With All My Soul (5 page)

“Back off, Em.” Sabine stood, both palms planted firmly on the
table. “This is the only warning you get. Kaylee may be skinny, and naive, and
clueless more often than not, and borderline adulterous, but you’re
lucky
to have her as a friend. She saved your
life.”

“Part of it, anyway,” Em mumbled. But she seemed a little
calmer.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear Sabine just came to my
defense. Sort of. “I’m not adulterous,” I said, for the record.

Sabine shrugged, still frowning at Em like she’d hardly heard
me. “I said ‘borderline.’”

Nash put a hand on Sabine’s arm, and she sat. Reluctantly. Less
than mollified by Em’s response. “Something’s wrong with her.”

“Yeah.” Emma huffed. “I just rattled off a whole
list
of what’s wrong with me.”

“Emotionally, she’s been kinda all over the place for the past
two days,” I added, still reeling from her outburst.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Em demanded.

“You cried at the funeral.”

“Lots of people cry at funerals,” Luca pointed out, and when he
said it aloud, it sounded perfectly reasonable. But it
wasn’t
reasonable, even if I couldn’t explain why.

“She was fine one minute, assessing the funeral she’d planned
for herself. Then she was bawling and clinging to her mom.”

“Well, yeah. Her mom was crying.” Nash stuck a fry upright in a
pool of ketchup, but it fell over. “Crying moms are contagious.”

But it was more than that... “Then, that afternoon, she got all
angry and determined to dish out vengeance to Invidia, and that kind of came out
of nowhere, too....”

“That wasn’t out of nowhere,” Sabine said around a bite of her
burger. She swallowed, then continued, “You were feeling the vengeance, too,
Kay. We
all
were.”

Yeah. And Em caught it from us—like it was contagious.

“Wait, when was that?” Sophie said, and I realized I’d said too
much.

“Stop talking about me like I’m not here!” Em stood and people
at the next table turned to stare until she noticed and sat again, glowering at
them from a distance.

“Sorry,” I whispered, leaning toward the center of the table.
“This just doesn’t make any sense. We’ve been friends since we were kids, and
for more than ten years, I’ve been the one bouncing from one emotional extreme
to the other—”

“That’s true,” Sophie interjected. “Kaylee’s never been
incredibly stable.”

“Thanks.” I scowled at her. “Now stop helping. My point is that
Em’s always been my rock. Steady. Even.
Nice.
” I
turned to her so she’d know I wasn’t trying to leave her out of a discussion
about her. “You’ve never blamed me for
anything.
Even things I deserved the blame for. And these are the same cafeteria
hamburgers we’ve been choking down for three years—why are you just now mad
about that? And what on earth did Jennifer Lamb do to deserve being called an
idiot?”

Em frowned, and her gaze fell. She was thinking. Really
thinking. “She... Well, she bumped my elbow and made me spill water all over our
lab table. But she did apologize. And clean it up.” Her frown deepened. “I do
hate those burgers, though. And you...” Her eyes widened. “Oh, Kay, I’m so
sorry. I didn’t mean any of that. None of this is your fault. You did save my
life, and I am lucky to have you as a friend. I don’t know what the hell I was
thinking. I was just so
mad.
”

But that was only partially true. She’d meant everything she’d
said. I could see that in her eyes. She
did
hate
living in Lydia’s body, and on some level she
did
blame me for that. But the part that made the churning in my stomach ease a
little was the fact that Emma—the Em I’d known most of my life—would never admit
that. She would go to her grave trying to spare my feelings.

Whatever was wrong with her, it was wearing off.

Luca cleared his throat and pushed his empty tray toward the
center of the table. “You know, considering how common it really is, death is
actually a strange process. Inhabiting someone else’s body is even stranger.
Maybe something about her death or her occupation of someone else’s body has
thrown her emotions out of balance.”

Balance.

“Oh, no...” I stared at the table and that sick feeling in my
stomach grew to encompass my chest, too.

“What?” Em looked worried now. Everyone else looked curious.
“What’s wrong?”

“It’s about balance.” Luca had no idea how right he was. “Lydia
was a syphon. And now you’re in her body.”

“Yeah. What exactly is a syphon?” Sophie said. “I was never
very clear on that.”

“It’s a psychic predator. Like a
mara,
” Sabine said, but I shook my head.

“Kinda. But not really. The way Lydia explained it to me was
that something inside her is very sensitive to imbalance of any kind. Pain.
Stress.
Anger.
” I glanced at Em to drive home my
point. “And when a syphon feels an imbalance in someone near her, her body has
an instinctive need to impose balance, by taking what someone else has too much
of, or giving what they have too little of.”

“That’s how she helped you?” Nash said. “At Lakeside?”

“Yeah.” Lydia and I had met as patients in the mental health
ward. She’d saved my life. “I needed to wail for one of the patients—for his
soul. But I didn’t know I was a
bean sidhe,
and I
didn’t know how to control the need to scream, so trying to bottle it up hurt. A
lot. Lydia could feel that, so she took some of my pain. Just enough so that I
could manage what was left.”

Em frowned. She looked scared now. “And what, this syphon
ability comes with the body?”

I shrugged. “Maybe. When Avari possessed Alec and Sabine, their
abilities came with their bodies.”

Sabine scowled at the reminder that she’d been possessed. She
hated knowing that she’d been out of control of her own body, even for a short
while.

“Is that what I’m doing?” Em’s voice rode the thin edge of
panic. “I’m possessing Lydia? Like a hellion? Or like a
ghost?
Because I’m still
dead?
”

“Shhh!” Evidently oblivious to Em’s latest trauma, Sophie
glanced around to make sure no one else in the quad was listening.

“No!” I sounded surer than I really was. Thank goodness.
“You’re not a ghost.” Fortunately, I didn’t have to worry about anyone else
hearing me.

“There
are
no ghosts,” Luca
added.

“Maybe I’m the first.” Em’s eyes were open so wide I was afraid
they’d pop right out of her skull. “Maybe that’s all a ghost is—a disembodied
soul taking up residence where it doesn’t belong. And I don’t belong here. I
wasn’t meant to be a syphon. I don’t
want
to be a
syphon.”

“You belong here.” I turned her by both shoulders so that she
faced me. So I could look right into her eyes. “You belong here with us, no
matter what it takes to make that happen. Even inhabiting someone else’s body.
And anyway, her body may not be what carries the syphon abilities. It could be
that bit of Lydia’s soul that got stuck in there with you.”

“That bit of her
what?
” Em slapped
her own sternum with one hand. “There’s part of Lydia’s soul still in here?” she
hissed. “When were you planning to tell me that?”

“Sorry.” I shrugged and tried to look as guilty as I felt.
Which was a lot. “I’ve been kind of preoccupied with the police investigation
into your death, and the funeral plans, and figuring out where you were going to
live, and how to get you back into school. The soul thing just kind of slipped
my mind.”

“It’s not that bad, Em,” Nash said, when nothing I’d said
seemed to be helping. “Lydia was syphoning some of your pain when you died, and
when Kaylee captured your soul, she got part of Lydia’s, too.”

“What happened to the rest of it?”

I took a deep breath. There was no good way to say the next
part. “It kind of...”

“Got disintegrated,” Sabine finished, when I held on to the
thought for too long. “Poof. Dissipated throughout all four corners of both the
human- and the Netherworld, for as long as it takes to coalesce again.”

“Wait. Her soul will coalesce?”

Luca nodded. “From what my aunt’s told me—” his aunt Madeline
was my boss at the reclamation department “—it will slowly pull itself back
together. Until then...it’s like being in limbo. Floating. We don’t think that
it hurts. We don’t think they’re even aware, when that happens.”

“So...Lydia will be back when her soul...congeals, or
whatever?” Emma was breathing too fast now, and her face was turning red. “Is it
reasonable to assume she’s going to want her body back when that happens? Are we
going to have to share?” Her hands gripped the picnic table so tightly her
fingers looked like they might snap. “Or is she just going to throw me out? Am I
going to be a
homeless ghost,
Kaylee?”

“Em, it could be centuries before that happens. That’s not on
the list of things we need to worry about immediately.”

“It
could
be centuries? So it
might not be?
”

“Okay, we need to focus on the positives.” Sophie laid both of
her palms flat on the table. “That’s what we do in dance, when we place second.
We don’t think about how second place is the first loser. We think about how
many other teams we stomped into the dirt and how hard they’re probably crying.”
She shrugged. “That always makes me feel better.”

For a moment, there was only silence while we stared at her.
Even Luca looked a little...disturbed. But Sabine only shrugged. “Makes sense to
me. And the positive side of this, if you ask me, is that now that you know what
you are, you can learn how to control your abilities. Trust me, a little control
makes all the difference.”

“I can control it?” Em looked almost hopeful.

I nodded. “Lydia could.” To some degree, anyway. “So, here’s
what we know. What I think, anyway. At the funeral, you were fine when you were
with us, because we knew you weren’t dead, so we weren’t as upset as the other
mourners. But when your mom came over, you lost it because she was devastated by
grief, and you took some of that from her. You calmed her down, at the expense
of your own composure.”

“Okay...” Nash looked fascinated. “So, yesterday when you got
all badass and hell-bent on revenge, you were probably taking a little of that
from Kaylee. She’s been itching to make Avari pay since the day you died.”

Since before that. Since the day Avari tricked me into killing
Alec.
That’s
when I’d started channeling my pain
into anger—a much more useful emotion.

Luca frowned. “So then, whose anger was she syphoning today?
Somebody must have been really pissed off, if the portion she took was strong
enough to make her go off on you like that.”

Oh, shit. I hadn’t even thought about that. Em’s rage had a
source, and considering how many hellions were known to frequent the Netherworld
version of our school, chances were good that that anger wasn’t human in origin.
Which meant that someone at Eastlake could be about to lose control.

Again.

Chapter Five

“Where are you going?” Nash said when I stood, already
pulling my phone from my pocket.

“To find whoever sent Em into anger overdrive before he
explodes in someone’s face.” More violence was the last thing we needed at
America’s most dangerous high school. Of its size. “You had chemistry before
lunch, right?” I said, trying to remember her new schedule, and Em nodded.
“Whose class?”

“Mr. Flannery.”

“Did anyone look angry in your chem class? Anyone lose his or
her temper?”

Em shook her head. “Only me.”

“That just means that whoever it was did a good job of hiding
his anger.” Which meant those around him would be completely unprepared when and
if he snapped. “I gotta get a look at Mr. Flannery’s roll book before lunch is
over. I’ll see you guys later.”

Before anyone could object, I took off across the quad, headed
for the corner of the building, texting Tod on the way. His shift at the
hospital had just ended. With any luck, he’d have time to come help me deal
with...whatever was about to go horribly wrong.

As soon as I was out of sight of the quad, I let myself fade
from human sight, then blinked into Mr. Flannery’s first-floor chemistry lab.
The room was empty, thank goodness, and his roll book was open on his desk,
which was another stroke of luck in itself. Most of the other teachers had long
ago switched to an electronic attendance and grade program. Fortunately, Mr.
Flannery was nearly sixty and set in his ways. I’d once heard him complain to a
colleague about how long it took him to enter the grades into the computer all
at once, at the end of each term.

Still invisible, in case anyone came in, I flipped through his
roll book to the third period page and scanned the list. Emily Cavanaugh had
been penciled in at the bottom. Most of the students were juniors, which meant I
knew nearly all of them. All but four had been in the quad with us—underclassmen
usually got stuck eating inside on nice days.

All four of the missing kids were members of the baseball
team—Nash’s former teammates—who’d started eating in the practice field’s dugout
in the two weeks since Brant Williams’s death. They seemed to think that was the
best place to remember him. And to avoid adult supervision.

They kind of had a point.

I closed the roll book and blinked onto the baseball practice
field, but a quick glance showed me that only three team members were in the
dugout. Marco Gutierrez was missing.

After several more minutes of looking—I blinked into every
men’s room in the building as well as both locker rooms—I finally found him
under the bleachers in the gym, just as the bell rang. Lunch was over. In six
minutes I’d be late to English.

I faded into the corporeal plane at his back—visible and
audible only to him—then took a deep breath. “Marco? Are you okay?”

He turned, obviously startled, and the moment his gaze found
me, it hardened in anger. His eyes narrowed. His nose flared. His fists clenched
at his sides. And I knew one thing immediately, though it made no sense.

Marco Gutierrez wasn’t just angry. He was angry
at me.

“Kaylee Cavanaugh. How kind of you to save me the trouble of
searching for you.”

Chills raced up my spine and tingled at the base of my skull.
Marco didn’t have such a formal, stilted speech pattern. And he had no reason to
be mad at me, that I knew of. “Avari.”

Marco was possessed.

“You do not seem surprised to see me....” Marco lifted one brow
and clasped his hands at his back in a gesture no high school junior makes,
unless he’s standing at ease in ROTC.

“Surprised to hear from you? No. The escalating pattern of your
intrusions into my life is pretty hard to miss. But I can’t say I expected to
see you...there.” I waved one hand at the body he’d borrowed. The body of
another relatively innocent, uninvolved classmate.

Still, seeing him by proxy was much better than seeing Avari in
the flesh. And the fact that he hadn’t come in a body of his own told me he
currently lacked the
ability
to come in a body of
his own. Which was a huge relief.

“What do you want? And how did you get
in
there?” Hellions could only possess people who’ve died—even if
they were resuscitated minutes later—people who’ve been to the Netherworld, and
people they have some kind of personal connection to...

That last thought led me to the answer to my own question. “He
huffed frost,” I concluded, and Avari frowned in confusion. “Demon’s Breath.
Your
breath.”

“Ah. Yes, Mr. Gutierrez was among those who sampled the product
your new lover delivered for me.”

“I’m seventeen. Calling Tod my lover makes us sound ancient.
Like, forty.”

“An accurate term, though, is it not? You seem decidedly less
innocent than when we first met.”

“That’s number one on a huge list of things that are thoroughly
none of your business.” Unless it made me less interesting to him. Less worthy
of being captured and tortured for eternity. If that was the case, I’d happily
brand myself a whore, complete with the scarlet letter
A.
Half the school seemed to think I deserved it anyway. “And Tod
had no idea what he was ferrying into the human world for you.” He’d done it for
the chance to help Addison. To keep her sane, even as Avari tortured her damned
soul.

But the frost he’d brought into our world had hurt countless
people, including Marco Gutierrez. How many more were there like him? How many
more of Nash’s friends and teammates had huffed Avari’s breath, unknowingly
nominating themselves for hellion possession?

“What do you want?” I repeated when I realized he was just
staring at me. Studying me. Which was somehow even creepier than when he
threatened me.

Avari made a
tssk-ing
sound with
Marco’s tongue—another gesture not native to human adolescence. “That question
has been asked and answered so many times surely you are as bored by it as I am.
The answer hasn’t changed, but the terms have. I want your anguish, both mental
and physical. I want to take you apart and see what biological pumps and vessels
make you bleed and what psychological gears and levers make you tick. Then I
want to put you back together and begin again. I want to hear you scream. I want
to see you writhe. I want to taste your flesh, and your blood, and your fears. I
want to savor your ill-fated dreams as they burst like berries between my teeth,
then melt like sugar on my tongue. I want
you,
Kaylee Cavanaugh.”

I swallowed my own fear, so he couldn’t have it, and that left
me with nothing but anger blazing like a furnace where my heart should have
been. “It’s always nice to be wanted, but I don’t feel like being enslaved and
tortured today. Sorry.”

“I’m going to make this simple for you, little
bean sidhe.
If you don’t cross into the Nether and
surrender—today—I will come for those you love most.” Because he couldn’t just
take me. Even if he’d had a way to make me cross over, and at the moment he did
not, he couldn’t have kept me in the Nether. Not while I was conscious and in my
own body, anyway. Female
bean sidhes
can cross
between worlds at will, which put us among those least likely to be held captive
in the Netherworld.

To keep me in the Nether against my will, Avari would have to
keep me unconscious—which would be no fun for him—or dispose of my body and take
physical possession of my soul, which was no doubt his intent. The hard part—for
him—was getting to my soul. Since my unfortunate demise, he’d decided it would
be easier to coerce me into willingly surrendering than to forcibly part my body
from my soul.

I rolled my eyes, displaying my disbelief in spite of the fear
tightening my chest. “That threat has been posed and ignored so many times
surely we’re both bored by it.” Throwing his words back at him felt good. Seeing
the anger rage behind his eyes felt even better.

He moved faster than I’d thought possible for a human body. One
second he was three feet away, at proper threatening distance. The next, he had
one hand around my throat. He slammed me into a support beam beneath the
bleachers, and the blow reverberated down my spine in echoing waves of pain. My
mouth fell open and I tried to drag in a shocked breath, but no air came. It
couldn’t get past his fist squeezing my airway shut.

“You
will
give me what I want,”
Avari said into my ear with Marco’s voice. “Or I will destroy what you treasure
most.”

My heart pounded almost painfully while my back throbbed, and
it took me a second to realize that my fear was
remembered
fear, virtually irrelevant to my current predicament. I
didn’t need to breathe. Sure, I couldn’t talk with his hand around my throat,
but I wasn’t going to suffocate, either.

Remembering that helped me push fear back again, even farther
this time, and anger roared in to take its place.

“And frankly, Miss Cavanaugh, every time we meet like this I am
less and less inclined to leave you unbruised. Standing here, touching you with
this borrowed—but very real—hand it occurs to me that not all of my corrupt
pleasures have to wait for your arrival in the Nether.”

And suddenly my fear was back, and
very
relevant to the situation. I could blink out anytime I wanted,
but if he was touching me, he’d come with me.

“I’ve never truly understood the human fondness for nude
rutting and the eager exchange of bodily fluids.” He stared down into my eyes,
studying my panic while I clawed at his hand, but I saw
nothing
of Marco in Avari’s expression. I saw only hellion, and the
dramatically dilated pupils that told me he was feeding from my fear. He was
nearly
drunk
on it. “But this borrowed body seems
willing, and you’re clearly terrified by the prospect of such an encounter. And
naturally, fear makes you taste so much better....” He leaned toward my neck and
inhaled, and my stomach churned, though I hadn’t eaten much in days.

Avari stepped back without letting go of my neck, and his gaze
assessed me with almost clinical detachment. “It’s the strangest thing. I don’t
understand what all the fuss is about, but every time I borrow a human form, my
sense of touch is... Well, it’s exaggerated. Sensitive. You mortals feel
everything so
intensely.
Is it the same for you, or
is this a trait exclusive to the human male?”

His free hand—Marco’s hand—slid down the side of my arm, and
his pupils dilated even farther when my nails broke through the skin on his arm.
I made a quick wish for luck, then threw my knee up into his groin, as fast and
hard as I could.

Avari yelped, and it was the most satisfying sound I’d ever
heard. His hand fell away from my throat, and he hunched over the hopefully
paralyzing pain.

“
That
is a trait exclusive to the
human male.”

Tod laughed out loud, and I looked up just as he appeared
behind the demon in stolen flesh. He swung something with both hands, hard
enough that the muscles in his arms stood out against his skin, and his weapon
slammed into Marco’s head with a dull
thunk.
Marco’s
legs folded, and he collapsed on the gym floor.

Tod stood behind him, holding Emma’s three-inch-thick chemistry
book. “You know, next time you text to tell me you may need help, I could get
here a lot faster if you also tell me
where you are.
I’m a reaper, not a necromancer. Am I going to have to have you fitted with a
GPS chip?”

“Sorry. I didn’t know where I’d be.” I glanced at poor Marco,
thoroughly unconscious and probably in a lot of pain, then stepped over him and
threw my arms around Tod. “And thank you. How’d you find me?”

“I tried about eight different places, then I found Luca. He
said it felt like you were in the gym.”

As a necromancer, Luca was like a compass for all things dead
but not yet decaying. Including reapers. And me.

Tod let me go and ran one hand through his short curls, and the
blue-eyed gaze that met mine was intense. Scared. And kinda...angry. “You have
to stop doing this, Kaylee. You’re dead, not invincible. Reclaiming souls when
Madeline sends backup is one thing. That’s your job. I get that. But you can’t
just go around confronting hellions on your own. Even in a human body they’re
dangerous. Especially when that human body is bigger than yours, and they’re
all
bigger than yours.”

The fear in his voice made my chest ache. “I didn’t know he was
possessed. And anyway, I can handle myself. See?” I made a sweeping gesture
toward Marco’s unconscious form. “Now he knows that being a teenage guy isn’t
all getting high and threatening girls.”

“Yeah, and that was awesome, even if I can’t help but
sympathize with the pain he’s going to be in when he wakes up. But Avari will be
ready for that next time. One of these days you’re going to get in too deep, and
I’m not going to get there fast enough, and...bad things are going to happen,
and
that
will kill me more than my actual death
did.”

“I think I was
born
‘in too deep,’
and bad things happen every day. Sometimes I have to stab hellions. Sometimes I
have to frame friends for murder, and stab evil math teachers, and watch my best
friend die. Again. We deal with it, then we move on.”

“Well, maybe next time you could let the bad things find you,
instead of searching them out for yourself. Or take someone with you. I know
Nash isn’t as much fun to look at, but he’d be decent backup, and even with a
broken arm, Sabine’s a force to be reckoned with.”

“But I’m not?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. I think the evidence speaks for
itself.” He glanced pointedly at Marco, still unconscious on the floor. “But six
hands are better than two. Especially when my hands aren’t close enough to get
to you.”