The Last Soul: A Reaper Novella (Reapers Book 1) by Lena Hillbrand

Author:Lena Hillbrand [Hillbrand, Lena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-06-08T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

The Reaper’s Reward: Part Two

Though the reaper’s first instinct was to rush straight to Lucifer, breathlessly waving her demon about and shouting in triumph, she knew that would not convince him. First, she needed to gather her thoughts, and only then could she approach him with calm and confidence. The memory or Kinto’s eyes, the steady rhythm of his speech, flashed across her mind. But he would not calm her that way. She was a hellion, an enemy by nature.

She spotted a listless soul drifting past a heap of smoldering trash, but she did not ready her scythe. Even when she heard Kinto’s footsteps approaching, she did not race to harvest the soul before he arrived. She did not step into his path to compete for the soul, as they had with the last man’s. Instead, she kicked out the remaining shards of glass that formed a jagged opening in a windowpane behind her. Without another glance at the soul, whose presence normally would have sent her into attack mode, she slipped through the window and crouched inside.

Kinto strolled by like he had all the time in the world. He didn’t pounce like a reaper. Instead, he made his way along the street until he stood before the soul. In a few bounds, the reaper could have leapt between them and cut down the soul. But she didn’t. She waited, frozen in place by his soothing tone.

“Are you lost?” he asked. “I can lead you home to heaven. All that is needed is genuine repentance.”

The soul fell to her knees and clung to his legs the way the demon had clutched at the reaper. Instead of protection, though, she sought salvation. “I repent,” she cried, as if she’d been waiting a hundred years for Kinto to arrive. Perhaps she had.

The reaper watched while the woman begged to be taken out of her misery, out of the purgatory of plague the souls on earth endured until they were harvested or released by an angel. In all her years of harvesting, she’d never seen a release. She’d seen plenty of angels, sometimes even battled for a particularly repentant soul. But she’d never seen such calm certainty settle over a face, transforming it from a hollow-eyed, disease-ridden horror to a something so serene, almost beatific.

Kinto gathered the woman into his arms, and the adoration in her face made the reaper’s gut clench in something that wasn’t quite the disgust she expected. At last, the urge to leap from the building and rip the soul away from the angel settled over her, but the accompanying twist inside unsettled her. It wasn’t a territorial urge to cut down the soul, but rather a searing rage that made her want to fling the soul straight into hell and condemn her to the worst torture Lucifer could fathom.

At the same time, she longed to see Kinto’s face. Did he wear the mask of concern he’d worn when he spoke to the demon, or the one of

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