My Soul to Steal

23

“HEY,” NASH SAID, pulling even with me in the hall on the way to my fifth period French class. “We need to—”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

He frowned and reached for me, but I pulled away. “Talk about what? Did something happen?”

I clutched my books and kept walking. “Doesn’t something always happen?” After four months of hellion-induced pandemonium, I could hardly remember what my life had been like before I’d known about the Netherworld.

“Specifically…?”

I sighed and stopped to lean against the nearest locker. I was exhausted, physically and emotionally, and I was too worried about Alec’s serial body snatcher and the unchecked series of school disasters to concentrate on class work. Or to dwell on Sabine, and whether or not I’d falsely accused her of trying to bring the school to its knees.

“I had a fight with Sabine.”

“Again?” Nash forced a grin, but I wasn’t buying it. “It couldn’t have been too bad—your face is intact. What happened?”

But if the past week had taught me anything, it was that if I accused her of something, he would automatically come to her defense—another point in favor of Tod’s “they’re meant for each other” conviction. So I tried a different tactic. “Don’t you think this is weird? I mean, the school’s in total chaos. Everyone’s gone crazy.” I hesitated, giving him time to infer my point. But he only frowned harder. “Something’s wrong, Nash, and I don’t think it’s human in origin.”

And the truth was that I had no idea how to even trace the source of the problem on my own. Of my two prime suspects, one was physically inaccessible by virtue of a hellish alternate reality, and the other was socially inaccessible, due to the fact that she now wanted to knock my head clean off my body.

“Agreed,” he said at last, and I actually sighed with relief.

“Okay, I’m not saying Sabine’s behind all of it, necessarily.” Though that’s what I’d believed an hour earlier. “But she’s definitely involved somehow.”

“Kaylee…”

“Just listen. I saw her talking to several of the kids who’ve gone off the deep end, and she’s not exactly a social butterfly.” Sabine was more like a social cockroach, skittering around in the dark, making trouble. “She has Coach Peterson for geography.” I’d verified that during English, with one of her classmates. “Also, I swear I saw her in Mrs. Cook’s class the other day, on my way to the bathroom.”

Mrs. Cook was the teacher who’d lost it in the teachers’ lounge.

“Kaylee, there could be a hundred people who have both Cook and Coach Peterson. That doesn’t prove anything.”

“No, but this didn’t start until she came to Eastlake,” I insisted.

Nash put a hand on my arm and stared straight down into my eyes. “Your turn to listen. This has nothing to do with Sabine.” He glanced around the hall, then pulled me into the alcove near the restroom entrances. “This is a blitz. It has to be. I’ve never personally seen one, but my mom says they’re not that uncommon. The news usually reports them as mass suicides—like that Jonestown thing back in the seventies?—or mass hysteria, or mob mentality. There’ve been witch hunts and lynchings and riots. And if this one goes unchecked, eventually Eastlake will devour itself whole and the building will crumble into a pile of smoldering bricks. Or something less dramatic, but equally bad.”

“Wait.” I blinked, struggling to absorb so much information so fast. “You told your mom about this?”

“No, I didn’t figure it out until lunch. She told me all about blitzes when we studied herd behavior in psychology.”

“So…what exactly is a blitz?”

“It’s a full-scale assault on a specific population by some force in the Netherworld. In this case, that specific population is our school, obviously. But it has to be driven by a big force, because… Well, you know how hellions and some of the minor Netherworld creatures feed on the bleed-through of human energy?”

“Yeah.” Unfortunately, I was intimately familiar with that process.

“Well, to support a blitz, this Netherworld force has to be able to do the opposite. He has to push enough energy into our world to affect human behavior. Or at least our state of mind.”

Which sounded exactly like what was happening here.

“So…who could have that kind of power? A hellion?” Avari was the obvious suspect.

“Not on his own. But with help, yeah. I think it’s possible.” Nash sighed and glanced at his feet before looking up to meet my gaze. “Avari’s the dominant hellion in our area—well, the Netherworld version of our area—and his entire existence is powered by greed. There’s no way he’d let something like this go down without at least getting in on the profit. Which means he’s involved, but not acting alone.”

“What kind of profit are we talking about?” I asked, as pieces of the puzzle floated around in my head, looking for some place to fit.

“Energy, probably. There’d be lots of it to go around, with this large an operation. And with energy comes power.”

“Would this blitz be enough to…boost his abilities?” I asked, thinking of his recent cameo in my nightmare.

“Yeah, I guess. Why?” When I didn’t answer, Nash stepped closer, glancing around to make sure no one was near. The bell would ring any second, but another tardy seemed pretty petty compared to an entire school under attack by at least one hellion.

“I think Avari’s had an upgrade. He was in my nightmare. And I don’t mean that I had a dream about him. He was there. Controlling it. Hurting me. And I think he was feeding from my fear.”

“Kaylee, that’s impossible. Hellions can’t mess with your dreams, and that’s not how they feed.”

I shrugged. “The only other person who can do that is Sabine. But this nightmare didn’t feel like her and she hasn’t claimed credit, which seems to be a point of pride with her. So who else could it be?”

Nash scowled as he thought, and I saw the exact moment understanding washed over him. “Shit. It was Sabine. Well, it was Avari using Sabine. If he can possess a hypnos, he can possess a mara, and he’d have access to anything she can do while he occupies her body. The tricky part would be catching her while she sleeps.”

“Uh-oh.” Avari was getting too strong, too fast, and we had no clue how to stop him. “Why didn’t she say anything?”

“I don’t think she knows. If she did, she’d tell me,” Nash insisted. “She’d be beyond pissed, and out for blood.”

I couldn’t blame her there. Avari was using Sabine, just like he’d used me. As badly as I hated to absolve her of any guilt, she was a victim in this—a selfish, deluded, boyfriend-stealing victim, but a victim nonetheless.

“What I can’t figure out is how he even knew she was there to use…” Nash wondered aloud.

Crap. “Um…that part’s my fault.” I shrugged miserably at the realization that I’d accidentally dragged the mara into this, then blamed the whole thing on her. “He masqueraded as Alec a couple of times before we figured it out, and one of those times, he heard me and Emma…complaining about Sabine.”

Nash’s eyebrows rose, like he might ask for details, then he apparently thought better of it. “Okay, I guess that’s understandable.”

“So, if he can possess her and feed through nightmares, or possess Alec and feed through any kind of sleep…would that give him enough energy to power this blitz?”

“I doubt it. He’d probably recoup the energy possession requires by feeding while he’s in the host body, but that’s not going to be enough for something this big.” Nash’s widespread arms took in the whole school.

“So, how is he running this thing?”

“Well, once he got it started, it would be self-sustaining. The chaos he causes would bleed through even stronger than regular human energy, and he could easily feed from it. But as for how he got it going in the first place…” Nash could only shrug. “I don’t know. But we have to make it stop.”

I KNEW FIFTH PERIOD was going to suck the moment Mrs. Brown turned off the lights. Because of the chaos—which everyone had noticed, but no one could explain—she’d decided to ditch her lesson plan in favor of something requiring a little less concentration from her half-traumatized students. The class let loose a universal groan when she pulled out an old documentary on the history of French architecture.

It was all I could do to keep my eyes open when the monotonous narration began.

THE NARRATOR DRONES ON about art nouveau, complete with pictures and clips of buildings I’ve never even heard of. I don’t care about art nouveau. I don’t care about art old-school, either. I care about staying awake and surviving another school day, so I can find and eliminate the source of the pandemonium.

And suddenly, my exhausted mind finds that word hilarious. Pandemonium roughly translates to “all demons,” and that seems weirdly fitting, considering Avari’s relentless intrusion into my life, and into my body, and now into my school.

All demons, all the time. That’s what my headstone will read, if Avari ever gets his way.

Mrs. Brown stands at the front of the room, and for a second, I’m convinced she’s read my mind. Or noticed that I’m not paying attention. But instead of yelling at me in French, she stares at the back of the room, her eyes oddly unfocused.

And that’s when the scream explodes from my mouth. It’s too hard and too fast to stop this time, and I am strangling on the vicious sound. Choking on it, as it scrapes my throat raw.

I taste blood on the back of my tongue and everyone stares at me. I can’t hear the film anymore. Can’t hear whatever they’re shouting as some gather around me and others back away. I can only hear my own screech.

No one notices Mrs. Brown. No one else is watching when she collapses, and finally I understand. She’s dead, and her soul cries out to me, clinging to the life she no longer has, begging to be held in place.

I want to help her, but I can’t. Not without damning someone else. So I try to close my mouth, but the scream is too strong, and my jaw too weak. I claw at my throat in desperation. My fingers come away bloody, and there is a new layer of pain. But still I scream, and now I can see Mrs. Brown’s soul, hovering over her body, a slowly swirling grayish form—just a representation of her actual soul, Harmony explained to me once. You can’t see a real soul, and you probably wouldn’t want to, she’d insisted.

But then the fog rolls in, and the real terror begins. Gray mist rises all around me. My heart trips over some beats, skipping others entirely. The fog obscures dingy floor tiles and scratched desk legs. I slap one hand over my mouth, but the sound leaks out, anyway. Thirty sets of shoes disappear into the gray. I try to back away from it, but there’s nowhere to go. It’s everywhere.

NO! I won’t cross over. I won’t!

But the scream has a mind of its own. The scream wants me to go and the fog is too thick to fight, so I close my eyes and pretend it’s not real. And only once my voice fades to an ineffective croak do I open my eyes again.

This time when I scream, nothing comes out.

I KEPT MY EYES squeezed shut, afraid to look. The desktop was cold beneath my folded arms, and I could feel the crack in the seat of my chair that pinched my leg when I wore shorts. Both of those facts should have meant everything was fine. That I was still in my darkened classroom, with twenty-nine other students feigning interest in the history of French architecture.

But silence doesn’t lie.

There was no tapping of Courtney Webber’s feet as she listened to her iPod instead of watching the film. No scratching of Gary Yates’s pencil against paper as he scrambled to finish his history essay before last period. And certainly no criminally dull narrator droning on about angles and perspective and rebellion against classical architecture.

My heart thudded against my sternum. I sat up, gripping the sides of my desk with my eyes still squeezed shut. I didn’t want to look. But not looking would be stupid. Not looking could get me killed. So I opened my eyes and took in the differences—the things that hadn’t bled through the barrier into this warped, twisted version of my own world.

An empty classroom. The thirty-two empty desks, devoid of scratches and names scribbled in permanent marker, gave the room an abandoned feel—the high school version of a ghost town. A barren metal teacher’s desk sat up front, by the door. There was no whiteboard. No posters of le Louvre, la tour Eiffel, or le Centre Pompidou. There was no ancient television on a cart, playing an outdated, staticky video cassette.

The Netherworld. If I’d had any doubt, it disappeared with my first glance at the educational void surrounding me. I’d crossed over. In my sleep.

No! It takes intent to cross into the Netherworld, and I had no intent. I had the opposite of intent. Yet there I was, of someone else’s volition.

Sabine.

She was mad at me. She was pissed, and I couldn’t blame her. And she alone had the ability to mess with my dreams. Well, she and Avari, but this felt like Sabine. It was cruel on a personal level—making me dream that my wail wanted me to cross over—and she knew my fears. She knew there was little in either world that scared me more than winding up in the Netherworld.

Focus, Kaylee. I had to get back to my own world, but I couldn’t just cross over again in the middle of class. It was entirely possible that no one had seen me disappear from French, thanks to the darkened classroom and bored or sleeping students. Assuming I hadn’t actually screamed my head off, in life as in my dream. But the chances of thirty people also missing my reentry were slim to none, and I wasn’t exactly swimming in good luck.

I’d have to find someplace unpopulated in both worlds before I could cross over. And I’d have to find that place without being eaten, captured, or ritualistically dismembered by any of the Netherworld natives.

No problem. The last time I’d been in the Netherworld version of my high school—less than a month before—it had been completely unpopulated. Surely I could just jog down the hall and around the corner, into the nearest supply closet, then scream my way back into my own world, completely unnoticed by the Nether-freaks.

Taking deep, slow breaths to control my racing pulse, I stood and walked silently to the classroom door, only feet from Mrs. Brown’s unoccupied desk. Fingers crossed against surprises, I twisted the knob, pulled open the door—wincing at the creak—then stepped into the doorway.

And froze in terror.

The walls were red. And they were moving.

It took one long, terrifying moment for me to understand what I was seeing, but understanding only made it worse. The walls themselves weren’t red. I couldn’t tell what color they were because they were covered—completely obscured—with thick red vines, pulsing, coiling, constantly twisting in one huge tangle.

My hands clenched around the door frame and three of my fingernails snapped off at the quick. Panic tightened my chest, constricting my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I could only stare in horror so profound it swallowed the rest of me whole.

Some sections of the vine were as thin as a pencil, others as thick as my bicep. The larger sections were striated with every possible shade from dried-blood red to a softer, watercolor cherry, like thinned paint. The ends of the vines, very fine and limber, sported needle-thin thorns and sharply variegated leaves, greenish in the center, bleeding to maroon on the edges.

I gasped, then clasped one hand over my mouth. I knew those leaves.

Crimson Creeper.

The entire hallway was crawling with it. A few months before, I’d been pricked by several thorns from an infant vine growing through cracked concrete, and that had been enough to nearly kill me. What clung to walls and lockers now was probably enough to take out half of Dallas.

As I stood frozen, staring, trying to overcome fear too thick to breathe through, something brushed my right index finger. I jerked my hand away from the door frame and turned to see a thin cord of vine slowly slithering down the metal jamb, leaves the size of half-dollars reaching for me like petals toward the sun.

I swallowed a startled shout and stumbled away from the door—and into the hall. Too late, I realized my mistake, but when I turned back toward the classroom, I found that one curious vine stretching across the opening at waist height, blocking my entrance. Deliberately.

Sparing one moment for a string of silent curses—most aimed at Sabine—I stepped carefully into the center of the hallway. There was no turning back now.

I walked slowly, eyes peeled for reaching vines, while soft, dry slithering sounds accompanied my whispered footsteps. A thicker vine slid toward my right foot. Skin crawling, I backed out of the way—only to step on a small tangle of leaves and thorns.

Several steps later, I noticed a break in the ever-shifting plant life—an open classroom door. A metallic scraping sound screeched from the opening, and I jumped, my heart pounding fiercely. I swallowed the new lump of panic and went still, willing myself to go unseen, hoping that whatever was in that room hadn’t heard me. Eyes closed, I sucked in a deep breath through my nose—and nearly gagged on it.

And that’s when I realized something warm and wet was soaking into the back of my shirt.

Barely suppressing a squeal of disgust, I darted forward and glanced up to find something foul and goopy and vaguely orange in color, dripping from the ceiling. From a large, tightly wrapped coil of vines, almost directly overhead. The creeper had caught something, and it was being slowly digested by tiny pores in the plant—but for the bit of Nether-slime that had leaked down my shirt.

Revulsion shuddered through me and it took every bit of self-control I had not to pull my shirt over my head and drop it where I stood, as fears of Netherworld poison and weird biological contamination threw my logic circuits into overload.

Another harsh, heavy scraping sound echoed from the classroom ahead, and I edged forward a little more. Then stopped again when a deep, rough voice slid over me, like sandpaper against bare skin.

The words sounded familiar, but the speech pattern was so foreign I couldn’t decipher any meaning from sounds and syllables I felt like I should know. When no one came thundering into the hall to grab me, I silently released the breath I’d been holding and crept forward again until I stood inches from the open door.

A second voice spoke, higher in pitch, but his meaning was no easier to grasp. I could hear them moving around inside the room—a second-floor math class, in the human world—and my muscles were so tense I was starting to ache all over.

If I ever made it back to the human world, I was going to kill Sabine.

After a pause in the bizarre conversation, the scraping sounds resumed, and I gathered my battered courage around me like the remains of badly beaten armor. Then, using the scrapes to disguise the sound of my movement, I lurched across the open doorway and deeper into the vine-tangled hall, my heart racing erratically.

As I passed, I got a fleeting look at the backs of two tall, hairless creatures with skin so wrinkled and voluminous they looked like overgrown shar-peis. They had smooth, shiny skulls—the only unwrinkled parts of their bodies—and long, black claws tipping too many fingers to count. But even weirder than the creatures themselves was the huge stack of school desks they were both studying, puzzled, like chess players searching for their next moves.

From there, I walked on softly, concentrating on silence and speed, trying to ignore the cooling patch of fetid wetness on my back as I dodged grasping creeper vines. The next few doors I passed were closed, the classrooms quiet and presumably empty.

I was about fifteen feet from the T-shaped hallway junction when a mad scrabbling sound sent chills skittering up my spine. It sounded like a hundred cat claws scrambling for purchase on a slick floor, the whole thing accompanied by a high-pitched, foreign-sounding voice.

My arms prickled with chills, I tiptoed toward the door, which stood open about four inches. The closer I got, the louder the sounds became, and when I was less than a foot away, a chorus of younger, sharper voices joined the first in a frenzy of eager inhuman cries.

Sweat broke out over my forehead. I took a deep, silent breath and peeked around the vine-choked doorjamb and into the classroom. My throat tightened around a gasp as waves of terror and revulsion washed over me, freezing me in place for several eternal moments.

At first, I couldn’t understand what I saw. There were too many limbs, gray like death, but short and dimpled like toddlers. Too many round, smooth heads, covered in soft, translucent peach-fuzz hair. Too many tiny violet eyes. Too many gaping mouths full of needle-teeth, snapping and whining eagerly.

And in the midst of what could only be a nest of pint-size Netherworld monster children stood a single adult, darker and smoother in color, but no less terrifying. As I watched, my pulse rushing in my ears, she held up an ordinary cardboard box, extended over the crowd around her. The children stilled, staring at the box in reverent silence.

The adult paused, and her smile chilled the blood in my veins. Then she overturned the box, and half a dozen round, fleshy things fell from it.

The children pounced. The air crackled with their hisses and snarls, and with the scratching of their clawed feet on tile. They fought for the bloodied treats, snatching quick, gory bites before another set of clawed hands ripped the prize away. Crimson sprays arced through the air. Teeth gleamed red beneath black gums.

It was a preschool free-for-all—a child-size slaughter—and the one adult watched, a proud, gruesome smile warping the bottom half of her round face.

Shuddering, I stepped past the door and only released the breath I’d been holding when nothing burst from the room to devour me.

Breathing hard now, I took a second to get myself back together, then I started walking again. The storage closet was right around the corner from the bathroom. Surely I could make it that far.

But I’d only taken a couple of steps when a commanding, glacier-cold voice sent chills the length of my body. I froze.

Avari. He was right around the corner.

Damndamndamn! What were they all doing here? The school had been empty just weeks before! Sabine’s life expectancy had just shrunk to a matter of minutes from the time I got back to the human world. Assuming that actually happened.

Riding a fresh wave of fear, I raced down the hall—toward the sound of his voice—and ducked into a bathroom niche, thick with shadows. The walls were blessedly free of vines, but covered with a thick, smelly, slowly oozing fluid.

I pressed as close to the wall as I could get without actually touching it, and stared out at the empty hall from the shadows hopefully hiding me.

“…very close now…” Avari said from around the corner, as I sucked in a silent breath tasting of fear and smelling of my own sweat. “When you have yours, and I have mine, this affiliation is over. You will slink back to your own corner of oblivion, and we shall see each other no more. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” said a second voice, smooth and seductive, like the first sweet taste of a chocolate-dipped pepper, before the fire inside it roasts you alive. “I shall have the lovely Nightmare child, and you shall have your little bean sidhe, and we shall feast on their souls for all of eternity….”