My Soul to Keep

  What? A wash of confusion diluted my fear. What did any of this have to do with me?

  “Scott, if I take you there, he’ll kill us both. Or worse.”

  He stiffened again, and his knife hand twitched. I gasped as the point of the blade pierced my skin with a sharp slice of pain. A warm bead of blood trailed slowly down my neck, and I froze.

  “He says I’ll die here. You say I’ll die there. But if I can’t get him out of my head, none of that matters!” He sobbed, then stood straighter, drawing me up with him as the blade pressed more firmly against my broken skin. “Take me there now, or I’ll cut your throat wide open.”

  “Okay…” I said, my heart pounding so hard I could barely hear my own words, much less my thoughts. “I’ll take you. Just…put the knife down.”

  “Kaylee?” Nash demanded from the other side of the door, and something thumped to the floor. He’d dropped the soda.

  “No way.” Scott shook his head, jostling us both, ignoring Nash completely. “He says you’ll run.”

  I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, trying to slow my racing thoughts. And my racing pulse. Then I opened my eyes to find the doorknob twisting again as Nash tried to force his way into the room.

  “If this shadow man is so smart—” my voice wavered with nerves “—he’ll know it takes a lot of concentration to cross over. And I can’t concentrate with a knife at my throat.”

  Nash pounded the door. “Kaylee, no…!” he shouted, but he was too upset now to manage much Influence on either of us.

  Scott went still behind me, listening to his shadow man again. Then, “Fine. But if you run, he says I should gut you like a goat on an altar.”

  My heart beat so hard my head hurt, and adrenaline was turning my fight-or-flight instinct into a demand. I knew what I had to do, but had no idea if I could actually pull it off. He was a lot bigger than I was, and a lot stronger and faster. And Nash would be no help from the other side of the door.

  Slowly, Scott removed the knife from my neck, and more blood trickled down my throat. A moment later, the blade poked at my back through my jacket and my thin tee. “Yes, that’s much more relaxing,” I snapped, unable to censor my sarcasm, even with my life in mortal peril.

  I stared at the closed door and tried to communicate my intentions to Nash silently, desperately wishing bean sidhes were psychic. But that was just another on a long list of really cool abilities I didn’t get.

  “Okay, this is gonna feel kind of funny,” I warned Scott, closing my eyes as I silently wished myself luck. “Your skin will tingle, and it’ll feel like you’re falling.” Which wasn’t true in the least. Nash stopped pounding on the door for a moment, as if to listen. He knew I was lying, and had hopefully gathered from that fact that I had no intention of taking Scott to the Netherworld.

  But then what I was really planning sank in, and he kicked the door so hard it shook in its frame.

  “So, don’t freak out if you lose your balance, okay?” I continued for Scott’s benefit, doing my best to ignore Nash. “You ready?”

  “Yeah.” But Scott’s voice had gone squeaky, and his grip on my arm was cutting off my circulation. He was terrified.

  Good. So was I.

  I took another deep breath. Then I spun away from the knife and twisted my arm from Scott’s grip. He shouted. The knife arced toward me. I threw my arm up to shield my face. Pain sliced across the fleshy part of my forearm. I screamed and kicked him. My boot hit his hip, and Scott stumbled toward the desk. He tripped over his own foot and went down like a felled tree.

  I whirled around before he landed and fumbled with the lock, twisting the knob twice before it would turn. I pulled the door open and Nash shoved me behind him even as he charged into the room, armed with nothing but his own outrage.

  Scott lay motionless on the floor, the knife clutched loosely in his fist.

  For a moment, I thought he was dead. That his shadow man had been right—he’d died because he hadn’t crossed over. Then I saw his chest rise and fall, and realized he was unconscious. He’d hit his head on the desk when he fell.

  Nash dug his phone from his pocket and was dialing before I’d even processed what happened. Distantly, I heard him answer the 9-1-1 operator’s questions, telling her that his best friend, Scott Carter, had gone crazy. That he’d attacked me with a knife, then fell and hit his head on a desk and knocked himself out.

  The operator said help would be there soon. She was right.

  Nash was still wrapping my bleeding arm with a kitchen towel when the sirens screamed down the street. “Just go along with whatever I say,” he insisted as flashing red lights drew to stop in front of the house, easily visible through the glass front door. He pushed me gently onto a couch in the living room. “Everyone at school will back us up. They all saw him acting crazy.”

  My eyes watered and the room blurred. “You’re going to get him committed…” I whispered, unsure whether or not I meant it as a question.

  “There’s no other choice,” Nash insisted, walking backward toward the front door to let the EMTs in. “There’s nothing we can do for him now, and the only way to keep him from hurting anyone else is to lock him up.”

  “This is our fault, Nash,” I sobbed, wiping scalding tears from my cheek with the back of my good arm. “We should have done something sooner.”

  “I know.” His eyes swirled with grief, and guilt, and regret. Then he turned his back on me and opened the front door.

  “TELL ME AGAIN WHY you left school?” the police officer said, scooting his chair closer to the E.R. gurney I sat on, my legs crossed beneath me like a kindergartner. Only he wasn’t just an officer. He was a detective. Because attempted murder—or manslaughter, or whatever they would wind up calling it—was a felony, and even though Scott was strapped to a bed in the same mental health ward I’d once spent a week in, he couldn’t officially plead his mental defect until his parents called in their fancy, overpriced attorney to replace the court-appointed rookie currently shaking in his loafers upstairs.

  And if anyone deserved to get off on temporary insanity, if was Scott Carter. He hadn’t really meant to kill me. Well, maybe he had, but he would never have done it if he weren’t in withdrawal from Demon’s Breath and under the manipulation of an as-yet-unidentified Netherworld monster. Both circumstances I was convinced Nash and I could have prevented, if we’d acted sooner. Called in reinforcements.

  “Kaitlyn? Kaitlyn, are you okay?” the cop asked, and Nash squeezed my good hand until I glanced up, surprised to find everyone staring at me.

  “It’s Kaylee…” I mumbled, staring at the neat row of stitches on the arm I held stiffly in front of me, awaiting a sterile bandage. “My name is Kaylee.” I was grateful for the local anesthetic, and a bit surprised that it seemed to have numbed my mind, as well as my arm.

  Or maybe that was shock.

  “I’m sorry. Kaylee,” the detective corrected himself, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. I’d insisted he sit, because I didn’t like him towering over me. He made me nervous, probably because I felt guilty, though he didn’t seem to suspect me of anything. “Kaylee, please tell me again why you followed Mr. Carter from the school parking lot.”

  Behind him, the thin blue curtain slid back on its metal track and an elderly nurse appeared, nearly swallowed by her purple scrubs. She carried several small, sealed packages, and I eyed them suspiciously.

  “Because he was acting…crazy.” There. Maybe I could help with Scott’s defense…. “He wasn’t making any sense, and we didn’t think he should be driving. So we followed to make sure he was okay.”

  “And he went straight home?”

  I glanced at Nash, who nodded. “Yeah. The front door was open, so we went in. He was in his dad’s office.”

  The nurse ripped open a package of sterile bandages and I flinched, startled.

  “And he just attacked you with a knife?” The detective was still scribbling in his notebook, not even watching me as I no
dded. “Did he say anything?”

  “Um… He wanted me to take him somewhere.”

  Finally the cop looked up, surprised. “Where?”

  “He didn’t say.” Which was true, technically. “He just said he’d kill me if I didn’t take him. I told him I’d take him wherever he wanted to go if he’d put the knife down. So he moved it from my throat to my back, and when I tried to get away, he slashed me.” I held up my injured arm for emphasis, foiling the nurse’s attempt to bandage it.

  “Okay, thank you, Kaylee.” The detective stood and flipped his notebook closed, then slid it into the right pocket of his long coat. “Your dad’s on his way—” I hadn’t been able to stop them from calling him and scaring him to death “—and it looks like you’re in good hands until he gets here.” The cop smiled first at Nash, who didn’t even seem to notice him, then at the nurse, whose cold hands shook as they pressed the bandage gently on the long line of stitches curving over the bony part of my forearm onto the fleshier underside. “We’ll be following up with you soon, when we know more about what happened. Okay?”

  I nodded as he headed toward the exit. He already had one hand on the doorknob when I looked up. “What’s going to happen to Scott?”

  Nash glanced at me in surprise almost equal to the cop’s, but the nurse didn’t even pause in her work.

  “Well, that all depends on his attorney. But Mr. Carter—Scott’s father—has testified in several cases around here and, for a psychiatrist, he knows a fair bit about the law. I wouldn’t worry about Scott. He’ll get the best legal and mental care available.”

  I nodded, but only because I didn’t know how else to respond. No amount of money or treatment could fix Scott now, and for all I knew, he’d hear that voice in his head—see that shape in the shadows—for the rest of his life. Even if he never again saw the outside of a padded room.

  12

  “JUST COME STRAIGHT HOME,” Harmony said into her cell phone as I sank onto my couch with my bandaged arm in my lap. She pushed the front door closed, cutting off the chill from outside, then marched into the kitchen, already digging through my fridge for something that hadn’t started to mold.

  On the other end of the line, my father tried to argue, but she interrupted him with the confidence of a woman accustomed to giving orders. “I already picked her up.”

  My dad worked at a factory in Fort Worth, while Harmony worked in the very hospital they’d taken us to. So even coming from home—she’d worked the third shift—she’d gotten there nearly half an hour earlier than my dad could have made it.

  “Because I was closer to the hospital than you were.” And because Nash’s Influence had convinced the doc to release me to someone other than my legal guardian.

  Harmony held the phone away from her ear while my father blustered, complained, and questioned. “She’s fine, physically. We’ll talk about it when you get here.” With that, she flipped her phone closed and shoved it into her front pocket with a finality that suggested she would not answer if he called back.

  Wow. I’d never seen anyone handle my dad like that, and I was so impressed I forgot to argue that I was fine mentally, too. I thought I was handling the whole thing pretty well, considering I’d nearly been killed. Again.

  “Kaylee, do you believe in déjà vu?” Harmony smiled amiably and pulled a carton of milk from the fridge. “Because the sight of you lying injured on that couch is starting to look awfully familiar.”

  “I don’t go looking for trouble,” I insisted, a little miffed.

  Nash set the keys to the rental on the half wall between the entry and the living room, then dropped onto the couch next to me with his head thrown back like it weighed a ton. We’d stopped by the Carters’ house on the way home so Nash could follow us in the loaner. Scott’s parents had been called back from Cancún early, but they wouldn’t get in until the next day, so his house was completely dark and looked oddly deserted, even in the middle of a sunny winter day.

  It was creepy, to say the least.

  Harmony set a tub of margarine on the counter, then pulled half-full bags of flour and sugar from the depths of a cabinet I’d rarely peeked into. “Yet trouble manages to find you, whether you’re looking for it or not.”

  “In this case, I think ‘trouble’ is a bit of an understatement,” I mumbled, twisting carefully to lean on Nash as he wrapped one arm around me. “Don’t you want to know what happened?” I asked, watching her through the wide kitchen doorway.

  “Not yet.” Her voice echoed from inside another cabinet.

  “You’ll have to explain it all over again when your father gets here, so I’ll just wait for that.”

  “Well, I won’t,” Tod snapped, and I glanced up to find him leaning against the kitchen door frame. He’d shown up in my room in the E.R. right after the detective left, demanding answers we couldn’t give him while the nurse was still there. Then he’d blinked out to find his mother, only to discover her already on the way to the hospital. One of her fellow nurses had called her when she recognized Nash.

  “Yes, you will.” Harmony finally stood and faced her older, mostly dead son, a box of baking soda in one hand. “Making her repeat herself won’t make her feel any better.”

  “Not that there’s any chance of that, anyway…” My dad was going to go apocalyptic when he heard about the Demon’s Breath. And I wasn’t entirely convinced Harmony wouldn’t join him, once she knew the whole story.

  Tod grumbled and dropped into my father’s recliner, apparently willing to physically wait with the rest of us for once.

  I sat up and shrugged out from under Nash’s arm so I could see his face, but he wouldn’t look at me. His eyes were closed, one wave of brown hair fallen over his eyebrow. I might have thought he was asleep, if not for the tense lines of his shoulders and jaw. Nash was just as upset as I was, and probably suffering an even heavier burden of guilt, because Scott was his friend.

  Metal clanged against the faded Formica as Harmony set our good mixing bowl on the counter.

  A labored engine roared down the street out front, then rumbled to a stop in the driveway. My father was home, and considering how quickly he’d arrived, I was surprised not to hear police sirens following him.

  Moments later, the front door flew open and smashed against the half wall. My dad’s keys dangled from his hand and his chest heaved as if he’d just run all the way from work. His breathing didn’t slow until his gaze found mine. “Are you okay?”

  I scooted forward on the couch as Nash sat up straight next to me. “Yeah. I’m good.” Thanks to twenty-eight stitches and a strong local anesthetic. But I wasn’t looking forward to the next hour of my life. The nurse who’d bandaged my arm had given me two Tylenol tablets. Because once the local anesthetic wore off, she’d said, I’d feel like someone sliced my arm open.

  I think that was her idea of a joke.

  “What the hell happened?” my dad demanded, still standing in the open doorway as a cold draft swirled across the room, fluttering the opened bills on one end table and raising chill bumps on my legs. “Don’t they have teachers at that school? Why wasn’t anyone there to stop this?”

  Well, crap. I guess there’s no way to avoid the whole truancy aspect….

  “We weren’t actually at school.” I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping I looked pathetic enough to thwart the bulk of his temper.

  The front door slammed and I opened my eyes to see anger and concern warring behind my father’s pained expression. “I don’t even know where to start, Kaylee. I’ve only been back for three months, and you’ve nearly been killed twice. What do I have to do to keep you safe? Are you out looking for trouble?”

  In spite of the growing pain in my arm and my general state of guilt and grief, I managed a wry grin, trying to lighten the mood. “You missed that part of the discussion.” When his worried scowl deepened, the smile died on my face.

  My father sighed and pulled his coat off as he clomped across the living room, bringi
ng with him the scents of sweat and metal from the factory where he worked. He’d had to leave early—giving up part of his paycheck—thanks to me. “How’s your arm?”

  “Fine.” I held out my hand when he reached for it, and he studied my arm, as if he could actually see through the long, thick bandage. “The doctor said there’s no permanent damage. It’s just a few stitches, Dad.”

  Tod huffed and propped his feet on the footrest of my father’s recliner. “Try twenty-eight,” he said, and my dad actually jerked in surprise. I was almost amused to realize that, though he could clearly hear the reaper, my father couldn’t see him.

  “Damn it, Tod!” He glared in the reaper’s general direction.

  “Do not sneak up on me in my own house—I don’t care how dead you are! Show yourself or get out.”

  Harmony and I shared a small smile, but my father didn’t notice.

  The reaper shrugged and grinned at me, then blinked out of the chair and onto the carpet at my father’s back, now fully corporeal. “Fine,” he said, inches from my dad’s ear, and my father nearly jumped out of his shirt. “Your house, your rules.”

  My dad spun around, his flush deepening until I thought his face would explode. “I changed my mind. Get out!”

  Tod shrugged again and a single blond curl fell over his forehead. “I’ll get the scoop from Kaylee later. My break’s over, anyway.” Then he winked silently out of existence, leaving my father still fuming, his fists clenched at his sides in anger that had no outlet.

  I looked up at the clock in the kitchen. It was 2:05 p.m. Tod’s shift had only started at noon. If he didn’t watch it, he was going to get fired.

  “Is he really gone?” My dad glanced first at me, then at Harmony, who shrugged, clearly trying to hide a grin as she shoved several fallen ringlets back from her face.

  “As far as I can tell.”

  Tod didn’t torment his mother or me much because he couldn’t get such a rise out of us. My father and Nash were his favorite targets, because they took themselves so seriously.