Shadow Reaper (Shadowlands Series) (14 page)

There’s a strange sound coming from somewhere.

It’s water.

The air smells odd.

He opens his eyes in a place he doesn’t know. Above him is rock, lit gently in silver light. He is in a cave. He sits up, looking beneath him at the soft leaves and white petals that have cushioned his body. He is very much naked.

He gets to his feet. There’s lightness to him, a sensation of freedom. The air smells clean. He draws a deep breath, letting it fill his lungs. It’s cool and fresh and feels amazing in his chest.

The silver light is coming from outside, from beyond this cave he’s in. Out there, it’s raining, and he realises the light is from the moon.

Moonlight. He has to see more of it. He needs to feel rain on his skin.

He walks slowly across the rocky floor, taking his time.

Pausing at the threshold of the cave, he looks up. So many trees, leaves dancing under the rain, all lit up beautifully by the moon. There she is, the moon. It’s enough to bring tears to his eyes.

But he’s a little afraid. The cave is safe and holds him secure in a dark embrace. What if he steps out and the rain burns him? It’s water, yes, but where does it come from? “It’s so beautiful,” he says.

And it is. Despite his anxiety, he cannot stay in the cave. He can come back later and rest in the leaves and the petals, but now it’s time to be outside in the night. It calls to him, asking him to come and dance.

He takes a step into the rain, embracing its chilly kiss on his skin. The sensation is amazing, an endless curtain of wetness cascading over him. The ground is grass and mud at his feet. He stomps around and twirls and throws himself down in it, rolling about in the pool he creates.

He doesn’t care about the dirt or how drenched he is. This is life, this is living.

Everything seems so bright. The moon is a powerful beacon, the raindrops sparkle like diamonds. Every leaf is the richest green, a new kind of green invented just for him.

He has to touch the leaves.

He sees a tree with low hanging branches, as if it’s trying to pick something up off the ground but can’t quite get to it. He reaches for the nearest leaf. It’s big and has five points to it. It’s a star!

“Star leaf,” he says.

So pretty, so splendid and wet. It loves the rain, loves to soak it all up and grow. He smiles as he strokes the leaf, tracing its veins with a delicate touch.

His finger starts to glow.

He jumps back, letting the leaf fall back into place.

His finger still glows. It’s a golden light; a gentle glow like the moon. But it’s not the same.

After a moment, he reaches for the leaf again. The light on his finger brightens and every other digit does the same. The veins of the leaf absorb the glow, feast upon it. It tingles and feels so amazing. The leaf swells in the middle and sprouts a bud. The golden light smothers the bud and makes it grow.

He looks down and sees the glow all over his body, right down to the ends of his toes. The sodden ground loves the light, takes it in and brightens. Things grow at his feet, tangling around his ankles.

The bud on the leaf releases a violet flower and a sweet perfume. He smiles at it and he could swear it does the same.

At his feet, a garden is growing. Tomatoes. More flowers. The tops of carrots in the dirt. He reaches down and pulls out a magnificent orange creation. It’s big and ready to devour. And the tomatoes are so fat and juicy and a blinding red.

“Let the garden grow!”

***

Clay woke up, the right side of his face planted firmly on his worktable. Drool pooled beneath him.

He sat up, a little unsteady, and wiped the drool with his T-shirt. Man, what a weird dream. Maybe it was a sign that his new grow light would be a success. He really was obsessed if it had started to infiltrate his dreams.

And now he had vegetables on the brain. All he could think about was how damn delicious those carrots looked.

He glanced at his clock. “Crap!” He’d slept for three hours.

Ash would be back by now, surely. A wave of panic swept over him, and his heartbeat sped up. He had to see his sister. Now!

He dashed out of his workshop and headed for Ash’s room.

She wasn’t there.

His chest felt tight.

Bernadette. Yes, she was with Bernadette. Clay wasn’t sure where Bernadette’s quarters were, but a quick stop at the rota board and a careful survey of the street map told him what he needed to know. Heart still pounding with a strange premonition, he headed to Bernadette’s room.

He knocked three times and waited, but there was no answer. No panic, he’d try the gym, the infirmary, the Eye. Yes! The Eye. Blake would help him locate Ash using the monitors that surveyed the whole complex.

He ran up the metal steps to the entrance of the Eye.

“Clay?” Ryder called from behind.

He stopped and looked down the stairway. “What?”

Ryder’s face was grim, his eyes too bright.

The heat that had been flooding Clay’s veins was replaced with ice. “What do you want?”

“It’s Ash.”

“No.” He didn’t want to know what he already suspected. That horrible sick sensation in the pit of his stomach made sense as he finally accepted that something was terribly wrong. “Where is she? How bad is she hurt?” He clambered back down the steps. “Is she at the infirmary? Damn it Ryder, did you leave Nina with her?” He made to storm passed, but Ryder grabbed his arm.

“Clay, she’s not at the infirmary.”

What the hell was he talking about?

Ryder swallowed. “Blake spotted something on the monitors about an hour ago, in one of the tunnels just off Shelter. He sent a team to investigate and they found her.”

“Found her doing what?”

“They found her, Clay, they found her dead. Ash is dead.”

Something was wrong but that wasn’t it. Dead. What a crock. “Fuck off,” Clay shook him off. “She’s not dead.”

“Clay! She’s at the morgue.”

He wasn’t listening, he wouldn’t listen because Ash wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be dead, because if she was gone, he would have felt it, surely he would have felt that.

Despite his conviction, he had to see. He had to know. His feet carried him through Shelter straight to the morgue. The doors opened to him as if in slow motion. A gurney sat in the middle of the grey stone floor, a body covered by a white blood stained sheet.

There were people around him. People he knew but it didn’t register. All that registered was the gurney. He approached and pulled back the sheet and stared at the body. Face a mess of flesh, eaten and torn. Auburn hair, long and tied back in a ponytail, Ash had hair like that. Ash owned a khaki green vest and black cargo pants too. A body, dead.

Ash.

Dead.

There were voices around him, speaking to him, gentle soothing tones but he couldn’t focus on anything else but the thing most precious to him. The person he loved more than life itself. The person who was dead.

“I’m dreaming.” He lifted a hand and slapped himself so hard he brought tears to his eyes.

“Clay!”

He fell to his knees and Blake was on him, pulling him close.

“I’m dreaming.”

“Clay.”

“This isn’t real. No way is this real. My sister isn’t dead. My sister isn’t dead. My sister isn’t dead.”

Blake rocked him back and forth.

“Not Ash, not Ash.”

A hand rubbed his head.

He felt closed in, smothered. He was being smothered and sheltered.

His body already ached from the shock of loss, an all-too familiar feeling he’d been hit with when he’d lost his parents. Ash wasn’t supposed to die.

“I’m sorry, Clay, so fucking sorry,” Ryder said.

This was Ryder’s fault. He’d messed with her head and she’d been off her game. The bastard had made her reckless.

She was always reckless.

No! She was just tough, a doer.

Was?

His hearts was swelling. He could feel it pushing against his chest, wanting to burst. The heartbreak was coming, a tide too strong to hold back.

“She’s dead.” His lips finally formed the words. “Ash is dead.” His head swam, his stomach churned and he threw up. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see. His vision blurred and the world spun.

“She’s . . .”

Everything went black.

Bartending in a Shadowland establishment isn’t ever boring. During my six-hour shift, I served, and spoke to, no less than twelve different species of Shadowlanders. I learned that in many ways, they weren’t that different from us humans, aside from the wanting to rend your flesh from your bones, or considering liquefied digestive systems a delicacy. Yeah, some very strange customs. But I also learned that every Shadowlander belonged to one of three realms. The term Tri-realms now made sense. I wasn’t sure what these realms were all about, but I knew they bordered the Shadowlands: Inferna, Enchansa, and Saul. When I asked about the Shadowlands, though, or tried to get anything out of them about what had happened to bring down the veil between our worlds, or how my human world had become corrupted, they were less informative. To be honest, I got the impression that they were as clueless as I was.

“Hey, daydreamer. Succubus at ten o’clock.” Henry, the bar guy nudged me. He smiled kindly but his eyes were wary as he studied the woman waiting to to be served farther down the bar.

“What’s a Succubus?” I asked him in a whisper.

“Just don’t let her touch you and you won’t have to find out.”

“I thought we couldn’t be hurt in here.”

Henry smiled slyly. “Oh, honey, if she touched you, the last thing you’ll be doing is hurting.” He gave me a shove in the small of my back, and I tottered toward the petite, dark-haired woman leaning against the bar. She pouted as I approached, her eyes sweeping me up and down. She looked harmless enough. I was so confused.

“What can I get you?”

She finished her visual assessment of my chest and raised her long lashes to fix me with her penetrating green eyes. “Oh, so many things, but for now I’ll take a Screaming Orgasm.” She licked her lips and my mouth went dry.

What the fuck?

“Um, okay.” I turned to search for Henry. I had no idea how to make a Screaming Orgasm, wasn’t even sure that was a drink, and Henry hadn’t left me any notes. So far, the drinks had been pretty straight forward.

Henry, however, was nowhere to be seen.

“Problem, sweetie?” she asked.

I sighed. “Sorry, I’m new, I’m not sure how to mix that.”

She chuckled, low and seductive, making every hair on my arm stand to attention. “Why don’t you come closer and I’ll tell you how.” Her green eyes seemed to glow, and I found myself moving toward her, despite Henry’s warning. I was practically pressed up against the bar. Her hand reached to cup my face.

“Caroline, haven’t I told you to keep your hands off my staff?”

The woman dropped her hand, and her eyes released me from the strange hypnotic spell. “Avery, you are such a hoarder. One taste wouldn’t do much harm, surely?”

Avery smiled. “Not to you, Caro, but I like to get a full lifetime of work out of my staff members, and I can’t do that with you siphoning off their years.” His tone was stern, but his expression was soft.

I blinked up at him stupidly, but he kept his eyes on Caroline. God, he was beautiful, even more so in the amber glow of the bar lights. They softened the hard planes of his face and lit up his eyes.

“Get back to work,” he said. “I’ll look after Caroline.”

I stepped away and Henry appeared, taking my elbow and steering me to the back of the bar.

“What the hell just happened?” he asked.

I shrugged. “She asked for a . . . a Screaming Orgasm, and I didn’t know how to make it, so she told me to come closer and I . . . I did.”

Henry slapped his forehead. “I told you not to let her touch you.”

“She didn’t. Avery turned up and stopped her.”

Henry frowned.

“What?”

“What did he say?”

“Something about not wanting her to take years off me.” I shrugged. “No idea what that means.”

“Succubi are sex beings. They invoke and feed off desire, but when they do, they also shave years off their victim’s lives. For a Shadowlander who has hundreds, it’s not so bad. But for a human, it could kill you.”

Thank Mother Avery had stopped her. “He saved my life.”

Henry smiled, but it was a tight smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

“Henry, what is it?”

He shook his head. “Nothing, let’s just get back to work.”

The mood was flat after that, and I was glad when my shift ended and I could escape back to my room. But I realised pretty quickly that I had no idea where my room was.

I stood outside the lift, feeling lost and hoping to catch a glimpse of Freya or Cal. Just as I’d decided to head back to the bar and ask Henry for help, the door pinged and opened and the tiny man with the bright orange hair, who had warned Cal about Treagor, emerged pushing a huge trolley.

I stared at the trolley and then the lift it had just come out of. There was no way it could have fit in there.

“Out the way, woman!” The trolley snagged on the carpet and the orange-haired man grunted in frustration as he tried to push it over the lump.

It could have been pretty amusing to watch him struggle. For a moment, I toyed with doing just that, but in the next shame coloured my cheeks and I moved to help him.

“Here, let me.” I grabbed the side of the trolley and hauled it over the lump. “There you go.” I released the trolley and stepped back as he shooed me away.

“What do you want? A medal? Humans! Waste of space, time, energy, air.” He began to move off and the trolley snagged again. “Buggering metal contraption! Shite-eating piece of shite!” He kicked it and then yelped, jumping up and down, holding his foot.

He looked so strange hopping up and down, his hair sticking up all over the place. It was the hardest thing to bite back the giggle that rose in my throat. I figured if I could make a few Shadowlander friends, I may be able to get closer to Daemon, closer to my goal. So I cleared my throat and took the trolley handle.