The Reaping (The Reapers Book 1) (30 page)

A sharp pain started where Landon’s hands touched my neck and traveled up into my head, to start a pounding ache in my head and all the way down my body to my toes. I pushed every bit of fear and anger and sorrow I felt into my hands on Landon’s chest and pulled him into me. At first, I only succeeded in letting him collapse lower on top of me, but then I started to feel his fear, anger, and sorrow mingle with my own and sink into me. I could hardly bear to feel his emotions, so much deeper and rawer than my own, and I wished I could heal him, rather than end him. His grip around my neck tightened as though he knew what I was thinking, and I focused on all the ways he had hurt me and how much I just wanted him to go away. I met his eyes, and I couldn’t look away. He had amazing irises, with tiny specks of green and grey mixed in with the brilliant blue. How could I destroy something so beautiful?

“You need to leave and never come back. Just go from this place, and we’ll both be okay,” I choked out, surprised that I could still speak at all. If only I could banish him as I had those ghosts from my childhood, but his grip tightened, and I pulled him into me with the last bit of strength I could find. Then my world went black.

When I woke up, I was on Caleb’s couch. My head pounded, and my cheek ached. I fought the urge to vomit as I pushed myself into a sitting position. “Cat?” I croaked.

“Kelsey?” Caleb said. He came from the kitchen or one of the bedrooms. I didn’t want to waste the energy turning my head to find out. He sat down on the couch by my feet. He smiled slowly at me, and I felt tears well up in my eyes.

“Landon?” I could barely say his name without dissolving into tears.

Caleb shook his head. “It’s Caleb.”

“Is Landon okay?”

“I don’t know. What happened over there?”

Cat appeared and sat on the coffee table. “I couldn’t see anything after you passed behind the second curtain. Jed is on the phone now, trying to find out if our reapers have any intel.”

“He’s gone, Kelsey,” Tucker said. I noticed him, for the first time, sitting in an armchair in a dim corner of the room. “Can’t you feel it?”

“Oh, my God,” I said. “I didn’t want to hurt him.”

“What?” Caleb asked. “This guy’s been making your life hell, and you didn’t want to hurt him?”

“Tucker’s here,” Cat told Caleb in a low voice. “He just told Kelsey that she absorbed Landon.”

“I wanted him to leave me alone, but I couldn’t… I didn’t want to be responsible for destroying anybody’s soul.” My stomach roiled at the thought, and I wanted to go back in time and undo it all.

Caleb opened his mouth and then closed it. He looked completely confused.

“It’s how the reapers operate, Kelsey,” Cat said. “The more powerful absorb the less powerful over any number of offenses. So to us, well, it doesn’t seem so horrible. They can do worse things to each other.”

“Landon could have gone after someone else, if he didn’t want to take the risk,” Caleb said and shrugged.

“But he couldn’t? I was the last person to see him alive so I was the only one he could reap.”

“He told you that?” Caleb asked.

I nodded.

“Why would he lie to her about something as basic as that?” Cat asked.

“Maybe to convince her that he would never give up on her, to scare her?”

Cat nodded but she didn’t seem convinced. “Maybe, but I’ve never heard that line before, and the guy doesn’t exactly seem like the brightest ornament on the tree.”

“Um, I don’t think he was lying,” I said when they paused long enough to give me a chance to speak. “He really wanted to re-enter life as a dude. I wasn’t exactly his favorite person.”

Caleb and Cat looked at each other as though I hadn’t spoken.

“Why would the others lie to Landon?” Caleb asked. Before Cat could answer, he stood up. “Unless they didn’t want him to back out once he found out how powerful she is. They wanted him to go the distance with Kelsey.”

“But why?” Cat asked. “If they really want to reap her, why not use someone more powerful? Landon didn’t stand a chance against her.”

“That’s not the way it looked today,” I said, hurting all over.

“There’s no way they were going to let Landon keep her if he successfully reaped her,” Caleb said. “Someone more powerful would have taken her from him. Maybe they’re just letting him do their dirty work.”

“He did seem pissed off at them. Like he thought they weren’t being straight with him,” I said.

Cat and Caleb were silent.

“They knew what she was before they sent Landon after her,” Jed said from somewhere on the other side of the couch.

“That’s more than I knew,” I said. “I mean, unless you’re referring to me being able to see ghosts, but that just isn’t super scary.”

“You have anything to offer, Cat?” Jed asked.

Cat glared over the couch. “Fuck you, Jed.”

“No, thanks.” Jed chuckled at his own joke. “I’m not trying to be a dick, but we both know the kind of people you work for and what they’ll do to you if you overshare. I respect your decision to keep your mouth shut in most cases, but this is beyond the pale, sugar, so if you know something…”

Cat glared at Jed for a long moment, and I could almost hear him taking a step back, then she looked at me and something in her face softened. “Kelsey, what can you tell us about the other people who were there with you?”

I felt like an idiot. “Um, yeah, I guess I should’ve mentioned before, but my dad was there. So that means he’s dead, right?”

Cat didn’t look at all surprised, but Caleb slapped a hand to his forehead. “Damn it. He set you up.”

“What?” I asked.

Caleb looked at me and sat back down slowly, then he looked at Jed, and he must have gotten some sort of signal from him, because he sighed and looked back at me. He seemed scared, and that scared me. “Maybe you guys should let me and Kelsey talk for a few minutes alone, okay?”

“Come on, Cat. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee,” Jed said as he moved into my line of sight by the front door. He grabbed his coat and hers and helped her into it when she joined him. My heart started to race when she walked out with him without a word of argument.

I forced myself to remain sitting and face Caleb. No matter how bad it hurt, I wanted to be upright for this conversation.

“Kelsey, I’m pretty sure that your dad set this whole thing up as a test for you.”

“What do you mean by ‘this whole thing,’ and what kind of test?”

“I don’t know the details, so I can only guess at how this all went down. Do you want worst case or best case?”

I took a deep breath. “Just go ahead and give me worst case.”

Caleb nodded, but he didn’t look at me, and that scared me even more than anything else. “We told you Len doesn’t believe in training, right? So when his kids came of age, he had to have some way to gauge how powerful they were. When he was working with us, he tried to convince us to send in one of our team, a reaper, to each of his kids to talk to them and see how far their abilities went, if they existed at all. No one agreed to it, because we knew the potential of his kids, and we couldn’t trust any reaper to be honest with us about their abilities or not try to eliminate the person if they discovered she or he was extremely powerful. Plus, Len has a lot of enemies among the reapers. He was willing to take that risk, but we weren’t. Len moved on to Cat’s company and he must have struck out there, because he left.” Caleb sighed. “I’m guessing he outsourced and found someone to talk to you enough to know that you could see and talk to ghosts.”

“He already knew that,” I whispered.

Caleb nodded. “He knew that you could when you were a kid, but some people lose the ability as they get older. He would want to check and, when he found out that you can see and talk to ghosts, he would have wanted to find out if you had any more abilities.”

“So after Landon was killed, he sent him after me to test me?”

Caleb swallowed. “If I had to guess, I’d say that he killed Landon and then sent him after you.”

I felt cold. “Look, my dad is an asshole, but he’s not a killer.”

Caleb winced when I said that, but he nodded and continued. “Generally, when reapers go after a host body, they spend months infiltrating their lives, so that they can slowly tear them apart. Len’s not the most patient sort of fellow, so he, I’m guessing, killed someone who was already in your life in some form, someone who would know your weaknesses and your fears.”

“Except that Landon was an idiot who didn’t see much past where his next hit was coming from.” I so did not want to believe that my father was a killer.

“Yeah, but Len also needed someone completely green who would believe that he didn’t have any choice but to go after you, so that he’d keep going after you even if you were as powerful as you are.”

“No, no. Landon believes that a reaper killed him. That’s the only way there wouldn’t have been some sort of evidence of another person in the store with him.”

Caleb’s face stilled into a hard mask. He stood and walked to the window, his back to me. After several moments, he turned and looked at me. His expression was completely calm. “When did you find that out?”

“When I was fighting Landon. I didn’t really believe him, until—”

“If he’s right, then this is worse than we thought. Len has reapers working with him.”

“What’s so bad about that? You work with reapers.”

A shiver of irritation whispered over his face. “We don’t ask them to kill people for us. The promises he must have made to get a reaper to agree to that….” Caleb shook his head. “But that’s Len’s problem. What matters is that he set up you and Landon in order to find out how powerful you are.”

“That makes sense,” I whispered. “So is the test over? Have I passed?”

Caleb stood and started to pace. “It depends on whether or not Len got enough to know just how powerful you are. In his mind, giving you any advice or help at all will weaken your abilities, so he’s not going to just show up and pat you on the back until he’s convinced he’s pushed you as far as you’re going to go, and you’ve displayed the extent of your power.”

“And if I die first?”

“Kelsey…shit.” Caleb ran a hand through his hair. “Your dad… How much do you really want to know?” He sat back down on the coffee table and met my eyes.

“I get the idea. Finding out how powerful I am, proving himself right about the no-training thing, is more important to him than my life.”

“Unless you’re as powerful as he wants you to be, in which case, he will protect you with everything he has. The question is, what does he want you to be?”

“And if I don’t want his protection or his stupid test?”

“He’s not going to give you an option, and, honestly, Kelsey, it’s already too late. Too many reapers know what you can do, and they’re going to want to kill you.”

My heart literally stopped for a few seconds. “Wouldn’t they just try to reap me and possess my abilities?”

Caleb shook his head. “By fighting in spirit form, you proved that your abilities aren’t attached to your physical body. They would remain with your spirit when you left it. The reapers who fear you will want you dead and your spirit annihilated.” He paused. “Or they might just want to force you to work for them.”

“Can my dad really protect me?”

“He thinks he can, but he’s vulnerable. Unless he’s into something I don’t know about, which is highly plausible. For all I know, he’s dead and King Reaper or whatever.”

“So what are my options?”

“You’re going to have to disappear from their radar. I would like to say that your only option would be to come work for Varius or Harvest One. My bosses have basically ordered me to tell you that those are your only options, but if you want other options, I think I can help you find them.”

“You’d be willing to do that?”

Caleb didn’t hesitate. “Yes, I’d do that. Doing anything else would be forcing you to work for a corporation, and I don’t believe in forcing anyone to do anything. Especially not my friends.”

“I’m assuming that staying in Briarton and continuing to work for the bookstore is not an option.”

Caleb shook his head. “I’m sorry, Kelsey.”

“Well, shit, so Landon won, anyway.” My head was spinning, and my body hurt all over. I wasn’t in a good place to be making life decisions. Caleb grimaced, but he didn’t argue with me. “How long do I have to decide?”

“You have six hours until our flight leaves, and then you have two days, during which Jed, Cat, and I will tell you everything we can to help you make an informed decision about your future. Those two days have to be spent in a safe house. We can’t risk exposing you to any more danger here.”

“Six hours during which some other reaper can try to rip me from my body?”

“It’s possible.” Caleb said slowly. “After what you did to Landon, today, I doubt any reaper is going to be willing to come after you without some sort of preparation.”

“Preparation?”

“Look, I don’t really have time to get into it right now—”

“They will want to have a plan, a strategy. They may even want to power up,” Tucker said. I had forgotten he was still there. Caleb must have noticed I was staring intently at an empty chair because he didn’t interrupt. I was surprised he hadn’t asked Tucker to leave with Cat and Jed, but maybe Caleb had forgotten he was there, too.

“Power up?” I asked

“Feed on other reapers to gain more power,” Tucker said, and I shivered. “I understand it disgusts you, Kelsey, but don’t feel guilty or blame yourself or you’ll be wasting Landon’s gift to you. You possess his energy now and, possibly, some of his emotions.”

I searched my mind and my body, but I didn’t feel anything— Wait, underneath my confusion and guilt, there was a muddled sense of despair and anger. “That’s horrible. Will I always feel him?”

“I don’t know. It’s different for everyone. Some believe that if the emotions of the absorbed spirit are strong enough, they can permanently alter the personality of the taker.” Tucker stared at the floor for a long moment while I hoped that I never became like Landon. He looked up and met my eyes. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do more to help you. I’d been talking to Landon, when I could get him alone, and I tried to help him see he was being used. I think you had more of an effect on him than I did.”