Ms. Hirsch’s head bobbed and a strand of red hair—her bangs were long and trendy—fell across her forehead. “You’ve managed to thoroughly piss off not one but three of my most reviled associates. And to survive their anger.” He frowned with my guidance counselor’s pink mouth. “Sort of.”
Every word he said stoked the fire inside me until the flames of my anger grew hotter, taller, licking the inside of my skin like they wanted to burst free and roast the world.
I knew what he was doing. He was feeding my anger. Nurturing it, like fertilizing a garden until the veggies are ready to harvest. And devour.
The worst part was that whoever this hellion was, he knew exactly who I was, and that I wasn’t—strictly speaking—alive. And he knew who my enemies were. But I didn’t need to be told that when dealing with hellions, the enemy of my enemies was definitely not my friend.
“Who are you and what do you want?” The longer I sat there, the angrier I got. He’d hijacked Ms. Hirsch’s body. He’d subpoenaed me from my lunch period like I had nothing better to do than be ordered around by a monster from another world! “Never mind. I don’t care who you are or what you want. Get the hell out of my counselor’s body, or I’ll take you out myself.”
I stood and picked up the large, jagged chunk of pink quartz Ms. Hirsch used as a paperweight and hefted it, silently threatening to bash his hellion brains in.
“Nice. Decent buildup from irritation to anger, with a flare of true rage on the end. How long have you been harboring so much hatred, Kaylee? You were only a blip on my radar a few months ago, but now you’re a blinking light too bright to ignore.”
What the hell? I glared down at him, confused. Was the hellion actually trying to counsel me? Was this some kind of demon identity crisis?
“Oh, and you do understand that if you bash me over the head with that rock, your counselor will be the one who wakes up with a headache. Right? If she wakes up at all.”
Crap. I did know that. Blazing anger did nothing to help my logic.
The twitch at one corner of her mouth looked suspiciously like amusement. “If we’re going to be any use to each other, you’ll have to learn to think through your anger.”
I desperately wanted to know what he was talking about, but I knew better than to ask. I needed to cruise below hellion-radar, not actively engage it.
“My name is Ira, incidentally.” He leaned back in Ms. Hirsch’s chair and crossed her slim legs, and the ease with which he moved told me that even if he wasn’t familiar with her particular body, this wasn’t his first time in human form. “In case you haven’t figured it out, I’m a hellion of wrath. And I’ve been itching to make your acquaintance of late. I think we can help each other out.”
“Not gonna happen.” I remained standing, but I put the rock down. I couldn’t hurt Ms. Hirsch, which Ira obviously knew.
“Oh, I think it might, if you knew what I had to offer.”
“No.” Never make a deal with a hellion. That’s the first thing they tell you in “Surviving the Netherworld 101.” Or it would be, if such a class existed. Hellions love to bargain, but they never agree to a deal if they’re not getting the better end of it. The vastly better end.
That other end tends to leave humans dead, or dying, or injured, or addicted. Or worse.
“There’s nothing I want from the evil incarnation of anger.” Nothing I was willing to pay for, anyway.
“Belittling my existence with understatement doesn’t change the facts. I am much more than an ‘incarnation of anger.’” Ms. Hirsch sat straighter and pinned me with a gaze too steady and merciless to come from anything other than a hellion. “I am in the clench of every fist. I am the hot thrum of blood rushing through your veins. Every thud of knuckles against flesh is the cry of my true name. I am the glint of rage in your ex’s eyes, the livid grinding of his teeth. My pulse is the wave of anger washing over the crowd. The swing of a corpse from the noose. The final twitch of a man murdered in revenge. I know you, Kaylee Cavanaugh. I know you very, very well, and I can give you what you want most in the world. What no one else can give you.”
“I don’t want anything from you,” I insisted, with less certainty this time, but repeating that didn’t make it true.
“Really? Not even justice for everything they’ve taken from you? For everyone they’ve killed? For everything they’ve cost your friends and family?”
Oh, crap.
The hellion smiled slowly with Ms. Hirsch’s perfectly glossed lips. “You want Avari, Invidia, and Belphegore to pay for what they’ve done.”
My chill bumps were back, and this time they felt like small mountains. I sucked in a breath I didn’t truly need and tried to swallow my fear and unease. I tried to bury that traitorous spark of interest piqued within me by his words—that soft voice whispering that it wouldn’t hurt to hear him out. Just to see what he was offering...
Because that would hurt. I knew better. Hellions don’t hand out free samples. But I couldn’t help wondering....
“And you’re going to do that for me?” Surely sarcasm disguised my curiosity. “Why would you conspire against your own kind?”
“My kind?” He actually laughed, and laughter looked nothing on him like it looked on the real Ms. Hirsch. “Avari is no more my kind than a garden spider is your kind. We inhabit the same world, but he would stomp on me with no more thought than you’d give to stomping on that spider.” He leaned forward, pinning me with a familiar brown-eyed gaze. “I would stomp on him, too. Then I would grind him into the dirt beneath my heel, just like you would, if you were capable of exacting justice on your own.”
“Hellions don’t deal in justice.” That was too noble a concept. “You’re talking about revenge.”
Ira shrugged. “That’s just as well, because justice isn’t really what you want.” He leaned forward again, and his gaze intensified, as if he were looking for more than he could possibly find in my face. Behind my eyes. “Your wrath is graceful. Has anyone ever told you that? Your anger has the bold, sweet overtones of blind rage, but the delicate tang of self-righteousness, because you actually think you’re after justice. But that’s not true, is it? You know there is no justice to be had. Hurting those who’ve hurt you and yours cannot undo what’s been done. Nothing can bring the dead back to life or unscar the wounded. But you still want to hurt them, don’t you? You still want to kill Avari in cold blood for what he’s done to you. That, my sweet, vengeful little flame, is revenge, not justice.”
I blinked, mentally denying everything he’d said. “So, I’m getting ethics lectures from demons now?” That was new.
“You misunderstand.” His smile was back. “I stand in full support of your thirst for vengeance. I would gladly feed it to you drop by decadent drop. I would see you nourished and strengthened by the taste of blood spilled in anger. Of course, that offer comes with a price....”
“We’re done here.”
He rolled Ms. Hirsch’s eyes. “And sanctimony rears its ugly head again. You are in denial, child. You won’t be satisfied until you get what you crave, and that can’t happen until you admit to yourself what it is you truly want.”
“You’re wrong.” Hellions couldn’t lie, but they could be wrong. Way wrong. “I’m not looking for revenge. I want justice for Emma and Alec, and everyone else Avari has hurt or killed.”
“And for yourself? Don’t you want this ‘justice’ for what he’s done to you? For commandeering your body? For putting possessed hands on you? For making you the instrument of your friend’s death? For abducting your loved ones? You seethe with anger, little flame. You practically glow with it. And some of that ire feels very, very personal.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” My pulse whooshed in my ears, which rarely happened now that I was dead. He was wrong. He had to be. “Get out of Ms. Hirsch. Now.”
“Don’t you at least want to know the price for your vengeance? It may be less than you think. I’m feeling generous.??
?
“No. Get out.” I turned and headed for the door.
“You’ll be back, little flame, and I’ll be waiting. When you’re ready to deal, you may summon me. You have my word that I will answer. You need only bleed and use my name.”
I fled the office as fast as I could go without running. I left Ms. Hirsch in the hands of a hellion, not because I didn’t know how to evict him without being expelled for attacking a staff member—though that was true—but because I was scared to listen to him anymore. I couldn’t hear one more loaded word from the hellion of wrath, because deep down, part of me wondered if he might be right.
And that wasn’t a question I was prepared to answer. Not yet, anyway.
On my way back from the counselor’s office, I was texting Tod to fill him in when I looked up and realized I’d wandered down the wrong hall. I was standing in front of the nurse’s office, which reminded me of Marco. Because that’s where we’d left him the day before—unconscious in one of the two empty patient rooms.
I should check on him. And I would check on Ms. Hirsch, too. But I just couldn’t bring myself to hit my guidance counselor in the head, even to expel a demon.
I ducked into the bathroom, glanced around to make sure it was empty, then let myself fade from all human sight. Then I blinked into nearly two dozen different classrooms until I finally found Marco Gutierrez in a fourth period senior AP English class. Another jock with a brain. Which meant he was too smart to inhale unfamiliar substances from balloons just because some idiot like Doug Fuller handed it to him.
Marco looked okay. He was wide-awake and taking notes on Heart of Darkness, which—based on the title alone—sounded like a good reason to dread senior English. I had plenty of darkness already without reading about someone else’s.
A glance at the clock over the whiteboard told me most of the period was over, and I now had an unexcused absence for English. So I decided to wait and talk to him after the bell. One minute before class ended, I blinked into the hall, checked for onlookers, then willed myself back into human sight. When the bell rang, I stood outside his class, and when Marco appeared, I fell into step beside him.
“Hey, Marco, can I talk to you for a second?”
He glanced at me in surprise. I couldn’t blame him. We’d never said more than three consecutive words to each other, and none of those had been since Nash and I had broken up, officially severing any connection I had to the baseball team.
Finally he shrugged. “If you can walk and talk at the same time. I can’t be late for statistics.”
“So, I kinda just wanted to check on you. I heard you were sick yesterday? Or hurt?”
Marco frowned and stopped in the middle of the hall, and the steady flow of traffic parted around us. “Look, I don’t care what you’re into, or how many starting players you have left on your list, but I’m not into that kind of thing. I have a girlfriend, and I like her, and I’m not gonna...”
My horrified expression must have made an impression. If not that, my sudden inability to form a coherent reply obviously did the trick.
“Wait, that’s just some stupid rumor, isn’t it? That you’re working your way through the baseball starting lineup?”
“Yes, it’s a rumor! I guess.” I hadn’t actually heard that one. “A totally fallacious and false rumor, that’s completely unfounded in truth!”
“Sorry. I would never have believed it, except I know you were with Nash. And there was that thing with Scott. And there was talk about Doug. And someone saw you dancing with Brant Williams. And that guy you made out with in the hall after school.” That was Tod. And the only part of what he’d heard that was true. “So it did kind of look like you were...interested.”
“Well, I’m not! There was never a thing with Scott or Doug. And I was never with Nash. Like that. Why, did he say we...?”
“No. Not to me, anyway. But we all just assumed, because you were with him for so long.”
“Well, unassume!”
“Done.” He smiled, and he looked friendly. Like he might not be such a bad guy. Which meant he definitely didn’t deserve to be possessed by a hellion or knocked out by my undead boyfriend. “So, you’re really just checking on me?” He started walking again, and I kept up.
“Yeah. I saw you in the nurse’s office, and you didn’t look so good.”
“That’s what I hear. I don’t know what happened. I dozed off in third period, and the next thing I know I’m lying on a table in the nurse’s office with a cold pack on my head and another one on my...lower. The nurse said she found me there, and no one even saw me go in.”
“So...you’re okay?”
“Except for the part where my dad wants me to see a shrink. He says blackouts are a sign of a more serious underlying problem.”
I gave him as confident and reassuring a smile as I could muster. “You’re not crazy. Just...don’t fall asleep in school anymore.”
“No shit. That all you wanted?” He stopped walking outside his next class, and I was dimly aware that mine was all the way across the building and up a floor.
“Yeah. Oh, wait.” I stepped closer and lowered my voice, uncomfortably aware that anyone who saw us would assume the rumors about me were true. One of the rumors, anyway. “I also wanted to ask you a question.” He nodded, so I continued, “I heard that back before he died, Doug gave you a sample of this stuff he had. The stuff in the balloon.”
“Frost?” he asked. When I nodded, his expression darkened and he motioned for me to follow him closer to the lockers, out of the main stream of traffic. “Stay away from that shit, Kaylee. They say it can’t be detected in a drug test, but everyone else I know who’s tried it is dead now. That can’t be a coincidence.”
“Everyone?” So, he didn’t know Nash had used, too?
“Yeah. There were some other guys who wanted to try it at Doug’s last party.” Right before he’d died. “But then Nash threatened to kick the shit out of the guy with the balloon bouquet if he didn’t get lost, and that night Doug died. I haven’t seen any balloons since. And the more time that passes, the happier I am about that. You shouldn’t—”
“I’m not,” I assured him. “I was just...curious. Thanks, Marco.”
I sped off into the thinning crowd before he could say anything else, and the one time I looked back, he was still staring after me, looking thoroughly confused.
Chapter Seven
“Are you girls ready?” Long blond curls fell over Harmony’s shoulder as she twisted in the driver’s seat to glance at Emma, then met my gaze in the rearview mirror.
“I will never be ready for this.” Em stared through the windshield at her house. Her former house. Which held her former room and all her former stuff. Even her former dog, Toto, who was still a dog but no longer hers. “Let’s get it over with.”
Harmony laid one hand on her arm. “We’re sure your mom’s still at work?”
“Yeah.” I leaned forward between the front seats. “I called to verify, and she said Traci would be here to let us in.”
“That’s her car.” Em pointed to the dusty Chevy parked in front of us in the driveway.
“Okay. I just need one of you to ask for a drink.” Harmony pulled the keys from the ignition and leaned to one side so she could slide them into her pocket, and again I was struck by how young she looked—thirty years old, at the most. You’d never know from looking at her that her sons were eighteen and twenty. Well, Tod would have been twenty, if he’d lived. “I’ll take care of the rest,” she continued. “If you’re sure you’re up to this.”
“No choice.” Em unbuckled her seat belt, and her hand trembled with the motion. “We can’t afford to put it off any longer.”
I unbuckled my own belt, one hand on the door handle. “If it’s too much for you—if she gets upset and you can’t control the syphoning—just let me know, and we’ll get you out of there.” She had been through so much already, and my heart ached at the thought of what lay ahead for her and for
Traci. A decision no woman should ever have to make. A choice no human could ever anticipate.
Another devastating decision neither of them would be facing if they’d never met me.
I was a disease, infecting everyone I came into contact with, and the rot spread too fast to be contained. I went around with my scalpel, excising the infected bits of tissue—operating on lives and memories I didn’t have the right to slice up—but the only way to truly stop the infection was to cut off the source.
To excise me.
I’d been struggling to clean up my own mess for so long that I could no longer tell if continuing to fight made me brave or selfish.
“Thanks. I’ll be fine, though.” Em opened her door and got out of the car, and when I stood, still trying to gather my thoughts, I was surprised for the dozenth time by the fact that I could almost see over her head. In her own body, Emma had been taller than I was.
Traci answered the door on the second knock, and the first thing I noticed when she let us in were the bags beneath her eyes. She’d looked tired at Emma’s funeral, but I’d attributed that to the stress of losing, then burying, her sister. But now, I couldn’t deny that it was more than that.
It was the pregnancy.
Traci, Emma’s middle sister, was pregnant with my murderer’s child. And, like nearly everything else that had gone wrong over the past few months, that was my fault. Mr. Beck had been looking for me when he’d found her.
“Hey, Kaylee. It’s good to see you.” Traci pulled me into a hug with too-thin arms, and I had to stop myself from blurting out how sorry I was for what she was going through, and how I’d do anything for a cosmic do-over. For the chance to take it all back.
Instead I swallowed apologies she wouldn’t understand and returned her hug. “Thanks.” I was careful not to squeeze her too hard. She hardly had any belly yet, and she looked like she’d blow over in a light breeze. “This is Harmony Hudson, Nash’s mom. And this is my cousin Emily. They came to...help. Moral support.”