Reaper (Dragon Prophecies Book 1)

by Hickory Mack

  Calling on a will power born of sheer stubbornness, she stumbled to her feet and lurched forward, but she couldn’t get enough breath to call out to him again. Taking it one pained step at a time, she made her way toward the sky people, refusing to close her eyes to the violence as the demon made contact.

  The shadow wolf destroyed them, his size growing with every sky person he killed, and the lightning just kept coming. The noise was unbearable, but Elsie couldn’t move her hands from her chest to cover her ears so they rang in a high-pitched buzz. Another round of jabbing pain struck her, and she cried out, curling into herself protectively. For several seconds, she couldn’t force air into her lungs, and she gasped fruitlessly against the pain.

  Her head spinning, Elsie heaved another great breath, and finally, there was sweet relief as air filled her lungs. “Oh gods,” she sobbed through another stab of pain. She kept moving forward, trying her best to save the creatures who wanted her dead.

  The demon pounced on another as the red ape cried out in fear. A few of them broke off from the group, trying to retreat into the trees, but Frost hunted them down. Elsie’s mind flashed back to another life when it was her hunting down demons, even if their only crime was being too close to a nest or facility. Her memories replaced the wolf with another demon. One who hadn’t wanted to hunt his own kind, but she’d convinced him it was the right thing to do.

  “Forgive me, Saint,” she muttered. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  The last of the sky people fell as another bout of pain ripped its way through her chest, and she fell once more, curling in on herself. The lightning struck again and again. It was an eerie thing, that much lightning with no thunder, no rain, and not a single cloud in the sky.

  Her mother’s demon was a terror to behold. His power was set loose, and the sheer amount of it was oppressive, making it harder to breathe than it already was. She didn’t even know what to compare his size to; no animal had ever been that large. He lifted his blood-soaked muzzle to the sky and howled in such a deep, commanding tone that Elsie shuddered. It traveled over the flat land, and a chorus of echos joined in.

  The sound tingled up her spine and settled into the reservoir of power seated in her chest, soothing some of her pain for half a second. Her magic swirled in a torrent, rejuvenated even though the moon was light years away. It wanted to answer him.

  “Who the fuck are you?” she whispered.

  The lightning slowed then came to a stop as his power fizzled and retracted, leaving the air heavy with its absence. Elsie’s ears kept ringing, but at least the pain had stopped. She lay dazed until she noticed the demon coming toward her.

  “No, you stay away from me!” she commanded hoarsely. Not once had she ever seen him do anything even remotely like that for her mother. She’d had no idea he commanded that kind of power.

  Frost ignored the order and kept padding toward her, his immense size shrinking back down to be somewhat more manageable. “You didn’t have to kill them. We could have avoided this entirely if you would have listened to me! They were just trying to protect their people. We are the enemy here.”

  She could smell the copper as he drew closer, gagging on how thick it was. Little splatters of blood dotted the ground with every step he took, though not one drop was his own. Elsie sat up, the remnants of pain echoing through her chest. She didn’t want him deciding that her laying vulnerable before him was a sign of her submission.

  “I was wrong about you,” she said, finding her strength. “I thought maybe I’d just misunderstood you. That maybe you weren’t as horrible as I’d always thought you were. Maybe under all that scary attitude was someone who needed a little kindness and respect. I thought maybe we could be friends! But I was wrong. You are every bit as awful as I always imagined.”

  Frost flashed forward and shoved her onto her back, pinning her in place with a single paw. Elsie fingered her bracelet as he lowered his teeth. Droplets of blood and saliva splattered onto her face along with his hot breath. He gave a low growl, and she was assaulted by a string of scents, images, and feelings.

  Herself on the ground clutching her chest. The taste of blood, hot in her mouth. The feeling of power rushing through her veins, stronger than anything she’d ever felt before. A sky person’s claws protruding from her throat. Lightning crashing. The chain breaking. Hills of green grass, the wind blowing through her hair.

  She looked him straight in the eye, understanding his message clearly. “I don’t care,” she spit out. “You think you were protecting me because you’re so desperate to be free. You want to go home, wherever that is, and you’re willing to kill anyone that so much as breathes in your direction. You didn’t have to kill them. That wasn’t for my protection.”

  He snapped his teeth, an inch from her face, but Elsie didn’t back down. “You killed them because you’re impatient and awful! If you would have done as I’d asked, we’d be on our way, and they would still be alive!”

  Frost huffed out a breath- like he was dismissing those he’d killed.

  “Go back in the cuff, Frost,” she ordered. He growled at her again, a deeper, more threatening sound. Elsie released her scythe, but instead of threatening him with it, she pointed the spear at the end at her own throat. She was fairly certain he couldn’t be physically hurt, but he’d die if she did.

  He barked at her in rage, saliva and blood flying everywhere. She put pressure on the blade until it pricked her skin. “I’ll fucking do it.”

  The shadow demon backed away, letting her loose. Elsie held out her arm, the cuff in plain sight. “I don’t want to see you again unless I call for you,” she said softly. He jumped at her with a snarl, and Elsie flinched, backpedaling with her feet as fast as she could, but he’d disappeared into a cloud of black smoke. The cuff glowed and burned for a few seconds, and then the chain disappeared.

  “Oh my gods,” she whispered, then flopped over on her back, letting her weapon fall to her side. “He’s absolutely fucking insane.”

  Frida hit the ground with a startled look on her face, her claws digging into the dirt, then she spotted Elsie and crawled up to snuggle on her chest. She pet the alebrije, making sure none of the cinnabar was sticking to her fur or paw pads while Frida squirmed around. Elsie let her nibble on her fingers while she thought about what her next step would have to be.

  Frost had just made it painfully obvious that she was not the one in control here, and the only thing stopping him from killing her himself was the link they shared. It only made her wonder what would happen when she set him loose. Would his thanks manifest as a quick death, or would he draw it out just to anger Santisima? She couldn’t trust him.

  Elsie stood and situated Frida on her shoulder where she nestled into her hair. She grabbed her pack and put her weapon back on its chain. “We’re going to need help, Frida, but we’re not going to find it here, so we have to keep moving.”

  She wanted to go around, so she wouldn’t have to see the carnage, but the fastest way to the connection point was straight ahead, so that’s where Elsie went. The stench of burning flesh surrounded her, and she covered her nose with her sleeve. She was still a quarter mile from the tree’s shadow line when she walked past the first body part laying in the dirt.

  There were dismembered bits of flesh everywhere, and the ground was slick with blood. Not one of the sky people had survived, and not one of their souls needed to be escorted to a hell dimension. They’d been decent people, and although all of them would reincarnate, some would bear the scars of trauma Frost had inflicted on them into their next life.

  “I did this,” Elsie said out loud, and Frida squeaked at her. “If I hadn’t brought him here, this never would have happened. But more than that, I’m being a huge fucking hypocrite. I’ve killed just as many in one attack myself. I told him he was horrible, but he’s no worse than I ever was.”

  “I killed on orders. I was just doing my job, but it was still wrong,” she admitted. She sidestepped around
a corpse with his intestines tossed in the bushes next to him. “Can you imagine how we’ll be framed in the stories the sky people will tell each other about today? Butchers. Killers. Monsters from another world.”

  Elsie fell silent; the only sound was the crunch of her boots on dirt. She walked and jogged for hours that day. Sometimes Frida flew in slow circles above her, and sometimes she rested on her shoulder.

  There were no more welcome parties, and Frost didn’t come out to bother her even once, though she kept expecting him to burst out of the cuff at any time. She just pressed on. When the sun set, she looked for another banana tree grove and crawled through its tunnels until she found its center.

  She cooked some more fry bread, this time with rice and beans and some avocado that was perfectly ripe. After feeding herself and Frida, she cleaned everything up except for the pile of food she left on one plate and several peeled fruits on another. When she was ready, she prepared her bedroll.

  “Frost,” she said, her voice tinged with anxiety. She had no desire to deal with the demon, but he had to be fed. “Come out, it’s time for you to eat.”

  He didn’t come out. Elsie stared at the cuff for a minute, then lay down on her bedroll, setting Frida next to her. “You have to stay close to me, Miss Kahlo. Don’t go wandering around while I’m sleeping. You’ve done so much flying today, you should get some rest as well,” she said.

  Spending so much time with magic changed regular animals in different ways, but becoming a spirit guide made those changes even more pronounced. For Frida, the change was gaining a fairly comprehensive understanding of what was going on around her. The alebrije had learned pretty quickly to stay off the ground in this world, but Elsie saw no harm in reminding her. She curled up against Elsie’s cheek, and they fell asleep together.

  Elsie did a better job with her internal alarm clock, waking just two hours later. She looked around groggily, noting that the food and fruits had been eaten while she’d been out, but the demon and his chain were both missing. It suited her just fine. She’d rather sleep alone than worry about what he was up to while she was unconscious.

  She cleaned up, gathered more fruit, and left the banana tree grove. It was the routine over the next few days. Elsie traveled the endless red landscape alone, with no one to talk to but Frida. At least the cat was good company. Every day, they moved closer to their end goal, and Elsie couldn’t wait to get out of this world.

  She wanted a bath and softer ground to sleep on. The grasses in the inner circles were nice, but they didn’t do an adequate job of covering up the fact that she was still sleeping on stone. There was no topsoil on this planet, which made the grass that much stranger in her mind. It had to be some kind of magic she wasn’t familiar with.

  Every night, she told Frost it was time to eat, and when she woke, the food was gone. The last time she got up, she noticed that her pants were getting loose. The constant movement and little food was eating away at her curves, which just pissed her off. Elsie loved her body the way it was, imperfections and all.

  The attacks from the curse kept coming, growing more frequent as time went on. The soreness of her muscles and feet said it all. Elsie wasn’t healing properly anymore. She took the vial out of her pocket as she walked, running her thumb over the ridged glass as she had so many times. She couldn’t take it. Not yet. Marley had said she wouldn’t feel the true pain of the curse until a week was up, and she wasn’t quite there yet.

  Elsie ate the last of the fruit, sharing it with Frida. She’d never thought she’d get sick of the taste, but five days in, she was over it. There was one more stand of the tall trees to get through, but she wasn’t worried anymore. After Frost had killed those hundred or so sky people, she hadn’t seen another trace of them. They weren’t a stupid species, and they’d decided it was better to let Elsie pass in peace rather than trying to stop her again.

  She walked among the giants and touched the rough bark as she passed them by. This was probably the last time she would visit this world. As convenient as it was, she couldn’t imagine revisiting the shame of what had happened here. Elsie maneuvered around what may have been a creek bed in the planet’s history and gave her silent apology to the sky people.

  She’d look for another dimension to use when she needed to travel from one place to the next, but not until after she rid herself of Frost. She wouldn’t inflict him on anyone else if she could help it.

  “We’re almost there,” she told Frida, though the cat was sleeping. She’d become lethargic, and Elsie worried that she’d been exposed to the cinnabar for too long, but it was just as likely that the kitty was having difficulty because of what they were eating.

  Frida was carnivorous, and there were no little meat creatures to eat on this planet. She’d have to find a healer for both of them when they returned to Earth. If she could find Riven and convince the mage to help them, she could heal them as well.

  The sun was setting for the fifth time when they finally reached the connection point. Elsie took out her scythe and found the right place, her eyes immediately settling on the line that would bring them home. Sort of.

  “This is it, Miss Kahlo,” she muttered. “Hey, Frost, we’re leaving this planet and going back to Earth if you want to be here for this.”

  Every time she spoke to the shadow demon, she had mixed feelings about it. Part of her hated that he so easily killed without remorse. Part of her was grateful that he was invested in keeping her alive. Especially since she wasn’t exactly the most magically talented reaper out there.

  The hunters hadn’t trained her in how to use it properly, so everything she knew about her magic was self-taught. Very few hunters outside of the rare few witches and mages had magic of their own since their blood had been so diluted over time. It meant that those like Elsie who had the advantage were still at a disadvantage. Santisima had taught her how to use her ethereal magic, but she had taught her daughter nothing about the white or dark moons, almost like they didn’t matter.

  In her mother’s mind, Elsie’s witch powers were secondary to her reaper powers. Her mother was convinced that she’d need them more, so their entire focus during their six years in Molta had been on how to harness those powers.

  A thick burst of black smoke erupted a few feet away, and Elsie flinched, quickly recovering before the wolf emerged. He gave her a disdainful look then shook out his fur before checking out their surroundings. Elsie scowled back at him. She was perfectly okay with this arrangement, so long as they maintained a truce—she didn’t need him to be her friend.

  She sliced through the connection point and blinked hard. It was getting dark on the sky people’s planet, but the sun was blazing on Earth. Bright blues and greens assaulted her eyes, and the familiar colors had never felt so rich.

  Elsie stepped through, followed by the wolf who immediately dropped onto the pine needle-laden ground and rolled. “You know sap sticks to those, right? You’re going to be covered in them, and I’m not picking them out for you,” she said dryly. The wolf ignored her and moaned with pleasure as he scratched his itches.

  She closed up the hole between worlds and looked around. They weren’t far from the ocean. She could taste the salt in the air and hear the waves crashing against the shoreline. That’s where she decided she needed to go first. She’d bathe in the ocean, and when she was refreshed, she’d come up with a plan for what they’d do next.

  “It’s been five weeks. Where is that damned reaper?” Angus Cornick demanded, the scar cutting his eyebrow in two flashing red with his anger. “We have no way of knowing what’s going on in our facility! There could be loose subjects and pure chaos with all the time that’s passed!”

  “At this point, Commander Chantraine could be dead for all we know. The tracker built into the cuff went dead, and there’s been no sign of her since. We were instructed to only give her one vial of the delaying agent,” Marley answered, fidgeting uncomfortably. She hated that they’d insisted on including her in t
his meeting. Everyone here held prominent positions, except her.

  “Or she could have entered another dimension,” Commander Grant said reasonably.

  “I’m going to pretend I didn’t just hear you say that,” Cornick groaned. “Do you have any idea how many dimensions there are? She could find any number of worlds with time distortions. It could be years before she surfaces again.”

  With a scowl on his face, he thumped his fingers on the table that they all sat around. Everyone else held their breath. Nobody wanted to piss this man off. “We may have to come to terms with the idea that we’ve lost this one and move on to finding ourselves another reaper,” Cornick said.

  “What about using your shades, Angus?” Grant asked, knowing the scientist had taken a special interest in the ghastly beasts. As horrible as they were, they could be of use in a situation like this.

  “They’re locked in the facility, completely inaccessible to us.”

  “Sirs, I don’t think Elsie will stay hidden for too long. She may have come to some kind of deal with the demon wolf, but it’ll be tenuous at best. She’s afraid of him. She’ll be looking for a way to get rid of him,” Marley spoke up.

  “And what makes you assume she cannot find that help anywhere but Earth?” Grant asked. All eyes in the room turned toward her.

  “I spent years under her command. I know Elsie. She’ll go to someone she knows, someone she’s comfortable with, someone she thinks might help her. I have a guess of who that will be,” she stated.

  “Well, do divulge your little secret then.” Cornick steepled his fingers, his eyes boring into hers.

  “I think she’ll look for a mage that was on our squad before Perrie joined us. Her name is Riven, and she and Elsie were close,” Marley told them.

  “Hmm. We will locate this mage and keep an eye on her, just in case the reaper shows up. I am highly disappointed that the squad we sent was not capable of keeping this one woman in check. You five came highly recommended,” Cornick said in a scathing tone.