I set my purse and backpack on the sofa in the living room and started toward the kitchen. The boys were most often found in there, since they had monstrous appetites, amazing metabolisms, and too much free time.

“Will?” I called. “Nathaniel?”

I paused to listen, and instead of voices, I heard music coming from a guitar. I moved through the kitchen to the doors out to the deck. I had pushed the oak-trimmed glass door open when I saw Will, pick in hand, on a wooden bench. The snow-covered lawn behind him stretched out to the edge of the frozen lake. The deck was swept free of snow and my hoodie barely kept the chill at bay, but Will was sitting out there comfortably in a long-sleeved shirt. Cold and heat never seemed to bother him much, but I figured it was a reaper thing. He may have been comfortable in twenty-degree weather, but I was shaking like a Chihuahua.

One of my favorite things in the world was watching Will play the guitar. It never failed to wash away any bad feelings weighing down my heart. He looked up and smiled at me when I stepped out onto the deck.

“Hey,” he said, and stopped playing. “How was your day?”

“A little too exciting.” My teeth chattered.

He frowned. “What’s up?”

I hugged my hoodie tighter as an icy breeze rolled down my collar and stung my bare flesh. “Can we go inside? It’s freezing.”

Without a word, he swept up to me and guided me indoors in that way of his. He set his guitar onto a stand inside and shut the door to keep out the cold. He’d do anything I asked without hesitation, but that also meant I had to be careful with him.

“Better?” he asked.

I nodded. “Where is Nathaniel?”

“Out with Lauren.”

I smiled secretly. Lauren was a psychic who helped Nathaniel often, and I had a suspicion that they were more than friends. Lauren and Nathaniel sometimes went on non-dates that Will described as “business.” Yeah, right. They adored each other and it was obvious.

“So what happened that was exciting?” Will asked.

I realized that I’d been holding off on telling him about Cadan. I was afraid Will would kill Cadan if he found out that the demonic reaper had come to my school, my only remotely safe place. I didn’t want Will to hurt Cadan for nothing, and I didn’t want Will to invade my school time, the only time I had where I could forget that I was the Preliator and concentrate on being a normal girl.

“I saw Cadan today.” I braced myself for whatever would come next.

“Why didn’t you call me?” His jaw clenched and his hands tightened into angry fists. “I’ll turn his skin inside out—”

“Okay!” I said, and threw up a hand. “Hulk smash. I get it.”

“Did he hurt you?”

“No,” I said quickly. “No.” The second no was more firm, more confident. “Actually, I tossed him around a bit. He came to warn me that Bastian has the Enshi and he’s looking for a key that will break the Enochian spell. That’s what the Enochian on the sarcophagus is, an angelic spell keeping whatever’s inside imprisoned. The nycterids from last night were sent to capture me alive, and if they fail, Bastian has more reapers to send after me. Cadan says that I have something to do with the spell, but he doesn’t know what it is.”

“He’s one of them,” Will snarled. “He works directly under Bastian. You can’t trust anything he says.”

“If we don’t at least consider what he says, then we’ll be making a mistake. You told me once that you didn’t like to gamble when it came to my life.”

His eyes met mine with a fierceness that made my heart skip a beat. The only thing that gave his emotions away was the color of his eyes. The more emotion he felt, the more beautiful and vibrant the green became, and then there was no denying he wasn’t human.

“It’s not like we can really do anything about it anyway,” I said. “Bastian’s sending his worst after me, but at least they want me alive. I think we can use that to our advantage, since they don’t want to kill me. That nycterid had every opportunity to kill me, but he didn’t. He could have just flown up there to drop me to my death, but he was determined not to let me go. Don’t forget that.”

“I haven’t forgotten. But we can’t trust Cadan. You don’t know him like I do.”

“Stop being so cryptic,” I grumbled. “You keep saying how bad he is, yet you’ve never told me why.”

“For one, he’s demonic. He’s manipulative, deceitful, violent, and cruel. He’s just like the rest of them.”

I opened my mouth to tell him how prejudiced that was, but I clamped it back shut. My amnesia hadn’t totally worn off, but everything I could remember told me that the demonic reapers were evil. Will had fought them for centuries without ever forgetting anything. Demonic reapers constantly tried to kill us. That should have been reason enough to mistrust all of them.

But why did I want to find a reason to redeem them, especially Cadan? He’d never tried to hurt me, and before my current incarnation, I had never met him. In truth, we’d caused him more damage than he’d caused us. Was my humanity making me more forgiving than I should have been? Gabriel wouldn’t have given Cadan a second thought before destroying him.

“If he’s telling the truth, then I’m kind of scared,” I confessed. “He said the things after me are really nasty.”

“Then we’ll fight them. I won’t let them take you.”