Reaper's Pack (All the Queen's Men Book 1)

by Rhea Watson

  “Do we need those?”

  “Next time,” I insisted brightly. As if that was the go-ahead he needed, the hellhound distributed the shot glasses amongst us, and after a somewhat sloppy cheers, we threw them back together. Fruity richness tangled with the almost painful bite of pure, paint-stripping alcohol, and while I hastily sucked down some of my apple pie cocktail to dull it, Knox chased his shot with a gulp of scotch. Gunnar made a face as he set his empty glass on the counter, nudging it away like he was officially done with tequila for life.

  The ringleader of tequila time shuddered, his face puckered; Declan danced from one foot to the other, coughing, chasing the aftertaste away with nothing at all. Poor darling.

  “So, tell us, Hazel,” Gunnar said, the three of them boxing me in on the barstool, barricading off this dark corner with their impressive, sculpted bodies. No amount of clothing could mask such perfect Adonis figures. “Is this reminiscent of your human days?”

  I snorted. “Not even a little. We had dance halls, but the dancing now is so different. Most of the time, for us, we had live bands, and we… You didn’t dance alone.” Royce had been a good dancer—quick on his feet, his narrow hips catching the beat as he led me through the steps. Something twisted in my gut at the memory, and I went for my cocktail. “And there were always dances we did, steps to follow. You weren’t really making it up as you went along.”

  Still noticeably reeling from the tequila shot, Declan accepted what was left of my cocktail with a grateful smile. “Do you remember any of them?”

  The ache in my core sharpened like the twist of a knife. I stumbled a little over the answer, staring at my drink in Declan’s skilled hands, the liquid level falling, falling, falling—gone.

  “Every last one,” I admitted, hoping none of them heard my slight fumble over the pounding bass.

  But my pack heard everything. Everything. Everything that I didn’t want them to, especially the subtext. Their hurried glances told me they were discussing my depressing omission between themselves, through that mystical pack bond that connected them forever. A part of me wished I could tune in to their frequency.

  Be one of the pack.

  Without it, I would always be an outsider.

  Always.

  Declan hopped up on the barstool beside me, setting my empty drink aside and stretching an arm along the counter so that it almost wrapped around me. His proximity was such a comfort, even if we weren’t touching, and I found myself gravitating toward him, our knees nudging together, my body settling into the crook of his arm.

  “Well, come on, then,” Gunnar interjected, his smooth lilt rising over the roar of the nightclub. He stepped back, which opened our little huddle up, then offered me his hand. “Teach me one of your favorite routines.”

  I cocked my head to the side, shoving down the memories of a life gone by—a life that would never be, so there was no point in dwelling on it. “I don’t know. This music doesn’t exactly lend itself to the Lindy Hop.”

  “Indulge him,” Knox insisted. He handed his empty tumbler to Declan, who set the glass next to mine on the bar top, sixteen scotches deep and steady as steel. “I need something more interesting to look at than them.”

  He gestured to the crowd of selfie-snapping, uncoordinated-dancing, sloppy-face-sucking humans on the other side of the squared off bar with a thrust of his chin. Disdain riddled his features, and had we not reaped together yesterday—had I not watched that decrepit but sweet old soul smoosh Knox’s huge hellhound face in her hands—I would have worried about his opinion of humanity.

  But Knox just had standards.

  And no one here met them.

  My eyes dropped to Gunnar’s awaiting hand, to the sheer size of it compared to mine, smooth and pale, long, lean fingers outstretched. Like Declan’s, they were exceptionally talented in their own right. The thought of them stroking my slick folds, pumping in and out of me as the third act of the opera raged on, elicited a painfully hot blush, one that I did my best to hide behind my hair.

  “Well, the Lindy is a tough one to learn if you don’t know, you know, your side of things.” Slowly, I slipped my hand into his, and he escorted me off the barstool and into the scarce bit of space between the bar and the brick wall. “I can teach you the foxtrot… That’s a pretty easy one.”

  Gunnar arched a dark eyebrow. “You think I want easy?”

  “I think you need easy,” I fired back, relishing the pleasant burn of his hand around mine, the safety I felt inside it. “Prove me wrong and I’ll step it up a notch.”

  As always, Gunnar was up to the challenge, exceeding my expectations and then some. He picked up the footwork after a single demonstration, moving slowly through our first attempt, then faster on the next, finally steering me around like he had been born to foxtrot. What we really needed for a dance as smooth as silk was a ballroom. All his lean lines, his effortless control of those long limbs—Gunnar was built to move, to follow a routine and execute it flawlessly.

  Declan, on the other hand, struggled to find his footing when his turn came, but we all blamed it on the booze. Apparently, reapers had a stronger tolerance than hellhounds, because he and I had downed the same amount, but he just couldn’t make it work. His feet were all over the place, the pair of us tripping over each other, laughing while Knox and Gunnar chuckled from the sidelines.

  It was a blast.

  And when the sweetest hellhound of my pack finally toddled off to get us all another round of drinks, my lone credit card in his pocket, I had a suspicion about him…

  That he was better than he let on.

  That he fumbled around to make me smile, to make me double over in a fit of giggles at his clownery, my cheeks sore from laughter.

  No one had ever done that for me before: embarrassed themselves on purpose.

  I mean, if that was his game, anyway.

  Maybe he was just hapless and sweet and naïve and innocent—and made love like none of those things, masterful when the time called for it, in control and dominant when I needed that.

  Multifaceted. I huffed a few strands of hair out of my face, hands on my hips as I watched him disappear into the swarm of humans at the bar. Yeah. Gunnar was precise and meticulous. Knox consistent and resilient. And Declan—never one-dimensional.

  I could work with that.

  I could love that.

  Them.

  I… I could love them one day—no question.

  A thought that made me giddy.

  A thought that, tomorrow, I would blame on the liquor.

  Relishing the buoyancy, just for now, I spun in place to Knox, unable to picture him gliding as effortlessly as Gunnar through the foxtrot—but eager to see him give it a go all the same. “Your turn, alpha.”

  He held up those huge hands, declining my offer with a slight shake of his head and a quirk of his lips. “I’m afraid the foxtrot requires skill that I don’t possess.”

  I let out a bark of a laugh. “Bullshit.”

  Right on cue, we fell into one of our usual stare-offs, only this one wasn’t riddled with an undercurrent of tension and strife, both of us struggling for dominance. It was still a standoff with one winner, one loser, but the stakes weren’t all that high. In fact, his black eyes almost glinted with a mischief I expected from Declan, and I nibbled my lower lip, peering up at him through my lashes with a playfulness of my own.

  Knox refused to fold, his great burly arms crossed, and no amount of coaxing would change that.

  But for the first time in our relationship, I had an inkling that maybe, just maybe, I could get him to bend, just a little.

  And that was progress.

  A hand suddenly smoothed up my back, tracing the ramrod line of my spine to the nape of my neck. Heat blossomed everywhere as Gunnar closed in, his body looming behind mine, his mouth teasing my ear as he whispered, “So… Am I ready for something more challenging?”

  I swallowed hard, my throat bobbing beneath his elegant fingers, an
d found Knox’s mirth dead in the water. Instead, he watched us intently, that black gaze blazing a path from Gunnar’s hand on my neck up to my lips. The intensity of his complete focus and the wall of muscle barring any escape at my back…

  It made me want to run.

  And it made me want to melt.

  “We… We have the records at home,” I stammered, breath catching when Gunnar’s fingertip whispered across my chin, scorching a path like a wildfire cutting through a field. Any second now, it would bring down the whole damn forest. I rolled my shoulder back, nudging him away as best I could, and while he retreated, he didn’t let go. Instead, he dragged his parted lips up to my temple, and out of some sense of skewed morality, I railed against him, twisting out of his grasp, my heart thundering. “I-I can teach you how to really swing there… with the right music.”

  His tongue flicked out to wet his smirking lips. “Ah. Were you a swinger, reaper?”

  Too late. Even with the added distance between us, the wildfire was off, ripping through me unchecked, unhindered, setting every inch of me ablaze.

  “I… It means something different these days,” I stammered, relieved to finally spot a returning Declan, arms overloaded with drinks, out of the corner of my eye. “To swing… It—”

  “I know what it means,” Gunnar purred, slouching against the bar to let Declan pass, his mouth positively sinful, his eyes twinkling like he really did enjoy my fumbling now. And why wouldn’t he? Gunnar had me—because, by the modern definition, I was a swinger. I’d slept with him and Declan…

  And I’d loved every second with them both.

  “Come along, reaper,” Gunnar urged, pushing off the bar as Declan set out the drinks on the counter. He caught my hand before I could slip away, then yanked me flush against him. Chest to chest, the hellhound maneuvered me with ease, a hand on my lower back while the other steered mine to his shoulder. He fell into the steps I’d showed him, which left me no choice but to let him lead, and the hellhound steered me around in an easy waltz, his royal blues locked on mine. “Teach me how to swing…”

  24

  Knox

  They kicked us out at two in the morning.

  By four, we had finished an enormous platter of waffles and fried chicken at an all-night diner.

  At four thirty, we returned to our territory, and as soon as the three drunk fools under my charge stumbled through the ward, the sky split open with a vengeance.

  Having witnessed the changing of the seasons, summer bleeding into autumn, August and September trailing ever further behind us, I had categorized all the usual storms. There was the light misting that drizzled all day, bringing with it humidity and an ever-present damp. Then there were the days where it rained on and off in great heaving bursts; just when you thought it was over, crack, there went the sky, pissing down fat droplets that hammered the windows and threatened Declan’s rooftop patchwork.

  There were storms that built over hours, the sky slowly darkening, the winds reaching a howl only after a creeping escalation.

  This was a tempest, a sudden and violent downpour. Hazel shrieked at the first explosion of rainwater, the droplets small but plentiful, relentless and cruel. Thunder crashed somewhere far off, possibly over the distant mountain range. Bright white light lashed against a pitch-black sky, the skittering bolts powerful but fleeting. The cedars did what they could to shelter us from the assault, some of the taller ones bowing to the wind, their piney branches dancing.

  After a night full of humanity, from their smells to their noises, their drunken slurs to their clumsy stumbling on the streets of downtown Lunadell, the storm was a welcome reprieve. I would take damp earth and sodden brushwood over Sampson’s Corner any day.

  Gunnar and Declan agreed, apparently. Glee blasted through our pack bond from both as soon as we set foot on our territory again, and the alcohol was fuel to the fucking fire. One moment they were drunkenly heckling each other with words—and then words turned to fists, the pair scuffling and shoving each other through the forest. At the next flash of lightning, Gunnar ripped his meticulously cared-for shirt clean down the middle, then hurled the torn fabric into the awaiting boughs of a cedar. Declan followed suit, and before I could reprimand either, they shifted, shredding their trousers in the process.

  I slowed my march through the soggy trees with a sigh, wishing those two would just drag their intoxicated asses to bed. But to see them roughhousing, playing, nipping and snapping their teeth at one another, Declan’s tail up and wagging, Gunnar’s encouraging barks bouncing off the landscape…

  Well, it made my heart full.

  I couldn’t remember the last time they had felt free enough to just—be. Hellhounds. Members of the same pack, bonding, strengthening their connection through a bit of rough-and-tumble play. Like two pups who had finally found each other in their shadowy den, I’d never seen them act this way.

  So, I let it go. Inside the ward, they were safe, contained. They’d find their way back to the house eventually, when the liquor left their system and their bellies howled for food.

  I already dreaded the impending headache. While I had downed more than the rest, it seemed I could handle my alcohol better than all of them—and that included Hazel. Who knew a reaper could get drunk? Not me.

  With Declan and Gunnar off to fend for themselves, I looked to the last member of our group, eager to herd her inside and into bed.

  Especially with that fuck lurking in the celestial plane. He couldn’t cross the ward, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t try. And in her current state, Hazel was no match for blood magic, scythe or not.

  And that scythe was precisely what I found where I had last seen the white-haired reaper. Leaning against a barren cedar trunk, the hook forged in starlight looked so inconspicuous. Safe, powerless without its soulmate. My brows furrowed. Where the fuck had she gone without it? Not that it mattered—no one could touch it in her absence if they wanted to keep their hands. But after that thing had followed us to the nightclub, I certainly didn’t like the idea of her wandering off, drunk and alone, unsteady on her own two feet.

  Her two bare feet.

  Because there were her fucking shoes, twin black heels, tucked neatly beside her scythe and already filling with rainwater.

  “Hazel?”

  The pitter-patter of rain answered, and my frown deepened. A flash of red suddenly caught my eye, teased me, darting between the trees, up and down like she was climbing through the underbrush. Honestly, it was like minding a bunch of pups…

  “Hazel,” I called, voice drowned out by what felt like a purposeful clap of thunder. I glared skyward, then started off toward her. Faintly, the smell of ocean spray and salty sea air tickled my nostrils, her scent calling me home.

  I found her headed east, cutting clear across our territory to nowhere. Her scent snagged on trees and scrub, a beacon through the storm, a dotted path for me to follow even when I couldn’t see her. Eventually, she must have grown tired of wandering, because she stopped in a slanted clearing, standing atop the scraggly grey boulder in the dead center of the lopsided circle—dancing. Arms up. Bare feet threatening to shred on the rockface.

  Her smile was beautiful, her laughter like a hymn.

  But given the hour, the weather, I wasn’t feeling all that worshipful.

  “Hazel, get down,” I boomed over the roar of rain, catching her eye with a wave from the tree line. She paused her dancing for a moment, hair slicked down her neck, her back, that sinfully snug red dress of hers drooping to expose a black lacey cup over her right breast. I swallowed hard, my mind darting to salacious places—like what was under that lace.

  “No,” she called back. The reaper threw her hands up in time with the next lightning strike. Brilliant white light illuminated the clearing, cast her in an angelic glow. When it vanished, she was a temptress once more, a dangerous creature in red, a threat to my self-restraint.

  Fighting a smile, some traitorous part of me loving her defiance, I s
talked into the clearing, careful over the slippery patches, the forest floor turned to muck. “We should get out of the rain. Come along.”

  I motioned for her to get down, but she shook her head, rising up onto her tiptoes, graceful as a ballerina.

  “I love storms,” Hazel insisted, running her hands up her neck, over her face, into her hair. “They’re so… powerful. Don’t you feel it?”

  “What you feel is drunk,” I said flatly as I picked my way around a few other rocks, mindful of the slope that led down into a shallow ravine—which the storm would flood within the hour, if it hadn’t already.

  “What I feel is alive,” she countered, “and it’s amazing…”

  Yes, I imagined it would for someone who dealt exclusively in death. But the charade had become tiresome. When I finally made it to the boulder, I could just reach her ankles.

  “Hazel, get down and let’s get out of the rain.” As soon as I had her, I’d teleport us straight to the house, shove her inside—see her to her bedroom, where she would undoubtedly crash. I was doing this for her own fucking good.

  Yet she still scampered out of reach, defiant to the last. “Why? Because the wet will make me sick?” She snorted, her face lighting up. “I’ll catch a cold?” Another snort, one that sounded more mad cackle than anything. “You’ll catch a cold?”

  “Yes, yes, hilarious,” I muttered. Lightning seared across the black, and I used Hazel’s intoxicated fascination with it to finally snare her. With her eyes up, I lashed out and caught both her ankles, then yanked her off the boulder. Light as a feather, she tumbled and squealed into my arms, then wiggled out in a fury immediately after.

  Before I had the chance to really feel her. Hold her.

  “Knox!”

  “I’m not in the mood for you to be difficult,” I growled, catching her by the elbow before she scampered off again. It was a bald-faced lie, of course; the alpha in me adored her fire, just as I had from the first day we met. But I couldn’t give in to that, couldn’t let myself succumb like Gunnar and Declan. I had to be stronger—for them. “Let’s go.”