The Witching Hour (The Grim Reaper Saga (Urban Fantasy Romance)) (2 page)

Then she blinked, and the grip was gone. She turned and followed the rest of her group into the club.

Cian’s heart thundered in his chest, he grabbed the roughened brick of the building, waiting for the tremors to subside. What the bloody hell had just happened? He swallowed hard, remembering the burn, the confusion, and impossible flood of joy. But why? She’d not looked excited to see him, her eyes hadn’t lit up, but still he’d felt it and couldn’t understand it.

Cian glanced back, frowning at the door.  

These were the ones he’d been sent to kill: the human man and his dark witch. Grim-faced and able to breathe easier, Cian followed.  His bony fingers clenched in his pocket. Death was a greedy mistress and demanded her due, their time was up.

Cian brushed by the bouncer.

The vampire’s one eye widened, his chin jerked as his gaze bobbed around, looking for the source of his discomfort. A low growl emanated from the vamp’s throat. Cian knew he was an anomaly, fae in form, but reeking of death.

“What be ye?” The archaic words rumbled. The vampire was old, evidenced by the trace of crimson bleeding through his irises. He might not be able to
see
Cian, but his nose knew danger.

Cian was in a hell of a mood, aggravated beyond reason that the witch had spotted him, warring with emotions not his own. He channeled his anger on the vampire and dimmed his glamour, stepping out as a wrath from shadow and grinned cockily.

The vamps lips curled into a snarl the moment he saw him. “Fae,” he spat. “Yer kind is nay welcome here.”

The bouncer’s powerful Nordic body invaded Cian’s space. Easily over six foot six, the old Viking probably intimidated many with his one eye and scarred face.

Fae he might be, but Cian was death, and death would never be denied. “Move aside,” he warned, voice low, modulated. But echoing with power.

The vampire licked his canines. His growls growing louder, like a lion faced with a rival he knows will soon maul him.

Cian chuckled, amused by the taste of the vamps fear on his tongue. Predators always had a sixth sense when another, more powerful predator was around. An idea that settled like lead in the gut and instantly turned them feral, making them more dangerous for their unpredictability.

A dark green vein in the vamp’s lily-white neck pulsed like the angry beat of a heart.

Cian pulled his hand from his pocket, exposing the skeletal appendage. The bouncer stiffened when he pointed a finger at his blond head. The penetrating chill of hoarfrost shot from Cian’s hand into the air, circling the vamps head.
Death’s mark
. The vampire sucked in a shaky breath as his crimson stained lips turned a pale shade of blue. A dark trickle of blood slid from his nose.

“Move aside,” Cian demanded one final time.

The vampire moved, stumbling over his stool in his haste. With a wink, Cian shoved his hand back into his pocket, following the scent of his witch, ignoring the fury-filled stare boring into his back.

It was ten ‘til midnight
.

He walked along the medieval stairwell at a sedate pace, pausing to enjoy the antiquated finery. The allure of the club was in its décor. Black iron chandeliers hung from rafters. Heavy crimson tapestries adorned the walls, depicting grisly scenes of death, men transforming to beasts, witches gazing into cauldrons filled with bubbling brews. The low yellow radiance cast the stairwell in a sickly light, adding shadow to hollows and turning faces into nightmarish masks of ghouls.

There were four floors to the club, each divided by species. First the vampires, second the witches, third the shifters, and fourth the mixed flock. Yeah, he’d been here a couple times. Mainly to scout out his marks, but sometimes simply for the enjoyment of hanging out with creatures that amused him. Old as he was, very little did anymore.

Her scent wound up past the first level and into the second. He pushed open the arched wooden doorway and scanned the dancing, shifting bodies of wizards, warlocks, and witches. Scattered throughout was an occasional human or two, but of his dark witch he couldn’t find. He lifted his nose and tracked her unique perfume.

Her scent shimmered like a golden wash of color throughout the room. His heart picked up in speed the nearer he came. There was an allure to the witch he’d never before known. It was a burning desire to believe she’d actually seen through his glamour, that she’d seen him and liked what she’d seen. It shouldn’t matter, whether she had or hadn’t, the end would remain the same. Cian was here to reap her soul.

But for one strange moment, he desperately wanted to believe it. Even though wanting it made him a masochist.

He found her in a dark corner of the club. She was alone, gazing at a floor length mirror affixed to the wall and applying a dark shade of lip-gloss. Like a blackberry stain, it glistened on her plump lips and he swallowed hard.

Five minutes ‘til midnight
.

His heart tripped in his chest at the sight she made. The mass of black curls spilling down her back, her ivory skin sparkling with tints of pink and green glitter, and the tight fit of her violet corset top--a gothic rose within a garden of thorns.

He took a step closer, gathering even more glamour around his body. In some weird way testing what’d happened outside. Maybe it’d been a fluke, maybe she hadn’t seen him at all, perhaps she’d smiled at something or someone over his shoulder and he’d been too transfixed to realize it.

What would she think if she saw him? He looked at himself standing so close to her in the mirror and his fingers twitched. Would she find the neon blue of his eyes shocking as so many of his own kind did? What would it feel like to be gazed at with something other than scorn? To be loved? Desired?

He blinked the strange desires away.
Turn it
off. Don’t feel. Don’t want. Never. Not ever.
He was Reaper, a killer, and here to do a job--nothing more, nothing less.

Two minutes ‘til midnight
.

A heated argument between two witches over a male they both desired broke out on the dance floor. No one noticed yet, but he knew. That was part of his skill. He’d always know what, when, where, and how his victims would die. And this was how she was meant to go--an unfortunate casualty to another’s greed and lust.

The words quickly escalated to something wild and heated and with it a simmering threat of violence. Dancers nearest the women began to notice and take pause.

A few cleared the floor. His dark witch was still unaware. 

She slipped the lip-gloss back into the velvet drawstring purse on her wrist, and like a flame to flesh, her gaze was on his face. She smiled and whispered, “hello”.

A physical warmth spread through his body with rocketing speed. He couldn’t rip his gaze from hers. Transfixed by her gentle beauty. As if her smile was connected to the center of his being, and for a brief moment in time, the darkness inside him washed away at the beauty of it. In her lioness gaze he read the truth.

She saw him through eyes without revulsion. To her he was only a man. Not a monster. Not a despised fae. His breath stuttered and his fingers clenched, to know that gaze for the rest of his life would be a small miracle. 

The emotions were powerful and foreign and not his own. That’s when he suspected these were not his feelings but hers. What’d happened to him outside, what happened to him now, it could only be one thing. She was a projecting empath--a being capable of transferring their thoughts and emotions onto another.

One minute ‘til midnight
.

The screams in the center of the dance floor rose to cacophonous levels. His witches gaze ripped from him to the disturbance, little knowing she watched the beginning of her end. Her human male sidled up to her side, gripping her elbow with a worried frown.

Thirty seconds
.

Cian turned, gazing at a brunette and blonde witch glaring with fury at the other. Panic fluttered desperate wings in his throat.
She
was going to die and with her the smile that ripped through his soul.

Some protective instinct snapped to life inside him. Not pausing for thought, he pulled his glove on over his skeletal hand.

The brunette witch lifted her hand and hazy red curls of power undulated between her fingers. She screamed, “--
you’ll never have him
!”

From her fingers shot a shaft of pulsating ruby colored energy. People yelled and fell to the floor. The intended target, the blonde, was barely nicked on the arm.

He didn’t think, merely reacted, and threw himself in the path of the blast. They never glanced up from the scene before them. The energy ripped through his back, sizzling through the flesh, even as he knocked the witch and her human to the ground. He landed with a hard grunt on top of them.

Then there was chaos. An explosion of sound erupted behind him and Cian bowed into the pain. Sweat stung his brows. The magick ate at him like flames licking at a pig’s carcass, the hot sizzle of burning flesh reached his nostrils and he grimaced.

Undulating waves of heat seeped through the front of his shirt. He glanced down, expecting to see blood. An iridescent bubble of silver encased the three of them. She’d thrown up some type of shield.

It wouldn’t have helped. She’d thrown it too late.

He had only seconds before the invisibility left him. The moment for death had passed. Using glamour, he weaved a net of illusion around himself. He wanted no one to witness the blood staining his back.

Fast, as only an immortal could, he picked himself up and ran out the club. Every step was agony, ripping the wound open further, causing him to grit his teeth against the dizzying pain.

Only then did he realize what he’d done. The irrevocable action he’d committed tonight. He’d broken the single most important rule of the reaper.
Spare none
. The Morrigan, his Queen, had preached that with threat of torture to any who dared to disobey.

She would want his blood, unless he fixed this first. Frowning with resolve he turned and fled. He must return.

They had to die.

But not tonight.

Eve gripped her husband’s arm tighter as they walked across the sidewalk to the mall entrance.

After last night’s incident any sane person would have probably barricaded themselves away, but not her. That was the life of a witch, especially one who chose to live in a city in as much turmoil as San Francisco. Still, there was no other place in the world she’d rather be.

Ten years ago, by congressional act, California had granted the first and only place the supernatural’s could come out of hiding and live as they truly were. Werewolves no longer had to hide in tunnels, vampires could roam the streets freely at night, and witches could practice their craft without fear of retribution by the normals. She’d never looked back.

Not to say that it was one big love fest. A snake could shed its skin several times in a lifetime, but that would never change its true essence. In the end a snake would always remain a snake. Just as a vampire could not help but feed, or a werewolf would go mad by the light of a full moon.

Having so many volatile and sometimes dangerous groups in such close proximity practically begged for the violence to occur.

She accepted it and moved on, because freedom was worth any price. Incidents like last night were rare. Besides she was a big girl who could definitely take care of herself.

Thankfully she’d been able to cast a barrier between her and Michael before the rogue witch’s curse had struck. Or things could have really gotten hairy. The blast had been powerful enough to knock both her and her husband to the ground. She bore a bruise in the center of her ribcage, but she was alive, and that’s all that mattered.  

She glanced around, inhaling the sharp nip to the wind. It was a cloudless, gray day. The type that made her want to curl up in front of a roaring fire with a steaming cup of chamomile, cocooned against her husband’s body. Instead, she and Michael were doing some last minute Christmas shopping. Typical.

She didn’t notice the small rut in the road and stepped down hard. Muddy water splashed up her leg. A large black gob of goo landed square on her blood-red pumps.

“Dang it!”

Michael glanced down. One side of his mouth curled into a half-formed grin. She growled and picked up a dead leaf to scrape up what looked like a mixture of dog crap and vomit.

“I don’t even want to know what that was.” He laughed.

Eve stood and glared at her husband’s smiling face. Turning her nose in the air, she dropped the leaf with disgust and walked away.

“Honey.” He grabbed her hand and chuckled. “You gotta admit. It was pretty funny.”

“Ha ha. I’m howling with laughter.” She pointed a finger to her deadpan face. “This is me in hysterics.”

Michael hugged her and slowly she smiled, never really that mad to begin with, but loving to be a little dramatic all the same.

“Why does that only ever happen to me?”

“Because you’re just so cute, the goddess had to give you some sort of flaw.”