Before I Wake

20

“OKAY.” I TOOK a deep breath, trying to gather my thoughts, and sank onto a picnic bench beneath the pavilion. “Whoever that was impersonating Tina, he’s down now, but not out. He’ll be back, and there’s no telling what he’ll look like.” Or she. The hellion could have been female.

“So, what’s the plan?” Sabine asked, her face lined in pain as she laid her injured arm on the picnic table in front of her.

“Well…” my father said from the opposite side of the table. He was naked from the waist up, his leg stretched out straight on the bench beneath him, pressing his shirt to the wound, like Harmony had shown him. “I’m sorry about your birthday party, Kaylee, but I think we all need to go. Now.”

“Agreed.” I scanned the shoreline, looking for Em and Jayson, and Sophie and Luca. They’d paired up on opposite sides of the lake—no doubt for privacy—and were out of earshot. Fortunately, they’d missed the demon slaying. “Harmony, can you drive Sabine and my dad to the hospital? We’ll get the others and follow you.”

“No…” my dad started to object. But I cut him off.

“You’re bleeding all over the place. We’ll be right behind you, I swear. I’m not looking for any more hellion interaction today, of all days.”

“You are still losing blood…” Harmony said, and my father sighed.

“You swear you’ll be right behind us?”

I nodded. “You’ll probably be able to see us in the rearview mirror.” When my father finally gave in, Tod and I helped Harmony get him into her car while Nash helped Sabine buckle her seat belt beneath her broken—and now swollen—arm. Then Nash headed to the pavilion to pack up the lunch stuff. Tod and I were about to blink to opposite sides of the lake to gather the rest of the troops when Luca came running toward us from the shore.

“Kaylee!” he shouted, and all three of us turned. An instant later, and Tod and I would have been gone.

“What’s wrong?”

“Dead guy. Or dead girl,” Luca said. “Either way, someone here is deader than either of you.”

A jolt of fear shot up my spine, followed by an echoing bolt of anger. Not again…

“It’s probably Tina’s body,” Tod said, while Nash filled Luca in on what had happened, and I was almost ashamed by how relieved that thought made me. As awful as it was to think that Sabine’s foster mother had been hauled around in her own car by the demon who’d killed her and stolen her soul, that was better than the alternative—yet another death. “Where?” I asked.

“Over there somewhere.” Luca nodded toward the parking lot, and my relief swelled. If Tina’s body had arrived with her car, that would explain why Luca hadn’t sensed it before.

“Show us,” I said, and we followed him away from the covered eating area toward the parking lot, with spaces for just six vehicles. Four of the spaces were occupied by cars we’d driven: mine, my dad’s, Tina’s, and Jayson’s.

Luca stopped in front of our row of cars, then veered to the right, past my car, like he was being physically tugged that way. “Here.” He started down the aisle between Tina’s car and Jayson’s, and my heart pounded so hard my chest ached. I didn’t want to think about Sabine’s foster mother lying dead in her own car. I didn’t want to think about anything. I wanted this moment to be over, before it had even begun.

At the end of the aisle, Luca turned to the right—away from Tina’s car. He stepped slowly, hesitantly toward Jayson’s trunk, his eyes narrowed in concentration, and I could feel my own brow wrinkle in confusion. “It’s in there. Dead. Not rotting yet, so it’s very recent.”

“What? No,” I said, frustrated by the fact that logic and the truth didn’t seem to line up. “Why would someone put a body in Jayson’s car? He doesn’t know anything about any of this.”

“No, but his trunk obviously made a convenient delivery system.” Tod peered over the roof, and I followed his gaze to the shore, where Em and Jayson were two indistinct forms near the edge of the water, enjoying their normal day, and their normal lives, with no idea how much macabre horror had hitched a ride in Jayson’s normal car. “He’s not looking. I’m going to pop the trunk.”

Tod disappeared, and an instant later he reappeared in Jayson’s driver’s seat.

My hands shook and my mind raced. Who was in the trunk? It had to be someone I knew. Someone close to me. The pattern was escalating—Avari had said that himself. A stranger. A classmate. A friend.

This time it was a relative. It had to be. Except that all of my relatives were alive and accounted for.

Except for Uncle Brendon.

“No…”

My uncle had cared for me like a father when my own father hadn’t been able to deal with my mother’s death. Uncle Brendon had been there on every first day of school and every trip to the doctor. He’d turned on the bathroom light when I was scared of the dark and thrown away the steamed broccoli I hated, when Aunt Val wasn’t looking.

But whatever he’d been to me, he was more to Sophie. He was all she had left. And no matter what she’d said and done to me in the past, she didn’t deserve this.

Tod leaned forward in the driver’s seat and something popped inside the car. The trunk lid rose a couple of inches, but I only stared at it. I couldn’t look. I didn’t want to see.

“Kaylee?” Luca said, but I shook my head.

“I need a minute.” How was I going to tell my dad that his brother was gone? How was I going to tell Sophie that her father was dead? And that it was my fault?

“Kay?” Tod appeared at my side and his arm wrapped around me from behind.

“I can’t do it. It’s Uncle Brendon. Am I a total coward if I don’t look?”

He squeezed me, then let me go and lifted the trunk. I turned my head. I didn’t want to see my uncle dead, and I especially didn’t want to see him dead in the trunk of Emma’s boyfriend’s car.

Luca made a sound, deep in his throat, and for a second, I thought he’d choked on horror. I’d come close myself, several times. “What the hell?” the necromancer said. “I don’t understand.”

“Kaylee,” Tod said, and something in his voice set off alarms in my head. He seemed to be calling me forward and warning me back at the same time. “It’s not your uncle.”

Chill bumps sprouted all over my arms, and finally I looked, because I had no other choice. But at first, I couldn’t process what I was seeing.

Tod was right; it wasn’t my uncle. This man was younger, thinner, with unruly brown hair and…

My hands clenched around the edge of the trunk and I looked up at Tod, my eyes wide. He nodded in response to the question I couldn’t voice. “He said he brought you a gift.”

Yes, that’s exactly what Jayson had said. Except it couldn’t really have been Jayson speaking, because Jayson was dead in the trunk of his own car.

“So, who’s that with Emma?” Luca asked, and I glanced up in horror, searching the shoreline for her and for not-Jayson. I had to squint to see them clearly. They were a quarter of the way around the lake, standing in the sand. Em’s shoes dangled from the fingers of one hand. And she was kissing…him. She was kissing not-Jayson.

My best friend was kissing the demon wearing her boyfriend’s stolen soul.

“That son of a bitch played us.” And now he had Emma within his grasp. Literally.

Tod saw my intent before it could possibly have surfaced in my eyes. “Kaylee, wait!”

But I couldn’t wait. I couldn’t let him have her.

Frantic with rage and impatience, I turned and stomped toward the picnic table, where my dagger lay, still smeared with blood. “Kaylee.” Tod followed me. “We need a plan.”

“I have one: kill him, before he lays another hand on Emma.”

“That’s not a plan, it’s a goal. Plans have steps, and forethought, and—”

I grabbed the dagger, but Tod stood his ground, blocking me in between the table and the grill. “Step one. Kill him. Step two. Repeat as necessary.” I turned to Nash and Luca. “Will you guys go get Sophie?” When they nodded, I turned back to Tod. “You comin’?”

Then I blinked out, without waiting for his reply. An instant later, I stood on the sand behind the Jayson-thing. Over his shoulder, Em saw my knife and gasped.

Jayson turned and laughed out loud. “I wondered how long that would take.”

“About this long.” I swung the knife at him, but he turned at the same time, with Emma in his grip. Em screamed. I tried to abort my swing, but the dagger sliced through the side of her blouse as he swung her around like a human shield. The blade scored her skin in an arc, just above her right hip.

She screamed again, and I gasped, almost frozen by my own horror and regret. “Em, I’m so sorry!”

“Ow, shit! What the hell, Kaylee?” Em slapped one hand over the wound, but Jayson nearly pulled her off balance when he dragged her backward, away from me.

“Let her go,” I said, trying to divide my focus between his face and the blood seeping between her fingers.

“Kaylee, put the knife down,” the Jayson-thing said. His voice was full of trepidation and fear, but his expression didn’t match. His grin was creepy and irrepressible, but Emma couldn’t see that with him at her back. He leaned down to speak directly into her ear. “I always heard she was crazy, but I didn’t think she was violent.”

And that’s when I understood the game—the hellion was still playing his role.

“Kaylee?” Emma’s face was white with pain, and her hands were red and slick with her own blood. She was breathing too hard. Too fast.

“I’m so sorry, Em. I was aiming for him.” My focus shifted to his eyes, sparkling with new pleasure over her head. “Let her go. This isn’t about her.”

“What is she talking about?” Jayson’s voice asked, practically shaking with fake fear, while his eyes shined in malicious pleasure. “And why is she armed?” He pulled her farther away from me, pretending to protect her, when he was really shielding himself.

“What’s going on?” Em demanded, and the strength in her voice gave me hope. Surely if the wound was very bad, she’d weaken quickly. Right?

“Don’t mean to scare you, Em,” Tod said, appearing on the left edge of my peripheral vision. “But there’s a better than average chance you may be dating a demon.”

She glanced at him, then back to me. “What the hell is he talking about?”

“That’s not Jayson. Jayson’s dead in his own trunk.”

“What does that mean?” the Jayson-thing said. “They’re crazy, Em. How could I be standing here right now, if I were dead?”

Tod made an exasperated sound. “Oh, let me count the ways… .”

“Emma, listen to me, please.” I stepped forward, but he dragged her back again. “Jayson is dead. He’s in the trunk of his own car, in the parking lot. The thing holding you is Avari, and he’s not protecting you from me, he’s using you as a human shield.”

“No…” Em flinched and pressed her hand harder against her wound. But she’d seen and survived too much to let fear and disbelief—or even pain—blind her to the dangerous truth. That was one of the things I liked best about her. “Jayson’s dead?”

“The word doornail comes to mind,” Tod said.

I nodded and gestured toward the thing still clutching Emma to its chest. “Ask him. Hellions can’t lie.”

Tears spilled from Emma’s eyes and trailed down her cheeks, and I couldn’t tell which hurt her worse: her bleeding cut or the thought that her new human boyfriend—innocent, and ignorant of the danger he’d walked into—had been killed by a monster. “Are you Avari?” Her words were halting, half choked with her own tears. “Did you kill Jayson?”

The Jayson-monster’s brows rose at me over Emma’s head. “No, to both questions.” He was challenging me. Daring me to prove him wrong.

But… Hellions couldn’t lie. Of course, they weren’t supposed to be able to cross over, either. What was I missing?

“Okay. I believe you,” Em said, holding my gaze with a teary one of her own. She was talking to me, but he was supposed to think she was talking to him. “But I’m hurt, Jayson. Let me go, so they can take me to the hospital.”

“I will.” He glanced over my shoulder toward the pavilion, probably making sure no one else had noticed the trouble yet. “As soon as she puts the knife down.”

But I couldn’t do that.

“Who are you?” I demanded. “Obviously you’re a hellion. Someone working with Avari.” But no self-respecting hellion would help out another without something to gain from the favor. Was Emma the payment? If so, why not just take her? Why would the Jayson-thing practically tell me he’d left something in his car for me, then walk down the shore with Em in plain sight, instead of just crossing over with her? “Belphegore?” I said. “Invidia?”

“Oh, now you’re just guessing,” the hellion said. And with that, the charade was over.

“Let me go,” Em said, her voice deep with hatred, haggard with pain. “Let go of me, you murdering, soul-stealing demon bastard!”

Jayson laughed. “I like this one. Easy on the eyes and even better on the tongue.” He bent toward her ear again. “Do you think they’ll save you?” he stage-whispered loud enough for me and Tod to hear. “If she has to kill you to get to me, do you think she’ll even hesitate?”

Fresh rage blossomed inside me, fire shooting up my spine. He was playing on old fears that I would let her die. On doubt that I would be able to save her a second time.

“Kaylee would never hurt me. On purpose,” she amended as blood continued to seep slowly between her fingers.

“Tell her what really happened to Alec,” the hellion said, and my rage was drenched in a cold wash of dread as he met my gaze again. “Don’t your friends deserve the truth?”

“I don’t want the truth.” Emma’s voice was weaker now from blood loss, and fear, and maybe from confusion. “I just want to go to the hospital. Please…”

“She killed him,” the hellion whispered. “Kaylee stabbed Alec, and it wasn’t an accident, like the scratch she just gave you, which smells so deliciously painful.” The Jayson-thing pushed Emma’s hand aside and pressed his fingers into her wound. She gasped in pain. He lifted his hand and licked a smear of blood from it, his hungry gaze holding mine the whole time. “She stabbed him on purpose. It’s true. I can’t lie.”

Em looked at me through tear-filled eyes, asking me for the truth without actually asking for anything.

“That’s not how it happened,” Tod insisted when I made no attempt to defend myself. “He was possessed, but we thought Alec was already dead. We thought Avari was wearing his soul.”

“Let her go,” I demanded.

Jayson laughed and licked another smear of blood from his hand, his other arm tight around Emma’s waist. “Drop the knife, or I’ll take a real bite out of her, right here. I do love a picnic at the lake.”

Emma’s breathing sped up and her face paled even more. My fist tightened around the hilt of the knife. I glanced at Tod, and he nodded. I blinked, sure I’d seen wrong. But he was still nodding, telling me to drop the knife.

“Drop it and distract him,” Tod said, his lip barely moving, and I knew from Em’s lack of reaction that I was the only one who could hear him.

I held up the knife, blade down, to catch Jayson’s attention. Then I dropped it. The knife speared the sand in front of my feet, stuck hilt up. “Now let her go. You said you would, when I put the knife down.”

Jayson’s head cocked to the side, like he was thinking back over everything he’d said. “True…” He let her go, and Emma stumbled toward me, one hand clutching her bloodied side, relief and fear mixing in her features only to be overshadowed by pain. I reached for her, but the second her hand touched mine, the hellion snatched her back.

Emma screamed, and he laughed. “I never said I wouldn’t take her back.”

I looked around for Tod, but he was gone. I glanced toward the pavilion and saw several human shapes, but we were too far away for me to tell who I was looking at. Had they heard her scream? Why was no one running to help?

“Distract him and move away from the knife,” Tod said from behind me and I realized no one else could see or hear him now.

Distract him? How? What would distract a hellion who already had what he wanted? But then, he’d had what he wanted the whole time. So why were he and Em still there? Unless he didn’t have what he wanted…

“Take me instead,” I said, stepping to my left. “You need me to go willingly, don’t you?” Because I was already dead, stealing my soul wasn’t as simple as just killing me for it.

The hellion shrugged. “Willing, or unconscious. Similar to mating rituals here on the human plane, isn’t it?” He laughed at his joke, and my stomach churned.

“Keep moving…” Tod said, and I stepped to my left again. This time the hellion had to turn Emma to keep me in sight. But in turning, he stepped closer to the dagger.

“Fine. I’m willing. Let her go.”

“Prove it.” The Jayson-monster lifted one foot and deliberately stomped on the hellion-forged dagger. The hilt broke off with less than two inches of blade, and a scream of despair rose up inside me, like a mockery of my bean sidhe wail. “Cross over.”

“Shit!” Tod swore.

“What?” I’d heard Jayson, but I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. I couldn’t drag my gaze from the ruined dagger, and the loss it represented.

“Cross into the Netherworld, and I will let her go,” Jayson said. “You have my word.”

“No!” Tod said, and I glanced at him. The hellion followed my gaze, but he couldn’t focus on what he couldn’t see. “Kaylee, do not cross over.”

“Cross. Now. Or I’ll chew her throat out, slurp up her blood, and keep her soul.”

“Kaylee…” Emma was terrified.

“Kaylee…” Tod was terrified.

In the Netherworld, I wouldn’t have any of my undead advantages, except for the ability to cross back into the human world. But if I didn’t go, he’d kill Emma, and I’d have to chase him into the Netherworld to retrieve her soul, anyway—there was no way I’d let Em’s soul be tortured or worn like a costume.

“I cross, and you let Emma go? Alive?”

Jayson nodded. “That’s the deal.”

I looked straight at Tod. “Take her to the hospital. I’ll be right back.” Then I crossed over.

In the Netherworld, I stood alone next to the lake. Except I wasn’t really alone. I couldn’t be.

Everything looked the same, only different. The sand was too pale. White. More like salt than like sand. The trees were skeletal, as if they were caught out of season, and the few leaves still hanging had shapes I didn’t recognize.

The lake was…not made of water. I don’t know what the Netherworld version of our lake was filled with, but it was thick, and dark, and it stank to high hell. Things slithered just beneath the surface, leaving ripples in the thin, foul membrane that had formed on top. I gagged just from looking at it, and without the ability to teleport, I couldn’t get far enough from the stagnant body of…fluid to avoid the smell.

I’d done my part. I’d crossed over. I closed my eyes, preparing to cross back into the human world to make sure Em had been released, when someone shouted my name.

I spun around to find Emma limping toward me from only feet away, leaving small drops of bright red blood on the sand. Behind her, long, black, multilegged creatures—carnivorous caterpillars?—crawled out of the sand and gathered around each new drop, fighting over her blood, scratching, clawing, and devouring until each stained grain was gone.

Invidia stood at Emma’s back, stuck in her own form now that the Jayson-costume had expired with her trip back into the Netherworld. The hellion of envy looked just like I remembered. Thin hands sticking out of the long sleeves of her black dress. Gaunt cheeks. Dark circles beneath featureless black-orb eyes staring out at everything. Or at nothing.

With a hellion you never could tell.

Invidia’s long, ever-flowing rivulets of black hair dripped down her back and over one shoulder, shining with a green tint in the anemic light of the Netherworld sun. Each drop sizzled on the sand at her feet, but instead of gathering for a bite, the caterpillars scurried away from the noxious fluid. Except for one unlucky creature, who suffered a direct hit and was consumed alive by the acidic drop of liquid hair.

“Em…” I threw my arm around her waist while hers went around my neck, and in the process, I stepped on several of the creepy little bugs still following the source of Em’s human blood. “You were supposed to let her go in the human plane!” I snapped at Invidia, then flinched over my own volume. Shouting in the Netherworld was like ringing a dinner bell in the Old West.

“I don’t recall saying where I would release her,” Invidia said, and her cackle of laughter grated against my bones like nails on a chalkboard. “You should take her home while you still have a chance. They’ve had a taste of her, and they’ll want more.” Her grand, skinny-handed gesture took in the army of tiny cater-creatures marching around the threat of Invidia’s toxic hair drops on a steady path toward me and Em. “I’ve seen them strip slabs of meat twice your size to the bone in under a single of your human minutes.”

I frowned in confusion, carefully backing Emma and myself away from the growing mass of bugs crawling over one another to get to us. “You’re letting us go?” It was a trick. It had to be.

“If she is still here in ten seconds, I won’t leave enough scraps of that pretty little body to feed a single one of the bugs… .”

She didn’t have to tell me twice—er, three times. I grabbed Em’s hand and closed my eyes. A second later, we stood on the lakeshore in the human world, where the sand was brown and nothing crawled out of it ready to devour us.

Emma sagged against me, her breathing ragged, her grip on my shoulder weakening with every second. “Is that it? She just let us go?”

“That’s what it looks like…” But my nerve endings were on fire, and every hair on my arms was standing straight up. Why would she let us cross over? It was almost like Invidia wanted us in the human world. “Something’s wrong. That was too easy.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“Oh, Em…” I lowered her to the ground carefully and she removed her hand from the wound long enough for me to take a look. But I couldn’t even tell what I was looking at, much less how bad it was. I only saw blood. “We’re going to get you to a hospital. They’ll fix you up.”

“It’s going to be okay, though, right?” she asked, staring up into my eyes, her entire face lined in pain and fear. “I can’t die if I’m not on the list, right? And Tod would have told us if I were on the list?”

“Yeah, if he saw your name, he’d definitely tell us. But…” Damn, I didn’t want to have to tell her this. “That knife—it’s actually a dagger made of hellion-forged steel.”

“What does that mean?”

“Supernatural events trump the list. Which means…”

“I could die,” she finished for me, and her gaze dropped in shock. “Again.”

“Yeah.” Of a wound I’d inflicted. “But we’re not going to let that happen. We’re going to get you to the hospital.” I couldn’t take her that far in one jump, but maybe Tod could.

Where was Tod? Why hadn’t he crossed into the Netherworld with us? He was gone, and so was the broken dagger.

“Shit. Give me your hand.” I reached down, and Em placed her bloody left hand in mine, still clutching her wound with the other. I closed my eyes and blinked us to the pavilion my father had rented, then helped Em onto one of the picnic table benches.

“Where is everyone?” she asked, and I glanced around, wondering the same thing.

“Harmony took my dad and Sabine to the hospital. Nash and Luca went to find Sophie, but I don’t see any of them.”

“What about Tod?”

“I don’t know.” The chill bumps on my arms grew even fatter.

The fire was still going in the grill, burning the burgers and charring the already-burned hot dogs. My dad’s spatula lay on the grass a few feet away. The soda cans he and Harmony had been drinking from still sat on the table nearest the grill. Nash hadn’t packed anything up yet, which meant they’d been gone since I went to confront Jayson/Invidia.

“Kaylee!” Nash shouted, and I looked up to see him and Luca running around the curve of the lake toward us, from the shore opposite where Em had been taken hostage. I exhaled in relief—until I realized they were alone.

“Hey, Emma’s hurt!” I said as they stopped beneath the pavilion, winded from their run. “Where are Tod and Sophie?”

“We couldn’t find Sophie,” Nash said. “There were several sets of footprints in the sand—some of them ours—and hers seemed to head into the woods. But we couldn’t tell for sure.”

“Didn’t know we were supposed to be looking for Tod,” Luca added, still trying to catch his breath from the sprint.

“What happened?” Nash dropped to his knees in front of Em before I could pull another word out of him. She moved her hand so he could look at her wound, and her nose and forehead wrinkled in pain.

“I accidentally cut her. I was aiming for Jayson, who turned out to be Invidia.”

“Invidia?” Luca said.

“The hellion of envy who turned Sabine and Kaylee against each other,” Em explained.

“It wasn’t just us!” I insisted. “The whole school went crazy because of her!”

“Emma needs a hospital,” Nash said.

“I know, but I can’t blink her that far, and we can’t leave Sophie and Tod.” I dug my keys from my pocket. “Why don’t you take Em to the hospital, and Luca and I will stay here and find them.”

Nash shook his head and refused the keys when I tried to hand them to him. “I’m not leaving you here.”

“But, Em…”

“I’m fine for a little while,” she insisted, but I found that hard to believe. “Besides, if you find Tod, he can get me there faster than driving, right?”

I nodded. “In theory.”

Em’s gaze focused on something behind me, and her frown deepened. “Shit. We have company.” She grabbed my hand and squeezed it before I could turn and look. “I don’t know what’s going on, but you guys have to make it stop,” she said, glancing from Nash to Luca, then back to me. “Before someone else gets caught in this like Jayson did.”

And like Emma had. And Sophie. And Brant. And Scott. And countless others.

She was right.

I turned to follow her line of sight and froze, blinking in disbelief. A thin woman in designer jeans was rounding the corner of the jogging trail, where it disappeared into a thickly wooded area of the park. I knew that blond hair, perfectly cut and styled, and I knew that her eyes were blue, though I wasn’t close enough to see that for myself.

“Oh, no…” I whispered, not surprised to hear the hollow, shocked quality of my own voice. “Aunt Val.”