Reap & Redeem (3 page)

His rage had leaked out visibly—he could tell from the way they’d reacted.

What he needed now was the time and space to get himself under some semblance of control.

A red neon sign flashed Vacancy three blocks down at the Marquette Hotel—sleazy was an understatement. It would do. The neighborhood was raw and dirty, but at least it would provide him with some downtime far away from the others.

He would have loved to track down another demon and take out his frustration on the damn thing. But he couldn’t do that alone. He could maybe find one, but if he beheaded the host, the demon would just stream out and find another one. In this realm, only Deacon currently had the ability to dispose of them.

A fact that continued to piss him off to no end. Deacon had
everything
—power, an impressive position, Ruth. All Kylen had was cold, hard vengeance, a century’s worth of bad memories…

And a death wish.

He walked into the hotel lobby and leveled his gaze at the ragged young clerk who was reading a magazine behind the iron-barred, bulletproof service window. The clerk looked up, his eyes wide as Kylen paced toward him, steel-toed boots thundering across the worn oak floor. The kid backed away.

“A room.” Kylen demanded.

The clerk didn’t speak. He was too busy staring at Kylen’s right hand.

“Did you hear me?” Kylen followed the kid’s gaze to the open scythe gripped by his side.

Well,
s
hit.
He hadn’t even realized he’d drawn the damn thing. Force of habit. His rage had demanded a response. Even if it was subconscious. His motivations didn’t make much sense these days, even to him.

Pawing at the Peg-Board of room keys beside him, the boy kept his eyes fixed on Kylen as he pulled one loose without bothering to note its number. The key jangled against the diamond-shaped key ring in his trembling hand before he tossed it onto the counter. He gave it a shove through the tiny pay slot before backing up all the way to the wall behind him. Kylen scooped up the key and headed to the third floor without another word.

* * *

The room was humid, dark and smelled like a wet ashtray. Fitting. The bedsheets were stained and threadbare. The comforter was worse. Didn’t matter. All he needed was a few hours to recharge without having to deal with the others.

He crossed to the window, parted the sheer curtain liner, and looked down into the alley below him. A working girl was giving head to some sad sack pushed up against the brick alley wall by a Dumpster. His own dick hardened against his will.
Christ.
Like he didn’t have enough problems.

Satisfied that there were no immediate threats, he pulled the heavy outer curtains across the sheer liner in an attempt to block out the one streetlight glowing through the barred window. He pushed a rickety nightstand against the door. If someone wanted to mess with him, they’d have to work for it, and he’d have time to pull his weapon, which he was still holding.

Convenient.

When he reclined onto the bed, the sheath was uncomfortable beneath him, but it was so much like an appendage, he couldn’t bear to remove it. Keeping the scythe in his hand, he folded it with care and settled it across his stomach.

The pillow was worthless, and he tossed it across the room toward the far wall. Arms crossed and eyes closed, he lay on the bed like the dead. He was relieved to be alone, somewhere where no one knew him, for a few hours. Here, in the dark of a strange hotel room, he didn’t have to pretend to be anything other than supremely fucked up. It was downright peaceful.

Opening his senses to the night, he reached out, searching for the next demon. They were still close. All of them. They hadn’t strayed as far as Deacon had expected they would. Their master was nearby as well. Instructing them, preparing them, leading them.

Yeah, Kylen could feel
him,
too.

It still surprised him that the connection didn’t seem to travel both ways anymore. Of course, his own personal demon had tried to burn the bridges of communication on its way out while also attempting to destroy his physical body. But that mission hadn’t been completed. Little by little, Kylen had become aware of his tether to the darkness. While he couldn’t communicate with the big boss, Camael, anymore, he could still see and hear flashes of what was happening in Hell and in Meridian. Only in these revelations, in his mind’s eye, was his vision still in perfect Technicolor. The demons were busy. Very, very busy.

Something big was about to go down.

Join us, Kylen. You belong here.
It was Camael’s voice, so very familiar to him.

Before he could tune in clearly, the transmission was severed, and his energy was too low to maintain it. The effort had sapped what was left of his reserves, managing to further deplete him, and his limbs grew heavy as exhaustion pulled him under its thrall. He would allow himself to slide from consciousness for just long enough to recharge. It was a luxury he could barely tolerate anymore. Every time he succumbed to sleep these days, he was haunted by nightmares. He couldn’t decide which memories were worse: his demon’s or his own.

* * *

Kara stood hundreds of yards in front of him across the battlefield, making her way from body to body, collecting the souls of the dead warriors. He’d lost count of how many she had already gathered. He had a dozen of his own, filled far beyond comfortable capacity. Kara might well have been carrying a hundred. She was a valkyrie—the ultimate reaper.

Her straight blond hair whipped wild and unkempt in the wind and her icy-gray eyes—the mark of a reaper filled with souls—shined like diamonds in the moonlight. Deacon moved downfield with swift efficiency, collecting souls as he went. Both of them were too far from her to stop what was about to happen.

Kylen heard the scream and raced toward her, reaching her before her wail extinguished. He was still too late. The warrior whose soul she’d attempted to liberate was not yet dead…and he was not alone. The demon who possessed him had been lying in wait for a reaper. As Kylen watched with horror, the warrior rose and smiled. Kara’s head swiveled on her neck, blood pouring from the crescent-moon slash the demon had inflicted on her. He sliced the scythe through her body over and over again until the souls began to pour from her, streaming into his disintegrating form.

Kylen drew back his own scythe and prepared to behead the demon, but stopped when the last soul hovered, its shape becoming visible the instant before it was drawn into the beast.

Kara.

Kylen fell to his knees before the demon, his world crumbling to a halt in a manner of seconds.

Kara was dead.

A hundred years together hadn’t been enough. Not nearly. Deacon approached from behind the demon, but empowered by its consumption of Kara’s soul, the demon blasted him with an orange fireball of energy that knocked him to the ground, rendering him unconscious.

The demon strode toward Deacon, intent on collecting his cargo as well, but Kylen shook off his despair and gathered himself.

“Wait,” Kylen pleaded. “I have an offer.”

The demon turned and considered him, the battle raging on all around them. He looked at Deacon again, hesitated and then returned to Kylen, his curiosity clear.

“What sort of offer, reaper?”

“Your ride is disintegrating around you. The strength you feel now is because you hold a reaper’s soul, but in mere moments the hundreds of souls you carry will wear you thin. I’ll make you a deal. You give me the reaper’s soul and let me take it to Purgatory. When I return, I’ll grant you access to my body. Surely you’d rather ride a reaper than a human?” Kylen held the demon’s black-eyed gaze.

“Well now, that
is
an offer.” The demon grinned, then gave Deacon a longing look.

Deacon carried at a least a dozen souls, too, and was as weak as Kylen. He’d be lucky to wake from his injury from the orange fireball. He had no idea if Deacon had enough light left to kick-start himself again.

“And I want the other reaper,” Kylen demanded. “He’s not yours.”

“I’m not sure you have room for any further negotiations, reaper.”

“I guess that depends on how much you want a new, nearly indestructible ride,” Kylen added.

“Nearly would be an apt assertion,” the demon taunted.

“Still sturdier than what you now ride.”

“Yes, this is the third one this week. Humans are…troublesome. You have fifteen minutes to go to Purgatory and return to me. If you renege on our deal, I’ll make sure your demise is nowhere near as neat and tidy as your friend’s.” The demon inhaled a great breath, and then forced Kara’s soul from his throat in a long gray stream.

She reformed between the two men, and Kylen stepped forward to claim her. He closed his eyes and breathed in her essence before crossing over to Deacon and hoisting him up over his shoulder. The very ground he stood on had been consecrated by the sheer number of the dead this day. He didn’t have to bother finding another portal to Purgatory. This battlefield had already become Hell on Earth.

“I’ll be waiting for you…” the demon promised.

Kylen swirled and spun, disappearing into the consecrated subway as bodies continued to fall around him…

* * *

When Kylen awoke, he was covered in a cold, clammy sweat, his heart racing. He
hated
that dream.
That memory.
He hadn’t consciously allowed it to replay in his mind for more than a hundred years, but since the demon had been forced from him, he relived it almost every time he slept.

A noise in the alley below brought him bolt upright in bed and to the window in two quick steps. He pushed the heavy curtain from the edge of the window and peered down. His heart slammed in his chest. The alley was full of imps. The gelatinous toadlike creatures sat on their haunches, patient and still, staring up at him. There was no magic circle of protection to keep them at bay here, only bricks and a barred window.

He narrowed his eyes and pulled the curtain closed, his lips thinning into a tight line. To anyone else—anyone human—it would look like nothing more than an alley full of hungry black cats. Only reapers and supernatural creatures could see them for what they really were… They would know
whose
they really were.

Demons commanded imps, but he was not a demon—not anymore, anyway—and he wanted nothing to do with these creatures. He’d already tried to command them to leave him alone. Obviously it hadn’t worked. It was unclear what they expected from him.

Kin to kin.

He looked at his watch. An hour.
So much for a good night’s sleep.
It would have to do.

He shoved the nightstand aside, stepping into the dim hallway just as the screaming began down below.

Chapter Five

Kylen pounded down the stairs, taking them two and three at a time, drawn to the scream like a beacon. The bright, shrill peal of terror was coming from the alley. The silence that followed it was almost worse.

The lobby was deserted when he ripped through it, bursting out of the building’s double glass doors, slamming them open against the brick walls on either side. Glass and metal shrapnel exploded with great force, scattering fragments across the pavement. He smelled the demon before he saw it. Imps smelled like baking cookies compared to the noxious, eye-burning stench that emanated from demons. Rounding the corner into the alley, the odor filled his senses.

The bastard was abandoning its wrecked host body—the skinny guy he’d seen earlier with the prostitute. The demon hovered over a different woman, definitely not the prostitute. Her eyes were wide with fear and she seemed frozen in place. Her mouth was stretched wide in a silent scream as the black steam forced its way into her.

Kylen swept forward and flicked his right wrist, extending the blade of his already drawn scythe. Seizing the woman by the throat, he pulled her back from the skinny host, who looked like a junkie, holding her upright as her knees buckled. He directed a bolt of light energy into her, the radiance exploding from his palm and fingertips, illuminating her from the inside out like a human glow stick.

The demon stalled its forward progress and began to back its way out of the woman. Hovering briefly, it gathered itself into a black ghost of its true form—a form Kylen knew all too well—before slipping back down the junkie’s throat.

The decrepit man’s eyes blinked once, sliding closed in a vertical slit as the demon settled back into the failing body.

“Too late,” the junkie mocked. “Cut off the head of one and more will take its place. You can’t stop it.”

“Can’t stop what?”

“The war.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

Kylen slashed his scythe in a wide arc up and across the junkie’s neck, beheading him.

The body fell to the ground in a heap as the head landed with a wet thunk beside it, rolling to a stop. The demon streamed by Kylen, its horrible face alone taking form from the black fog. After taking stock of his adversary, it turned and streamed down the alley, up and over the buildings.

Kylen caught the woman as she began to crumble into a pile before him. He clutched her to him. Her vacant eyes shone bright with the brilliant afterglow of the energy he’d forced through her, and then fluttered closed as she fell unconscious. Folding his blade, he slid it into the sheath down the center of his back while he held her with one arm and felt her neck for a pulse.

She was alive. Barely.

Imps gathered around his feet, circling him and the woman in anticipation. One stopped to sniff something behind the Dumpster where Kylen had spotted the prostitute. So the kid hadn’t been after a happy ending after all.

Kylen scooped up the woman and cradled her in his arms. He sidestepped the seep of garbage fluids pooling under the Dumpster to investigate. The prostitute lay sprawled on the ground, unmistakably dead. From the look of things, she’d tried to crawl to safety. She had no visible wounds other than a few cuts and scrapes. Nothing mortal that he could see. But her eyes were black and vacant.