In the wings of the stage, a small crowd had gathered to watch the show. Everyone wore badges similar to ours, and several people held equipment or props, most notably a small monkey, wearing a collar and a funny, brightly colored hat.
I laughed out loud, wondering what on earth America’s reigning pop queen would do on stage with a monkey.
From our vantage point, we saw Eden in profile, now grinding in skintight white leather pants and a matching half top. The new song was gritty, with a crunchy guitar riff, and her dancing had changed to suit it; she popped each pose hard, and her hair swung out behind her. Guys in jeans and tight, dark shirts danced around and behind her, each taking her hand in turn, and lifting her on occasion.
Eden gave it her all, even several songs into the performance. The magazines and news stories hyped her hard work and dedication to her career, and the hours and hours a day she trained, rehearsed, and planned. And it showed. No one put on a show like Eden. She was the entertainment industry’s golden girl, rolling in money and fame. Rumor had it she’d signed on for the lead in her first film, to begin shooting after the conclusion of her sold-out tour.
Everything Eden touched turned to gold.
We watched her, enthralled by each pose she struck, mesmerized by each note. We were under such a spell that at first no one noticed when something went wrong. During the guitar solo, Eden’s arms fell to her side and she stopped dancing.
I thought it was another dramatic transition to the next song, so when her head fell forward, I assumed she was counting silently, ready to look up with those hypnotic, piercing black eyes and captivate her fans all over again.
But then the other dancers noticed, and several stopped moving. Then several more. And when the guitar solo ended, Eden still stood there, silent, a virtual vacuum sucking life from the background music.
Her chest heaved. Her shoulders shook. The microphone fell from her hand and crashed to the stage.
Feedback squealed across the auditorium, and the drummer stopped drumming. The guitarists—both lead and bass—turned toward Eden and stopped playing when they saw her.
Eden collapsed, legs bent, long, dark hair spilling around her on the floor.
Someone screamed from behind me in the sudden hush, and I jumped, startled. A woman raced past me and onto the stage, followed by several large men. My hair blew back in the draft created by the sudden rush, but I barely noticed. My gaze was glued to Eden who lay unmoving on the floor.
People bent over her, and I recognized the woman as her mother, the most famous stage parent/manager in the country. Eden’s mom was crying, trying to shake her daughter awake as a member of security tried to pull her away. “She’s not breathing!” the mother shouted, and we all heard her clearly,
because the crowd of thousands had gone silent with shock. “Somebody help her, she’s not breathing!”
And suddenly neither was I.
My hand clenched Nash’s, and my heart raced in dreadful anticipation of the keening that would rip its way from my throat as the pop star’s soul left her body. A
bean sidhe
’s wail can shatter not just glass, but eardrums. The frequency resonates painfully in the human brain, so that the sound seems to rattle from both outside and within.
“Breathe, Kaylee,” Nash whispered into my ear, wrapping both arms around me as his voice cocooned my heart, his Influence soothing, comforting. A male
bean sidhe
’s voice is like an audio-sedative, without the side effects of the chemical version. Nash could make the screaming stop, or at least lower its volume and intensity. “Just breathe through it.” So I did. I watched the stage over his shoulder and breathed, waiting for Eden to die.
Waiting for the scream to build deep inside me.
But the scream didn’t come.
Onstage, someone’s foot hit Eden’s microphone, and it rolled across the floor and into the pit. No one noticed, because Eden still wasn’t breathing. But I wasn’t wailing, either.
Slowly, I loosened my grip on Nash and felt relief settle through me as logic prevailed over my dread. Eden wasn’t wearing a death shroud—a translucent black haze surrounding the soon-to-be-dead, visible only to female
bean sidhes
. “She’s fine.” I smiled in spite of the horrified expressions surrounding me. “She’s gonna be fine.” Because if she were going to die, I’d already be screaming.
I’m a female
bean sidhe
. That’s what we do.
“No, she isn’t,” Tod said softly, and we turned to find him still staring at the stage. The reaper pointed, and I followed his finger until my gaze found Eden again, surrounded by her mother, bodyguards, and odd members of the crew, one of whom was now giving her mouth-to-mouth. And as I watched, a foggy, ethereal substance began to rise slowly from the star’s body like a snake from its charmer’s basket.
Rather than floating toward the ceiling, as a soul should, Eden’s seemed
heavy,
like it might sink to the ground around her instead. It was thick, yet colorless. And undulating through it were ribbons of darkness, swirling as if stirred by an unfelt breeze.
My breath caught in my throat, but I let it go almost immediately, because though I had no idea what that substance was, I knew without a doubt what it
wasn’t.
Eden had no soul.
“W
HAT IS THAT
?”
I whispered frantically, tugging Nash’s hand. “It’s not a soul. And if she’s dead, how come I’m not screaming?”
“What is what.” Nash hissed, and I realized he couldn’t see Eden’s not-soul. Male
bean sidhes
can only see elements of the Netherworld—including freed souls—when a female
bean sidhe
wails. Apparently the same held true for whatever ethereal sludge was oozing from Eden’s body.
Nash glanced around to make sure no one was listening to us, but there was really no need. Eden was the center of attention.
Tod rolled his eyes and pulled one hand from the pocket of his baggy jeans. “Look over there.” He pointed not toward the stage, but across it, where more people watched the spectacle from the opposite wing. “Do you see her?”
“I see lots of hers.” People scrambled on the other side of the stage, most speaking into cell phones. A couple of vultures even snapped pictures of the fallen singer, and indignation burned deep in my chest.
But Tod continued to point, so I squinted into the dark
wing. Whatever he wanted me to see probably wasn’t native to the human world so it wouldn’t be immediately obvious.
And that’s when I found her.
The woman’s tall, slim form created a darker spot in the already-thick shadows, a mere suggestion of a shape. Her eyes were the only part of her I could focus on, glowing like green embers in the gloom. “Who is she?” I glanced at Nash and he nodded, telling me he could see her too. Which likely meant she was
letting
us see her…
“That’s Libby, from Special Projects.” An odd, eager light shone in blue eyes Tod usually kept shadowed by brows drawn low. “When this week’s list came down, she came with it, for this one job.”
He was talking about the reapers’ list, which contained the names and the exact place and time of death of everyone scheduled to die in the local area within a one-week span.
“You knew this was going to happen?” Even knowing he was a reaper, I couldn’t believe how different Tod’s reaction to death was from mine. Unlike most people, it wasn’t my own death I feared—it was everyone else’s. The sight of the deceased’s soul would mark my own descent into madness. At least, that’s what most people thought of my screaming fits. Humans had no idea that my “hysterical shrieking” actually suspended a person’s soul as it leaves its body.
Sometimes I wished I still lived in human ignorance, but those days were over for me, for better or for worse.
“I couldn’t turn down the chance to watch Libby work. She’s a legend.” Tod shrugged. “And seeing Addy was a bonus.”
“Well, thanks so much for dragging us along!” Nash snapped.
“What is she?” I asked as another cluster of people rushed past us—two more bodyguards and a short, slight man whose face looked pinched with professional concern and curiosity. Probably a doctor. “And what’s so special about this assignment?”
“Libby’s a very special reaper.” Tod’s short, blond goatee glinted in the blue-tinted overhead lights as he spoke. “She was called in because that—” he pointed to the substance the female reaper now was steadily
inhaling
from Eden’s body, over a twenty-foot span and dozens of heads “—isn’t a soul. It’s Demon’s Breath.”
Suddenly I was very glad no one else could hear Tod. I wished they couldn’t hear me, either. “Demon, as in hellion?” I whispered, as low as I could speak and still be heard.
Tod nodded with his usual slow, grim smile. The very word
hellion
sent a jolt of terror through me, but Tod’s eyes sparkled with excitement, as if he could actually get high on danger. I guess that’s what you get when you mix boredom with the afterlife.
“She sold her soul….” Nash whispered, revulsion echoing within the sudden understanding in his voice.
I’d never met a hellion—they couldn’t leave the Netherworld, fortunately—but I was intimately familiar with their appetite for human souls. Six weeks earlier, my aunt had tried to trade five poached teenage souls in exchange for her own eternal youth and beauty, but her plan went bad in the end, and she wound up paying in part with her own soul. But not before four girls died for her vanity.
Tod shrugged. “That’s what it looks like to me.”
Horror filled me. “Why would anyone do that?”
Nash looked like he shared my revulsion, but Tod only shrugged again, clearly unbothered by the most horrifying concept I’d ever encountered. “They usually ask for fame, fortune, and beauty.”
All of which Eden had in spades.
“Okay, so she sold her soul to a hellion.” That statement sound wrong in
sooo
many ways…. “Do I even want to know how Demon’s Breath got into Eden’s body in its place?”
“Probably not,” Nash whispered, as heavy black curtains began to slide across the front of the stage, cutting off the shocked, horrified chatter from the auditorium.
But as usual, Tod was happy to give me a morbid peek into the Netherworld—complete with irreverent hand gestures. “When the hellion literally sucked out her soul, he replaced it with his own breath. That kept her alive until her time to die. Which is why Libby’s here. Demon’s Breath is a controlled substance in the Netherworld, and it has to be disposed of very carefully. Libby’s trained to do that.”
“A controlled substance?” I felt my brows dip in confusion. “Like plutonium?”
Tod chuckled, running his fingers across a panel of dead electronic equipment propped against the wall. “More like heroin.”
I sighed and leaned into Nash, letting the warmth of his body comfort me. “The Netherworld is soooo weird.”
“You have no idea.” Tod’s curls bounced when he turned to face Libby again, where the lady reaper had now inhaled most of the sluggish Demon’s Breath. It swirled slowly into
her mouth in a long, thick strand, like a ghostly trail of rotting spaghetti. “Come on, I want to talk to her.” He took off toward the stage without waiting for our reply, and I lunged after him, hoping he was solid enough to touch.
He was—at least for me. Though I was sure Nash’s hand would have gone right through the reaper.
“Wait.” I hauled him back in spite of the weird look I got from some random stagehand in a black tee. “We can’t just trot across the stage without being seen.” Though, there were certainly times I wished I could go invisible. Like, during P.E. The girls’ basketball coach was out to get me, I was sure of it.
“And I don’t think I want to meet this super-reaper.” Nash stuffed his hands in his front pockets. “The garden variety’s weird enough.”
Plus, most reapers hold no fondness for
bean sidhes
. The combined natural abilities of a male and female
bean sidhe
—the potential to return a soul to its body—are in direct opposition with a reaper’s entire purpose in life. Or, the afterlife.
Tod was the rare exception to this mutual species aversion, by virtue of being both
bean sidhe
and reaper.
“Fine, but don’t expect me to pass on any pearls of wisdom she coughs up….” Tod’s gaze settled on me, and his full, perfect lips turned up into a wicked smile. He knew he had me; I was trying to learn everything I could about the Netherworld, to make up for living the first sixteen years of my life in total ignorance, thanks to my family’s misguided attempt to keep me safe. And as creeped-out as I was by Eden’s sudden, soulless death, I wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to learn something neither Tod nor Nash could teach me.
“Nash, please?” I pulled his hand from his pocket and wound my fingers through his. I would go without him, but I’d rather have his company, and I was pretty sure I’d get it. He wouldn’t leave me alone with Tod, because he didn’t entirely trust his undead brother.
Neither did I.
I saw Nash’s decision in the frown lines around his mouth before he nodded, so I stood on my toes to kiss him. Excitement tingled along the length of my spine and settled to burn lower when our lips touched, and when I pulled away, his hazel eyes churned with swirls of green and brown, a sure sign that a
bean sidhe
was feeling something strong. Not that humans could see it.
Nash nodded again to answer my unspoken question. “Yours are swirling, too.”
I dared a grin in spite of the solemn circumstances, and Tod rolled his eyes at our display. Then he stomped off silently to meet this “special” reaper.
The fluttering in my stomach settled into a heavy anchor of dread as we followed Tod behind the stage, dodging shell-shocked technicians and stagehands on our way to the opposite wing. I needed all the information I could find about the Netherworld to keep myself from accidentally stumbling into something dangerous, but I didn’t exactly look forward to meeting more reapers. Especially the creepy, intimidating woman swallowing the ominous life-source that had kept Eden up and singing for who knew how long.
“So what makes this reaper such a legend?” I whispered, walking between Nash and Tod, whose shoes still made no sound on the floor.
For a moment, Tod gaped at me like I’d just asked what made grass green. Then he seemed to remember my ignorance. “She’s ancient. The oldest reaper still reaping. Maybe the oldest reaper ever. No one knows what name she was born with, but back in ancient Rome she took on the name of the goddess of death. Libitina.”
I arched both brows at Tod. “So, you address the oldest, scariest grim reaper in history by a nickname?”
Tod shrugged, but I thought I saw him blush. Though, that could have been the red satin backdrop panels showing through his nearly translucent cheek. “I’ve never actually addressed her as anything. We haven’t officially met.”
“Great,” I breathed, rolling my eyes. We were accompanying Tod-the-reaper-fanboy to meet his hero. It couldn’t get any lamer without a
Star Trek
convention and an English-to-Klingon dictionary.
When we rounded the corner, my gaze found Libby just as she sucked the last bit of Demon’s Breath from the air. The end of the strand whipped up to smack her cheek before sliding between her pursed lips, and the ancient reaper swiped the back of one black-leather-clad arm across her mouth, as if to wipe a smudge of sauce from her face.
I didn’t want to know what kind of sauce Demon’s Breath swam in.
“There she is,” Tod said, and the eerie, awed quality of his voice drew my gaze to his face. He looked…shy.
My own intimidation faded in the face of the first obvious nerves I’d seen from the rookie reaper, and I couldn’t resist a grin. “Okay, let’s go.” I took Tod’s hand and had tugged him
two steps in Libby’s direction before his fingers suddenly faded out of existence around my own.
I stopped and glanced down, irritated to see that he had dialed both his appearance and his physical presence down to barely-there, to escape my grasp. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing a little dignity wouldn’t fix,” Tod snapped. “So could we please
not
mob the three-thousand-plus-year-old reaper like tweens at a boy-band concert?” He ran transparent hands over his equally transparent tee and marched toward Libby with his shoulders square, evidently satisfied that his composure was intact.
He grew a little more solid with each step, and I glanced around, afraid someone would notice him suddenly appearing in our midst. But when his shoes continued to make no sound, I realized he hadn’t stepped into human sight. Not that it mattered. All eyes were glued to the stage, where the doctor still worked tirelessly—and fruitlessly—on Eden.
We followed Tod, and I knew by the sudden confidence in Nash’s step that he could now see his brother. And that he was probably secretly hoping Tod would do or say something stupid in front of the foremost expert in his field.
We caught up with him as he stopped, and since they were the same height, Libby’s bright green eyes stared straight into Tod’s blue with enough intensity to make even me squirm. “Hi,” Tod started, and I had to give him credit for not stuttering.
My own tongue was completely paralyzed.
Libitina was very old, very experienced, and clearly very powerful—all obvious in her bearing alone. She was also so impossibly beautiful that I was suddenly embarrassed by the makeup I’d probably sweated off during the concert and the
long brown hair I could see frizzing on the edge of my vision, in spite of my efforts with a flatiron.
Libby wore a long, black leather trench coat, cinched at her tiny waist to show off slim hips. I would have said the coat was cliché for someone intimately involved with Death, except that as old as she was, she’d probably been wearing black leather much longer than it had been in vogue for hookers and superheroes alike.
Her hair was pulled back from her face in a severe ponytail that trailed tight, black curls halfway down her back. Her skin was dark and flawless, and so smooth I wanted to touch her cheek, just to assure myself she wasn’t as perfect as she looked. She couldn’t be.
Could she?
“Yes?” Libby said, her piercing gaze still trained on Tod. She hadn’t acknowledged either me or Nash, and I was suddenly sure that, like most reapers, she hated
bean sidhes
. Maybe we shouldn’t have tagged along after all.
Yet she hadn’t become invisible to us….
“My name is Tod, and I work for the local branch office.” He paused, and I was amused to realize Tod’s cheeks were blazing—and this time that had nothing to do with the stage backdrop. “Can I ask you a couple of questions?”
Libby scowled, and a chill shot up my spine. “You are dissatisfied with my services?” She bit off the ends of her words in anger, distorting an accent I couldn’t place, and we all three stepped back in unison, unwilling to stand in the face of her fury.
“No!” Tod held up both hands, and I was too busy choking on my own fear to be amused by his. “This has nothing to
do with the local office. I’m off duty tonight. I’m just curious. About the process…”
Libby’s thin, black brows arched, and I thought I saw amusement flicker behind her eyes. “Ask,” she said finally, and suddenly I liked her—even if she didn’t like
bean sidhes
—because she could easily have made Tod feel about an inch tall.