Before I Wake

  “It’s not that easy,” Alec explained. “Devouring a soul isn’t the same as having one of your own. He’s been trying to make that work for centuries, but once he eats the soul, it’s gone, and he can’t make it past the fog. To cross over, he’d have to be able to sort of…install a soul in his own body. And that’s impossible.”

  “Well, he’s figured something out. I spoke to him here, on the human plane, twice in two days, and both times he was wearing the skin of a dead person. First Scott Carter, then Heidi Anderson.”

  Em shrugged. “So maybe he’s just possessing them, and not really crossing over. Not that that is any less terrifying.”

  “What’s the difference, in practical application?” Luca asked, and I nodded to Alec, tossing the question his way.

  “Hellions can only possess the sleeping and unconscious, and even then, only those who have some link to the Netherworld. Possession victims have to have died—even if just for a minute—or have traveled across the fog at least once. And since possession is merely borrowing someone else’s body, his abilities would be limited to those his victim already has.”

  “Like when he possessed Sabine and gave you nightmares?” Em asked, and I nodded, while the mara scowled over the reminder that she’d lost control of her own body, even briefly.

  “But none of that is applicable here,” Alec insisted. “Because he can’t possess the dead. No one can. It can’t be done. Period.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Nash asked, and Alec nodded firmly. So Nash turned to me. “Are you sure Scott was already dead when you talked to him? No chance there was a misprint in the obituary?”

  I shrugged. “I seriously doubt it. But even if Scott was still alive and Avari was possessing him, that doesn’t explain how he showed up as Heidi Anderson. She died seven months ago. No misprint can explain that away.”

  “Okay, so what do Scott and Heidi have in common?” Sabine asked, glancing at each of us in turn.

  “You’ve never met them?” Nash said.

  Sabine gave an exaggerated nod. “And I never will. Because they’re both dead.”

  “Which means they’re no longer using their souls…” I said, starting to catch on. Then I turned to Alec. “He’s figured it out. Somehow, Avari’s figured out how to install a soul in his body. Or whatever.”

  “Not possible,” Alec said again, but no one was listening to him.

  “And that makes him look like the person the soul belongs to?” Em asked.

  “More likely—assuming any of this is true—it makes him take the form that soul last took,” Madeline said. “Souls don’t really belong to anyone, once they’ve departed their most recent bodies. They’ll be recycled, and they’ve been recycled before. But until that happens, they retain the psychic memory of the life they just lived, including perfect recall of the physical form.”

  “It’s much more than that,” Alec insisted. “Disembodied souls retain much more than a psychic memory. If they didn’t, how would hellions be able to torture them for all of eternity? Life has two parts,” Alec said, leaning forward on the couch, and I was both amused and relieved to realize that everyone else leaned toward him a little, ready and willing to hear the wisdom that could save us all.

  “There’s the physical body, and the soul—the life force that supports it. When the body dies, a reaper takes the soul to be recycled, but that process isn’t death like we understand it. The soul doesn’t cease to exist. It’s just wiped clean of the existence it supported most recently. Until then, the soul still thinks and feels, and it can be tortured for a hellion’s pleasure or nutrition. So if Avari has figured out how to install a soul in his body, what he’s actually discovered is how to absorb a human life force, something he, as a hellion, lacks entirely. And if he’s really figured that out, we are all—all seven billion of us—in very big trouble.”

  “Okay, you’re really starting to freak me out,” Em said, and her voice trembled.

  “Good.” Alec reached over my lap to squeeze her hand, but his tone of voice lacked any comforting qualities. “If Kaylee’s right, we should all be very freaked out. And we should be willing to do whatever it takes to stop Avari from crossing over, much less handing out tickets to the rest of his hellion garden club.”

  “Okay, let’s talk strategy,” Madeline said, and I couldn’t help noticing that no one had touched the popcorn. “But first, Kaylee, where is the soul you extracted?”

  “Um, the dagger’s in the bathroom. I’ll get it.”

  “The dagger?” Madeline frowned, and I realized I hadn’t actually made my report to her yet.

  “Yeah. Avari had it when I got there. He said my amphora wouldn’t work on him—maybe because of whatever method he’s found of crossing over?—and that the other extractors died because they didn’t have my dagger.”

  “How did he get it?” Alec asked, his forehead deeply furrowed in concern.

  “I’m assuming he took it from my room.” And that was one of the scarier parts of this whole thing. “He obviously has at least some of the standard undead abilities when he crosses over.”

  “Let me see this dagger, please,” Madeline said, and I stood, but Nash was already up.

  “I got it,” he said. “I’m headed that way, anyway.”

  “Thanks,” I said as he crossed the living room toward the hall. “If we’re right about Avari figuring out how to harness a human soul, there should be two in the dagger. Heidi Anderson’s, and the soul of the woman Avari killed in the restroom.” I frowned with another realization. “Well, make that three, with Beck’s.” And I couldn’t help wondering how many souls the dagger could hold.

  “So, tell us everything you remember about both encounters with him,” Madeline said, and to my amusement, she pulled a small leather-bound notebook from an inside pocket of her jacket and started taking notes. “Did he have a physical form that you could tell? Or was he more of a specter?”

  “There’s no such thing as ghosts, Aunt Madeline,” Luca said.

  “Yes, but most varieties of the undead have a spectral form,” she insisted, and a lightbulb went off in my head.

  “That’s what that’s called?” I wasn’t invisible; I was spectral. “Anyway, he was truly physically there, in both cases. I touched him. But no one else in the mall could see either of us.”

  “Kaylee, what the hell happened?” Nash asked, and I looked up to find him standing in the living-room doorway with my dagger in one hand, my bloody shirt in the other.

  I shrugged. “Turns out extracting a soul from a hellion involves actually stabbing it to death. It was totally traumatic.”

  Madeline stood and took the dagger by the hilt, then held it up to the light as she examined it. “Hellion-forged steel…” she muttered, turning the blade over. “It’s inscribed, but I don’t recognize the language.” Finally she lowered the dagger and met my gaze. “It appears to function as an amphora in a basic, rather barbaric fashion.”

  “Yeah. I gathered that when I barbarically stabbed a girl-shaped demon with it. Thus the trauma.”

  “There was actual blood?” She set the dagger on the coffee table, then took my shirt from Nash and held it up for a better view.

  “Yup. Blood. Melodrama. Threats. He said that if I didn’t stab him, he was going to kill this little girl carrying a balloon. Why would he do that? Why would he volunteer to die?”

  “Because he knew it would traumatize you, and your trauma is like his chocolate-fudge brownie,” Alec said. “It’s yummy.”

  Sabine shrugged. “That, and as a message.”

  “What’s the message?” Em asked.

  “That we’re nothing to him. We’re ants on the sidewalk, so small compared to his foot that he can’t even squish us one at a time. By making you banish him from one stolen body, he’s pointing out that he can get another one anytime, anywhere,” the mara said, and for about the billionth time, her insight scared me. More than ever, in fact, because this time she was demonstrating under
standing of a hellion’s thought process.

  “Well, the souls in the dagger should verify some of this for us,” Madeline said, exchanging the knife on the coffee table for my shirt. “And if this Heidi Anderson’s soul is among them, I’d call that fairly conclusive proof that Avari has in fact discovered how to wear the souls of the dead on the human plane.”

  “The real question is how he got her soul in the first place,” Nash said. “Scott’s, I can understand. He could have sent Thane to kill him, or Avari might have done his own dirty work, if he was already on the human plane by then. But Heidi died months ago, and Avari didn’t get her soul.”

  “How do you know that?” Madeline asked, and the unease churning deep in my stomach swelled.

  He shrugged. “Because Belphegore got it.”

  “Who is Belphegore?” Madeline and her nephew asked in unison, and even Alec looked confused.

  “She’s the hellion of vanity my aunt made a deal with. Aunt Val hired a rogue reaper named Marg to collect the souls of five innocent, beautiful young women to trade in exchange for her own eternal youth and beauty. Heidi was the first of them. Marg tried to take my cousin Sophie’s soul as the fifth, and my aunt traded herself for her daughter. Belphegore got all five souls, including my aunt’s.”

  “Sophie’s mom died to save her?” Luca said.

  “Yeah, and she’s only known that for a few weeks.” Since the night I’d died and her father had come clean about the family secret.

  “So, Belphegore is involved in this, too?” Emma had all but curled into a ball. Hers had been one of the souls Marg tried to take, and the minute and a half she was dead had made her eligible for possession by Avari, or any other hellion who decided to try.

  “Sounds like it. How else would Avari get Heidi’s soul?” I said. Em had tears in her eyes. I gave her a hug, but that was the best I could do until someone invented a Band-Aid for pure terror. “I think we need to face the fact that Avari will be back, but we have no way of knowing where, when, or in what form.”

  * * *

  My dad got home from work shortly after Madeline left to extract and identify the souls in my dagger. She promised to fill Levi in and ask for his help.

  When my dad heard what was going on, he immediately called both Harmony Hudson and my uncle Brendon, who showed up twenty minutes later with Sophie in tow. Our poor little house had never been so full, but everyone agreed that we had strength in numbers.

  Everyone except Styx, who barked to be let back in, then walked around growling at everyone she didn’t know until I finally closed her in my bedroom to keep everyone from being bitten by a nervous half Nether-hound.

  Sophie was sullen and uncooperative until Luca emerged from the bathroom, at which point she recruited him to help her take dinner orders and make a run to my dad’s favorite Chinese restaurant.

  For the next hour, everything we’d already discussed was dissected ad nauseam over cardboard cartons of rice and noodles, and at some point, I realized I’d rather pull my hair out and spend eternity bald than have to explain one more time that I didn’t know how Avari had done what he’d done, or what he was up to.

  After dinner, my uncle Brendon took Luca for a drive around town—Sophie insisted on going—to see if he could sense either Thane or Mareth, who had yet to turn up. We were pretty sure Thane had snatched her and taken her to Avari, but no one wanted to admit defeat on that front. Not yet, anyway. And we still had no idea why Avari wanted another reaper.

  Tod turned up as they were leaving and took one look around at the chaos and the mess, then tugged me toward my room to escape the noise. “There are several advantages to invisibility,” he said, closing the door at his back.

  “The word of the day is spectral,” I said as my arms slid around his neck. “We’re not invisible right now, we’re spectral.”

  “I don’t care what you call it, so long as it’s just the two of us. It’s crazy in there.”

  “Yeah, but it could be worse. I, um, wasn’t able to keep this afternoon a total secret.”

  “This afternoon?” He glanced at the bed for confirmation, and I could feel myself flush as I nodded. “Em, right?” he said, and I nodded again. “Kaylee, I don’t care who knows, as long as you’re comfortable with it. Assuming you made me sound good.”

  I laughed. “She didn’t get the details she was hoping for.” I sat on the edge of my desk and pulled him closer, one hand on his chest as I looked into his eyes. “That’s between us.”

  “I’m good with that… .” He leaned in for a kiss, but I stopped him.

  “Sabine knows, too.”

  Tod’s brows rose, and he leaned back for a better look into my eyes. “I didn’t think you two were that close.”

  “We’re not. She’s crazy perceptive and psychotically honest.”

  “Meaning…?”

  “She wants to tell Nash.”

  Tod frowned. “I don’t see how that could possibly be good for his ego. Especially if you told the story the way I remember it.” He grinned, trying to lighten the mood, but I couldn’t even summon a smile.

  “I don’t want to hurt him any more than we already have. I told her that if she values our friendship, she’ll keep her mouth shut.”

  “You’re friends now?”

  “If that’ll keep her from spewing our personal business in front of the entire world, then, yes. We’re friends.”

  * * *

  “Sophie?” I set my backpack on the ground next to my usual lunch table, surprised to find my cousin sitting on it. I was almost always the first to reach the quad—a benefit of having no third-period class—but even when someone beat me there, it wasn’t Sophie. My cousin had never once sat at my table. In two years, she’d rarely even glanced our way without throwing an insult at me.

  This time she just blinked at me and brushed blond hair behind her shoulder. “Hey.”

  My frown deepened. If she hadn’t spoken with her own voice, I’d assume she’d been possessed—that had certainly happened before. “Is something wrong?”

  “No.” She frowned and reconsidered. “Well, yes. Everything’s wrong. But no one would know that better than you, I guess.”

  “I meant, why are you here?”

  She shrugged. “I’m meeting Luca. I have yet to convince him that he doesn’t have to sit in the social wasteland.”

  “And you honestly think he’d be more comfortable in the intellectual wasteland?” I tossed a pointed glance at the table where she and her jock friends had been sitting every day of the two years she’d been at Eastlake.

  Sophie exhaled and nodded, and I waited for verbal venom that never came. “I guess I deserve that. I just…” She hesitated, glancing at the grass for a moment before meeting my gaze again. “I never got a chance to tell you that I’m sorry for what happened to you that night. With Mr. Beck.”

  Except that she’d had plenty of chances. She just hadn’t taken any of them.

  “Oh.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “You mean the night I was brutally murdered in my own bed?”

  Sophie flinched. “You don’t have to make it sound so…”

  “So what? True? Because it’s true.”

  “So…ugly.” Her face scrunched up, like she found the word personally offensive. Or maybe it was the truth that offended her. “You don’t have to go for the shock factor with every weird-ass sentence that comes out of your mouth. Especially considering that you got a happy ending.”

  “Happy ending?” I couldn’t pile enough disbelief into my voice to accurately express how much of it I was dealing with. “What part of ‘walking corpse’ sounds like a happy ending to you? The part where I’ll never reach the age of consent or the legal drinking age?” Not that either of those really mattered anymore. “Or the part where there’s still a demon from another dimension out to get my soul, and willing to go through everyone I love to get to me? I understand that there’s a discrepancy between the way the world really looks and the way you se
e it, but I think you need to open your eyes a little wider.”

  Irritation flared behind her gaze. “I’m trying to apologize, Kaylee, and you’re not making that very easy.”

  “So sorry to have inconvenienced you with the truth. Go ahead. I’m listening.”

  Yes, I was being hard on her. But life would be even harder on her, assuming she survived long enough to graduate. And with Avari on the warpath, there was no guarantee of that at all.

  “Look. My dad said you saved my life that night,” Sophie said, and I shrugged. I’d actually saved her life several times, but who was counting? “So I wanted to say thank you, and tell you I’m sorry for all the mean things I said about you being a crazy freak before. I swear I had no idea those weren’t personal life choices.”

  I didn’t know whether to pity her or smack her. Fortunately, the decision was taken out of my hands when the bell rang and students started pouring into the quad with lunch trays.

  Nash and Sabine arrived first, but Luca was only a minute behind, and one glance at what passed for chili on their trays was enough to make me grateful that I didn’t have to eat ever again, if I chose.

  “Is my brother here?” Nash asked, sliding onto the bench seat across from me and next to Sabine. Sophie sat on his other side, so she could stare across the table at Luca.

  “No, and I don’t know if he will be. He has to cover all the hospital shifts, with Mareth gone. Levi’s filling in for him tonight, though, so he can do a shift at the pizza place.”

  “Because delivering pizza is more important than reaping souls?” Sophie’s brows rose as she took a carrot from Luca’s tray.

  “Spoken like someone who doesn’t have to cover her own cell-phone bill. Or make her own car payment. Or buy her own clothes,” Sabine said, and I realized it would be hard for me to choose sides in a Sophie/Sabine cage match.

  “So who pays your cell bill?” Sophie asked.

  “It’s a prepaid phone,” Nash supplied, and from the look on his face, I could tell he regretted sitting between them.