Книга - With All My Soul

With All My Soul
Rachel Vincent


What does it mean when your school is voted the most dangerous in America? It’s time to kick some hellion butt… After not-really-surviving her junior year (after all, she did die), Kaylee Cavanaugh has vowed to take back her school from the hellions causing all the trouble. She’s going to find a way to turn the incarnations of Avarice, Envy and Vanity and the rest on each other.And so she—and her gang— make plans to protect her friends and finish this war, once and forever. But then she meets Wrath. And Kaylee realises that she’s closer to the edge than she’s ever been. Especially when one more person she loves is taken….












Praise for RACHEL VINCENT’sSOUL SCREAMERS series


‘Just think Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Twilight.’ — Lovereading

‘A fantastic fun-filled rush of a book’

—Girls Without a Bookshelf

‘You’ve got to love it when a series gets better

with each book.’ —YA Book Reads

‘Twilight fans will love it.’ —Kirkus Reviews

‘Awesome with a side of awesome’ —Mostly Reading YA

‘I’m so excited about this series.’ —The Eclectic Book Lover

‘A book like this is one of the reasons that I add authors to my auto-buy list.’ —TeensReadToo.com




‘I have a plan, Em. A good one.’


‘I know you do. I’m sorry.’ She shoved limp brown hair back from her face and sat again with her glass. ‘I just…I attended my own funeral today. There’s just no way to improve a day that started with throwing clods of dirt on your own coffin.’

‘I know.’ My hand tightened around Tod’s. I hadn’t seen myself buried, but I had been…well…murdered. Sacrificed, in fact. As a virgin.

Cliché? Sure. Painful? Hell yes.

Reversible?

Nope.


Also available fromRachel Vincent

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Soul Screamers MY SOUL TO TAKE MY SOUL TO SAVE MY SOUL TO KEEP MY SOUL TO STEAL IF I DIE BEFORE I WAKE



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With

All

My

Soul


Rachel Vincent






www.miraink.co.uk (http://www.miraink.co.uk)


Ending any series is hard. Ending this series has been particularly hard for me, both creatively and emotionally. I’ve been working with Kaylee and her friends and family since January of 2008. We’ve been through seven novels and several novellas together. Kaylee and the gang have lived in three different houses with me, in three different states. I’ve spent more time in the Soul Screamers world than in either of my adult series to date.

Saying goodbye has been bittersweet. But Kaylee has grown up and I’ve grown up a little bit with her, I think.

This book is dedicated to Kaylee, who’s suffered through so much for our entertainment. She’s been a good sport—a fighter to the end—and it has been my pleasure to finally give her the happy ending she deserves. (Don’t peek! I promise, you’ll hate yourself for it later…)

And…

This book is dedicated to every reader who’s ever written to ask me for a release date, a spoiler or a snippet of the text. My words may have brought Kaylee to life, but your interest kept her going.

Thank you all.




ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


Thanks to Natashya Wilson and the rest of Harlequin Teen for launching the Teen line with Soul Screamers and for supporting Kaylee the whole way.

Thanks to my agent, Merrilee Heifetz, for making things happen.

Thanks to my critique partner, Rinda Elliott, for untold hours plotting, and whining, and planning over the phone. I hope we get to do all that in person very soon.

Thanks to No. 1, who sees the crazy, frazzled writer my official author photos hide well. Thanks for knowing when to offer coffee, when to make fajitas, and when to back quietly away from the office door. You’ve made this possible.

Thanks most of all to my editor, Mary-Theresa Hussey, for guidance, support, enthusiasm, and—most importantly—for smiley faces in the margins.




1


I used to hate the fact that my world is built on half-truths, held together with white lies. My life itself is an illusion requiring constant effort to maintain. I lie better than almost anyone I’ve ever met. But if I know the truth about anything, it’s this: when people say the devil is in the details, they have no idea how right they are.…

“It was a nice service, right?” My best friend, Emma, smoothed the front of her simple black dress, both brows furrowed in doubt. She shifted her weight to her right foot and her heel sank half an inch into the soft ground. “I mean, as far as funerals go, it could have been worse. People cried.” She shrugged, staring out at the slowly departing crowd. “This would have been awkward if no one had cried.”

It was awkward anyway. Funerals are always awkward, especially in my social circle, where the definition of “death” is under constant reevaluation.

“It was a lovely service, Em.” I watched as people fled the open grave in slow-motion retreat, eager to be gone but reluctant to let it show. There were teachers, shell-shocked but in control, looking out of place without their desks and whiteboards. Parents, looking helpless and scared. Classmates in dark dresses, black slacks, and uncomfortable shoes, most in the same clothes they’d worn to the past few funerals.

We were all much too familiar with the routine by now. Whispered names and details. A day off for mourning. Excused absences for the viewing. Counselors on call for grieving students during every class period. And finally, the funeral, where we said goodbye to yet another classmate most of us had known for most of our lives.

I was one of those who’d cried, even though I was among the few who knew that the star of the show—the recently deceased herself—was actually still with us. Right next to me, in fact. A guest at her own funeral.

Sabine leaned closer, Nash’s hand clasped in her right one, because her left was still encased in a cast. A curtain of thick, dark hair fell over half her face, shielding her from most of the thinning crowd. “So, seeing yourself in a coffin wasn’t awkward? ’Cause it was awkward for me, and I’m not the one being buried today.”

“Oh, no, the viewing was totally horrible,” Em admitted, her brown eyes wide. Those eyes were all that was left of her, other than her soul. Everything else was Lydia’s. Thin, angular face. Petite bones and slim build, similar to my own. Limp brown hair. Freckles. Feet that didn’t quite fit into Em’s favorite pair of shoes, stolen from her own closet while her mother and sisters shopped for her casket. “But the funeral itself—that was nice, don’t you think?”

It was, as it damn well should have been. Em had left funeral details—in her own handwriting—in an envelope on her vanity table the day we’d picked up her shoes and a few other essentials. Once Ms. Marshall was thinking clearly, she’d probably wonder why her seventeen-year-old daughter had given so much thought to how she wanted to be buried, but grief had eclipsed her skepticism at least long enough to arrange the funeral of her daughter’s—albeit morbid—dreams.

“It was beautiful, Em,” Tod whispered, and I glanced up to find him standing next to me, where there’d been only damp grass a second before. It took more self-control than I’d known I had to keep from throwing my arms around him and trying to melt into him, which had recently replaced hoping for world peace as my new favorite impossible task.

I couldn’t throw myself at him because most people couldn’t see him. Reapers are sneaky that way.

Beyond that, I couldn’t indulge in an embrace from my boyfriend—that word felt so inadequate—because today wasn’t about comforting me. It was about burying Emma. Being there for her.

And planning vengeance. Justice for Em and for everyone else Avari and his fellow hellions had possessed, tortured, or taken from us. Today was about plotting retribution for Emma’s boyfriend. And for Lydia, and for Sabine’s foster mother, and for Brant, Nash’s baseball teammate.

And for Alec.

My hand twitched at the thought of him, as if I still held the dagger. I could almost smell the blood. I could still see him in my mind, one of my few real friends, his eyes filled with pain and confusion, staring up at me in fear. Until they’d stared at nothing.

I swallowed my anger at Avari and what he’d taken from us, determined to avoid ruining Emma’s perfect funeral with the bellow of rage itching to burst free from me.

Today was a new start for Em, and a new start for us all. We could no longer afford to be victims in Avari’s quest to walk the human world. Beginning today, we were soldiers. Warriors, battle-weary and not yet focused, but warriors nonetheless.

Warriors, at least for the moment, in black formal funeral attire. All except for Tod, who could wear whatever he wanted because no one other than the five of us could see him.

I started to take his hand, hoping no one would notice such a small motion, but then Emma made a soft, strangling sound and I looked up to see her staring ahead, frozen like a deer in mortal danger.

Her mother was heading straight for us.

“Kaylee, thank you so much for coming.” Ms. Marshall sniffled and reached for my hand, and her tears triggered more of my own. “Thank you all.” She glanced at everyone but Tod, whom she couldn’t see, and when her gaze lingered for a second on her own daughter, hidden behind a stranger’s face, Emma burst into fresh sobs.

“We wouldn’t have missed it, Ms. Marshall,” Nash said, while I wrapped one arm around Emma.

Sabine stared at us both. The funeral hadn’t upset her at all, that I could see, and she obviously didn’t understand why it had bothered us, beyond the lie we were telling the world, since Emma was still alive and mostly well.

“Thank you.” Ms. Marshall sniffled again, and she didn’t seem to notice that her own heels were sinking into the soft earth. “I know Emma would be happy if she could see you all here now.”

Em sobbed harder.

“I’m sorry, I don’t believe we’ve met.” Ms. Marshall dabbed her eyes with a damp tissue and held one hand out to her own daughter.

Emma cleared her throat and shook her mother’s hand. Her mouth opened, but nothing came out.

“This is my cousin. Emily,” I said. “She’s just lost her parents, so she’ll be staying with me and my dad.” That was the best story we could come up with. It was heavy on coincidence, but just as heavy on necessity—Em had to live somewhere, now that she’d lost everything she’d ever had. Except for us.

Ms. Marshall’s expression crumbled beneath a new layer of sympathetic grief, and her voice shook. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Emily.”

But if Em heard her, I couldn’t tell.

“She loved you so much!” Emma threw her arms around her mother and buried her tear-streaked face in her mom’s hair. “She wouldn’t want you to forget about her, but she doesn’t want you to worry either. Or to…” Em nearly choked on her own tears, and we all stood there looking as helpless as Ms. Marshall looked confused and…devastated. She was crying again, and so was I. “Or to…you know…stop living. She wants you to live,” Em said into her mother’s ear. “And to hug Traci and Cara a lot. And to make yourself happy. She’s sorry she called your boyfriend an idiot. It shouldn’t matter that he’s kind of stupid, if he makes you happy, so Emma would want you to go for it.”

She finally released her mother and stepped back, wiping tears with her bare hands. “So you should go for it.”

Ms. Marshall’s tissue was soaked and when she blinked, more tears fell. “I didn’t realize you knew Emma. Do you go to Eastlake?”

“She will,” I said, when I realized Em’s flood of words had dried up, leaving her speechless and evidently mortified by her outburst. “But she knew Emma from…before. We were all three really close.” I couldn’t tell whether or not Ms. Marshall believed me—or whether she was even capable of thinking my hasty explanation through at the moment—but she nodded and wiped at her cheeks again.

“Kaylee, when you feel up to it, I hope you’ll come over and take something from Emma’s room. To remember her by. I’m sure she’d want you to have whatever you’d like.”

“We will,” Em said before I could speak.

Ms. Marshall frowned, then nodded again and started backing away from us in heels crusted with mud from the recent rain. “Thank you all for coming.” Then her two remaining daughters each put an arm around her and led her to the long black car waiting with its engine running.

“I think I scared her,” Emma whispered, clutching my hand.

“Yup.” Sabine’s nearly black eyes were dilated and her mouth hung open just a little. As a mara—a living Nightmare—Sabine fed on fear, but she’d been going hungry a lot lately, since grief and anger had finally overwhelmed the nearly constant state of fear we’d all been living in for the past few months.

“I’m pretty sure it’s rude to feed from the dead girl’s family at a funeral,” Nash said, one arm around her waist, his fingers curled around her narrow hip. He used to hold me like that. I used to like it. But Nash and I were over. We’d been over before we even knew we were over, and I still wasn’t sure he’d completely accepted that yet. But it made me feel better to see him touch her in public.

He’d been touching her in private since the very day we broke up.

Sabine lifted both brows at him. “You expect me to believe that if someone threw a pie in your face at a funeral you wouldn’t lick your lips?”

“If someone threw a pie in my face at a funeral, I’d…” Nash frowned. “Well, that’d be really weird.”

“Weirder than seeing yourself buried?” Tod’s hand slid into my grip, his fingers curling around mine, now that there was no one near enough to see me holding hands with empty air. No one except Sophie, my real cousin, and her boyfriend, Luca, who watched us from the other side of the open grave. They knew all about Tod. In fact, my undead reaper boyfriend hardly even registered as “strange” to Sophie anymore, considering that her own boyfriend was a necromancer. And that Luca and Sabine were the only ones among us who’d never died.

Nash’s death was classified information, available on a need-to-know basis, and so far, his mom and brother didn’t think anyone needed to know. Including Nash.

Emma and I had both died twice, and for me, that second one actually stuck. Now I was a “resurrected American,” better known, in colloquial terms, as life-challenged. Or undead. Or the living dead. But I’m not a zombie. I’m just a little less alive than your average high school junior.

“No,” Nash said, in that short-tempered voice he seemed to save just for his brother. “Having a pie thrown in my face at a funeral would not be weirder than seeing myself buried.”

“Then Em wins this round.” He glanced around at the last of the mourners, including my father, who leaned on his crutch, chatting softly with Harmony, Tod and Nash’s mom, and his own brother—my uncle Brendon. “Let’s get out of here. I’ve had enough death for one day.”

That really means something, coming from a reaper.

“You okay?” I tossed Emma a T-shirt from my dresser, and she pulled it over her head. We were nearly the same size, now that she was Lydia. Which meant that the clothes we’d snuck out of her mom’s house no longer fit her.

“Yeah.” She kicked one of Styx’s rubber dog bones out of the way and stepped into a pair of my jeans. “I don’t know what happened at the cemetery. I mean, it’s not like I’m really dead, but as soon as my mom started talking to you, I just lost it.”

That was true. She’d been staring at her mother and sisters for two straight days, at the viewing the day before, the funeral today, then the actual burial, and she hadn’t lost it once. Not until her mother was within arm’s reach.

“Don’t worry about it. You’ve been through hell this year, Em. I’d be worried about you if you weren’t upset.” Though actually, I was worried about her. Very worried.

Emma sat on the edge of her bed to pull on a pair of sneakers, and if I’d reached out from the end of my bed, I could have touched her. We’d given up nearly all the floor space in my room for the extra twin bed, and I’d had to get rid of my beanbag chair, which was a real shame, considering we didn’t actually need a second bed. Emma could have had mine—I hadn’t slept in it once in the nearly two weeks since my birthday/her death-day, in part because I no longer needed sleep, though I’d discovered that I did need rest.

But telling my father that I was spending most of my nights at Tod’s place, whether or not my reaper boyfriend was actually at home, would have been…

Well, that wouldn’t have been a pleasant conversation. Even if my dad had his suspicions about how physical our relationship had become, I was in no hurry to confirm them. I may have been practically grown—and technically dead—but I would always be his little girl. He’d made that more than clear.

And I loved him for it.

More comfortable in our regular clothes, Em and I met everyone else in the front of the house, where Sabine had helped herself to a soda without getting one for anyone else. “All I’m saying is that Emily and Emma are practically the same name. No offense, Em,” she added when we walked past my father’s chair, where the mara was perched on the arm, hopelessly wrinkling the black slacks she only wore to funerals. And, truthfully, she only wore those because Nash had insisted black jeans weren’t good enough.

“None taken.” Em headed into the kitchen and took a seat at the bar, where she rested her forehead on her folded arms.

“At least she wasn’t named after a can of soup,” Tod said, and Sabine shot him a scowl. Her last name—Campbell—had come from a hungry worker at the church where she’d been abandoned as a toddler.

“Emma and Emily are pretty similar.” Nash sank into my dad’s armchair and wrapped one arm around the mara’s waist. “Wouldn’t you rather pick something different? I mean, you could be anyone you want. It could be fun. None of the rest of us got to pick our names.”

Em didn’t even look up.

“We called her Cynthia for three days.” Tod shoved a pillow over so I could sit with him on the couch. “She couldn’t remember to answer. Calling her Emily is just easier.”

“Who cares what you call her? Emma is still Emma, and that’s all that matters, right? That she survived.” Sophie shrugged in her spaghetti strap dress, leaning against the wall by the door like she wanted to stay but needed to be near an exit, just in case.

I could tell she was trying to say the right thing. To be useful and insightful. She’d been doing that a lot since she and Luca got together, which seemed to show her that she had more in common with me and my “freak” friends than she would ever again have in common with her fellow dancers and teen socialites. But when filtered through the lens of narcissism through which my cousin viewed the world “useful and insightful” usually came out sounding more like “pointless and trite.”

Sophie had come a long way, but the journey was far from over.

“Yeah, I survived.” Em sat up and glared at her over the half wall separating the kitchen from the living room. “Unless you count the part where my neck was snapped by a hellion who wanted to wear me like a perpetual Halloween costume. And the fact that my permanent address is now plot number 436 at the Grandview Cemetery. You think Zappos delivers to burial plots? If so, you must be right! Nothing’s changed! So what if I’m now a brunette, and a B-cup, and an Emily? At least I survived, right?”

“I was just trying to help.” Sophie blinked back tears that probably had more to do with her own frustration than with sympathy for Em. “I almost died, too, you know. We all did.”

“Almost only counts in beauty pageants.” Emma slid off her bar stool and pulled a can of soda from the fridge, then took down a tall glass and the bottle of whiskey my dad had confiscated from Nash a couple of weeks earlier. No one said anything when she poured generous helpings of both into the glass.

“We’re going to get him,” I said through clenched teeth, struggling to hide my anger on her behalf while she drained a quarter of the glass. “We’re going to get them all.”

She didn’t deserve this. It was my fault Emma had lost everything she’d ever had, except for a best friend who’d failed to protect her. It was my fault, and it was Avari’s, and he was going to pay for what happened to Em and to everyone else he’d hurt.

“Sure we are.” Emma rolled her eyes and took another drink. “We’re going to sock it to the immortal hellions capable of squashing us like ants on the sidewalk. So what if they can’t be killed, or caught, or even hurt, as far as we know. Maybe we can kill them with kindness. Or maybe they’ll see us wearing our big-boy pants, all ready to take them down, and they’ll die laughing. That’s the only way we’re going to get them. I know nothing about the Netherworld, but I know that.”

“I have a plan, Em. A good one.”

“I know you do. I’m sorry.” She shoved limp brown hair back from her face and sat, still holding her glass. “I just…I attended my own funeral today. There’s just no way to improve a day that started with throwing clods of dirt on your own coffin.”

“I know.” My hand tightened around Tod’s. I hadn’t seen myself buried, but I had been…well…murdered. Sacrificed, in fact. As a virgin.

Cliché? Sure. Painful? Hell, yes.

Reversible?

Nope.

“Well, at least you’re compatible roommates,” Sabine said as Luca headed into the kitchen. “Kaylee’s dead, but pretending to live in her own body, and Emma’s alive in someone else’s body, but faking death. Your living situation was meant to be. Unlike mine.” The mara threw an angry glance at my cousin.

Since her foster mother’s death, Sabine had been staying with Sophie and my uncle Brendon, who’d officially applied to be her new foster parent, to keep her within the fold. Because in spite of obvious attitude…issues, she’d proved useful.

Also because if we tried to get rid of her, she’d only claw her way back into Nash’s life, stepping on everyone in her way. She’d certainly done it before.

Sabine had a unique perspective on boundaries—she refused to recognize them.

Sophie stepped away from the wall she’d been holding up and adjusted her black silk dress. “Hey, Luca, I told my dad we’d put in an appearance at the reception,” she said, but we all saw through that—she looked more comfortable in her three-inch stiletto heels than in my house. “Are you ready?”

“Yeah. Just a sec.” Luca looked up from the kitchen peninsula, where he was talking softly to Emma with his back to the rest of us. He said something, and she actually chuckled. When he tucked a strand of hair behind her ear—Lydia’s ear—the look Sophie gave them should have boiled the blood in their veins.

Em and I were supposed to go to the reception, too, but when I’d told my dad how she’d reacted to her mother at the funeral, he’d agreed that we should probably forgo any more close contact with Ms. Marshall until they’d both had a little time to adjust to Emma’s death.

“Luca?” my cousin repeated.

He stood and gave Emma one more smile before joining Sophie in the living room. “Hey, I was thinking maybe you could give Em a hand with her hair before school tomorrow.” He tried to take his girlfriend’s hand, but she pulled it firmly from his grasp. His smile faltered, but he barreled forward, and I was impressed by his resolution in the face of imminent temper tantrum. “She’s never had to work with thin, fine hair before, so—”

“Are you saying my hair is limp?” Sophie demanded.

“No, your hair is beautiful.” He tucked a long blond strand behind her ear and ended the gesture with his palm cupping her jaw. I could practically see Sophie melt. “I was just thinking that Em’s a little insecure about her new look, and you’re good with stuff like that, and she’s your friend, so…?”

“Yeah. Of course.” Sophie blinked. “No problem.” She almost looked ashamed of herself, and I couldn’t resist a smile. She was nicer when she was with him. She wanted to be better, which made me want to like her.

Luca was the best thing that had ever happened to my cousin, and he’d come at the best possible time—in the middle of the worst year of her life. I think she truly cared about him. I couldn’t help hoping that someday she’d actually deserve him.

After Luca and Sophie left to mourn my best friend in public, Emma brought her half-empty glass into the living room and sank onto the couch on my other side. “Okay, let’s hear this brilliant plan. How are we going to bring the hurt to everyone’s least favorite hellions?”

“We’re not.” I smiled. I was proud of my plan, even if it still had a few kinks to work out. “You were right—we can’t hurt them. But they can hurt one another. A lot, hopefully. Maybe they can even kill each other.” Because goodness knows we couldn’t kill them. We’d never even come close to hurting a hellion, even though a couple of weeks before, I’d been forced to stab Avari over and over every time he took a new form in the human world—stolen from a murder victim—to torture us.

“Okay, that sounds promising.” Nash leaned forward in my dad’s chair, and Sabine put one hand on his back. “How do we get them to do that?”

“We’re going to use their weaknesses against them.” Tod’s hand tightened around mine again. He already knew the plan. We’d gone over and over it during his breaks at work for nights on end—he was both a reaper at the local hospital and a delivery boy for a nearby pizza place, but the reaper gig came with more free time.

Way more people ordered pizzas than met their death on any given night.

“Weaknesses?” Sabine said. “Hellions have weaknesses?”

“Only one apiece, that we’ve seen.” I scooted forward until I sat on the edge of the couch, excited and relieved to finally tell them what we’d come up with. “Think about it. When Sabine tried to sell me and Emma to—”

“Really? We’re on that again?” the mara snapped. “You know I was under the influence of a hellion of envy. As were you. We both did some pretty stupid shit because of Invidia.”

“Yeah, but Kaylee didn’t try to sell anyone to a demon,” Tod pointed out.

“Forgiven and forgotten, remember?” Nash aimed an irritated glance at his brother.

I remembered forgiving Sabine, but I’d never said I could forget.… “Just listen. When we were all with Avari and Invidia in the Netherworld, how did we get away?”

Sabine shrugged. “I crossed over with Nash.” Because male bean sidhes don’t wail, they can’t cross to and from the Netherworld on their own. “Tod took Em, then came back for you.”

Like his brother, Tod was a male bean sidhe, but he could cross freely by virtue of his reaper abilities, most of which didn’t work in the Netherworld, much like my own undead skills. Unfortunately.

“Yes, but how did we get that chance?” I waved one hand in a circular motion, encouraging them to follow that thought through to the conclusion.

Nash’s brows rose with the realization. “Avari attacked Invidia.”

“Why?” Tod said, and his brother—my ex—frowned, trying to remember. He’d been in a lot of pain at the time, and I’m sure the memory was fuzzy.

“Because he wanted what she had,” the mara said.

“Exactly.” Sabine was smart—I had to give her that. “Avari is a hellion of greed. The only weakness I’ve ever seen him display is an obsession with having everything. He wants his toys and Invidia’s. And Belphegore’s. And any others on the playground.”

Em set her nearly empty glass on the coffee table. “So we’re going to play them against one another? How?”

Tod frowned, and his voice deepened. This was the part he didn’t like. “By dangling the same bait in front of all three of them at once.”

“What bait?” Em asked, but I could tell by her tone that she was already catching on.

“Us.” I glanced around the room. “Some of us, anyway. Including Sophie and Luca, if we need them and they’re willing.” And we probably would need them. Avari had already gone after them both. “We’re the bait.”




2


“We’re the bait? And you’re okay with this?” Nash stared across the room at his brother, challenge swirling in the greens and browns of his eyes—a bean sidhe’s emotions could be read in the colors twisting in their irises, at least by fellow bean sidhes.

“Hell no, I’m not okay with it. It’s dangerous, and risky, and perilous, and also profoundly unsafe. But I have yet to come up with a better idea, so…” Tod gestured to me, reluctantly yielding the floor, but Em snatched it before I could speak.

“We’re the bait? So we’re going to be dangled? How are we going to be dangled?”

“Okay, first of all, no one has to do this.” I stood and Tod scooted over so I could sit on the arm of the couch, from where I could see everyone in the room. “You’re all completely free to just…not participate. But obviously, I can’t promise that staying out of this will keep you safe. We weren’t dangling anything in front of anyone the last time Avari and his hellion posse set their sights on us. Not on purpose, anyway. Which is why I’m pretty sure it’ll be easy to get their attention. The hard part will be keeping them from seeing the setup. So, raise your hand if you want to be a part of this, then I’ll—”

“I’m in.” Nash didn’t bother to raise his hand.

“Just like that?” Em frowned at him.

He nodded. “No one wants to see that bastard pay more than I do.”

“I’m fully prepared to debate that statement with you, but there’s really no point.” I glanced around the room again. “I’m in, obviously, as is Tod.” He nodded to confirm, and a single pale curl fell over his forehead. “What about you two?”

“You couldn’t keep me out of this if you tried,” Sabine said. “This place is dull when there’s no evil afoot.”

“When is that, exactly?” Tod gave her a sardonic grin, and Sabine returned it.

“Em?” I wasn’t yet familiar enough with her new face to tell what she was thinking. “You totally don’t have to do this.”

“No.” She drained the last of her whiskey and soda, made a sour face, then set the glass down a little too hard on the coffee table. “I’m in. Just tell me what to do.”

“Yeah. What kind of dangling are we talking about?” Nash said. “Carrot in front of a donkey? Or raw meat over a pit of lions?”

“Probably not the carrot.” Sabine shrugged. “Hellions strike me more as carnivores.”

I’d rarely heard a truer statement. As far as I could tell, hellions lived only to consume humanity—whichever parts of us they could get. Our emotions. Our blood. Our flesh. And, rumor had it, any other bodily fluids on hand.

“Since they can’t cross into the human world, with a few obvious exceptions—” like the recent invasion of hellions wearing the souls and forms of the dead “—we’re only going to be dangling our emotions.”

“Oh, good. Metaphysical carrots.” Emma exhaled in relief and looked like she might want a refill.

“Here’s where it gets tricky,” Tod said, while I headed into the kitchen for a six-pack of sodas from the fridge. “They’re not going to be fooled by anything less than the real thing. Authentic—and very strong—envy and vanity.”

“Envy for Invidia and vanity for Belphegore?” Sabine said, and I nodded.

Nash accepted the soda I handed him, then passed it to Sabine. “What about Avari?”

I handed him another can. “We’re not going to worry about him. He’s harder to get rid of than to trap, and if one of us starts flaunting unusual levels of greed, he’ll know something’s up. But if he thinks Invidia and Belphegore are closing in on the carrot he’s been chasing for months—”

“Or any of us other carrots,” Tod added, accepting a can for himself.

“—he’ll jump into the game on his own. Which is exactly what we want. So all we really have to do is dangle one carrot in front of each of the other two. And since this involves you all, I’m open to suggestions. Anyone want to dangle?”

Sabine raised her hand. “I nominate Sophie as bait for Invidia.”

Tod laughed. He was always able to find humor in even the creepiest situations. I’d thought that was an undead thing, until I became a member of the undead. Then I realized it was a Tod-thing.

“Just because you don’t like someone doesn’t mean you can feed her to a hellion,” Em said. “Haven’t we been over this?”

“I don’t want to get rid of her, I—” Sabine rolled her eyes and started over. “Okay, I do kind of want to get rid of her, but that’s not what this is. Think about it. Out of all seven of us, who’s currently harboring the most envy?”

The three of them turned to look at Nash, who fired back angry glares. “Screw you all. Just because I don’t think my brother should have made out with my girlfriend doesn’t mean I’m jealous of him!”

“Forgiven and forgotten…” I reminded him, but his glare only deepened.

“Not Nash,” Sabine snapped. “He has everything he could possibly want. Everything. More than he can handle,” she added, as if we could possibly have missed her point. “I’m talking about Sophie. Did you all see the look she gave Em when Luca was talking to her in the kitchen?”

I had seen that.

“That was nothing. He was trying to make me feel better about my hair. Seriously. He’s totally into Sophie.”

“I know. I can’t figure it out, but I don’t doubt it,” Sabine said. “But Sophie does. And with a little nudging, I think I can turn your prissy little cousin’s shiny new insecurity into a feast of jealousy any hellion of envy would covet.” She glanced around for our reactions. “How’s that for a carrot?”

“What kind of nudge are you talking about?” I wasn’t Sophie’s biggest fan either, but that didn’t give me the right to put her in any danger she didn’t volunteer for.

Sabine shrugged. “A little strategic feeding of her fears. Namely, self-doubt.” As a mara, she could do that and much more. “And I’ve been dying to try out my vial of Invidia’s hair. That shit is concentrated liquid envy.”

“No.”

“Oh, come on.” The mara rolled her eyes at my hesitance. “I figure a drop in her morning diet shake should be enough to do the job. That can’t be any worse for her than those pills she pops when she gets upset.”

Aunt Val’s sedatives.

I made a mental note to sneak into Sophie’s room in the middle of the night and flush the whole stash.

“We could at least ask her if she wants to.” Em shrugged. “She did look pretty jealous.…”

“She can’t know about it!” Sabine insisted. “If we tell her, she’ll know she has no reason to be jealous, and there goes our carrot.”

“We’re not going to spike her protein shake and throw her to the wolves!” I insisted.

Tod chuckled. “I thought they were lions. Or donkeys. You’re losing control of your metaphors, Kay.”

I turned on him, but before I could yell at him to stop lightening the mood, Nash spoke up. “We could watch her. All of us. We could take shifts. That way, if anything goes wrong, we can stomp on the brakes immediately.”

“No.”

Tod took my hand again. “She’s already in danger, Kaylee. You said it yourself. We all are. At least this way, someone will have her back, 24/7. If you think about it, she may actually be safer this way.”

So I thought about it, and I had to admit they were right. I’d done everything I could think of to keep Emma safe and only wound up getting her killed. Twice. Maybe the best way to keep Sophie safe was to manipulate her environment.

I thought we should at least tell Luca what we were doing, though, so he could watch out for her, too. But he would never go for it. And he was spending almost every waking moment with her anyway, so he’d definitely notice if something went wrong, even if he didn’t know she was in any particular danger.…

“You all swear you’ll help me look out for her?”

Heads nodded all over the living room, but Sabine only shrugged. “I’m in the perfect position for that, unfortunately.”

“Fine. But we’re not giving her a drop of Invidia’s creepy liquid hair until we’ve tested it.”

“Wait.” Emma frowned and raised Lydia’s thin, pale brown eyebrows. “Isn’t that stuff, like, corrosive? It sizzles like acid.”

“Yeah, in its concentrated form. It was a challenge to contain. Over time, it’ll eat through nearly anything but plastic.” Sabine’s grin looked almost vindictive, and I started to question her motives. “But it’s easily diluted in anything water based, like coffee or tea. Or nondairy diet protein shakes.”

Tod set his empty soda can on the coffee table. “You’ve been experimenting with it?”

“Just a little—I don’t want to waste it. But one drop dissolved in eight ounces of water is perfectly safe to touch. I stuck a finger in and felt nothing. Even took a little sip.”

“And?” Nash prompted.

“And I dumped the rest of it out. I just wanted to make sure it was safe, not feel the effects myself.”

I groaned, “Do we even want to know why you were testing it?”

Sabine shrugged. “Probably not. But I’m willing to take a full dose this time, if that’ll convince you that it’s safe. Physically, at least.”

“No!” Em and I said in unison. She continued, “The last time you were all hopped up on jealousy you tried to sell us in the Netherworld.”

“I’ll try it,” I said. “Otherwise, we’re not doing this.”

Sabine shrugged again and sank back against Nash’s shoulder. “Fine. I’ll go get it when we’re done here.”

“It’s not somewhere Sophie could find it, right?” Tod said.

“It’s in the toe of my left boot. The dancing queen won’t go near shoes without a designer label. She thinks she’s allergic to cheap fabric.” She twisted to scowl at Nash. “Sophie and I are not compatible. I still don’t see why your mom won’t let me stay with you guys.”

Emma actually grinned, for the first time in days. “Because Harmony thinks she’s too young to be a grandmother. But she’s, like, what? Eighty?”

“Eighty-two,” Tod said. From puberty on, bean sidhes age much slower than humans. Our average life span is around four hundred years. Not that I’d know from personal experience. Half the bean sidhes I knew were already dead or living on borrowed time. But Nash didn’t know his brother had traded death dates with him—Tod didn’t want him to feel guilty about something that was beyond his control. “Anyway, it’s not the grandmother thing that bothers her. It’s the thought of you two as parents.”

“That thought bothers me, too.” Sabine’s gaze settled on me and Tod. “Not a risk for you, though, right? You two have all the luck.”

“Yeah.” Sarcasm dripped from the word as Tod pushed pale curls back from his face, and I could feel my own cheeks flame. “Not having to worry about teen pregnancy totally makes up for the fact that we’re dead.” His eyes flashed in anger, probably on my behalf. “Every time I think you’ve reached the pinnacle of insensitivity, you exceed your own reach.”

“No way. You don’t get to be mad about the truth.” Sabine turned to Nash, obviously puzzled by social etiquette she didn’t understand. “Are they pissed because I mentioned sex or death?”

“New subject!” Nash stood and stomped into the kitchen with his soda.

“I second the motion,” I mumbled as he drained his can and dropped it into the recycling bin. I would much rather talk about trekking toward certain death in the Netherworld than ever again discuss sex in front of my boyfriend, his brother/my ex, and his new girlfriend. Who was also his old girlfriend/first love, who’d once tried to sell me to a demon to get rid of me.

Some conversations will just never be comfortable.

“Okay. So.” I shook my head, trying to mentally strike the previous two minutes from the official record. “Any ideas for how to lure Belphegore into our hellion cage match?”

“Vanity, right?” Nash reappeared in the living room with an open bag of potato chips. “I nominate my venerable brother. He likes to play hero, and one look at him should establish the vanity angle.”

“Nash!” I really shouldn’t have been surprised by the dig. But I was.

“What?” He raised one brow at me in challenge. “It’s okay to call me jealous, but not to call him vain?”

“Awareness of one’s obvious advantages doesn’t imply vanity,” Tod insisted calmly.

Nash turned on him. “Does it imply narcissism?”

Tod huffed. “This coming from the guy who owns more hair products than his girlfriend.”

“I don’t own any hair products,” Sabine said. And that was true. Her beauty was natural. Dark, fierce, and kinda scary at times, but completely natural.

Nash glared at his brother. “When you were still alive you spent more time looking at yourself than at girls, and I doubt death changed that.”

“Seriously? Are we doing this again?” The overhead light flickered in response to Sabine’s irritation—another creepy aspect of hanging out with a mara. “You’re pretty. He’s pretty.” She turned to scowl at Nash. “Your brother’s arrogant, and you’re confrontational. You’re both fed, clothed, sheltered, and sexually satisfied.”

“Sabine!” I hissed, while Em stared at the floor, evidently lost in her own thoughts. But the mara continued without even glancing at me.

“Now bury the hatchet in this stupid little family feud, or I’m going to bury one in you both!”

For a moment, we all stared at her. I should have been accustomed to her lack of a verbal filter and apparent determination to discuss my private life in front of the entire world, but every now and then she still shocked me.

“Well?” She glanced from one brother to the other, but before either of them decided to make the first move, Emma looked up, her jaw set in a determined line, though she wasn’t looking at anyone in particular—in fact, she seemed to be looking inward.

“I’ll do it. I’ll be Belphegore’s carrot.”

For a second I could only stare at Emma as what she was saying sank in. Then I shook my head, horrified by the thought. When I’d said we would be the bait, I hadn’t meant Emma. More than any of us, she deserved a little peace.

“No, Em, you don’t have to do that. You’ve been through so much already. This is the last thing you need right now.”

She twisted on the couch to face me, tucking one leg beneath her, and again I was thrown off by how odd it was to look into Lydia’s face and see Emma’s eyes. Hear Emma’s voice. “Your plan is good, Kaylee,” she said. “It’s smart, and it’s bold, and it could work. But it won’t work if you’re not willing to accept help. To let the rest of us take the risks you’ve been taking on your own.”

“No, Kaylee’s right. I’ll do it.” Tod shrugged. “I prefer to think of myself as a pretty accurate judge of my own gifts, but in the right slant of light, that could be seen as vanity, and—”

“I’m the natural choice,” Em insisted.

“You’re the least vain person I know—”

“Just listen,” my best friend said, and I did, because that was the least I owed her. “I never thought about it until I died and woke up with a stranger’s face, but who we are is very much influenced by what we look like. By our own self-images. Think about the crazy things people will do to change the way they look. Dangerous diets. Obsessive workouts. Unnecessary surgeries. And what they’re really trying to change is who they are. Or at least how they see themselves. As if changing what they look like can actually do that. It can’t. But for the first time, I understand that mind-set. It’s like my name.”

“Your name?” Nash looked just as confused as I felt.

“Yeah. We went through several baby books and at least a dozen baby-naming websites looking for a new name for me, but no matter what we tried—no matter what names I thought I liked—I couldn’t remember to answer to them. Because they weren’t me. I didn’t associate those names with who I am. Just like I don’t associate this body—this face—with who I am. Every time I look in the mirror, I’m surprised. There’s this moment of disorientation when I have to remind myself that I’m seeing my own reflection. And I know I should be grateful. Sophie was right about that. I’m still alive, and that’s the most important thing, and I should be grateful to Tod and Kaylee for directing my soul, and to Lydia for giving me her body. Not that she had any choice in the matter.”

Em sniffled and a tear fell from each of her eyes to roll slowly down her cheeks. “But I can’t help it. Every time I look in the mirror, I’m disappointed.”

“Because you’re not pretty anymore?” Sabine said, and I’d never wanted worse to smack her.

Okay, except for that time I did smack her.

“What?” the mara said, like she actually didn’t understand her gaffe. “It’s true. Lydia’s not pretty, and Em’s used to being pretty. That can’t be easy. I may not go through a lot of trouble in the morning, but that doesn’t mean I’d be happy to wake up tomorrow with nothing to fill out my bra, you know?” She gestured toward my nearly flat chest, and that time my palm itched to connect with her face.

“She’s right.” Em frowned and glanced at me apologetically. “Not about your boobs. They’re fine.”

“Way better than fine,” Tod leaned over to whisper, and I buried my face in my hands, both embarrassed and relieved to realize that Nash was the only one in the room who’d refrained from commenting on the sad state of my personal assets.

“But Sabine knows what I’m saying,” Em said, mercifully diverting attention from me and my subpar endowment. “I liked who I was. What I looked like. I liked having curves, and I liked my hair, and loved having clear skin without having to mess with it. I liked seeing my eyes in my own face. I’m never going to have that again, and I hate it. So yeah, I’m vain. As it turns out, I’m really vain. If Sabine’s willing to help manipulate that with a little strategic fear amplification, I know I could reel Belphegore in.”

She closed her eyes for a second, then met my gaze. “And, frankly, I plan to enjoy the hell out of it. The bitch broke my neck, Kaylee. It’s her fault I died—not yours. And I’m not going to let any of you tell me I can’t play a big part in bringing her down. I deserve this. She’s going to get what she deserves, too.”




3


“How was the reception?” I set a glass of sweet tea on the end table next to my father, then carefully lifted his leg from the coffee table and slid a pillow beneath it.

“Kaylee, you really don’t have to wait on me. I’m fine.” He scruffed the fur between Styx’s small, pointed ears, and she snuggled closer. The cutest part about their recent bonding was that my dad thought Styx was hungry for attention. I suspected the truth had more to do with her determination to protect him at all costs.

Styx was half-Netherhound. She was fiercely loyal and could snap a human long bone in a single bite.

“You were stabbed in the leg by a psychotic hellion wearing Sabine’s foster mother’s face.” In the kitchen again, I pulled his plate out of the microwave and grabbed a fork from the dish drainer. “What part of that is fine?”

“The part where I lived.” My dad sighed, and for a moment his eyes swirled with survivor’s guilt. “Some weren’t so lucky.”

“I heard that!” Em called from the bedroom, where she was obsessing over which of my hopelessly plain T-shirts to wear on her first day of school as Emily Cavanaugh.

“You’re a survivor, Em!” I called back. More of a survivor than I was, anyway. At least her heart still beat on its own. Even if it wasn’t her original heart.

I shooed Styx off the couch with one hand while I handed my dad’s plate to him with the other.

“How’s she doing?” My dad pulled back the plastic film covering his dinner as I set the remote control next to him.

“It’s going to take a while to adjust, but she’ll get there.” I shrugged. “She still has all of us.” Which was more than most new kids had on the first day. “So? The reception? How’s Ms. Marshall? And Em’s sisters?”

My father sighed. He no longer looked hungry. “They’re hurting, Kay. It kills me that we can’t tell them the truth.”

We’d thought about it. A lot. After all, we could certainly prove our crazy story. But telling them that Emma was still alive in someone else’s body would mean telling them about bean sidhes, and reapers, and death dates, and about the Netherworld, and that there were hellions over there just waiting to devour our souls and torture us for all of eternity.

Most humans didn’t handle that kind of disclosure well.

“It probably doesn’t help that they had to wait nearly two weeks to bury her.”

The police had refused to release Emma’s body until after a full autopsy. They hadn’t bought our claim that she’d broken her neck in a freak fall from the swing set at the lake, where my birthday party had been crashed by hellions.

We didn’t tell them about the hellions.

Of course, part of the reason our story was so hard for them to accept was that her boyfriend, Jayson, had died that same day. As had Sabine’s foster mother. That was too many deaths related to one high school clique to pass as coincidence.

But in the end, they’d had to release all the bodies for burial when they could find no signs of foul play. Because there was no foul play, on our part, anyway.

The hellions were not available for questioning.

“I’m just glad it’s over.” My dad picked up his fork and poked at a clump of rehydrated mashed potatoes.

“Yeah.” Except for the part about us getting rid of the three hellions occupying the Netherworld version of my high school. My dad wasn’t ready to hear about that just yet. At least not until his leg had healed.

“Hey,” Tod said, and I looked up to find him standing in the middle of the living room, holding a plain manila envelope.

“Is that…?” My dad gestured to the envelope, and Tod nodded.

“Em!” I called when he sat on the couch on my other side and handed me the package.

My bedroom door creaked open, and Emma trudged in from the hall as I dumped the contents of the envelope on the coffee table. She looked more nervous than curious when she saw what Tod had brought.

I picked up a small laminated card from the middle of the pile of papers and held it out to her. “Emily Cavanaugh, you are now officially licensed to drive.” Even though Lydia’s body was only fifteen years old. It hadn’t seemed fair to make Em wait another year and take driver’s ed all over again. She’d already lost so much—including her car.

“Where did you get them done?” Em sank into the armchair, staring at her new license.

I wondered what she was thinking. Was she hating her new face again? I couldn’t help wishing she’d known Lydia before becoming her. Lydia was so kind and selfless. She was so beautiful on the inside that her outside hadn’t mattered.

And it’s not like she’d had any obvious flaws. She was just…normal.

Obviously normal was hard to get used to, after a lifetime of gorgeous.

“I got yours the same place I got mine.” Tod had needed paperwork to get hired as a pizza delivery boy, just like Em needed it to start school. “But I’m sworn to secrecy on that front.”

“Like it matters.” Emma slid her new license into her back pocket, then leaned forward to study her new birth certificate. “This is bizarre. I’m not sure I’ve even seen my real one.” She frowned and picked up another small paper card. “New social security number. I guess I should memorize this…”

“Thanks for getting these, Tod,” my dad said, lifting a forkful of meat loaf toward his mouth.

“No problem.”

When my dad turned on the TV and Em sank farther into the chair to study her new social security number, Tod gave his head a subtle nod toward the hall.

“Hey, Dad, we’re gonna go…” I hesitated, trying to come up with a quick, reasonable excuse to be alone with Tod, but my father only rolled his eyes.

“Just leave the door open.”

I gave him a grateful smile and picked up my glass of water on the way into the hall.

In the middle of my bedroom floor, between the beds, I turned and put one hand over Tod’s chest to feel his heartbeat. It was there—faint but very real. The gesture, checking for his heartbeat, had become both habit and a silent communication between us. A reassurance.

A promise too big to be defined by mere words.

He opened his mouth, and I put one finger over my lips in the universal sign for “shhhh.”

Tod rolled his eyes. He didn’t need to be reminded to make sure the living couldn’t hear him—one of the handier perks of our undead state. In fact, he often had to be reminded to let others see and hear him. In the two-plus years since his death, most normal human functions had fallen out of habit, and he’d once told me he wasn’t sure his heart ever beat when I wasn’t there to feel it.

I’d promptly melted into a puddle of Kaylee-goo.

My fingers curled around a handful of his shirt when he kissed me, and I stood on my toes to give him more of me. To taste more of him. “Mmm…” I murmured when his lips trailed from my mouth over my chin, then down my neck. “I missed that.”

“It’s only been a few hours,” he whispered, though no one else could hear us. “Shouldn’t eternity make us more patient?”

“It’s having the opposite effect. Knowing we should have forever makes me want a little bit of forever right now…” I pulled him back up, and my lips met his again. His hands trailed slowly up my sides, and I let the feel of him chase away the anger and sadness I’d been fighting for most of the day. For most of the past two weeks, in fact. Tod felt good. Tod always felt good, even when the rest of my world was falling apart.

“Oh!” He pulled away from me and reached into his pocket, then held up a small plastic vial full of a murky greenish liquid. “I almost forgot. I picked this up to save Sabine a trip.”

“Is that…?”

“Yeah. She said not to touch it until you dilute it. We’re supposed to use this.” He dug in his other pocket and came up with a small plastic medicinal dropper. “But for the record, I don’t approve of you ingesting Netherworld substances. Especially untested Netherworld substances. So I really have no choice but to hang out until the effects have completely worn off. To make sure you’re safe.”

I laughed. “My dad and Em are here.”

He lifted one pale brow. “And, naturally, you’re going to tell your dad what you’re up to…?”

I tugged him closer until I could whisper against his cheek. “I thought we agreed there were some things he doesn’t need to know about.…”

“We did.” His hand slid beneath the hem of my shirt, and the dropper grazed my side. “Those are my very favorite things.”

“You know, when it’s silent in there, I get suspicious!” my dad called from the living room. Em laughed. Tod groaned.

He held me for another second and I breathed in his scent, then let him go and took my water glass from the desk, where I’d set it. I stared down into it, then at the vial. “This is not going to mix well.” I pulled out my rolling chair—it wouldn’t go far, with Em’s bed in the way—and sank into it, then set the glass down again while Tod worked the plug from the vial.

“You sure you want to do this?”

“No. But I can’t give it to Sophie if I’m not willing to try it myself.”

He stuck the tip of the dropper into the vial and drew up a quarter of an inch of murky green gunk. “My mom calls that the baby food test.”

“Baby food?”

“Yeah. When we were little, she wouldn’t give us anything to eat until she’d tasted it herself. Which is why she started baking. Evidently baby food is vile.”

I watched as he dropped into a squat, so that he was eye level with my glass. “So you really did grow up on cookies and cake. I knew it.”

“That’s why I’m so sweet now. I have no idea what went wrong with Nash.” He carefully squeezed the bulb at the top of the dropper, and a single drop of concentrated liquid envy plopped into my glass. For a second, it hung suspended in the water. Then tiny threadlike feelers of dark, dark green stretched out from the drop in all directions, bleeding slowly into the rest of the glass while Tod squirted the rest of what he’d sucked up back into the vial.

In seconds, the drop was gone and my water was an uneven green, paler than the concentrated color. Like an old bruise.

“Yuck.” I held the glass up to the light, and the green grew paler. “Maybe we should have mixed it with soda.”

Tod opened his mouth, and I took the first sip before he could offer to drink it for me. To test it on himself. The last thing I needed was for him to develop an irrational envy. The only person he could possibly be jealous of was Nash, and it had taken me forever to get the two of them back on speaking terms. Backward momentum was not okay.

“Yuck!” I made a face and wished for a cookie to rid my mouth of the foul film. “Envy tastes bitter.”

Tod laughed. “I could have told you that without even trying it. You gulp that, and I’ll get you something sweet to chase it with.”

“Thanks.”

I made myself drink the whole glass while he was gone, then made a mental note to warn Sabine to put it in something dark and sweet. Definitely coffee or soda. Or artificially sweetened diet protein shakes.

As I was swallowing the last mouthful, Tod reappeared in my room with a clear plastic cup of pink lemonade from my favorite burger place, a block from school. “Thanks.” I set the empty glass down and gulped a quarter of the lemonade through the straw without even taking the cup from him. “Much better.”

He set the drink on my nightstand, then sank onto my bed and scooted back until he could lean against the wall. I sat in front of him, my back pressed against his chest, and his arms wrapped around me. “Feel anything yet?”

“Just this.” I threaded my fingers between his in my lap. But I was already starting to regret volunteering for our little experiment. The more I thought about it, the easier it was to remember how I’d felt with Invidia spewing envy into the air at my school, poisoning us, amplifying whatever benign envy we felt on a daily basis until it poured from us in bitter, violent waves.

If she hadn’t been there—if we hadn’t been under the influence of more jealousy than any normal sixteen-year-old could handle—would Sabine and I have fought over Nash? Or would I have seen what was right in front of me sooner?

I didn’t have the answer, and thinking about it—about being out of control of my own emotions—made me angry. So I snuggled closer to Tod, determined to distract myself from my fears. “Have you ever been jealous of anyone? Like, really jealous?”

“Is that a serious question?”

Something in his tone made me pull away just enough that I could turn and see his face.

“Nash?”

The blues in his irises twisted for a second before he got his emotions under control.

“Don’t,” I whispered. “Let me see. Please.”

Tod frowned. Then he closed his eyes, and when they opened, the shades of blue they held were churning like a storm at sea, cobalt twisting through thin, fragile shades of glacial ice, then rolling over bold streaks of cerulean.

“That bad, huh?” I couldn’t completely hide the satisfaction in my voice. It was nice to be wanted. It was even better to be needed, and I could feel how much Tod needed me every day. He needed me almost as much as I needed him.

“It wasn’t just jealousy, Kaylee. I coveted you. It was all biblical and forbidden.”

“Tell me.”

He hesitated just for a second. “I hated seeing you with him, but I couldn’t stay away because I knew that if I wasn’t there, you two would do things you’d never do with me in the room, and then I’d be all alone imagining that—imagining my brother touching the girl I was meant to be with for the rest of my afterlife—and then…Well, then things would get worse. But it’s not like I could say anything. Not as long as you wanted to be with him.”

I smiled. I couldn’t help it.

“It’s not funny.” He frowned, and even his frown was beautiful. “It was torture.”

“I’m not laughing. I’m just feeling very, very lucky.”

“Is it possible that this liquid envy has some kind of osmosis effect? Like maybe it’s leaking out through your pores, and I’m breathing most of it in? Because I’m reliving the worst envy of my entire existence, and you seem just fine.”

I shrugged. “I have nothing to be jealous of.”

His pale brow rose again, and I realized I’d accidentally laid down a challenge. “I’m perfectly covetable, you know.”

“Oh, I know. I’m grateful every single day for the fact that you’re invisible to everyone else most of the time, so I’m the only one looking at you.” And I looked at him a lot. He was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. “So I don’t have to beat girls off of you.”

“Would you?” He looked intrigued. “Would you fight for me?”

“Would you make me?”

“No. There will never be anyone else for me, Kay.” He grinned that evil reaper grin, and I knew what was coming before the words even left his tongue. “But there were a few before you.…”

“La la la!” I covered my ears and squeezed my eyes shut, pretending I couldn’t hear him. But the seed had already taken root in my brain.

He pulled one hand away from my ear. “How are we supposed to evaluate the strength of this essence of envy if you refuse to explore your own jealousy?”

I opened my eyes and dropped my other hand. “Fine. Point taken.” But I didn’t have to like it. “How many?”

He frowned again. “How many what?”

“How many girls? Before me?”

His frown deepened. “That’s not what I was getting at. It’s not a competition.…”

“I know. It can’t be a competition, because I can’t compete. Because I’ve never been with anyone but you. But you can’t say that, can you?” He flinched and I felt sorry for him for a second. Just one second. “How many, Tod?”

“I think we’re losing track of the point, here.”

“Addison? Were you with her? Like, with her?”

I saw it in his eyes, and my chest ached like I’d been punched. Like someone had tried to rip my heart out through my rib cage. “She was your first.” I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to swallow, but my throat didn’t want to work right.

“Kaylee.” His hands slid down my arms, and my eyes flew open again.

“What is it with you Hudson boys and your first loves? She was a rock star. A TV star. And she would have burst right out of any one of my bras. How the hell am I supposed to compete with that?”

“You’re not. Addison’s dead, Kaylee. Not just dead.” Because I was dead, and he was dead. “She’s gone.” Her soul had been disintegrated and scattered throughout both worlds two weeks before, and it could take centuries for it to slowly reform.

“I know, and I’m sorry about that, but honestly, I’m a little less sorry than I was a second ago.”

His eyes widened, and he looked…surprised.

Crap. What the hell was I saying? Addison had never been anything but kind to me. She’d put herself between me and Avari so I could escape the Netherworld, and she’d suffered horribly for it. Of course I was sorry she was gone. But…

“Her memory. Sabine was right. You can never really compete with the memory of a tragically deceased lover.”

“You don’t need to compete.” He lifted my chin so that I had to look into his eyes. “I love you, Kaylee. I love you like I have never loved anyone else. Like I will never love anyone else.”

I knew that, but…“After her?” I didn’t want to know, but suddenly I had to ask. “After Addy? How many? Were they pretty? Were they…good?”

His eyes flashed in panic. “Okay, you see that this is the envy talking, right, Kay?”

“I know.” But I didn’t care. “How many, Tod? When you touch me, how many other girls are you remembering?”

“None. Look at me.”

I looked at him, but I could hardly see him through tears. When had that happened?

“When I touch you, I’m not thinking about anyone but you. When I look at you, I can’t remember what any of the others looked like. When I hear your voice, I can’t even remember their names.”

“Really?” My tears fell, and he wiped them away with his bare hands.

“Really. Compared to you, they’re all nameless. Like…Thing One and Thing Two. And Thing Three. And…okay, that’s not helping.” His gaze searched mine, and his forehead furrowed. “This sucks. How can I help?”

“I don’t…” But I did know. “I think I need you to kiss me.”

His features relaxed, and his grin came back slowly, like he expected me to change my mind. When I didn’t, he pulled me into his lap, and I tucked my legs around him. “My pleasure.”

He kissed me, and my hands slid behind his neck. I wanted to devour him. I really did. And the beauty of being dead and in love is that you don’t have to come up for air.

I don’t know how long we sat there kissing, tangled up in each other and nearly desperate for more, but I know we didn’t stop until Emma came in to get ready for bed. And I only know when that happened because she pretended to gag in the doorway.

“I can’t even see you, but I know what you’re doing.”

“No, you don’t,” Tod said to her, his lips still pressed against mine. “We’re still dressed.”

I laughed and concentrated on being visible on the human plane.

Em sank onto the edge of her bed, and I climbed off Tod’s lap. “Better?” he said, and I nodded, my face flaming.

“Sorry. That was intense.”

“That?” Em waved one hand at the two of us, grinning. “Or the test dose?”

“Both,” Tod and I said in unison. He was only partly kidding when he continued, “Tell Sabine to give Sophie a half dose.”




4


“So? Do we have any classes together? Let me see.…” I pulled Emma’s new schedule from her hands as the office door swung shut behind us. “Crap.” I scanned the schedule again, hoping I’d misread. “There are only a couple hundred juniors in this school. How can we only have one class together?”

French. With Mrs. Brown. The only class “Emily Cavanaugh” and I shared was Em’s least favorite.

She leaned in to whisper, staring out at a sea of faces she’d known most of her life, none of whom recognized her. “If we were going to make up my age anyway, why the hell didn’t we go with eighteen instead of seventeen? Or twenty-one. That would have been nice.”

“You have to finish high school, Em.”

“Why? What’s the point?”

I’m sure there were several dozen good answers to her question, but I couldn’t think of any of them in that moment; I didn’t want to be there, either. So I gave her a little taste of the motivation I was clinging to. “Justice. This is where Avari and the other hellions hang out, remember? Invidia could be exactly where we’re standing right now, on the other side of the world barrier. She could be sniffing us out as we speak. How are you going to draw her into a trap if you’re not here?”

“Valid point. But frustratingly ironic. They hang out here to be close to us. To feed from our emotions. And now that I don’t have to be here if I don’t want to, I’m stuck here anyway, to stay close to them.”

“Welcome to my afterlife. Where’s your first class?”

Emma studied her new schedule as we ambled aimlessly down the hall, and I tried to ignore the stares focused on us—no, focused on me. I didn’t figure out what the whispers were all about until some idiot underestimated his volume.

“I can’t believe she came to school today. Her best friend’s been in the ground less than twenty-four hours, and she doesn’t even look upset.”

Oh. They’d expected me to still be mourning Emma, which had never occurred to me because Emma was standing right next to me. It had been much easier to pretend to grieve during the week and a half before she’d come back to school, when we were still waiting for the police to release her body so we could bury her. Without her next to me, I’d had no trouble remembering that she was supposed to be dead.

“Two-oh-four.” Em looked up from her schedule and frowned. “I’m headed upstairs. See you at lunch?”

“Yeah.” At least that much hadn’t changed.

First period math was weird without Emma. The stares continued all the way through class, and I actually had to do math during the last five minutes of class, when we were supposed to be starting our homework, since I had no one to whisper with.

But there were plenty of people whispering about me.

I was the center of attention when I’d secretly died, yet somehow I was still the center of attention now that Em had secretly lived. I couldn’t win for losing.

“Hey, Kaylee.” Chelsea Simms sat next to me—uninvited—at my empty lunch table in the quad, and I silently cursed myself for showing up early.

“Hey.” I had no third period class, so I usually spent the hour there, knowing that if Tod had a break at work, that’s where he’d look for me.

Chelsea pulled a notebook from her bag. “Do you mind if I ask you a few things about Emma? I’m working on a memorial article for the school paper.”

Oh, yeah. Journalism was also third period. Just my luck.

“Sure.”

She frowned, studying my expression. “If this is a bad time, I can…?”

“No, go ahead. I don’t mind talking about Em. Feels like I’m keeping her memory alive.” How’s that for quotable?

“Great. Em was a junior, right?” Chelsea said, and I nodded. “And she had two sisters?” Another nod, and I noticed that though her notebook was open, she wasn’t taking notes. Whatever she really wanted to ask obviously required courage she hadn’t yet worked up.

“And…was she a good student?”

I turned to face her directly, looking right into her eyes. “Chelsea, just ask whatever you really want to know. Otherwise, this sounds like it’ll take all day.”

She blinked, surprised, then nodded. “Okay.” She sat straighter and actually picked up her pen, ready to write. “Do you really think it’s a coincidence that Emma Marshall and her boyfriend died on the same day? Just one day after Brant Williams died in his car, here on campus?”

I swallowed, trying to hide my own surprise. Obviously our classmates were just as suspicious as the police had been, but I hadn’t expected anyone to actually ask that question. And I certainly hadn’t expected anyone to expect me to have an answer.

“Do I think it’s a coincidence?” I bought time to think by repeating the question. “I don’t know what it is. I don’t see how it could be more than that. They died at different times, in different places, in different ways.” Sort of. Neither Brant nor Jayson had any obvious cause of death, so the coroner had labeled them both with the generic “heart failure.” Which wasn’t exactly common in teenagers.

“Were you there when Emma died?” Chelsea asked, her gaze glued to me. Watching closely for my reaction.

“Yeah. A bunch of us were. We took the day off for my birthday.” The tears in my eyes were real—I was lying, but the truth was no less traumatic. “We were just goofing off on the swings. At the lake. But Em went too high.” I sniffled. “She was showing off. Then she let go and just…She just fell out of the swing. She landed on her back, but she must have hit her head first, and…”

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.”

“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.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. And though everyone else at the table looked curious, no one asked what Tod had said. They were finally starting to learn. “Thanks, but it’s hard enough to take grief counseling seriously without you singing ‘Living Dead Girl’ at the top of your lungs behind the counselor’s back.”

“You mock one grief counselor, and you’re branded for life,” he mumbled. “Er…afterlife. I have a shift at the pizza place this afternoon, but I’ll pop in when I get a chance.” Tod kissed my cheek—the most we could get away with while only one of us was invisible—then disappeared. I grabbed my bag, said goodbye to my friends, then headed for the counselor’s office.

Our school had two counselors, one for the first half of the alphabet and one for the last half. During lunch, the waiting room they shared was nearly empty.

“You can go in,” the student aide said when the outer door had closed behind me. “She’s been waiting for you.”

Because I was eighteen minutes late.

I trudged into Ms. Hirsch’s office, trying to summon an expression appropriate for someone who’d just lost her best friend. Nuance was important. My grief had to fall somewhere between “sobbing, devastated heap” and “Emma who?” I knew from experience that either of the extremes would only get me sentenced to more counseling.

“Hey, Ms. Hirsch. Sorry I’m late.” I closed the door, then slouched into one of the chairs in front of her desk. But Ms. Hirsch only watched me from across the desk.

I set my bag on the floor and stared at my feet for a second, riding out the silent treatment—was that supposed to pressure me into talking on my own? But when I looked up, she was still watching me. No, studying me. Like she’d never seen me before.

“Ms. Hirsch? You okay?” Was she in shock? Was I going to have to counsel her?

“You’re smaller than I expected,” she said. Only she said it with someone else’s voice. She said it with a man’s voice, deep and smooth, and…rich, somehow. And totally out of place coming from Ms. Hirsch’s slim, delicately curved feminine form.

She was obviously possessed, presumably by a hellion, but I didn’t recognize the voice.

My pulse spiked and chill bumps popped up on my arms, but beneath that an angry flush began to build inside me. I knew I should be scared—I was sitting across my guidance counselor’s desk from a hellion I couldn’t identify—but since my untimely death, I’d discovered that there was a limit to my capacity for fear. I could only be threatened, stalked, intimidated, manipulated, possessed, and actually killed so many times before I began to acclimate to the constant state of fear. Before terror lost its punch, like a scary movie watched too many times.

Anger, though…My capacity for anger at the Netherworld and at the host of Nether-creatures that had turned my afterlife into a living hell…that seemed to know no limits.

Much like hellions themselves.

My hands clenched around the arms of the chair. “Who the hell are you?”

Ms. Hirsch’s left brow arched. “You don’t know?” At the sound of his voice, that warmth inside me spread, not comforting, but seditious. Like a fierce flame burning within me, demanding action.

“Should I?” The fact that he couldn’t use her voice probably meant he hadn’t been in her body often enough to learn how to work all the gears and levers. Hopefully, he’d never been in her body before. I hadn’t even known she was eligible for possession.…

“Not officially, but I’m a big fan of your work.”

“My work?” I should have been terrified, but what little fear I felt wasn’t because my guidance counselor had been possessed, or because whoever was possessing her had obviously known when and where he could get to me through her. I was scared for Ms. Hirsch. Of what he might do to her—or make her do to herself—if he didn’t get whatever he wanted from me.

Ms. Hirsch’s head bobbed and a strand of red hair—her bangs were long and trendy—fell across her forehead. “You’ve managed to thoroughly piss off not one but three of my most reviled associates. And to survive their anger.” He frowned with my guidance counselor’s pink mouth. “Sort of.”

Every word he said stoked the fire inside me until the flames of my anger grew hotter, taller, licking the inside of my skin like they wanted to burst free and roast the world.

I knew what he was doing. He was feeding my anger. Nurturing it, like fertilizing a garden until the veggies are ready to harvest. And devour.

The worst part was that whoever this hellion was, he knew exactly who I was, and that I wasn’t—strictly speaking—alive. And he knew who my enemies were. But I didn’t need to be told that when dealing with hellions, the enemy of my enemies was definitely not my friend.

“Who are you and what do you want?” The longer I sat there, the angrier I got. He’d hijacked Ms. Hirsch’s body. He’d subpoenaed me from my lunch period like I had nothing better to do than be ordered around by a monster from another world! “Never mind. I don’t care who you are or what you want. Get the hell out of my counselor’s body, or I’ll take you out myself.”

I stood and picked up the large, jagged chunk of pink quartz Ms. Hirsch used as a paperweight and hefted it, silently threatening to bash his hellion brains in.

“Nice. Decent buildup from irritation to anger, with a flare of true rage on the end. How long have you been harboring so much hatred, Kaylee? You were only a blip on my radar a few months ago, but now you’re a blinking light too bright to ignore.”

What the hell? I glared down at him, confused. Was the hellion actually trying to counsel me? Was this some kind of demon identity crisis?

“Oh, and you do understand that if you bash me over the head with that rock, your counselor will be the one who wakes up with a headache. Right? If she wakes up at all.”

Crap. I did know that. Blazing anger did nothing to help my logic.

The twitch at one corner of her mouth looked suspiciously like amusement. “If we’re going to be any use to each other, you’ll have to learn to think through your anger.”

I desperately wanted to know what he was talking about, but I knew better than to ask. I needed to cruise below hellionradar, not actively engage it.

“My name is Ira, incidentally.” He leaned back in Ms. Hirsch’s chair and crossed her slim legs, and the ease with which he moved told me that even if he wasn’t familiar with her particular body, this wasn’t his first time in human form. “In case you haven’t figured it out, I’m a hellion of wrath. And I’ve been itching to make your acquaintance of late. I think we can help each other out.”

“Not gonna happen.” I remained standing, but I put the rock down. I couldn’t hurt Ms. Hirsch, which Ira obviously knew.

“Oh, I think it might, if you knew what I had to offer.”

“No.” Never make a deal with a hellion. That’s the first thing they tell you in “Surviving the Netherworld 101.” Or it would be, if such a class existed. Hellions love to bargain, but they never agree to a deal if they’re not getting the better end of it. The vastly better end.

That other end tends to leave humans dead, or dying, or injured, or addicted. Or worse.

“There’s nothing I want from the evil incarnation of anger.” Nothing I was willing to pay for, anyway.

“Belittling my existence with understatement doesn’t change the facts. I am much more than an ‘incarnation of anger.’” Ms. Hirsch sat straighter and pinned me with a gaze too steady and merciless to come from anything other than a hellion. “I am in the clench of every fist. I am the hot thrum of blood rushing through your veins. Every thud of knuckles against flesh is the cry of my true name. I am the glint of rage in your ex’s eyes, the livid grinding of his teeth. My pulse is the wave of anger washing over the crowd. The swing of a corpse from the noose. The final twitch of a man murdered in revenge. I know you, Kaylee Cavanaugh. I know you very, very well, and I can give you what you want most in the world. What no one else can give you.”

“I don’t want anything from you,” I insisted, with less certainty this time, but repeating that didn’t make it true.

“Really? Not even justice for everything they’ve taken from you? For everyone they’ve killed? For everything they’ve cost your friends and family?”

Oh, crap.

The hellion smiled slowly with Ms. Hirsch’s perfectly glossed lips. “You want Avari, Invidia, and Belphegore to pay for what they’ve done.”

My chill bumps were back, and this time they felt like small mountains. I sucked in a breath I didn’t truly need and tried to swallow my fear and unease. I tried to bury that traitorous spark of interest piqued within me by his words—that soft voice whispering that it wouldn’t hurt to hear him out. Just to see what he was offering…

Because that would hurt. I knew better. Hellions don’t hand out free samples. But I couldn’t help wondering.…

“And you’re going to do that for me?” Surely sarcasm disguised my curiosity. “Why would you conspire against your own kind?”

“My kind?” He actually laughed, and laughter looked nothing on him like it looked on the real Ms. Hirsch. “Avari is no more my kind than a garden spider is your kind. We inhabit the same world, but he would stomp on me with no more thought than you’d give to stomping on that spider.” He leaned forward, pinning me with a familiar brown-eyed gaze. “I would stomp on him, too. Then I would grind him into the dirt beneath my heel, just like you would, if you were capable of exacting justice on your own.”

“Hellions don’t deal in justice.” That was too noble a concept. “You’re talking about revenge.”

Ira shrugged. “That’s just as well, because justice isn’t really what you want.” He leaned forward again, and his gaze intensified, as if he were looking for more than he could possibly find in my face. Behind my eyes. “Your wrath is graceful. Has anyone ever told you that? Your anger has the bold, sweet overtones of blind rage, but the delicate tang of self-righteousness, because you actually think you’re after justice. But that’s not true, is it? You know there is no justice to be had. Hurting those who’ve hurt you and yours cannot undo what’s been done. Nothing can bring the dead back to life or unscar the wounded. But you still want to hurt them, don’t you? You still want to kill Avari in cold blood for what he’s done to you. That, my sweet, vengeful little flame, is revenge, not justice.”

I blinked, mentally denying everything he’d said. “So, I’m getting ethics lectures from demons now?” That was new.

“You misunderstand.” His smile was back. “I stand in full support of your thirst for vengeance. I would gladly feed it to you drop by decadent drop. I would see you nourished and strengthened by the taste of blood spilled in anger. Of course, that offer comes with a price.…”

“We’re done here.”

He rolled Ms. Hirsch’s eyes. “And sanctimony rears its ugly head again. You are in denial, child. You won’t be satisfied until you get what you crave, and that can’t happen until you admit to yourself what it is you truly want.”

“You’re wrong.” Hellions couldn’t lie, but they could be wrong. Way wrong. “I’m not looking for revenge. I want justice for Emma and Alec, and everyone else Avari has hurt or killed.”

“And for yourself? Don’t you want this ‘justice’ for what he’s done to you? For commandeering your body? For putting possessed hands on you? For making you the instrument of your friend’s death? For abducting your loved ones? You seethe with anger, little flame. You practically glow with it. And some of that ire feels very, very personal.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” My pulse whooshed in my ears, which rarely happened now that I was dead. He was wrong. He had to be. “Get out of Ms. Hirsch. Now.”

“Don’t you at least want to know the price for your vengeance? It may be less than you think. I’m feeling generous.”

“No. Get out.” I turned and headed for the door.

“You’ll be back, little flame, and I’ll be waiting. When you’re ready to deal, you may summon me. You have my word that I will answer. You need only bleed and use my name.”

I fled the office as fast as I could go without running. I left Ms. Hirsch in the hands of a hellion, not because I didn’t know how to evict him without being expelled for attacking a staff member—though that was true—but because I was scared to listen to him anymore. I couldn’t hear one more loaded word from the hellion of wrath, because deep down, part of me wondered if he might be right.

And that wasn’t a question I was prepared to answer. Not yet, anyway.

On my way back from the counselor’s office, I was texting Tod to fill him in when I looked up and realized I’d wandered down the wrong hall. I was standing in front of the nurse’s office, which reminded me of Marco. Because that’s where we’d left him the day before—unconscious in one of the two empty patient rooms.

I should check on him. And I would check on Ms. Hirsch, too. But I just couldn’t bring myself to hit my guidance counselor in the head, even to expel a demon.

I ducked into the bathroom, glanced around to make sure it was empty, then let myself fade from all human sight. Then I blinked into nearly two dozen different classrooms until I finally found Marco Gutierrez in a fourth period senior AP English class. Another jock with a brain. Which meant he was too smart to inhale unfamiliar substances from balloons just because some idiot like Doug Fuller handed it to him.

Marco looked okay. He was wide-awake and taking notes on Heart of Darkness, which—based on the title alone—sounded like a good reason to dread senior English. I had plenty of darkness already without reading about someone else’s.

A glance at the clock over the whiteboard told me most of the period was over, and I now had an unexcused absence for English. So I decided to wait and talk to him after the bell. One minute before class ended, I blinked into the hall, checked for onlookers, then willed myself back into human sight. When the bell rang, I stood outside his class, and when Marco appeared, I fell into step beside him.

“Hey, Marco, can I talk to you for a second?”

He glanced at me in surprise. I couldn’t blame him. We’d never said more than three consecutive words to each other, and none of those had been since Nash and I had broken up, officially severing any connection I had to the baseball team.

Finally he shrugged. “If you can walk and talk at the same time. I can’t be late for statistics.”

“So, I kinda just wanted to check on you. I heard you were sick yesterday? Or hurt?”

Marco frowned and stopped in the middle of the hall, and the steady flow of traffic parted around us. “Look, I don’t care what you’re into, or how many starting players you have left on your list, but I’m not into that kind of thing. I have a girlfriend, and I like her, and I’m not gonna…”

My horrified expression must have made an impression. If not that, my sudden inability to form a coherent reply obviously did the trick.

“Wait, that’s just some stupid rumor, isn’t it? That you’re working your way through the baseball starting lineup?”

“Yes, it’s a rumor! I guess.” I hadn’t actually heard that one. “A totally fallacious and false rumor, that’s completely unfounded in truth!”

“Sorry. I would never have believed it, except I know you were with Nash. And there was that thing with Scott. And there was talk about Doug. And someone saw you dancing with Brant Williams. And that guy you made out with in the hall after school.” That was Tod. And the only part of what he’d heard that was true. “So it did kind of look like you were…interested.”

“Well, I’m not! There was never a thing with Scott or Doug. And I was never with Nash. Like that. Why, did he say we…?”

“No. Not to me, anyway. But we all just assumed, because you were with him for so long.”

“Well, unassume!”

“Done.” He smiled, and he looked friendly. Like he might not be such a bad guy. Which meant he definitely didn’t deserve to be possessed by a hellion or knocked out by my undead boyfriend. “So, you’re really just checking on me?” He started walking again, and I kept up.

“Yeah. I saw you in the nurse’s office, and you didn’t look so good.”

“That’s what I hear. I don’t know what happened. I dozed off in third period, and the next thing I know I’m lying on a table in the nurse’s office with a cold pack on my head and another one on my…lower. The nurse said she found me there, and no one even saw me go in.”

“So…you’re okay?”

“Except for the part where my dad wants me to see a shrink. He says blackouts are a sign of a more serious underlying problem.”

I gave him as confident and reassuring a smile as I could muster. “You’re not crazy. Just…don’t fall asleep in school anymore.”

“No shit. That all you wanted?” He stopped walking outside his next class, and I was dimly aware that mine was all the way across the building and up a floor.

“Yeah. Oh, wait.” I stepped closer and lowered my voice, uncomfortably aware that anyone who saw us would assume the rumors about me were true. One of the rumors, anyway. “I also wanted to ask you a question.” He nodded, so I continued, “I heard that back before he died, Doug gave you a sample of this stuff he had. The stuff in the balloon.”

“Frost?” he asked. When I nodded, his expression darkened and he motioned for me to follow him closer to the lockers, out of the main stream of traffic. “Stay away from that shit, Kaylee. They say it can’t be detected in a drug test, but everyone else I know who’s tried it is dead now. That can’t be a coincidence.”

“Everyone?” So, he didn’t know Nash had used, too?

“Yeah. There were some other guys who wanted to try it at Doug’s last party.” Right before he’d died. “But then Nash threatened to kick the shit out of the guy with the balloon bouquet if he didn’t get lost, and that night Doug died. I haven’t seen any balloons since. And the more time that passes, the happier I am about that. You shouldn’t—”

“I’m not,” I assured him. “I was just…curious. Thanks, Marco.”

I sped off into the thinning crowd before he could say anything else, and the one time I looked back, he was still staring after me, looking thoroughly confused.




7


“Are you girls ready?” Long blond curls fell over Harmony’s shoulder as she twisted in the driver’s seat to glance at Emma, then met my gaze in the rearview mirror.

“I will never be ready for this.” Em stared through the windshield at her house. Her former house. Which held her former room and all her former stuff. Even her former dog, Toto, who was still a dog but no longer hers. “Let’s get it over with.”

Harmony laid one hand on her arm. “We’re sure your mom’s still at work?”

“Yeah.” I leaned forward between the front seats. “I called to verify, and she said Traci would be here to let us in.”

“That’s her car.” Em pointed to the dusty Chevy parked in front of us in the driveway.

“Okay. I just need one of you to ask for a drink.” Harmony pulled the keys from the ignition and leaned to one side so she could slide them into her pocket, and again I was struck by how young she looked—thirty years old, at the most. You’d never know from looking at her that her sons were eighteen and twenty. Well, Tod would have been twenty, if he’d lived. “I’ll take care of the rest,” she continued. “If you’re sure you’re up to this.”

“No choice.” Em unbuckled her seat belt, and her hand trembled with the motion. “We can’t afford to put it off any longer.”

I unbuckled my own belt, one hand on the door handle. “If it’s too much for you—if she gets upset and you can’t control the syphoning—just let me know, and we’ll get you out of there.” She had been through so much already, and my heart ached at the thought of what lay ahead for her and for Traci. A decision no woman should ever have to make. A choice no human could ever anticipate.

Another devastating decision neither of them would be facing if they’d never met me.

I was a disease, infecting everyone I came into contact with, and the rot spread too fast to be contained. I went around with my scalpel, excising the infected bits of tissue—operating on lives and memories I didn’t have the right to slice up—but the only way to truly stop the infection was to cut off the source.

To excise me.

I’d been struggling to clean up my own mess for so long that I could no longer tell if continuing to fight made me brave or selfish.

“Thanks. I’ll be fine, though.” Em opened her door and got out of the car, and when I stood, still trying to gather my thoughts, I was surprised for the dozenth time by the fact that I could almost see over her head. In her own body, Emma had been taller than I was.

Traci answered the door on the second knock, and the first thing I noticed when she let us in were the bags beneath her eyes. She’d looked tired at Emma’s funeral, but I’d attributed that to the stress of losing, then burying, her sister. But now, I couldn’t deny that it was more than that.

It was the pregnancy.

Traci, Emma’s middle sister, was pregnant with my murderer’s child. And, like nearly everything else that had gone wrong over the past few months, that was my fault. Mr. Beck had been looking for me when he’d found her.

“Hey, Kaylee. It’s good to see you.” Traci pulled me into a hug with too-thin arms, and I had to stop myself from blurting out how sorry I was for what she was going through, and how I’d do anything for a cosmic do-over. For the chance to take it all back.

Instead I swallowed apologies she wouldn’t understand and returned her hug. “Thanks.” I was careful not to squeeze her too hard. She hardly had any belly yet, and she looked like she’d blow over in a light breeze. “This is Harmony Hudson, Nash’s mom. And this is my cousin Emily. They came to…help. Moral support.”

“Nice to meet you.” Traci shook Harmony’s hand, then motioned for us to come in. Then she turned to shake her sister’s hand without a single sign of recognition. “Kaylee can show you Emma’s room. Take whatever you want to remember Emma by. Mom, Cara, and I have already been through it all and taken what we wanted. What means the most to us.”

Em’s eyes watered. Traci didn’t notice.

“How are you?” I said, instead of leading everyone to Em’s room. Traci was leaning against the doorframe. I was afraid she might fall.

“Um…I’m having a rough first trimester.” She let go of the doorframe and sank onto the arm of the couch. “Emma told you about…the baby?”

Actually, I’d told Em about the baby, weeks before Traci had even known she was pregnant.

When Mr. Beck had come to Emma’s house looking for me and my best friend, he’d found Traci instead. What he’d done to Em’s sister might not have been rape by any human legal definition, but I couldn’t think of it any other way. Mr. Beck was an incubus. He’d made Traci want to sleep with him. She didn’t know it, but she’d had no choice.

If her baby was a boy—an incubus—the pregnancy would probably kill her. All signs were pointing toward that already. And if the pregnancy didn’t kill her, the child’s birth almost certainly would.

We hadn’t really come so I could take something to remember Em by. We’d come to help Traci.

“Is there anything I can do?” I asked. Harmony looked like she had plenty of suggestions, but I knew she wanted to wait until Traci’d had something to drink.

“No, thanks, hon. I’m fine. Just tired.”

“Do you want something to drink?” Emma asked a second before I would have. “I could use a soda, if you have any.” She knew they had some. All her mother ever drank was Dr. Pepper. Pretending to be unfamiliar with her own house must have been killing her.

“Sure.” Traci stood. “Just give me a minute.”

“You don’t look like you feel good,” Harmony said, right on cue. “If you don’t mind, I can get everyone a drink while the girls go through Emma’s things.”

Traci only hesitated for a second. Then she sighed and sank onto the couch again. “That’d be great. Thanks.”

Harmony disappeared into the kitchen while Em and I headed to her room and Traci stayed on the couch.

“She looks sick,” Em whispered to me in the hall.

I nodded. “We’re going to help her.” But Traci’s health would come with a price only she could pay.

Emma’s room was a mess. There were open cardboard boxes on the floor, photos missing from the walls, and clothes draped over the back of Em’s desk chair. Her bed was unmade, too, but that had nothing to do with her death. The bed probably looked just like it had when she’d woken up after her last night in it.

I was halfway across Emma’s room when I realized she’d stopped in the doorway. “You okay?” I called over my shoulder.

“This is weird. They’ve already started packing stuff up,” she whispered. “Like they can’t wait to get rid of me.”





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