Before I Wake

13

“THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE,” ALEC said. “He doesn’t have a soul. He can’t cross over.”

“Yeah.” Emma tucked her feet beneath her, like she did during scary movies, so nothing evil could grab her ankles from beneath the couch. “The only reason I get any sleep at all anymore is because you told me he couldn’t cross over. No way, no how. That’s the rule. How is he breaking it now?”

“Kaylee,” Madeline said, before I could even try to answer Em. “I’ve been dead for more than half a century, and my superiors have been here even longer, and in all that time, I’ve never heard of a hellion crossing through the fog. It can’t be done. If it could, they would have taken over the human realm centuries ago.”

“The realm? The whole realm?” Em was close to panic.

“Stop saying the word realm,” Sabine said. “I’m having sci-fi convention flashbacks.”

“When were you at a sci-fi convention?” Alec asked, and the mara shrugged.

“Nerds give good nightmare. They’re afraid of everything.”

“Could we focus, please!” I snapped. Then I turned to Alec. “If a soul is all that’s keeping hellions from crossing over, why has it taken them this long to make the trip? I can think of half a dozen souls Avari’s stolen this school year alone.”

“It’s not that easy,” Alec explained. “Devouring a soul isn’t the same as having one of your own. He’s been trying to make that work for centuries, but once he eats the soul, it’s gone, and he can’t make it past the fog. To cross over, he’d have to be able to sort of…install a soul in his own body. And that’s impossible.”

“Well, he’s figured something out. I spoke to him here, on the human plane, twice in two days, and both times he was wearing the skin of a dead person. First Scott Carter, then Heidi Anderson.”

Em shrugged. “So maybe he’s just possessing them, and not really crossing over. Not that that is any less terrifying.”

“What’s the difference, in practical application?” Luca asked, and I nodded to Alec, tossing the question his way.

“Hellions can only possess the sleeping and unconscious, and even then, only those who have some link to the Netherworld. Possession victims have to have died—even if just for a minute—or have traveled across the fog at least once. And since possession is merely borrowing someone else’s body, his abilities would be limited to those his victim already has.”

“Like when he possessed Sabine and gave you nightmares?” Em asked, and I nodded, while the mara scowled over the reminder that she’d lost control of her own body, even briefly.

“But none of that is applicable here,” Alec insisted. “Because he can’t possess the dead. No one can. It can’t be done. Period.”

“Are you sure about that?” Nash asked, and Alec nodded firmly. So Nash turned to me. “Are you sure Scott was already dead when you talked to him? No chance there was a misprint in the obituary?”

I shrugged. “I seriously doubt it. But even if Scott was still alive and Avari was possessing him, that doesn’t explain how he showed up as Heidi Anderson. She died seven months ago. No misprint can explain that away.”

“Okay, so what do Scott and Heidi have in common?” Sabine asked, glancing at each of us in turn.

“You’ve never met them?” Nash said.

Sabine gave an exaggerated nod. “And I never will. Because they’re both dead.”

“Which means they’re no longer using their souls…” I said, starting to catch on. Then I turned to Alec. “He’s figured it out. Somehow, Avari’s figured out how to install a soul in his body. Or whatever.”

“Not possible,” Alec said again, but no one was listening to him.

“And that makes him look like the person the soul belongs to?” Em asked.

“More likely—assuming any of this is true—it makes him take the form that soul last took,” Madeline said. “Souls don’t really belong to anyone, once they’ve departed their most recent bodies. They’ll be recycled, and they’ve been recycled before. But until that happens, they retain the psychic memory of the life they just lived, including perfect recall of the physical form.”

“It’s much more than that,” Alec insisted. “Disembodied souls retain much more than a psychic memory. If they didn’t, how would hellions be able to torture them for all of eternity? Life has two parts,” Alec said, leaning forward on the couch, and I was both amused and relieved to realize that everyone else leaned toward him a little, ready and willing to hear the wisdom that could save us all.

“There’s the physical body, and the soul—the life force that supports it. When the body dies, a reaper takes the soul to be recycled, but that process isn’t death like we understand it. The soul doesn’t cease to exist. It’s just wiped clean of the existence it supported most recently. Until then, the soul still thinks and feels, and it can be tortured for a hellion’s pleasure or nutrition. So if Avari has figured out how to install a soul in his body, what he’s actually discovered is how to absorb a human life force, something he, as a hellion, lacks entirely. And if he’s really figured that out, we are all—all seven billion of us—in very big trouble.”

“Okay, you’re really starting to freak me out,” Em said, and her voice trembled.

“Good.” Alec reached over my lap to squeeze her hand, but his tone of voice lacked any comforting qualities. “If Kaylee’s right, we should all be very freaked out. And we should be willing to do whatever it takes to stop Avari from crossing over, much less handing out tickets to the rest of his hellion garden club.”

“Okay, let’s talk strategy,” Madeline said, and I couldn’t help noticing that no one had touched the popcorn. “But first, Kaylee, where is the soul you extracted?”

“Um, the dagger’s in the bathroom. I’ll get it.”

“The dagger?” Madeline frowned, and I realized I hadn’t actually made my report to her yet.

“Yeah. Avari had it when I got there. He said my amphora wouldn’t work on him—maybe because of whatever method he’s found of crossing over?—and that the other extractors died because they didn’t have my dagger.”

“How did he get it?” Alec asked, his forehead deeply furrowed in concern.

“I’m assuming he took it from my room.” And that was one of the scarier parts of this whole thing. “He obviously has at least some of the standard undead abilities when he crosses over.”

“Let me see this dagger, please,” Madeline said, and I stood, but Nash was already up.

“I got it,” he said. “I’m headed that way, anyway.”

“Thanks,” I said as he crossed the living room toward the hall. “If we’re right about Avari figuring out how to harness a human soul, there should be two in the dagger. Heidi Anderson’s, and the soul of the woman Avari killed in the restroom.” I frowned with another realization. “Well, make that three, with Beck’s.” And I couldn’t help wondering how many souls the dagger could hold.

“So, tell us everything you remember about both encounters with him,” Madeline said, and to my amusement, she pulled a small leather-bound notebook from an inside pocket of her jacket and started taking notes. “Did he have a physical form that you could tell? Or was he more of a specter?”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts, Aunt Madeline,” Luca said.

“Yes, but most varieties of the undead have a spectral form,” she insisted, and a lightbulb went off in my head.

“That’s what that’s called?” I wasn’t invisible; I was spectral. “Anyway, he was truly physically there, in both cases. I touched him. But no one else in the mall could see either of us.”

“Kaylee, what the hell happened?” Nash asked, and I looked up to find him standing in the living-room doorway with my dagger in one hand, my bloody shirt in the other.

I shrugged. “Turns out extracting a soul from a hellion involves actually stabbing it to death. It was totally traumatic.”

Madeline stood and took the dagger by the hilt, then held it up to the light as she examined it. “Hellion-forged steel…” she muttered, turning the blade over. “It’s inscribed, but I don’t recognize the language.” Finally she lowered the dagger and met my gaze. “It appears to function as an amphora in a basic, rather barbaric fashion.”

“Yeah. I gathered that when I barbarically stabbed a girl-shaped demon with it. Thus the trauma.”

“There was actual blood?” She set the dagger on the coffee table, then took my shirt from Nash and held it up for a better view.

“Yup. Blood. Melodrama. Threats. He said that if I didn’t stab him, he was going to kill this little girl carrying a balloon. Why would he do that? Why would he volunteer to die?”

“Because he knew it would traumatize you, and your trauma is like his chocolate-fudge brownie,” Alec said. “It’s yummy.”

Sabine shrugged. “That, and as a message.”

“What’s the message?” Em asked.

“That we’re nothing to him. We’re ants on the sidewalk, so small compared to his foot that he can’t even squish us one at a time. By making you banish him from one stolen body, he’s pointing out that he can get another one anytime, anywhere,” the mara said, and for about the billionth time, her insight scared me. More than ever, in fact, because this time she was demonstrating understanding of a hellion’s thought process.

“Well, the souls in the dagger should verify some of this for us,” Madeline said, exchanging the knife on the coffee table for my shirt. “And if this Heidi Anderson’s soul is among them, I’d call that fairly conclusive proof that Avari has in fact discovered how to wear the souls of the dead on the human plane.”

“The real question is how he got her soul in the first place,” Nash said. “Scott’s, I can understand. He could have sent Thane to kill him, or Avari might have done his own dirty work, if he was already on the human plane by then. But Heidi died months ago, and Avari didn’t get her soul.”

“How do you know that?” Madeline asked, and the unease churning deep in my stomach swelled.

He shrugged. “Because Belphegore got it.”

“Who is Belphegore?” Madeline and her nephew asked in unison, and even Alec looked confused.

“She’s the hellion of vanity my aunt made a deal with. Aunt Val hired a rogue reaper named Marg to collect the souls of five innocent, beautiful young women to trade in exchange for her own eternal youth and beauty. Heidi was the first of them. Marg tried to take my cousin Sophie’s soul as the fifth, and my aunt traded herself for her daughter. Belphegore got all five souls, including my aunt’s.”

“Sophie’s mom died to save her?” Luca said.

“Yeah, and she’s only known that for a few weeks.” Since the night I’d died and her father had come clean about the family secret.

“So, Belphegore is involved in this, too?” Emma had all but curled into a ball. Hers had been one of the souls Marg tried to take, and the minute and a half she was dead had made her eligible for possession by Avari, or any other hellion who decided to try.

“Sounds like it. How else would Avari get Heidi’s soul?” I said. Em had tears in her eyes. I gave her a hug, but that was the best I could do until someone invented a Band-Aid for pure terror. “I think we need to face the fact that Avari will be back, but we have no way of knowing where, when, or in what form.”

My dad got home from work shortly after Madeline left to extract and identify the souls in my dagger. She promised to fill Levi in and ask for his help.

When my dad heard what was going on, he immediately called both Harmony Hudson and my uncle Brendon, who showed up twenty minutes later with Sophie in tow. Our poor little house had never been so full, but everyone agreed that we had strength in numbers.

Everyone except Styx, who barked to be let back in, then walked around growling at everyone she didn’t know until I finally closed her in my bedroom to keep everyone from being bitten by a nervous half Nether-hound.

Sophie was sullen and uncooperative until Luca emerged from the bathroom, at which point she recruited him to help her take dinner orders and make a run to my dad’s favorite Chinese restaurant.

For the next hour, everything we’d already discussed was dissected ad nauseam over cardboard cartons of rice and noodles, and at some point, I realized I’d rather pull my hair out and spend eternity bald than have to explain one more time that I didn’t know how Avari had done what he’d done, or what he was up to.

After dinner, my uncle Brendon took Luca for a drive around town—Sophie insisted on going—to see if he could sense either Thane or Mareth, who had yet to turn up. We were pretty sure Thane had snatched her and taken her to Avari, but no one wanted to admit defeat on that front. Not yet, anyway. And we still had no idea why Avari wanted another reaper.

Tod turned up as they were leaving and took one look around at the chaos and the mess, then tugged me toward my room to escape the noise. “There are several advantages to invisibility,” he said, closing the door at his back.

“The word of the day is spectral,” I said as my arms slid around his neck. “We’re not invisible right now, we’re spectral.”

“I don’t care what you call it, so long as it’s just the two of us. It’s crazy in there.”

“Yeah, but it could be worse. I, um, wasn’t able to keep this afternoon a total secret.”

“This afternoon?” He glanced at the bed for confirmation, and I could feel myself flush as I nodded. “Em, right?” he said, and I nodded again. “Kaylee, I don’t care who knows, as long as you’re comfortable with it. Assuming you made me sound good.”

I laughed. “She didn’t get the details she was hoping for.” I sat on the edge of my desk and pulled him closer, one hand on his chest as I looked into his eyes. “That’s between us.”

“I’m good with that… .” He leaned in for a kiss, but I stopped him.

“Sabine knows, too.”

Tod’s brows rose, and he leaned back for a better look into my eyes. “I didn’t think you two were that close.”

“We’re not. She’s crazy perceptive and psychotically honest.”

“Meaning…?”

“She wants to tell Nash.”

Tod frowned. “I don’t see how that could possibly be good for his ego. Especially if you told the story the way I remember it.” He grinned, trying to lighten the mood, but I couldn’t even summon a smile.

“I don’t want to hurt him any more than we already have. I told her that if she values our friendship, she’ll keep her mouth shut.”

“You’re friends now?”

“If that’ll keep her from spewing our personal business in front of the entire world, then, yes. We’re friends.”

“Sophie?” I set my backpack on the ground next to my usual lunch table, surprised to find my cousin sitting on it. I was almost always the first to reach the quad—a benefit of having no third-period class—but even when someone beat me there, it wasn’t Sophie. My cousin had never once sat at my table. In two years, she’d rarely even glanced our way without throwing an insult at me.

This time she just blinked at me and brushed blond hair behind her shoulder. “Hey.”

My frown deepened. If she hadn’t spoken with her own voice, I’d assume she’d been possessed—that had certainly happened before. “Is something wrong?”

“No.” She frowned and reconsidered. “Well, yes. Everything’s wrong. But no one would know that better than you, I guess.”

“I meant, why are you here?”

She shrugged. “I’m meeting Luca. I have yet to convince him that he doesn’t have to sit in the social wasteland.”

“And you honestly think he’d be more comfortable in the intellectual wasteland?” I tossed a pointed glance at the table where she and her jock friends had been sitting every day of the two years she’d been at Eastlake.

Sophie exhaled and nodded, and I waited for verbal venom that never came. “I guess I deserve that. I just…” She hesitated, glancing at the grass for a moment before meeting my gaze again. “I never got a chance to tell you that I’m sorry for what happened to you that night. With Mr. Beck.”

Except that she’d had plenty of chances. She just hadn’t taken any of them.

“Oh.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “You mean the night I was brutally murdered in my own bed?”

Sophie flinched. “You don’t have to make it sound so…”

“So what? True? Because it’s true.”

“So…ugly.” Her face scrunched up, like she found the word personally offensive. Or maybe it was the truth that offended her. “You don’t have to go for the shock factor with every weird-ass sentence that comes out of your mouth. Especially considering that you got a happy ending.”

“Happy ending?” I couldn’t pile enough disbelief into my voice to accurately express how much of it I was dealing with. “What part of ‘walking corpse’ sounds like a happy ending to you? The part where I’ll never reach the age of consent or the legal drinking age?” Not that either of those really mattered anymore. “Or the part where there’s still a demon from another dimension out to get my soul, and willing to go through everyone I love to get to me? I understand that there’s a discrepancy between the way the world really looks and the way you see it, but I think you need to open your eyes a little wider.”

Irritation flared behind her gaze. “I’m trying to apologize, Kaylee, and you’re not making that very easy.”

“So sorry to have inconvenienced you with the truth. Go ahead. I’m listening.”

Yes, I was being hard on her. But life would be even harder on her, assuming she survived long enough to graduate. And with Avari on the warpath, there was no guarantee of that at all.

“Look. My dad said you saved my life that night,” Sophie said, and I shrugged. I’d actually saved her life several times, but who was counting? “So I wanted to say thank you, and tell you I’m sorry for all the mean things I said about you being a crazy freak before. I swear I had no idea those weren’t personal life choices.”

I didn’t know whether to pity her or smack her. Fortunately, the decision was taken out of my hands when the bell rang and students started pouring into the quad with lunch trays.

Nash and Sabine arrived first, but Luca was only a minute behind, and one glance at what passed for chili on their trays was enough to make me grateful that I didn’t have to eat ever again, if I chose.

“Is my brother here?” Nash asked, sliding onto the bench seat across from me and next to Sabine. Sophie sat on his other side, so she could stare across the table at Luca.

“No, and I don’t know if he will be. He has to cover all the hospital shifts, with Mareth gone. Levi’s filling in for him tonight, though, so he can do a shift at the pizza place.”

“Because delivering pizza is more important than reaping souls?” Sophie’s brows rose as she took a carrot from Luca’s tray.

“Spoken like someone who doesn’t have to cover her own cell-phone bill. Or make her own car payment. Or buy her own clothes,” Sabine said, and I realized it would be hard for me to choose sides in a Sophie/Sabine cage match.

“So who pays your cell bill?” Sophie asked.

“It’s a prepaid phone,” Nash supplied, and from the look on his face, I could tell he regretted sitting between them.

“And how does she prepay for it?”

Sabine leaned around Nash to glare at Sophie, and I swear a cloud rolled across the sun and the whole quad got darker. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to.”

“Okay, truce!” Luca threw his arms out across the table, like an umpire declaring the batter safe. “Let’s talk business before Jayson gets here.” Em had been holding him back at the beginning of every lunch period—I could only guess her method of distraction—to give us a chance to talk about something more important than prom and postgraduation parties.

“Was your aunt able to ID the souls in the dagger?” I asked. The knife had been on my desk when I got out of the shower that morning, but Madeline hadn’t waited around to talk to me.

“Yeah. You were right. Other than the incubus, there were two souls, and one of them has been missing for seven months. It was last reported in the possession of a rogue reaper Levi says he killed.” Marg, of course. “They have no reason to doubt that Belphegore ended up with the soul, and as for how Avari got it from her… Their guess is as good as ours.”

Which meant we had yet to uncover the connection between Avari and Belphegore, or figure out what Avari wanted with the reapers.

“Did you find Thane?” I asked. Thanks to Tod, I already knew Mareth was still missing. Tod was pretending that didn’t worry him, but how could it not?

“No.” Luca exhaled heavily. “Either he’s left town, or he’s left the human realm altogether.”

“My money’s on the latter,” Sabine said, and Sophie laughed so hard she nearly choked on a carrot.

“What money?”

Sabine stood, fists clenched, and Nash pulled her back down.

“Sophie, Sabine beat up a reaper two nights ago,” I said. “And it’s entirely possible that she may one day be the only thing standing between you and a hellion ready to rip your head off and suck out your soul. Do you really think it’s wise to piss her off?”

Sophie glanced from me to Sabine, then back, scowling. “I’m not scared of her. I can handle myself.”

“Yeah, and hissing kittens think they’re badass, too,” Sabine said.

“Okay, listen,” I said, and I couldn’t quite shake the discomfort of having all four sets of eyes turned my way. I wasn’t used to being the center of attention, and the recent media coverage of my so-called attempted murder had done nothing to change that. But someone had to say what needed to be said. “Everyone here has some reason to dislike everyone else at this table. Except for Luca,” I added when he started to object. “But we don’t have the time or energy to waste hating one another, so from here on out, everyone gets a clean slate. No more grudges. Got it?”

“You know that’s a lot easier said than done, Kaylee,” Nash said softly, and we all knew he was thinking about Tod. About a betrayal he didn’t think he could forgive. But he was wrong about that.

“Yeah, I know. But I’m willing to—” The rest of that sentence died on my tongue as my gaze snagged on something behind him. A girl in a green-and-white-letter jacket, watching me from the edge of the quad, half-hidden by the brick wall of the building.

“Kaylee?” Nash twisted to see what I was looking at.

I stood and the girl smiled at me. My heart stopped beating.

No. It couldn’t be.

But it was.

Meredith Cole. Sophie’s fellow dance-team member, who’d died last September, here in the quad. I’d screamed for her soul. Which Marg the reaper had then given to Belphegore, the hellion of vanity.

Meredith was back, and that could only mean one thing.

“Shit,” Luca mumbled, and in my peripheral vision—I didn’t dare let Meredith out of my sight—I saw him scrub one hand over his face and through his hair. “There’s a body. In the parking lot, I think.”

I grabbed my backpack and climbed over the bench seat as Meredith disappeared around the building. I took off after her, dodging tables and kids with trays, and I ran right past Emma and Jayson, who stared after me in surprise.

“Kaylee!” Nash shouted, and footsteps pounded on the ground behind me, but I couldn’t tell how many of my friends were following me. And I could only hope the rest of the student body hadn’t decided to come watch whatever drama they imagined we were playing out.

I chased Meredith around the corner of the building and she stopped halfway to the parking lot and turned to face me. I slowed to a walk and my grip tightened around the strap of my bag as I pulled the zipper open with my free hand.

“Avari?” I said so softly I could barely hear myself.

“Who else?” the hellion said in Meredith’s voice. “I thought this ensemble most appropriate for a visit during school hours. However, I’m not sure I got the smile quite right. How does she look on me?” He spread Meredith’s arms, inviting me to inspect her. She looked exactly like she had the day she’d died. Letter jacket. Skirt that barely passed the dress code. Too-thin legs. Honey-brown ponytail. This was beyond creepy. I was being haunted by everyone I’d ever failed to save—all the ghosts of my past.

Dickens was probably rolling over in his grave.

“Who’d you kill?” I demanded as several sets of footsteps slowed to a stop behind me.

Meredith cocked her head to one side. “I didn’t ask his name. I only asked if he knew you, and when he was finished soiling himself—evidently he recognized my disguise—he managed to say that he shares a class with you.”

My backpack shook in my grip. Another death laid at my doorstep. Another classmate dead for no reason. Who would be next? One of my friends? A member of my family? I could hardly see through the horror clouding my vision. I couldn’t let this go on.

“I warned you, Ms. Cavanaugh, yet you greedily cling to your soul, when you could have spared your friends and classmates another loss.”

“Meredith?” Sophie’s voice was a shocked whisper as she slowed to a stop at my side, and I glanced back just long enough to make sure no one else—no one human—had followed us out of the quad. They hadn’t, but that couldn’t last long.

I tried to step in front of my cousin, but she shoved me away, her eyes wide and filled with tears.

“Get her out of here,” I said to Luca. He tried to lead her away, but she wouldn’t go.

“Meredith?” she said again, and I could hear the tears in her voice.

To my horror, the hellion answered, in Meredith’s voice. “Don’t let them hurt me, Sophie. Your crazy cousin wants to kill me.”

“Kaylee?” Sophie demanded, and on the edge of my vision, I saw Nash move to help Luca with her. “No! Get off me!” She shoved their hands away. “Kaylee, is that Meredith?”

“No. Meredith is dead.” I didn’t dare look away from the hellion as he watched her, a quiet smile turning up one corner of his stolen mouth, enjoying her confusion and pain.

“So are you!” Sophie hissed, pushing Nash away. If she threw a fit, people would come running. We had to keep her quiet and get her away from the hellion. “Is Meredith back? You can’t kill her! I won’t let you!”

“Sophie, get out of here and let me do my job.” I desperately didn’t want her to be there when I had to stab a monster who looked like one of her friends.

Luca stepped in front of Sophie, blocking her view of the hellion, and when she tried to step around him, he wrapped both arms around her—more hug than restrictive hold. He spoke into her ear, so softly I could hardly hear him. “I don’t know who Meredith is, but if Kaylee says that’s not her, then that’s not her. That’s not even her corpse—you have my word.”

“Then what is that? What the hell is that?” Her voice went shrill and terrified, and for the first time I thought I heard a little of her mixed-blood bean sidhe heritage leaking through. “What’s going on? What does it want?”

“I came back for you, Sophie,” the Meredith-thing said. “Come with me. You belong in hell. That’s where all snotty little bitches wind up eventually, anyway.” The hellion’s lips curled up into a creepy smile, and Sophie screamed.

Luca and Nash tried to cover her mouth, but her lungs were powerful and her voice was shrill.

I reached into my backpack and pulled the dagger from an inside pocket. I’d had to blink straight into the school building to get it past the metal detectors, and now I was glad I’d gone to the extra trouble.

The hellion was drinking up Sophie’s trauma, but Meredith’s eyes narrowed on me when she saw the blade, and she spread her arms. “This is my favorite part,” Avari said with Meredith’s voice. “Until next time…”

I drove the dagger through her stomach and up into her chest.