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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.
5
“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.”
“They’re close enough now…” I pulled him toward me, and I could see that he was trying to resist a smile. To stay mad, to emphasize his point.
“That’s not gonna work.”
