My Soul to Keep

  My dad closed his eyes and sucked in a long, hopefully calming breath, then refocused his attention on me. “Where were we?”

  “I was telling you I’m fine. No permanent damage.” No need to mention the twenty-eight stitches again…

  “But you could have been killed,” he insisted, and I couldn’t argue with that, so I kept my mouth shut. “Come in here where I can get a better look at you.” He stomped into the kitchen and gestured for me to take a seat at the table, beneath the brightest light in the house.

  I sat, and he sank into the chair next to mine, studying my face as if it now held foreign planes and angles. “Who did this?” He took my chin in one hand and carefully turned my head for a better look at the short, shallow cut on my neck, which the nurse had cleaned and left unbandaged. It hadn’t even required stitches.

  I sighed and pulled away from his gentle grip, already dreading the explanation I was about to launch. “Scott Carter.”

  “The same kid who trashed your car?”

  “No, that was Doug Fuller.”

  My father twisted in his seat to glare at Nash, who was now hunched over on the couch, his head cradled in both hands, his broad shoulders slumped. “And they’re both friends of yours? Teammates?”

  Harmony crossed her arms over her chest. “Aiden, Nash had nothing to do with this.”

  “Oh, really?” My father turned on her, and I hoped she understood that the sharpness in his voice reflected more worry than anger. “So it’s just a coincidence that one of his teammates rammed her car through a brick mailbox, and less than a week later another one tries to hack her head off.”

  Well, at least I know where I get my penchant for exaggeration….

  “Scott’s kind of been borrowing trouble from Doug,” I said, picking at the edge of my bandage. “But Nash has nothing to do with any of it.”

  I glanced at Nash for confirmation, but he still had his head buried in his hands. He was really taking Scott’s breakdown hard, and I couldn’t blame him. I’d be devastated if anything happened to Emma. Especially something I could have prevented. Which was why the whole thing had to end now, even if that meant turning the whole mess over to my dad.

  “Exactly what kind of trouble are these boys in?” my father demanded softly. “And what does it have to do with you?”

  Nash finally looked up, his eyes shiny and rimmed in red. His hands shook, clenched in his lap, and I wanted to sink onto the couch next to him and tell him it would be okay. That none of it was really his fault. He hadn’t given his friends the Demon’s Breath, and we didn’t know for sure that acting earlier would actually have saved Scott. For all we knew, sending him into withdrawal earlier might only have escalated his breakdown.

  But I stayed at the table because Nash looked like he wanted to wallow in private misery. I wanted to respect that. To give him some time. But if he so much as looked at me, I’d be across the room in an instant.

  I shrugged, meeting my dad’s gaze reluctantly. “I don’t think it has anything to do with me.” Though Scott’s shadow man’s insistence that the whole thing was my fault was certainly nagging at the back of my mind. I sucked in a deep breath and spat out the rest of it before I could chicken out.

  “Scott and Doug are taking Demon’s Breath, and it’s making them crazy. Literally.”

  “What?” my father demanded, at the exact moment Harmony dropped an egg on the kitchen floor. She just stood there, her open hand palm up and empty, slimy egg white oozing over the linoleum toward the toe of one worn sneaker.

  Then understanding sank in—I saw its progression across her face—and she stepped absently over the busted egg. “That’s why you were asking—”

  My father turned on her. “You knew about this?”

  “No!” Harmony glanced at me, and the hurt in her slowly swirling eyes withered my self-respect. “I thought she was talking about Regan Page! I had no idea there was Demon’s Breath in their school!” Then her gaze narrowed on me again. “You didn’t take any of it, did you?”

  “Of course not!” It killed me that she even had to ask. But then, I had lied to her—if indirectly—in my search for facts.

  “Don’t you think I’ve spent enough time strapped to a bed?”

  My dad flinched and I almost felt guilty for throwing such a low blow. But he wasn’t the one who’d had me hospitalized. My aunt and uncle had done that, in a very ill-thought-out attempt to help me “deal” with abilities I neither knew about nor understood. My father’s only crime was leaving me with them in the first place.

  “Nash and I were just trying to cut off their supply.” I shrugged, hating how unsure of myself I sounded. And how juvenile our attempts at intervention must look to a couple of bean sidhes with a combined age of more than two centuries.

  “Dad, these guys have no idea what they’re taking, or what it’s doing to them. We took Scott’s first balloon and gave it to Tod to dispose of, but he got another one, and—”

  “You did what?” My father’s voice was as hard as ice, and about as warm. “Tod knows about this?”

  I shrugged and glanced at Nash, who looked like he wanted to disappear as he avoided his mother’s look of disbelief and confusion. “We were assuming you wouldn’t want us to take the balloon to the Netherworld ourselves….”

  “You assumed right.” Yet somehow my father didn’t look very happy about my display of uncommon sense. “How did two human boys get their hands on Demon’s Breath in the first place?”

  “They…” I started, but then a sharp shake of Nash’s head caught my attention, and I looked up to find him staring at me intently. And suddenly I wasn’t sure what to do. We’d agreed to tell our parents about the Demon’s Breath, and technically we’d done that. But Nash clearly didn’t want them to know about Everett. Or maybe about the party.

  My father watched me expectantly, waiting for me to finish my aborted thought. “They bought it from some guy who sells it in party balloons. He calls it frost.” Which was true…“We could ask Doug—”

  “No!” My father’s palm slapped the table and it shook beneath my arm. “Stay away from him, Kaylee. Harmony, Brendon, and I will take care of this. I don’t want you anywhere near that kid. Ever.”

  I nodded slowly, unsure what else to do. My dad was starting to sound paranoid. I had to go to school, and unless he’d miraculously graduated in the past few hours, so did Doug.

  Harmony knelt on the kitchen floor in front of the cracked egg with a dish rag in one hand, but her attention was focused on me. “How bad off are they? Scott and Doug.”

  “They’re both seeing things, but it’s obviously affecting Scott a lot worse than Doug,” I said, thinking about Nash’s conjecture that Doug had a little Netherworld blood somewhere in his genealogy.

  “Scott totally lost it today at school,” Nash added, and I glanced at him in surprise; he’d hardly spoken since we’d left the hospital. “He was seeing things, and hearing things, and he was literally scared of his own shadow.”

  “Assuming it really is his shadow…” I said. Nash and I hadn’t discussed my theory that Scott wasn’t really hallucinating, but I figured if anyone would know for sure about the side effects of Demon’s Breath, it would be Harmony.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  But Nash answered before I could. “Kaylee got creeped out by Scott’s shadow fixation. He was talking to them, and listening to them, and the whole thing was pretty convincing. Plus, there was the knife.” He shrugged and shot me a concerned, almost condescending look of sympathy. “It’s no wonder she started to believe him. She was terrified. I was scared, too.”

  I bristled, glaring at him. “You think I’m imagining this? I was not creeped out!” Though I wasn’t going to deny being afraid of the knife.

  “Kay…” Nash stood and made his way into the kitchen, his voice flowing over me like warm silk. “He was delusional, and you were scared, and bleeding, and in shock. Anyone would have been freaked out, but try no
t to read too much into anything Scott said or did. He’s not playing with a full deck anymore.”

  I shook my head so hard my brain felt like it was bouncing in my skull, but I couldn’t shake the seductive feel of his voice in my mind. The overwhelming urge to nod my head, close my mouth, and let the whole thing play out without me.

  I fought it, but struggling was like trying to swim in a huge vat of warm honey, when it would have been so much easier simply to sink into the sweetness. “Stop Influencing me,” I whispered, when what I really wanted to do was shout.

  “Nash!” Harmony snapped, and his warm mental presence dissipated like fog in bright sunlight.

  Furious now, I pushed my chair away from the table, twisting my injured arm in the process. I gasped over the fresh throb and clutched my arm to my chest, but the pain helped clear my head and I rounded on him, fighting angry tears and the sharp sting of betrayal. “I’m not some hysterical kid, and I am not crazy!” Even the implication that my logic had been compromised triggered my very worst fears.

  And Nash damn well knew that.

  “Kay, no one’s saying you’re crazy.” My father stood, too, and when he reached out for me, I let him pull me close. “You’ve had a traumatic day, and he was just trying to calm you down, though admittedly he’s going about it the wrong way.” He shot a pointed scowl at Nash, who had the decency to look horrified by what he’d done. So why the hell had he done it?

  “I’m sorry, Kaylee.” Nash let me see the swirl of regret in his eyes. But I couldn’t forgive him. Not for this. Not yet.

  “Stay out of my head, Nash.” I stepped back when he reached for me, and he looked like I’d punched him in the gut. Some small part of me felt bad about that, but the rest of me was pissed. I had more to say about this, but not in front of our parents.

  So I sat at the table again and ground my teeth when he sat in the chair next to mine.

  “I assume people noticed Scott acting strange?” my dad asked as he crossed the kitchen, obviously eager to pull the discussion back on track.

  “Um, yeah.” Nash fought to catch my gaze, and when I refused to look at him, he fingered a crack in the weathered kitchen table. “But they all think he was high on something…normal.” He glanced at his mother, who’d just finished cleaning up the egg slime. “Is there anything we can do for him?”

  Harmony shook her head slowly. “The damage to his brain is permanent. And withdrawal will be very hard on him in a human hospital, because all they can do is restrain him to keep him from hurting himself. The only medications I know of that can make him feel better come from the Netherworld.”

  “Can you get him any of those?” I asked. “Assuming they keep him at Arlington Memorial?”

  She leaned with one hip on the counter, drying her hands on a damp dishrag. “I don’t work in mental health, but I can probably get in to see him once or twice. And if I can’t, Tod can.”

  “What about Doug?” I asked. “He’s not as bad off as Scott is, but the night he hit my car, he said he saw someone in his passenger’s seat.”

  “That’s easy enough,” Nash shrugged, looking optimistic for the first time since we’d left school. “Next time we hang out, I’ll just slip whatever weird medication he needs into his drink.” He glanced at Harmony again, eyes shining in either hope or desperation. “You can get whatever he needs, right?”

  “I think so. But it won’t do any good until the Demon’s Breath is completely out of his system…”

  “And we still don’t know how to cut off the supply,” I finished.

  “You let us worry about that,” my father said with a note of finality he’d probably perfected kicking drunks out of his parents’ pub in Ireland. “Let’s get you something to eat, then I want you to take a nap while I’m here to make sure you wake up in your own bed.”

  I didn’t even try to argue. I was exhausted, and I wouldn’t be any help to Emma or Doug until I could think straight.

  My dad and Harmony messed around in the kitchen, trying to put together a decent meal and discuss the situation without saying anything that would upset me. Because apparently exhaustion and blood loss had combined to make me look about as sturdy as a blown-glass vase.

  After several minutes spent listening to them whisper, I plodded to my room without even a glance in Nash’s direction.

  He followed me.

  I collapsed stomach-down on my bed while he stood in the doorway. “Go away.”

  He took that as an invitation to sit at my desk.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You should be.” I turned to face the window, fluffing my pillow under one cheek, and my desk chair creaked as he stood. A moment later, he knelt on the opposite side of the bed, inches from my face. “What the hell is wrong with you lately?” I was worried about the frost invasion too, but it hadn’t turned me into a controlling bitch.

  “Kaylee, please…”

  “That was messed up, Nash. That was…slimy.” I sat up and scooted back on the bed to put distance between us. “You make me think I want things I don’t really want to do, and it’s like losing control of myself. It’s worse than being strapped to a hospital bed because it’s not some stranger who has to let me up when I stop fighting. It’s you, and I shouldn’t have to fight you.” I blinked back tears, almost as mad at myself for crying as I was at him for invading my mind. “I don’t want your voice in my head anymore. Not even to help me.”

  Nash nodded slowly, his eyes churning with too many emotions for me to interpret. “I’m so sorry, Kaylee. I swear it’ll never happen again.” He swallowed and glanced at his hands, where they gripped the edge of my mattress. “It’s just that everything is so messed up, and it’s all my fault. Scott could have killed you, and I…I’m just not thinking straight right now.”

  “I know.” I wasn’t, either. I was running on caffeine and adrenaline, both of which were fading fast.

  But before he could say anything else, my phone dinged, and I leaned to one side to dig it from my front pocket.

  There was a text from Emma. R U OK? LB said you narced on Scott.

  Crap. I’d forgotten that Laura Bell—LB—had been home sick all day. She’d obviously seen them load me and Scott into ambulances—his under police escort—and had reported her version of the event.

  It was probably all over school. And since I couldn’t tell anyone the truth, Laura’s version—which evidently blamed me for getting the quarterback arrested on drug charges—would stand on the record.

  Great.

  I tried to text her back, but I couldn’t type very well without my right hand, so after two failed attempts, Nash held out his hand for my phone, watching my face closely. Letting him help would mean I’d forgiven him.

  I sighed and gave him my phone. “Tell her I’m fine, and I’ll explain later,” I said, and he nodded, typing almost as fast with two thumbs as I could. “And that I did not rat on Scott.”

  The part about Scott trying to kill me could wait for another day.

  13

  EMMA EYED ME in concern when I collapsed into my chair beside her in chemistry on Friday morning. She’d been preoccupied with Doug for most of yesterday and hadn’t noticed my exhaustion, but evidently my zombie impersonation was now too obvious to be overlooked.

  “Wow, Kaylee, you look like crap,” she whispered as the girl in front of me passed a stapled test packet over her shoulder.

  “Thanks.” I shot Emma a good-humored smile. At least, I hoped it looked good-humored. “I haven’t been getting much sleep.”

  After Nash and Harmony left the night before, I’d collapsed on the couch—again in my homemade protective gear—but got very little rest, because this time my father refused to sleep and I could feel him watching me. I had two death dreams in a four-hour span, and my dad woke me up from both of them the moment the first note of a soul song erupted from my mouth.

  Each time, he sat on the coffee table with a spiral-bound notebook, pen ready to go, but I had no new d
etails to offer. Same dark figure. Same falling through the Nether-smog. Same panic welling inside my dream throat. Same featureless face I couldn’t identify.

  Between the dream-screaming, the butchered forearm, and my near-death experience, peaceful sleep was a fond and somewhat distant memory. Yet, thanks to Scott’s absence and Laura Bell’s sensational but inaccurate gossip, the last school day of the semester was even worse than the sleepless night it followed.

  I could feel them staring at me as I flipped open my test booklet. They’d been watching me all morning. Ogling the bandage my right sleeve wouldn’t cover, which made it obvious that something big had gone down the day before, but left the details tantalizingly vague.

  I pretended not to hear the whispers in the hall, rumors linking my name with Scott’s. Wondering if he and I had been cheating on Nash and Sophie, which was easily the most ridiculous speculation I’d ever heard.

  Until I heard someone claim that Nash had cut me—and was the source of whatever mysterious damage Scott had suffered—when he caught the two of us together.

  There were other, quieter rumors from people who’d seen Scott’s breakdown in class or in the cafeteria. They knew something had been wrong with him before we’d ever left school, but their tales were less exciting and never really caught on. Which left me and Nash to bear the brunt of the rumors and the stares.

  And Sophie, of course. Her conspicuous absence only fanned the flames of the rumor bonfire consuming the school, and for the first time, she found herself tied to a stake at the center of the blaze, condemned to burn alongside me.

  I couldn’t really blame her for skipping school. Especially considering she had no idea what had really happened between me, Scott, and Nash. For all I knew, she’d actually bought the load of crap Laura was shoveling.

  “Just ignore them.” Emma glared across the room at a couple of juniors whispering and staring at me while they waited for test booklets. “Their own lives aren’t interesting enough to warrant gossip,” she said, loud enough for the whole class to hear.