The Reaping (The Reapers Book 1) (10 page)

She held my hand and brushed my hair back from my face. “It’s okay, I’ll stay.”

And I fell asleep.

I awoke to laughter, a hoarse male laugh that I recognized immediately as Landon’s. I sat straight up in bed and found that I wasn’t in bed, but on a sandy beach, the ocean waves rolling up and kissing my feet. Landon stood in the surf, looking out at the ocean. I could smell salt in the air, feel the sand beneath me, and the cool caress of the water on my toes.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Landon asked as he turned to look at me. “It’s almost as good as being alive, better even, because I can go anywhere I want, anytime I want to. The only problem is that it isn’t real. I can feel the water touch me, I can feel the sun on me, but I can’t bump into a hottie and go home with her. I can’t get drunk and fall asleep on the beach. I can’t do anything that matters.” He gave me a quick once over. “You sleep like that every night?”

I looked down at myself and discovered I was dressed in the teeniest string bikini I had ever seen. My embarrassment lasted only long enough for my cheeks to warm briefly, before I decided not to think about it. There was nothing I could do to change it, and I was lucky to be clothed at all, considering Landon had full control here. “It’s pretty cute. Can I keep it?”

A shiver of irritation crossed his face before he smiled. “Sure you can, sweetie. You stay here and you can have whatever you want. I’ll just be having your body.”

“Not a chance,” I said, trying to sound braver than I felt. “How do you get inside my dreams?”

He laughed. “I’m not in your dreams, Ice Princess. I’m in your head. You won a couple of points getting Reid placed on probation. I don’t want him to get fired, because I just never know when his job might be useful for me, so I won’t use him to bother you again. I can still get to you without him, and I intend to fuck with your itty bitty mind every chance I get until you give me what I want.”

I did my best to stay calm and smile coolly at him, but I’m afraid the expression I managed looked more like a grimace. “Too bad. I was just starting to like Reid.”

He was suddenly right in front of me, his face only a couple of inches from mine. He held my chin in a grip that was real enough to hurt.

“Don’t get too used to him being gone. If it becomes necessary to use a bit more physical force with you, I’ll bring him back out again. Just remember, if you do see him again, it’ll be because I’m really, really angry and I want to make you hurt.” He jumped away from me and smiled casually. “Hopefully, it won’t come to that, though, sweetheart.”

“Why don’t you just leave me alone, Landon? You already said you’d rather be a dude.”

He nodded. “You aren’t kidding. I’d rather be just about anyone other than you, but I don’t have any choice. I can take your body as the easiest pickings or wait around a decade or so until I’m strong enough to take over someone of my choosing.”

“What’s wrong with Reid? You seem to control him pretty well.”

“Glad you finally appreciate my work. I was beginning to give up on you ever believing it was me in that sad sack cop costume. The problem with Reid, sweetheart, is that I can only control him and live through him in the moments that he is blackout drunk. With him, that is a pretty frequent condition, but it’s not permanent. Plus, when I’m in him, everything is muted through his drunken senses, and I don’t feel truly alive. I can’t take him over completely because I’m not strong enough, and he was too far from my physical body when I died. You, on the other hand…”

“I still don’t get how it works.”

He threw his hands up. “What damn difference does it make how it works? I don’t know how it works and I don’t care as long as I get a body.”

“Who’s told you I’m your only option? Are you sure you can trust them?”

His eyes widened. “Are you kidding me? You are in no position to question my judgment, honey. Stop asking so many damn questions and start acting scared like you should be.”

I let my true feelings show for just a moment. I let the tears well up in my eyes and made myself shiver and shake. In that moment, I saw his eyes light up, and I appreciated how he enjoyed my fear and his control over me. I quickly regained my composure and met his gaze evenly. “Fuck you.” I closed my eyes, laid back down, and tried to imagine myself back in my own bed with Angelica next to me.

Landon laughed. “You think it’s that easy? You can just close your eyes, and I’ll go away?”

I tried to block out his words and hear Angelica’s heavy breath next to me. I imagined the feel of my soft flannel sheets and the weight of my down comforter. I imagined the aroma of flowers that wafted up from the flower shop even in the middle of the night. I imagined myself safe in my own bed and, gradually, I stopped hearing and smelling the ocean and Landon’s voice.

When I opened my eyes again, I was home, in my own bed, with Angelica sleeping soundly beside me. I didn’t know if Landon had released me or if I had escaped on my own, but it didn’t matter because I was home and safe. Sleep, however, was out of the question. So I got up and headed for the kitchen where a new recipe for vegetable soup was waiting for me.

Angelica bounced into the kitchen around 6 AM. “I was worried when I woke up and you were gone, but then I smelled yummy food cooking, so I knew you had to be okay. What’s for breakfast?”

“Vegetable soup. I’ve got two batches, one with mushrooms and tofu, and one with just veggies.”

“Yum. I’ll try a little of both, please.” She grabbed two neon green bowls from the cupboard and filled them from the two pots on the stove. I stopped washing the dishes, got a bowl of my own, filled it, and followed her to the table.

She took a couple bites of each and nodded. “Delicious. There’s nothing better than veggie soup for breakfast.”

“Do you like it better than the one we had last week?”

“Kelsey, honestly, it all tastes good to me. You’re going to have to find someone with a more sensitive palate to tell the difference.”

She ate a few more bites and looked at me. I had taken one bite and laid down my fork. I knew I must look only slightly better than death, after getting beaten up and not sleeping.

“You want to tell me what happened after we went to bed last night?”

I knew I shouldn’t tell her the truth, but I couldn’t stop myself. I was too scared or too desperate, and I just needed someone to talk to. “Landon visited me last night, in a dream. He manipulated everything down to my clothes, or lack thereof.”

Angelica gasped. “How is that possible?”

“I don’t know.” I stood and started to pace. “He doesn’t know. He doesn’t care. He says he can get inside my mind like that whenever he wants and that he will keep doing it until I give him my body.”

“Well, that’s not an option,” she said, but her voice came out a bit shaky. “Are you sure it wasn’t just a bad dream?”

“Yes. No. Damn it, I don’t know. It felt real, really, really real.” I sat back down. “Last night, at the hospital, Alice told me she’s seen this before. She’s seen ghosts attack a living person and try to take them over. Angelica, she said that the living person always loses.”

She shook her head. “Alice is the ghost you were talking to last night?”

I loved her more than life for her calmness in that moment.

“Yes, I knew her when I was a little girl. She says that she’s been watching me all this time.”

“That’s so sweet. She’s like a guardian angel.” Angelica’s face stiffened with seriousness and determination. “If she’s been watching you all these years, she hasn’t been watching everyone else, right. I mean, she couldn’t know for a fact that no one has ever escaped, could she?”

I felt a moment of hope. “No, of course she couldn’t.”

“Okay, so we just have to figure out how to fight Landon.”

“Landon and his legion of evil ghosts.”

“What?” I filled her in on the rest of what I’d learned from Alice and Landon, and we spent the morning making a plan. Angelica would use her occult connections to try and track down the group of ghost fighters, and I would do my best to follow Alice’s guidelines and stay awake so that Landon couldn’t get to me in a dream again. That settled and breakfast finished, I headed back to the bathroom to shower and get ready for work.

I was halfway down the hall when Angelica’s voice stopped me. “So, what did Caleb want to talk to you about?”

I walked back into the kitchen. “What?”

“He came to the apartment looking for you. He said he had to talk to you about something important. I told him about Reid harassing you and sent him to the store. I figure with all that time you spent with Jed in the emergency room, he must have talked to you about whatever it was.”

“We talked about a lot, but nothing important.” I racked my brain to be sure. I wasn’t hit in the head so hard that I wouldn’t remember, was I? “Are you sure he said it was important? Jed told me Caleb bumped into you and just happened to be in the area of the store so he and Jed decided to stop in.”

“That’s what I thought,” Angelica said with a nod as she rinsed her dish and stuck it in the dishwasher.

“What is what you thought?”

“He likes you. He wanted to ask you out. Why else would he make up that story about accidentally bumping into me? He wanted it to seem casual.”

I tried my very best not to roll my eyes. The idea of Caleb asking me out seemed silly at best. He had wanted to go to dinner with me, but that request had felt nothing like him asking me out. “I really don’t think that was what he wanted to talk to me about. Jed certainly didn’t say anything about it.” It bothered me that Caleb had lied about how he’d found out where I was, and I did wonder what could be so important that he’d track me down like that, but I figured I’d ask him when I saw him again.

“Okay, whatever. You don’t appreciate how attractive you are.”

“Angelica, I love you for thinking I’m so pursued by the opposite sex, but the truth is, they are hardly beating down my door.”

At that moment, there was a knock on the door, and Angelica gave me a pointed look and a smile. I rolled my eyes. “I’ve got to get ready for work.”

When I walked into the living room, showered and dressed for work, I found Angelica and Cat in deep conversation. Doug, my ghostly friend from the plane, sat in a dark corner, and he winked and waved at me when I looked at him. I hadn’t expected to see him again, but I ignored him and focused on the two living people in the room.

Angelica looked up as I walked in. “Here she is now. I was just telling Cat what a great roommate you are.”

“She really was,” Doug said. “She’s a sweet girl.”

I smiled and sat down on the couch next to Angelica. “Just don’t tell her about the super long showers I take.”

“You make up for it with all of the grocery shopping and cooking you do. Seriously, Cat, you’ll never go hungry here.”

Cat smiled and leaned back in the blue armchair. She seemed completely at ease and happy. Angelica usually brought out the best in people. “Sounds great to me. When can I move in?”

“Today, if you’d like,” Angelica said, then looked at me. “I mean, if it’s okay with Kelsey.”

“It’s great with me,” I said, relieved that Angelica liked Cat. I had already gotten used to the idea of cheaper rent but Caleb’s warning had made me nervous. If Angelica liked Cat, though, I could count on her being safe. “I was just waiting for the okay from you.”

“Are you two for real?” Doug sneered. “I’ve never seen two women get along so well in my life. Of course, the only women I really know are my wife and daughter, and you know how tensions can flow there—”

Cat beamed. “Thank you,” she said over Doug’s rambling. “I can actually move in right now. My bag’s in my car.”

“Don’t you think you should get some money up front?” Doug whispered in my ear so suddenly that I almost jumped. I hated the way ghosts could invade my personal space without any warning. As annoying as his method was, he had a point.

“Great,” I said. “We’ll just need two weeks rent up front.”

“Oh.” Cat had started to stand to go grab her bag, but she sat back down with a thump. “I actually just started my job and I haven’t even gotten paid yet. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize…” She looked like she might burst into tears. “I’m living in my car, actually, and I…”

Warning bells were banging in my head. I was only talking about a hundred bucks. If she couldn’t come up with that… Then again, I’d been new here once, too. I knew what it felt like. Of course, I’d worked and paid my way.

“We totally understand,” Angelica said before I could decide how I felt about our new roommate being broke and homeless. “Don’t worry about it, just pay us when you have the money.”

“Big mistake,” Doug said.

I felt certain he was right, but I didn’t want to question Angelica’s judgment. She had the apartment first, so it was really her place to decide. Besides, she’d been so understanding about my ghosts that I really didn’t want to go all judgmental on someone she liked and wanted as a roommate. “Yeah,” I heard myself saying. “Don’t worry about it. Just pay your portion of the rent when it’s due next month.”

Cat smiled. “Thank you so much. I have to be at work in an hour, so if you don’t mind, can I bring my stuff in and hop in the shower?”

“Of course,” Angelica said. She actually hugged Cat. “Welcome home.”

Angelica’s acceptance of me was beginning to look less exceptional. My feelings were a little hurt.

While Cat grabbed her stuff and showered, I moved around the apartment picking up dirty dishes and unread books, trying to make up for a month’s worth of neglect. As I swiped dust off the mantle, I hoped that Cat wasn’t a neat freak. Not that a girl who had paid nothing for her abode had any right to complain.

Cat walked into the living room, dressed in a uniform for a local fast food joint. “I’ll be home around ten. Would you and Angelica like to hang out?”

“We should both be here. We usually stay up pretty late. What did you have in mind?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know… Talk, maybe watch a movie or something?”

“Um, yeah, okay. I’ll see you tonight,” I said. She headed out the door, and I looked around for Doug to find out what he was doing back, but he had vanished again. I was halfway down the hall when my cell phone rang. I considered ignoring it, but it might be someone from work needing me to answer a question, so I hurried back to the kitchen and grabbed it. “Hello?” I said, a bit breathlessly.