My Soul to Keep

And I hadn’t even noticed.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I heard the sob in my voice, and it seemed to warble in time with the unsteady rhythm of my heart.

  Nash sank onto the bench next to me and stared at his hands in his lap. “I didn’t realize what had happened at first, and by the time I started feeling it, you were dying from Crimson Creeper venom. What was my stupid contact buzz compared to your life and Addy’s soul?” He shrugged again, as if choosing my problem over his was no big deal. “But I couldn’t fight it, and by the time you got better, I was hooked. It just snowballed from there.”

  Stunned, I let my head fall into my hands, my mind now as numb from shock as my nose was from the cold. How could I not have known? How could I have seen him nearly every day, and not noticed what was going on?

  But that was just it. I’d barely seen Nash in the month after he was exposed, other than a few minutes between classes and half an hour at lunch. I’d been grounded on a massive scale, unavailable to him when he’d needed me most. When it was my fault he was exposed in the first place. I’d dragged him to the Netherworld, and I’d made Addy blow up those balloons.

  Focus, Kaylee. There would be time to feel guilty later.

  “You should have told me,” I groaned, staring up at him again. “I could have helped you.”

  He shrugged, shoving chapped, clenched fists into his jeans pockets. “I thought I could quit on my own, and you’d never have to know.”

  “I had a right to know!” I swiped the back of one frozen hand across my dripping nose. “I told you every secret I have—even the ones I wish I could forget—because I thought I could trust you.” My hands clenched around nothing, as if I could wring the composure I needed from the air. “But you were lying the whole time. Why, Nash?”

  “Because I didn’t want you to know!” He stood and stomped across the concrete tiles, staring into the hedges before turning to face me, gesturing helplessly with one cold-reddened hand. “I can’t fight it, Kaylee. I don’t even want to fight it.” He blinked, and his irises churned with fervor—with desperation for something I couldn’t offer—and an ache settled deep into my chest like a bad cold.

  “It feels like the whole world is buzzing, and when you come down from it, everything feels flat and colorless, and all you want to do is get that feeling back. Even before the withdrawal sets in, you’ll do anything to get that feeling back, because as long as it lasts, nothing’s wrong. It doesn’t matter if you forget something, or lose something. Or if you fail someone. Nothing’s wrong and everything feels good, and you never want it to end. Okay? I didn’t want you to know that I don’t ever want it to end….”

  He sank onto the bench across from mine as his last tortured sentence trailed into silence, but for the thumping bass from the house behind me.

  I could only stare at him, trying desperately to calm the storm of fear, disappointment, and anger lashing around inside me. “Nothing’s wrong when you’re on Demon’s Breath because nothing’s important.” And I wanted to be important. I wanted so badly to matter to him. To mean more than his next fix.

  “Nash, it should matter to you that you let it go this far. That your habit got Scott locked up and nearly got me killed.”

  “No.” Nash shook his head vehemently, his damp lashes glittering in the glare from the floodlight. “That had nothing to do with me. The guys have never even seen me with a balloon.”

  I believed him. He was meeting my eyes too boldly to be lying, his irises swirling calmly with sincerity. But the coincidence was too…coincidental. He had to be connected, even if he didn’t know it.

  I slid my frozen hands into my borrowed jacket pockets, and the right one curled around something cold and hard. I pulled out a weighted, black plastic balloon clip. “So, I’m assuming Everett is your supplier, too?”

  Nash sighed. “Yeah. But I swear I had no idea he was selling to humans until Fuller actually said his name.”

  Again, I believed him. But again, it didn’t matter. “He got to them through you. He must have. None of this makes sense otherwise.”

  “No.” Nash shook his head, and I wasn’t sure which one of us he was trying to convince. “Everett doesn’t know my name, and I never gave him anyone else’s.”

  I shrugged, a thin thread of panic tightening around the base of my spine, sending cold fingers across my flesh from the inside. “So, he followed you. He saw you at school and realized there’s an entire untapped market out there. A whole world full of spoiled, careless kids with more money than sense.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe…” Nash finally conceded.

  “What’s Everett’s last name?” I sank onto the bench again and hunched into Nash’s jacket, suddenly overwhelmed by the exhaustion I’d been holding back by sheer will and caffeine.

  “I don’t know,” Nash said, and I raised both brows at him.

  “I swear!” He shrugged defensively.

  “Is he human?”

  “Half. His mother’s a harpy.”

  I bet that was a weird childhood. And his mixed blood certainly explained how he’d survived addiction long enough to turn a profit…. “What about those girls?”

  Nash shrugged again, and dropped wearily onto the bench beside me. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen them before. Junkies, maybe?”

  They didn’t look like junkies to me. But then, neither did Nash or Doug.

  “How did you get hooked up with Everett?” My teeth had begun to chatter, and I had to concentrate to make myself understood. “How does one even find a Netherworld drug dealer?”

  Nash exhaled, then stared at the white puff of breath, obviously avoiding my gaze. “I was referred to him.”

  That sick feeling returned, churning the contents of my stomach mercilessly. “Referred?”

  “You have to understand, Kaylee,” he began, turning suddenly toward me with a fevered look in his slowly swirling eyes. “You were still sick from the Creeper venom. We hadn’t even buried Addy yet, and I started feeling weak, like I had low blood sugar or something. I couldn’t concentrate on anything, but I didn’t know what was wrong until I started shaking and twitching, like that fiend, when he was desperate for a hit. I didn’t know what else to do. So I got Tod to cross over with me.”

  “Tod took you to the Netherworld?” Normally nothing Tod did surprised me. He didn’t see things from the normal human perspective—or even the normal bean sidhe perspective—and his moral compass always seemed to point just to the left of north. But Tod would never intentionally hurt Nash. Or let him hurt himself.

  “He didn’t know why,” Nash insisted. “He owed me another favor—don’t ask,” he added when I opened my mouth to do just that. “And I called it in, no questions asked. He crossed me over, then came back for me half an hour later.”

  “So you, what? Tripped over Everett in the Netherworld?” I wiped my dripping nose on a tissue from Nash’s left jacket pocket. “Can half harpies cross over?”

  “Not on their own. I don’t think Everett’s ever been there.” Nash glanced down at his lap, where his hands had nearly gone purple from the cold.

  It took me a minute to understand. If he hadn’t crossed over to find a dealer…

  I felt the blood drain from my face and I backed away from him on the bench. “Please tell me you didn’t go there looking for a hellion.” Sucking Demon’s Breath from a balloon was bad enough, but from the source?

  Nash frowned, conflict written in every line of his face. “I didn’t know what else to do. I was desperate.”

  “What hellion?” I demanded, so softly I could barely hear my own words. I only knew of two in the area—or the Netherworld version of our area—and was horrified by the thought of Nash going near either of them.

  “I had to, Kaylee.” His voice pleaded with me to understand. “I thought I was dying. You don’t know what it’s like.”

  “Nash, who was it?”

  “Avari,” he whispered.

  My heart dropped into my stomach.
A face flashed from my memory, along with a chill that had nothing to do with the seasonal temperature.

  Avari was the demon of greed who’d made a bid for my soul when I was dying in the Netherworld. His icy voice haunted my nightmares, promising that he would one day feast from my suffering, even if he had to destroy everyone I loved to get to me.

  Evidently he’d started with Nash.

  16

  TERROR AND ANGER TWISTED through me like vines dripping poison into my veins. I shot off the bench, and Nash grabbed my arm to stop me from leaving. “Kaylee, please…” he begged, his warm fingers leaching some of the chill from my own. If his skin had been colder than mine—if I’d had any reason to suspect he still had frost in his system—I’d have run all the way to my car without looking back.

  But because he was warm, I turned and made myself look at him. “So, how did it work?” I demanded, my voice as cold as the fingers he still gripped. “He blew up a balloon for you? Just like that?”

  “Um, no.” And I swear I saw Nash flush, in spite of the little available light. “The initial transfer was more…personal.”

  Eewww! “You kissed Avari?” My own lips went cold at the thought, and I couldn’t help being creeped out that a Netherworld hellion and I had indirectly shared intimate contact through my boyfriend.

  “It was more like artificial respiration,” he insisted, but his rationalization couldn’t make the facts sound any better. The thought of kissing a hellion sent me into realms of terror and disgust I hadn’t even known existed. “And after that first time, he set things up with Everett, so I wouldn’t have to cross over again.”

  “Well, wasn’t that nice of him!” I snapped, jerking my fingers from his grip.

  Nash ignored my sarcasm. “I thought so at the time, and I couldn’t figure out why he’d go to that much trouble. But the payoff’s obvious now.” He gestured toward the house, and the party full of teenagers who’d nearly become the client base of an alternate-realm drug dealer.

  But the payoff wasn’t obvious to me. “What’s Avari getting out of this?”

  “My guess is that he’ll feed from their suffering until they die. Hell, Carter’s just become a twenty-four-hour buffet….”

  And suddenly my stomach wanted to send those tacos back up. “Do you think he’s given up on them?” I waved my hand at the party still in progress.

  “Not a chance. But it’ll give us some time to think.”

  Mentally and physically exhausted, I sank back onto the bench, far from encouraged by the temporary reprieve. “So, you know how to get in touch with Everett, right? You call him when you need…more?” The very thought gave me chills, but if Nash knew how to find him, at least we’d have some valuable information to give my dad. Or whoever was most qualified to deal with a half-harpy Netherworld drug dealer.

  Did we even have people like that? A supernatural equivalent of the police? Or was this a neighborhood-watch kind of operation?

  I honestly wasn’t sure which possibility frightened me more….

  “Not exactly,” Nash said, avoiding my eyes again. “I don’t know how it works with his human…clients, but in my case, Everett is just the mule. Avari collects the payment personally.”

  I closed my eyes, trying to sort the facts out in my head. It was physically impossible for hellions to cross into our world, and Nash said he wasn’t crossing over, either…. “I don’t get it,” I said as a new foreboding twisted my guts even tighter. “How does he take payment if neither of you crosses over?”

  “It’s kind of a long-distance operation.” Nash sighed and finally met my gaze before I could show off another confused frown. “There are a few ways for a hellion to interact with the human world, and they all suck.”

  He shuddered with some horrible memory, and a sudden wave of intuition rolled over me, dropping another piece of the puzzle into place in my head. “Your nightmare… Avari talks to you in your sleep?”

  His eyes closed, like he was scrambling for composure—or for control of the telltale swirling in his irises—and when he met my gaze again, his own seemed somehow closed off. Like he’d slammed shut the windows to his soul. “I wouldn’t call it talking, but yeah. In my dreams, or through an…intermediary.”

  “An intermediary?”

  Nash sighed. “He can sometimes talk to me through someone in this world—anyone he has a connection with.”

  “You mean, like, possession?” That’s not creepy or anything…

  “For lack of a better term, yes. And I’m pretty sure he’s Carter’s shadow man, too. I think you were right about his hallucinations.”

  Though I hadn’t realized who Scott was actually hearing.

  “You knew that, didn’t you?” I demanded, my voice actually shaking with anger. I scooted back to put distance between us. “You knew Scott was really hearing Avari, but you made me sound like an idiot in front of my dad. Why?”

  “I’m sorry.” His gaze dropped like an anchor. “I was afraid that if they knew he was hearing a hellion, they’d want to know who that hellion was, and would eventually connect him to me.”

  “So, you made me look crazy to cover your own tracks? How very chivalrous of you,” I spat. The Nash I’d met three months earlier had given me strength and confidence. He’d sacrificed his own safety to help protect me. But now he was lying to me, and Influencing me, and covering up information that could have helped save his best friend. Was it all because of the Demon’s Breath? Could breathing from Avari actually change him? Was it already rotting his soul?

  “I’m so sorry, Kaylee…” Nash started, but I cut him off with a harsh wave of one hand. I was already tired of pointless apologies.

  “Is Avari giving me nightmares, too? Are these death dreams because of him?”

  Nash shrugged miserably. “I don’t think hellions can make you have premonitions if no one’s dying, but I honestly don’t know.”

  I didn’t realize I’d been grinding my teeth until my jaw began to ache. How could he answer so many questions with so little information? “So, does this mean you don’t have Everett’s number, or e-mail, or anything?”

  Nash shook his head again. “Avari just tells me where and when to meet him. That’s why I had to come to the party. Because I can’t get in touch with Everett on my own.” I started to interrupt, but Nash rushed on. “Neither can Fuller. I already asked him. Everett calls him and sets up a meeting, and his number shows up as Unidentified.”

  Nash scowled and rubbed his hands together for warmth. I was freezing, too, in spite of his jacket, and part of me wanted to slide closer to him for heat. But I wasn’t ready to be that close to him yet.

  “So, Avari feeds from the suffering he causes and Everett gets the money,” I said, scooting farther away from him for good measure. “But you’re not suffering like Doug and Scott are.” Presumably because he wasn’t human. “And you don’t have any money. So how does Avari plan to turn a profit on you?”

  Nash’s gaze fell to where his hands now clenched the edge of the stone bench on either side of his thighs. And suddenly a devastating new understanding crashed over me, threatening to crush me.

  “He already is, isn’t he?” My pulse roared in my ears, and I wasn’t sure I really wanted the answer. But I had to ask.

  “How do you pay, Nash?”

  He shook his head. “Kaylee, you don’t want to—”

  “Service?” I interrupted, twisting on the bench to pin him with my eyes. “You’re not selling for him, are you?” I whispered, because that was all the volume I could muster.

  “No!” Nash insisted, rubbing my back through his jacket.

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Then what is it like?” I shrugged out from under his hand, silently begging him—daring him—to tell me the truth.

  “What are you paying him, Nash?”

  He sighed, and his entire body seemed to deflate as his jaw tensed. “Emotions, in the past tense.”

  “What?” I felt my
forehead crinkle. “What does that mean? You’re giving him your emotions? So, you can’t feel anything?” The horror rising through me had no equivalent. The only thing that even came close was the black scream that built inside me when I felt Death coming.

  “No, not my current emotions,” Nash insisted, trying to reassure me, but the gloom in his eyes didn’t match his tone, so the look was more frightening than comforting. “The emotions in some of my memories.”

  “He’s eating your memories?” I couldn’t imagine a more personal violation. Nash was giving away the experiences that made him the person he was.

  The person I loved.

  I ran my hand over the smooth, cold bench, desperate for something real and sturdy to cement me in reality. In a world where food was food, and memories were invulnerable. Untouchable.

  “No.” He shook his head vehemently and put one warm hand over mine on the bench. Yet somehow, he seemed to steal my waning warmth, rather than fortify it. “Just the feelings from them. When I think about things from my past, I don’t feel how I felt when they actually happened. Past emotions.” He tried to smile reassuringly, but failed. Miserably. “I don’t need those, anyway, right?”

  My vision went dark and my hearing began to fade as shock and horror sank through me, cutting my ties to the world. Then my senses came roaring back, stronger than ever, the floodlight glaring in my eyes, the cold numbing my skin. “You don’t need those? You don’t need to revisit feelings from your past?” I snatched my hand from his and jumped from the bench again, and this time he was too slow to catch me.

  “In most cases, it’s a mercy, Kaylee,” he insisted as I backed slowly away from him, wondering if I’d be making things better or worse if I simply walked away. Would I be giving us time to think, and to miss each other? Or time to realize we shouldn’t have been together in the first place. After all, I’d dragged him into the Netherworld where he’d been exposed to Demon’s Breath. And he’d lied to me and left me alone with Scott, who’d tried to slit my throat.

  Maybe we didn’t belong together….