Unreap My Heart (The Reaper Series) (17 page)

Balthazar twisted, and Arianne felt them switch positions. She suddenly lay on top of him as they fell.

“Don’t argue with me,” he said so calmly that she almost didn’t believe he spoke.

“But we don’t know what we’re landing on,” Arianne whispered. She didn’t know why she needed to be quiet, but the blackness around them closed in so tightly she didn’t want to disturb it.

“Should have thought of that before you jumped in.”

Arianne shook her head. “Better than being ghoul food. You should be thanking me.”

Balthazar grinned, his white hair whipping around his face. “Jury’s still out on that one. We might not survive the fall.”

The bubble of worry in her gut transformed into boiling panic. Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe. Her fingers went numb from clinging tightly to Balthazar’s coat. They’d been falling for a long time now. A plunge this long never had good consequences.
Pancakes,
she thought, her heart in her throat.

“No worries. No worries.”
The Nixies fell with them. Or around them, Arianne corrected herself. Their fluffy, puffy fur ruffled with the wind from their fall. They looked so much like those fuzzy balls on some key chains. She would have thought of them as cute if they weren’t all skydiving to their deaths.

Blinding light closed Arianne’s eyes for her. She screamed while a chorus of
wheeee
surrounded them. Arianne rested her head against Balthazar’s chest and focused on his heartbeat. Hers must be beating a mile a second, but his kept a perfectly calm rhythm. She drew unexpected comfort from the strength of his heartbeat. If Balthazar wasn’t worried, then why should she be? He promised he’d protect her and she believed him.

A loud splash cut off Arianne’s scream. Something cold and wet enveloped them. Arianne opened her eyes a second after cannonballing into the water. She pushed against Balthazar to swim to the surface. She swam a couple of feet up when she noticed Balthazar didn’t follow her. Arianne looked around and spotted him plunging deeper. He had his eyes closed. The impact must have knocked him out.

Arianne switched her course and swam toward Balthazar. She reached for his coat and pulled him up, but his weight kept dragging them down. Panicked, Arianne kept pulling, struggling to get them to the surface. She used one of her arms to paddle upward. No use. They still kept sinking. If she thought her lungs hurt when she ran for her life, they turned into a furnace now that she couldn’t breathe. But she wouldn’t let him go. She’d only made it this far because of him. Screw the consequences, she wouldn’t leave him.

Arianne just about lost the last of her breath when the Nixies crowded around her and Balthazar. They each grabbed a part of his coat and pulled. Arianne nodded at all of them in thanks, and they all heaved and heaved until Arianne’s head broke the water’s surface. She gulped in as much air as her lungs could accommodate. Balthazar broke the surface too, but remained unconscious. Arianne’s summer as a life guard kicked in. She hooked her arm over Balthazar’s shoulders and doggy paddled to shore. The Nixies helped tug him the whole way. They must not have needed to breathe because Arianne suspected the only reason Balthazar floated had to do with the furry little things supporting his weight under the water.

Reaching shore, Arianne stumbled forward, her clothes waterlogged. She balanced her footing and pulled Balthazar the rest of the way until only his feet were in the water. Working fast, she put her ear on his chest. He still had a heartbeat, but it seemed weaker than before. She moved her ear to his nose and couldn’t feel him breathe. She tilted his head back and opened his mouth. Pinching his nose, she breathed into his mouth. Then she began chest compressions. After a count of five, she repeated breathing into his mouth.

“Come on,” she said between her teeth as she pumped Balthazar’s chest. She breathed into his mouth again. “Wake up you, jerk!”

Water gushed out of Balthazar’s mouth, and while he coughed like his life depended on it, Arianne rolled him onto his side so he wouldn’t choke the water back down. Every time Balthazar spit water out an ugly curse followed. To Arianne they sounded like the best words anyone could ever listen to.

“Shit,” Balthazar said. He coughed some more. “Damn…”
Cough
. “It…”
Cough, heave
. “All…”
Cough
. “To…”
Inhale
. “Hell,” he spat out.

Arianne sat back on her haunches and pushed back strands of her hair that had escaped from her braid. She needed to retie the thing once her hair dried. Relieved laugher bubbled out of her chest.

“So damn not funny.” Balthazar groaned before he sat up slowly. “Felt like I slammed into a brick wall.” He shook his head like a dog would after a bath. Arianne squealed when the cold drops hit her face. She raised her hands to block the rest.

The Nixies squealed with her. The little things had crowded around them while she’d been busy saving Balthazar’s life.

She smiled at them. “Thank you.”

They jumped up and down and cheered like an army of Lilliputians, except round, pink, and fuzzy—even the water-logged ones.

“Yay, yay, yay!”
they cheered, their tiny hands in the air.

Arianne laughed. They were too cute! Then she caught Balthazar staring at her from the corner of her eye. He sat very still, just staring. She locked gazes with him and tilted her head to the side.

“What?” she asked.

The Nixies quieted down, like they knew something was about to happen.

“You saved my life,” Balthazar said.

Did she hear awe in his voice? Arianne couldn’t believe it. Maybe she’d heard his tone wrong. He just came back to life, after all.

“I think you’re in shock.” She came closer and checked his white pupils to see if they were dilated.

Balthazar leaned away from her. “I’m the one who’s supposed to be saving you,” he grumbled, dropping his gaze.

Arianne reached out and paused, remembering how Balthazar didn’t like to be touched. She dropped her hand to her lap. “You did save me. You took most of the impact of that fall. I wouldn’t have survived if you hadn’t.”

He touched his lips, and at first she didn’t know why, but she blushed, realizing what she’d had to do to save him. This was becoming super awkward, so she scrambled to explain.

“I was a lifeguard one summer,” she babbled. “I went into lifesaving mode the second I felt you weren’t breathing. You would have done the same thing.”

She gasped from the way Balthazar looked at her. His expression could only be called confused, like he stared at something he couldn’t understand. The words sprang out of Arianne’s lips before she could censor them.

“Don’t make a big deal out of it.” She focused her gaze on the Nixies. “I still need you to find the Redeemer. I have a feeling this trip is far from over. Let’s call it even.”

At the corner of her eye, she saw Balthazar’s face turn blank. But before he could stand up, the Nixies jumped all over him. He struggled, but so many of them swarmed him that they soon covered him from head to toe. The all-black Balthazar covered all over by pink Nixies. Arianne couldn’t help herself. She laughed and laughed.

“Not funny!” Balthazar barked.

“It’s a little funny,” Arianne said. She covered her open mouth, but the laughs kept coming.

The Nixies laughed too and began jumping up and down on Balthazar.

“Get them off me!”

Chapter 19

FWIW

B
ALTHAZAR
L
AY
T
HERE
S
TEWING
, ignoring the jumping Nixies on top of him while Arianne laughed. She’d saved him. Damn it! He should have been the one doing the saving. Now he owed her, and he didn’t know how to feel about it. The thought of her lips on his as she breathed life back into him disturbed him as well.

Plunging into the water had knocked him out cold. He’d seen nothing, felt nothing. If it weren’t for Arianne’s quick thinking, it might have taken him longer to recuperate, and time wasn’t a commodity they had a lot of these days. D had been worse when they’d spoken last. That had been more than a day ago. When he’d gotten a glimpse of the ring on Arianne’s finger as they ran away from the marauding ghouls, the pulsing seemed distinctly weaker. They needed to keep going.

He rolled onto his side, sending the Nixies flying in a chorus of
yahoo, yippee,
and
wahoo
. He grunted, but tried not to crush any of the too-pink creatures. Arianne had reacted horribly when he’d crushed the whisps, and he wanted to avoid the meltdown squashing the Nixies would bring. She apparently thought they were cute. At least the feeling from her thoughts told him so. If he was the type of creature that puked, he’d lose his gourd right about now. He pushed to his feet and shook off the dizziness that came with being knocked unconscious.

Arianne’s laugher redoubled, almost knocking her over. She hugged herself, her cheeks pink from something hilarious that Balthazar couldn’t understand. He narrowed his eyes at her.

“What?” he asked with an almost wicked trepidation. Did he really want to know?

She pointed up at him, still laughing. Her legs flailed about.

He raised an eyebrow, waiting for actual words to come out of the girl.

Arianne gulped in a lungful of air and forced herself to speak around the giggles. “Your face.” Another round of giggles.

Balthazar refused to touch his face. “What about it?”

“It’s full of kiss marks.”

His eyes widened before he ran for the water’s edge—they’d fallen into a massive lake, now that he got a good look at it—and stared at his reflection. The damned Nixies had left their mark on every available surface of exposed skin he had, even on the tips of his fingers where they weren’t covered by the fingerless gloves. He saw red then. He didn’t care how cute Arianne thought the puffy pink creatures were. He manifested his scythe and growled at them. The pink balls scattered amidst tiny, squeaky screams.

“Oh, you better run!” He continued growling like a rabid dog.

Arianne pushed off the grassy embankment they’d been on this whole time and raised her hands, no hint of concern on her face at all, just a playful smile across her lips.

“Come on, Balthazar,” she said, stepping a little closer. “They were just having some fun.”

Balthazar’s nostrils flared. “You call this a bit of fun?” He pointed at his face filled with countless red spots. “My head looks like a giant pimple.”

Arianne made it worse by giggling some more. Balthazar dropped his head and returned his scythe to its inert state. What had happened to his carefully built bad guy reputation? The Nixies were right to run. Arianne, on the other hand, represented a whole different bowl of beans. The crazy kind. She’d gotten too used to him. She no longer saw him as something to be afraid of. He had to remedy that, and quickly.

“Don’t think for a second that just because you saved my life we’re in any way even, little girl,” he said, adding bite to his words.

Her brow furrowed when she said, “Don’t bark at me. The Nixies saved us from the ghouls. If I hadn’t listened to them we wouldn’t be here.”

“Here” was a small island surrounded by the lake Balthazar had used as a mirror earlier. At the middle of the island grew a stand of trees with orange leaves. The grass looked green, at least, and the water clear. A massive cavern enclosed the rest of the space. They seemed to be in an underground cave of some sort. Balthazar knew of these places, but had never been in one. The Underverse had many facets that lay undiscovered. The home of the Nixies seemed to be one of them.

“You were wrong,” Arianne said, distracting him from his thoughts.

He looked down his nose at her. “Wrong about what?”

She pointed at the cowering Nixies. Grouped together, they resembled a giant, trembling pink clump.

“Not everything in the Underverse is dangerous.”

Balthazar snorted. “Just because they haven’t attacked you yet doesn’t make them any less dangerous.”

“Don’t snort at me.” Arianne frowned. “Just because you’re wrong doesn’t mean you have to get snippy. The Nixies helped us. They could have just as easily ignored what was going on, but they brought us here instead.”

“Don’t be naïve, Arianne.” Balthazar indicated the “here” she mentioned. “If you haven’t noticed, we’re in a place that doesn’t look like it has any exits. How are you supposing we’re getting out of here? In case you’re forgetting, we have a date with the Voyeur.”

Before Arianne could respond, a brave Nixie separated from the group and said, “
We can take you to the Voyeur.”

“See?” Arianne said to Balthazar like they had nothing else to argue about then smiled at the still shaking thing. “You’ll help us?”

Nixies nodded using their whole body since they didn’t have a distinct head. Of course, Arianne found it adorable. Balthazar, on the other hand, found it gag-worthy. He hated having his initial impression of the Underverse as a killer world shattered. He didn’t trust the Nixies, no matter how small, cute, and pink Arianne thought they were. He shuddered at his use of the word
cute
. Never in his considerably long life had he used that word to describe anything.