by Rhea Watson
Reaper’s Pack
All the Queen’s Men, #1
Rhea Watson
Copyright 2020 Rhea Watson
Published by Rhea Watson, Amazon Edition. All rights reserved.
License Notes
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Paperback ISBN: PENDING
Dedicated to all the darlings who feel a little less lonely with their soulmate(s).
And to those taking a chance on an author trying something new, I see you. I appreciate you.
Let’s do this.
Contents
Content Warning
Reaper’s Pack
1. Hazel
2. Hazel
3. Gunnar
4. Knox
5. Hazel
6. Declan
7. Gunnar
8. Hazel
9. Declan
10. Gunnar
11. Knox
12. Hazel
13. Declan
14. Hazel
15. Knox
16. Gunnar
17. Hazel
18. Hazel
19. Knox
20. Hazel
21. Declan
22. Gunnar
23. Hazel
24. Knox
25. Hazel
26. Hazel
27. Knox
28. Hazel
29. Declan
30. Hazel
31. Gunnar
32. Hazel
33. Knox
34. Hazel
Bonus Content
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Content Warning
Please note that Reaper’s Pack includes content that may not be suitable for all readers. In this full-length standalone novel, you’ll find a Why Choose romance, graphic violence, mentions of abuse, death, and detailed steamy, steamy steam. Please know your own limits and discontinue reading should something take you beyond your comfort zone.
Reaper’s Pack
All the Queen’s Men, #1
Rhea Watson
One grim reaper. Three hellhounds who refuse to bow down to her. A monster hunting them in the shadows…
Ten years ago, I was judged worthy of life after death and returned to the mortal realm as a grim reaper. Scythe in hand, I guide souls to deliverance—and it’s time for a promotion.
My new territory is triple the size of any I’ve worked before. High death rates mean one busy reaper, and the only way to keep up is with a pack of hellhounds. Faithful. Strong. Merciless. Hellhound shifters are a reaper’s right hand in the field, shepherding and guarding souls until they can be reaped.
We get our pick of the litter from the best breeders in Hell, but for some reason, I’m drawn to the pack no one wants.
An alpha who refuses to yield.
A beta who doesn’t take me seriously.
A runt who flinches at every command.
I want them—even if they don’t want me.
Because the hunger in their eyes tells a different story. But the fact that they can’t decide whether to love me or hate me, fight me or screw me, is making our situation way too complicated.
Still, I refuse to give up. If this infuriatingly handsome trio can’t be trained, if we don’t pass the trials, they go back to a cage and a cruel demon master.
Yeah. Not happening.
Reapers and hellhounds are natural allies, and the sooner we secure our bond, the better, because as it turns out…
All our lives depend on it.
1
Hazel
“Place your scythe on the table and register your identity in blood, please.”
Please. Rather polite for a demon. My grip tightened around the handle of the weapon gifted to me ten years ago by Death. I knew it better than I knew myself, every groove of the yew staff, the glyphs carved into the shimmering curved blade forged from a star—one of the Corona Borealis constellation, unique to my scythe and mine alone. There was literally no greater weapon in the universe, a herald of doom, the deliverance of death, a reaper’s right hand.
And this little boy wanted me to hand it over?
Ha.
I drew a breath, ready to tell him, no, in fact, I would hang on to it, when Alexander placed his scythe on the onyx table before us without a second’s hesitation.
“Just a formality, Hazel,” he mused, flashing me a handsome smile. My reaper mentor, the one who had been minding Lunadell for nearly a decade on his own as the human population exploded from a suburb to a bustling metropolis, had a knack for quieting my concerns with nothing more than a grin. With the looks of a sinner but the mind of a saint, he probably had human souls swooning over him when he showed up. None of the screaming, wailing, begging that I had dealt with for the last ten years.
Still. My scythe was a piece of me—my only true companion since I had been chosen by Death to reap. And this was the first time someone—a demon, specifically—had asked me to just hand it over. I nibbled my lower lip for a moment, indecision gnawing at me, before finally delicately placing my weapon on a surface that looked better suited as a sacrificial altar than a check-in station at one of Hell’s top hellhound breeding facilities.
Beside me, Alexander flipped open an enormous tome, swiping through yellowed pages until he reached the last used. Golden fingerprints gleamed back at us, catching the light of the gaudy crystal chandeliers above. I glanced up, scanning our new locale with raised eyebrows. White marble stared back, floors, walls, ceiling, flecked with grey and gold, smooth and cold. While I had only ventured into Hell a few times since I’d gone from human soul to grim reaper, it always amazed me how similar it all looked to Heaven.
Well, sort of a black mirror reflection, actually. The architecture had its similarities, but statues of saints and angels and beautiful women down here were grotesque ghouls and screaming demon princes and gore. So, not quite the same, but Lucifer had dragged that love of white marble from paradise down into the pit. The interior of every building drowned in the stuff, while the exterior walls… Well, Hell had a knack for staining everything it touched.
“Now you,” Alexander muttered, a full head and a half taller than me, wide and robust and blond, his elbow catching me just below the shoulder when he nudged me. Swallowing thickly, I pricked my finger on the tip of my scythe’s blade, then pressed the bleeding digit to the book, taking the spot directly below his. Like angels and the gods of old, reapers bled gold, and when I pulled back, a perfect fingerprint glimmered in the breeder’s ledger—my first step toward acquiring my very own hellhound pack.
The thought of which still terrified me.
“Alexander, do I—”
Tortured shrieks erupted from the young demon behind the table, the agonized pitch launching my heart straight into my throat. Horror bounced off the marble walls, and I whipped around to find the poor sod hurling Alexander’s scythe back onto the table, his hands shredded down to the bone. The noises he made—like he was still a human soul being ripped apart in the d
eepest circles of this awful place, no longer the demon they had made him. Broken.
I lurched forward when he collapsed, instinct kicking in: stem the oozing black blood, wrap his bony fingers, find a way to keep them from further deterioration. Alexander caught me by the shoulder with an annoyed huff, his expression bored and utterly unmoved by the sight before us, like he had seen it a thousand times before.
“Idiot boy,” he grumbled, flicking his wrist to examine his watch. “Honestly.”
No one had ever been stupid enough to touch my scythe, but blood and screaming men were nothing new to me either, and the desire to help, fix, resuscitate was one I couldn’t shake. I’d died a nurse on the Western Front in 1943; even some seventy-five years later, having died and come back, my life very different from what it once was, it was difficult to ignore the call to action inside me.
The wall opened to our immediate left, and out strode the demon in charge—Fenix. While we reapers almost always dressed in black—Alexander in a pair of tailored trousers and a collared shirt, me in a floor-length, shapeless dress—demons embraced all manner of fashions. Today, Fenix strode forth in a burgundy suit, his black hair slicked back, sinfully attractive. Most demons had an air of dark beauty about them, just as angels were blessed with unnatural loveliness; physicality truly was the best way to damn and save humanity.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Fenix boomed, crocodile-skin shoes clicking across the marble floor, his strides as long and lean as his physique. “Apprentices… what can you do? Some just aren’t cut out for the work.”
Before either of us could get a word in, Fenix cuffed the sniveling demon apprentice by the back of his neck, hauled him up, and tossed him in the general direction of the door from which he’d emerged. Black blood droplets stained the floor behind him as he shuffled along, this nameless boy who had lost his hands in a single moment of stupidity—who, now useless, would probably be stripped of his demon status and hurled back into the torture pits as a damned soul.
I watched him go, an ache in my chest as he shuffled through the door. In my periphery, Alexander and Fenix clasped hands for a stiff shake. It shouldn’t matter to me what happened to the boy. He was a soul condemned to eternal torment; he didn’t deserve my pity.
None of them did.
Yet he received it all the same. I bit the insides of my cheeks as hard as I dared, using the brief flash of pain to refocus, then faced the towering pair at my side with a thin smile.
Fenix offered his hand to me now, long fingers reaching, reaching, reaching, as if drawn to my throat. I acquiesced to the formality, his flesh hot and his grasp hard. His smile almost matched Alexander’s, handsome and sultry and striking—damning, to the right eyes. Unnerving to mine. But no matter my personal feelings about him, this demon was one of the top hellhound breeders in the realm. He was the only one Alexander would work with and had produced champion lines of shifters for centuries.
His hounds had one purpose: to serve grim reapers charged with large territories. After all, in a population of a few million, there were countless deaths each day. A sole reaper, even two like Alexander and me in Lunadell, simply couldn’t handle the numbers. We needed a hellhound pack to control wayward spirits, to corral them, to keep them, to catch them so that we could do our job and get them to Purgatory for judgment.
Every soul lost was a poltergeist in the making.
And the angels responsible for hunting and destroying violent spirits were a bunch of lazy assholes who preferred we reapers let as few slip through our nets as possible.
“Hazel, I presume?” Fenix arched a perfectly waxed black eyebrow at me, and I forced my smile to stretch a hint farther across my face.
“Yes.” My hand ached when he released it, but a few flexes in and out of a fist behind my back soothed the pain away. Contrary to popular belief, we reapers could feel the same as demons, angels—any supernatural creature. Not as intensely as humans, of course, but we weren’t robots.
“Right!” Fenix clapped his hands together, positively giddy as his black gaze slid between me and Alexander. “You’ll be selecting your first pack today… Congratulations.”
That brought a nervous smile to my face and sparked a flurry of butterflies in my belly. Acquiring my very own hellhound pack was a promotion in a job I loved, a job that garnered me respect—where I wasn’t called love, sweetheart, or poppet; where I wasn’t spoken down to because of my gender. Before I’d died in an air strike, Alexander and I wouldn’t have been treated the same. The world just wasn’t there yet. Now, we were equals, even more so after the angels in the reaping department informed me of my relocation to Lunadell.
Whether Alexander shared my perceived equality was a murkier subject. While he hadn’t expressed much, he also hadn’t exactly done backflips when we’d first met and he learned I had only reaped for ten years before this. The reaper next to me had harvested souls on the celestial plane for nearly seventy before he had been granted his hellhound pack.
“Thank you,” I managed. Fenix sounded proud of my accomplishment, sure, but he was also about to make a killing in gold from my higher-ups. His packs were the most expensive in Hell, and he all but floated around the table, guiding us deeper into the stark, unfurnished marble foyer. I trailed after the two tall creatures before me, arms crossed, and cast one last glance back to my scythe. It was where I’d left it, and while I didn’t bring it everywhere with me when I was off duty, being without always left me feeling hollower inside than I already did.
But as we strolled into an elevator, the doors and inside panels made of pure gold, I knew my scythe would be waiting there for me when I returned. No one else could touch it—literally. These gifts, forged of ancient trees and stardust by Death himself, were nuclear weapons, capable of killing any being in this realm and the next. At no point could we risk them falling into the wrong hands.
“We have some excellent contenders this year,” Fenix remarked as the elevator started its gentle descent. “Wonderful lines, perfect sires, competent bitches… Many of the older packs are well-oiled machines at this point. They’ll need little training.”
“Mine hardly needed the allotted three months,” Alexander noted, chin lifted, a touch arrogant. “A testament to your stock, Fenix.”
My mentor had a pack of eight hellhounds, all monstrous black beasts, all devoted—mind, body, and soul—to their reaper master. I couldn’t even fathom that sort of loyalty, but it would come, in time. I had three months to get mine into shape before they faced their final trials administered by an archangel, or it was back to square one.
And I had no intention of going through this process again. The pack I chose today would be mine, period.
The gold box around us stopped suddenly, jerking into place in a way that made my stomach loop. As soon as the doors whizzed open, my companions shouldered through, briefly barring my view, and for a few precious moments I could pretend all of Hell was gold and white marble. That was dashed once the doorway cleared, and I shuffled into the dark corridor with a scowl.
This was the Hell we all expected: black rock and ash, volcanic runoff hardened with sorrow. Barking erupted as soon as I set foot on the gravelly earth, the wide corridor ahead arched and lined with barred gates. As part of my reaper training, I had seen the deepest circles of Hell, the torturous pits full of demons and damned souls. All reapers needed to know the light and the dark; we had been plucked from Heaven, worthy souls destined to reap, to serve Death honorably, but we had no experience with Hell. And it was just that—a horrible, brutal, awful experience. The souls I marched to Purgatory, the cruel and the violent and the heartless, had no clue what awaited them.
But I did.
And it made my job so much easier knowing they were headed here, that as desperately as I wanted to unleash vengeance on them for their earthly crimes, torment awaited.
Fenix’s hellhound kennels reminded me of the deepest circles of Hell, only the howls of hounds replaced the screams of huma
n souls. In theory, none of the shifters here were tortured for eternity, but as I approached the first gate, the same emotions I’d felt in the pits clung to me like a second skin.
Maybe I was too sensitive. Alexander continued to joke and chat with Fenix like they were old friends, neither flinching when a yelp or a screech punctured the barking chorus. Maybe I just needed tougher skin.
Maybe…
No. I might have walked each step on unsteady footing today, unsure and out of my depth with the changes this promotion brought, but my gut was certain: this was a foul place.
“Just go with your gut,” Alexander remarked suddenly, as if he’d read my mind, his melodic baritone cutting through the tensely chaotic air around me. He stepped aside and gestured to the nearest gate. “The right pack will call to you… just like the right house.”
Shit. I still hadn’t found a place to hold my pack once I got them topside. Another monumental task to do today. After all, who needed a forever home when you spent every single second alone, loitering out of sight on the celestial plane, waiting for humans to die?
Squaring my shoulders, I approached the gate with as confident a stride as I could muster; hellhounds responded to strength, and there was no way I would land a pack without it. Alexander stepped aside to give me an unfettered view of the creatures inside, and my first look at an unclaimed pack threatened to cut me off at the knees.