Authors: Rachel Vincent
Luca was out cold in a twin bed, covered only in a thin sheet,
which I could see easily in the red glow of his alarm clock numbers and the
light from the bathroom across the hall.
Was Luca afraid of the dark?
I tiptoed silently to the side of his bed, but when I bent over
to shake him awake, the broken dagger blades scratched the inside of my jeans. I
pulled the blade out before I could accidentally slice open the seat of my own
pants, then shook Luca awake with my other hand.
His eyes opened groggily, and that surprised me. For some
reason, I’d expected a boy with such an intimate connection to death to be a
lighter sleeper. It took him several seconds to focus on my face, and another
one to recognize it.
“Kaylee?”
“Yeah. It’s me.”
And suddenly he was wide-awake. “What are you...?” His gaze
fell on the broken dagger, which must have looked threatening from his
perspective—flat on his back in the middle of the night with a dead girl
standing over him—because he screamed like a little kid.
“Relax. I just need some help.”
“What happened? Was I possessed?”
It took me a second to figure out what he was talking about,
and why my reassurance had failed to reassure him.
Alec.
Like the rest of my friends and family, Luca knew that I’d
killed Alec when I’d mistaken him for Avari. I’d killed him in the middle of the
night, with the very dagger I now held inches from Luca’s stomach. By total
coincidence.
“No!” I reached back and slid the dagger into my waistband
again, to get it out of sight. “I just need you to find something for me.”
Luca exhaled, then glanced at his alarm clock. “It’s two in the
morning.”
“I know. Sorry.”
He leaned over and turned on his bedside lamp, then tossed off
the sheet, and I had to admit that Sophie had good taste. The necromancer was
hot. Which I could tell, because he slept in nothing but boxer briefs.
“You may as well sit down and let me put on some pants.” Luca
knelt to pick up a pair of flannel pj bottoms from the floor at the foot of his
bed. I pulled the dagger from my waistband again, then set it in my lap as I
sank into his desk chair and glanced around his room, which was easier to see in
the light.
He had a beanbag chair, which made me miss mine. His held three
different soccer balls. There was a small TV on top of a chest of drawers, but
no gaming system that I could see. Four different pictures of Sophie were wedged
into the space between his mirror and its frame.
I suspected she’d stuck them there herself, but the fact that
he’d left them said a lot.
“You sleep here alone?” I swiveled in his chair, one foot on
the ground for stability.
He sat on the end of his bed, facing me, his bare feet dangling
an inch from the floor. “I practically live here alone. Aunt Madeline doesn’t
need to eat or sleep. I suspect she only rented this place for me.”
“That must get lonely.” I was lucky enough to have my dad, my
dog, and now Emma to keep me company, even in the afterlife.
Luca shrugged. “I really only sleep here. Sophie and I...” He
shrugged, and I could fill in for myself the part he’d left out. He spent as
much time at my cousin’s house as Tod spent at mine. The only difference was
that they didn’t bring the party to his place after my uncle Brendon went to
sleep. Though they might, if they could do it on the sly. “So, what’s up, Kay?
Though something tells me I don’t really want to know.”
“Have you ever been to reaper headquarters?”
“Nope.”
“You know where it is, though, right?”
He shrugged. “I could make an educated guess. A very educated
guess. The PhD of guesses, really. There’s only one spot in the city where more
than a dozen dead people hang out 24/7. And those are only the ones
off-shift.”
“Great. Do you happen to know where Levi’s office is in that
building?”
“Again, I can only guess. I know where he spends most of his
time....”
“And that would be?”
Luca frowned, like he was just now awake enough to have
questions of his own. “Why? What are you doing?”
“Just a favor for a friend.”
“Without Tod? You wouldn’t need my help if he knew what you
were up to.”
“He’s my boyfriend, not my dad.” Besides, Tod had warned me
early in our relationship that he was no role model. I was starting to realize I
might not be, either. “Anyway, I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m not even
breaking any rules.” Taking back what should still belong to me wasn’t really
stealing, right? “I just need to get something from Levi.”
“Something he doesn’t know about? Something that requires a
scary-looking knife?”
Irritation flared in my chest. “Why do you care? I’m not doing
anything wrong, and no one will get hurt. Haven’t you figured that out about me
yet?”
But I could see the answer in his eyes, and it stung. He knew I
wouldn’t intentionally hurt anyone. But he also knew that my friends and
acquaintances had a shorter-than-normal life expectancy.
“Just help me. Please. I’ll owe you.”
Luca looked intrigued at that. “Fine. Levi’s usually in a room
on the third floor. Northwest corner of the building. I’m pretty sure that’s his
office.”
“Is he there now?”
Luca closed his eyes for a second, and his forehead wrinkled,
like he was thinking. Or seeing something I’d never be able to see. “No. He’s
down the hall with another reaper. And Tod.”
Crap.
What was Tod doing in the
reaper building, in the middle of his shift?
“Thanks.” I stood and replaced the dagger beneath my waistband.
“I gotta go.”
“Okay, so when you say you’ll owe—”
I blinked out of his room before he could finish his sentence.
We could work out the details at school.
Chapter Ten
Blinking into the reaper headquarters building was like
playing hide-and-seek in pitch-dark—I had no idea where I’d wind up.
Fortunately, I remembered to take the commonsense precaution Tod had taught me.
I blinked out of Luca’s room and into the reaper building in incorporeal form.
That wouldn’t keep reapers from seeing me, if there were any in the room when I
appeared, but it would keep me from becoming a permanent piece of whatever
furniture my arrival collided with. Which was good, because I landed in the
middle of a table.
Fortunately, the room—some kind of break room, with a coffee
bar and a couple of vending machines—was empty.
I stayed incorporeal, so that if I saw anyone coming before I
was spotted, I could step through a door and into another room. Where I had an
equal chance of being seen, come to think of it.
Reaper headquarters was
not
a good
place for a dead girl to hang out.
The hall outside the break room was empty, but I could hear
voices coming from several of the rooms that opened into the hall. The plaques
outside the doors read things like “The West End” and “Downtown” and “DFW.” As
near as I could tell, those were zones of the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, each
of which had obviously been assigned an office and probably a crew of
reapers.
Would a rookie like Tod have an office?
The door at the end of the hall—at the northwest corner, unless
my navigation was off—was a door marked “Administration.”
Bingo.
I tiptoed down the hall, my heart pounding from nerves, like it
had when I was still alive, until I realized that the more suspicious I looked,
the greater my chance of being identified as a trespasser. But if I walked
through the hall like I belonged there, maybe anyone who saw me would assume I
was a reaper.
After all, who’d be stupid enough to break into reaper
headquarters?
Well, me, obviously. But I tried the confidence approach
anyway, and I stuck with it even when my pulse began to race like it hadn’t
since the day I’d died. I walked past two open doors, through which I caught
glimpses of reapers at work. Or on break. I couldn’t really tell the difference,
since no one was swinging a scythe or donning a long black cape.
The other rooms were empty, and when I got to the end of the
hall, I walked right through Levi’s door, trusting that Luca was right. That the
boss wasn’t home.
When I saw the empty room, I actually exhaled with relief. Then
I jogged across the good-size room and snatched the letter opener from its
obviously custom-made wooden stand.
The moment my hand touched the metal, I knew Madeline had been
right. It hummed against my flesh, more a feeling than a sound—the soul trapped
inside calling out to me.
With the letter opener in my left hand, I held the broken
dagger in my right, ready to make the switch. Until I realized I had no idea how
to do that. Calling the soul from its current home should be easy, but leading
it into the dagger? I wasn’t sure how to do that. Normally, the soul would be
attracted to the dagger on its own, because hellion-forged steel seems to call
to displaced souls. But both the letter opener and my dagger were made of the
same material, and I had no male
bean sidhe
around
to help guide the soul.
Nor did I have time to stand around and think for very long.
So, with my mouth closed, to keep most of the volume in, I let just a thin
ribbon of my
bean sidhe
wail leak from my throat,
calling to the displaced soul. That used to be a very difficult task for me. I’d
only known my true species for eight months, and since then I’d learned what I
could do mostly through trial and error. And a little trial by fire. And a lot
of help from Harmony, the only other female
bean
sidhe
I knew.
She’s the one who’d taught me to call for a soul without
letting loose the full power of my scream, which humans found painful, at the
very least.
After less than a second, the soul within the letter opener
began to leak out in a thin stream of foglike substance, attracted to the
muffled version of my soul song. But I still had no idea how to get it into the
dagger. I tried waving the severed blades through the ethereal stream of...soul,
but nothing happened. My rough chopping motions sliced through the disembodied
soul, which flowed right back together afterward.
Finally, when I heard footsteps outside Levi’s office, and my
pulse began to race in panic, I set the letter opener back on its stand and
backed away from it, still singing softly for the soul. It followed me, trailing
out from Levi’s “conversation piece” until it hung in the air. When the soul,
the dagger, and I were all as far from the desk as we could get without walking
through the door, I let my wail fade into silence.
The soul hung in the air for just a second, and when I held the
dagger up near it, the soul soaked into the hellion-forged steel on its own. To
my immense relief.
I was about to blink out of reaper headquarters and into my
room to wake Emma up and tell her the good news, when I heard voices headed my
way through the door. Very familiar voices...
“Any leads?” Levi asked, and my heart nearly ruptured my
sternum in an attempt to flee my body. If I didn’t leave immediately, I would
get caught. But before I could go, Tod answered his boss’s question.
“No, but I still have a few more people to talk to. Have any of
the souls turned up yet?”
“No. He’s either selling them outside our district, or he’s
holding on to them. I’ve alerted the managers of all the closest districts, but
no one’s seen or heard from him so far.”
They were talking about Thane. They
had
to be. Tod was tracking him. Was that why he’d been out of reach
so much recently? Why hadn’t he told me he was hunting down my mother’s
murderer?
My
murderer. I would have helped!
But then, that’s probably exactly why he hadn’t told me. To
keep me from putting myself in danger. Tod never stood in my way, but he didn’t
go out of his way to show me new risks I could take, either. And I couldn’t
really blame him for that.
When the footsteps got too close to Levi’s office, I blinked
out reluctantly, wishing I could have heard the rest of the conversation.
In my room, I set the broken dagger on top of my dresser, then
turned on my bedside lamp and shook my best friend’s shoulder.
“Em. Wake up.”
“Mmmm?” Her eyes fluttered open, then closed, then opened
again. She pushed thin brown hair back from her face and sat up slowly. “What’s
wrong?”
“Nothing.” I sank onto the edge of my own bed, facing her.
“Nothing new, anyway. I got it.” I couldn’t help smiling from ear to ear. “I got
a soul for Traci’s baby.”
“You did? How?” Em was wide-awake now. She tossed back her
covers and crossed her legs beneath her on the mattress. “Where is it?”
I pointed at my dresser. “It’s in the dagger. I kind of...took
it from Levi’s office. He doesn’t know yet.” I was hoping he wouldn’t figure out
the incubus soul was missing for a very long time, and that when he did, I
wouldn’t be the first suspect to come to mind. Hopefully lots of people were
envious of his “conversation piece.”
Em stared at the dagger, which was thin in profile from across
the room. “How? Whose soul is it?”
“That’s the best part. It’s Beck’s. Traci’s baby can inherit
his father’s soul! No one else has to die so he can live!”
But Em’s expression fell suddenly, and I knew what she was
thinking, because I’d had a very similar thought. “Until he needs to feed.” She
suddenly seemed much less sure of what we’d agreed to without Traci’s emotions
there to syphon. “How many will die then?”
“None.” I kicked off my shoes and folded my feet beneath me. “I
can’t let that happen. I’m hoping Traci’s baby will be like Sabine, in a way.”
In several ways, actually. More ways than I really cared to think about. “He’ll
have to learn to eat without killing, but first he’ll have to learn to control
his charm long enough to find girls who actually, legitimately
want
to be with him. Maybe if we help Traci raise
him—teach him—he’ll be able to control his appetite like Sabine does. Maybe even
better
than Sabine does.”
Maybe he wouldn’t have to actually
touch
anyone to feed....
Tod didn’t think that was much of a possibility, but he hadn’t
called it an impossibility, either. And I was personally acquainted with more
living, breathing impossibilities than I could count at the moment. My very
existence was one of them. As was Tod’s. And it was worth a shot, if we were
willing to make sure the teen incubus didn’t accidentally hurt anyone while he
was learning his limits.
“So...how do we...make it happen? How do we get the soul from
your dagger into the baby?”
“I’m not sure, but I don’t think we can do that until he’s
actually born.
Very shortly
after he’s born. And I’m
really hoping that Tod and I—” or my dad or Nash or my uncle “—can just install
the soul in him, like we did for you.”
Maybe it would be that easy.
Please
let it be that easy...
“So, can I tell Traci?”
“No! She doesn’t remember any of what we told her, remember?
We’ll have to make another disclosure, without Harmony’s forget-me water, later
on. Closer to the birth. For now, no one else needs to know about this. But I
had to tell you. I couldn’t let you worry about your nephew’s soul for the next
six months or so.” Especially considering that she was still going to be
worrying about her sister’s health that whole time.
* * *
Wednesday at school was blissfully uneventful—for the
first time all week, no hellions showed up at Eastlake. Sabine seemed to be
playing nice for once, only feeding Sophie’s and Emma’s fears as necessary,
careful not to take things too far, at least that I could tell.
Tod showed up early for lunch, so we had some alone time in the
quad, visible to no one, while we waited for the rest of the group to show up.
And I realized as we ate that it had been nearly twenty-four hours since the
Hudson brothers had been intentionally snippy with one another.
Maybe their relationship was starting to heal.
With that thought on my mind and a relatively peaceful day
behind me, I went home right after school, feeling additionally fortunate that
the theater where I worked most afternoons had given me a couple of weeks off to
mourn Emma, who’d worked there, too.
Maybe I could get Emily hired.... That would be at least one
part of Em’s life that I could give back to her.
Emma had stayed after school to meet with the guidance
counselor—something to do with being a new student—and Sabine and Nash had
promised to give her a ride home, so I had the house to myself for the first
time in weeks.
I was reaching for the remote control, intending to scroll
through the menu for an action movie, when my gaze caught on the blinking red
light on our answering machine.
Weird.
We hardly ever used the home
phone, because both my dad and I had cell phones. Even Em had a new one, on our
family plan.
I dropped the remote on the coffee table and crossed the room.
That’s the problem with answering machines and home phones—you have to actually
get up to go use them. I pressed the button, and my dad’s boss started speaking,
asking if he was okay and why he hadn’t called in sick. Or answered his
cell.
I tried not to panic. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility
that my dad might skip work, considering everything he’d been through recently.
Everything
I’d
put him through. It wasn’t much like
him not to at least call in sick, though.
“Dad?” I pressed the button to save his boss’s message, then
glanced into the kitchen to confirm that it was empty. That he wasn’t lying on
the floor having a heart attack or convulsion. He was still relatively young for
a
bean sidhe,
but you never know....
“Hey, Dad? Are you here?” I checked the garage, the bathroom,
and even my bedroom before heading into his room at the end of the hall. The
last room in the house.
My father’s bed was made. His curtains were closed. His clothes
were folded and still sitting on the chair in the corner, where I’d left them
that morning—I felt bad about him getting stabbed by a demon, so I was doing
more chores than usual, but I drew the line at putting his clothes in his
dresser.
I was about to leave the room when I noticed my dad’s cell
phone lying on his pillow. I picked it up and pressed a button to wake up the
screen, then froze. Staring. I couldn’t think past the horror of what I saw on
the screen. My father’s cell phone background had been changed to a picture of
him, bound and evidently unconscious, sitting on the floor of a room I didn’t
recognize. Propped up on his lap was a sign written in unidentifiable and
strangely gloppy ink—
please
let it be ink—in
handwriting I didn’t recognize.
The sign read, “Come and find me.”
On the edge of the photo, less than a foot from his shoe, was a
familiar green vine. I zoomed in on the photo to be sure. To confirm my worst
fear.
Sure enough, the serrated edges of the leaves on that vine were
bloodred. The thorns between the leaves were very thin and at least an inch
long. Crimson creeper only grows in one place.
The Netherworld.
My shock lasted for about a minute and a half. Then there was
another fraction of a moment when I wondered how on earth Avari had gotten to my
father in the human world. But then I realized that “how” didn’t matter. There
would probably always be some minion with crossover potential willing to do the
hellion’s bidding for a price.