My Soul to Keep

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….

“It’s like mental anesthesia,” he continued, pleading with me silently to understand. “The things that used to hurt…” He shrugged. “Now they’re just…numb.”

“Numbness is a mercy?” What kind of screwed-up perspective was that? “Do you have any idea what I’d give for more memories of my mother, Nash? What I’d give to remember how she lived, and what it felt like when she died? And you’re just throwing your past away!”

“It’s not like that.” He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, in spite of the cold, sharp air. “I’m not losing the memories. They’re still there.”

“What does that matter, if you can’t feel them?” I’d never felt so frustrated or disappointed in my entire life. How could he let Avari have such an important part of himself?

Nash sighed again, and the small slip of air through his lips conveyed a devastating weight of hopelessness. Of despair. “It was the only acceptable price, Kaylee. It’s all I was willing to part with. And you’d understand if you knew what he really wanted from me.”

His soul? His blood? His service? That time I didn’t ask. Those were all unacceptable prices for me, but I’d never been in his position. What might I have given to save myself from the Creeper toxin, if we hadn’t made it back to the human world in time? Certainly not my soul. But would I have given my memory-emotions in exchange for my life?

Depends on the memories in question…

“What memories, Nash?” I demanded, suddenly afraid that he’d set no limits on what Avari could take. “Potty training? Pulling your first tooth? Your first independent bike ride? What did you lose?”

He shook his head slowly. “The most intense,” he admitted finally. “Only the ones with real value to me have value to him.”

I took a deep, cold breath and it caught in my throat, stuck behind a sob. “Us?” I closed my eyes, blinking back tears when I remembered all the times in the past few days when his irises had abruptly gone still instead of swirling with emotion. Had he been remembering something all those times? Trying to feel what used to be there?

“Do you still feel what you felt when we met? At Taboo?” I stepped closer for a better look at his eyes, testing the most painful theory I’d ever explored. “When you calmed me so I wouldn’t scream? When you figured out what I was? That I was like you?”

His eyes swam in tears, but his irises held painfully steady. Not so much as a twitch of color shifting in the browns and greens I’d always loved.

I swallowed thickly. “Kissing me for the first time?”

Nash closed his eyes to keep me from seeing the truth, and a whip of anger coiled tightly around my spine. No! How could he give that away? Did my most precious memories mean less to him than his next high?

What else had he sold?

“Your dad dying? Tod dying? Do you feel what you felt when I was dying?” I demanded at last, and when he shook his head, tears slipping from closed eyes, I’d had all I could take.

“It’s all gone, Kaylee.”

And so was I.

I shrugged out of his jacket and dropped it on the brick patio, gasping out loud when the cold hit me full force. The roar of my pulse in my ears drowned out the noise from the party as I ran across the stone path toward the quaint wooden gate.

“Kaylee, please…” Nash’s whisper hit my back with a last, desperate surge of Influence, but I stiffened my spine and kept going. I was too devastated by my own loss—the boyfriend who remembered why he loved me—to worry about his.

I swiped scalding tears from my frozen cheeks when I stopped to shove the gate open and was jogging again by the time I rounded the front corner of the house, headed for my car. And for my human best friend, who would soothe me with junk food, though she could never understand the source of my pain.

But bleak panic hit the moment I spotted my car, two blocks down the street. The instant I saw the form leaning against my front passenger’s side door, that familiar dark terror wound its way around my spine, sending thick, hot fingers toward the base of my throat.

The beam from a streetlight shone on the bright red balloon clasped between two pale hands, but darkness slanted across their owner’s broad torso, leaving the face obscured. Why had Emma left the balloon unattended?

“Kaylee, are you okay?” Emma asked, and I whirled to see her close Doug’s front door, already jogging down the steps toward me, wearing her jacket now. “Where’s Nash?”

I shook my head and clenched my jaw shut, unable to answer her without screaming as the death wail took me over. It wrapped around my throat like a thorn-spiked glove, and I tasted blood on the back of my tongue. This premonition was strong; he would die very, very soon.

I glanced pointedly from Emma to my car, trying to guide her gaze. To speak to her with only my eyes. But she wasn’t Nash. She didn’t understand.

“What’s wrong, Kaylee?”

Frustrated, I turned my back on her and ran for my car, racing toward death for the first time ever, because this time my effort wasn’t pointless. Nash had said deaths caused by Netherworld elements were unscripted, so whoever he was, if Demon’s Breath was the problem, I could save him—if I got there in time.

I’d just passed the dark, silent house next door when the old wooden gate squealed open again and winter-dead grass crunched under someone’s feet. “What’s wrong?” Nash called out behind me.

“I don’t know!” Emma shouted as his steps pounded after us. “She won’t tell me!”

And that was enough for Nash.

“Kaylee, stop!” he yelled, even as he raced after me. “Wait!” But I couldn’t stop. I’d let Nash down. I’d let Scott down. But I could save this one.

Thirty feet. My nose dripped, and my throat burned.

“Stay here,” Nash ordered Emma, but his footsteps never slowed. “Kaylee, stop!”

Twenty feet. The form against my car came into focus, his features coalescing in the swirling shadows to form a face I recognized. He raised the balloon. The weighted clip hit the ground.

Ten feet. My jaws ached from being clenched. My throat felt like I’d swallowed razors from holding back his soul song. My hands clenched into fists at my sides, pumping as I ran. And now I could hear him.

“Hudson, you’ve been holdin’ out on me!” His smile was joyous. Relieved. Uncomprehending. “I’ll pay you back….”

“No!” Nash shouted behind me, but I didn’t turn. There was no time. “It’s too strong!”

But Doug put the balloon to his mouth, anyway, and drew in a long, deep breath.

He smiled, even as he began to convulse….