My Soul to Steal (23 page)

“Shut up. Laura’s bad hair day is the least of what you’ve done. Jeff’s car. Derek’s broken arms. Coach Rundell’s trashed office. Cammie’s torched mold spores… This school is the only safe, normal thing in my life, and Eastlake does
not
deserve to go down like this!”

“I know. That’s why I’m not doing it.” Sabine shrugged. “I could if I wanted to, but I kinda like it here. The food sucks,
but I’m passing with minimal effort and I have friends…” She gestured to me, and my mouth actually dropped open.

“I am not your friend.”

She gave me an infuriatingly good-natured roll of her dark eyes. “I think the definition of ‘friendship’ is open to a little interpretation from the fringe groups, Kaylee.”

I crossed my arms. “It’s really not.”

“Whatever. My point is that none of that stuff is my fault.”

I shook my head, thoroughly disgusted. “I
saw
you talking with half the people who’ve gone psycho!” And there was no telling how many private conversations I’d missed.

“Yeah. I was reading their fears. For later.” The
mara
uncrossed her arms and shrugged. “A girl’s gotta eat.” She sat on the edge of the nearest table, leaning forward with her palms against the wood. “I’ve been in your head. I’ve been
all over
your boyfriend. And I was messing with your best friend in the gym. But I didn’t hurt anybody. And I didn’t do any of that crazy shit you’re talking about.”

“And I should believe you because you’re just such a joy to be around?”

“Think about it, Kaylee. This isn’t fear-based. From what I can tell, all these newly converted psychos are running on pure jealousy, and that’s just not palatable for a
mara,
no matter how hungry I get.”

Crap. I hadn’t thought of that. But then, she couldn’t directly benefit from making Em distrust me, either, and that hadn’t stopped her.

“Fine. So you’re doing it for fun.”

Sabine’s grin was back, and I wanted to slap it off her face. But I wasn’t stupid enough to indulge that impulse. Again. “Well, there’s definitely a slapstick sort of lowbrow
entertainment value involved in watching your school fall apart at the seams. But a few laughs aren’t worth the effort it would take to orchestrate something like this myself. And anyway, my nightmares aren’t just food—they’re art. I take pride in that. But this isn’t art, Kaylee.” She spread her arms to take in the school around us. “This is nothing but…chaos. And as much as I enjoy upsetting the balance of your sad little existence, believe it or not, I don’t thrive on chaos.”

Chaos…

She was right.
Maras
don’t thrive on chaos—but hellions do.

Yet the violent frenzy all around us didn’t feel like Avari’s work—jealousy wasn’t his medium—and the only suspect that left was Sabine, no matter how artfully she wielded logic against me.

“So, what, you expect your pristine record to speak for itself? You’ve been arrested at least twice, expelled from two different schools, and were handed off from one foster family to the next for years. I think that says pretty clearly what you’re capable of.”

Sabine’s eyes narrowed and darkened. She stood and stepped closer, putting her face inches from mine, and for the first time, I notice that she was at least a couple of inches taller than I was. And now thoroughly pissed. “You Googled me?”

I shrugged. “I thought I should know what I was dealing with.”

“Then you should have asked me,” she growled through clenched teeth. “I got expelled the first time for punching a teacher who called me stupid in front of the whole class. He had it coming, and everyone knew it. Which is why he got fired and never pressed charges. I got expelled the second time for breaking into some stuck-up bitch’s locker to take back the
cell phone she stole from my jacket pocket and used to send dirty emails to the entire school from my account.”

“You really expect me to believe that?” Her story actually made sense, and I might really have believed it—if she hadn’t spent every moment since we’d met trying to make my life miserable. Logic said that I probably wasn’t her first victim.

“I don’t care what you believe. But just in case you still have a brain cell functioning behind that inch-thick skull, listen up. I’ve never lied to you, Kaylee. Not once. I may not always say what you want to hear, but it’s always the truth.”

With her last word, the first wave of fear slammed into me, so cold and strong I had to fight to suck in a breath. She’d opened her mental gates, and now the full force of the terror
maras
emanated naturally was washing over me in wave after bitter wave. “It’s
your
version of the truth,” I insisted, taking an involuntary step back when the black weight of my own fear threatened to drive me to my knees. “And that’s about as reliable as a politician’s promise.”

“Well, how ’bout a few truths you can trust?” She stepped forward again, and again I stepped back, watching shadows twist in her eyes, the silent reflection of every fear I’d ever felt. “Nash belongs with me, whether he knows it or not. You were nothing but a fleeting curiosity, and he’s already started getting over you.”

“Pathetic…” I spat, gasping for breath as the dark oblivion in her eyes swelled, threatening to swallow me whole. “You’re in denial, and it’s pathetic. And so are you. What, can’t you handle one little
bean sidhe
without channeling Freddy Krueger?”

Sabine’s brows arched high over black irises swimming around bottomless pupils. “You think I can’t rein it in?”
Without waiting for me to answer, she closed her eyes, and a second later the dark cloud of fear lifted. I could breathe again, and even the sun looked a little brighter.

“Better?” she snapped, malice sharp in her voice and in her gaze. She’d pulled it in, but that only meant that the concentration of anger inside her had doubled. Sabine was an angry dog on a leash—if I kept goading her, she’d pull free, and next time she might not be able to control it. “I can play nice if that’s all you can handle, but that won’t change the facts.” She took another step, and this time when I backed up, my spine hit the corner of another picnic table. “If I’m in denial, why are
you
the one he gave up, memory by memory?”

“He had no other choice…” I made myself stand straighter and maintain eye contact.

“There are always choices. The truth is that you’re what he was willing to give up.”

“No.” I shook my head. I couldn’t believe that. I just…couldn’t.

“Oh, yeah? Then why is it he can’t remember what it felt like to kiss you for the first time, but he can relive every single time he touched me, whenever he wants? I’m still up there.” She touched her temple, eyes narrowed in fury, hand steady with conviction. “And I’m still in here.” She laid that hand over her own heart, and I felt mine crack a little. “And I’ve been other places you were too scared to go when you had the chance. And now it’s too late.”

I couldn’t breathe, and this time that had nothing to do with any fear leaking from her abusive, rotting soul. I couldn’t breathe because she was right. He’d given me up, but he’d kept her. All of her.

Why would he do that?

Sabine’s brows arched again, and she leaned down to peer
into my eyes. “You get it now, don’t you? He can still feel that initial thrill from the very first time we touched.”

She ran her hand slowly down from my shoulder, and my chest felt like it was caving in. I jerked back, but she only laughed. “It was innocent, at first. Fresh and new. Exciting, like if my heart beat any faster, it’d explode. And he still feels that, every time he thinks about it.”

I shook my head and backed around the corner of the table.

“What does he feel when he thinks about you, Kay? You should ask him. Or I could just tell you. He feels nothing. You’re a big numb spot on his heart, and all he feels now when you’re around is guilt and pain. You’re killing him, and for what? So you can cling to something he didn’t care enough about to preserve? You should let him go so he can find peace.”

And with that, my anger flared to life again, incinerating doubt and self-pity. “I don’t know how to be any clearer about this.
Nash doesn’t want you
. Not like you want him. And getting me out of your way isn’t going to change that, because I’m not the obstacle in your path, Sabine. You’re standing in your own way.”

That one great truth strengthened me, and I stood taller, itching to show her what she refused to see. “You’re obsessed with him. And not even with the real Nash. You’re in love with the memory of someone you knew two and a half years ago, but you’re both different people now, and here’s the thing that’s killing you: he’s moved on. You want to believe that he never really got over you. That if you could just push me out of the way, he’d remember what the two of you had together. But you said it yourself, Sabine—he never forgot. He remem
bers exactly what it was like to touch you, and love you, and know you loved him back. And he still picked me.”

Sabine flushed bright red. Shadows swam over her eyes, and my skin prickled with the cold concentration of terror accumulating inside her, like a balloon, about to explode. Her right hand curled into a fist, and I braced myself for the blow. But before she could swing, the lunch room door burst open and students flooded the quad, carrying trays and drinks, and talking about whatever cafeteria disaster had cut our lunch time in half.

I wasn’t sure the sudden crowd would actually stop either her physical or psychological blows, but Sabine dropped her fist and glared at me like she could see right past my heart and into my soul. “You’re right,” she whispered, anger shining along with something deeper and more haunted in her eyes. “We’re not friends.” Then she spun around and stomped toward the building.

And the really weird thing was that as the rest of the lunch crowd spread out around me, I could only watch Sabine go, fighting a deep bruising ache in my chest, just like the one I felt every time I lied to my dad.

“H
EY
,” N
ASH SAID
, pulling even with me in the hall on the way to my fifth period French class. “We need to—”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

He frowned and reached for me, but I pulled away. “Talk about what? Did something happen?”

I clutched my books and kept walking. “Doesn’t something always happen?” After four months of hellion-induced pandemonium, I could hardly remember what my life had been like before I’d known about the Netherworld.

“Specifically…?”

I sighed and stopped to lean against the nearest locker. I was exhausted, physically and emotionally, and I was too worried about Alec’s serial body snatcher and the unchecked series of school disasters to concentrate on class work. Or to dwell on Sabine, and whether or not I’d falsely accused her of trying to bring the school to its knees.

“I had a fight with Sabine.”

“Again?” Nash forced a grin, but I wasn’t buying it.
“It couldn’t have been too bad—your face is intact. What happened?”

But if the past week had taught me anything, it was that if I accused her of something, he would automatically come to her defense—another point in favor of Tod’s “they’re meant for each other” conviction. So I tried a different tactic. “Don’t you think this is weird? I mean, the school’s in total chaos. Everyone’s gone crazy.” I hesitated, giving him time to infer my point. But he only frowned harder. “Something’s wrong, Nash, and I don’t think it’s human in origin.”

And the truth was that I had no idea how to even trace the source of the problem on my own. Of my two prime suspects, one was physically inaccessible by virtue of a hellish alternate reality, and the other was socially inaccessible, due to the fact that she now wanted to knock my head clean off my body.

“Agreed,” he said at last, and I actually sighed with relief.

“Okay, I’m not saying Sabine’s behind all of it, necessarily.” Though that’s what I’d believed an hour earlier. “But she’s definitely involved somehow.”

“Kaylee…”

“Just listen. I
saw
her talking to several of the kids who’ve gone off the deep end, and she’s not exactly a social butterfly.” Sabine was more like a social cockroach, skittering around in the dark, making trouble. “She has Coach Peterson for geography.” I’d verified that during English, with one of her classmates. “Also, I swear I saw her in Mrs. Cook’s class the other day, on my way to the bathroom.”

Mrs. Cook was the teacher who’d lost it in the teachers’ lounge.

“Kaylee, there could be a hundred people who have both Cook and Coach Peterson. That doesn’t prove anything.”

“No, but this didn’t start until she came to Eastlake,” I insisted.

Nash put a hand on my arm and stared straight down into my eyes. “Your turn to listen. This has nothing to do with Sabine.” He glanced around the hall, then pulled me into the alcove near the restroom entrances. “This is a blitz. It has to be. I’ve never personally seen one, but my mom says they’re not that uncommon. The news usually reports them as mass suicides—like that Jonestown thing back in the seventies?—or mass hysteria, or mob mentality. There’ve been witch hunts and lynchings and riots. And if this one goes unchecked, eventually Eastlake will devour itself whole and the building will crumble into a pile of smoldering bricks. Or something less dramatic, but equally bad.”

“Wait.” I blinked, struggling to absorb so much information so fast. “You told your mom about this?”

“No, I didn’t figure it out until lunch. She told me all about blitzes when we studied herd behavior in psychology.”

“So…what exactly is a blitz?”

“It’s a full-scale assault on a specific population by some force in the Netherworld. In this case, that specific population is our school, obviously. But it has to be driven by a
big
force, because… Well, you know how hellions and some of the minor Netherworld creatures feed on the bleed-through of human energy?”

“Yeah.” Unfortunately, I was intimately familiar with that process.

“Well, to support a blitz, this Netherworld force has to be able to do the opposite. He has to push enough energy into our world to affect human behavior. Or at least our state of mind.”

Which sounded exactly like what was happening here.

“So…who could have that kind of power? A hellion?” Avari was the obvious suspect.

“Not on his own. But with help, yeah. I think it’s possible.” Nash sighed and glanced at his feet before looking up to meet my gaze. “Avari’s the dominant hellion in our area—well, the Netherworld version of our area—and his entire existence is powered by greed. There’s no way he’d let something like this go down without at least getting in on the profit. Which means he’s involved, but not acting alone.”

“What kind of profit are we talking about?” I asked, as pieces of the puzzle floated around in my head, looking for some place to fit.

“Energy, probably. There’d be lots of it to go around, with this large an operation. And with energy comes power.”

“Would this blitz be enough to…boost his abilities?” I asked, thinking of his recent cameo in my nightmare.

“Yeah, I guess. Why?” When I didn’t answer, Nash stepped closer, glancing around to make sure no one was near. The bell would ring any second, but another tardy seemed pretty petty compared to an entire school under attack by at least one hellion.

“I think Avari’s had an upgrade. He was in my nightmare. And I don’t mean that I had a dream about him. He was
there
. Controlling it. Hurting me. And I think he was feeding from my fear.”

“Kaylee, that’s impossible. Hellions can’t mess with your dreams, and that’s not how they feed.”

I shrugged. “The only other person who can do that is Sabine. But this nightmare didn’t feel like her and she hasn’t claimed credit, which seems to be a point of pride with her. So who else could it be?”

Nash scowled as he thought, and I saw the exact moment
understanding washed over him. “Shit. It was Sabine. Well, it was Avari
using
Sabine. If he can possess a hypnos, he can possess a
mara,
and he’d have access to anything she can do while he occupies her body. The tricky part would be catching her while she sleeps.”

“Uh-oh.” Avari was getting too strong, too fast, and we had no clue how to stop him. “Why didn’t she say anything?”

“I don’t think she knows. If she did, she’d tell me,” Nash insisted. “She’d be beyond pissed, and out for blood.”

I couldn’t blame her there. Avari was using Sabine, just like he’d used me. As badly as I hated to absolve her of any guilt, she was a victim in this—a selfish, deluded, boyfriend-stealing victim, but a victim nonetheless.

“What I can’t figure out is how he even knew she was there to use…” Nash wondered aloud.

Crap.
“Um…that part’s my fault.” I shrugged miserably at the realization that I’d accidentally dragged the
mara
into this, then blamed the whole thing on her. “He masqueraded as Alec a couple of times before we figured it out, and one of those times, he heard me and Emma…complaining about Sabine.”

Nash’s eyebrows rose, like he might ask for details, then he apparently thought better of it. “Okay, I guess that’s understandable.”

“So, if he can possess her and feed through nightmares, or possess Alec and feed through any kind of sleep…would that give him enough energy to power this blitz?”

“I doubt it. He’d probably recoup the energy possession requires by feeding while he’s in the host body, but that’s not going to be enough for something this big.” Nash’s widespread arms took in the whole school.

“So, how is he running this thing?”

“Well, once he got it started, it would be self-sustaining. The chaos he causes would bleed through even stronger than regular human energy, and he could easily feed from it. But as for how he got it going in the first place…” Nash could only shrug. “I don’t know. But we have to make it stop.”

I
KNEW FIFTH PERIOD
was going to suck the moment Mrs. Brown turned off the lights. Because of the chaos—which everyone had noticed, but no one could explain—she’d decided to ditch her lesson plan in favor of something requiring a little less concentration from her half-traumatized students. The class let loose a universal groan when she pulled out an old documentary on the history of French architecture.

It was all I could do to keep my eyes open when the monotonous narration began.

T
HE NARRATOR DRONES ON
about art nouveau, complete with pictures and clips of buildings I’ve never even heard of. I don’t care about art nouveau. I don’t care about art old-school, either. I care about staying awake and surviving another school day, so I can find and eliminate the source of the pandemonium.

And suddenly, my exhausted mind finds that word hilarious.
Pandemonium
roughly translates to “all demons,” and that seems weirdly fitting, considering Avari’s relentless intrusion into my life, and into my body, and now into my school.

All demons, all the time. That’s what my headstone will read, if Avari ever gets his way.

Mrs. Brown stands at the front of the room, and for a second, I’m convinced she’s read my mind. Or noticed that I’m not paying attention. But instead of yelling at me in
French, she stares at the back of the room, her eyes oddly unfocused.

And that’s when the scream explodes from my mouth. It’s too hard and too fast to stop this time, and I am strangling on the vicious sound. Choking on it, as it scrapes my throat raw.

I taste blood on the back of my tongue and everyone stares at me. I can’t hear the film anymore. Can’t hear whatever they’re shouting as some gather around me and others back away. I can only hear my own screech.

No one notices Mrs. Brown. No one else is watching when she collapses, and finally I understand. She’s dead, and her soul cries out to me, clinging to the life she no longer has, begging to be held in place.

I want to help her, but I can’t. Not without damning someone else. So I try to close my mouth, but the scream is too strong, and my jaw too weak. I claw at my throat in desperation. My fingers come away bloody, and there is a new layer of pain. But still I scream, and now I can see Mrs. Brown’s soul, hovering over her body, a slowly swirling grayish form—just a representation of her actual soul, Harmony explained to me once. You can’t see a real soul, and you probably wouldn’t want to, she’d insisted.

But then the fog rolls in, and the real terror begins. Gray mist rises all around me. My heart trips over some beats, skipping others entirely. The fog obscures dingy floor tiles and scratched desk legs. I slap one hand over my mouth, but the sound leaks out, anyway. Thirty sets of shoes disappear into the gray. I try to back away from it, but there’s nowhere to go. It’s everywhere.

NO!
I won’t cross over. I won’t!

But the scream has a mind of its own. The scream wants me to go and the fog is too thick to fight, so I close my eyes and pretend it’s not real. And only once my voice fades to an ineffective croak do I open my eyes again.

This time when I scream, nothing comes out.

I
KEPT MY EYES
squeezed shut, afraid to look. The desktop was cold beneath my folded arms, and I could feel the crack in the seat of my chair that pinched my leg when I wore shorts. Both of those facts should have meant everything was fine. That I was still in my darkened classroom, with twenty-nine other students feigning interest in the history of French architecture.

But silence doesn’t lie.

There was no tapping of Courtney Webber’s feet as she listened to her iPod instead of watching the film. No scratching of Gary Yates’s pencil against paper as he scrambled to finish his history essay before last period. And certainly no criminally dull narrator droning on about angles and perspective and rebellion against classical architecture.

My heart thudded against my sternum. I sat up, gripping the sides of my desk with my eyes still squeezed shut. I didn’t want to look. But not looking would be stupid. Not looking could get me killed. So I opened my eyes and took in the differences—the things that hadn’t bled through the barrier into this warped, twisted version of my own world.

An empty classroom. The thirty-two empty desks, devoid of scratches and names scribbled in permanent marker, gave the room an abandoned feel—the high school version of a ghost town. A barren metal teacher’s desk sat up front, by the door. There was no whiteboard. No posters of le Louvre, la tour
Eiffel, or le Centre Pompidou. There was no ancient television on a cart, playing an outdated, staticky video cassette.

The Netherworld
. If I’d had any doubt, it disappeared with my first glance at the educational void surrounding me. I’d crossed over. In my sleep.

No!
It takes intent to cross into the Netherworld, and I had no intent. I had the
opposite
of intent. Yet there I was, of someone else’s volition.

Sabine
.

She was mad at me. She was
pissed,
and I couldn’t blame her. And she alone had the ability to mess with my dreams. Well, she and Avari, but this felt like Sabine. It was cruel on a personal level—making me dream that my wail wanted me to cross over—and she knew my fears. She knew there was little in either world that scared me more than winding up in the Netherworld.

Focus, Kaylee
. I had to get back to my own world, but I couldn’t just cross over again in the middle of class. It was entirely possible that no one had seen me disappear from French, thanks to the darkened classroom and bored or sleeping students. Assuming I hadn’t actually screamed my head off, in life as in my dream. But the chances of thirty people also missing my reentry were slim to none, and I wasn’t exactly swimming in good luck.

I’d have to find someplace unpopulated in both worlds before I could cross over. And I’d have to find that place without being eaten, captured, or ritualistically dismembered by any of the Netherworld natives.