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“An accurate term, though, is it not? You seem decidedly less innocent than when we first met.”
“That’s number one on a huge list of things that are thoroughly none of your business.” Unless it made me less interesting to him. Less worthy of being captured and tortured for eternity. If that was the case, I’d happily brand myself a whore, complete with the scarlet letter A. Half the school seemed to think I deserved it anyway. “And Tod had no idea what he was ferrying into the human world for you.” He’d done it for the chance to help Addison. To keep her sane, even as Avari tortured her damned soul.
But the frost he’d brought into our world had hurt countless people, including Marco Gutierrez. How many more were there like him? How many more of Nash’s friends and teammates had huffed Avari’s breath, unknowingly nominating themselves for hellion possession?
“What do you want?” I repeated when I realized he was just staring at me. Studying me. Which was somehow even creepier than when he threatened me.
Avari made a tssk-ing sound with Marco’s tongue—another gesture not native to human adolescence. “That question has been asked and answered so many times surely you are as bored by it as I am. The answer hasn’t changed, but the terms have. I want your anguish, both mental and physical. I want to take you apart and see what biological pumps and vessels make you bleed and what psychological gears and levers make you tick. Then I want to put you back together and begin again. I want to hear you scream. I want to see you writhe. I want to taste your flesh, and your blood, and your fears. I want to savor your ill-fated dreams as they burst like berries between my teeth, then melt like sugar on my tongue. I want you, Kaylee Cavanaugh.”
I swallowed my own fear, so he couldn’t have it, and that left me with nothing but anger blazing like a furnace where my heart should have been. “It’s always nice to be wanted, but I don’t feel like being enslaved and tortured today. Sorry.”
“I’m going to make this simple for you, little bean sidhe. If you don’t cross into the Nether and surrender—today—I will come for those you love most.” Because he couldn’t just take me. Even if he’d had a way to make me cross over, and at the moment he did not, he couldn’t have kept me in the Nether. Not while I was conscious and in my own body, anyway. Female bean sidhes can cross between worlds at will, which put us among those least likely to be held captive in the Netherworld.
To keep me in the Nether against my will, Avari would have to keep me unconscious—which would be no fun for him—or dispose of my body and take physical possession of my soul, which was no doubt his intent. The hard part—for him—was getting to my soul. Since my unfortunate demise, he’d decided it would be easier to coerce me into willingly surrendering than to forcibly part my body from my soul.
I rolled my eyes, displaying my disbelief in spite of the fear tightening my chest. “That threat has been posed and ignored so many times surely we’re both bored by it.” Throwing his words back at him felt good. Seeing the anger rage behind his eyes felt even better.
He moved faster than I’d thought possible for a human body. One second he was three feet away, at proper threatening distance. The next, he had one hand around my throat. He slammed me into a support beam beneath the bleachers, and the blow reverberated down my spine in echoing waves of pain. My mouth fell open and I tried to drag in a shocked breath, but no air came. It couldn’t get past his fist squeezing my airway shut.
“You will give me what I want,” Avari said into my ear with Marco’s voice. “Or I will destroy what you treasure most.”
My heart pounded almost painfully while my back throbbed, and it took me a second to realize that my fear was remembered fear, virtually irrelevant to my current predicament. I didn’t need to breathe. Sure, I couldn’t talk with his hand around my throat, but I wasn’t going to suffocate, either.
Remembering that helped me push fear back again, even farther this time, and anger roared in to take its place.
“And frankly, Miss Cavanaugh, every time we meet like this I am less and less inclined to leave you unbruised. Standing here, touching you with this borrowed—but very real—hand it occurs to me that not all of my corrupt pleasures have to wait for your arrival in the Nether.”
And suddenly my fear was back, and very relevant to the situation. I could blink out anytime I wanted, but if he was touching me, he’d come with me.
“I’ve never truly understood the human fondness for nude rutting and the eager exchange of bodily fluids.” He stared down into my eyes, studying my panic while I clawed at his hand, but I saw nothing of Marco in Avari’s expression. I saw only hellion, and the dramatically dilated pupils that told me he was feeding from my fear. He was nearly drunk on it. “But this borrowed body seems willing, and you’re clearly terrified by the prospect of such an encounter. And naturally, fear makes you taste so much better.…” He leaned toward my neck and inhaled, and my stomach churned, though I hadn’t eaten much in days.
Avari stepped back without letting go of my neck, and his gaze assessed me with almost clinical detachment. “It’s the strangest thing. I don’t understand what all the fuss is about, but every time I borrow a human form, my sense of touch is…Well, it’s exaggerated. Sensitive. You mortals feel everything so intensely. Is it the same for you, or is this a trait exclusive to the human male?”
His free hand—Marco’s hand—slid down the side of my arm, and his pupils dilated even farther when my nails broke through the skin on his arm. I made a quick wish for luck, then threw my knee up into his groin, as fast and hard as I could.
Avari yelped, and it was the most satisfying sound I’d ever heard. His hand fell away from my throat, and he hunched over the hopefully paralyzing pain.
“That is a trait exclusive to the human male.”
Tod laughed out loud, and I looked up just as he appeared behind the demon in stolen flesh. He swung something with both hands, hard enough that the muscles in his arms stood out against his skin, and his weapon slammed into Marco’s head with a dull thunk. Marco’s legs folded, and he collapsed on the gym floor.
Tod stood behind him, holding Emma’s three-inch-thick chemistry book. “You know, next time you text to tell me you may need help, I could get here a lot faster if you also tell me where you are. I’m a reaper, not a necromancer. Am I going to have to have you fitted with a GPS chip?”
“Sorry. I didn’t know where I’d be.” I glanced at poor Marco, thoroughly unconscious and probably in a lot of pain, then stepped over him and threw my arms around Tod. “And thank you. How’d you find me?”
“I tried about eight different places, then I found Luca. He said it felt like you were in the gym.”
As a necromancer, Luca was like a compass for all things dead but not yet decaying. Including reapers. And me.
Tod let me go and ran one hand through his short curls, and the blue-eyed gaze that met mine was intense. Scared. And kinda…angry. “You have to stop doing this, Kaylee. You’re dead, not invincible. Reclaiming souls when Madeline sends backup is one thing. That’s your job. I get that. But you can’t just go around confronting hellions on your own. Even in a human body they’re dangerous. Especially when that human body is bigger than yours, and they’re all bigger than yours.”
The fear in his voice made my chest ache. “I didn’t know he was possessed. And anyway, I can handle myself. See?” I made a sweeping gesture toward Marco’s unconscious form. “Now he knows that being a teenage guy isn’t all getting high and threatening girls.”
“Yeah, and that was awesome, even if I can’t help but sympathize with the pain he’s going to be in when he wakes up. But Avari will be ready for that next time. One of these days you’re going to get in too deep, and I’m not going to get there fast enough, and…bad things are going to happen, and that will kill me more than my actual death did.”
“I think I was born ‘in too deep,’ and bad things happen every day. Sometimes I have to stab hellions. Sometimes I have to frame friends for murder, and stab evil math teachers, and watch my best friend die. Again. We deal with it, then we move on.”
“Well, maybe next time you could let the bad things find you, instead of searching them out for yourself. Or take someone with you. I know Nash isn’t as much fun to look at, but he’d be decent backup, and even with a broken arm, Sabine’s a force to be reckoned with.”
“But I’m not?”
“That’s not what I’m saying. I think the evidence speaks for itself.” He glanced pointedly at Marco, still unconscious on the floor. “But six hands are better than two. Especially when my hands aren’t close enough to get to you.”
“They’re close enough now…” I pulled him toward me, and I could see that he was trying to resist a smile. To stay mad, to emphasize his point.
“That’s not gonna work.”
I went up on my toes to kiss him, and he groaned. “Do you really think this is appropriate on school grounds?”
“Nope.” I wrapped my arms around his neck. “And I happen to know there isn’t an appropriate thought running through your head right now.”
“Or any other time.” Tod pulled me close and held me so tight my ribs almost hurt, but I didn’t want him to let go. Ever. “Just promise me you’ll be more careful.”
“I promise.”
“So…” Tod tried on a grin, and I bent to pick up Em’s textbook from where he’d dropped it. “What did Tall, Dark, and Evil want?”
“The usual. Devour my soul. Mutilate my corpse. Dissect my psyche. Just another day in the most dangerous high school in the country. Of its size.” I nudged Marco’s arm with my foot. “Can you help me get him to the nurse? He’s going to wake up with several unexplained injuries, and I don’t want to be in the room when he starts asking questions.”
That night, Tod, my dad, and I made a conscious effort to keep our own emotions in check, so we wouldn’t accidentally trigger Emma’s as-yet-uncontrollable syphon ability. Which wasn’t so much an ability at that point as a constant trial.
I think we did pretty well. Until around ten-thirty, when Em was doing homework on her bed and Tod and I were stretched out on my bed, not doing my homework. After about ten minutes of what I would categorize as PG-rated not-quite-adult content, she threw a balled-up pair of socks at us and said if we didn’t go away she would jump my boyfriend herself.
Evidently we weren’t very good at keeping those emotions in check. And since I did not want my best friend syphoning anything quite that intimate, we took the party to Tod’s place.
Tuesday morning, Emma was in much better spirits. We picked up coffee on the way to school and met Nash and Sabine in one corner of the cafeteria, as far from the breakfast eaters as we could get.
“Here.” I passed out lattes, and Em snatched a napkin dispenser from an empty table.
“What’s the occasion?” Sabine looked suspicious. I couldn’t blame her. We’d reached an understanding—she could have Nash, and I could never again touch him, for any reason whatsoever, so long as we both shall live. Which isn’t as bad as it sounds. Nash and I had made serious strides toward actual friendship, which was more than I could say for him and his brother. Sabine and I would never be like sisters, but we had definitely reached something akin to friendship.
And that was good, considering that the alternative always seemed to involve her trying to kill me, with little regard for the fact that I was already dead.
“I need some information.” I took the lid off my cup and blew over the top of my latte. “From Nash.”
“What’s up?” He dumped a packet of sugar into his open cup, then realized he had nothing to stir with.
“I need you to make a list of everyone you know who tried frost, back when Doug was, um, distributing to your teammates.”
Emma flinched at the mention of her ex, and I felt guilty all over again. Both of her most recent boyfriends had died because of me and my otherworldly complications.
“I don’t have a list.” Nash scowled at the powder that refused to mix with the foam on top of his coffee. “In fact, I don’t know a single name for sure. I didn’t even know Doug was using, until that party. The night he hit your car.”
“You don’t have a single name? Seriously? Not even an educated guess?”
He shrugged and put the lid back on his cup. “I can tell you who I saw him with at that last party, when his dealer showed up.”
“Was Marco Gutierrez one of them?”
“Yeah.”
“Good enough.” I pulled a notepad from my bag and pushed it across the table toward him. Em added a pen. “Write down all you can remember. Please.”
“Is this about what happened with Marco yesterday?” Sabine sipped from her cup while Nash scribbled on the notepad.
“Yeah. He was just possessed, so it was pretty easy to get rid of Avari, but I’d like to avoid a repetition. Or at least see it coming ahead of time.”
“So, where do we stand with Sophie and the liquid envy?” Em cradled her cup in both hands.
Sabine’s smile looked almost euphoric. Which kinda scared me. “I gave her the first dose this morning, in her coffee. Had to dump in extra sugar to cover the taste.”
“Half a drop?” Em said. “Because Kaylee went bat-shit crazy on a full drop.”
“I did not—”
“Yeah. Half a drop, as instructed.” Sabine spoke over me. “But I’m telling you, this whole thing would be much more entertaining—and would go a lot faster—if you’d let me really dose her.”
“No. I know you enjoy your work, but the object isn’t to drive her nuts.”
Sabine huffed. “Speak for yourself.” Then she shrugged. “At least I’m getting a decent bedtime snack out of this.” Because she was feeding from Sophie’s relevant fears as part of the process.
Em chuckled, staring into her cup. “I can’t believe you put real sugar in her coffee. She’d kill you if she knew it wasn’t calorie-free sweetener.”
“Here.” Nash slid the notepad back to me. “That’s all I can remember.”
I glanced at the list. “That’s only three names.”
He shrugged and sipped his coffee. “If I had more, I’d give them to you.”
“Thanks.” I turned to Em. “What about you? Did you see Doug hang out with anyone in particular?”
“Yeah.” She shrugged. “Half the school. But I never even saw him with a balloon.” Which is what they’d used to store frost in. Which was kind of…my idea. Though I’d never intended to contribute to the ease of drug trafficking when I’d thought of it.
“Hey, Kaylee, can I talk to you for a minute?” I twisted in my chair to see Chelsea Simms holding a green paper folder.
“Sure.” I shoved the notepad into my bag, picked up my coffee, and stood. “I’ll see you guys at lunch.” Sabine, Nash, and Emma nodded, and I followed Chelsea into the hall.
She opened the folder as we walked in the general direction of our first-period math class, then pulled out a sheet of paper and handed it to me. “I just wanted to show you this.” It was a screen print from some kind of layout program. “It’s for her memorial page in the yearbook.”
In the center was a candid shot of Emma at a football game, from the fall semester. Her cheeks were red from the cold and she wore a green scarf; her thick, golden hair was flying over her shoulder in the wind. She looked happy.
She looked alive.
In that moment, I understood what Emma had lost, beyond her family, her clothes, her car, and the future she’d always assumed she’d have. She’d lost herself.
I’d met Emma in the third grade, and in all the time I’d known her, I couldn’t remember her ever lacking confidence or self-esteem before I’d exposed her to truths about the world no human should have to deal with. She’d always known who she was and where she fit into the world. She’d known what she wanted to do with her life—even if that changed on a monthly basis—and exactly what she was capable of.
She had none of that now, and even if I spent my entire afterlife trying to make that up to her, I could never give her back what she’d lost. Ever. The best I could do was help her adjust to the life she had now. Show her that she still had her friends, and that this new life could still be a good one.
But I couldn’t do that with Avari always two steps behind us. I couldn’t honestly tell her that life was still worth living if we were always looking over our shoulders to evade death and eternal torture. I had to get rid of Avari and the rest of the hellions not just to avenge Em’s death, and those who’d gone before her, but to make sure that the life she had left was more than just the constant struggle to hold on to it.
“Do you think she’d like it?” Chelsea asked, and I realized we’d stopped walking several doors away from our classroom. And that my hand was clenched around the printout, my knuckles white from the strain.
“Yeah. It’s beautiful. I think she’ll love it.”
Chelsea gave me a confused look, and it took me a second to realize I’d referred to Em in present tense. Again.
“I mean, if she were still here. Which she’s not, obviously. Because she died. But if she hadn’t, I have no doubt that Emma would love this yearbook memorial page.”
6
“I hate it.” Em set the memorial page printout on the picnic table and pinned it with her soda can.
“Hate what?” Nash put his tray down, Sabine set hers next to it, and they sank onto the bench across from me and Em.
“My yearbook memorial page.”
“That’s what Chelsea wanted to show me this morning.” I leaned across the table and took an apple wedge from Nash’s tray. I wasn’t hungry, but if I never ate anything at lunch, people would start to notice, and he rarely bothered with the fruit anyway.
Sabine unscrewed the top on a bottle of flavored water from the vending machine. “What’s wrong with it?”
Emma rotated the page beneath her can so they could see it. “The layout is simplistic and too symmetrical, the quote they picked says nothing about me, and I’d complain that the picture’s too small, except that it’s a horrible shot of me anyway.”
“What are you talking about? You look great!” I frowned, studying her. “Are you channeling someone’s anger again?”
“Not that I know of. Anyway, I’m not mad. I just hate that picture.”
“Oh, that may be my doing,” Sabine said around a bite of cheese-slathered corn chip. “Em’s afraid she’ll never look that good, so I thought this might be a good time to amp up her insecurity and vanity by feeding that fear. Tastes pretty good, too.” She washed her bite down with a gulp of water. “Want me to stop?”
“No. It’s fine.” Em sat with a pout and turned the printout over, so she couldn’t see her own face. Her own former face. And suddenly I felt bad for showing it to her. I’d thought it would make her feel better to know how much people cared. How much they missed her. Instead, I’d reminded her of what she’d lost. Again.
“Your dad snuck out of my house at two this morning,” Nash said. I glanced up in confusion to find my cousin and her necromancer boyfriend only a few feet away, carrying their lunch. Sophie looked sick.
“Whoa, really?” Luca glanced from Nash to Sophie, who scowled and dropped her tray on the table so hard that her orange bounced into a plastic cup of cottage cheese. “This is the man who threatened to make sure I could never sire children if he ever caught me at your house past nine o’clock?”
“The very same.” Sophie sat and started scraping cheese off her orange with a plastic spork. “And that wasn’t an idle threat. Turns out I also have three older half brothers—like, way older—who would cut off anything you let dangle if they knew half of—”
Luca put a hand over her mouth, and I swear he looked suddenly pale. “Well, then let’s not tell them.” He frowned and dropped his hand. “Wait, what do you mean, it turns out you have older brothers?”
She shrugged. “My dad couldn’t tell me about them until I knew he was a bean sidhe, because they’re in their sixties but they look, like, twenty-five. Like they could be my uncles. But they all have grandkids.”
“Wait a minute.” Sabine scowled at Nash, and the sun seemed to fade a little. “I can’t stay the night at your place, but Sophie’s dad can? How is that fair?”
“How’s what fair?”
Tod appeared out of nowhere and sat next to me on the bench. He slid one arm around my waist, and it took all the self-control I had not to lean over and kiss him. Which I couldn’t do without looking crazy to the hundred or so other students in the quad who couldn’t see him.
Em leaned forward to fill him in. “Your mom’s sleeping with Sophie’s dad, and Sabine thinks—”
“Whoa…” Tod clamped both hands over his ears. “I don’t ever need to hear that sentence again. No need to finish it, either.”
“At least we agree on something,” Nash mumbled, ripping the crust from a slice of cafeteria pizza.
Sabine planted both palms flat on the table. “My point is that it isn’t fair that he can come and go as he pleases—no pun intended—”
Everyone at our table groaned in unison, and Nash looked more than a little nauseated.
“—but—and I am not kidding—I now have a nine o’clock curfew. Seriously. Nine o’clock! I am a creature of the night! You can’t impose a curfew on a living Nightmare! What am I supposed to do for the ten hours after lockdown? Maras only need four hours of sleep. Who the hell is he to tell me when I can and can’t leave the house?”
“Your legal guardian.” Sophie sank her thumbnail through the skin of her orange and began to peel it. “Officially, as of eleven this morning. He called to tell me when he finished Influencing the juvenile court judge over brunch. I was supposed to tell you, but you know.” She shrugged. “I didn’t.”
Sabine’s eyes narrowed and her mouth opened, no doubt ready to spew several inventive and highly entertaining threats aimed at Sophie, but before she could say anything, Luca cleared his throat and smiled at Emma. “Your hair looks nice today. All smooth and shiny.”
“Thanks.” Em’s eyes lit up, and her smile made me want to smile back. It was a very nice change from the previous day’s lunch.
Sophie glared daggers at her. “Keratin treatment and some Frizz-Ease. It’s not rocket science.”
I glanced at Sabine in silent question, and she nodded. She was amplifying Sophie’s fears to heighten her envy of…anyone Luca so much as looked at.
“Kaylee Cavanaugh?” a new voice said, and we all turned to see a sophomore whose name I couldn’t remember standing at the end of our table, holding a slip of paper out to me. “Are you Kaylee Cavanaugh?”
“Yeah.” As if she didn’t know. Everyone in school knew who I was. Everyone within a hundred-mile radius knew who I was. I was the girl stabbed in her own bed by her evil math teacher. Not that most people knew Mr. Beck was actually evil, instead of just your average psychotic pedophile.
“They want you in the counselor’s office.”
Crap. “Okay. Thanks.” I took the slip of paper from her—my official summons—and when the sophomore walked away, I turned back to the rest of the table. “I completely forgot my appointment.” Turns out that when you’re nearly fatally stabbed, then lose your best friend in a freak park-swing accident less than a month later, the school guidance counselor likes to keep tabs on you.
“Want me to come?” Tod ran his hand up my back, over my shirt. “If you keep her busy, I could convert the filing system from ‘alphabetical’ to ‘most deserving of psychiatric help.’” He leaned closer, and I knew no one else would hear whatever came out of his mouth next. “I’ve been meaning to make some special notations in Nash’s file anyway. Imagine the level of help he could receive if they knew the root of his recent academic decline was a deep-seated fear of the letter Q.”