Chapter 7

CHAPTERSEVEN

He did it all one more time. Power of three, and all that. She was proud of how long she lasted, but she’d had a lot of desire for him stored up. Maybe almost as much as he had. Even so, when they were done, he had to carry her back to the cot. Raina often referred to “being fucked until your legs no longer worked,” but Ramona now understood why her friend spoke so highly of the experience.

When he lay on the narrow mattress, Silas tugged her down so her lower body was between his spread legs, her stomach pressed against his finally somewhat resting cock, her cheek on his chest.

She hoped to take him home when they both woke. She had a much bigger bed there. But despite Mikhael’s recommendation that Silas take a couple days, it was likely wishful thinking. Sending the message had apparently worked, so she assumed they would eventually be getting an answer. All the things she’d imagined for their reunion, spending time together…well, so much for that. They had a threat from the demon world to counter and a possession mark that needed to be removed.

Even semi-conscious, he responded to her uneasiness. His arms tightened around her, hand moving to her hair to stroke. It gave her a quiet wash of hope. This was what they had, and she would take it. With that thought in mind, she drifted off to sleep.

When she woke, it was nighttime, which meant she’d slept several hours. She was alone.

He’d left. She sat up, a jagged ache in her lower belly. Then she viciously quashed the feeling of abandonment. You spent sixteen months believing he didn’t come back because of who you are, and you were entirely wrong. Goddess, how quickly the fragile ego could drag one down the same tiresome roads. Maybe he’d received that message response and had to leave. Maybe he’d left her a note.

As she folded her arms over herself, her thumb rubbed against her right wrist. The ribbons were gone, but the ink remained. He had left her a message. His own energy coursed much more strongly through the bands, because she’d opened herself to what the bands meant, invited him in to take full possession of them. Her feelings for him were still fueling them, but now so were his for her.

The thought thankfully took her past her freakout moment. Nevertheless, she detected an unsettling vibration through her shop. Plus Silas. He hadn’t left. Rising, she slipped her clothes back on and went to find him.

He was standing to the right of her front display window, out of direct view. Most the shops closed at dark, so Main Street was populated primarily by people coming or going from the handful of restaurants. He looked like he was staring into space. Thoughtful.

He was also dressed. He wore snug cargo trousers, plus an open button-down shirt whose cotton fabric lay against him as his robe did, a flowing remark on the beauty of the form beneath. Mikhael and Derek had a cache of possessions they could call upon when needed, a cosmic storage locker of sorts. She supposed Reapers had the same.

His head was dipped down, his thick, unruly hair falling over his brow. With the resilient leanness to him, it made his silhouette almost look young. The shirt was open and he had his palm on his chest, was rubbing the marked spot with an odd repetition, as if unconsciously trying to remove a stain, even though it wasn’t currently visible.

The disruptive energy waves were coming from that, messing with the shield she kept on her shop to ease her clients and occupy her Chaos energies. Which was why her toy train changed routes, and her inventory routinely rearranged itself or transformed into other things.

As she drew closer, she saw his eyes were unfocused. Slowly, she brought her hand to hover over his rubbing one, listening with all her senses, feeling for it…

His head jerked her way. For a flash, she saw the skull beneath the skin, the empty eye sockets with green flame. Then the image was gone. His hand dropped from beneath hers before they could touch and he stepped back, giving himself the room for the energy to dissipate.

“All right?” she ventured.

“Yeah. Sorry, I was trying to probe deeper into it again. Thinking it might be more accessible now that I have most of my strength back.” He gave her a half-smile, the heat of which rippled over her skin. “Thank you for that.”

Her cheeks warmed as he took her hand and pressed his mouth to her palm. “Does it hurt?” she asked. “Having it there?”

“No. When I think about it too much, it just feels like something is clinging to me. A leech, without the useful bloodsucking properties.” Though he spoke matter-of-factly, she sensed the storm crashing against the wall of his self-discipline. If she wanted to rip that marker out of him forcibly, burn it to ash, she could only imagine how he felt, having to suffer its presence, its unknown but surely malevolent purpose.

Looking more closely, she was also certain he hadn’t slept well. Was it due to his revulsion over having it within him, or because the thing itself wasn’t allowing him the respite, with the intent of wearing him down, weakening him?

Sensing any talk related to the mark wouldn’t be helpful to him at the moment, she chose distraction. It often widened the perspective on a problem, giving the puzzler more options to solve it. Gina’s question about celebrities came to mind, so she gave that her own spin.

“So you said you were meant to be a Reaper. But do you ever want to do something else, just for a while? Rock star, short order cook?”

He chuckled at her expectant look, rubbed a hand over his face. “I’ve spent the day with both of those. Reapers get a lot of vicarious experiences. It’s enough. So, no. I’ve never known a Reaper who didn’t feel the same as I do, that this was their chosen destiny. When they can do it no longer, they simply fade away. Usually into moving water. Underground springs, rivers, creeks. Oceans. Why are you smiling?”

“When I was little,” she said, “I would conjure origins for myself like the old stories. Pegasus and Chrysaor, spawned out of Medusa’s neck when Perseus cuts off her head. Or the trickster who became a seed to escape the sorceress Cerridwen’s wrath, so she turns herself into a chicken, swallows him, and that seed became the famous bard-wizard Taliesin.”

“So what was your favorite?”

The question sent a shadow across her heart, a vision of her mother’s face, but she gave him an honest answer. “That I came from a river, formed from the tears of a goddess. I thought of bodies of water as places to be born, so it makes sense that a life like a Reaper’s goes there to end, completing the cycle.”

He stared down at their joined hands, then drew her to him again. He put his mouth to her throat, just under her jaw. She made a soft sigh of pleasure at the pressure of his lips. “Is this insatiability an immortal thing?”

“Afraid so. I’m restraining myself. I want to have you until you’re too weak to walk again. In my very impractical fantasies, all you’d do is wait in bed for me, all the time.”

“Unless I hire more staff, that’s a very impractical plan, my lord,” she agreed. “Have I mentioned I have a very big bed at my home?”

Smiling, he lifted his head to kiss her mouth again. When she leaned full into him, she threaded her fingers through the light mat of curling hair on his chest. It was a shade darker than the strands scattered across his lined brow.

When she glanced up at him, she saw the smile had died away. He touched her face. It wasn’t just the limitations of her more fragile mortal body holding him back.

“I have to go soon,” he said. “I heard from Honora.”

She was in a peculiar position, suddenly intimate and involved with a Reaper, but having no sense of her standing with him, or enough information about his kind to assert anything of what he should or shouldn’t be doing. But she could express her feelings. “I wish you had more time to rest and recuperate.”

“I’d like nothing better than to lie in bed with you all day.” He gave her a speculative look. “Dedicate myself to earning your trust, see what happens when you fully offer it to me.”

“The climax was beautiful. The first I’ve experienced at the hands of another.” She didn’t like thinking she’d fallen short of what he’d desired from her.

He frowned, but spoke with a tender firmness. “If there is any failing here, it is mine. Either in my understanding, or in my greed to have every corner of you too quickly. Forgive me if I made you think otherwise.”

He clasped the hand she had on his chest, stroked her fingers. “It isn’t merely what happened to you at seventeen that holds you back,” he added. “That story of your origins, there was pain there.”

He was too good at discerning her thoughts, but she wasn’t going there. “Yes and no. That inspired me to learn as much as I could about my abilities. That knowledge, the places it’s taken me, have made me cautious. You’ve given me a happiness, Silas, more than I can express.”

“I plan to give you more, if time is kind.”

Which it rarely was. But before they could feel the weight of that obvious cloud, she took them back to lighter footing. “If I’d known you had to work, I’d have packed you a lunch.”

“Ah.” The corner of his mouth tipped up. “In creating my identity, what did you decide I like for lunch?”

“A peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Potato chips. A cookie for dessert.”

“You know all my favorites.” He cocked a brow. “What flavor jelly?”

She rolled her eyes. “Grape. It’s the only kind you like. You’re such a man-child.”

Sobering, she shifted her grip to either side of his open shirt. Her thumb brushed his nipple, not intentionally, but it captured his attention, his hand rising to rest over hers again, his gaze stilling on her. “Take me with you,” she said. “It’s not been long enough. Last time you left, I didn’t see you for eighteen months.”

As soon as she spoke the words, she knew they were right. While they came from her heart, everything else be damned, it wasn’t just that which prompted the request. She was as certain she needed to stay close to him as she was that the mark was keeping him awake.

“Ramona…” He framed her face with his hands. “You said it had been sixteen months.”

“It felt like eighteen.”

When he caressed her mouth, she kissed his fingers, her lips parting to tease them with her tongue. “You are misbehaving,” he admonished gently.

“I’m a witch. It’s in our DNA.” But she couldn’t smile, could only grip him tighter. He sighed.

“I am meeting Honora and others of my Wake at a Reaping. It was a skirmish, in a region at war.”

“I can handle death. I’ve seen death.”

Her voice faltered, as the images came to her and were just as quickly pushed away, because they would take over. Their talk of rivers and his intuition had brought those memories too close to the surface.

He studied her. “I’m sorry for that. Yet have you stood passively and watched people kill one another? Seen the looks on their faces, witnessed that violence grip and control them? It is different.”

“No, but I know what lies in people’s hearts. I know how close to the surface darkness lies.”

His gaze flickered, acknowledging that truth. “I am still learning what you are, but immersing a Chaos witch in such despair doesn’t seem like a good idea.”

“No more than a Reaper being there who’s operating on too little sleep with a crazy symbol of evil pulsing inside him.” When he didn’t say anything, she tapped his chest. “You remembered what I said about storms.”

“I remembered everything about that meeting. Every second of it.” He met her gaze. “Holding onto those words helped me. I spoke them to Cal, and they helped him as well. Like Taliesin, who could weave words that spoke to the heart and inspired great magic.”

She grimaced. “Trauma has given you an inflated sense of my literary strengths. Rhymes help with spell work, focusing intent. Some witches really are poets, but it doesn’t have to be that way, thank Goddess. It can be simple, practical stuff. This is the path I will choose today. Laugh and play, true to my heart, soul and way. I shamelessly stole that from two girls I heard playing hopscotch.”

He gazed down at her. With about six inches difference in their heights, when she tipped her chin down, she was staring at his chest. She felt like that hateful mark was glaring balefully at her.

Good. Maybe that meant her compulsion to go with him to the Reaping didn’t serve its purpose. “The other Reapers will be busy, right? As I said, it’s a good idea for you to have a set of eyes on the mark. It’s a possession magic; it could compromise your judgment or observation skills, right?”

“There is some sense to what you’re saying.”

“Why, thank you.” She scowled. “Derek and Mikhael have the patronizing immortal thing, too. It still seems to shock them when us mere witches come up with something they haven’t thought about.”

He held up both hands in surrender. “I plead recent trauma for my insensitivity.”

“Smooth talker.” She curled her fingers inside his grasp. “I wish I’d been your backup with Cal. After you took him to The Gate, we could have gotten lunch at that café I told you about.”

His brow pulled low, his lips firming. “The last thing I’d allow near you is a Soul Collector.”

“I have a way of turning scary things into less scary things,” she told him stoutly. “Like kittens. Or kitchen utensils. A potato masher. An ice cream scoop.” She returned to the main point, determined. “I want to go with you. I can handle it. Please.”

Apart from her real concerns about the mark, she was back to her original motive. She’d missed him. She wasn’t a clingy person, but she couldn’t handle being apart so soon after seeing him again.

He released her hand to brush his fingers along her cheek. She could see him weighing the pros and cons with the same thoroughness he’d tested her shielding ability. But from the tightness around his mouth, she knew her logic was sound. Even if they both wished it wasn’t.

“When we get there, follow my direction,” he said at last. “If it gets to be too much, turn away, shield yourself to shut it all out. I will transport you back as soon as I can.”

“I’ll be fine,” she repeated.

“The deaths you will see are fated,” he said. “We are only watchers, unseen by the living. You’ll be able to see what I am seeing. Do not stray from where I tell you to be.”

“All right.”

He gave her a hard look. “I mean it. I know you are more than capable, but this is unfamiliar territory.”

“Yes, sir.”

She tagged it with a smile, but his look kindled a ball of the same in her lower belly. “I don’t entirely dislike the sound of that,” he said.

She arched a brow. “I didn’t entirely dislike the way you said ‘you’re misbehaving.’ Almost as if you were encouraging it.”

He chuckled, shook his head. Then gazed up and around him as he was showered with white and gold daisy petals. Several landed on their clasped hands. At his quizzical look, she explained.

“Your laughter,” she said. “That’s how it makes me feel.”

The sexy smile he answered her with told her she might “Sir” him a hundred times over, if the promises behind it were her reward.

Then the humor died from his face. She could tell he was considering if he should rescind his permission for her to accompany him, though it pleased and reassured her to recognize he was also weighing her points.

While Raina and Ruby teased about it, the truth was, no matter how much Derek and Mikhael loved and respected their mates, at the end of the day they wouldn’t be overruled if they didn’t agree. On certain things, their authority as Guardians, as immortals—and yes, as Dominants—was absolute. Silas had the same manner to him. Frustrating and titillating both.

At last he gave her a serious nod. “The living, their weapons and physical matter, can’t affect you, but the elements, the earth they fight upon, will be as real as what you stand upon here. Wear something you don’t mind getting bloody.”

* * *

She changed into old jeans and a dye-spattered T-shirt she kept at the shop for dirty work. She also pulled the thick mass of her hair back and braided it.

When she rejoined him, he’d donned a cowled robe with wide sleeves over his clothes, what she assumed was the standard Reaper uniform. “Do souls see you like this, or in your Ghost Rider form?”

He got the reference, his eyes sparking with a more serious humor. “It depends. Sometimes neither. They see us in the form they need to see, to ease their transition, cut the link to their body.” He curled an arm around her waist, positioning them for portal travel. “I’ve appeared as a boy’s dog before. His pet had passed a couple years before his own death, so Bruno was the perfect guide to The Gate.”

“Ah.” She put her hands on his shoulders, spreading out her fingers to maximize the contact, for the transport and her own enjoyment. “How was that?”

“I received a very thorough ear rub and belly scratching. And many hugs. It was a good day. Hold onto me, witch. And remember what I said.”

She’d done portal travel before, though never on her own. Those channels weren’t used except by those who had regular need of them, and doing it properly was a highly developed skill, learned under the tutelage of the more experienced. No surprise that a Reaper could do it as intuitively as a fish could swim.

An apt comparison, because it was like being plunged into a strong ocean current, no obvious control or anything to hold onto. For Silas, that is, since under her clutching hands he was a solid anchor. He’d drawn her even closer when he’d stepped through the portal, so she had both arms wrapped over his shoulders, body full against his. It quelled any anxiety she might feel, any stray horror stories she’d heard about catastrophic portal jumps.

If there’d been time, she would have made an inappropriate joke about the mile-high club equivalent for those plastered together during portal travel, but they reached their destination. Then all the air around her seemed to be sucked away, because where he’d brought her, there was no room for laughter, sex or anything of joy.

Only screaming. Smoke and blood, human waste. The staccato pops of guns, more screams, a roar beneath it all.

The roar of negative Chaos. Shit.

She’d told him she could handle it. She could, but he was right—she’d never stood on the sidelines of wartime violence. In the space of an indrawn breath, her Chaos magic was threatening to go off like fireworks tossed on a bonfire.

His concern about Chaos witches and despair was also apt. Though losing hope could cripple any person, when one commanded the kind of magic she did, losing hope could have far wider ramifications.

That observation raised an abrupt flag in her mind, a question about his mark’s nature, who had created it. But she put that aside and dropped to her heels, a physical posture representing her mental one, getting low to make a smaller target. She was already speaking the words to seal herself in a bubble of quiet, where the negative forces couldn’t get through and pull her magic to the surface, co-opting it for its own uses.

Cast a bubble, do it right now. Nothing gets through but what we allow. All is heard and seen, all through a screen.

Silas was over her, hand gripping her shoulder. He was within a breath of sending her back.

She shook her head, her hand landing over his to tell him she had this. In a matter of seconds, the shielding was stabilizing. She’d intentionally cast it opaque, with a gradual move toward transparency that would filter in the sensory impacts. She used that momentary respite to use his hand and her own propulsion to draw herself back to her feet, stand at his side. When she rose on her toes to speak into his ear, his arm slipped around her, his green eyes close and intent.

“Just needed the right shielding. I’m okay. Do what you need to do.”

If he overrode her, there’d be no time for rebuttal. She’d be in her shop again. But after a lengthy moment, he inclined his head, though he kept her close, pressed against his hip. She noted he had his scythe in the other hand, was leaning on it as he hooked his thumb in her waistband, his fingers passing over the sensitive skin of her lower back.

“We don’t step in until the fight is done. There’s too much of that negative energy you wisely shielded yourself against. At first, a rising soul believes it’s still fighting. They can’t make sense of their reality until it dies back. That’s when most will release their tie to their fallen mortal form.”

The shield was beginning to let in sight, sounds and smells. She modulated it to keep the sounds recognizable but muffled, because the overwhelming noise of battle had the strongest impact on her magic.

They were in a rocky field, just off a road with a wooden fence running along it, fields beyond that, forest at her back.

The clash between rival factions involved over three dozen people. Mostly male adults and teens, a scattering of women. Some firing guns, others in hand-to-hand combat, with blades, rocks, fists. Some wore uniforms, others wore street clothes. Beyond that, she didn’t recognize anything about them. A small fight in a small corner of the globe that wouldn’t make the news in her part of the world. Yet here, this fight, whatever had driven it, was everything. Particularly for those who fell and didn’t get up again.

Silas had said she’d be able to see the souls, but even so, the first one was a shock. A teenager fell, bullet wounds in his face and chest. He was gone with a blood-laced cough, a jerk. Staring eyes. After five heartbeats, the soul erupted from him. Still looking like the boy, but up on its feet, continuing to fight.

Leaping away from his fallen corpse, he went after the opponent who had shot him. He was using his fists, so frenzied in his attack he didn’t realize they were passing through his enemy. The violence of the energy carrying him did have an effect, seeming to disorient the older man. The shooter stumbled, pivoted back into the soul, so the kid kept hitting. Then the living enemy shook off the feeling and dashed forward to engage another opponent.

The boy came to a confused halt, trembling. He seemed to have no awareness that he stood up to his calves in the chest of his sprawled body. Instead, he saw a dropped gun and dove for it. Ramona swallowed, her hands rising in a tight knot against her heart. His awareness of the battle seemed to die away as he couldn’t make sense of it, why he kept scraping at the weapon and couldn’t grasp it. Like a child on a playground, trying to pick up a worm as it writhed from his touch.

It was an insidious skill of negative Chaos, translating the small pleasures of life into a horror like this. The crash of how life had been into what it had become, for reasons that seemed impossible to unmangle and reverse, brought despair. Robbed a body of hope.

Countering it required a different kind of spellwork, one available to anyone with the will, not just a magic user. She pulled the image of the toy train in her store into her mind. Broke it down by the details of each car and worked it into her shielding. The gaily clacking noise, the way it would suddenly spiral around the track, upside down and back upright again, delighting children and adults alike as they tried to figure out how it did that. In her shop, she could get away with telling the plain truth. “It’s magic.”

Unpredictable, fun, hopeful. It existed, and when needed, could hold the line against this. Even as it shredded her own heart and made tears roll down her face.

The boy was stumbling toward the perimeter of the fighting, still trying to pick things up, as if choosing something different would work. It was then she saw a Reaper waiting near him. And behind him, there were more. All in cowled robes, a mix of males and females, standing along the perimeter of the field.

Ramona’s gaze was drawn to a female who stood at the highest point of the battlefield. The flame that sparked along the edge of her silver scythe was a glittering blue, like liquid topaz. Her lowered cowl revealed silk platinum-colored hair, just past her shoulder blades whenever the wind settled.

That had to be Honora. The mantle of leadership rested as obviously on her shoulders as the crown on a queen’s head. Plus her attention was fixed on Silas. Until it shifted, that regard falling on Ramona for a weighted moment before it returned to the field again.

The boy was next to the Reaper. As Ramona watched, a lump grew in her throat. She hadn’t expected to see the Reaper as the soul would see him. The cowled male’s tall frame altered into a much shorter, thick-waisted, broad-hipped woman, wearing a colorful print dress and embroidered slippers. On the wind, Ramona inhaled a scent of tomatoes, basil. Lamb and figs. She looked like the boy, only older. When he fell to his knees, gripping her skirts, and sobbed, she bent to put her arms around him, hold him.

The tether between the soul and his fallen body broke. The end attached to the body whipped into the air like an untied ribbon, a good-bye.

The Reaper was himself again. Without the cowl, she could see the smooth skull, his skeletal fingers wrapping over the boy’s back. Then two of them were gone, melted away. The cord continued to flap. In the boy’s absence, there was something desolate about it, unnerving. As if it was looking for something it needed, but was no longer there. Or was calling for it to come back.

It felt…wrong. Not the way it was supposed to happen.

At the moment she had the thought, Silas stiffened. His attention locked on where the Reaper and boy had vanished, and Ramona saw them rematerializing. It wasn’t part of the plan. The Reaper’s demeanor had gone battle-ready. He had his scythe turned toward the body. Ramona drew in a breath. The cord was no longer an inanimate thing, carried by the breeze. It was coiled and stiffly arched, like a serpent preparing to strike.

The boy had lost the peace he’d seemed to acquire from the Reaper’s touch. Terror was taking over. He was being pulled away from the Reaper, dragged back to his body.

“Stay here,” Silas said tersely. Two other Reapers were closing in on the same location, and he headed down the slope to join them. But as he left her side, Ramona’s attention snapped to him. An outline of darkness was thickening around his shoulders, growing in size and height, a hunching predator hovering over him. A horrible wrongness to it, just like the behavior of that cord. The feeling rippled outward.

Honora was moving with swift grace toward the same point as Silas and the others. All of them coming to aid the soul and his assigned Reaper.

Under no circumstances should that specter get any closer to the boy’s struggling soul. She was sure of it. Silas’s scythe was gleaming, not with that pure gold and blue firelight, but a sickly greenish yellow. Infection.

He didn’t seem to notice. None of them seemed to notice. Which meant no one else could see it.

As Silas passed through battling, struggling humans, that damned poisonous thing cared about none of that. It wanted that soul, and it was going to use Silas to get it.

Ramona cast off her protective shield. She didn’t brace for the onslaught of violent energy she’d been protecting herself from; she surged through it, visualizing a mermaid figurehead cutting through crashing waves. In her element and determined on her course.

Through the cacophony of battle, she reached out to the poisoned wisps coming off of that specter. Chaos and Dark Soul magic had been twins in the womb, so she wouldn’t be ignored. When the wisps responded to her caressing whisper, she began to play with them, twisting, turning, winding them over her fingers. Keeping the right mix of tension on the line so it wouldn’t know she had it hooked.

Come to me, dear fish,

I will grant your dearest wish.

To find the nourishment you desire

Give you a resting place when you tire.

A siren’s song, calculated to be irresistible to something wanting to suck life out of a soul. Silas kept moving forward, but the specter’s attention slowly flowed toward her. As it came deeper into her hold, she entranced it with a sky of souls, like shooting stars leaving sparkling trails for it to chase, obscuring the path it had turned from.

A quick glance told her Silas and the others had reached the soul. The ripple of flame along the arc of Silas’s scythe was the pure blue-gold it should be.

That was when her quarry realized it had been tricked. Part of it had been a magical binding, but way too much of it was illusion, because she hadn’t had time to cast something stronger. What was it Raina had said?

“If we’re not building the track an ass hair’s width ahead of the roller coaster wheels, I feel spoiled.”

Pretty much. She had another precious second to throw all she could into the binding while the thwarted and disoriented thing tried to figure out what had happened. It shrieked and thrashed, trying to figure its way out of her trap. Goddess, it was strong. Then it realized what had it. Its stench, the desolate energy, tried to invade her.

If it couldn’t have that soul, it would take hers.

She charged her intent and spoke the words, using their power to thrust it away from her.

Now you go back where you belong,

Your intent here malevolent and wrong.

Wrong, wrong…wrong!

The recoil that came on the final syllable was an arcane cannon. She let it hit her, no time to block. She expected to sail through the air, land against something unyielding and painful.

She got the unyielding part, only it wasn’t painful.

“Ramona.” Silas was holding her in his arms, kneeling next to where she lay, a grassy area populated with a lot of jagged, speckled rocks, tufts of dandelions thrusting up between them. From the peaceful surroundings and the silence, she wondered if they had left the battlefield.

She sat up, helped and steadied by his touch. They were still here, but it was over, the battleground strewn with the fallen. She must have blacked out for a few minutes.

“The boy…”

She looked, and saw his fallen body, but not his soul. Other souls were in the process of being claimed by the Reapers. Some of those spirits were on their knees by their corpses, staring, while the Reapers stood at their sides, in various forms. They spoke to the soul, or just silently waited for the cord between past and future to be severed.

“He was taken to The Gate. He is fine. We felt a Soul Collector’s hand in what happened, but never saw it. What were you doing?”

She wished she didn’t have to answer him, and not just because he looked pretty intimidating, like he was planning to give her total hell for engaging whatever it was. She could handle that. Telling him the truth was harder.

“It was coming from you, Silas.”

His gaze flashed. “The mark was commanding the soul back to its body?”

“No. And yes. The mark called what I assume was some version of a Soul Collector, but it cloaked it. Taking the soul was its intent, but the mark was using you to make it happen.” When his brow creased, she knew she wasn’t stating it clearly enough. “The mark was using your power to call a soul. Your blade changed colors.”

She suspected it had been testing its intent, its hold on Silas. She expressed that to him, adding, “I distracted the Collector, broke the summoning.”

Silas’s expression was wooden as Honora arrived to kneel beside them. Her face was grooved and gray as the bark of the live oaks that lined the road to Raina’s plantation house. Close up, her hair had the mix of colors and crinkled waves of the Spanish moss that dripped from them. Her eye color matched. A Reaper that looked like a tree spirit. The fingers she wrapped around her staff were gnarled, but not with age. Her spirit was ancient, but her body was straight and strong, bosom firm.

“Sylvanus,” she said. “You have been corrupted.”