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Friendly eyes glowed through the screen.
Alpha Adam.
The phone clattered out of my hand. I couldn’t be standing in…
“We meet again,” a dusky voice called.
Limbs moved. Instinct won.
I struck. With all the desperation of a human, all the viciousness of a fae.
I sank my knife deep into Reaper’s chest.
The petals painted on my knife glossed over with black blood. Almost as black as his eyes.
“You!” I screamed.
“You did this!” I moved to sink it in deeper, but Reaper seized my arms.
“Relax,” he said. “You look… disgusting, mortal.” His voice resembled his face—shocked, appalled.
“You’re a murderer! Murderer!” I kicked my feet at him, which he deflected with his shadows. Warm figures pushed my legs away from him. Humanoid apparitions surrounded him—like he’d made his shadows into soldiers, and they’d all swarmed us.
“You need to get cleaned up,” he said. “This was not meant for mortal eyes.”
“Mortal? Not gumiho? Not today? No, ‘this is a rather impressive act’ or ‘what an ingenious plan to make it look like some other force injured you today!’”
I shrieked into the sky in frustration. His shadows thickened to coat me, pulling my arms away from him. “Fight me, Reaper! Let’s just get this over with! You want me dead, don’t you? The feeling is mutual!”
He pulled the knife from his chest, shaking off his onyx blood.
“You cannot kill me, hopeful seraphim,” he said, eyeing me with displeasure.
“But if you really are a mortal, my responsibility is to care for you.”
The world went dark.
* * *
I awokewhere the sky above was covered in a lifeless, never-ending gray. The air felt cold and damp as if winter was approaching, but the sky lacked the energy to produce snow. Dense gray clouds swirled and rotated, moving the sky in a dreary kaleidoscope.
I wasn’t cold, though. A warm arm cradled my back, and another held my hand in his. I was sitting against a body in an unknown location.
I jolted to awareness. Was this the Beyond?
Reaper sat beside me, crossing his legs. He dipped one of my hands in a tub of water, and gore floated off. I reeled.
“Sorry,” he said, jaw tight. “I am frustrated.”
“With what?” I could feel the earth beneath my body. At least, I thought it was earth. It felt soft and vaguely damp, like soil.
“I could feel your fear and confusion through our bond. It took me too long to find you, and when I did, you looked horrible.”
He could feel me? Like my emotions?
“Have we teleported to the Beyond?”
“No,” he answered, “We are in the Barren Fields, East of the House system.”
