Free Reaper's Dark Kiss by Ryssa Edwards Page B

lies.
    The small apartment was just the way he remembered it. The tiny living room was crowded with a desk the size of a luxury coffin. Overstuffed chairs with dimpled cushions worn to threads leaned against the walls. The heels of his boots thudded against the blond hardwood floor.
    “A jet?” she said. “I didn’t know freelance bodyguard work paid that good.”
    “It belongs to my family.” Hands hovering near his knives, Julian scanned the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom. “What did you find that scared you?”
    She reached into a drawer of her desk and tossed Julian something. “Someone knocked on my door. When I opened it, those… things …were there. ”
    Turning them over in his hand, Julian smelled no poison on the white plastic fangs. They were the kind mortals wore on All Hallow’s Eve. They had the scent of the Shadow World, a mix of stone and ancient blood. A Shade leaving fangs for a female was like an infatuated mortal leaving roses. After all the time they’d spent together, Julian knew his scent was all over Sky. It would be stupid for anyone to leave these for her. Going near a female with a reaper’s scent was the same as calling down a death sentence.
    Pocketing the fangs, he backed away from Sky and leaned against the door. He could tell from the way she was avoiding his gaze that she was hiding something. The last thing he wanted to do was crowd her.
    “There’s something I didn’t tell you,” Sky said in a better-get-this-over-with voice.
    Julian, a reaper who’d waited hours for the right second to kill, said nothing.
    “There was a man following me a while back.” Sky sat on her desk and concentrated on picking at a gash in the edge. “And one night I ran into him,” she went on, her words gushing out, stumbling over each other. “I mean, I saw him. I got spooked tonight when I found those at my door because…” She swallowed. “I think he’s a vampire.”
    For long seconds, Julian focused on nothing but Sky’s scent. He breathed her into him, tried to sense a lie, but there was only fear. She believed what she was saying. “What makes you think that?”
    Sky cast him an uncertain glance. “He’s got fangs.” He saw a shiver run through her. “Real ones. And I don’t think—” She shook her head, as if she were shaking off a bad dream. “No. That’s impossible.”
    Ignoring his beast’s demand to grab Sky off the desk, take her to Montana, and keep her safe at whatever cost, Julian asked, “You don’t think what?”
    “He didn’t have a shadow,” Sky blurted. “God, Julian. I know it sounds crazy.”
    “Where were you when he didn’t cast a shadow?”
    “I know I promised about not going to the park.” She looked up at Julian, and her eyes were saying please don’t be mad. Just doing my job.
    “Nothing to worry about,” Julian said, meaning every word. She didn’t have to worry about it, because he wasn’t leaving her alone in Manhattan again. Ever. “Tell me what happened.”
    “One of the bodies they found, he was male, a hundred and eighty pounds. A couple nights ago I was coming home, and I started wondering. Who could carry around weight like that and not get noticed, even in Manhattan?”
    “What did you do?” Julian asked, even though he had a feeling he knew.
    “I got coffee at Millie’s and took a walk over to the Central Park West entrance. That’s when I saw him. He was standing there. His back was to me.”
    “And he didn’t have a shadow?” Julian asked.
    Shaking her head back and forth, Sky said in a slow, dazed voice, “The streetlight was out, he was standing in moonlight, and”—her voice fell to a whisper—“no shadow.”
    Sky had just described the one mark Shades couldn’t hide, no shadow in moonlight. He wondered if Sky remembered seeing him in moonlight the night he took her to the Old Circle. “His back was to you. How do you know he was the same one who was following you?”
    “His hair,” Sky said,