My Soul to Keep

10

WEDNESDAY NIGHT WAS hell on earth.

After painting carnival booths until dinnertime, Nash and I grabbed fast-food burgers and ate while I rushed through only the homework that had to be done, for the teachers who actually checked. Then I fell asleep on my couch with my head on his lap while he watched old action movies until my dad got home.

When the front door slammed, I woke up and rolled over to find my father staring down at me, looking pissed beyond words. Apparently napping with my nose pressed into my boyfriend’s denim-clad crotch was not on the list of approved sleeping arrangements.

Who knew?

But when I broke into tears explaining that I was afraid to sleep alone, in case I woke up in the Netherworld again, my dad’s scowl softened into a sympathetic frown, and he suggested we camp out in the living room that night, to put both of our fears to rest. That way, if I started screaming, he could wake me up before I crossed over.

A living-room slumber party with my dad sounded a little juvenile, but I was willing to try anything that might keep me anchored to my own reality.

Unfortunately, his plan worked out better in theory than in practice.

Around midnight, my dad fell asleep in his recliner, head rolled to one side, bottom lip jiggling each time a snore rumbled from his mouth. But I was still awake two hours later, when the Judge Judy marathon gave way to an infomercial advertising men’s hair-loss products. I couldn’t relax. I was terrified of waking up in a field of razor wheat, barefoot and hoarse, and unable to move without getting shredded like secret government documents.

So after twenty minutes of watching old men have their hair spray-painted on, I exchanged my pj bottoms and Betty Boop slippers for jeans, a thick pair of socks, and my heaviest pair of boots from the bottom of my closet. After slipping on the black quilted jacket Aunt Val had given me for Christmas the year before, I snuck back into the living room and collapsed on the couch, finally feeling armed for sleep.

That way, if I crossed over, at least I’d be warm, and dressed in defense of razor-sharp, literal blades of grass.

I even considered running outside for the lid to the old trash can we raked leaves into, but in the end decided that would only bring up more questions from my father when the crash of metal woke him up.

Finally prepared for the worst, I managed four hours of light dozing, during which several extra loud commercials broke through my delicate slumber. But by six in the morning, I was awake for good, reading the directions on the back of the coffee grounds, hoping I wouldn’t mess up my first pot too badly.

By the time I’d showered and dressed, my father was padding wearily around the kitchen in his bare feet, and the coffee was done. “Not bad.” He held up a nearly full mug. “Your first batch?”

Sighing, I sank onto a chair to pull mismatched socks from my feet. “Yeah.” I forced an exhausted smile, wondering how I would ever make it through my history review session if I couldn’t even find a proper pair of socks from the pile of clean laundry in the basket in my room.

I had to hand it to Aunt Val: she may have been a vain, soul-stealing, interdimensional criminal, but she’d always kept the laundry neatly folded…

“Harmony and Brendon are coming over tonight to discuss your problem. To see if we can’t figure out how and why it’s happening.” My father paused, pouring coffee into another mug for me—this one oversized. “I didn’t hear you sing.” Which was how male bean sidhes heard the female bean sidhe’s wail. “Does that mean you didn’t have any death dreams?”

I shook my head, rubbing my temples. “I had another one. Same as last time, from what I remember. But this time the Geico gecko woke me up before the screaming started.”

My dad frowned and crossed the room to set a heavily doctored mug of coffee on the table in front of me. “I could call you in sick, if you want to stay home and rest.”

“Thanks, but I better go.” I cradled my mug in both hands and blew on the surface before taking the first long, bitter sip.

“We’re reviewing for midterms today.” And as awesome as staying home sounded, I need to be there to watch Scott and Doug for further signs that their sanity was slipping. And Emma and Sophie, for any signs that they’d gotten a contact buzz from breathing near their own boyfriends. “Besides, I could dream about death as easily in the daytime as I can at night, right?”

“I guess so.” My father put one hand on the back of my chair, watching me in concern as he brought his own mug to his mouth. “Just be careful, okay? I can’t follow you into the Netherworld, and by the time I find someone to take me—” Harmony, presumably “—there’s no telling where you’ll be.”

I nodded and bit my tongue to keep from reminding him that—barring catastrophe, like injured vocal cords—I could get myself out the same way I got myself in. I’d done it several times already.

But something told me that reminder would reassure him no more than it reassured me.

I WANDERED AROUND SCHOOL in a daze on Thursday, feeling almost as out of it as Scott looked. I fell asleep during individual study time and slept through the bell, so I was almost late to my next class.

In the hall before lunch, Nash told me Scott had showed up twenty minutes late for economics with his shirt inside out, carrying the wrong textbook. Then he laughed out loud during Mr. Pierson’s lecture on the influence of the American stock market on the global financial community.

When Pierson asked what he found so funny, Scott said the teacher’s shadow had flipped him off.

Half the class laughed along with Scott, assuming he was either high—on something human in origin, presumably—or making fun of Pierson in some way they didn’t understand. The other half looked at him like he’d lost his mind, which was much closer to the truth. We’d waited too long, and Scott had gotten in too deep. He was living in his own world now, and I became more certain with each painful beat of my heart that Nash was right: we wouldn’t be able to fix him.

At lunch, Scott refused to sit with us—or with anyone else in the room. He stood in front of our table, glancing nervously back and forth between it and the narrow, floor-to-ceiling windows along the outside of the room, which cast student-shaped shadows on the opposite wall. He looked from one of us to the next, then at the silhouettes lined up along the wall behind us, muttering under his breath. He said something about being followed, then covered his ears, spun one hundred and eighty degrees, and ran straight down the center aisle and out the double doors, leaving Sophie and her friends—and everyone else in the cafeteria—to stare after him.

Sophie’s friends burst into laughter, watching their toppled football idol with the same derisive dismissal they usually reserved for stoners and loners. Sophie looked like she’d either scream or vomit as she marched to their usual table.

I almost felt sorry for her. Almost.

Nash and I followed Scott into the main hall, ignoring curious looks from the other students, but he was already gone. We glanced into each empty classroom we passed, Nash’s irises roiling with fear, regret, and guilt. I knew exactly how he felt. If we’d told someone sooner—if I’d insisted on telling our parents the night Doug hit my car—Scott might never have gotten his hands on Demon’s Breath in the first place.

At the end of the main hall, a flash of movement caught my eye from the parking lot beyond the glass door. “He’s going for his car,” I said, and Nash nodded, then glanced at me with both brows raised, waiting for my opinion before he charged ahead. Most exterior doors locked automatically. If we followed Scott into the parking lot, we’d have to walk around the building to reenter through either the office or the cafeteria, where I’d come in after we’d taken that first balloon.

I shrugged and shoved the door open, flinching as a cold draft chilled me instantly. But a little discomfort and a hike around the school meant nothing compared to the friend we’d failed to save.

Nash followed me outside and across the lot, both of us crossing our arms over our chests for warmth. We headed toward Scott’s usual parking spot and found his car three rows back, just to the left of the gym entrance. As we got closer, we could see Scott behind the wheel, alternately shaking his head, and vehemently gesturing as he yelled at no one.

He’d progressed from hallucinating to carrying on conversations with his own delusions.

Had I looked that crazy, strapped to a bed in the hospital, when I couldn’t stop singing for some stranger’s soul?

“Come on.” Nash grabbed my hand and we raced across the lot toward Scott. But the moment he saw us coming, he twisted his key in the ignition and slammed his gearshift into Reverse, peeling out of his space way too fast. His rear bumper plowed into the front of another car, then he tore down the aisle and out of the lot, newly dented bumper winking at us in the sunlight as he pulled onto the road.

Nash and I changed directions, and I dug my keys from my pocket as we ran. Our school day was over. We couldn’t let him drive all over town in his current state of…crazy. I popped the lock from several feet away and Nash made it into his seat before I did. I backed out carefully—still unfamiliar with the length of my borrowed car—then raced after Scott.

“I think he’s heading home.” Nash shoved his seat belt into the clasp and braced one hand on the dashboard as I took a sharp turn just after the light turned red. Fortunately, no one else was coming.

But Scott zoomed through the next yellow light, and I got stuck behind a pizza delivery car. By the time we got to Scott’s house, his car was slanted across the driveway, the driver’s side door still open, and he was nowhere in sight. I turned off the engine, shoved the keys into my pocket, and raced up the driveway after Nash, fully expecting the front door to be locked.

It was open. Nash led the way into the house, which had recovered nicely from the previous weekend’s party. Thanks, no doubt, to the unseen and likely unthanked Carlita.

“Scott?” Nash clomped through the foyer onto the spotless white carpet in the formal living room. There was no answer. We peeked into the den, kitchen, dining room, laundry room, and two guest bedrooms before coming to Mr. Carter’s office at the end of the hall—a space I remembered fondly.

The room was dark, and it took a minute for my eyes to adjust to what little light fell from the cracks in the wooden blinds drawn shut over both windows.

“Close the door!” Scott shouted, and I jumped as he lifted one hand to block the light from the hallway. Nash nudged me farther into the room and pushed the door closed softly, cutting off so much light that I had to wait for my eyes to adjust again.

Scott cowered on the far end of the brown leather couch, and as Nash approached him, Scott began to mumble-chant under his breath.

“No light, no shadow. No light, no shadow…”

Chill bumps popped up all over my arms, in spite of the warm air flowing from the vent overhead.

“What’s wrong, Carter?” Nash squatted on the floor in front of his friend, one hand on the arm of the couch for balance. “Does the light hurt your eyes? Does your head hurt?”

Scott didn’t answer. He just kept mumbling, eyes squeezed shut.

“I think he’s afraid of the shadows,” I whispered, remembering Scott’s horror when he’d eyed our silhouettes in the cafeteria and his own shadow in the hall the afternoon before.

“Is that right?” Nash asked without looking at me, his profile tense with fear and concern. “Is something wrong with your shadow?”

“Not mine anymore,” Scott whispered, his voice high and reedy, like a scared child’s. He punched the sides of his head with both fists at once, as if he could beat down whatever he was seeing and hearing. “Not my shadow.”

“Whose shadow is it?” I whispered, fascinated in spite of the cold fingers of terror inching up my back, leaving chills in their wake.

“His. He stole it.”

My chest seemed to contract around my heart as a jolt of fear shot through it.

Nash shifted, trying to get comfortable in his squat. “Who stole it?”

“Like Peter Pan. Make Wendy sew my shadow back on…”

I glanced at Nash, and Scott froze with his eyes closed and his head cocked to one side, like a dog listening for a whistle humans can’t hear. Then he opened his eyes and looked straight at Nash, from less than a foot away. “Can you get me a soda, Hudson? I don’t think I ate lunch.” The sudden normalcy of his voice scared me almost as badly as the childlike quality had, and I glanced at Nash in surprise. But he only nodded and stood.

“Just watch him,” he whispered, squeezing my hand on his way out the door, which he left ajar a couple of inches.

Uncomfortable staring at Scott in his current state, I glanced around the room, admiring the built-in shelves behind a massive antique desk with scrolled feet and a tall, commanding chair.

“You can go look,” Scott said, and I jumped, in spite of my best effort to remain calm.

“What?”

“You like to read, right?” He cocked his head to one side, as if he heard a reply I hadn’t made. “Some of them are really old. Several first editions.”

I hesitated, but he looked so hopeful, so encouraging, that I rounded the corner of the desk farthest from him, drawn by the spine of an old copy of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. It was on the second shelf from the top, and I had to stand on my toes to reach it. To brush my fingers over the gold print on the spine.

The soft click of a door closing shot through the room, as loud as a peal of thunder in my head. I dropped to my heels and whirled to see Scott standing in front of the now-closed door, mumbling something like soft, inarticulate chanting.

My heart thudded in my chest, my own pulse roaring in my ears. “Scott? What’s wrong?”

His head snapped up, his fevered gaze focusing on me briefly. Then his mumbling rose in volume, and he seemed to be arguing now, but I couldn’t make out the words. He shook his head fiercely, like he had in his car. “Can you hear him?”

I stepped slowly toward the desk between us. “Hear who, Scott? What do you hear?”

“He says you can’t hear him,” Scott continued, his gaze momentarily holding mine again. Then, “No, no, no, no…”

I tried to sound calm as I inched toward him. “Who do you hear?”

“Him. Can’t see him in the dark, but I hear him. In. My. Head!” He punctuated each word with a blow to his own temple. “Stole my shadow. But I still hear him…”

Shivers traveled the length of my arms and legs, and my hands shook at my sides. Was Scott actually seeing someone the rest of us couldn’t? Hearing something meant only for his ears? Thanks to Tod, I knew better than most how very possible that was….

But this didn’t feel like the work of a reaper. Reapers couldn’t steal someone’s shadow. Could they?

Scott rolled his eyes from side to side, as if to catch movement on the edge of his vision. My stomach tried to heave itself through my chest and out my throat. I knew that motion. I did the same thing when I peeked into the Netherworld. When I tried to get a clear view of the heard-but-unseen creatures skittering and sliding through the impenetrable gray fog.

Could he see the fog? Could he see the things? Was something from the Netherworld talking to him?

No. It’s not possible. But my chill bumps were as big as mosquito bites.

“What is he saying?” I was past the desk, four feet from him now, and closing. When Nash came back, I would peek into the Netherworld to rule out that impossibility. To verify that Scott wasn’t seeing and hearing something from that other reality. From a world he didn’t even know existed.

Because creatures that couldn’t cross over couldn’t shout across the barrier, either. Right?

Scott looked up and smiled, but it was the kind of smile a cancer patient wears when he’s realized chemo isn’t worth the pain and nausea. When he’s finally decided to give up and let Death claim him. “Take me to him. He’ll fix me if you take me to him.”

Dread burned like ice in my veins, and I edged back when Scott stepped toward me. “Take you where?”

“There.” He rubbed his brow, as if to soothe a bad headache. “Where he is. He says you know how to cross.”

Cross. No. My eyes closed briefly, and I sucked in a long, devastated breath.

Scott’s shadow man wanted me to take him to the Netherworld.