Page 131 of An Oath at Midnight

We slipped out the front door and headed down the path to the cemetery. I thought about Bram as we walked, about how much I wanted to be his mate and of how that might never be. An eternity of never being touched by him was not a welcome prospect, but an eternity without him at all wasn’t a life I wanted. I didn’t want to live forever if I didn’t have him with me.

The moon was high when we pushed open the iron gates. “I got out of Umbra, but I still don’t have control over this whole reaper thing. I can feel the poison inside me, on my skin. What if I never can? What if I can never touch Bram, never mate with him, and I lose him. He’ll eventually grow old, and I’ll be stuck here without him,” I said, voicing my deepest fear as we weaved through the headstones.

Jasmine frowned. “But if you mate, you’re both immortal, right? The reaper thing won’t matter if Bram can’t die.”

“But we can’t mate if we can’t touch,” I said.

Jazzy’s cheeks darkened. “Oh, right.”

Rose cleared her throat. “I mean, to mate you’ve just got to, you know, both finish while he’s…”

“Inside you,” Iris said. “Seems easy enough to me.”

Willow nodded. “All you have to do is get yourselves close to the finish line, and just before you both, you know…Bram thrusts inside—”

“You think that will work?” I said cutting her off before Jazzy died of mortification. “I won’t risk Bram, not on a maybe.”

“Give me sec,” Rose said, and she sliced her finger and stared into the blade’s shiny surface. Her eyes rolled back in her head.

“She’s getting good at that,” Iris said.

Rose couldn’t see into the future, not really. But images came to her, visions. Sometimes she asked for them, sometimes they came on their own.

Her eyes rolled down and she smiled at me. “It’ll work.”

“You’re positive?”

“I mean, I didn’t see you doing it, thank the goddess, but I did see you and Bram a week from now, and you were cuddled up on the couch together.”

That was good enough for me, Rose’s visions hadn’t been wrong yet.

“We have a plan,” Wills said and clapped her hands. “Mate tonight…catch a killer tomorrow.”

“As much as we want to, we can’t help her,” Rose warned, sounding frustrated as hell.

“I know, but I have complete faith in Mags.” Willow strode deeper into the cemetery. “And she needs to wrap this up fast. The council won’t let what happened tonight go. We have to assume they’re rallying the troops as we speak. If we don’t come up with the real killer ASAP, they’ll come after us, all of us.”

“So no pressure,” Iris said, giving Willow an exasperated look.

“We can always move to Hell, right?” Rose said with a strained laugh.

“Or Ronan could hide us,” Iris said.

Ronan could make us all disappear if we needed him to. Rose and Ronan’s place looked like a vacant lot to everyone else, but vanishing into thin air was no way to live, not long term. It was a good thing I knew exactly what I needed to do next. “I have a plan. We’re not going to Hell or living in an invisible little world of Ronan’s making, not just yet.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Willow said. “Now let’s break this curse so you can go jump Bram’s bones.”

Jasmine laughed, her cheeks flaming. It was good to hear. She’d been closed off and quiet for so long.

“So how do we do this?” Rose asked.

Willow smirked. “Well, first, we get naked.”

Jasmine groaned at the same time as me.

Of course, we did.

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