Before I Wake (18 page)

Because Avari wanted my soul for himself.

“Take it,” the hellion said with Heidi’s voice.

I picked up the dagger in a horrified mental fog, vaguely aware
that Avari could kill me anytime he wanted, dagger or no dagger. Was I supposed
to use it against him? If so, why would he give it to me?

The blood—both mine and Mr. Beck’s—had been scrubbed clean, but
the hilt hummed in my palm with a familiar resonance, like a whispered echo of
my own
bean sidhe
wail. Beck’s soul was still
trapped inside, and it called to me every time I touched the hellion-forged
steel.

“I don’t understand…” I said, and my voice sounded hollow.

“Yes, you do. You now hold the instrument that could have saved
your predecessors’ lives. Surely you must have known this little confrontation
could only end in violence.” Avari spread Heidi’s arms, offering her up for
sacrifice. “Have it done, then. Slaughter the girl you failed to save.”

He wanted me to stab her. Him. Them—or whatever. He
wanted
me to shove my knife through flesh he’d proven
to be solid and warm.

The dagger shook in my hand.

Heidi was already dead. I wouldn’t be killing her.
Intellectually, I knew that. But this wasn’t self-defense. This wasn’t even a
fair fight, because for no reason I could understand, Avari wasn’t trying to
kill me.

“Ticktock, little
bean sidhe.
Kill
me now, or the next blood I spill is on your hands. It might be her blood.” The
Heidi-hellion glanced to the left, where a woman in a mall cop’s uniform walked
past us in blissful ignorance. “Or his.” She nodded toward a boy not much older
than me, in a fast-food restaurant uniform.

“Why would you let me kill you?” I whispered, tightening my
grip on the dagger. I had no choice. I couldn’t let Avari kill again, nor could
I let him leave with an innocent soul.

“Because you will suffer from this far more than I will,” Heidi
whispered, and suddenly I understood. The hellion wouldn’t die just because his
physical form did, but he
would
feed from my trauma.
“Do it now, or I will take the small one.”

I followed his gaze and horror swallowed me whole when I found
a toddler holding her mother’s hand, clutching a star-shaped Mylar balloon in
the other.

“How many souls do you intend to reclaim today, Ms. Cavanaugh?”
the Heidi-thing said, already inching toward the mother and child. “The choice
is yours.”

Stab Avari and capture the soul he’d stolen in the dagger he’d
forged, or abandon that soul and let an innocent child die.

There was really no choice at all.

I sucked in a deep breath and swallowed a sob, tightening my
grip on the dagger. I tore my gaze from the toddler and stared into Heidi’s
eyes, trying to see Avari staring back at me. Tears rolled down my cheeks. I
shoved the double blades deep into Heidi’s stomach. Warm blood leaked sluggishly
onto my hand, slower than what had flowed from Beck’s chest, but just as warm,
and red, and gruesome.

Her eyes widened and she made a strangled sound of pain. “That
truly hurts,” the hellion whispered, with a rare note of surprise. A silver
bracelet slid down her arm as she grasped my shoulder for balance, hunched over
my knife. “How extraordinary.”

I couldn’t hold her up, so we both fell, and distantly I
noticed that no one rushed to help her. As solid and real as she was, they
couldn’t see her, just like they couldn’t see me.

Heidi sprawled on the floor beneath me, her jaw clenched in
pain, her gaze glued to mine as the hellion swallowed my agony, along with his
own.

I didn’t want to spill blood. I didn’t want to fight hellions.
I didn’t want to watch people die.

As I blinked through my own horrified tears, a colorless,
shapeless haze leaked from Heidi and curled around the dagger, soaking into the
hellion-forged steel like water pulled up into a sponge dropped into a
puddle.

Her soul. Or maybe the soul of the woman Avari killed.

“Until we meet again,” the demon whispered with a dead girl’s
voice. “And, Ms. Cavanaugh, next time it won’t be a stranger.”

His words sent fresh terror through me as I watched, paralyzed
by the true pain racking the hellion’s borrowed features. The last of the soul
soaked into the dagger and Heidi began to fade from existence, like a shadow
dying slowly with the rising of the sun. When she was gone, I still held the
double-bladed knife, on my knees on the second floor of the mall.

All that remained of Heidi Anderson was the blood on my knife
and a dark bit of smoke where she’d lain, like the Nether-fog that constantly
churned between worlds. And as I watched, breathing slowly through my own
horror, that dark smudge of…something…began to fade into nothing, just like
Heidi’s body had.

On the floor, where she’d been, lay the bracelet she’d been
wearing moments earlier. And on the night she’d died.

11

“KAYLEE?” TOD
RACED
across the E.R. waiting room toward me, dodging chairs but
running right through patients. “What happened? Are you okay?”

The dagger slipped from my grip and clattered to the floor as
he reached me, and several people turned to stare at the strange, bloody knife
that had appeared out of nowhere, from their perspective.

Tod bent to snatch it, and the onlookers’ eyes widened as the
dagger disappeared from their sight. Several blinked and shuffled slowly toward
the drops of blood still on the floor, the only evidence that they hadn’t
imagined the whole thing. Several looked scared. Several more looked
confused.

Tod led me toward an empty hall without even a glance at
them.

“Kaylee. Are you hurt?” He took a step back to look me over,
but I couldn’t see anything except my own right hand, still trembling and
covered in blood. And Heidi’s bracelet, clenched in my left fist.

“I’m fine,” I whispered, only vaguely frightened by the pitiful
sound of my own voice, like a mere echo of my thoughts. “It’s not my blood. I
killed her.”

“Who? Who did you kill, Kaylee?”

“Heidi,” I said as he led me down the hall toward an empty
grouping of chairs near the radiology department. “Only she was already dead, so
it wasn’t really her. It was Avari. But he didn’t really die. I don’t think he
can, but I killed him, and now she’s gone but he’s not, and her blood is
literally on my hands.” I held my hand out to show him, and that’s when I
noticed that my shirt was soaked in it, too. “And there was this bracelet on the
floor.”

“Okay, you’re not making any sense, but you
are
covered in blood. Let’s get you home.”

Before I could pull together enough focus to blink myself out
of the hospital, Tod did the work for us both. We appeared in my living room,
and he tugged me toward the hall and into the bathroom. He lowered the toilet
lid and turned on the sink faucet. “Sit down, and let’s get you cleaned up.”

“I’m sorry,” I said as he set the bloody dagger on the
countertop and rummaged beneath the sink for a clean rag. “I didn’t mean to go
to the hospital. I was just standing in the mall, holding a bloody knife,
wishing you were there, and the next thing I knew, I was in the E.R.”

“No better place to be, when you’re covered in blood,” he said,
running tap water over his fingers in the sink, to check the temperature.

“This is better.” I glanced around the bathroom, but my gaze
was drawn to him as my hands turned the bracelet in aimless circles.

When the water was warm enough, he held the rag beneath it,
then turned the faucet off and wrung the rag out. It steamed from the hot
water.

Tod sat on the edge of the tub and turned me by my knees to
face him. I closed my eyes, and more tears fell. Behind my eyelids, I saw Heidi
as she’d been in the club seven months ago. Right before she’d died. She’d
danced and people had watched her. She’d glowed with youth and beauty—the very
vitality that had nominated her for death by the rogue reaper who’d killed her
and stolen her soul.

“What happened?” Tod asked, and I gasped when I felt the warm
rag on my cheek.

I opened my eyes as he wiped away my tears, and his blue-eyed
gaze chased away thoughts of blood, and death, and the horrible, visceral
resistance Heidi’s very solid flesh had presented against my dagger. The images
were still there, but they were memories now instead of moments extracted from
time, playing over and over in my head and behind my eyelids.

“The soul thief killed again.” I set the bracelet on the edge
of the tub, then cradled my bloody hand in my clean one, resting on my leg.
“Madeline said I had to go get the soul. It had to be me, because there’s no one
else left. I’m the last one.” I could hear the uplift of panic in my voice on
the last word.

Tod picked up my bloodied right hand and began to wipe my palm
clean, slowly. And the panic eased again. The chaos raging inside my head and my
heart couldn’t survive the calm, rhythmic strokes of the warm rag as it cleaned
away all evidence of what I’d done. What I’d had to do.

“What happened to the other extractors?” he asked, and his
voice was like his hands. Steady. Too strong and measured to give in to
confusion.

“Avari killed them. He’s the soul thief, but I don’t know what
he’s doing. Or how he’s doing it. Or why he didn’t kill me.”

“How could he steal souls from the Netherworld? How would he
have killed you from across the barrier? Please tell me you didn’t cross over…?”
he said, rotating my hand to wipe my knuckles clean.

“No. I was at the mall—the version in our world. But he was
there, wearing a dead girl’s skin like he wore Scott’s. It’s not possession,
Tod. He was really there, in the flesh. Just, not his own flesh.”

Tod set my hand back in my lap and frowned at me, and the
twists of color in his irises deepened in hue as his concern grew. “Could people
see him?”

“Not when I was there, but he killed a woman in the bathroom.
Like, physically killed her. And I touched him. He was solid. Flesh and blood.”
I held my hand up for emphasis, though most of the evidence was now on the rag,
which he was rinsing in the sink again. “He said that if I didn’t kill him—he
called it sacrificing the pawn—he’d kill this little girl who was there with her
mother. And it would be my fault. So I had to stab him. I had to kill Heidi…
.”

The tears were back, and I couldn’t stop them.

“Who’s Heidi?”

“The dead girl. She’s been dead for months, but he looked just
like her. Clothes and all, just like the night she died. But when I stabbed her
and she disappeared, that didn’t.” I glanced at the bracelet on the counter.

Tod studied it, then laid it on the edge of the sink again. “I
have no idea what that means.”

“Me, neither.”

“And you’re sure she’s not just undead?” He sat on the tub
again and started wiping the remaining blood from my hand.

“I’m sure. He said she was rotting in her grave, and hellions
can’t lie. They can’t possess the dead, either, right?” Which was the only real
bright side to my new state of being.

“Right.” Tod frowned and draped the rag over the edge of the
tub to his left. “So, he took a corporeal form that looked and felt like a girl
who’s been dead for months. And the other day he took a corporeal form that
looked like Scott, at least twelve hours after he died.”

“Yeah. It makes no sense. It’s like he’s cloning dead people
and possessing them, but that’s not possible, is it?”

The reaper shrugged. “I’m not ready to call anything truly
impossible at this point, but that doesn’t sound very likely, does it?”

“No. He’s killing people, Tod. He says people are his pawns,
and the world is full of them, and he’ll kill as many as it takes.”

“As many as it takes for what?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that he acted like Avari, but he
looked and sounded like a girl I saw once, and I had to kill her. He
made
me kill her, and he wouldn’t do that unless he
knew he could come back. He’s found a way into the human world and the only way
to get rid of him—even temporarily—is to kill his physical form. Even if it
looks like someone you know.” I sucked in a deep breath. “I’m going to have to
do it again, Tod. I’m going to have to kill him over and over, and every time,
it’s going to feel like murder.”

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t keep killing people, even if they
weren’t really people, because killing not-Heidi had felt like murder. And Avari
knew that.

Tod took my hands and looked straight into my eyes. “It’s not
murder, Kaylee. You didn’t kill a person, you killed a demon. And you saved a
little girl’s life in the process.”

“I know.” But it didn’t feel like I’d saved anything. The woman
in the bathroom was still dead, and she’d suffer the postmortem indignity of
being found propped up on a public toilet. It was hard to feel like I’d done
anything right at all, knowing that.

“Let’s get your shirt off,” he said. “I think we’re going to
have to call this one a total loss.”

I glanced down in surprise. I’d forgotten about the blood
drying stiff on my clothes. That was two ruined shirts in two days.

“How can there be blood?” I demanded, staring down at the
evidence of what I’d done. “Do hellions bleed?” Their breath was toxic and
addictive. There’s no telling what random evil properties their blood had.

“I don’t think this is hellion blood,” Tod said, staring at my
top button. “A hellion can’t physically cross the world barrier, so whatever
flesh he was wearing wasn’t his own. It wasn’t Netherworld in origin. Which
means the blood isn’t, either.”

“Then what did I kill?” My words lacked volume because I hadn’t
taken in enough air to give them voice. Because I could hardly comprehend the
question I’d just asked. That was the root of the problem. How could it not be
murder, if there was blood? And if it was murder, what did I kill?

“I don’t know what you killed,” Tod admitted, and that cold
horror began to unfurl within me again. “But I know it was evil. You did what
had to be done, Kaylee, and you saved lives.”

I nodded, but I felt like there was still blood on my hands,
and no matter how hard I scrubbed, they’d never come clean.

Tod’s gaze met mine again, and his irises swirled with a single
tight burst of color, then went still as he got control over them. “Do you want
me to…?” His focus shifted to my shirt again, and I realized that it would have
to come off. “I can step outside if you want.”

“Stay,” I said, and his irises swirled again. “Stay with me,
please. I don’t want to be alone.”

Tod’s gaze met mine. “You’ll never be alone again, Kaylee.”

My hands shook as I pushed the first button through the hole,
and that burst of color was back in his eyes. The second button slid free and
Tod’s gaze never left mine, but he was breathing harder. It took me a moment to
realize I was breathing again, too. And that my inhalations had matched the
rhythm of his.

His gaze burned into mine, like he could see past my eyes into
parts of me no one had ever seen, and I knew I was seeing the same in him. No
one else had ever seen him so vulnerable before, like if I pushed him away, he
might crumble into pieces that could never be put together again. Yet there was
strength, too. He was strong beneath that fragile need, and I knew that I could
never fall with him next to me. If I tripped, he would catch me. If I lost my
balance, he would find it.

I wanted to be those things for him, too. His strength. His
balance.

I found the third button and flinched. It was sticky and cold
with drying blood. I didn’t want to touch it.

“Do you want me to get it?” Tod asked, and that complicated mix
of strength and vulnerability echoed in his voice, deeper than it should have
been, like his question meant more than what his words actually asked.

I nodded. “Take it off. Get rid of it. Please.”

He reached for me, and his gaze held mine until the last
possible moment before his focus shifted to his fingers on my shirt. To the
button, as he slid it through the hole, then moved on to the next. His fingers
brushed my skin as he worked his way lower, and I sucked in a deep breath. My
eyes closed again, and I let my head fall back against the shelf above the
tank.

I didn’t realize he was finished until he whispered, “Lean
forward.” So I did, and his hands slid over my shoulders, pushing the material
down slowly until I could pull my arms from the short sleeves.

Then my shirt was gone, and so were his hands. I opened my eyes
just as he turned the hot water on again and rinsed the rag beneath it. He wrung
the cloth out, then took my hand in his warm, damp one. “Stand up.”

I stood, and he knelt in front of me. The cloth was scratchy on
my skin, and each stroke was torturously short and deliciously hot as he worked
his way across my stomach. When he was finished, he laid the rag across the tub
again and his hands found my hips. He kissed the dimple above my navel, and his
hair brushed my stomach, so soft I had to touch it.

His grip on my hips tightened and he exhaled against my
stomach. “Every time I see you, I want to touch you, and I’m still a little
stunned every time you let me.”

“Why?” I whispered. If anything,
I
was the lucky one.

“Because this feels too good to be true, so I keep expecting
something to ruin it. When I saw you covered in blood, I thought it was
happening again, the way it was supposed to last time. I thought Thane got to
you.”

“I’m fine.” Physically, anyway.

“Not much scares me anymore, but I’m terrified of losing you,
Kaylee.” His lips skimmed my stomach again, and I closed my eyes as my hands
curled in his hair. “I don’t want to let you go long enough for that to
happen.”

“Then don’t. Nothing else feels right,” I confessed. I couldn’t
tell anyone else what I was telling him, because no one else would understand.
They were worried enough about me already. “Everything that isn’t
us
is pain, and blood, and death. Or nothing at all.
Everything that doesn’t hurt is just…emptiness. It closes in on me when I’m
alone, and I hate it, but I can’t fight it. Food doesn’t taste right. Music
sounds flat and tinny. Colors look dull and faded. Why? What’s wrong with
me?”

“Nothing. It won’t be like this forever, Kaylee,” he promised,
his lips brushing my skin with each word, his breath hot on my stomach. “Your
body and your mind are still adjusting to the afterlife. You have to give your
senses time to readjust.”

“
You
feel good.” I lifted his chin
and his gaze met mine again. “Why are you the only thing in the world that feels
good right now?”

“I don’t know.” He stood, and his hands trailed slowly up my
sides. “But I’m not gonna question it.”