“You give me progress reports, and you let me see everything you have before you print said story.”

“Since this story looms so large on the Directorate’s radar, will I actually be allowed to print it?”

“They can’t stop it if they don’t know about it,” I said. “All you need to do is keep your head down.”

“Yeah, that’s going to be easy given what I’m investigating.” His gaze moved down again, narrowing slightly when it came to rest on my left arm. “Interesting tat.”

“Yeah,” I said dismissively, not even glancing down at the wingless lilac dragon that twined its way up my arm from my fingertips. I certainly wasn’t about to explain that it wasn’t actually a tattoo, but something far more deadly—a Dušan, a spirit guardian that came to life on the gray fields to protect me. “Have we got a deal?”

“Maybe. Let me dig around a little, just to see if there really is a worthwhile story in all this.”

“Just don’t take too long to decide, because we haven’t got a whole lot of time left.”

He nodded, finished his coffee in one long gulp, then rose. “I’ll let you know, one way or another, by tomorrow.”

He walked out. I tried to resist the urge to watch, but my gaze still flicked that way. The man sure could move nicely… Something fluttered at the outer reaches of my vision. It was almost ghostlike, a wisp of silver that was quickly shredded by the sunlight streaming in through the window. I frowned, scanning the front of the shop, intuition tingling. Whatever it was, it didn’t reappear.

Jak left the café and the door whooshed shut behind him. I sighed in relief and ordered a second cup of coffee. My damn hands were shaking so bad it took several attempts to swipe the credit card through.

“You should not have met him if his presence affects you so.”

The words came out of the emptiness behind Jak’s chair even as the heat of Azriel’s presence caressed my skin. Reapers, like the Aedh, were beings of energy rather than true flesh and blood, but they could attain that form if they wished to.

Which was how I’d come about. My father had spent one night in flesh form with my mother and, in the process, had given life to me—a half-breed mix of werewolf and Aedh who was lucky enough to get most of the best bits of each and few of the downsides.

“You’re the one that said we had to do everything possible to stop the remaining portals from being opened. No matter what I might think or feel about Jak, he is good at digging up forgotten information.” I stabbed my spoon into my cake for another bite. “If it’s out there to be found, he’ll find it.”

Azriel formed substance on the other side of the table and sat down in Jak’s recently vacated chair. While reapers were basically shape-shifters, able to take on any form that would comfort the dying on their final journey, they did possess one “true” shape. Usually I just saw whatever form they used to claim the soul they were meant to escort, but for some weird reason, I always saw Azriel’s real form rather than the shape he decided to take on. Even he had no idea why this happened—or if he did, he wasn’t telling me.

Which wasn’t exactly a bad thing, because his real form was rather stunning. His face was chiseled, almost classical in its beauty and yet possessing the hard edge of a man who’d won more than his fair share of battles. He was shirtless, his skin a warm, suntanned brown and his abs well defined. The worn leather strap that held his sword in place seemed to emphasize the width of his shoulders, just as the dark jeans that clung to his legs hinted at the lean strength of them. A stylized black tat that resembled the left half of a wing swept around his ribs from underneath his arm, the tips brushing across the left side of his neck.

Only it wasn’t a tat. It too was a Dušan—a darker, more stylized brother to the one that now resided on my left arm.

Azriel’s gaze met mine, and his blue eyes—one as vivid and as bright as a sapphire, the other the color of a storm-held sea—hinted at sympathy.

“Couldn’t you have just asked him all this on the phone?”

I grimaced. “Jak’s the sort of person who prefers face-to-face meetings.”

“Because of his gifts.”

“Yes.” I gave the waitress another smile of thanks as she delivered my second cup of coffee. She didn’t even blink at the half-naked, sword-carrying man sitting opposite me.

But that wasn’t entirely surprising. The same ability that allowed reapers to see what form a soul would most likely accept in their guide allowed Azriel to take on an outer skin that would raise no eyebrows, no matter where he was. The waitress probably saw him as just another man in a suit.

“Actually,” he said, “she still thinks Jak sits at the table.”

“Well, I’m glad he isn’t,” I muttered around a mouthful of cake.

“Odd words, since your thoughts suggest otherwise.”

“As you have previously noted, human thoughts are not always rational.”

“But you are not human.”

“And right now, I’m not exactly rational.” I finished the last of my cake, then pushed the plate away and reached for Jak’s. Never let it be said that I let chocolate cake go to waste, even if it wasn’t the best I’d ever tasted. “So, what’s next?”

He shrugged. “Until your father contacts us with details of the next key’s location, we are basically at a standstill.”

“Well, if he wasn’t the one who stole the first key from us, maybe he won’t.” And if he wasn’t the one who’d stolen it, I was more than happy for him to remain far, far away. If only because I’d seen him angry—and, despite the fact that I’m part werewolf, it had taken days for the bruises to fade. “Maybe he’ll consider us too great a risk to use us again.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Do you honestly believe that?”

He knew I didn’t. He could read every thought, after all. I threw the spoon onto the plate, but it bounced and clattered over the edge of the table. Azriel caught it casually in one hand and gave it back to me.

“Finish the cake,” he said softly. “You need the sustenance.”

I scowled at him. “Stop mothering me. Besides, cake isn’t sustenance.”

“It is impossible for me to mother you when I am male,” he replied evenly, but there was a hint of humor glinting in the depths of his eyes, and, as usual, it did strange things to my pulse rate—which only emphasized just how irrational I really was. He added, “And is not chocolate one of the five essential food groups?”

I rolled my eyes. “You, reaper, need to stop believing everything you read in my thoughts.”

He merely raised an eyebrow. “If it is not essential, why do you have it so often?”

I studied him for a moment, wondering if he was still teasing me or not. “Because it’s like love and sex—it’s just something a woman has to have.” I paused, but couldn’t resist asking, “What about you? Is there anything in your life that you’d consider essential?”

“Valdis,” he said immediately.

“Valdis is your sword.” A demon-forged sword with a whole lot of power and a voice and mind of her own, granted, but still a sword. I had a similar one sitting at my back, but Amaya was shadow-wreathed, and no one would ever see her—not until her black blade pierced their flesh, anyway. “Swords don’t count.”

“Then it would be duty,” he said.

I snorted. “It’s a sad statement about the reaper community that duty is considered a far higher priority than love and laughter.”

“It is natural our priorities are different considering our beings are completely different in design.”

I frowned. “Aren’t you even curious as to why we humans consider love, sex, and chocolate so vital to our existence?”

“No.” He paused. “Which does not preclude the possibility that I have experienced at least one of those options.”

“I wasn’t talking about the reaper version of love and sex.”

“Neither was I,” he said, amusement teasing his lips.

I stared at him for several seconds, completely dumbstruck. No, he surely couldn’t mean…

He’d shown no interest in eating in the time I’d known him, so I had to think chocolate was out. And it was hard to imagine him falling in love with a human, given his often harsh opinions of humanity as a whole. But that left only sex and I really couldn’t imagine…

“Why not?” he asked softly. “If I can find death in this form, why would you think me incapable of finding other emotions?”

“Death isn’t an emotion. Neither is sex.” I said this in total disbelief. I was still trying to get my head around the fact that Azriel had had sex. In human form.

“On the contrary, death is a time of great sadness. And does not sex bring joy and completeness?”

“Yeah, for us. You’re not us.”

“Why can you believe it possible for the Aedh to enjoy the benefits of flesh, but not a reaper?”

The Aedh he was referring to was Lucian. Despite all the help Lucian had given to us recently, Azriel both disliked and distrusted him, to the point where he refused to call him by name—even if he was in the same room with him.

“I believe it because I’ve seen the joy Lucian gets out of sex. Besides, reapers are soul guides and it seems to me that you all treat that role with great respect and utmost devotion. I would have thought fraternizing with us would be banned.” Hell, there seemed to be rules forbidding almost everything else in the reaper world.

“Ah, but it is,” he said, and there was an almost bitter twist in his brief smile.

I blinked. “Okay, now you’re just confusing me.”

He studied me for a few moments, his gaze more intense than usual, as if he were judging me. Which was odd, because he was connected to my chi and probably knew me better than I knew myself.