Reaper Uninvited

“Not our problem.”

Sariah pressed her lips together and focused her eyes on me. “Dominus, your orders, please.”

I wanted to punch Conah. Instead, I backed away. “We fight.”

I ran toward the stairs. I had to help. I had to speak to the Rising Pack and explain this had been my idea. They needed to know the truth.

I was halfway down the stairs when Conah’s arms snagged my waist, and the world melted away again.

Chapter Eighteen

“What the hell!” I shoved Conah away and put distance between us.

I’d heard the phrase my blood was boiling, but this was the first time I’d experienced it.

“How fucking dare you undermine my authority with my reapers?” I stood, hands on hips, chest heaving, vision blurring with rage. “How dare you take away my choice. How fucking dare you?” My voice was a screech, and yeah, I sounded insane even to my own ears, but I couldn’t help it. Fury was pulsing behind my eyes, making me feel as if my eyeballs were about to pop out of my head.

“What the fuck?” Mal entered the room. “Conah, what the fuck is going on?”

Mal was half-dressed as usual. Bare chest, bare feet, and for some reason, that just served to amplify my fury.

I leveled my boiling eyes on him. “What the fuck do you care? Why don’t you get your dick back inside whomever you were just fucking?”

“Oh, shit.” Cora appeared by the mantelpiece. “She said whomever. She only goes proper grammar when she’s pissed …”

I ignored her and focused on the two Dominus. “You made me leave them to fight alone. You made me leave.” A sob of frustration caught in my throat. “You think because I’m a woman, because I don’t have wings and can’t teleport, that you can push me around and make my decisions for me? That you can lie to me, keep secrets, and keep me fucking cooped up in these quarters. Well, you fucking can’t.” My scythe appeared in my hand. “I have a big one too, you wankers, and I’m not afraid to use it.”

I glared at them. My breathing was too fast and shallow. It was making me dizzy.

It was Mal who broke the silence. “There was a fight, and you didn’t stay to help?” he asked Conah.

“Fuck you, Mal,” Conah said. “It’s not like you were bothered. I knocked for you.”

“Not very hard. You could have teleported in and spoken to me.”

“No, thanks.” His lip curled. “I don’t need to see you fucking your whores.”

“Oh yes,” Mal said. “Because you’re not getting any love. Kiara still got her snatch closed?”

Conah snarled at Mal and I lost it.

“Shut up! Shut up, the both of you. And fuck your sex lives. I don’t give a shit. This is about me. About the wolves and the fucking vamps and what you did.” I pointed an accusatory finger at Conah.

“What happened, exactly,” Mal asked. “Fee, look at me.”

I tore my gaze from Conah and focused on Mal’s concerned expression.

“What happened, Fee,” he asked again. His tone was soothing.

I took a shuddering breath, and the scythe in my hand winked out. “I was on patrol with my reapers, Grayson, and his Loups.”

Mal blinked sharply. “You were in Westside.”

“Yes.”

“I thought patrol was tomorrow?”

Impatience and annoyance stabbed at my chest. “Things changed, okay. What the fuck does that matter?”

“Okay.” He held up his hands. “So, what happened.”

I filled them in on our scoping out the club, Grayson being taken, the weird magical corridor, my little chat with the smarmy owner, and how we’d encroached on the Rising Pack’s territory to save Grayson. “And after I healed him, more vamps arrived. They just kept coming, but we fought them off, and then he fucking came and pulled me out.” I jerked a thumb in Conah’s direction. “He didn’t let me speak to the Rising Pack and explain the situation. He left Grayson and his wolves to the mercy of the Rising Pack.” I shot dagger eyes at Conah. “What is wrong with you?”

Conah’s jaw ticked. “You broke the fucking law, Fee. You went onto their land without permission. You fucked up.”

“I wasn’t going to let a piece of paper stop me from saving a life, and neither should you? I mean, what the fuck? What kind of people are you if you can do that? If you can just walk away when you know you can do something?”

Conah’s eyes narrowed. “This is why you’re cloistered. This is why you haven’t been allowed out there. Because you’re not ready. Our world exists on a delicate balance. There are treaties, alliances. There is protocol, and you didn’t consider any of those.”

Seriously? He was trying to turn this on me? “Because you never told me.”

“Would it have stopped you today?”

“No, and it shouldn’t stop you either.”

“We’re going around in circles,” Mal said. “I’ll contact Azazel. Get him to check on Grayson, intervene if he has to. He’s the only one of us who has access to all territories.”

He was the outlier liaison. Of course. “He should know the vamps have a witch on their payroll. They had magic.”

Mal nodded and tapped out a message on his comm.

Conah strode to the drinks cabinet and poured a large whiskey before downing it. His shoulders were tense, his knuckles white where he gripped the glass.

“Enough.” My tone was flat as the adrenaline leached from my system. “No more lies. No more treating me like I’m lesser than you. I don’t need you to baby me. I need you to trust me. To teach me and give me the choice of whether to fight or flee. I need you to treat me as your equal because I am. I fucking am, and you need to accept that.”

“Conah?” Mal said. “It’s time.”

Time? My pulse pounded harder.

Conah ran a hand over his face, and when he fixed his sapphire eyes on me, they weren’t filled with anger or disappointment. They were filled with compassion.

Ice trickled through my veins.

“What? What is it?” Cora asked on my behalf. “Shit, Conah, can’t you see you’re scaring her. What is the problem?”

Conah turned his attention to Cora. “The problem is you.”

She balked, and then her eyes narrowed. “Excuse me?”

“What the fuck?” I walked over to Cora. “Don’t you speak to her like that.”

“That’s just it, Fee,” Conah said. “No one should be speaking to her. Not even you.”

Needles pricked the back of my mind, and my fingers tingled. “What … What do you mean?”

Conah took a breath through his nose as if preparing to deliver bad news, and my stomach cramped in response. A door in the back of my mind creaked open.

No.

No, don’t say anything.

I didn’t want to know what the thing behind that door was. The thing I’d locked up and forgotten, the thing …

I shook my head, my eyes welling. Why did I want to cry?

Cora frowned at me in confusion even as the door in the back of my mind swung wider.

“She turned up when your aunt died in that accident,” Conah said softly. “The accident you felt responsible for. You’d locked yourself away. You were spiraling in your grief, but a part of you knew you needed to come out. That part of you knew what you needed, and so, it somehow created it. I saw the photograph in your room. Of you, as a child, clutching a doll. A favorite toy?”

No …

Cora blinked at me in confusion. “What? What is he talking about, Fee?”

“Have you heard of a tulpa?” Mal asked.

I shook my head even as the truth of what they were saying pricked at my consciousness and pulled the door wider.

“You know, Fee,” Mal said softly. “I can see, you know.”

I turned my head and looked at Cora, looked into her cornflower blue eyes, at her sweet, kind face. A face I’d seen before so many times when I’d played with Lissa and hugged her to sleep at night. Lissa, my doll, had been my comfort blanket. The first thing Aunt Lara had bought me. I’d taken her everywhere with me. She was in almost every photograph of me. She hadn’t left my side until we’d gone on a picnic, and I’d accidentally left her behind. We’d gone back for her, but she’d been gone. I’d cried myself to sleep for days.

“A tulpa is a being that is created by another’s spiritual and mental power,” Conah continued. “A consciousness that usually lives inside the creator’s head as a separate entity. Only the creator can interact with it. Except in your case, your tulpa exists outside of your head where everyone can interact with it.”

Tulpa … I stared at Cora. Cora … Lissa … my comfort blanket…

“You think I’m one of these tulpa things?” Cora scoffed.

My mouth was suddenly too dry as memories drifted out of that door. “I slept for days.” I rubbed my temple. “I dreamt of being a child. Of being with Aunt Lara. Of having Lissa back. Of being happy… When I woke up, you were at the door. Three days had passed, but I thought I got the date wrong, and that in my grief, I’d lost time. It didn’t matter because when I opened that door, I knew you were meant to be there. I knew we were connected.”

Oh, God. Oh, fuck, it was true. I’d blocked it out. I’d explained it away. I’d labeled her a ghost and treated her like one. I’d needed comfort, and I’d created it.

“Pfft,” Cora said. “Bullshit. I’m a ghost. I had a life.”

“And how much do you remember?” Conah asked her.

“I was killed. Shot. It was an accident.”

“And before that?”

“I had a boyfriend. We were happy, we … We were so happy.”

“And before that. What about your mother? Your father?”

“Foster homes.”