My Soul to Keep

24

“YOU OKAY?” TOD WHISPERED, leaning so close I could feel his breath on my ear, warm in contrast to the bone-deep chill of the Netherworld.

“Mmm-hmm,” I mumbled, afraid to speak for fear of somehow giving away my species. His hand squeezed mine, reassuring me with the physical presence he couldn’t avoid in the Netherworld.

All around us bodies milled, clustered in restless groups or walking aimlessly around the grassless park. Some whispered words as thin and wispy as the wind, while others thundered in deep, round tones. Everywhere I turned, sparkling, flowing gowns were decked with large multilobed feathers from birds I couldn’t identify. Long swaths of crystalline material draped forms whose gender I couldn’t determine.

Several people wore masks, and as I watched, a man with three legs and a tail lowered a visage painted with four glittering lilac eyes to reveal a smooth, featureless expanse of chalk-white flesh where his face should have been. I gasped, and Tod squeezed my hand, then pulled me swiftly through the crowd.

He stopped at a tree with a massive, twisting trunk in varying shades of a deep, earthy gold and tugged me beneath branches bowed with thick, spiky, rust-colored foliage. “If you want to blend in—” he whispered “—it might help not to flinch and gasp every time you see a Netherworlder. I hear they’re pretty common around here.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” But the featureless face was new to me. As were the short, thick creatures with wickedly curved claws instead of fingers, and long, sharp beaks where their noses should have been. “Do you see Alec?”

“I don’t know. What does he looks like?”

“You’ve never seen him?” Frustrated, I reached up to brush a spiky, orange-ish plant pod from my hair, then stopped myself just in time. For all I knew, the tree we stood under was just as poisonous as the Crimson Creeper that had nearly killed me a month earlier.

“When would I have seen Avari’s proxy? You think he parades his staff in front of me every time I visit Addison?”

Lovely. “Well, we know he’s human.” I shrugged. “Or at least he thinks he’s human.” But then again, so had I.

Tod stared out at the crowd. “Okay, so we’re looking for someone who probably stands out almost as badly as we do. How hard can that be?”

It turned out to be pretty damn hard. People were everywhere—“people” defined as beings able to move under their own power—and while the vast majority of them looked terrifying to my humanoid-accustomed eyes, sprinkled throughout the array of extra limbs, missing extremities, backward joints, wings, horns, claws, and the odd tentacle were the occasional normal-looking beings with the proper proportions and standard number of appendages.

Some of these creatures, upon closer examination, were very definitely not human. One normal-looking woman turned out to have perfectly round, anime eyes with bright teal irises, surrounded by rich, deep rings of lavender. Another man’s flesh, when I saw it up close, was covered in shallow but pervasive wrinkles, like a Sphinx kitten, and for several seconds, I battled a horrifying impulse to tug on a flap of the skin drooping from his arm to see how far it would stretch.

Yet others could easily have been kids in my third-period class, or the parents who picked them up after school. The variety of shapes, sizes, and colors was truly astounding and almost too disorienting for me to process, with shock and fear still racing through my veins. So when my gaze finally settled on a familiar profile in the crowd, it was all I could do not to shout her name across the multitude, which would surely have gotten us all killed.

Instead, I grabbed Tod’s arm, trying to guide his gaze with my own. “Addison…” I whispered, standing on my toes to get as close as I could to his ear.

As if she heard me, Addy suddenly turned, and my breath caught in my throat, trapped by horror so profound it had no expression. Addison’s profile was just as I remembered it, bright blue eye, heavily lashed lid, and a flawless cheek and nose. But the other side of her face was a ruined mass of oozing red wounds and black crusted flesh, stretching from her scalp—where most of her beautiful blond hair had been burned off—to below her collarbone, where her skin disappeared beneath her shirt.

My hand tightened around Tod’s arm, but he only pried my fingers loose and squeezed them, then let me go.

I forced my gaze away from Addy to glance at Tod, who betrayed neither horror nor shock. He exhaled in relief, then headed for Addison with quick, determined strides.

Gathering Sophie’s stupid long skirt in both hands, I rushed after him and caught up as he sidestepped a tall, skeletal woman with dark eyes and cheeks hollow enough to cradle a pool ball. “What happened to her?” I whispered as we walked, my horror on Addison’s behalf almost eclipsing my terror of the creatures all around us.

“It looks like he lit her on fire today.”

“Today?”

Tod nodded grimly as Addy’s gaze found him, and her half-scarred mouth struggled into a gruesome smile. “What part of ‘eternal torture’ don’t you understand? Yesterday he peeled her flesh off while she screamed, and you could see her teeth through her cheek. He always leaves one side perfect, though, so she can mourn her own beauty. Her room is walled-in mirrors, and the damage goes all the way down her body.”

I couldn’t voice my horror; I had neither the words nor the nerve. Questions were all I could manage, and my voice croaked as I forced it into the bone-cold air. “How does she even have a body? We buried her. I saw her in the coffin.”

“Avari gave it back to her.”

I dodged a man with a suspicious lump roiling beneath his broad white shirt, lowering my gaze at the last second to avoid his. “But is it real?”

Tod’s jaw tightened. “Real enough to feel every second of agony.”

By then we’d reached Addison, and I forced my mouth closed, unwilling to embarrass either of us with my ignorance. Tod slid one arm around her waist and, though Addy winced, she didn’t shrug out of his grip. Without a word, he led us back toward that same weird tree, and only once we were hidden by the heavy branches did he exhale, and even Addison seemed to relax.

“Kaylee, you look beautiful!” She reached out with one mutilated hand—fingers fixed into a clawlike position by her fresh, puckered scars—to touch Sophie’s pristine white satin dress.

“Thanks.” I wished I could say the same to her, but the most I could manage was a small smile to cover my horror.

“It’s my cousin’s.”

It’s not your fault, I thought for at least the twelfth time as I stared at my skirt to avoid looking at her wounds. I hadn’t done this to Addison; she’d done it to herself when she sold her soul. All I’d done was fail to save her….

“Did you find him?” Tod said, rescuing me from my own guilt and denial.

Addy nodded eagerly, then winced when the skin on the right half of her face stretched. “I let him out. He’s supposed to meet us here when he finds your brother. And your dad,” she added, glancing at me in sympathy. “Hey, there he is!”

I twisted to peer between two low-hanging branches, and my eyes nearly fell out of my skull. Walking briskly toward us from the edge of the crowd was the trash-can-lid-wielding boy I’d seen in the field of razor wheat when I’d woken up in the Netherworld.

“You!” I said as he ducked beneath the limbs into our private powwow.

“You, too,” the boy said, in a voice I’d last heard from Emma’s mouth.

“You know each other?” Tod’s eyes narrowed as he glanced back and forth between us. But I couldn’t tear my gaze from Avari’s proxy.

“You’re Alec?”

“Since the day I was born.” He shrugged, dark eyes watching me closely. “Though the name’s about all I have left from that existence.”

“I saw you in the razor wheat on Wednesday.”

Alec nodded. “I was looking for you, and your house seemed like a good place to start.”

Great. A sarcastic demon proxy.

“But I have to say you look better in formal wear than pajamas,” he continued, eyeing Sophie’s dress—and me in it—appreciatively. Suddenly I wanted a coat, to cope with more than just the cold.

“Wait, why were you looking for her on Wednesday?” Tod asked. “Nash didn’t go missing until yesterday.”

“Yes, but I wanted out of here two and a half decades ago, and she seemed like my best shot in years.”

I propped both hands on my hips. As badly as I wanted to know who he was and how he’d known I could get him out, I had more important things to worry about at the moment. “I’m not taking you anywhere until you take me to Nash and my father.”

“Are they at Prime Life?” Tod asked. The Netherworld version of Prime Life, one of the largest life insurance companies in the country, was Avari’s home base when he was in town.

Addison shook her head in stiff, obviously painful motions. “Not that I could find. And I looked everywhere I had access.”

“They’re in there.” Alec pointed off into the throng and I followed his finger toward the building rising over the heads of the crowd gathered in front of it. Eastlake High.

Or the Netherworld version of it, anyway.

“Why are they in the school?” I asked, dread clenching around my stomach with an iron grip.

“Avari’s planning something big, and I think he wants them both nearby to boost his energy,” the proxy said, and Addison nodded.

“He wants them near?” I repeated, glancing again at the second floor of the school, which was all I could see over the crowd. “Does that mean they’re not actually with him?”

“They don’t have to be in the same room, no,” Alec said.

“They just have to be close enough to draw power from.”

I shrugged, a thin pulse of hope threading through me. “So, we can just go get them, right?”

“In theory…” Addison started, and that was enough for me.

“Let’s go.” Human-looking people were rare enough in the Netherworld that four of us together might be noticed, so Addy and Alec each started off on their own, one veering to the left and one to the right. Tod and I stayed together for strength in numbers, since neither of us belonged there or had any defensive abilities. We headed down the middle, hoping to avoid notice at the edge of the throng, where the crowd was least dense.

The multitude swallowed us whole, and I let it, breathing deeply through my mouth as we walked, trying to calm my racing pulse in case any of the predators could hear it. Sophie’s skirt swished around my ankles, brushing other pieces of clothing made of rich, iridescent materials I didn’t recognize, several of which seemed to move independently of their wearers.

A tail brushed my hand and I shivered. A soft, warm breeze caressed my face and exposed cleavage, and as it passed, I both heard and felt the words it whispered into my ears, though I couldn’t understand a bit of what was said.

I clung to Tod’s hand as we crossed the crowded street, grateful for how very there he felt in the Netherworld, though no doubt his physical vulnerability made him feel exposed and defenseless. And finally, when we stepped past the edge of the crowd onto the sidewalk in front of the school, I exhaled. We were still alive, and we were almost there.

“Ready?” Addison appeared at Tod’s side and took his hand, just as Alec emerged on my right.

We both nodded. Then the double front doors of the school opened, and my gaze was drawn toward the literally dazzling figure that emerged.

“Who’s that?” I stared at the girl, who looked completely human except that she glowed with a beautiful, intense inner light. As if she were lit from within, like a human candle, shining so brightly it hurt my eyes to look at her.

Her eyes were dark pinpoints in a face so brilliant I couldn’t make out her actual features, and though her short, fitted dress was a pristine white, it was dull in comparison to flesh that gleamed and glittered like sunlight on the ocean. In one glowing hand, she carried a slim, dark cylinder I couldn’t identify from that distance.

“That’s Lana. She’s one of the lampades,” Alec whispered as the girl sank onto the top step, like a school kid waiting for a ride. “She’s one of Avari’s favorite pets in decades. This whole celebration is for the lampades. About them. And Avari has two of them for the first time in living memory. Lana, and her sister, Luci. They just got here yesterday.”

“What are they?” I asked, unable to drag my focus from the girl glowing like a living jack-o’-lantern, even though the light hurt my eyes.

“Lampades are the only creatures I know of that exist in both worlds at once, in the exact same time and place.” Alec headed slowly away from the crowd and we followed him, the cold Netherworld wind seeming to push us along. “If you were to cross over, you’d see her sitting there in your world just like she is here. Lampades are walking liminalities. You see how Lana’s glowing like someone shoved a lightbulb up her butt?” Alec asked, and I nodded, amused by the visual in spite of the circumstances. “That’s liminal light, and it runs through her like blood runs through us. A concentration of that light can temporarily merge corresponding sections of the Netherworld and your world if she shines it at a liminal space, like a window, or a threshold.”

Sudden brutal understanding uncoiled like a whip inside me, snapping tight around my brain. “Can someone go through that…merged space? Like a doorway?” I whispered, dreading the answer even as I asked the question.

“Maybe…” Alec began, and I recognized comprehension as it swept over Tod, and the reaper met my gaze. “But he’d have to move fast. Shining her light is like bleeding for a lampade, and she’ll bleed to death if she’s not careful.”

“But you said there are two of them, right?” I asked, and the proxy nodded, dark curls almost blending with the shadow of the building. “So if they worked together…”

“…they’d only have to bleed half as much,” Alec finished, and the deep furrows in his forehead said he was starting to understand.

“That’s how he got them,” Tod said, and I nodded. “These lampades took Nash and your dad.”

My eyes closed in sudden cruel certainty. “And I could have stopped them.”

“How?” Addison asked, stepping from the sidewalk onto the umber-colored grass on one side of the school’s front lawn.

I gestured toward the steps, where Lana now sat with her hands clasped over her knees. “I think I met both of them last night. They came to Doug Fuller’s party with Everett. Nash ran them off, but they must have come back after Em and I left. After Doug died.”

“What?” Tod’s eyes flashed in anger, and I knew exactly how he felt.

“These lampades? I’d bet my life they were the arm candy hovering over Everett last night at the party. Only they didn’t glow then.”

Alec rubbed one hand over his forehead, like he was fending off a headache. “They only glow here. In your world, they’d look like normal people.”

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, except they’re identical, and flawlessly gorgeous.” More than enough to give a regular girl an inferiority complex, without adding evil to the mix. “I’m going to cross over and make sure I’m right.”

“Want me to come with you?” Tod asked, but I shook my head.

“Stay here with them.” I knew he didn’t want to leave Addy, and I needed him to keep an eye on Alec, whom I had no intention of bringing with me until we found Nash and my father. “I’ll be right back.”

I rounded the corner of the building quickly to cross over without being seen in either world, and my silent scream came fairly easily that time, which scared me almost as much as the necessity of using it. I faded into my own world near the back corner of the parking lot, then hugged the wall of the building all the way to the front of the school, to keep from being seen. Sophie’s satin gown whispered against the rough bricks, and twice I had to tug the material free when it snagged. My cousin was going to kill me.

Assuming I survived long enough to be murdered.

At the edge of the building, I peeked around the corner to see Lana—definitely one of the girls I’d seen with Everett—sitting on the front step, exactly where she’d been in the Netherworld. Only now she held an ornately decorated metal flashlight. It was unlit—for the moment.

I crossed back over and rejoined the group without bothering to lift the hem of Sophie’s skirt when I walked. “It’s her,” I said, shivering from the cold. “The lampades are the girls from the party.”

“What are they doing here?” Addison asked as the front door of the school opened and Luci joined her sister on the top step, holding an identical unlit flashlight. “Waiting to be celebrated?”

“They’re obviously waiting for something,” I said, and no sooner had the last word fallen from my lips than the girls twisted in unison to glance at the sky to the east of the school, where the sun was just starting to sink below the horizon, a mirror image to the sunset in the human world, but for the bruised green-and-purple of the Netherworld sky.

“Uh-oh…” A heavy new dread anchored my sneakered feet to the sidewalk.

“What?” Tod asked, but my gaze found Alec—the man with the answers.

“What effect would other liminalities have on this doorway a lampade can create? Big liminalities. Like, once-a-year events.” Such as the winter solstice.

Alec’s eyes closed in alarm as the reaper tensed visibly. “They would amplify the power of the liminal light.”

“And would that make this doorway any bigger? Or hold it open any longer?”

The proxy nodded, because words were no longer necessary. We finally understood the purpose of Avari’s Liminal Celebration. “He’s using the solstice to bridge the gap, when the veil between the two worlds is thinnest,” I whispered, terror rendering my voice a hoarse echo of itself.

Even as I spoke, the lampade sisters stood and took up positions on either side of the double front doors, facing each other. And that’s when the last piece of the puzzle fell into place. “Crap!” I whispered fiercely, grabbing Addison’s scarred hand without thinking. “They’re about to start.”

“Start what?” she asked, pulling her blistered hand firmly out of my grip.

“Don’t you get it? Avari’s planned the whole thing out! The school, a carnival full of high schoolers, the solstice…Dusk is a liminal time, the lampades are liminal creatures, the front door is a liminal place, and teenagers are at a liminal age in life. Lana and Luci will shine their light across the threshold at dusk. And when the carnival opens, instead of heading into the front hall, a couple of hundred teenagers will cross directly into the Netherworld, like lambs to the slaughter.”