Authors: Stephanie Rowe
He whipped his sword into position, ready for murderous breasts and hostile mascara wands—
A cosmetic dentist’s wet dream glided into the Hotel instead, and Jarvis relaxed at the sight of another male. As with all soulless bloodsuckers, the vampire was too thin to be taken seriously as a badass, and giving him a spray tan would be an act of mercy.
What was a vamp doing inside the Den? The undead were too emotionally fragile to make good subjects for Angelica’s studies. They were going to be destroyed if they stayed. “Get out,” Jarvis warned, striding toward them, ready to shove them to safety if they didn’t respond. No more suffering. No more. No more.
No more.
“This is not the place for men. These women aren’t the ones you want to be using to satisfy the bloodlust thing.”
The vampire held up a melodramatic hand with long, well-manicured fingernails and a way-too-stereotypical large black ring with a family crest of some sort on it. “I’m here for you, warrior.”
“My soul’s already got a lien on it.” Pascal twitched again and let out a low moan of distress. Urgency tightened Jarvis’s muscles, and he gripped the kid more securely. Pascal needed freedom, and he needed it now. “Call me on my cell next week. Kinda busy right now.”
Twelve more tuxedo-wearing vampires appeared behind the first one. A baker’s dozen of the undead. Arms were folded, shoulders were back, and chins were raised loftily in that “I am so much better than you” disdainful look they must practice diligently as soon as they were converted.
Jarvis raised his sword and let it burn with his poison. “Get out of my way.” He kept his voice low. A promise of no mercy—
The lead vampire’s eyes flashed red, and his fangs elongated. “My Lord, you are not going anywhere.” Behind him, his cronies went caveman: fangs as long as tusks, skin like stale marshmallows, eyes going cherry-bomb. Battle stance for hemoglobin junkies.
Under normal circumstances, thirteen parasites with big canines and bad fashion sense were no match for two magically enhanced ex-torture victims with serious attitude problems. Odds were with the good guys. But throw in a nearly dead kid fading fast on Jarvis’s shoulder and his buddy occupied with a bunch of rabid pit vipers?
Well, shit.
***
Not that there’s ever a really good moment for a woman to find out she doesn’t have the cojones necessary to be a murderer, but
now
had to be one of the top ten most inconvenient times for Reina Fleming to make that discovery.
Seriously. It was D-day. Her sister was going to die in forty-eight hours. There was
no time
to discover the save-your-sister-plan Reina had been working on for the last eight years was fundamentally flawed. It had taken almost a decade to orchestrate this moment. Was it
really
possible that she was going to blow it?
No. It wasn’t.
It was simply pre-harvesting jitters. This was going to go perfectly.
Reina took a calming breath as the werewolf whose soul she was supposed to harvest trotted down the ramp of the chicken house. His toenails clicked on the splintery wood, and each little tippety-tap ripped another hole in the hope dying inside her—
No. You’re going to be fine, Reina. Don’t panic.
“So, there he is. The big baddie you’re going to drop kick into the Afterlife to get your promotion to Reaper.” Trinity Harpswell, Reina’s dearest friend and world famous black widow killer, held up her iPhone, comparing the picture on it to the four-legged chicken snatcher in front of them. “Same beady eyes, torn right ear, and a star-shaped wand burn on his left hip. Maxwell Smart has sent more fairy godmothers to the Afterlife than the entire Disney franchise. He deserves to do some late night bonding with Satan. Go to it, girlfriend.”
But Reina couldn’t get her feet to move. She just stared with increasing dismay at Fur Face as he sat down and began licking the feathers from his front paw.
Trinity shoved her doomsday black hair out of her face and shot Reina a frown. “What’s wrong?”
“He looks like Roger.” The single-use disposable sickle Death had given her to cleave Max’s unwilling soul from his murderous little body dropped from her fingers and thudded to the crusty dirt of the chicken playground. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
Trinity retrieved the sickle from the chasm it had cleaved in the ground. “Roger? Who’s Roger?”
“A werewolf puppy I rescued when I was six. He slept on my bed for a year until he healed enough to revert back to his human form.” Roger was the only living creature she had ever managed to save. That one success had been the nugget of hope she’d clung to as she buried loved one after loved one. Seven sisters and her mother. All dead. Everyone she loved except her youngest sister, Natalie. And if Reina didn’t harvest this pooch’s soul, Natalie would soon be dead, too.
Oh, God.
“I can’t fail her—”
“You’re not going to.” Trinity slapped the handle of the sickle into Reina’s hand. “As Death’s most promising assistant, you’ve carried more than a million souls to their final destination, and you hand out popcorn whenever someone dies. This is your
thing
!”
“I know, but it’s different to rip an unwilling soul from a living body. Not the same thing as guiding a soul to its final destination after the person has already died.” Failure to cleave meant Death wouldn’t promote her to Reaper. No promotion meant she wouldn’t have the power to switch her sister’s soul to a living body when hers finally quit in forty-eight hours. “Dammit! It feels like murder!”
“It’s not murder. You’re simply fulfilling a basic tenet of our existence, which involves guiding souls to the Afterlife.” Trinity set her hands on Reina’s shoulders and squeezed. “You’re just panicking because this is your last chance to save your only remaining family member from the horrific death that has claimed everyone you love.”
Her last chance.
“Oh, God.” She took a breath, trying to control the desperation building inside her. “You really think I can do this?”
“Think deedub payback, and that should fire you up.”
Reina’s fist tightened around the embossed leather handle of the sickle. “I hate deedubs.” The demonic leprechauns of hostile origin had stolen everything from her when they’d attacked her family that awful Valentine’s Day so many years ago. She’d done everything to protect her loved ones from the gradual onset of those awful deedub symptoms, but each family member had eventually succumbed.
And now it was Natalie’s turn. Her sweet, loving, baby sister had no one to help her except Reina, who had failed to save anyone else in their family. Reina fisted the sickle, but her fingers felt numb. Like she couldn’t work them. “Come on,” she whispered. “You can do this—”
“Hey!” Trinity grabbed her shoulders and yanked her close. “It you don’t do this, your sister will die a really brutal, horrible death. Every last person you have ever loved will be dead, all because you weren’t able to kill one deserving serial-killing monster. Can you live with that? Can you? Because I think it’ll eat at your gut, gnaw at your soul, chip away at your heart until you’re a broken shell of a woman who can do nothing but mourn for a chance to do it again, an opportunity you will never, ever get.”
“Oh, God. That’s horrible.” Reina felt like someone had chained a cement block to her heart and tossed it in the English Channel where her sister, Jeanine, had drowned so happily on her sixth lap. The blackness of the night sky became too oppressive, the dripping of the rusted faucet by the henhouse seemed to mock her loneliness, and her mother’s bracelet felt cold, heavy, and dead on her wrist. “You’re really good at that.”
Trinity nodded grimly. “It’s not easy to bring a friend from a place of love and empathy into a pit of utter despair and misery, but I do my best.”
“Well, you did it. I feel like my soul is being crushed.” Reina put her hand over the searing pain trying to rip through her intestines, and black death powder spewed from Reina’s fingertips. “Look at that,” she said, unable to keep the hope out of her voice. “I’ve got my mojo back.”
“Go get him, sweetie. I know you can.”
Reina faced Max and flexed her hand. More powder spewed out, caking the ground by her feet. Dust that would knock him out long enough for her to harvest his soul.
Max paused mid-lick of his testicles, then he leapt to his feet, hackles up, saliva dripping from his jaw, yellow eyes narrowed with lethal hostility.
Reina braced her feet. “Bring it on, big guy.”
Max charged, and suddenly the fifty yards between them didn’t seem like all that much room.
Ignoring her urge to run away screaming from a werewolf in full attack mode, Reina let her vision go black and gold, and a mucky, filthy aura was visible around Max. Fantastic! He might have cute ears, but he was one of the bad guys.
One with really big teeth who was closing fast.
“This is for all the girls who didn’t get their dreams granted because you ate their fairy godmothers.” Reina wiggled her fingers, and the lethal black powder shot out and hit the wolfman square in the muzzle when he was less than a yard away.
But Max didn’t fall to the ground into happy naptime, dreaming of sugarplums and candy canes, like he was supposed to after getting hit with death dust. Instead, he body slammed her in the chest. She yelped as the sickle flew out of her hand and she skidded across the rocky dirt. Max pounced on her and plunged his teeth toward her throat. “Yikes!” She misted out of his grasp and reformed several yards away.
Max spun around, searching for her.
“You’re sure you’re doing the powder thing right?” Trinity asked.
“Of course I am! I’ve dusted millions of people. I can knock out a giant from two miles away.” Well, slight exaggeration, but still. “I know what I’m doing—”
Max located her and then launched himself at her, baring teeth bigger than, oh, her head?
She tried to mist away… but this time nothing happened. “Oh, crap!”
He knocked her down, snarled, and then slammed his teeth down on her jugular. She gasped as his teeth broke the skin. Good lord! Women found men with fangs a turn-on? Painful, not sexy, in case anyone was wondering.
“Reina! Mist out of his grasp!” Trinity hauled on his tail, but he didn’t release his grip.
“Trying.” Reina summoned enough death powder to Agent Orange an entire continent and then unleashed it right into Max’s face from point-blank range.
There was so much spillage in the air, her own eyes began to burn, and Trinity started coughing. But good old Max just tightened his grip on her throat, and Reina began to get dizzy. The night sky began to shift out of focus. It was almost impossible for her to die, but it sure felt like Max had figured out how to do it—
There was a sudden burst of pink light, and Max collapsed on top of her. He twitched once and then began to snore.
Okay, she knew she hadn’t done that.
“Are you all right?” Trinity crouched beside her.
Reina pressed her hand to her neck and winced. Her skin was raw and frayed. If he’d actually ripped her throat out… she wasn’t sure she could heal that. “That was close. Thanks for taking him out.” She looked around for her sickle. He was down. Had to take his soul.
“Me? I didn’t do it.” Trinity pulled off her sweatshirt and pressed it to the geyser springing from Reina’s neck. “I thought it was you.”
“No.” Reina stared at her friend in dismay. “If neither of us did it, then it must have been—” She bolted upright just as the wooden wall of the chicken shack began to glitter like a disco ball. “Oh, no.”
Trinity followed her gaze, and she bit her lip. “That’s not the fantastic timing we were hoping for.”
“You think?” Reina scrambled to her feet as a tall, dark-haired man in a black tuxedo stepped out of the shimmering slats of the henhouse. Yep, it was Death, the power monger who had privatized death and turned it into the most profitable business in existence.
He was shaking his head in disgust. Perfect. Fail the big promotional test and have her boss there to witness it. Always a good plan.
Death squared his arms over his chest as he watched her frantically brush the dirt off her pants. He always responded much better to her when she was sexy. Having dirt, blood, and dog hair all over herself wasn’t going to gain her wiggle room.
“Not laudable, Fleming.” His deep voice rolled over her, and he sounded immensely unimpressed.
“The granules must have been past their expiration date.” She pressed Trinity’s sweater to her throat, trying to stem the bleeding.
Come on, throat. Do your healing thing already.
“I used enough to—”
“It’s not the quantity of the weapon.” Death tapped his forehead. “It’s about the intent. You have to become simpatico with the powder.”
Reina blinked. “Simpatico? What do you mean?”
“You have to want it to work.”
“But I did—” She suddenly remembered the only other time her dust hadn’t knocked out a target: when she’d tried to take down Jarvis Swain.