“This is about bringing peace to Darcy Cavanaugh’s soul, and we’re not done yet,” Nash said. “Now we have to track down the harpies and hope they haven’t—”
“Harpies?” Sabine sat straighter on the center couch cushion. “What harpies?”
“The ones who stole Darcy’s soul from Thane a few years ago,” Nash said.
She frowned. “Why would harpies want a human soul? They typically want nothing they can’t enjoy in some form of debauchery. Unless it’s shiny. They do like their shinies.”
“Her soul was suspended in a charm made of hellion-forged steel,” I explained.
“Ah. Shiny.” Sabine nodded. “How many were there?”
“Two. A redhead, name unknown, and a guy harpy named Troy. Did you know there are guy harpies?” I glanced from my brother to his girlfriend. “How weird is that?”
“No weirder than guy bean sidhes,” Nash insisted, and I had to concede the point.
“A harpy named Troy?” Sabine scowled, obviously stuck on that point. “You’re sure he said Troy?”
“Yeah, why?”
“I know a harpy named Troy. How many of those could there be?”
“Seriously?” I pushed the empty plate aside and sat on the coffee table, where I could see them both better. “Does your Troy live near Austin?”
“He’s not her Troy,” Nash said. Then he turned to Sabine with a frown. “He’s not your Troy, right?”
Sabine snorted. “Not even if he were the last harpy on earth. I met him when I was looking for you.”
Sabine was in corrective custody when I died. My mom moved within days of my death, trying again to outrun her grief, and Nash lost contact with Sabine. When she was released from custody, she spent nearly two years tracking him down and manipulating her way into a foster home in his school district—only to find Kaylee standing at his side.
Neither of us had been very happy about that situation.
“And yeah, they live in Niederwald,” Sabine continued. “South of Austin. But there’re more than two of them.”
“Can you put us in touch with them?” Nash asked.
“I don’t think they have cell phones. Or any phones. And even if they did, they wouldn’t be glad to hear from me. I kind of...disabled a couple of them.”
“Disabled?” I wasn’t really surprised. Sabine makes an impression everywhere she goes.
The mara nodded. “I might have...ripped one of Troy’s wings half off his back.”
I gaped at her, and Nash blinked. “Barehanded?”
Sabine shrugged. “What? He deserved it. He tried to eat Emma.”
“Whoa, what? Em was there?” I could totally picture Sabine wreaking havoc in a flock of harpies, but Emma? “When was this?”
“A long time ago. Back before you and Kaylee cursed her to life as a brunette and a psychic syphon.”
“That wasn’t our intent.” The memory made me ache deep inside, but I didn’t want to let it go. Memories were all I had left of Kaylee, and the pain that came with them was exquisite. “The supernatural traits came with Lydia’s body. So did the hair color.” I scrubbed both hands over my face, forcing myself to refocus on the present. “I haven’t seen her in a while. How’s she adjusting?”
“She tried bleach once, but Lydia looks ridiculous as a blonde, so she dyed it back after two days.” Sabine shrugged. “Now she’s learning to deal with a life where no one looks at her twice.”
A tragedy I knew well, since I spent most of my afterlife invisible to all of humanity. But...
“I meant how is she adjusting to life as a syphon? Has she gained any control?”
“A little.” Sabine’s grin was evil. “But she’s still great to have around if you have cramps or a headache.”
“She’s not a walking painkiller!” I snapped, and the mara laughed.
“Of course she is. I have too much pain, so she soaks up just enough to maintain balance. She won’t come over on the weekends anymore, though. She’s caught on to my new hangover cure.”
Before I could tear into Sabine, Nash took her hand and squeezed it. “We haven’t seen Em much lately. She’s spending a lot of time with Chad.” Her necromancer boyfriend, a friend of Luca’s.
“Good. I’m happy for her.” I was happy for all of them. Em and Chad. Sophie and Luca. Nash and Sabine. Mom and Brendon. Everyone had someone, except Aiden.
And me.
Nash frowned at whatever flickered in my eyes, then turned back to Sabine with his mouth fixed in a straight, determined line. “We’re still waiting to hear why you took Emma to visit a bunch of flesh-eating Netherworld birds.”
“Okay, here’s the quick version.” Sabine brushed crumbs from her hands onto the carpet, then settled back on the couch for her story. “The first time I went to Niederwald, I was looking for information to help me find Nash—you weren’t networking digitally, back then,” she said aiming an obsolete criticism his way. “The most recent time, I was after...other information, and I only had Emma with me because my car was broken and I was using her for transportation. I told her to stay in the car, but you know how well she listens.”
“Hypocrite,” I coughed.
“That’s not hypocritical,” she insisted. “I always listen. I just don’t follow directions when those directions are stupid. But my point is that Em followed me when I told her not to, and nearly got herself eaten.”
“Eaten?” Nash couldn’t seem to come to terms with the concept. Not that I blamed him.
Sabine shuddered. “Harpies aren’t straight-up cannibals, but they don’t exactly hate the taste of human flesh. They are birds of prey.”
I closed my eyes, trying to mentally organize all the new information. “Okay, so why would the harpies have information about Nash?”
“They wouldn’t,” she said. “Unless he’d been keeping very unsavory company.”
Nash grinned and pulled her closer. “You’re the most unsavory company I’ve ever kept.”
The mara’s expression soured. “You say the sweetest things.” She turned back to me, while Nash laughed. “These particular harpies have custody—’possession’ might be the more accurate term—of a very tragic little oracle named Syrie, who was kind enough to point me toward Nash when I got tired of crashing into dead ends. Then, when I went back with Em a year later, Syrie showed me, in her own creepy way, that Tod and Kaylee would hook up, and Nash would be mine once-again-and-forever.”
That was Sabine’s own personal fairy tale—one she would have moved mountains to bring to fruition, heaven help anyone who got in her way.
She and Kaylee got along famously.
“We didn’t ‘hook up,’” I insisted, as my brother turned to his girlfriend with latent irritation swirling in his irises. “It was just a kiss.” The most amazing, life-changing kiss the world—either world—has ever seen, before or since. Not that I’m bragging.
“You knew that was going to happen?” The annoyance in Nash’s eyes bled into his voice when he spoke. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Sabine turned a puzzled gaze at him. She lacked empathy almost entirely and probably couldn’t understand his irritation. “Because you wouldn’t have believed me. You would have hated all three of us if I’d shown you what Syrie showed me, and hate isn’t what I want from you.” She shrugged. “Anyway, I was rewarded for my patience.” The mara tried to pull him in for a kiss, but Nash stiffened, and the light in her eyes died. “Fine. Be mad at me if you want. But if I’d told you that your girlfriend was going to cheat on you with your brother, you would have pushed all three of us away. And I can’t help noticing that no one’s mad at Emma for not spilling the proverbial beans.”
“She’s right,” I said, when Nash’s expression didn’t soften. “Knowing about the future rarely helps, and as painful as the whole thing was at the time—for everyone involved—it all worked out the way it was supposed to. For a little while, anyway.”
For less than two months.
We?
??d said big words, like forever and eternity, and we’d meant them. But Kaylee and I only got a handful of weeks together, and for the rest of my afterlife, I would hate the universe for taking her away from me. For leaving me here to miss her with every single beat of my heart—whether it actually pumped blood or not.
“My point was that Troy and his flock probably shouldn’t know that you know me, if you want them to cooperate,” Sabine said, when Nash didn’t immediately forgive her. “But I can tell you where to find them. And if you decide to bypass their cooperation altogether, I can tell you where they’re most likely to have Darcy’s soul squirreled away.”
I thought about that for a second. “So you think we should go the covert route? Just...steal the soul back?”
“Well...” Sabine gave me a shrug, while we both ignored Nash. “Harpies aren’t the friendliest or most forthcoming species, generally speaking.”
“What are they even doing in the human world?” Nash said, rejoining the conversation.
“This particular flock is in Niederwald to guard a thin spot between our world and the Netherworld. You know, to make sure no one sneaks in or out, where the barrier is weak. They’re not supposed to leave the town—if a single stoplight in the middle of the road can be called a town. But obviously they break the rules, occasionally.”
“So where would they be keeping the charm?” I asked.
“Okay.” Sabine tucked one foot beneath herself on the couch, getting comfortable. “There’s a convenience store right in front of the only stoplight. The harpies own that, and they live in the house right behind it. The basement of that house is full of junk. I mean, full. Harpies are the original hoarders.”
“But they’re organized hoarders, right?” Nash’s voice carried a thin thread of hope. “Please tell me they stack things in neat piles. Or maybe they employ some kind of rudimentary filing system?”
Sabine only blinked at him.
“Okay,” I said, thinking out loud. “So we can break into the basement and try our luck sifting through piles of junk, or we can knock on the door and see if the harpies will willingly hand over Darcy’s soul.”
She nodded. “Assuming they can find it in that sea of crap.”
“I vote to skip the meet-and-greet,” I said. “If we can get in and out without going up against a flock of cannibals with beaks and talons, I’ll call today a total win.”
“If you get a chance to talk to Syrie without getting caught, she might be able to show you where to look,” Sabine said. “But it’ll be hard to get to her without going through the birds.”
“We’ll keep that in mind.” I stood, and Nash stood with me. “If we’re not back by midnight, tell my mom I love her.”
“That’s not funny,” Sabine said.
“It wasn’t a joke.”
“We’ll be back,” Nash assured her.
She took his hand. “You better be. You’re the only reason I get up in the morning,” Sabine said, and Nash started to argue, with a pointed look in my direction. As if seeing what they shared could possibly make me feel Kaylee’s absence more than I already did. “Kidding.” Sabine smiled. “I get up for Starbucks and Cinnabon. You know that. Speaking of which, I picked up a dozen this morning. They’re in the kitchen. Help yourself.”
Nash headed into the kitchen, and when the door swung shut behind him, Sabine turned on me with fire blazing in her eyes. “You know I wasn’t kidding. I only breathe because he breathes.”
“I know.” There’d never been any bullshit between me and Sabine, and in that particular instance, I knew exactly how she felt.
The mara’s voice dropped so low I could hardly hear it. “If you get him killed, I’ll put you out of your misery myself. I’ll have nothing left to lose, without him.” Her gaze was steady, her sincerity rock-solid.
“This was his idea, Sabine.”
“I know. But he’s doing it for you.” Her eyes didn’t swirl, but her intent was impossible to mistake. “Don’t come back without him.”
“You know I won’t.”
“Won’t what?” Nash stepped back into the living room with a half-devoured cinnamon roll in his right hand.
“Won’t let your careless ass get eaten by a bunch of giant birds. Come on.” I forced a smile and plucked the cinnamon roll from his hand. “Let’s go,” I said, with the remainder of his snack in my mouth.
“Hey, guys,” Sabine called out to us as I reached for my brother’s hand, so he could blink out with me. “Take a box of crayons.”
“What?” Nash said. “Why?”
“Because Syrie doesn’t take cash or credit.”
* * *
Niederwald wasn’t a real town. It was the name given to a wide section of street in the middle of nowhere, marked with a single blinking stoplight, a steady red flash in the night.
But the convenience store was right where Sabine said it would be, lit up and surrounded by dark, empty fields. The lights were on inside, and some kid wearing a bulky black T-shirt was reading a magazine behind the counter, tossing long, dark hair out of his eyes every few seconds. I wondered if he was human.
Then I wondered if he was Troy.
There were no cars in the lot. No customers in the store. In the ten minutes Nash and I spent scoping out the gas station from the shadows outside, nothing moved. No one drove by.
The house behind the store was big and run-down. I couldn’t tell its true color in the dark, but the paint was drab and peeling, the window frames warped, and the glass thicker at the bottom than at the top from suffering decades of gravity’s pull. We circled the house as quietly as we could—well, as quietly as Nash could; they couldn’t hear me anyway—but the basement had no independent exit, other than several small windows, which had been boarded over from the inside.
“You’re going to have to blink us in,” Nash whispered at one back corner of the house. “Or we could ring the doorbell and actually ask for the charm.”
“Good idea.” I rolled my eyes, but he probably couldn’t see that in the dark. “Then we can strip and hop into their boiling cauldron, to save them the trouble of throwing us in. And while we’re being accommodating, we could break each other into tiny pieces so our bones don’t get stuck in their throats on the way down.”
Nash crossed both arms over his chest. “Do you honestly think they have cauldrons?”
“Do you honestly want to find out? Give me your hand so I can blink us inside.”
“Fine.” He held out his hand and I took it, trying not to think about all the times Kaylee and I had snuck into and out of buildings the same way. In retrospect, we’d spent most of our ill-fated time together either running from or toward mortal danger. Statistically speaking, true death was bound to catch up to one of us eventually. I’d just never expected her to go looking for it.
Or to leave me behind.
“Okay, I have no idea what the inside of that house looks like, and there’s a better than average chance we’ll appear in the middle of a table, or a wall. I’ll keep us both incorporeal until I’m sure it’s safe, so don’t let go until I tell you to.” I blinked at my brother in the dark. “Got it?”
I expected an argument, but Nash only nodded, and for a second, I thought the apocalypse was nigh. But when several seconds passed without fireballs shooting from the sky, I realized my baby brother was simply growing up. It was bound to happen sooner or later.
Not that I had any real right to judge, considering my own frozen youth and penchant for skipping work....
I blinked us into the house, as close to the locked back door as I could get, hoping to avoid walls and furniture. Instead, we landed in the middle of an ancient dishwasher.
Nash yelped, startled to find himself standing in/through a major appliance, and if he hadn’t still been in contact with my hand, he would have given us away.
I stepped into the middle of the grimy kitchen floor and tugged him after me, and when he realized he hadn’t become melded to the dishwasher, his pul
se and his breathing slowed. We glanced around the dark room, taking in open soda cans, beer bottles, and stacks of used paper plates buzzing with flies.
“Damn, what slobs,” I said. “I’ve seen cleaner puddles of vomit.”
“They can’t hear us?” he whispered, his voice a mere hint of sound.
“Nope,” I said at my regular volume. “Wanna try a round of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’? I’ll take the harmony.”
Nash rolled his eyes, then pulled me past sticky countertops and a rickety kitchen table into an empty, dusty foyer. Ahead was the front door, which didn’t look like it’d been used in years. To our left was the dining room, where a long oak table stood on three legs, surrounded by four half-rotten chairs spaced at odd intervals. The layer of dust on the table was half an inch thick.
To our right was the living room, where an old television with a thick, curved screen was tuned to some game show in which contestants had to choose between briefcases without opening them. Two people—harpies?—sat on the couch with their backs to us, staring at the TV. I couldn’t see any wings or talons, and I’d almost decided Sabine was full of crap when a wooden creak drew my attention to a wide armchair on the right side of the room.
The girl in the chair cleared her throat, then swung her legs around to dangle over the arm of the chair. Nash made a weird sound and I glanced at him, then followed his gaze to the girl’s feet. I had to squint in the near-dark, but when the game show went to commercial, the television threw more light into the room and I saw that the girl in the chair didn’t have feet.
She had talons. Large, three-toed talons, with nails sharpened to wicked, curving points.
“Well, we’re in the right place....” I said, and Nash flinched at the sound of my voice. I knew how he felt. I’d adjusted to invisibility almost immediately after my death, but it had taken a long time for me to trust in my own inaudibility.
But none of the harpies turned. They couldn’t hear us.
“Let’s go,” Nash whispered, as if his volume really mattered, and I realized that one covert op wouldn’t be enough for him to adjust to temporary incorporeality.
As we turned back to the foyer in search of the entrance to the basement, his hand began to sweat in mine. “There has to be a less touchy-feely way to do this,” he whispered.