Reap & Repent (6 page)

His ongoing battle with Kylen was personal, and he knew the stakes were high, not just for him but for anyone he cared about. It was dangerous to let anyone close to him with Kylen lurking about. He knew it.

So what was he doing with this girl? Had he really told Rashnu he planned to mentor her? It would slow him down. No doubt about it. And it would put her at risk, too.

Stupid.

He should walk away now. If she’d made it this long without using her gifts, she could just wait until the next training course opened up in Purgatory. Or she could keep living her life the way she’d been living it. Her sad, lonely, pathetic life. Why did he even care about that? Why had he kissed her?

Damn it.

They drove along in silence as a fresh ulcer began to eat at the pit of his stomach, and he pondered why exactly he felt so compelled to protect someone he’d only just met.

After a long drive, they finally arrived back in Meridian. A quick trip through the drive-through for food was a necessary delay. The grocery shopping still hadn’t happened, and neither of them was in any kind of shape to dine in. The car dash clock read a quarter to midnight as they wound down Ruth’s driveway.

As they got out of the car and headed up the driveway to the house, Deacon paused and listened intently, trying to pinpoint an unusual sound in the darkness of the woods around them.

“What is it? Did something follow us out of there?” Ruth fidgeted nervously, edging closer to him.

“No,” he said, less than convinced. “There’s nothing out there. It’s just the frogs. They’re so freakin’ loud out here.”

“Oh, they’re just spring peepers looking for love.”

“I’m not used to the noisiness in the country. I guess I don’t spend much time away from work.”

“People must die out here, too?”

“Sure, but there usually isn’t any reason to linger.” His hand pressed against the small of her back, urging her toward the house. “Let’s get inside. Those frogs are creeping me out.”

* * *

Ruth opened the door to the back porch, kicking off her Nike shoes before padding into the kitchen. Tossing her empty fast-food bag toward the trash can, she realized that Deacon hadn’t touched his yet. He’d been pretty intent on not careening them off one of the many curves on the way to her house. She got the impression that he didn’t do a lot of driving.

She pointed to the table. “May as well sit down and eat.”

Deacon hesitated in the doorway. “I should go.”

“Oh, no, you don’t,” she said, her voice rising, edged with anger. “You open up a whole new world of crap for me, drag me to Hell and back, and now you think you’re just going to leave me?
Now?
At midnight? Alone? I don’t think so. You’re staying right here and answering some questions, of which I have plenty.”

Ruth’s face felt flushed as she finished her tirade. The food she’d eaten was crap, but she
was
starting to feel a little better. So much so that she wasn’t about to back down. He had best plant his ass at that kitchen table because he wasn’t going anywhere without doing some serious explaining first.

Deacon raised his eyebrows at her as she got her second wind. He started toward her, but she raised one hand in a dismissive “talk to the hand” motion she’d seen the sorority girls at school use to great effect.

“You are
not
juicing me! I want to feel what I feel: the good, the bad and the ugly.” She repeated, “Do. Not. Juice. Me.”

He sat down at the table with a grin on his face, pulling out his fast-food bag.

“I’m going to go take a shower. When I get back, you sure as hell better be here, or I swear to God I’ll …” She actually didn’t have an ultimatum to threaten. She was hoping the possibility of incurring further wrath was enough. She’d never spoken to anyone like that, but then she’d never had reason to before. She was entering one uncharted territory after another tonight.

Her exceptional intelligence hadn’t exactly been showcased in the past twenty-four hours, but she was ready to channel her inner badass if need be.

I know I did not see a smirk on his face,
she thought as she turned in the direction of the master bathroom.

“It was Purgatory.”

She whipped around. “What?”

“Purgatory. Not Hell. I dragged you to Purgatory and back. Trust me, babe. If you’d been dragged to Hell and back, you wouldn’t be nearly so feisty.”

She harrumphed and stomped off to shower.

Chapter Seven

Deacon admired her spirit. She was spunky.

Unstable but spunky.

He finished his fast food while she showered and resisted the urge to walk in there and …

What the hell was wrong with him?

He threw his trash into her bin and occupied himself with inventorying her food situation. She had no idea how all of this was going to affect her. Tolerance came with time, and right now she wasn’t going to have the luxury of either tolerance or time. She was practically a child. A beautiful, sexy, unstable…
Shut the hell up!

Food. Make the grocery list!

He pilfered through her cabinets, then the fridge, making a mental inventory. Finally, he found a notebook and pen and began a real list.

* * *

Ruth spent a good fifteen minutes under the hot water, letting it wash away the day’s events. Seeing her father again after all these years, even in his unearthly state, had been amazing. And jarring. Her heart hurt as memories of him filled her mind.

She knew he’d had much bigger hopes for his family and this home than had come to fruition. Her father had wanted a large family, and when that hadn’t happened because of fertility issues, they’d adopted her as an infant through the
Catholic Church. One child had turned out to be enough for her mother, but her father invented imaginary siblings for her and had told her hundreds of stories about their adventures through the years.

The house came with nearly ten acres, and all of it was woods. The small yard was already growing into an out-of-control mess in the few days since her mother had checked into the hospital. Between the clover and the thistles, there didn’t appear to be much actual grass out there anymore. Still, she’d at least need to mow a path to and from the house.

There was a lot of work to be done. Much more than she could handle. Luckily for her, she had no pesky job prospects to distract her. The thought of a job working with the public was terrifying, and as she’d neared graduation with a PhD in Information Technology, she’d found herself procrastinating and making no inquires…which had landed her exactly where she was now: jobless.

Her dream was to work in the bowels of a huge library far away from the public in research or reference or maybe even doing paid research for clients. So far, she’d been a perpetual student.

Face-to-face communication with people was unbearable for her, which was a lesson she’d learned over and over throughout the years. Their auras were too distracting and confusing. It was like trying to have a conversation with completely naked strangers.

When her professor had walked into one of her first-semester classes with an unmistakable white aura, she’d had a panic attack. She’d caused such a disturbance that someone called an ambulance, and she wound up making a brief
visit to the mental health ward. Her school psychologist, to whom, of course, she lied, eventually diagnosed her as agoraphobic, which helped her secure online classes for most of the remaining semesters.

Since then, she’d been a shut-in, and when her mother got ill, it had been easy to push off job hunting. Now what was to become of her?

This whole reaper business was boggling. Was it even a real job? Did they actually get paid?

Good grief.

As the water turned cold, she put the brakes on that train of thought and started mentally assembling a rather long to-do list. She left the shower, dried off and got dressed. After a haphazard attempt at detangling her hair, she gave up.

* * *

When she returned to the kitchen, Deacon appeared to be making a list of his own. She was pleased and more than a little relieved that he had yielded to her threat and stuck around. Rummaging through the cabinets for an after-midnight snack, she was surprised to realize that she already had the munchies again. Settling on the only piece of fruit in the house, a soft, blackened banana, curiosity got the best of her, and she peeked over his shoulder.

“What’s up with the list?”

“Grocery list,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “You’re going to need a good stash of high-calorie foods on hand for post-reaping replenishment. Fast food is the best because it’s super high in calories, but you may not always be able to stop somewhere. These will do in a pinch. You’re going to need to carry a
backpack with you with plenty of portable snacks in it and probably a change of clothes.”

She glanced down at the list and whistled after a moment. “Who are you? Bob Harper’s evil twin?”

The list consisted of peanut butter, Snickers bars, chocolate, avocados, energy drinks, bacon, beef jerky, mac and cheese, nuts, mashed potatoes, lots of frozen dinners, and meat, meat, meat.

“You gotta be kidding me. If I eat all of that every week, I’ll be five hundred pounds. They’ll have to cut my dead and bloated body out of the house with the Jaws of Life. Seriously, I saw it on The Learning Channel.”

“Ruth, each time you reap or travel through the network, you’ll need to replenish. The process will burn thousands of calories each time, especially reaping. You might do six reapings in one day. What are you, about a size eight? Maybe a hundred and fifteen pounds soaking wet? Eighteen hundred calories a day will
maintain
that. Subtract six thousand plus calories a day, and you’ll be a bone sack in a week.”

She considered this revelation. There were a lot of negatives to being able to see auras. All of her life, she had only seen it as a hindrance. She’d spent years thinking she might be dangerous and avoiding people because of it. As a result, she had become the campus cat lady…without the cats. And now,
today,
at twenty-seven, she was finding out that she could eat as much as she wanted without repercussions because she was a reaper. She knew a gaggle of sorority girls at the university who would have
killed
for that opportunity. Of course, most
of their calories would have been liquid, but still. On the food front, all she could see was an upside.

It’s good to know the rules.

“So, what happens if I don’t eat? Will it kill me?”

“No, but you’ll grow weaker and weaker. If you go too long without replenishing yourself, you’ll most likely be rendered immobile, which will leave you vulnerable to attack. Reapers
can
be killed, Ruth. We aren’t immortal, but we are close. After you’ve reaped enough souls, your body will transition, and you won’t expend quite as many calories when you’re working. You may even develop some enhanced abilities similar to the ones you’ve already seen me use. Yours may be the same or they might be different. We’ll have to see how it plays out. It might take more than a hundred reapings before
anything
unusual happens.”

He had her attention. “What
can
kill us?”

“If your life force becomes too depleted through lack of nutrition or if you carry too many souls for too long, your energy could be completely and irretrievably exhausted, and you would die.”

“What would happen to the souls?”

“The souls would leave your body along with your own. If you were lucky enough to die where a reaper could get to them, they would be reaped. If not …”

“They could become sleepers? Like my father?”

“Yes. But it’s a situation that you can easily avoid. We’re able to heal ourselves as well as others, but not if we are completely drained ourselves.”

Ruth leaned forward, excited. “So you can heal people?”

“No, our energy is too strong for humans. We can use light pulses to manipulate them when necessary, but if we use too much reaper mojo, they’ll permanently short-circuit. You’ll want to use your energy sparingly until we know how it affects you. We are at our weakest point when we reap and our own bodies are filled with the souls of the dead. The good news is that it’s pretty damn hard to die accidentally. The bad news is that you’ll be putting yourself in danger if you let yourself get too depleted. That’s when you’re at your most vulnerable. If your soul is drawn out when you’re in that state, it’s game over. That and …”

“What?”

“Beheading.”

Ruth shivered. “How long can I live?” Feeling suddenly ravenous, she poured Raisin Bran cereal into the biggest bowl she could find, only to realize there wasn’t any milk.

“Most of us stay in the business for around two hundred years. That’s the average. There’s no forced retirement, but most reapers tend to flame out around then, so there are some retirement options.”

“Like what?” she asked, giving up on the dry cereal and going for the peanut butter straight out of the jar. She needed comfort food. Now.

“Well, some choose to pass on to the afterlife to be with their friends and family. They get a new body, and after a pretty lengthy process to cleanse their
souls, they move on. Others who want a change of career apply for ascension. If they’re chosen, they train to become a low-level Guardian Angel or to transcend to one of the higher levels of Heaven, if they qualify. Others want out of the service side of the industry altogether and choose…a darker path.” Deacon shifted in his chair, clearly uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation.

“How much darker can you get than being a grim reaper?”

“We’re just reapers. There’s only one Grim. He was the first reaper, which was fine until the population got out of control. Now there are millions of us. Grim doesn’t even reap anymore.”

“Have you seen him?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know he exists?”

“Do you believe in God, Ruth?”

“Of course.”

“Have you ever seen him?”

“No.”

“You believe because you have faith. It’s the same with Grim. I believe in him.”