve wouldn’t have been oblivious to the temperature or her conditions. Evidence of her physical suffering was clear to him as he examined her.

He tapped the inside crook of her elbow and pressed lightly, searching for a good vein. After several long seconds, he settled on one. Not a good one. She was very dehydrated and her veins were shriveled like dry grass. Uncapping the needle, he turned her arm to face straight up and slid the slim piece of steel home in one quick push. Nate flipped the clip on the tubing and the nutrition solution began to drip into Maeve’s arm.

His efforts seemed far from adequate and he wished there was something—anything—else he could do to alleviate her condition. He reached up and brushed her tangled bangs to the side, then released a heavy sigh. It wouldn’t be long before Deacon would be at his door, demanding answers Nate didn’t have.

He wouldn’t let them take her away to languish in a holding cell somewhere with the hordes of soulless wanderers they’d “rescued.” Nate hadn’t seen the accommodations himself, but he was sure they would not be up to his standards for Maeve.

He
would protect and care for her. Whatever it took.

There was one other thing he could do for her here that no one else could. His tattoos grew tetchy beneath his shirt sleeves in anticipation of what he was considering. The sigils that circled his biceps were his magical barometer as well as protection, always monitoring the flow of magic, his own and others’. He’d been given his first one when he was sixteen, after a near fatal first encounter with black magic from a rival in the coven. The boy had been placed on probation by the Coven Board and banned from using magic for a year. Nate had learned a valuable lesson as well. Magic could be deadly.

The kid had never liked him, looked at him as an outsider since Nate hadn’t been born into the coven. When they vied for the affections of the same girl, Liam chose to summon dark forces to eliminate his competition and Nate had nearly drowned on dry land alone in his room. Soon after, Nate designed the permanent protection sigil that was tattooed on his bicep. The first of many. If he were the paranoid type, he’d have two full sleeves after everything he’d seen lately. As it was, he was confident he’d covered the most common magical bases with his ink.

Opening the drawer beside his bed, he retrieved his smudge stick and lighter. While they were safe inside the circle of protection he’d cast, its purpose was to keep supernatural outsiders from entering their compound. Now he needed to make sure Maeve didn’t unwittingly find her way outside the safety of his trailer unattended. While that seemed impossible in her current state, he didn’t know how the nutrition IV and healing energy would affect her if and when they managed to adequately revive her physical body. Without a soul to animate her, she’d be running on sheer survival instinct, which included eating—anything—at the top of the list. At least that’s what they’d seen with the humans so far. He shuddered, imagining the wanderers being fed like animals in a zoo.

The lighter flared to life and he ignited the bundle of herbs, and then blew out the flames to let the packet smolder. Due to the small size of his lodging, the task of cleansing the structure didn’t take long. Wafting the smoke into the four corners of the trailer, he recited the cleansing words aloud, the low murmur of his incantations the only sound in the room.

Next, he removed a ball of hemp twine from the same drawer and cut four three-inch strands. A binding spell was serious magic, but without it, Maeve might wander into even more danger. He laid the strings on the bed beside her. Closing his eyes, he summoned the energy of the elements and cast another, very specific circle of protection around his trailer.

He reached over and plucked a single hair from Maeve’s head from the root then another from his own and twisted them around one of the strands. Choosing a length of twine, he began to tie the knots as he chanted the spell.

The first knot binds my intention.

The second knot binds any ill-wishing

The third knot binds the one called Maeve to these four walls.

These knots shall hold the spell, until these knots are undone well.

Nate wrapped the knotted length snugly around Maeve’s thin wrist and tied the final knot, binding it to her physical body as well.

Unless he unbound the rope bracelet or physically removed her himself, she would remain safely inside the trailer. It was wrong to impose one’s magical will upon another. Free will was what made people human, but Maeve’s free will had already been compromised. He assuaged his guilty conscience with the justification that it was
for her own good
.

Satisfied, he crossed the trailer to the couch, emptied it of the other storage crates, and then stretched out across it, exhausted. Maybe some rest would grant him a clearer perspective. Maybe not.

What he needed was a miracle. And stronger magic.

The kind of magic only his coven could provide.

***

The last thing she saw was Nate coming toward her in the bar like a man on fire, then a blinding light. She’d felt every torturous tendril of her essence as it ripped free from its moorings. She’d fought against him, but as her own toxic energy was drawn forth and stirred with Camael’s angel essence, a noxious union resulted.

Camael became infused with her venomous energy, which he’d been unable to access on his own despite his possession of her body. Had he known the potential effects of her poison, no doubt he would have redoubled his efforts to tap into it. One consequence of riding a reaper was that while their bodies were much more durable, their greater gifts, or in Maeve’s case—curse, were unavailable to their parasite.

When her energy had been drawn against her will into Nate once more, she’d been helpless to stop it. Somehow, Nate had been able to wrench Camael out. Whether by his own power or the combination of her poison and his enhancing energy, she didn’t know, but Camael hadn’t been able to maintain his hold inside her. What did any of it mean for her now, though?

As she’d looked down on her body while in transit, she was certain that this was it, the end. The one saving grace was that she’d managed to keep her head. Camael could be defeated. She knew how! But now that her soul had been reaped, how could she ever warn the other reapers?

Soon she’d be sorted and sent to her final resting place, but it would still be too late.

The darkness overcame her and she stopped struggling, letting the weariness engulf her. She would have to accept whatever came next. She knew that, but something inside her could not, would not, stop fighting.

***

While Nate slept, his mind stirred, trying to solve the problem of Maeve’s displaced soul.

Her energy had latched onto him like a magnet. He couldn’t have stopped it any more than a man could have stopped a hurricane. Regret, guilt and elation all fought for control of his emotions. She was free of Camael, but was he really a better jailer?

His one driving motivation over the past few months was to free her and bring her home. But not like this.

Not like this. Not like this. Not like this.

His mind reeled as the mantra echoed through him and he became aware of Maeve’s soul reaching into his consciousness, twining around his own until he wasn’t sure where his memories ended and hers began.

Images played across his mental television as he eavesdropped on her memories, feeling like a trespasser in his own body.

He watched the replay of the day Maeve had walked away from her family, her home, and it filled him with grief and despair. Everything had changed after her brother’s death, and she could no longer stand the pitying look in the eyes of her parents or the fearful looks of her peers. Her departure would only earn her a short reprieve. It wasn’t a long-term solution. Maeve knew she could never escape her past, but she could add some distance to it. Mute it into something she could bear. In a few years, she’d have to return for reaper training because the pull of the dead would become too strong to ignore. By then, if she were very lucky, the reaper community would find someone else to pity. For now, everything was too raw to be revisited and analyzed over and over.

Her brother’s death had been deemed an accident, but the powers-that-be wanted to study her. See exactly what made her tick and why she seemed to exude such destructive energy. The last thing Maeve wanted was to become a lab rat or worse—a weapon. She was desperate to control her destiny.

She’d left with a backpack and a knife. Having already managed to make it through a quarter of the reaper training, Maeve was certain she could take care of herself on her own. She’d wait as long as she could before returning. One thing was for sure: this place would never be home again.

As she struggled back toward consciousness, Maeve began to realize she wasn’t dead. Not just yet anyway. She was entombed once again, although clearly not in her own body.

Her host’s eyes snapped open and for the first time since her escape from Camael, Maeve was afraid
.
Inexplicably, she was still in her reaper’s vessel. Whose? Why? Panic filled her and she reached out.

***

Help me.

The words, not his own, sat Nate upright on the futon, eyes opened wide as he instinctively reached for his weapon, long discarded somewhere in the trailer.

Save me.

Cold sweat broke out across his chest and beaded on his forehead as panic filled him.

How?
he asked, unable to believe that he was somehow communicating with Maeve.

Was he still dreaming? Awake?

Please, take me home.

The line blurred into reality as he came to alert consciousness and the dream faded.

Nate raced across the trailer to Maeve’s lifeless body. No sign of awareness emanated from her. She laid as still as death and just as silent.

Nate took her hand in his and sat beside her on the bed. She needed another IV. Her body was greedily soaking up the nutrients and eagerly drawing Nate’s energy from his own body at their slight contact. He couldn’t heal what afflicted her. Not even her body. His own light was still too depleted. The hour or so of fitful sleep he’d just experienced wasn’t enough to rejuvenate himself, let alone another.

He’d dreamed of her, whole and beautiful, restored. But the dream had been cluttered and jumbled. He wasn’t clear what had been dream and what had been memory.

Her
memory.

But of course, that was impossible.

Wasn’t it?

Chapter Eight