- -
- 100%
- +
I stopped there, with another sob. A real one. Picturing Em’s actual death helped. Seeing Belphegore’s hand on her neck. Hearing the gruesome crack. Seeing Emma crumple to the ground.
In my memory, it all happened in some kind of horrible slow motion. That was the only way I’d gotten through the police interview, and I’d seen no sign that they doubted any of my story.
Their suspicion had come later, when they started calculating the death toll.
“It must have been horrible,” Chelsea said, and I realized that my tears were like a shield between us. A line of defense she wouldn’t cross. At least, not now. Not at sixteen. Though I had no doubt she’d someday dial up the pressure on some poor lying politician, unfazed by tears.
“It was.”
“Okay. Thanks.” She stood, stuffing her notebook and pen into the front pocket of her scuffed denim backpack. “Kaylee, I just want you to know that…we stopped the presses on the yearbooks. They’d already started printing them, but when we told them about Brant, and Jayson, and Emma, they agreed to reprint at no additional charge. So…the yearbooks will be late, but she’ll have a memorial page. They all will.”
“Thank you. That means a lot.” I hadn’t even known Chelsea was on the yearbook staff.
The lunch bell rang as she walked away, looking more frustrated and confused than she had before she sat down. I knew exactly how that felt.
Two minutes later, Sophie appeared in front of me and slapped a newspaper down on the picnic table. “Have you seen the headline? I would have missed it if my dad didn’t still read the news in print.”
Luca set his tray down and sat across from me, but Sophie was obviously too riled up to relax. She hadn’t bought a lunch, either.
“Headline?” I glanced at the paper and had to read it upside down. “‘Eastlake High Named Most Dangerous School of Its Size in the Country.’”
Sophie nodded, eyes wide, brows furrowed.
“Wow.”
“Look at the picture,” Luca said, his burger halfway to his mouth. So I looked.
Beneath the headline was a black-and-white shot of…us. Me, Nash, Sabine, and Emma, in Lydia’s body. It was taken at her funeral. The caption read, “Teens Mourn Yet another Lost Classmate.”
I mentally crossed my fingers and hoped that Lydia’s parents wouldn’t see that photo.
“Do you see that?” Sophie demanded, like I was refusing to look. “We’re the most dangerous school in the country.”
“Of our size,” Luca added, looking up at her. “Don’t you want something to eat?”
“How could I possibly digest anything with that staring back at me?” She waved one hand at the paper still lying on the table.
“What’s wrong?” Nash asked as he and Sabine settled onto the bench next to Luca.
“What’s wrong? We’ve just surpassed inner-city alternative schools all over the country as the most dangerous school in the U.S.”
“Of our size,” Luca added again. “I’m sure there are way more dangerous schools out there with several thousand students.”
Nash laughed, and Sophie turned on him. “This isn’t funny! All the other schools on this list are plagued by gang violence and organized crime.” She lowered her voice and leaned over the table. “We’re the only one overrun with demons.”
“How do you know?” Sabine plucked a fry from Nash’s tray.
“What?” My cousin finally sank onto the bench.
“How do you know those other schools aren’t also infested by hellions? I mean, the paper doesn’t say that’s what’s wrong with our school, does it?” she asked, and Sophie shook her head reluctantly. “Then it may not say what’s really wrong with those schools, either. For all we know, their ‘gang violence’ could really be roving bands of gremlins, shaking down students for their lunch money and handheld technology.”
“When something’s funny, you should let yourself laugh,” Nash added. “Otherwise, you’ll just stay mad or scared, and those little frown lines in your forehead will become permanent.”
Sophie’s eyes widened, and Sabine laughed out loud.
“Hey, Sophie!” Someone called from across the quad, and we all looked up to see Jennifer Lamb crossing the grass toward us, holding a chemistry textbook. “Can you give this to your cousin? She left it in class.”
“My cousin?” Sophie stood to take the book and glanced at me in confusion, but before I could tell her it wasn’t my book, Jennifer elaborated.
“Emily, right? She’s my new lab partner. Is she always so…grumpy?”
Sophie’s hand clenched around the thick textbook. “She’s Kaylee’s cousin. On a completely different side of the family.”
Jennifer frowned. “But her last name is Cavanaugh.”
Sophie turned to glare at me. “Great. You made her my cousin, too.”
I tried to hide a laugh while Jennifer backed away from us in confusion.
Emma finally showed up nearly halfway into the lunch period, about thirty seconds before I would have gone to look for her. “Today sucks!” She dropped her bag on the table, and Luca had to snatch his tray out of the way before his burger got smashed. “My new math teacher made me take some kind of placement test, which made me late for English, so now my English teacher hates me. My new lab partner is an idiot, and I spent half of lunch looking for my damn chemistry book. And I hate cafeteria hamburgers.” She collapsed onto the bench in a huff and leaned forward to put her forehead on the table.
We stared at her in surprise. I think we all expected her to sit up with a smile and jokingly demand a do-over day. When that didn’t happen, I put one hand on her shoulder. “Em.”
“What?” She didn’t even look up.
Nash took her text from Sophie. “Your idiot lab partner brought your chemistry book.”
Em sat up and snatched the book from him. “She probably stole it. Sabotage. I had no idea we went to school with so many stuck-up little bitches.”
A sick feeling swelled in the pit of my stomach. Something was wrong. Something beyond the obvious.
Sophie’s brows rose. “As one of those stuck-up bitches, I have to say, I’m a little offended.”
“Sometimes the truth hurts.”
I gaped at Em. She was going through something really difficult—we all knew that—but she was still Emma. She was still loyal to her friends and relatively calm, unless she was defending one of them, and generally a pleasant person to be around.
“Em, is something wrong?”
She turned on me, anger flashing in her eyes. “Weren’t you paying attention? Everything is wrong. I’m too short to see the whiteboard from the back of the class, and no one’s even said ‘hi’ to me all day. And it’s your fault, Kaylee. You stuck me in this stupid twig body, and no one notices twigs. When was the last time you saw a guy hit on a girl shaped like a chopstick?” She frowned, then rolled her eyes. “I guess I’m asking the wrong person, huh? Obviously the Hudsons like girls who look like little boys. That androgynous thing might work for you, but for me, it’s a definite step down.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I couldn’t think past my shock and the sting of her words. I’d never seen her so angry.
And I was not androgynous!
“Sabine?” Nash looked as confused as the rest of us. “Are you doing this?” He couldn’t be more specific without risking clueing Sophie in on the fact that Sabine was intentionally manipulating fears. Again.
“It’s not me.” The mara looked like she wanted to say more. “I can only mess with fear, and she doesn’t have any right now. None. This tastes like anger to me.”
“No fear?” I said, and Sabine shook her head.
No fear of not fitting in? Of standing out for all the wrong reasons? Of having bombed the math placement test? Of being sucked back into the Netherworld by the hellion who’d already killed her once? I’d never met anyone who had no fear.
“You bet your ass it’s anger.” Emma shoved her chemistry text into her bag. “What the hell do I have to be afraid of? I should be pissed off to be stuck in a second-rate body, in this stupid-ass school, without my own clothes, and my stuff, and my car. Whose brilliant idea was this, anyway? Yours?” The depth of anger in her gaze stunned me. And scared me a little. “Sounds like something you’d do. Another pathetic attempt to help that only makes shit worse.”
“Back off, Em.” Sabine stood, both palms planted firmly on the table. “This is the only warning you get. Kaylee may be skinny, and naive, and clueless more often than not, and borderline adulterous, but you’re lucky to have her as a friend. She saved your life.”
“Part of it, anyway,” Em mumbled. But she seemed a little calmer.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear Sabine just came to my defense. Sort of. “I’m not adulterous,” I said, for the record.
Sabine shrugged, still frowning at Em like she’d hardly heard me. “I said ‘borderline.’”
Nash put a hand on Sabine’s arm, and she sat. Reluctantly. Less than mollified by Em’s response. “Something’s wrong with her.”
“Yeah.” Emma huffed. “I just rattled off a whole list of what’s wrong with me.”
“Emotionally, she’s been kinda all over the place for the past two days,” I added, still reeling from her outburst.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Em demanded.
“You cried at the funeral.”
“Lots of people cry at funerals,” Luca pointed out, and when he said it aloud, it sounded perfectly reasonable. But it wasn’t reasonable, even if I couldn’t explain why.
“She was fine one minute, assessing the funeral she’d planned for herself. Then she was bawling and clinging to her mom.”
“Well, yeah. Her mom was crying.” Nash stuck a fry upright in a pool of ketchup, but it fell over. “Crying moms are contagious.”
But it was more than that…“Then, that afternoon, she got all angry and determined to dish out vengeance to Invidia, and that kind of came out of nowhere, too.…”
“That wasn’t out of nowhere,” Sabine said around a bite of her burger. She swallowed, then continued, “You were feeling the vengeance, too, Kay. We all were.”
Yeah. And Em caught it from us—like it was contagious.
“Wait, when was that?” Sophie said, and I realized I’d said too much.
“Stop talking about me like I’m not here!” Em stood and people at the next table turned to stare until she noticed and sat again, glowering at them from a distance.
“Sorry,” I whispered, leaning toward the center of the table. “This just doesn’t make any sense. We’ve been friends since we were kids, and for more than ten years, I’ve been the one bouncing from one emotional extreme to the other—”
“That’s true,” Sophie interjected. “Kaylee’s never been incredibly stable.”
“Thanks.” I scowled at her. “Now stop helping. My point is that Em’s always been my rock. Steady. Even. Nice.” I turned to her so she’d know I wasn’t trying to leave her out of a discussion about her. “You’ve never blamed me for anything. Even things I deserved the blame for. And these are the same cafeteria hamburgers we’ve been choking down for three years—why are you just now mad about that? And what on earth did Jennifer Lamb do to deserve being called an idiot?”
Em frowned, and her gaze fell. She was thinking. Really thinking. “She…Well, she bumped my elbow and made me spill water all over our lab table. But she did apologize. And clean it up.” Her frown deepened. “I do hate those burgers, though. And you…” Her eyes widened. “Oh, Kay, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean any of that. None of this is your fault. You did save my life, and I am lucky to have you as a friend. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I was just so mad.”
But that was only partially true. She’d meant everything she’d said. I could see that in her eyes. She did hate living in Lydia’s body, and on some level she did blame me for that. But the part that made the churning in my stomach ease a little was the fact that Emma—the Em I’d known most of my life—would never admit that. She would go to her grave trying to spare my feelings.
Whatever was wrong with her, it was wearing off.
Luca cleared his throat and pushed his empty tray toward the center of the table. “You know, considering how common it really is, death is actually a strange process. Inhabiting someone else’s body is even stranger. Maybe something about her death or her occupation of someone else’s body has thrown her emotions out of balance.”
Balance.
“Oh, no…” I stared at the table and that sick feeling in my stomach grew to encompass my chest, too.
“What?” Em looked worried now. Everyone else looked curious. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s about balance.” Luca had no idea how right he was. “Lydia was a syphon. And now you’re in her body.”
“Yeah. What exactly is a syphon?” Sophie said. “I was never very clear on that.”
“It’s a psychic predator. Like a mara,” Sabine said, but I shook my head.
“Kinda. But not really. The way Lydia explained it to me was that something inside her is very sensitive to imbalance of any kind. Pain. Stress. Anger.” I glanced at Em to drive home my point. “And when a syphon feels an imbalance in someone near her, her body has an instinctive need to impose balance, by taking what someone else has too much of, or giving what they have too little of.”
“That’s how she helped you?” Nash said. “At Lakeside?”
“Yeah.” Lydia and I had met as patients in the mental health ward. She’d saved my life. “I needed to wail for one of the patients—for his soul. But I didn’t know I was a bean sidhe, and I didn’t know how to control the need to scream, so trying to bottle it up hurt. A lot. Lydia could feel that, so she took some of my pain. Just enough so that I could manage what was left.”
Em frowned. She looked scared now. “And what, this syphon ability comes with the body?”
I shrugged. “Maybe. When Avari possessed Alec and Sabine, their abilities came with their bodies.”
Sabine scowled at the reminder that she’d been possessed. She hated knowing that she’d been out of control of her own body, even for a short while.
“Is that what I’m doing?” Em’s voice rode the thin edge of panic. “I’m possessing Lydia? Like a hellion? Or like a ghost? Because I’m still dead?”
“Shhh!” Evidently oblivious to Em’s latest trauma, Sophie glanced around to make sure no one else in the quad was listening.
“No!” I sounded surer than I really was. Thank goodness. “You’re not a ghost.” Fortunately, I didn’t have to worry about anyone else hearing me.
“There are no ghosts,” Luca added.
“Maybe I’m the first.” Em’s eyes were open so wide I was afraid they’d pop right out of her skull. “Maybe that’s all a ghost is—a disembodied soul taking up residence where it doesn’t belong. And I don’t belong here. I wasn’t meant to be a syphon. I don’t want to be a syphon.”
“You belong here.” I turned her by both shoulders so that she faced me. So I could look right into her eyes. “You belong here with us, no matter what it takes to make that happen. Even inhabiting someone else’s body. And anyway, her body may not be what carries the syphon abilities. It could be that bit of Lydia’s soul that got stuck in there with you.”
“That bit of her what?” Em slapped her own sternum with one hand. “There’s part of Lydia’s soul still in here?” she hissed. “When were you planning to tell me that?”
“Sorry.” I shrugged and tried to look as guilty as I felt. Which was a lot. “I’ve been kind of preoccupied with the police investigation into your death, and the funeral plans, and figuring out where you were going to live, and how to get you back into school. The soul thing just kind of slipped my mind.”
“It’s not that bad, Em,” Nash said, when nothing I’d said seemed to be helping. “Lydia was syphoning some of your pain when you died, and when Kaylee captured your soul, she got part of Lydia’s, too.”
“What happened to the rest of it?”
I took a deep breath. There was no good way to say the next part. “It kind of…”
“Got disintegrated,” Sabine finished, when I held on to the thought for too long. “Poof. Dissipated throughout all four corners of both the human- and the Netherworld, for as long as it takes to coalesce again.”
“Wait. Her soul will coalesce?”
Luca nodded. “From what my aunt’s told me—” his aunt Madeline was my boss at the reclamation department “—it will slowly pull itself back together. Until then…it’s like being in limbo. Floating. We don’t think that it hurts. We don’t think they’re even aware, when that happens.”
“So…Lydia will be back when her soul…congeals, or whatever?” Emma was breathing too fast now, and her face was turning red. “Is it reasonable to assume she’s going to want her body back when that happens? Are we going to have to share?” Her hands gripped the picnic table so tightly her fingers looked like they might snap. “Or is she just going to throw me out? Am I going to be a homeless ghost, Kaylee?”
“Em, it could be centuries before that happens. That’s not on the list of things we need to worry about immediately.”
“It could be centuries? So it might not be?”
“Okay, we need to focus on the positives.” Sophie laid both of her palms flat on the table. “That’s what we do in dance, when we place second. We don’t think about how second place is the first loser. We think about how many other teams we stomped into the dirt and how hard they’re probably crying.” She shrugged. “That always makes me feel better.”
For a moment, there was only silence while we stared at her. Even Luca looked a little…disturbed. But Sabine only shrugged. “Makes sense to me. And the positive side of this, if you ask me, is that now that you know what you are, you can learn how to control your abilities. Trust me, a little control makes all the difference.”
“I can control it?” Em looked almost hopeful.
I nodded. “Lydia could.” To some degree, anyway. “So, here’s what we know. What I think, anyway. At the funeral, you were fine when you were with us, because we knew you weren’t dead, so we weren’t as upset as the other mourners. But when your mom came over, you lost it because she was devastated by grief, and you took some of that from her. You calmed her down, at the expense of your own composure.”
“Okay…” Nash looked fascinated. “So, yesterday when you got all badass and hell-bent on revenge, you were probably taking a little of that from Kaylee. She’s been itching to make Avari pay since the day you died.”
Since before that. Since the day Avari tricked me into killing Alec. That’s when I’d started channeling my pain into anger—a much more useful emotion.
Luca frowned. “So then, whose anger was she syphoning today? Somebody must have been really pissed off, if the portion she took was strong enough to make her go off on you like that.”
Oh, shit. I hadn’t even thought about that. Em’s rage had a source, and considering how many hellions were known to frequent the Netherworld version of our school, chances were good that that anger wasn’t human in origin. Which meant that someone at Eastlake could be about to lose control.
Again.
5
“Where are you going?” Nash said when I stood, already pulling my phone from my pocket.
“To find whoever sent Em into anger overdrive before he explodes in someone’s face.” More violence was the last thing we needed at America’s most dangerous high school. Of its size. “You had chemistry before lunch, right?” I said, trying to remember her new schedule, and Em nodded. “Whose class?”
“Mr. Flannery.”
“Did anyone look angry in your chem class? Anyone lose his or her temper?”
Em shook her head. “Only me.”
“That just means that whoever it was did a good job of hiding his anger.” Which meant those around him would be completely unprepared when and if he snapped. “I gotta get a look at Mr. Flannery’s roll book before lunch is over. I’ll see you guys later.”
Before anyone could object, I took off across the quad, headed for the corner of the building, texting Tod on the way. His shift at the hospital had just ended. With any luck, he’d have time to come help me deal with…whatever was about to go horribly wrong.
As soon as I was out of sight of the quad, I let myself fade from human sight, then blinked into Mr. Flannery’s first-floor chemistry lab. The room was empty, thank goodness, and his roll book was open on his desk, which was another stroke of luck in itself. Most of the other teachers had long ago switched to an electronic attendance and grade program. Fortunately, Mr. Flannery was nearly sixty and set in his ways. I’d once heard him complain to a colleague about how long it took him to enter the grades into the computer all at once, at the end of each term.
Still invisible, in case anyone came in, I flipped through his roll book to the third period page and scanned the list. Emily Cavanaugh had been penciled in at the bottom. Most of the students were juniors, which meant I knew nearly all of them. All but four had been in the quad with us—underclassmen usually got stuck eating inside on nice days.
All four of the missing kids were members of the baseball team—Nash’s former teammates—who’d started eating in the practice field’s dugout in the two weeks since Brant Williams’s death. They seemed to think that was the best place to remember him. And to avoid adult supervision.
They kind of had a point.
I closed the roll book and blinked onto the baseball practice field, but a quick glance showed me that only three team members were in the dugout. Marco Gutierrez was missing.
After several more minutes of looking—I blinked into every men’s room in the building as well as both locker rooms—I finally found him under the bleachers in the gym, just as the bell rang. Lunch was over. In six minutes I’d be late to English.
I faded into the corporeal plane at his back—visible and audible only to him—then took a deep breath. “Marco? Are you okay?”
He turned, obviously startled, and the moment his gaze found me, it hardened in anger. His eyes narrowed. His nose flared. His fists clenched at his sides. And I knew one thing immediately, though it made no sense.
Marco Gutierrez wasn’t just angry. He was angry at me.
“Kaylee Cavanaugh. How kind of you to save me the trouble of searching for you.”
Chills raced up my spine and tingled at the base of my skull. Marco didn’t have such a formal, stilted speech pattern. And he had no reason to be mad at me, that I knew of. “Avari.”
Marco was possessed.
“You do not seem surprised to see me.…” Marco lifted one brow and clasped his hands at his back in a gesture no high school junior makes, unless he’s standing at ease in ROTC.
“Surprised to hear from you? No. The escalating pattern of your intrusions into my life is pretty hard to miss. But I can’t say I expected to see you…there.” I waved one hand at the body he’d borrowed. The body of another relatively innocent, uninvolved classmate.
Still, seeing him by proxy was much better than seeing Avari in the flesh. And the fact that he hadn’t come in a body of his own told me he currently lacked the ability to come in a body of his own. Which was a huge relief.
“What do you want? And how did you get in there?” Hellions could only possess people who’ve died—even if they were resuscitated minutes later—people who’ve been to the Netherworld, and people they have some kind of personal connection to…
That last thought led me to the answer to my own question. “He huffed frost,” I concluded, and Avari frowned in confusion. “Demon’s Breath. Your breath.”
“Ah. Yes, Mr. Gutierrez was among those who sampled the product your new lover delivered for me.”
“I’m seventeen. Calling Tod my lover makes us sound ancient. Like, forty.”