The Reaping (The Reapers Book 1) (13 page)

Landon stood and paced the snow. “You stay away from him, Kelsey. You understand me? He’s a good friend and I don’t want him knowing you.”

“Might upset him if I die?”

“Far as I’m concerned, he’ll never know you are gone. I’ll be in your body, and he and I can go back to being buddies. I just don’t want to have to fuck him, understand? Or break up with him or whatever.” He threw up his hands and shuddered. “Just stay away from him, okay.”

“Cancel dinner?” I almost hoped Landon would say yes. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to hear Landon’s sad story or learn to have any sympathy for him.

“Yes, cancel the fucking dinner.” Landon looked at me and shook his head. “Shit, no don’t cancel. Go to dinner and pretend you give a shit, it’ll make him feel better.”

“Or what?” I asked, wondering if I could get any leverage at all in this game.

“Or I go after Angelica starting tomorrow.”

He had me there. Maybe I was better off with no friends.

He put a wrist up to his face and pretended to study it. “Looks like we have about three hours until the sun comes up on your side, so I’ve got a little job to keep you warm while you wait.” Landon suddenly produced a shovel and threw it at me. “Clear the snow off the mountain.”

I didn’t move. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine myself back in my own living room.

“Ha,” he said with a laugh. “You aren’t going anywhere that way, sweet thing. I’ve fixed that little loophole. Start digging before you freeze to death.”

I considered asking for warmer clothes, but I knew Landon would say no and decided not to waste energy asking. I picked up the shovel and used it like a cane to help me get to my feet. When I stood, it took everything I had not to curl around myself to try to keep warm. The icy wind hit my bare belly and I gasped at the cold that stung me with a physical pain. Standing still wasn’t going to warm me so I started digging. I dug in deep, lifted out a heavy load of snow, and tossed it on the ground next to the hole. When I moved the shovel back to my starting spot, the hole was gone. I looked around for it, but there was no hole. The pile of snow was still where I’d left it. I looked at Landon, but he was staring at the blank snow, his eyes wide. “Are we in hell?” I asked.

He met my eyes then and the look on his face was one of primal fear. “Just shut up and dig,” he said.

I went back to work and he watched, making comments on my snow shoveling form and on my body. Those three hours felt like twenty-four. Eventually, Landon stood, walked over, and took the shovel from me.

“Now, get outta here.” He gave me a shove, and I started sliding down the slope. Somehow, I got my frozen body to work just in time, and I caught myself. “I said get out of here. I’m sick of looking at your goody-goody face.” He gave me another shove and this time, I slid straight for what appeared to be the edge of a cliff. I scrambled for something to hold onto, but my fingers just slid over the icy slope. I fell for what seemed like an eternity. I could see the ground below rushing toward me, and I struggled desperately to wake up. I’d heard that if you die in a dream, you die in reality, and that was a theory I didn’t want to test. As I fell, I imagined myself back in my own bed, under my own blanket. Too late, I remembered that I had fallen asleep on the couch. I hit the ground with a kind of squishy thud and a searing pain before my world went entirely black.

When I opened my eyes, daylight streamed in through the large window in our living room, and I was on the couch. I was shivering uncontrollably, and all I wanted in the world was to be warm and go back to sleep. To achieve that goal, I would have to get out off the couch and find about ten more blankets. I started to push myself up to a sitting position but every muscle in my body shouted at me not to move. So I listened and tried to figure out why I hurt so bad. It took me approximately thirty seconds to remember that Landon had pushed me off a cliff and I’d been shoveling snow all night. That was the only physically traumatic thing that had happened to me in the last twenty-four hours, but it had happened in a dream. Maybe my pain was related to the beating I’d taken from Reid, but when I squeezed my stomach muscles I found that those were the only muscles in my body that didn’t hurt. I gingerly reached up and touched my cheek to find that it was still tender and swollen, but it didn’t seem likely that cheek pain had somehow magically become full body pain.

Unable to reach a definitive conclusion about the cause of my pain, I decided to pretend it didn’t exist. I could stay on the couch and go back to sleep until I stopped hurting, but that would only give Landon another shot at me. I could get up and go discuss the incident with Angelica and let her decide what I should do next, but this was weird beyond weird. Once the ghosts started physically injuring the living, it was time to freak out, and I didn’t want to freak out Angelica. I took a couple of deep breaths to avoid freaking out myself and a male voice said, “You okay, Kelsey?”

I carefully turned my head to the side and saw Doug still sitting in the blue chair. “Doug. Were you here all night?” I asked as well as I could around chattering teeth.

He nodded. “I wanted to help if Landon bothered you again, but I couldn’t find you.”

I forced my arms under my body, pushed myself to a sitting position, and dropped my legs over the side of the couch so that I was facing him. Luckily, it seemed that all of my limbs were still working and present. “I was right here, wasn’t I?” I tried to hold back the panicky squeak from my voice, but judging by the concern in Doug’s eyes, I failed.

“Your body was here, but you were gone. I don’t know where he took you, but I couldn’t find you, and I tried, Kelsey. I really tried.”

“He took my spirit.” My voice shook and I cleared my throat trying to get control of myself. “He took me to a mountaintop. A freezing, snowy mountaintop. Sound familiar?”

He shook his head. “I’m still getting the lay of the land over there. Most of what’s there mirrors what’s in the living world, and if I’m familiar with a place, I can be there in a thought. Maybe the mountain he took you to was the mirror of your mountain here.”

“Probably.” I shrugged and then wished I hadn’t as my shoulder muscles screamed in pain. It didn’t really matter where he’d taken me, since he’d take me somewhere different next time, anyway. What mattered was that he had taken me, my soul, my essence, away from my body and then thrown it off a cliff. “Doug, do you feel pain? Like if I punched you right now, would you feel that?”

“Nope, but Alice took my hand the other day, and I felt that. I hadn’t realized how much I missed touch, until…” He looked away from me.

I nodded, sorry I’d asked. I felt suddenly sorry about a lot of things. All of the things I hadn’t done yet, all the things I’d meant to do, the person I’d meant to be. If the pain I felt now was just the beginning, if Landon could make me hurt like this whenever he wanted to, I was going to lose. I was certain that I was not a strong enough person for this. “Landon pushed me off a cliff last night. Well, I guess he pushed my spirit off a cliff, and now I hurt. I really, really hurt.”

“Well, at least you’re still alive,” Doug said without a smile.

“Listen, Doug. Please don’t help me anymore.”

“I haven’t helped you, yet.”

“No, you have helped me. You’ve been a friend to me when I really needed one and I appreciate that, but I don’t think I’m going to win this one, and I don’t want you to get hurt because of me.”

He stood and strode over to get in my face. “Are you going to roll over that easily? Wake up one morning a little sore and—”

“A little?” I gasped.

“A little sore, and you’re just going to throw in the towel? If it’s that easy for them to take over your body, then maybe you really
don’t
deserve it. And if you are going to give up so easily, then I’m definitely not going to stick out my neck for you.”

He was right. I knew he was right, but I was tired, and I hurt, and I wasn’t thinking clearly. I needed to keep fighting, but he didn’t have to keep fighting next to me. There was no reason for both of us to be destroyed. “Good, Doug. If you don’t like it, you can leave.”

He must have seen something in my face, because he smiled, walked over to the ugly blue chair, and sat back down. “That’s better. I knew you still had fight left in you.”

I sighed and started to shake my head, but it hurt too much. “Doug, if you get yourself hurt trying to help me, I’ll…”

He just kept grinning at me. “Well, I should get going and see what else I can find out about these guardians.”

“Wait,” I whispered. There was something else I needed to ask him, something I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. He looked at me and waited. “Have you heard…Does anyone know what happens to the soul of the person who gets kicked out of the body?”

He frowned. “Kelsey…”

“It’s that bad, huh? Well, I guess that’s another reason to keep fighting.” I said the words to make him feel better, but I felt the little bit of fight I had in me wither. Rationally, I knew I had to fight with everything I had to preserve myself, but emotionally, I felt hopeless. How could I possibly fight a force so powerful that it destroyed the entire soul of a person?

Angelica bounced into the kitchen, humming, and Doug vanished. I didn’t even want to think about trying to explain to Angelica why I was hobbling around so I carefully lay back down and pretended to sleep. I must have really dozed off because the next time I woke up, I saw Cat leaning over me and whispering my name. She jumped back when I opened my eyes.

“I’m so, so, so sorry. Angelica asked me to wake you up if you didn’t get up on your own. She said you had to be at work at ten.”

“What time is it now?”

“Um, ten?” She said it sort of like it was a question and sort of like it should have been obvious to me.

“Shit, shit, shit,” I said as I freaked out because I was going to be so late and then because it hurt so bad when I jumped off the couch and tried to run to the bathroom. I made it about three paces from the couch before I crumpled to the floor.

“You okay?” Cat asked, without moving from her seat on the couch.

I was starting to dislike her. “I’m fine. I think my legs fell asleep.”

She nodded. “Ewww, I hate it when that happens.”

Seriously?
But I smiled, pushed myself up, and hobbled back to the bathroom. I somehow managed to brush my hair, but I didn’t have time for a shower so it might have been better if I hadn’t brushed it and had let everyone think that unwashed, bed head was the look I was going for. I tried to cover the bruise on my face with make-up, but I didn’t do a very good job. In some places, the make-up looked caked on, and, in others, the bruise shone through like I wasn’t wearing make-up at all. Everyone knew I’d been punched, and I didn’t have the time to care. I even managed to wiggle into a pair of jeans, but the shirt I’d worn the night before was staying—my arms and back hurt so bad I could barely lift them. I brushed my front four teeth and limped to the door, where I wrapped a coat around my shoulders and headed out. For the first time, I wished I owned a car. The walk to the store took an eternity.

Luckily, Cherie was as late as I was, so we pretended we’d both arrived right on time and opened up only a tad quicker than we usually did. I then crawled up the stairs to the office, shut the door behind me, and sat down behind the desk, intending to do whatever required the least amount of movement. I had three messages on the office phone. Isabella had called in “under the weather.” Al had called asking me to expect a shipment of about five boxes of books that needed to be inventoried and put on the shelves that day. And the guy who owned the deli next door called to ask if I was interested in changing my window display to match his Thanksgiving themed window. I swallowed hard, wondered if Landon had left a stash of painkillers lying around, then stood and moved downstairs by sheer force of will.

I was halfway through the book shipment when Caleb showed up. When I saw him push through the back doors into our receiving room, my heart sort of skipped a beat, and I couldn’t help smiling at him. Not like I was into him or anything—just that he was really pretty and, after the night I’d had, pretty was nice.

“Late night? Or did Cat already skip out on a payment?” he asked.

I must have looked as bad as I suspected. “Late night.” I winced like I had a headache, which I did if I really thought about it. “Too much to drink.”

“You and Angelica go out again?”

I shook my head then wished I hadn’t. “Nope, stayed in. How ’bout you?”

He looked a tiny bit uncomfortable. “Jed left yesterday, so I had a quiet night by myself.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize he’d already left.”

“Yeah, I kind of hoped he would stay, but this really isn’t his scene, you know. If Angelica had gone out with him, maybe…”

“I didn’t know he’d asked.”

“He didn’t. It was joke.” Caleb now looked truly uncomfortable. “A bad one, I guess.”

“Um, no.” I was beginning to feel uncomfortable myself, just standing there as still as possible so he didn’t see what kind of shape I was really in.

“I don’t want to keep you from your work. I just wanted to see if you and Angelica want to hang out tonight. I’m at loose ends now that Jed’s gone.”

“Unfortunately, I can’t tonight. Maybe this weekend?”

“Sure. What’s up tonight? You have a date?”

The way he said that, like he completely expected me not to have a date, really got on my nerves. I had dates. I hadn’t had a date in six months, and I really hadn’t had
many
dates, especially if drunken sleepovers didn’t count, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that I was datable, and it shouldn’t be surprising to him, especially not to him who had made my heart skip. So I lied. “I do, actually.”

“Really?” His eyes widened. “With who?”

“Bruce. I don’t actually know his last name. He works at the bakery next to our place.”

He nodded, and then I did see something in his eyes. Maybe he was thinking of a way out of the conversation so he could go find someone else to hang out with. “Yeah, I’ve seen him around. I didn’t know you knew him.”