Before I Wake

  The reaper shrugged. “That, I don’t know. But he’s obsessed with it. Everything he’s doing plays into it. And you have a central role.”

  “Okay, let’s go back to the basics.” Because if I thought any more about the people I could have saved—and the people I would have been damning in their place—I was going to lose what was left of my mind. “He’s using your resurrected soul to cross through the fog into our world. What about this second soul? The one that gives him a physical form. How does that work?”

  “I don’t know all the details. He figured that part out himself, by accident, so—”

  “Whoa, what does that mean?” Tod demanded. “Who figured out the first part?”

  Thane shrugged. “Not to give myself too much credit, but… I did. Decades ago.”

  “And you told Avari that he could use your soul to cross over?” I frowned, watching him through narrowed eyes. “Why would you do that? Why would you give him a reason to need your soul?”

  “Your boyfriend didn’t give me much of a choice!” Thane shouted, pushing away from the countertop to gesture angrily at Tod. “One sucker punch from a rookie, and I’m staring at the business end of a hellion!”

  “Yeah, he’s all about the sucker punches,” Nash mumbled.

  “As long as Avari needs my soul, he’ll keep me alive. More or less. Anyway, it shouldn’t have mattered.” The rogue reaper shrugged. “What I showed him let him cross over, but gave him no physical form. Like a visitor’s pass, where you can’t touch anything. He figured the rest of it out on his own, when he was playing around with another soul.”

  “Okay, so back to the part where Avari shows up in the guise of the dearly departed. What do you know about that?” My head was already spinning from everything he’d told us, but we had to get it all down now—there was no telling when Avari would call him back or Madeline would show up.

  “I know that it’s a one-way trip. He needs a human soul and something that belonged to the deceased. He crosses over with both of those in his possession and takes the form that soul had when it died. Down to the clothes it was wearing.”

  “The bracelet…” I said, and Tod nodded. “How did Avari get Heidi Anderson’s bracelet?”

  “How the hell do you think? He sent me after it. But you’re missing the point. Once he crosses back into the Netherworld, that nonresurrected soul is useless. Gone. Poof.” He made an exploding gesture with both hands. “It can’t be worn again.”

  “Disposable packaging,” Tod said. “It works for bottled water, why not for hellions?”

  “I don’t understand.” And I wasn’t sure I really wanted to. “How does wearing a human soul give him a physical body?”

  “I truly don’t know how it works. But his physical restrictions seem to be the same as mine, maybe because he’s using my soul as his passport. Selective corporeality and audibility. Transportation. But no hellion superpowers.”

  “So he’s vulnerable when he’s here?”

  Thane shrugged again. “As vulnerable as I am. But as you may have noticed, killing him doesn’t really kill him. When his physical body dies, he just gets sucked back into the Netherworld, along with my soul.”

  “So, is there any chance we can get your soul back without having to cross over?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. And I don’t really care. How you fulfill your end of the deal is up to you.”

  “You said you’d help,” I reminded him.

  Thane nodded. “But I’ve told you everything I know, so I don’t know how much more help I can be.”

  “You can find out why my amphora doesn’t capture your soul from him when I take the others,” I said, picturing the two human souls that last sank into the hilt of my dagger. “And find out how to fix that.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  I shrugged and enjoyed throwing his own words back at him. “How you fulfill your end of the deal is up to you.”

  “So, let me get this straight,” Nash said, before Thane could blink out in anger. “Avari’s going to keep showing up disguised as dead people, and while he’s here, he’s going to kill even more of them? Just for fun?”

  Thane nodded. “At the moment, human souls are easy for him to come by, so he doesn’t mind losing them every time she stabs him, because her trauma is worth more than the lost soul.”

  I shoved more hair back from my face and rubbed my forehead. Can dead people get headaches? “And since he’s sold a resurrected soul to Belphegore, we can expect her to show up any day, but we have no idea when, or what she’ll look like. Right?”

  Another nod. “Though you may never see her. I can’t imagine she’s as obsessed with your shiny little soul as Avari is.” He glanced at Tod then—as near as I could tell, considering his eyes were featureless white orbs. “Just think. None of this would have happened if Avari and I had never met.”

  Tod looked sick. “This is my fault. Avari would never have figured all this out if I hadn’t thrown Thane at him,” he mumbled beneath his breath.

  The only comfort I had to offer him was my hand intertwined with his.

  “That’s right, lover boy.” Thane obviously enjoyed Tod’s self-torment. “No good deed goes unpunished.”

  “So, how do we stop him?” I said, fighting the overwhelming, numbing lure of despair.

  “Stop him?” Thane shrugged. “I have no idea how to stop him, and I don’t really care.”

  “But we had a deal!” I stood, furious. “I snatch your soul from the grip of a demon and you tell us how to stop him.”

  “Uh-oh. Someone wasn’t paying attention. I only promised to tell you what I know, and I’ve done that. What you do with the knowledge is up to you. And if you even think about defaulting on your end of the bargain, keep in mind that your little ‘circle the wagons’ routine can’t last forever. I spent days following you around in advance of your death, and just because there were times you didn’t see me doesn’t mean I wasn’t there. I know everyone you know. I know where all your friends and family live. If you don’t produce my soul in very short order, you won’t have to worry about Avari killing everyone you love. I’ll save him the trouble.”

  * * *

  “You can’t tell Madeline!” I cried, chasing my father down the hall as he went for his cell phone. He’d left work the minute I’d called him, as soon as Thane left.

  “Oh, yes, I can. I can’t believe you’re even thinking about keeping this from her.”

  “I didn’t have to tell you, either, you know.” I grabbed his arm, and he finally turned to face me, forehead deeply furrowed, irises stubbornly still so I couldn’t see how scared he really was. But I knew. He was almost as scared as I was.

  “Kaylee, I’m glad you told me, but I can’t reward your good decision with a poor one of my own. Madeline knows much better than either of us how to deal with rogue reapers and runaway hellions,” he insisted, already on the move again, and I shouted after him.

  “If that were true, she wouldn’t have lost all three of her other extractors!”

  My father stopped cold in the hall, then turned to face me. “I’m not Madeline’s biggest fan, but even I know that wasn’t her fault. She did the best she could with the information she had, and you’ll only be making her job more difficult and dangerous by withholding more information from her.”

  “There’s nothing she could do with this information, even if we gave it to her!” I insisted. “She doesn’t have any other extractors to put at risk—I’m the only one left. The ones Avari took are trapped in the Netherworld in cold storage—whatever that means—and I have no idea what state they’re in. Thane still has a body, but that could be because he’s useful. For all I know, Avari’s already disposed of the extractors’ bodies, so their souls can’t escape. And that’s assuming he hasn’t already sold them.”

  “Sold them?”

  “Yeah. To other hellions. Thane says there are hundreds of them, and once they know what Avari’s up to, they’re all
gonna want in on the fun, and no matter how bad you’re thinking that’s gonna be, I promise it’ll be worse. Mass-slaughter of the human race. Bodies dead and defiled. Souls enslaved and tortured. The end of existence, as we know it.”

  My father stared at me without speaking for close to half a minute, and I could practically see the rapid succession of thoughts and fears as they raced across his expression. Then he scrubbed his face with both hands and met my gaze again. “Is there any chance at all that this is some massive misunderstanding, or the product of an overactive teenage imagination?”

  “Nope,” Tod said, and I turned to find him in the hall. “Nash and I heard the whole thing.”

  “Okay, then, what are the chances that Thane made it all up and Avari’s feeding off of our panic?”

  “That’s not impossible,” I admitted. “But everything Thane said lines up with what we already knew. Missing reapers and extractors. Avari haunting the human plane in the guise of the dead.”

  “Mr. Cavanaugh, I think all hell really is breaking loose,” Tod said.

  “And if I tell Madeline…?”

  “She’ll tell Levi, who may or may not hunt Thane down and kill him by removing the Demon’s Breath keeping his body functioning in the absence of his soul.” And then we’d have lost our source of inside information and any chance of more help from the only person in either world who had free access to Avari and his evil scheme.

  “Look, no one wants to kill Thane worse than I want to kill Thane,” my dad said. “But Levi—much like me—will understand that there are bigger problems at hand. He won’t act rashly at the expense of so much human life.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Thane knows Levi would never let me return his soul, so if he finds out we involved Levi or Madeline, he’ll consider our deal broken and he’ll go after everyone we care about on his own, without waiting for Avari to give the orders. Emma. Sophie. Harmony. Who knows how many other souls he’ll be able to reap before someone catches him?”

  My father sighed so heavily I wondered if he had any air left in his lungs at all. “We’re all already in danger, and so long as you, Tod, or Luca are around, Thane can’t sneak up on anyone.” Because he couldn’t hide from the three of us. “Levi and Madeline need to know, Kaylee. You have to be willing to compromise here.”

  I exhaled, my thoughts racing. “Fine. We tell everyone—including Levi and Madeline—what Thane told us, but we make it sound like we pounded the information out of him, and we don’t mention my promise to get his soul back from Avari. I don’t think we can keep Sabine from finding out, for obvious reasons—”

  “I can keep a secret!” Nash shouted from the living room.

  “We all know how good you are at keeping secrets,” Tod said, and I elbowed him. “What, he can take shots at me, but I can’t return fire?”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because you won the war, and he’s still nursing his wounds,” my father said softly, glancing pointedly at Tod’s hand, which was wrapped around my own.

  “There was no war,” Tod insisted, and I knew from the intimate resonance of his voice that Nash wouldn’t have been able to hear it even if he’d been standing right next to us. “We didn’t fight over Kaylee. She made a choice. And no one feels worse about how that happened than she and I do.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that…” my father whispered, glancing down the hall toward the living room to drive home his point.

  “You know, just because I can’t hear you doesn’t mean I don’t know you’re talking about me,” Nash snapped.

  I swallowed another upsurge of guilt. Then I pulled us back on track. “So, you’re not going to tell Madeline about our deal with Thane?” I said, where everyone could hear me.

  My dad only hesitated a moment, then shook his head. “No, but I reserve the right to change my mind, at my own discretion.”

  I nodded. That was the best we were going to get.

  “Sabine’s bringing Sophie over,” Nash said when we rejoined him in the living room. “And Emma’s bringing Luca straight from school.” They’d cut the school day short because of Brant’s death—a hauntingly surreal déjà vu for a student body that had already lost several members since the start of the school year—but Luca’d had to stay to talk to the police and school officials. “My mom’s dropping by before her shift starts at eleven.”

  “I expect to hear from Madeline any minute, and I’m about to text Alec,” I said.

  My father sighed, resigned, already heading for the home phone. “Another full house. I’ll order a giant sub.”

  * * *

  “Okay, here’s what we know,” I said, leaning against the half wall separating the kitchen from the living room, where six of my closest friends—plus Sophie—watched me, listening, and for just a second, the surrealism threatened to overwhelm me. What qualified me for the position I’d somehow assumed? Nash, Sabine, and Tod were all better fighters. My father had way more life experience. So why were they all looking to me? What if their trust was misplaced?

  What if I got us all killed?

  I glanced at Tod, suddenly unsure of myself, and he smiled and nodded for me to continue. There was no doubt in his eyes. None at all. He had more confidence in me than I’d ever had in myself.

  “Um, Avari will be back, and he may not be alone. We don’t know how many other hellions currently have the ability to cross over, but we know that when they show up, they’ll look like…well, like the person whose soul they’re wearing. And since you can’t fight an enemy you can’t see, I’m thinking the best way to start is by familiarizing ourselves with what the enemy might look like.”

  “What does that even mean?” Sophie asked. Her face was still swollen and her eyes red from crying.

  “The hellion you saw this afternoon is named Avari. Avari looked like Meredith Cole because he was wearing her soul, kind of like a costume. So what we’re going to do is make a list of souls—potential costumes—Avari and his demon buddies could be wearing.”

  Behind me, cellophane crackled in the kitchen as my dad unwrapped a massive sub sandwich and set a stack of paper plates on the island. He’d set several six-packs of soda into a chest of ice. But I’d caught him eyeing the whiskey he’d confiscated from Nash.

  He’d had a rough month, too.

  “And how do we do that?” Em asked. “Wander through the cemetery playing ‘knock-knock, who’s there’ on the headstones?”

  She was upset. Maybe as upset as Sophie was. She’d known Brant as long as I had, and she knew firsthand what kind of damage a single hellion could do, even without crossing into the human plane. The thought of several of them turned loose in our world was almost too much for her to think about.

  I could totally sympathize. Her life would have been so much safer if she’d never met me.

  “I thought we’d start with the obituaries instead,” I said at last. “That seems less disrespectful of the dead. Levi sent over this list… .” I glanced at Tod, and he held up a stack of printed pages Madeline had brought when she’d come to pick up the dagger. “It contains everyone in the local area who died on schedule in the past month. We’re going to compare this list with the local obituaries covering the same time period. What we’re looking for are people who died but are not on Levi’s list.”

  “Why?” Sophie asked, but Sabine beat me to the answer.

  “Because those are the people who weren’t supposed to die. And if they weren’t supposed to die, their souls weren’t turned into the proper authority by your friendly neighborhood reaper. Which means their souls are MIA. You see where I’m going with this…?”

  Sophie nodded. “Any missing soul could be worn like a costume by a hellion like the bastard who killed Meredith.”

  Meredith was killed by a reaper, not a hellion, but… “Close enough,” I said. She was catching on pretty quickly for a traumatized human. “Okay, everybody grab a sandwich and pick a partner. Each partner ge
ts a laptop and you’ll go through the online obituaries in pairs.” Tod and I had already made lists of the local papers and paired them as best we could with sections of the list Levi had sent, which was organized by geographical zones.

  Nash and Sabine settled onto the couch with his laptop, their portion of the reaper list, and a plate piled high with food. Sophie and Luca took her laptop and claimed the kitchen table. Tod sat between me and Em and our laptops at the bar, checking off names as we read them to him, while Em munched on her sandwich and I picked at mine with no real interest.

  “You know, it’s amazing how much of this Netherworld creepy demon crap winds up involving a bunch of teenagers armed with laptops and a wireless connection,” Em mumbled as she scrolled.

  Tod chuckled. “We’re the twenty-first century’s Mystery Inc.”

  “Well, that’s comforting, right?” I said, summoning a grin in spite of the circumstances. “Scooby always gets his man… .”

  My phone buzzed in my pocket and I pulled it out to find Alec’s name and number on the display. I accepted the call and held the phone up to my ear, swiveling on my bar stool to face away from most of the talking at my back. “Hey, shouldn’t you be at work?”

  “Yeah.” The tension in that one syllable rang sympathetic notes of fear down the length of my spine. “We have a problem, Kaylee.”

  I excused myself with a glance at Tod, then blinked into my room and closed the door. “What’s wrong, Alec?”

  “I need your help. Now.”

  My chills became icicles growing in place of my bones, freezing me from the inside out. “Where are you?”

  “My place. And, Kaylee? Bring your dagger.”

  16

  “DID HE SAY who it is?” Tod paced at the end of my bed while I typed furiously on my phone with both thumbs.

  “No. He just said to bring my dagger, which I can’t do until Madeline brings it back.” I hit Send on the text to my boss.

  My room. Need dagger. Now.