Passion of the Vampire King (Blood Fire Saga Book 5) by Bella Klaus (best motivational books txt) 📗

young reaper woman said with a shrug of her shoulder. “Without the right kind of power, that scythe is barely adequate for peeling apples.”

I gave her a tight smile. “The Mage King might disagree with that.”

She narrowed her eyes but didn’t ask what I meant.

“Right then.” The short reaper hovered four feet in the air and clapped his hands together. “Everybody stay alert. We have over seven hundred souls to reap tonight and only twelve of us to do the job. Enforcers will stand by with dharma-salinated weapons to stop the souls from escaping, but it’s our responsibility to guide them to their eternal rest or everlasting torment. Please keep your heads.”

His colleagues raised their scythes, which each reflected Zozimus’s beaming figure. He clutched the box to his chest and saluted the leader.

I turned to Captain Zella and frowned. “Why am I here?”

She stared down at me, the corners of her lips tightening with disapproval. “The Angel and Demon Kings thought you might benefit from a display of the consequences of turning people into preternaturals.”

“But…” I clamped my lips shut, cutting off the denial. While I hadn’t deliberately created a preternatural vampire, Valentine was now dead and Beatrice had fire in her blood and could rise from her grave if she died before the magic faded. The common denominator to both preternatural events was me.

I turned my gaze to the reapers, who rose several feet in the air and scattered across the room. My hand clapped over my mouth. For some reason, I thought that the cloud of putrid souls was much smaller and confined to the six-by-six-foot hole in the ground. If the souls filled the entire parking lot, it was no wonder they’d sealed the place.

The reapers sliced their scythes through the air, raining down white wisps that dropped mere feet above us, circling the enforcers.

“Can you see that?” I asked.

The captain turned to me and frowned. “See what?”

“The—” I pointed at the swirls, following one of them as it circled a reaper before getting sliced by the young woman who had approached me earlier. “Never mind.”

“I heard the cloak can enhance the vision of its wearer,” said the captain. “It’s rare for a civilian to obtain such a valuable item.”

“Right,” I muttered, not wanting to admit that Valentine had given it to me. Even though the woman had twice referred to me as the fiancée of a monarch, I still remembered the time she had implied I was just Valentine’s blood cow. “Will the reapers be opening any portals into Heaven or Hell?”

Zozimus shuffled toward us, clutching the white box to his chest. “There’s no need for additional portals.”

The captain placed her hand over her mouth and nose, and I adjusted the hood of my cloak, so as not to add his odor to the stench of corpses already filling the air.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Once released from their mortal bodies, most souls automatically gravitate to where they belong.” He nodded to himself and beamed. “Call it a moral compass.”

“What if the person’s deluded and think they’re good when they’re actually bad?” I asked.

“It doesn’t work that way,” he said.

My brows furrowed. “Then how—”

“The mind can fool itself all it wants, but it’s the soul that gets stained by a person’s misdeeds.” Zozimus flipped open his box and took out an ampoule. “Would you like to load up your scythe?”

I shook my head. “I’m not really a reaper.”

He stepped closer, making me gulp, and held the gelatinous ball of fluorescent pink fluid in front of my hood.

“Nobody is born into their profession.” His voice grew more certain as he spoke, and he straightened, seeming to gain inches with every word.

A chill fell across my skin. Right now, he no longer seemed like a doddering old man but someone who was once confident and well respected in his time. I raised the mini scythe, letting the hellfire shining from his body glint against the curved blade.

He wrapped his fingers around the knife and pushed the ball onto its sharp tip, letting the blade suck up all the fluid. “I have a feeling about you, young miss.”

“What’s that?” I met his twinkling blue eyes.

“You’re going to need to extend this weapon to full size, and not just to protect yourself from preternaturals.”

A chill slipped beneath the cloak and spread across my skin, and my mind leaped to the souls Kresnik had sent to Hell in search of me. The crazy ex-god hadn’t just killed them so they would enter the other realm empty-handed. Each of them died with a piece of enchanted helmet welded to their souls, and possibly other items that could help them bribe others in Hell to help them on their quest to capture me.

“Get away from her.” Captain Zella pointed her gun between the alchemist’s eyes.

Zozimus skittered back, clutching the box to his chest, and once again looking like a frightened old man. I shook my head. Had I just imagined his eerie confidence?

The captain leaned into me and murmured, “Be careful when conversing with the dead. It doesn’t matter if they’re in Heaven or Hell or Elphame, they always want some unsuspecting fool to take their place.”

“Thanks.” I was sure that hadn’t been the alchemist’s intention, but what on earth did I know about conversing with the dead apart from the time I spent with Valentine’s soul?

The reapers continued slashing their scythes through the air, each swipe of their blades revealing more and more of those wisps until a thin layer of fog drifted eight feet in the air. All the other enforcers stood at the doorways’ metal plates with their guns raised and shooting out crystals of salt.

I folded my arms across my chest, stifling a yawn. Standing around doing nothing while everyone else cleared up this mass of souls made me feel completely useless, especially with so many filling the air.

“They’re not drifting away,” I said to Captain Zella.

“Give them a few moments,” Zozimus muttered from where he’d been banished several