Reap & Reveal (The Reaper Series Book 3) (20 page)

Ruth was at wit’s end. Exhausted from too little activity and too much sleep, she could not escape the worrisome feeling that something was wrong. Very wrong. While the baby and her pregnancy seemed fine, some hunch told her that the other shoe was just waiting to drop. Bocephus, who was whining softly in his sleep at the side of her bed, seemed to feel the same way. That dog missed Nate something terrible. And right now? The big galoot seemed to be in some sort of physical pain, rising, circling and readjusting before lying back down again, trying to find a comfortable position.

She could relate. Deacon and the other members of the Authority had been home sporadically for meals since Nate and Maeve left, but most of her days and nights had been spent alone. Temperance’s company didn’t count. Olivia wasn’t even around all that much, spending more and more time at the food shelter she’d set up downtown. They’d all been catching rest where they could and making real progress on the demon cleanup while Camael continued to hide beneath the radar.

They were “making hay while the sun shined,” as Raguel had said earlier. He’d cast aside his southern Italian colloquialisms and adopted the local sayings way too quickly. But given how charming he was, it was pure entertainment for the rest of them.

Man, she’d give anything to be off reservation for a few hours, but with Temperance holding up the east wall of the trailer, an escape seemed very unlikely. She was still plotting her imagined departure when Deacon appeared at the foot of her bed, startling a scream from her.

Temperance sprang to action, her wings spreading and filling the room, followed by a bright shimmering red iridescent cloud that made it impossible to focus on what was happening. The glint of a sword stopped Ruth’s heart for one long terrifying moment before recognition kicked in.

“Shit!” Ruth skittered off the bed.

Deacon had pulled out his scythe as soon as he recognized Temperance’s intent to attack, and the two of them filled the small room with menace. Bo growled, low and threateningly, his head touching Ruth’s shoulder as he stood his ground, protecting her. The angel shot a look of disdain at Deacon and folded her wings back until all that showed were the two top arches, mere millimeters below her ears. She leaned back against the wall, as nonchalant as was possible for the angel.

“Maybe use the front door next time. Someone’s a little edgy,” Ruth said.

“At least she’s on task, unlike I have been this afternoon.”

“What do you mean?”

“I checked out your lead for you,” he said with a smile.

“And? Did you find her? Or…her house anyway?”

“I found 337 Birch Street. It wasn’t her home. It was a cemetery, outside of Bolton.”

“Oh.”

“I also found an Elaina Carter, or at least her grave and headstone. She was twenty-nine the day she died.”

“And when was that?”

“Your birthday.”

***

Camael finally settled on a host. It was time to stop lamenting things that couldn’t be changed and start getting back into the game at hand. His head seemed to be clearing and the latest reports from his demon minions were enough to snap him out of his sentimental reverie. The reapers had been busy, it seemed, and they were making a serious dent in his incursion. Without a leader, the demons were no more than a bothersome nuisance up top. Like the children they were, they needed constant guidance and supervision. On a bad day, he was a glorified babysitter, on a good day? Well, on a good day, he was Hell incarnate.

Standing tall before his long dressing mirror, he admired the host form he’d settled on. This human was an outstanding physical specimen, heavily muscled and healthy, his tanned head slick and bald—a welcome change from Maeve’s high maintenance coif. The full-body tattoos extended along both arms and across his chest and back. Only his legs were free of markings. The ink boasted numerous symbols that were well known in Camael’s adopted neighborhood. The swastika gracing his pectoral muscle was one of his personal favorites. How many souls had fallen with that emblazoned upon their skin in the past century? It was inspiring what a little branded marketing could accomplish. It had gone from being a symbol of life, luck and strength for three thousand years to one of total domination and evil in fifty. Amazing.

The true power of any symbol lay in the eye and heart of the beholder.

His chosen host was a one-owner model. One who had foolishly summoned a demon. He was a human who
desired
to be possessed. A fact that had allowed Camael’s demons to lead him right up to the gates of Hell and walk him straight to Camael’s door, new and never previously possessed. If there were possession CARFAX, this one’s record would be clean as a whistle.

Camael dismissed the attending demons. Enough of this nonsense. He stretched inside his new skin. Yes, this one would do for now. Maybe he would even last a week inside one so strong.

And wouldn’t that be a miracle? It would give him just enough time to complete his mission.

Just once, Camael wished Lucifer could experience the frustration of his limitations up top. Lucifer had been the first to fall and in his all-consuming wrath, God had bound him to Hell as a condition of his betrayal. Lucifer wouldn’t be able to leave until the last soul was freed from Hell, but he’d still retained all of his powers, not to mention his wings. It came in handy that the Big Guy hadn’t been clear on the condition the souls needed to be in when they were freed. A loophole Lucifer fully intended to exploit. The last souls would indeed be free of Hell very, very soon…just not in the form anyone had expected.

Camael, on the other hand, had fallen in the last quarter century, countless millennia since Lucifer, and he’d slid into Hell, and out of reach of God’s wrath, in the nick of time. His punishment was the loss of his angel body outside of Hell, which—along with his traitorous heart—was what had caused the entire chain of events leading to his fall. So he’d been left to languish in Hell or ride a host, just like the demons. He’d spent the last quarter century reliving his last few days, hours and minutes on Earth.

Having been alive for nearly as long as Lucifer, these past twenty-seven years—the blink of an eye in his life, really—had been by far the longest. He’d been in Hell in every sense of the word before finally pulling out of his stupor and beginning to plot his revenge.

Opening the final portal for Lucifer would be a sweet victory. God had taken everything Camael loved from him. And now Camael could return the favor.

There was one place Camael would visit again before heading back to Meridian to find the location for the final portal. His sacrifice wasn’t ready yet, but after some self-reflection over the past few days, he had come up with a new plan that he was confident would work.

Even a half-baked plan was better than nothing, and after this latest setback, he was ready to accelerate things or die trying. He would experience one last indulgence before drawing out his prey and completing his mission.

He flashed out of Hell and headed to Bolton.

***

Nate followed Rosemary and Garrett back to the hub where the Yule fire had burned down to a still smoldering pile on the cold, late December morning. Crossing the hub, they continued in silence onto Mabon Street, moving past several Arts & Crafts style homes. Tension coiled in his gut as Rosemary came to a stop in front of a dusty blue home accented with white trim. A two-foot tall, gray, fieldstone fence lined the front and left side of the yard, broken only by the narrow driveway, which led to the attached carport. A wooden sign hung from the front door announcing, “The Witch Is In.”

Nate’s heartbeat quickened. A few more steps and she would be there. His mother. How many times through the years had he walked past this very house, not knowing who was inside? Hundreds. His chest ached.

Climbing the wooden stairs to the tidy front porch, Rosemary reached for the cast iron doorknocker. The gentle tapping on the solid cedar and pine wood front door filled Nate’s chest with a slow burn of unease.

He heard the latch click open and then a wiry but elderly woman emerged in the doorway, her eyes crinkling at the corners with her smile.

“Rosemary, so glad to see—” She stopped when she looked past Rosemary and took in the sight of the crowd gathered on her porch. “Oh.”

“Fiona, we’ve come to see her.”

Fiona looked past Rosemary to Nate, who recognized her as the coven’s librarian. While Nate hadn’t been a frequent visitor to the library, he’d always known her to be kind and patient, even with the rowdier kids.

“Oh, dear. Are you sure?”

“Yes. It’s time.”

Sadness crossed her face and she backed away from the doorway. “Very well then. Come on in.” They walked into the cozy living area. “There won’t be room for all of you at once, of course.”

“I’ll go in with Nate for now.” Rosemary reached back for his hand, but he couldn’t bring himself to give it to her. She nodded and led him down a narrow hallway toward the back of the house. Garrett and Maeve stayed in the living room with Fiona.

Sunlight streamed through high, stained glass transom windows as they passed a small bedroom, an office and a personal library. They stopped at the back of the house before an open archway leading to a converted sunroom. Windows lined the southern wall of the room and the remaining three walls were painted a painfully cheerful color of purple. To the left of the doorway was a queen-sized bed that filled most of the narrow, rectangular room. Lying upon it was a woman.

Rosemary crossed the room and stood in the narrow space between the edge of the bed and the wall of windows. Nate remained in the doorway, reluctant to make the last three steps to her side.

“Nate, meet your birth mother, Elaina Carter.”

Nate’s world imploded. Ruth’s
birth mother
was named Elaina Carter. His mind raced as he tried to make sense of the new knowledge that overtook him. A hard lump formed in his throat and he was reduced to his five year-old self, cold, afraid and alone in a cemetery in the middle of the night. For the first time he remembered the details of the headstone he’d landed against when he flashed there twenty-two years ago. The stone had read
Elaina Carter.

Yet here she was. Elaina Carter. Alive if not well.

No, not well at all.

And Ruth was his sister.

As the pieces rearranged, one last puzzle piece clicked into place. If his father was an angel, and he and Ruth were indeed nephilim, then there was only one fallen angel they held in common.

Camael
.
Could it be?
But his mind couldn’t wrap itself around that, couldn’t even process the truth about Ruth while he stood here in the same room as his birth mother.

He closed the space between them and looked down at Elaina in wonder. The first thing he noticed was her lack of an aura. Her long, dark hair fanned out beneath her head and she reminded him of Sleeping Beauty. Her hands were folded across her stomach on top of the quilted blanket covering her.

Even through her thinness, the sickly paleness of her lips and the translucent quality of her skin—every vein and artery seemingly apparent in her visible flesh—he could still see evidence of the beauty she’d been. Almost as beautiful as Maeve. But her thin arms now consisted of mostly bone, and her clavicles protruded through her thin gown just above the edge of the blanket. Even beneath the coverings, it was clear her hipbones projected through the quilt in two pronounced points, leaving him with little doubt about how skeletal the rest of her body was.

“We’ve tried a variety of treatments through the years, from feeding tubes to black magic, but nothing has helped. We’ve tried to keep her comfortable, nourish her body as well as we can, but she continues to deteriorate, albeit slowly. She’s never spoken since we found her moments after you were born.”

“Where was she?”

“In a cemetery a few minutes from the coven. In a town called Bolton. We had no idea how she got there or why she was there, but you and your sister were wrapped in the same T-shirt. You were still in her arms when I found you.”

“Why were you in the cemetery?”

“I was on my way home for the summer solstice celebration. The cemetery is on a hill, visible from the main highway, but about a half mile off the road. I sensed a great discharge of magic from that direction as I drove by, and I couldn’t ignore it. When I went to investigate, I found the three of you, and…”

“What?”

“Another body. A man. He was decapitated. I left him there.”

“And you didn’t call an ambulance? Or the police?”

“Nate, it wasn’t the first time we had seen her. She came to us alone a few days earlier for help, drawn in by the power of our magic, I’m sure. She told us an impossible story about who and what was pursuing her. She was almost nine months pregnant. Of course, we were going to help her. And from the things she told us, we were the only ones who could. She stayed with me and Garrett at the healing center so I could help her with her pregnancy. How or why she left the coven that night and ended up in that cemetery, we still don’t know. But if I hadn’t been driving by…”

Nate leaned across the woman and gently lifted her top eyelid with his thumb to examine her. Silver-gray eyes stared back at him, unseeing.

She was soulless, all right.

Taking her hand in his, he forced a shot of Reiki light into her. Her long-starved body latched onto the offered nourishment, but he watched as it leaked back out through her damaged chakras as it passed through her. He placed his fingers along the pulse in her neck and waited. And waited. And waited. Nearly three minutes later, he felt one labored throb of her heart. Another three minutes passed before he counted another beat.

No doctor would have waited so long before pronouncing her deceased.

This is what a true and complete reaper coma looked like: defenseless, depleted and as good as dead.

“Can you tell? Is she—like Maeve? Like, you? A reaper?”

“Yes.”

Rosemary was silent for several long moments as Nate considered the possibilities. He had an idea about why she might have been in that cemetery. Elaina was obviously a reaper, so she had probably been trying to access the consecrated subway. He knew from his experience with Ruth that using that means of transportation was a last resort for a pregnant reaper.