With All My Soul (21 page)

We started at the hospital because as unlikely as I thought my
uncle was to actually hide out there, I couldn’t help thinking he was
very
likely to have stopped there, at least for a
little while, in search of medical supplies. Tod showed me where the
easiest-to-access first-floor medical supplies were in the human world, and we
crossed over one site at a time, armed with the sledgehammer Tod had dug up from
somewhere—he was inspired by the one my uncle had used—and the large meat
cleaver he’d taken from the hospital cafeteria for me.

I wasn’t surprised to see that all of the closets he showed me
had bled through from the human world with at least some of their supplies
intact, but I
was
pleasantly surprised to see that
the Netherworld version of the hospital was virtually deserted. If Avari’s
lackeys had looked for Uncle Brendon and Harmony there, they’d obviously long
since moved on.

Finally, after checking out three different supply closets, we
were rewarded in the fourth, where the doorknob had been beaten off, evidently
with the fire extinguisher propped against the wall several feet away.

On the floor of the closet, we found empty bandage wrappers,
bloody scraps of gauze and cotton swabs, and an open bottle of rubbing
alcohol.

Tod stared at the mess for a minute, and I linked my hand with
his, hoping he could feel both my sympathy and empathy in that one touch. I knew
how he felt, as few others could—we knew even less about my dad’s current state
than we knew about his mom’s. Tod squeezed my hand, then let it go and knelt to
gather the trash my uncle had left behind.

“What are you doing?”

“They obviously haven’t found this yet, so I’m taking it. I
don’t want them to know what my mom tastes like. I don’t even want to
think
about the possibility that one of them could
develop a taste for her blood specifically, like Avari has for your...you. What
if that sparks some kind of similar obsession, and they start hunting her like
he hunts you? It’s bad enough that I can’t protect you. At least I can do this
for her.”

I wanted to let him think that. I actually considered
preserving his well-intentioned fantasy. But eventually he would realize his own
mistake, and he’d know that I hadn’t told him the truth when I should have.

“Tod, they’ve already had a taste of her. Didn’t you say they
were gathered around drops of her blood outside?”

His hands went still, one of them clenched around a handful of
empty wrappers. “Fine. But I’m not going to give them any more of it to obsess
over. This is part of her, Kaylee, and I’m not just going to leave it here for
them to snort and drool and fight over.”

“I get it.” I would have done the same thing for my dad if I
could’ve.

We traced my uncle’s most likely path out of the hospital from
that closet, but we couldn’t find footprints or anything else to indicate which
way he’d gone from there.

We were about to cross into the human world near the ambulance
bay when something scraped concrete behind us. We both tensed and turned toward
the sound. In the middle of the hall stood two small grayish creatures whose
bulbous heads didn’t quite reach my waist. They were bald and wore no clothes,
but even without the odd, arrhythmic jerking in their arms, legs, and thin gray
tails—not to mention the occasional full-body twitch—I would have recognized
them based solely on their double row of needle-sharp, metallic-looking
teeth.

Fiends.

I hadn’t seen a fiend since the day a creeper vine had nearly
ended my life several months ahead of schedule. Or thirteen years late,
depending on your perspective. That was the day Nash was first exposed to
Demon’s Breath, and though I didn’t know it at the time, the whole thing was my
fault. I’d brought some latex balloons filled with the substance to give to
three fiends in exchange for information, accidentally kicking off a series of
events that led to Nash’s addiction, our eventual breakup, and Avari’s
inexplicable obsession with owning my soul.

It was not my finest day.

“Victory!” the fiend on the left cried in a voice so
high-pitched my ears tried to crawl into my skull. “We found the treasure. We
get the prize.” He bounced forward, metallic teeth clinking together in
excitement—or maybe that was his jaw twitching.

“Stay there!” I brandished the huge knife, suddenly glad we’d
come armed.

Tod set the head of his sledgehammer on the ground, resting
both palms on the end of the handle, and I had the sudden, irrational thought
that he looked like Thor must have as a teenager. Assuming Norse gods were ever
teens.

“Treasure!” the other fiend echoed, yellow eyes flashing with
eagerness, and mentally I named him Thing Two. “We play the game. We find the
treasure. We win the prize. Come! Maybe we will share the prize.”

“No!” Thing One turned on his little associate, snarling, and
Thing Two sprang backward just in time to avoid losing a chunk of his thin gray
arm to Thing One’s needle teeth. “No sharing!”

Thing Two snarled back, and they faced off, teeth snapping,
thin tails whipping up dust at their feet. Any second, one would pounce.

“Fiends! Focus!” I snapped, my cleaver held ready. I’d had more
practice with a blade than I cared to remember, but I’d never chopped
anything...off. Which seemed to be what a cleaver was used for. “What
prize?”

“The breath of hellions, of course.” Thing One cocked his head
to one side. “What else would suffice?”

“Avari offered a reward for us,” I whispered, and on the edge
of my vision, Tod nodded.

“He knew we’d come looking for Mom and Brendon.”

“Come!” Thing One shouted. He started to turn, and when we
didn’t follow, his thin, dark gray brows furrowed at the bottom of his huge,
smooth forehead. “Come!”

“Bite me.” Tod lifted the hammer and choked up on his grip as
Things One and Two gave us scary metallic snarls.

“Maybe not the best choice of words...” I clenched the handle
of my cleaver tighter. “They’re poisonous, right?” I had just enough time for a
moment of thanks that, like Nash, Tod had played both football
and
baseball before the little monsters charged.

Things One and Two took a few running steps on the floor, then
leaped like crazy little monkey-monsters and bounced off opposite walls as if
the Sheetrock hid springs. They shrieked as they raced toward us, bounding from
floor to wall and back, swapping sides without ever colliding, and I backed up,
my heart pounding, my pulse racing. The hallway was wide, but Tod needed room to
swing his hammer, and after watching the fiends bound through the hospital
hallway like toddlers in a bouncy-house, I was no longer confident that either
of us could actually hit them.

We’d backed into the waiting room by the time they got close
enough to pounce, and the double doors swung shut between us and them just in
time. One fiend slammed into the glass window and slid out of sight, and the
thud that followed said his friend had hit too low for us to see.

“Ready to go?” I could hear the tension in my voice.

“In a minute.” Tod held the massive hammer like a baseball bat,
and I gave him some more room. “We need to find out if they know where—”

The doors flew open, fast and hard, and not two, but a
dozen
or so fiends poured through the opening,
evidently drawn by their freaky little brethrens’ shrieks. “Treasure!” several
of them shouted, limbs twitching, yellow eyes flashing.

Tod groaned. “Never mind. Get back.”

I had half a second to process what he’d said, then I
backpedaled just as the first fiend pounced, jaw open, metallic teeth shining in
the light from overhead.

Tod swung. His hammer thunked into a bulbous skull with a crack
like thunder, and the little monster flew across the room to smack into the
opposite wall. I flinched at the sound, and the sight, and at the knowledge that
what leaked from the massive rupture in the little beast’s head was what passed
for brains in a fiend.

“You’re not going to trade us for a hit of Demon’s Breath,” Tod
said. “But you are going to answer a question.”

But before he could ask, a murmur rippled through the small
crowd, too soft and squeaky for me to understand until one fiend near the front
narrowed his yellow-eyed gaze on me. “Wrong treasure,” he said. Then, “Wrong
treasure!” He stepped toward me, and Tod tightened his grip on the hammer, ready
to swing again. “Too tender. Too young.” His focus rose to my head. “No blood.
Wrong treasure!”

With that, the murmuring grew in volume, and the crazy little
fiends backed out of the lobby almost as one. The door swung shut behind them,
and through the window, I caught a glimpse of several small gray bodies
springing off the walls as they retreated down the hall without another glance
back at us.

“What the hell...?” Tod lowered his hammer.

“They weren’t looking for us. They were looking for Harmony and
Uncle Brendon.” Who weren’t so young and tender. And one of whom—Harmony, at
least—was bleeding.

Tod turned to me, his hammer propped on the floor. “If they’re
looking for Mom and Brendon, that means Avari hasn’t found them.”

And that was the best news we’d had all night.

* * *

In the human world, Tod disposed of his mother’s medical
waste, and after texting Nash with an update, I stayed with Tod at the hospital
so that between his few scheduled reapings, we could head back into the
Netherworld to keep searching, temporarily bolstered by the knowledge that Avari
didn’t yet have his mom and my uncle. We tried over and over that night to find
them, moving in an ever-widening arc from the hospital and dodging roving bands
of fiends searching for their next fix, but after the supply closet, we found no
other sign of our missing authority figures.

The only bright spot that entire night was when Emma called
around two in the morning to tell us that Sabine had regained consciousness. Tod
had to stay at work, but I blinked into my room to find the
mara
sitting up in my bed, surrounded by the rest of my pajama-clad
friends. And Sophie.

“Seriously, if you don’t get out of my face, I’m going to turn
your dreams into a nightmare circus the minute you fall asleep. Creepy clowns
and all.”

Emma laughed in relief. “Yeah, I think she’s back to normal.
Well, as normal as she ever was anyway.” She turned to head for the hall and saw
me about the same time Luca and Sophie did.

“Hey.” I gave Emma a relieved hug and noticed again how small
she was now in Lydia’s body. “Now that she’s awake, why don’t you guys go get
some sleep? We still have school tomorrow.”

“That’s not gonna happen.” Sophie crossed her arms over her
chest, and I noticed that her eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot. “We’re in the
middle of a supernatural crisis here.”

“If we only went to school when life was calm and not plagued
by evil forces, I’d have already flunked out for truancy,” I said.

“My dad’s trapped in a scary alternate dimension, Kaylee. I’m
not going to sit through algebra and geography with that on my mind.”

I shrugged. “Fair enough. I’m going, though.” I wasn’t going to
let Avari drive me out of my own school, in part because it was
my
school. And in part because if he possessed anyone
else, someone would need to be there to exorcize him from the stolen body.

But I was already planning several long bathroom breaks so I
could keep up the search for those still trapped in that scary alternate
dimension.

“I’m going, too.” Sabine threw back the covers and started to
swing her legs out of bed, but Nash put one hand on her knee to stop her.

“You should rest.”

“I’ve been unconscious for, what, five hours?” She glanced at
my alarm clock and frowned. “That’s more rest than any
mara
needs in one night.”

“Being unconscious isn’t the same as sleeping,” Nash insisted.
“And anyway, you were poisoned.” He lifted her good arm to show her the ring of
tiny red dots now permanently encircling her wrist. Just like the ones around
her ankles. Just like the one around
my
ankle. “You
need to rest, so your body can fight what’s left of the poison.”

“Bullshit. Just because it took Kaylee days to recover doesn’t
mean it’ll take me that long. I’m a Nightmare. We’re kinda badass.”

I laughed, but Nash only crossed his arms over his chest. “If
you don’t rest, I don’t rest. We’ll both be exhausted and vulnerable together at
school tomorrow.”

Sabine rolled her eyes. “Fine. I’ll lie here and stare at the
ceiling if you’ll go to sleep.”

“Deal.” Nash finally smiled, and I could see exhaustion warring
with relief in his eyes.

“You can have my bed.” Em followed him into the hall. “I’m fine
in the living room, in the recliner.”

“Thanks.” He ducked into the bathroom. When Em joined Sophie
and Luca in the living room, I sat in the chair Nash had vacated next to my
bed.

“He was here the entire time, you know,” I said softly, and
Sabine looked like she didn’t know whether or not to believe me. “Seriously. He
sat right here the whole time you were out. And he gave you two antivenom
injections. And I doubt he ate a bite of his dinner.”

I’d rarely seen Sabine speechless. It looked kind of like a
fish gasping for air.

“You should have seen him when Tod brought you back,
unconscious and poisoned. I haven’t seen Nash that focused in a long time. He
knew exactly what to do, and he did it well. But he was terrified that you’d die
anyway. That he’d lose you.”

“Thank you,” she said, finally. “I know you didn’t have to tell
me that.”

“Yeah, I did. I just...” I’d been thinking about what she’d
said to Sophie, and what Nash had told me about the
mara.
“I want you to know that you’re one of us. You’re a total pain
in the butt, and I may never forget that you tried to sell me to a demon, but I
do
forgive
you for that. And you need to know that
you belong here. With us. This place wouldn’t be the same without you here to
throw the truth around like a weapon and call us on our own bullshit. So, try
not to get yourself killed, okay?”