Page 1 of Reaper

Chapter 1

REAPER

I worked the outer edge of the Hollow Hill Halloween Festival with my back pressed to a row of hay bales, boots planted on gravel, eyes scanning the crowd in neat, even lines. Left to right, right to left, like reading the same page twice to make sure I didn’t miss anything.

Three bonfires burned at the center of the field, each one the size of a small car. The heat hit me in waves, carrying the scent of pine smoke and scorched sugar, wood ash and the faint chemical tang of whatever they’d soaked the wood in to get those flames so fucking orange. The light caught on the underside of every face it touched, turning skin into something carved and hollow. Halloween light. The kind that makes everyone look like they’re wearing a mask, even when they’re not.

The hayride queue snaked past me, a slow, shuffling line of families and couples clutching cardboard cups of cider. A hand-painted sign hung crooked from the nearest post: a skull wearing a top hat, the words HAYRIDE OF TERROR painted beneath it in shaky red letters. Nobody was terrified. The wagon creaked and clanked at the far end of the track, the chain pulling it through the dark stretch of trees behind the festival grounds. Kids screamed as it disappeared into the shadows. Not fear screams. The kind where they’re having too much fun to hold it in.

I’d been standing here for two hours. My job wasn’t complicated. Watch the crowd. Look for trouble before it starts. Club business meant we kept the peace at these local events, which mostly meant standing around until someone got drunk or stupid or both. Tonight it was looking quiet. Too quiet, maybe. The kind of quiet that made my neck itch.

Game booths lined the dirt path to my left, barkers shouting from behind plywood counters. One guy in a rubber monster mask kept calling the same line over and over: “Three balls for five dollars, knock down three bottles, win a prize worth twice that!” Nobody was winning. The bottles were glued to the fucking table. I’d watched six people try and fail before I figured it out. The barker caught me staring and shut his mouth. Smart man.

Costumed kids ran everywhere, colliding into adults, shrieking at each other, sugar high and wild. A little boy in a skeleton suit nearly took out my knees before his mother grabbed him by the hood. She shot me an apologetic look. I nodded. Didn’t smile. Smiling makes people think you want to talk.

I don’t want to talk.

I read faces the way other men read menus. Fast. Automatic. Looking for the one thing that doesn’t belong on the plate. Most faces are easy to dismiss. Families moving in packs. Teenagers in groups of three or four, laughing too loud, checking their phones every thirty seconds. Couples with their hands in each other’s back pockets. Normal people doing normal shit at a festival.

Then there are the others. The ones who don’t fit.

She arrived alone, mid-evening, when the crowd had thickened to the point where moving through it required actual effort. I clocked her the moment she stepped into the orange light. Not because she was pretty—though she was, in that unremarkable way that makes a man look twice without knowing why—but because of the way she moved.

Wrong rhythm.

Everybody at a festival moves with a certain looseness. Even the anxious ones have a flow to them, a give-and-take with the crowd. This woman moved like she was counting steps. Pause. Half-beat. Decide. Step. Pause again. Shoulders drawn up tight under her jacket, chin tucked, phone held close to her chest. She was dressed for the occasion: dark jeans, boots, a sweater with some kind of Halloween pattern I couldn’t make out from this distance. But her eyes weren’t in it. They darted. Constantly. Checking exits, checking faces, checking over her shoulder without fully turning her head.

Trained behavior. Or traumatized. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

She stopped near the edge of the hayride queue, close enough to the post that the skull sign cast a shadow across her left shoulder. Pulled up something on her phone. Scrolled. Stopped. And then she laughed.

It hit me like a sucker punch. A real laugh, sudden and unguarded, the kind that comes from somewhere deep and hasn’t been rehearsed. She threw her head back a little, phone dropping to her side, and for three seconds she wasn’t the tense, calculating woman moving through the crowd. She was just a person finding something funny on a screen.

Three seconds was all I needed.

Because that’s when I saw him.

Ten feet behind her, positioned near the hayride queue post with his weight balanced evenly on both feet, hands loose at his sides but hovering just above the hem of his jacket. Not resting. Ready. He wasn’t watching the bonfires. Wasn’t watching the kids or the barkers or the wagon creaking into the trees. His eyes were fixed on the back of her head with focus that had nothing casual in it.

He was trained. I could see it in the way he stood. Still, but not relaxed. The kind of stillness that comes from holding your body exactly where you want it, muscle by muscle, and keeping it there until you need to move. His jacket was dark, unzipped despite the cold. Easy access. His right hand hung lower than his left by maybe half an inch. Not much. Enough.

The taste of wood smoke turned sharp on my tongue.

I keyed the radio clipped at my shoulder, thumb pressing the button just hard enough to activate without drawing attention.

“Two on my six. Silent.”

No response. Didn’t need one. The radio clicked once. Acknowledgement.

I shifted along the fence line, one boot in front of the other, gravel barely whispering under my weight. Twenty feet of distance closed without breaking stride, without a single person in the crowd turning to look. Most men don’t know how to move through a space without announcing themselves. They clomp. They swing their arms. They make eye contact with strangers as if it’s required. I’ve spent fourteen years learning how to be the thing nobody notices until it’s too late.

The woman laughed again into her phone. Lower this time, private, the sound mostly lost in the festival noise. She turned slightly, angling her body toward the hayride queue, and I saw her profile: sharp nose, dark hair pulled into a messy knot, the orange light catching the curve of her cheek. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear with her free hand. Casual gesture. Normal. The kind of thing you do when you think nobody’s watching.

The watcher took one step forward.

Measured. Deliberate. The step of a man closing distance with purpose.

I took one to match it.