Free Reap & Repent by Lisa Medley

having to deal with her fear of auras and what they might mean. Most of her fears up until now had been more abstract anyway. Now she was about to come face-to-face with God knew how many bogeymen.
    Ruth threw the ridiculous collection of stuff into her backpack with a little more than the necessary roughness, and then stuffed her purse in, too. Perturbed by his bossiness, she grabbed the spray bottle without another word and headed for the back door.
    Deacon appeared between her and the door.
    “Let me go first…please.”
    “No problem,” she said curtly.
    Better for his face to get eaten off first than mine.
    Deacon walked outside into the beautiful May morning and stood on the bottom step, looking over at the trees. He closed his eyes and spread out his arms, palms up. His palms glowed faintly as light emanated out in tendrils, drifting toward the line of trees. As the light faded, he opened his eyes.
    “It’s safe. Let’s go.”
    They walked over to the car, where he opened up all four of the doors of the Continental.
    “Bottle?” he asked.
    She handed it to him, and he set about dousing her car with his homemade concoction. He used the entire bottle, which left her with a soggy carpet and a dripping interior.
    Nice.
    “It’ll dry. Then only the salt will be left. Don’t worry about it—it won’t hurt anything.” Martha Stewart he was not.
    Ruth was skeptical as to its effectiveness, but considering the potential alternative, she wasn’t going to bicker over salt stains.
    She drove them to Good Springs Cemetery, and he got out. Walking around to the driver’s side, he bent down and leaned in close through her window.
    “I’ll be back before dark. Make sure you are, too. And stay inside the house. Get some more salt while you’re out. A lot. And put it in an unbroken line along all your window sashes and across all of your doorways when you get back. We’ll talk more tonight.”
    He lingered longer than necessary in the window and for a second, she thought he was going to kiss her again. After a moment’s hesitation, he turned and walked through the Good Springs archway. He didn’t even look back as he grabbed hold of the first headstone he came to and swirled and shimmered in a mini tornado until
poof,
he was gone. Just like that.
    Ruth rolled up her window and locked the doors. All of them. She was not ashamed to admit that she was more than a little scared. As far as she could tell at the moment, there wasn’t anything to actually
be
scared of in her immediate vicinity.
    It’s the things you can’t see.
    She backed her big-ass car out of the cemetery and headed into town with the radio blasting so that she couldn’t think too much.

Chapter Nine
    Deacon didn’t dally in collecting his things from home. He changed, reloaded his backpack, and then went straight to the hospital to begin his usual rounds. He worried about leaving Ruth, but he was eager to lure in Kylen…and the last thing he wanted was for his former friend to be anywhere near Ruth.
    The pull of the detached souls he’d missed the day before had already begun to fade. Sometimes the feeling lasted for days, others only hours. Because the more stagnant souls were harder to track down, he took the easy way out and checked the newspapers when necessary.
    Use it if you’ve got it.
    Technology was wonderful. Back when he had officially been installed as a reaper in the mid-1800s, finding missed souls had been damn near impossible. For one thing, the world was much less populated and hiding a body was an easy thing for enterprising criminals. It was usually a matter of dumb luck to stumble upon a sleeper. Everything moved slower back then—the news, the transportation…life.
    He quickly learned not to let things slide. When he felt the tug, he went.
    These days, with so many reapers and so few uninhabited places, it was rare to come across a sleeper. They were something of a hobby that he only actively pursued during downtimes if