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was in conflict with her body. His touch made her feel better: warm, but not fuzzy this time. Clear. Sure. Content. Yet, her adrenaline refused to entirely release its grip.
    Be afraid,
it warned.
    He pulled her to her feet and into his chest in an embrace. She let him.
    She curled into him like a kitten, and he felt so good against her that she wanted to purr. The longer he lingered, the better he began to smell, too. Like cedar trees and fresh earth. Ruth closed her eyes and breathed him in. She hadn’t been this close to a man in a long, long, long time.
    Dangerous.
    She relaxed so much that her inhibitions were in danger of failing. That was what pulled her out of her stupor, and she jerked back.
    “What are you doing to me?” she whispered.
    “I’m calming you. I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do, Ruth. Let me help you relax.”
    He led her back to the couch, and they both sat. He pulled her snug against his chest, and they sat there for a long moment, him pumping the happy juice through her until a pale orange glow surrounded both of them. It occurred to her that she should be asking more questions, like how come he had suddenly become a human glow stick for starters. Instead she relaxed into him. It was nice in that scary “what the hell am I doing with this strange man” sort of way. She was letting go, and he was holding her.
    And damn if it didn’t feel good.
    * * *
    Deacon had no idea what he was doing here, on a couch with his arms wrapped around the girl he’d suspected of being a poacher up until twenty minutes ago.
    This is wrong.
    One thing was for damn sure, she wasn’t a poacher. He knew all too well that poachers could possess
anyone
—no matter how nice or normal or sane—if they found the right in, but Ruth showed no signs of possession.
    Still, Deacon had let his inhibitions down to the point of stupidity tonight. He needed to figure out her game and be done with her, one way or another. He had work to do. There was no telling how many, if any, demons still roamed the city. Not to mention the souls that pulled at him incessantly even as he sat here on this couch, his arms around a strange woman.
    So soft and warm.
    Sure, it had been a little easier for him to juice her into submission than it should have been if she was a reaper. On the other hand, the fact that she wasn’t a blabbering vegetable after the amount of juice he’d already poured into her also proved she was more than human.
    So what other explanation was there?
    His gut told him she was an untrained reaper.

Chapter Four
    I must have dozed off,
Ruth thought. She opened her eyes, slowly absorbing the fact that she was still on the couch, and the early afternoon sunlight was streaming in through the window. She’d somehow managed to sleep half the day away. The smell of bacon cooking in the kitchen filled the room. The day before came back to her in fuzzy bits and pieces. Her mother dying. The Scrub Man. Reapers. She got up and padded into the kitchen in the clothes she had now worn for two days. Deacon, the reaper, was flipping eggs on her mother’s stove. Surreal.
    “Hope you’re hungry,” he said. “You’ll need to keep eating to maintain your energy. That’s one thing about being a reaper—most of the same human rules apply, you just get some benefits, too,” he said, a smirk on his face.
    “Seriously, I don’t know why you keep calling me that. I have no idea what you’re talking about.” In the light of day, she still wasn’t buying the whole reaper thing. But she knew one thing for sure:
Deacon
was more than human.
    That energy mojo trick is not normal.
    It wasn’t that she was dismissing the possibilities of what he was offering outright. Her own experience was proof that not everything was black-and-white.
    Most people said that they didn’t believe in the supernatural, but if they believed in God, they should at least believe in the possibility of everything else. If God, then why not