Reapers of the Dark (Cora Roberts #4)

Chapter 13

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Only idiots and vampires taunt the universe.

“ W hat did you do?” Aunt Liz asked as she quirked a brow at the shadow creatures. Sebastian had driven her and my newly arrived Aunt Dayna to The Pit. They’d arrived less than two minutes ago, and I was already getting the blame.

Dave and Hudson snorted in unison, making me narrow my eyes at the pair. “I did nothing,” I snapped. “Why would any of this be my fault? Am I responsible for all dead shit? No.” I yanked my phone out of my pocket and waved it around. “If you want to know more, call my dad. He’s on speed dial under favorite number five.”

“Who is one?” Hudson asked.

I rolled my eyes. “Sebastian.”

“As I should be,” my vampire best friend said. He raised a brow at Aunt Dayna, who was walking the perimeter with her arms outstretched.

“So I’m number two?”

“No, Dave is.”

“What? Why?” Hudson growled.

“It’s based on who I met first and has nothing to do with importance or love.”

“So I’m three.”

Umm… “Sure.”

“You are not three,” Dave helpfully added.

“Uncle Lucifer is,” Sebastian said with a grin.

Hudson snarled, and the shadowy creatures shifted.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed. “Stop antagonizing him. It makes them excited.”

“Swap me with the vampire,” Hudson demanded.

“Imagine your ego being so fragile that you feel threatened by a gay vampire,” Sebastian needled.

“Seriously?” I snapped. They were being ridiculous.

Hudson folded his arms and lasered me with a glare, making Sebastian snort. I rolled my eyes, pulled up my contacts, and swapped them around.

“You can’t do that,” Sebastian protested. “I’m your number one.”

“Now whose ego is fragile?” Hudson shot back with a smug grin.

I slid the phone back into my pocket just as the door to The Pit slammed open and our resident alchemists tumbled into the bar. Rockhard glanced around and froze. Lenson, his partner in life, love, and magic, stumbled into his back with a curse.

“What did you do?” Rockhard muttered, making everyone but me laugh.

Why was it always my fault? I didn’t have a monopoly on dead shenanigans. “I did nothing. These things were already terrorizing the line dancing enthusiasts of The Pit before the sheriff asked me to check it out.”

Lenson, the slim, slightly more flamboyant of the pair, glanced around. “It’s line dancing night? Damn, I missed it. Did you guys get hats?”

Did everyone but me come to line dancing? I pointed at the bar where we left our discarded hats. Somehow, battling shadowy creatures while wearing pastel cowboy hats was a step too far into weirdness. Lenson grabbed my pink one and dropped Dave’s black one onto Rockhard’s head with a wink and a quick kiss.

“Where’s Karen?” Rockhard asked.

I swung my thumb over my shoulder toward the office she’d barricaded herself in. “She said not to leave sage around and to open the windows, because she hates the smell.”

“She does hate sage,” Lenson said with a firm nod. Just how many cleansings had Karen needed?

“Odd problem for a woman that works with the constant smell of stale beer and sweat,” Dave said.

That was my thought, but to each their own. Maybe she had gone nose blind to The Pit’s permanent odor.

Aunt Dayna arrived from her sweep of the room and hugged Lenson and Rockhard with a carefree giggle. “I miss you guys.” She did? Why was everyone leading a double life? Since when was I the one who was transparent? Dave caught my eyes, and I remembered all the new secrets I was keeping from everyone I loved. Okay, so more like opaque.

“What are they?” Hudson said with a jerk of his head at the dance floor, thick with slithering shadows.

Dayna’s smile fell. “Well, spirits, but not.”

Harry blinked at her. “She has quite the insight.” Now my normally clueless ghost was being sarcastic. He’d obviously been hanging around me for too long.

“What does that mean?” Dave asked.

Dayna’s brows knitted. “They are definitely remnants of dead people.”

“So they are ghosts, just less,” Sebastian declared.

Harry tilted his nose in the air. “I resent the implication that ghosts are not people.” I twisted my lips to the side. Next, Harry would campaign for ghost rights.

“I think they are something that gets left behind when the soul passes through the light.”

Dave pointed at the ceiling. “Like the actual light.”

“No, the one you left on in your room after being up my sister’s skirts this afternoon.” Aunt Liz glowered at her sister.

“I didn’t think anything got left behind,” I said in an attempt to prevent a Roberts woman argument. We didn’t have time to clean up the bar if they got into it.

Dayna broke eye contact with Liz and blinked at me. “It’s the soul dualism concept. One is associated with the body. It’s what keeps us functioning, our hearts beating, and animates us. The other is said to be the timeless soul. It leans more toward reincarnation. It is what enters the body when we are conceived, and it leaves when we die. This is the free, or wandering soul.” She turns to face the shadows. “These are, I suspect, the body souls.”

“If that’s the case, why aren’t there millions of them roaming the earth?” Hudson asked. Good question, and one I was about to ask.

Dayna presses her lips together. “They stay with the body and are therefore normally scattered with the ashes or buried in the earth. They sometimes break free, often during violent deaths, or when the body hasn’t undergone the typical burial ceremonies. These souls are responsible for hauntings and poltergeist activity. They can, when they are most sentient, reenact their final moments on this earth, leaving us with many death echo legends. Occasionally, some dark magic practitioner dabbles with reanimation, but all that does is push the body soul back in its meat sack. It’s rarely done.”

“Because it’s too hard?” Dave asked.

“No, because they stink,” Dayna said, with a look that questioned his intelligence.

“Zombies. You are actually talking about zombies,” Sebastian said with a shiver.

“What is unusual is the amount of them that are here in one place, and the fact they seem to be keyed into emotion. I don’t know how intelligent they are beyond that.”

“Can we get rid of them?” Hudson asked. “Because for once, I agree with the vampire. Zombies are a hard limit for me.”

I rolled my eyes. “You are both being ridiculous.” They scowled at me.

“A simple cleansing should sort it,” Dayna said as she looked at Rockhard. “Did you bring it?”

Rockhard nodded as he opened his satchel and pulled out bundles of sage. He handed one to each of us, then lit his own.

Dave held it away from his body and sneezed. “What do we do with it?”

“Just wave it around. We need to get the smoke into every nook and cranny.”

“No hocus pocus?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Leave the hocus pocus to us.”

We set our bunches alight and began walking around the room. I kept my focus on the shadowy remnants slithering on the floor. They recoiled from the smoke, which was a good sign. Perhaps our supernatural shenanigans were going to be relatively uneventful for once. Of course, we needed to figure out why they were here, but we could do that after we sent them packing.

My aunts began chanting, and I followed suit, with Lenson and Rockhard joining us. Harry blinked at the smoke and recoiled.

“Best wait outside,” I muttered to him. He nodded and zipped off out of The Pit. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but the remnants shrank and disintegrated, and we slowly cleared the room of them.

The last words of the cleansing were uttered, and the final bits of sage burned. We opened the windows and let out the smoke and any remaining negativity, leaving The Pit a clean space once more. Okay, so not clean, but cleansed of supernatural bullshit. I glanced around at my family and friends. The ghosts were gone, and that was what mattered.

“That was easy,” Sebastian said, making us all groan. “What? It was,” he added, doubling down. Wonderful.

“You just jinxed it,” I told him as I went to find Karen and tell her the happy news.

“I don’t believe in that mumbo jumbo.”

“How?” Aunt Dayna asked. “You are literally the mumbo jumbo.”

“Jumbo, yes.”

I rapped my knuckles on the office door, and Karen yanked it open. “Are they gone?”

“Yup.”

“That was easy.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose and stalked back into the bar. Now that we’d put it out there twice, it would be a goddamn miracle to receive backlash now. Not goddamn—oh hell. No, not hell. Jesus, I couldn’t catch a break. Wait… forget it. If God was going to smite me, I’d go out in flames.

“Cora?” my Aunt Dayna asked.

“Yes?”

“You doing okay? You’re mumbling a lot.”

“She’s having an existential crisis, which isn’t helped by assholes who can’t learn to keep their mouths shut,” Hudson said as he squeezed my shoulder and guided me out of The Pit.

“All I said was it was easy,” Sebastian grumbled. There was a rumble of disapproval around me as we swung open the door and spilled out into the parking lot. “You are all a superstitious bunch of supernaturals. You need to loosen—” He froze.

Harry zoomed around the car lot. “Pineapples, Miss Roberts, goddamn pineapples.”

Slithering shadows saturated the parking lot. There must have been fifty, maybe even a hundred times more than what was in The Pit.

“This, asshole, is why we don’t taunt the universe,” Dayna snapped.

Too late now. The universe heard the call, and she came out swinging.