Free 03 Before The Devil Knows You're Dead-Speak Of The Devil by Patricia Eimer

them?”
    “Faith.” Matt curled his fingers into fists and pressed them against his legs and I knew he was trying to keep from touching me, trying to fight against his instincts to comfort me even though it would lead to his destruction.
    “What?” I asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
    “Valentin didn’t take the time to train a replacement from among the reapers,” Dad said. “He’d only been in the job a short amount of time. Twenty years. That’s nothing. He figured he had another eighty years to go.”
    “Wait, you’re telling me the job has term limits? It’s, what, like an elected office or something? I know you said it was one mortal body and then you’re done but there’s actually a set amount of time you’re supposed to serve?”
    My father and the Alpha both looked away from me. Malachi crossed his arms over his chest and didn’t meet my eyes. Suddenly I knew. What’s the ultimate punishment for an angel who craved touch? Or for the person who accidentally ran you over with a car?
    “It’s a punishment, isn’t it?” I asked. “A prison sentence. One hundred years without the ability to touch anyone. It’s meant to be a form of torture.”
    “Faith…” Regret wafted off my father in a thick cloud of burned toffee and chocolate.
    “Isn’t it?” I asked, my voice a panicky scream and then I threw my cup of tea at him. The bastard didn’t even have the courtesy not to duck as it flew over his head and crashed into my radiator.
    “Yes,” Tolliver said, his voice quiet, “the worst torture that they could think of. It’s the ultimate punishment, trapping an angel or a demon in the mortal plain and preventing them from ever touching. The Angel of Death is trapped, watching the world around them live and forced to stay apart because the briefest touch will kill everything that they could ever find to love.”
    “What did Valentin do?” I asked. “What did he do to deserve one hundred years without touch?”
    “He caused a mortal’s death. Several mortals in fact. He lusted after the power of touch so much that others died. So in return I took that power from him,” the Alpha answered.
    “What about me? What did I do? An accident? I tried to take responsibility for it. I wanted to call for help.”
    “This was never supposed to happen to you,” Dad said. “Originally, I’d thought it would be a suitable punishment for your former brother-in-law before I put him in a bubble in Purgatory but I couldn’t trust him to work among the reapers until Valentin was ready to retire.”
    “You’d have trusted Boris to be the Angel of Death?” Hope laughed bitterly at the mention of her ex-husband. “Obviously you must not think it’s a position of too much responsibility if you were going to entrust it to him.”
    “It is a position of responsibility,” the Alpha said, “but for a former incubus it would be an unimaginable torment. He’d have lived one hundred years unable to touch, unable to feed, hungry, miserable, and alone. It would have been a torture like you couldn’t imagine.”
    “When you put it like that, can I wholeheartedly endorse this idea?” Hope asked her voice harsh.
    “Great. Wonderful. I second the motion.” I clapped my hands together and looked at my father. “Let’s get on it then. Go get Boris, we’ll do a power switch, and that will be that.”
    “It’s not that simple,” Dad said. “The Angel of Death position rotates between angels and demons. You’ve already taken the position so it has to go to an angel next—Boris is ineligible. Besides, a power transfer is tricky. If it’s not done right there can be…complications.”
    “Complications…” I looked over at my best friend, sitting on the couch between her husband and my dread demon, her eyes filled with tears. “I’m supposed to be Lisa’s Lamaze coach.”
    “You will be,” she said. “We’ll find a way so that you can touch people. I’ll get Harold on it and