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She placed a couple of sugars in each cup, then gently stirred the tea “We’re talking about the dead here Their minds are not what they once were, especially those who have been murdered”
“I didn’t say he’d been murdered”
“You didn’t have to Trouble, my dear, darkens your steps, and it’s not such a leap to think that if you want to speak to a ghost, it’s because he died before his time Otherwise, your reaper would have been able to find out whatever you needed” She handed ht shoulder “I would prefer it, by the way, if you’d just show yourself It’s iray fields like that”
Heat shimmered across my skin as Azriel appeared Of course, he wasn’t strictly a reaper, as they were soul guides He was so el who hunted and killed the things that broke free from hell
But what he hunted noasn’t an escapee deh we certainly had been hunting one of those We’d gotten it, too, but not before the fucking thing had al like an old woht be half olf, but fast healing was one of the gifts I hadn’t inherited enough of In fact, I couldn’t shift into wolf shape at all, and the full moon held no sway over me
Of course, I could healin and out of Aedh forh of that, either
“That’s better,” Adeline said, satisfaction in her voice “Noould you like a cup of tea, young man?”
“No, thank you”
There was a hint of ahshivered through me
Adeline picked up her own cup, a frown once againher homely features “Why do you wear a sword, reaper? There is no threat in this house”
“No, there is not,” he agreed
When it beca else, Adeline turned her expectant gaze to me
“He wears a sword because he’s helping me hunt down some—” I hesitated For safety’s sake I couldn’t tell her everything, yet I couldn’t not explain, either Not if I wanted her help “—rogue priests who seek the keys to the gates of heaven and hell so they can permanently close them”
That raised her eyebrows “Why on earth would anyone want that?”
“Because they’re not of earth” They were Aedh, energy beings who lived on the gray fields—the area that divided earth froht and dark portals, as the reapers tended to say While the reaper community had flourished, the Aedh had not They’d all but died out, and only the Raziq—a breakaway group of priests—were left in any great numbers “And they’ve decided it would be easier to perainst the occasional demon breakout”