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  They see death. Can they share a life?

  Ruth Scott can read the energy of every person she meets—yellow is happy, green is peaceful, red is aroused. She can even see the brilliant white light that glows just before death. Then she meets Deacon Walker. She can see his ice-blue eyes, his black hair and his gorgeous face. But this beautiful stranger has no aura.

  Deacon is just as unsettled by Ruth—and, having spent more than two hundred years ushering souls to Purgatory and battling demons, Deacon is seldom shocked by anything. He’s a Reaper. What, he wonders, is Ruth?

  A demon invasion forces Deacon to confront the darkness in his own past even as he fights to save the human souls he’s charged to protect. When he’s taken captive, his first concern is for Ruth. Wielding her newly awakened and untested powers is the only way to save herself —and the Reaper she can’t live without.

  Reap & Repent

  Lisa Medley

  Dedication

  To my husband and daughter for believing in me and eating more Ramen noodles for dinner than is nutritionally sound so I could write instead of cook.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Prologue

  What does a guy have to do around here to get some service? Deacon Walker marveled as he glared at the undulating queue of grotesque reapers in front of him.

  For all that’s holy, move the hell along already.

  It had been a long week, and it wasn’t over yet. He needed to make at least one more pass through the hospital circuit before he could call it a day. He could already feel the tug of a freshly departed soul. Again. People were dropping like flies lately.

  He massaged his brow, trying to soothe his exhausted patience as the line inched forward at a snail’s pace.

  He was worn thin. Over the past few weeks, three demon soul poachers had popped up in his fair city of Meridian like poisonous mushrooms after a hard rain. While it wasn’t unheard of for one to slip out from Hell every now and then, three was a nightmare.

  When it got topside, a demon’s M.O. was to steal a human body, poach a few souls from the dead and dying, and then make its merry way back to Hell, taking its host’s soul along for the ride. The only way to save the souls a poacher was carrying was to behead the host with a scythe. Not a pretty thing to do, but the poor suckers were too far gone by then to survive anyway. No human could withstand the pressures of being ridden by a demon. And it was worth it to save a handful of souls, not to mention inconveniencing the demon.

  Deacon refused to lose any souls from his territory. At all.

  So far the score was Deacon, 3. Demons, 0.

  As a reaper, carrying souls to Purgatory for judgment was his job and he wasn’t about to cede his territory to poachers who used up their hosts like they were disposable Tupperware. So now, in addition to his normal day job, he also had to keep an eye out for more demon invaders.

  While demons burned through most human hosts in a matter of days, some in a matter of hours, they had discovered long ago that under the right circumstances they could ride a reaper. Of course, they couldn’t just worm their way in like they did with humans—they had to be invited. But once a deal was struck? They were in.

  And reapers? Yeah, they could hang on for decades inside a reaper. Deacon knew that fact firsthand.

  His stomach twisted at the thought, but he shook it off, looking ahead with a heavy sigh.

  Seriously, this line? Still. Not. Moving?

  God, he needed a freakin’ vacation. Extended. He dragged a hand through his hair in frustration as his mind flipped through postcard-esque locations of reapings past. He snarled at the thought of New Orleans in summer. He would definitely want to go someplace cool—cool as in frigid, not hip. He was sick of the heat, and it was only the beginning of summer in the semitropical Midwest.

  Come to think of it, he was sick of a lot of things.

  This place was high on the list. It was as hot as…well, Hell actually. Or at least what he imagined Hell to be, although he’d never actually been there. Thank God.

  Steam rose from random cracks in the stone floor of the underground station, veiling the place in a humid sulfur stench.

  He pushed forward, finally making his way to the front to deposit his cargo of souls. He didn’t bother chatting. In. Out. Move on. It was a motto that served him well.

  Mission completed, he hustled through the crowd, forgoing the bar-side frivolity of some of the more socially inclined reapers and their small talk about their glory days in the field or—even better—the missteps of the newest reapers. Newbies often tested their limits to humorous if not disastrous effect at least once in their early careers. That was exactly why new reapers had mentors or at least worked in teams. From all the laughter, he could tell that the stories were good ones. It didn’t tempt him.

  He slapped his palm against the black granite monolith and flashed out of Purgatory to what he prayed was his last stop of the day.

  Chapter One

  “What color is my light?” Ruth Scott’s mother asked her as soon as she stepped into the hospital room. Not “Hello” or “How was graduation?” or any of the normal niceties polite people employed.

  Ruth didn’t try to soften it for her.

  “White.”

  Silence filled the space between them. The time for talk was over. Her mother turned to face the wall. They stayed that way for a long time—together, but so far apart that Ruth might as well not have been there.

  She didn’t want to be there. Not in this city, not in this hospital and definitely not in her dying mother’s room. Estranged or not, she wasn’t happy that her mother’s life was ending.

  Uncomfortable with both the silence and the ergonomically uninclined chair, Ruth stared out into the night, waiting for her mother to fall asleep. The soft whoosh of machinery and rapid beeps of monitors filled the space between them. There were a lot of things that she could have said to her mother. Things she probably should have said. But even now, listening to her mother’s life come to a slow end, her father was the one she thought about.

  Ruth knew when people were dying. Ever since she was a little girl, she’d been able to see the light around people. Now she knew what it meant. Each person was surrounded by an aura that reflected his or her life energy. Auras waned and waxed, changing according to feelings and circumstances, like a personal mood ring. The colors of the living ran the gamut, but the dying? Their auras were bright white—the absence of color, the absence of life.

  She hadn’t always known that her abilit
y was abnormal. The first time she made the connection was the day of her father’s death.

  She and her family had been on their way to church when a blinding white glow suddenly descended upon him. By the time they arrived, she told him that his light was so bright white she couldn’t even look at him. It burned brighter and brighter still, becoming a supernova. The three of them walked into the sanctuary, hand in hand in hand, and then her father collapsed in a heap on the church floor. He died of a brain aneurism before he hit the ground. The light snuffed out as quickly as it had appeared, and the typical chaos associated with death in a public place ensued.

  As he lay dead on the church floor, surrounded by feverishly whispered prayers, weeping parishioners and a man leaning over him attempting CPR, Ruth saw her mother’s light transform to a muddy brown.

  Over the years, Ruth had told her parents over and over again about the light she saw around people. Her father had responded with humorous indulgence, saying that while other children had imaginary friends, their daughter was more inventive. But her mother was deeply superstitious. Each time Ruth mentioned someone’s light, she hushed her. She didn’t seem to believe in Ruth’s visions any more than her husband did, but she feared them nonetheless. That day in church, her superstitions transformed into a wariness of Ruth. Mary Scott no longer denied her daughter’s abilities, but Ruth quickly learned that her mother’s denial had been better than her belief. Ruth knew what she was thinking: Where could such a talent come from? Surely nowhere good.

  The muddy brown Mary’s light developed on the day her husband died became the predominant color of her aura for the rest of her life. Ruth now associated it with an unsettled and negative spirit.

  Because of her mother’s superstitious terror, most of Ruth’s early knowledge of auras had come from trial and error. She’d figured things out on her own. The meaning of a white aura had been clearly and indelibly stamped upon her psyche: white equals death. Her few attempts at quizzing her mother about other possible color meanings had ended badly, causing Mary to retreat further into herself, pulling away when Ruth needed her most. The reserved yet caring mother Ruth remembered from her childhood was replaced with a depressed, fearful shell of a woman, who seemed to hate her own daughter.

  As a result, Ruth did what any kid would do. She stopped talking about it. Her mother didn’t ask, and she didn’t tell. Ruth knew that if she wanted to learn what the colors meant, she’d have to discover the answers on her own. Which she did. Eventually. But the burning question, even now, was what she was supposed to do with that knowledge.

  Ruth rubbed her eyes to stop the flow of memories and disappointments. She crossed over to the bed and peered down upon her mother. Nothing was going to change the past. And for her mother, the future was all but over. Things could have gone differently. Should have gone differently. She felt a twinge of guilt at not trying harder to hide her ability from her mother over the years. Sometimes, particularly in her teenage years, she had even taunted her with it. The way her mother had cringed from her spot-on aura readings had made her feel powerful…and lonely.

  The white glow around Mary’s body intensified tenfold as Ruth stood by her bedside. She took Mary’s hand in hers and the light crackled like a Fourth of July sparkler as her mother’s body rose and fell with her last breath, then stilled.

  The monitor flatlined and set off a fluster of activity as Mary Scott passed out of this world.

  Ruth placed her mother’s hand upon her chest, then kissed her forehead as the last of her light faded away. A bustle of nurses and hospital staff hurried into the room and tended to her dead mother’s remaining needs.

  There were forms to fill out, questions to answer and arrangements to make, all of which took several more hours and a myriad of phone calls to complete.

  When Ruth finally walked out into the hospital hallway, she was physically and emotionally exhausted.

  As she hurried down the hospital corridor, she kept her eyes fixed on the floor, watching the green and white tile squares slide past as she made her way to the exit. The auras in a hospital were more disconcerting than anywhere she had ever frequented. With white (death) being the predominant color throughout the hospice ward, she didn’t want to look around her any more than was absolutely necessary.

  As she rounded the corner of the hallway, she slammed into a rock wall of a man dressed in black scrubs. Startled, she directed her gaze up, up, up his torso until she locked on to a pair of ice-gray eyes. His hands gripped her upper arms, preventing her from stumbling.

  Flustered, she began to sputter an automatic apology.

  But then she noticed something that shocked her silent.

  He had no aura. None.

  She gaped at him, staring for what must have been an aeon before she finally returned to her senses and looked away. He probably thought she was an escaped mental patient, but what explanation could she possibly offer? It wasn’t exactly normal to ask a stranger about his aura (or lack thereof). That was something crazy people did.

  He gave her a questioning look, his eyebrows raised, his dark hair falling across one eye. Shrugging her shoulders from his steadying hold, she skirted around him without explanation, because there wasn’t one. She knew it was rude, but she was finished with people for the day.

  Even this strange—and strangely beautiful—man.

  Who had no freakin’ aura!

  At another time, another place, she might have submitted to her curiosity and tried to find out why he had no light. As it was, she just wanted to be alone.

  *

  Deacon was shaken. Being a reaper, he was not easily undone. He should have pursued the girl, questioned her. Truth was, he had been so surprised by her missing aura and the way she’d pinned him to the floor with her doe-eyed stare, he hadn’t been able to think straight. At the time, he’d consoled himself with the lie that she’d been too fast. That she’d scurried away into the bustle of hospital activity before he’d had time to respond.

  But now, after the fact, even he couldn’t make himself believe that bullshit.

  Something else was going on.

  He’d been on his way to retrieve a soul, the one he’d felt tugging at him from Purgatory, when he literally ran into her. She was beautiful: petite, with long, curly dark hair and pale, smooth skin.

  Basically, he knew just one thing about her…she wasn’t human. Even if her nonexistent aura hadn’t been a dead giveaway, he would have known that from the way she’d looked right at him.

  Reapers naturally repelled the attention of “normals” when they were on the job, and could turn on the charm if necessary, manipulating subtle changes in humans’ auras to bend them to their will. Most of the time, they could pass by completely unnoticed. Not invisible exactly, but certainly less than memorable.

  She’d definitely noticed him, and then some.

  What the hell?

  When he walked into the hospital room after their encounter, he was surprised to find that the dead woman’s soul had been detached but not reaped. He’d assumed the girl was a reaper. Because of all the supernatural beasties in his known universe, only reapers didn’t have auras.

  So if she isn’t a reaper, what is she?

  He procured the prize, and then checked the visitor log on the way out. Ruth Scott had been the last visitor of Mary Scott, the soul he’d retrieved. The girl was the daughter? He would have followed her, but she was already long gone. The dead and dying he could track; the living were trickier.

  He’d have to go old school to find her.

  The mother’s house?

  The living always gathered at the deceased’s residence at some point. He could bide his time if necessary, but he would find her again.

  And question her. Something wasn’t right.

  If she was a reaper, she’d failed to do her job. Considering the state of things lately, he would have been informed if another legitimate reaper had been assigned to his territory.

  If she was
some new type of poacher, he was even more confused.

  So many questions. The last thing he needed was to be distracted from his job. Bad things happened when a guy got distracted.

  Chapter Two

  Ruth walked into her apartment and stared at the answering machine blinking on the kitchen bar. She didn’t carry a cell phone. It was just another bill to pay, and honestly, she didn’t have any friends who would bother calling her anyway. Punching the button to play back the message, she already knew what it would be about.

  It had only been a few hours since her mother’s death and already people were following up with her about the various minutiae that needed to be addressed. It was amazing how many details had to be considered by the living on behalf of the dead.

  Luckily, her mother’s no-frills life would carry through to her death. She’d left a letter detailing her wishes—cremation, burial beside her husband and no service. Easy enough. All Ruth had left to do was sign some paperwork.

  Mother is dead.

  Ruth had watched the white light of her mother’s aura fade to nothing, winking out like a burned-up star. And yet she still couldn’t quite wrap her head around it.

  Her mother had been sick for many months, and she’d expected that she’d feel something more when her light faded away. Surprisingly, the thing she felt most keenly was regret.

  She sat at the bar with her head in her hands, trying to figure out what to do next. Then, from the corner of her eye, she caught sight of her favorite and most precious family photo on her faux hearth: her and her father standing in front of a bulletin board in her second-grade classroom after she’d won the spelling bee.