Reaper's Dark Kiss
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Loose Id Titles by Ryssa Edwards
Ryssa Edwards
REAPER’S DARK KISS
Ryssa Edwards
www.loose-id.com
Reaper’s Dark Kiss
Copyright © February 2014 by Ryssa Edwards
All rights reserved. This copy is intended for the original purchaser of this e-book ONLY. No part of this e-book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without prior written permission from Loose Id LLC. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Image/art disclaimer: Licensed material is being used for illustrative purposes only. Any person depicted in the licensed material is a model.
eISBN 9781623006471
Editor: Rory Olsen
Cover Artist: April Martinez
Published in the United States of America
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This e-book is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Warning
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Dedication
This book is dedicated to my sister, whose encouragement has been unfailing.
Acknowledgment
This work would not have been possible without the works of Bram Stoker.
Chapter One
If Julian’s brothers ever heard about this, he’d spend centuries living it down.
He carried out death scrolls. He hunted his own kind, executed them mercilessly. He was a Shadow World reaper. And where was he tonight? Behind a tree, hiding from a mortal female.
She stopped at the end of a wooded path just feet away. He willed her to move on, to go do whatever errand had lured her into a killing ground. She didn’t. Cautious, she perched on a bench beside the path and opened a small backpack.
Inside Julian, his beast woke, aroused by the sight of her in moonlight. Soft hair, curly to her shoulders, thin nose, high cheekbones. Lips that were a seduction.
For a second Julian couldn’t believe what he saw. She’d pulled out a tablet, stroked the screen to life, and now she was settling down to type.
In Central Park? At two in the morning?
He couldn’t ambush the vampire he’d come after if she sat there all night blogging. She had to leave. He’d frighten her if that was what it took. Crunching over stone, he made his way toward the bench. Even though Julian knew she heard him, she kept typing. The giveaway was her heartbeat. It was too fast.
“You should go find a diner to write at. It’s healthier,” he said, coming to a halt in front of her.
A blast of adrenaline filled the air between them. Her body went tense. Her hammering heart told Julian she was on the edge of fight or flight. At less than half his size, there was no way she was thinking of fighting. And she couldn’t run, because he was between her and the path. Even with all that, she sounded calm when she looked up at him and said, “Healthier? You ever eat in a diner? They’re heart attacks waiting to happen.”
“Maybe,” Julian said, “but sitting here in the middle of the night is a good way to get dead quick instead of slow.”
The mortal’s heartbeat spiked to quick staccato rhythm. Whoever she was, she knew how to stand her ground when everything about Julian told her to run or die. She fixed him with a cool stare. Her eyes were silvery gray, the color of a hazy sky. “You know a lot about killing?”
“I know enough.”
The scent of her adrenaline faded. Her instincts were sharp. She suddenly knew Julian wasn’t there to kill her. With a sigh she said, “You’re not him.” She laid the tablet aside, got to her feet, and offered him a hand. “Sky Jordan,” she said, “investigative reporter for Gritty Streets, online journal.”
This was trouble he could do without.
Julian took her hand. It was warm, soft, and bone-dry. Sky Jordan had the guts of a centurion. “Julian.” He scanned the darkness. “What if I’d been—”
“The Fang Killer?” she said, excitement edging out fear in her voice.
“Let’s just say.”
Her hands disappeared. Then they were in Julian’s face with two tiny red spray cans. “Mace,” she said, shaking them. She dropped the cans, then whipped a slim rectangle from the small of her back. “Taser.”
News stories of the Fang Killings had drawn mortals with more curiosity than common sense to the park deep into the night. Rogue vampires found them, fed on them, and left them weak, easy prey to mortal predators. Sky’s Mace and Taser would have made a stalking vampire angry enough to rip out her throat. But Julian couldn’t say that. “Too slow,” he said. “You’d be dead.”
Sky bent to pick up the cans. “Sounds like you know something about what’s been going on.”
Julian breathed in her mixed scent of fear and excitement. His beast snarled an animal demand for sex. Even after millennia in this world, the feel of raw desire hit him like a body slam and left him reeling. His mating scent rose in the night like mist. Doing his best to ignore what he was feeling, he sa
id, “I don’t know what kinds of stories you write, but you need to be gone from this park, right now.”
She met his gaze, a response poised on her lips, but a confused expression crossed her face. A light blush touched her cheeks. It was impossible, but she was responding to his mating scent. He felt her gaze on his tall, muscled body and kept a smile from his lips, waiting for her to speak.
“Why should I leave?” Sky pretended she felt nothing, but the sudden scent of arousal made a liar of her. “It’s a nice night, full moon.”
It would be easy for Julian to get Sky out of the way, if he was willing to gag her so she couldn’t scream when he threw her over his shoulder and hiked her to the park entrance. Then he’d be the biggest story on Gritty Streets. He couldn’t have that. When a reaper couldn’t win, he waited. “You’re right,” he said in an even voice. “It’s nice out.” He sat on the back of the bench, his feet on the seat, hands hanging relaxed between his legs. Sitting like that, his knives were in easy reach. “Let’s stay awhile.”
A subtle change in Sky’s heartbeat told Julian he’d caught her off guard. She settled onto the bench, got her tablet, and started typing again. “What are you doing out here?” she asked, her fingers not slowing.
“It’s a park,” he said, telling the quickest lie he could think of. “I came to see the flowers.”
She gave him a look that said he was either stupid or dangerous, but she said nothing. Julian let her fall into concentrated silence and watched her peck at her on-screen keyboard. She was close enough for her body heat to seep into him. That made him wonder what she would feel like against him, naked, after they’d made love and he was drunk on the taste of her kisses. Julian smiled to himself. He enjoyed some parts of being captive to a human form.
What was wrong with him? He was on a mission, one that was taking too damn long.
Most mortals didn’t know that Shades—what their legends called vampires—lived side by side with them, hidden from a sun that would burn them to ash. That was why the mortals being dumped in the park, drained of blood, were a big problem. A drainer so far gone he used a park as an aboveground cemetery was like taking out a billboard ad in Times Square that said GOT VAMPIRES?
The council had sent Julian. In the past, they had turned blind eyes to how Julian carried out his death-scroll executions. But they wouldn’t this time. A bad kill could start a war between Dominion vampires and the Creed. Mortals would be caught in the middle. Julian’s directive was to witness the drainer in the act so that his brother Marek, Lord of the Creed, could petition the council for a death scroll.
He glanced at the horizon. Sunrise was about an hour too near. Julian had to head for shelter, away from the coming light. But he wasn’t leaving Sky here alone.
“If you let me walk you home before dawn,” he said, “I’ll answer one question about the Fang Killer.”
“One question?” She gave him a thoughtful look. “All right,” she said. “I can come back tomorrow night.”
“No,” Julian said before he could catch himself.
“How would you stop me?” Sky asked.
He couldn’t. “I’ll think up a better offer on the way,” he said. “But we leave now, and you call me before you come back out here.”
She stood and stretched. Lithe muscles flexed under her long-sleeve navy-blue jersey. “I don’t have your number.”
Julian gestured for the tiny notebook and pencil he’d seen sticking out of the back pocket of her jeans. When she gave it to him, he wrote down his number and handed it back. “Let’s go,” he said.
As they left the park, morning bore down on the city. The streets were getting dangerously light. Julian asked Sky where she lived.
“Why should I tell you?” she asked, turning to him.
In Julian’s world, he asked questions and got answers. Civilians didn’t talk back to reapers. He thought fast.
“Because if I don’t walk you home, no deal,” he said.
She pursed her lips together, looked at him. “One question. Now. Then you walk me home.”
Julian tried not to feel the coming sun. His instincts were tearing at him to go. “One question,” he said.
“What do you want with the Fang Killer?”
“I’m hunting him just like you are.” That was as close to the truth as he could get.
True to her word, Sky told where she lived. Julian found shortcuts through narrow streets and alleys edged with dawn.
In front of her building, Sky asked, “Why are you hunting him?”
Knowing he couldn’t tell her even half the truth, Julian baited a hook he knew she couldn’t resist. “You used up your one question,” he said. “If you call me before you go back to the park, I’ll answer two more.”
“Tomorrow?”
The rush of breath behind the single word was what Julian had been waiting for. Sky was hooked. And caught.
“Tomorrow’s good. I’ll walk you home after you write more on your tablet.”
“Are you asking me out?”
Julian was at a loss. He’d never had to ask a female into his bed. They came and went easily. A day’s pleasure was all he’d ever wanted from any of them. With Sky he wanted to ask for more, but he didn’t know how. “I’m afraid of the dark. Tomorrow?” he asked. “Around midnight? I’ll take you to the park.”
She gave him a sharp look. “You’re built like the cover page for Steroids Does a Body Good. You’ve got inside information on why corpses are showing up with zero blood.” She folded her arms over her chest. “And you expect me to go with you to Central Park in the middle of the night?”
Julian ran his gaze over Sky’s delicious curves. “Not a good time for you?”
* * * *
If a tourist saw Vandar mixed with the Friday-night crowd in Washington Square Park in New York’s Greenwich Village, their first thought might be that he was a six-and-a-half-foot wrestler with blond dreadlocks.
This would not be a fatal mistake.
If a mortal ignored the street musicians, the jugglers throwing fire, or the artists sketching in pencil and gave Vandar a closer look, they might notice that perhaps his big chest didn’t rise and fall enough.
This would not prove fatal.
The streets around Sixth Avenue—the oldest part of the Village—are narrow and twisting. A mortal who got turned around in the confusion of dimly lit streets might find the Lord of the Dominion lurking.
This would prove quite fatal.
Vandar owned a row of town houses that bordered the north side of Washington Square Park. Dressed in faded dirt-gray jeans and a sleeveless black leather vest, he stood before a UV-filtered window, watching night flee the skies.
Each drained body that appeared in Central Park was like a nail into his coffin lid. Sooner rather than later, he would be trapped and caught. No measure he took to conceal the bodies was enough to stop them from surfacing after he’d drained them.
Behind him, his counselor waited.
“Will Marek risk withdrawing my blood contract from the council?” he asked Kraeyl. His counselor’s knowledge of the law was the greatest asset Vandar had in the building war against the Creed.
Kraeyl, his straight black hair flowing out behind him, his delicate Japanese features revealing nothing, said, “He can’t risk that. Not unless a witness comes forward to reveal the identity of the drainer.”
That Vandar was the drainer was an uneasy, open secret between them.
“He’s sent Julian to bear witness,” Vandar said, curbing his rising anger with an effort. Exile to this world was punishment enough. The added burden of uncontrollable emotion was insufferable.
“Yes,” Kraeyl said. “But no death scroll has been issued.”
“Not yet.” Julian still hated Vandar for rising against Marek and founding the Dominion. Vandar’s rebellion had driven a stake into the heart of the Shadow World, forever dividing them into Creed and Dominion. Only Kraeyl’s machinations before the council kept Domin
ion vampires one bare step from being ruled outlaws.
Draining was the cancer of the Shadow World. It struck without warning and there was no cure. More and more when he drank, it came over Vandar in a tidal wave of undeniable hunger, easing only when the mortal’s heart stopped beating. Only then did he come back to himself and see what he had done. It was unpredictable and infuriating. “I must have A sub D blood,” he said.
The blood type was as yet undiscovered by mortal science. It was the rarest on the face of the world. In a land mass the size of North America, there were perhaps a thousand mortals with A sub D. Red gold, as it was known, was as valuable as precious metals were in the Sun World. With a steady supply, a Shade could withstand hours of sunlight. To Vandar, red gold brought a benefit worth even more: it quelled the urge to drain.
“In the territory I’ve negotiated, we’ve found red gold in only one mortal so far,” Kraeyl said, “but acquiring her may prove difficult.”
For months, Kraeyl had dedicated every waking moment to a systematic, unrelenting search for the scent of red gold. Now, mere days before the counselor’s carefully negotiated contract was finalized, the specter of failure threatened Vandar with annihilation.
Early this morning, the A sub D mortal they’d found caught Julian’s eye. Kraeyl, a superior tracker, said he suspected Julian’s haeze was falling. The haeze was a storm of useless emotions that could drive a Shade into frenzied, murderous madness to defend what belonged to him.
“As of last evening,” Kraeyl said, “the voting on the contract is in your favor.”
“How long?”
“A night, perhaps two.” Kraeyl crossed his legs, straightened the crease in his silk trousers. “If no more bodies show up.”
“I’ll go for her tonight.”
“As your counselor,” Kraeyl said, “I strongly advise against that action. At present, she is in Creed territory. Your claim on her does not begin until the council approves the contract and Marek executes it. Should you go for her before that, you will be banished to the light.”
“And as my friend?” Vandar asked Kraeyl. “What is your counsel?”
“Survive at any cost,” he said, rage spiking every word, “in this world into which we have been thrust and from which we cannot escape.”