I turned onto Ormond Place and hurried toward the private parking lot my restaurant shared with several other nearby businesses. There was no sound of steps behind me, no scent of another, yet the reaper's presence burned all around me—a heat I could feel on my skin and within my mind.
Sometimes being psychic like my mom really sucked.
I wrapped my fingers around my keys and hit the automatic opener. As the old metal gate began to grind and screech its way to one side, I couldn't help looking over my shoulder.
My gaze met the reaper's. His face was chiseled, almost classical in its beauty, and yet possessing a hard edge that spoke of a man who'd won more than his fair share of battles. His eyes were blue—one a blue as vivid and as bright as a sapphire, the other almost a navy, and as dark and stormy as the sea.
Awareness flashed through those vivid, turbulent depths—an awareness that seemed to echo right through me. It was also an awareness that seemed to be accompanied, at least on his part, by surprise.
For several heartbeats neither of us moved, and then he simply disappeared. One second he was there, and the next he wasn't.
I blinked, wondering if it was some sort of trick. Reapers, like the Aedh, could become energy and smoke at will, but—for me, at least—it usually took longer than the blink of an eye to achieve. Of course, I was only half Aedh, so maybe that was the problem.
The reaper didn't reappear, and the heat of his presence no longer burned through the air or shivered through my mind. He'd gone. Which was totally out of character for a reaper, as far as I knew.
I mean, they were collectors of souls. It was their duty to hang about until said soul was collected. I'd never known of one to up and disappear the moment he'd been spotted—although given that the ability to actually spot them was a rare one, this probably wasn't an everyday occurrence.
Mom, despite her amazing abilities—abilities that had been sharpened during her creation in a madman's cloning lab—certainly couldn't see them. But then, she couldn't actually see anything. The sight she did have came via a psychic link she shared with a creature known as a Fravardin—a guardian spirit that had been gifted to her by a long-dead clone brother.
She was also a full Helki werewolf, not a half-Aedh like me. The Aedh were kin to the reapers, and it was their blood that gave me the ability to see the reapers.
But why did this reaper disappear like that? Had he realized he'd been following the wrong soul, or was something weirder going on?
Frowning, I walked across to my bike and climbed on. The leather seat wrapped around my butt like a glove, and I couldn't help smiling. The Ducati wasn't new, but she was sharp and clean and comfortable to ride, and even though the hydrogen engine was getting a little old by today's standards, she still put out a whole lot of power. Maybe not as much as the newer engines, but enough to give a mother gray hair. Or so my mom reckoned, anyway.
As the thought of her ran through my mind again, so did the sudden urge to call her. My frown deepening, I dug my phone out of my pocket and said, "Mom.”
The voice-recognition software clicked into action and the call went through almost instantly.