My Soul to Keep

17

“NO!” NASH YELLED AGAIN, and in the next instant, time seemed to shift into fast-forward. My world hurtled through space and time so quickly my head spun and the neighborhood around me swam in and out of focus.

Doug shook violently and fell against the car. Strands of shaggy brown hair flopped into his wide, empty eyes. His hands seized around the balloon. Demon’s Breath burst from it in a frosty white vapor. I skidded to a stop two feet from him, one hand over my mouth to hold the scream back. But I was out of breath and couldn’t help sucking in air through my nose to satisfy my abused lungs.

Strong hands grabbed my arms from behind, lifting me. The world spun around me as I inhaled. The air I pulled in was clear and cold. And clean. The hands shoved me forward and I stumbled onto the neighbor’s yard, my feet barely brushing the ground.

I fell facedown on cold, dead grass, recently sprayed green with fertilizer. My graceless landing jarred my mouth open, and the scream ripped free from my throat, calling out to Doug’s soul as it prepared to leave his body.

Doug fell forward, draped across the sidewalk, still convulsing. His shoes slammed into the road. His knuckles scraped the sidewalk. His skull bounced on the grass. Dark, translucent shadows swirled all around him.

The Nether-fog rolled in from nowhere, swallowing my world whole.

Nash grabbed the balloon he’d dropped and tied the opening into a quick knot, trapping what little vapor hadn’t escaped into the air. Then he dropped to his knees at Doug’s side, two fingers at his throat, feeling for a pulse, uninhibited by the fog he couldn’t see.

I saw both layers of reality, and was desperate to separate them. To push the fog back. Yet still I screamed.

“No!” Emma’s mouth formed soundless words of denial. She sank into the fog next me, hands covering her ears, hunched over her knees in shock. Dark things scuttled around her, and revulsion skittered up my spine. Tears filled my eyes, then ran over. “No!” she shouted again, though I couldn’t hear her over my own screaming.

Nash looked up.

His eyes reflected pain, and regret, and guilt, and horror, swirling as madly now as they’d sat calm moments earlier. He left his friend still seizing in the fog and churning shadows and dropped to his knees beside me. Nash turned me so that I couldn’t see Doug. His lips brushed my ear, but I couldn’t hear him. He wasn’t using his Influence. Because I’d told him not to.

He leaned back and shouted at me, as Emma sobbed, but I couldn’t hear either of them. Yet I knew what Nash was saying. Pull it back. You can do it, Kaylee. You have to let him go….

It was hard. It was so hard without Nash’s help. But I couldn’t let him back in my head.

I closed my eyes and slapped both hands over my mouth, but that wasn’t enough. I could practically feel the gray haze lapping at my skin. I forced my jaw closed, but the screaming still leaked from my sealed lips, scraping my insides raw. So I swallowed it, fists clenched against the pain, locking the wail inside myself, where it bounced around my throat like a swarm of angry wasps.

When I opened my eyes, the fog was gone. Nash was still watching me. Doug was still convulsing. Em was still crying. Nash glanced from one of us to the other, and finally his anxious gaze settled on me. “Can you drive?” he asked, and I nodded, relieved to be able to hear him. I wasn’t sure I really could drive, with Doug’s death song consuming me from the inside, but Emma had been drinking.

It was either me or a cab.

“Okay.” He left Doug—still convulsing—and hauled Emma up by both arms, as gently as he had time for. “Em, you have to calm down. He’s still alive, and I’m going to do what I can for him.” We both knew Doug was as good as dead, but maybe Emma didn’t know I’d never yet had a false premonition. “But I need you and Kaylee to get out of here before she starts screaming again.” He walked with her as he spoke and carefully settled her into the passenger’s seat, then closed the door.

“Go straight to her house,” he said, circling the car to open my door for me as I held one hand firmly over my mouth.

“Drive slowly, just in case. I’ll call you later.”

I nodded. I would answer his call, even though we’d just had the biggest fight in the history of fights, because things weren’t as simple as “break up and make up” between me and Nash.

What we had was life or death. Literally.

He closed the door and I twisted the key in the engine with my free hand. Then I grabbed the wheel and hit the gas. The last thing I saw in the mirror before I turned the corner was Nash kneeling on the ground next to one of his best friends, already pulling his phone from his pocket. No one had come out yet—the whole thing couldn’t have taken two minutes, and the music from the party had helped cover my screaming—but it wouldn’t be long before someone wandered outside, and the second party in a week would end in disaster.

When I turned the corner—swerving too sharply in haste—the panic began to ebb, and my throat started to relax. The pincushion feeling faded slowly, and two blocks later, I opened my mouth and sucked in a deep breath, grateful when the only sound that escaped was the rasp of air through my throat.

And that’s when I realized Emma was still crying.

She sat huddled in one corner of the passenger’s seat, knees to her chest, seat belt unbuckled, right temple pressed against the cold window. Her shoulders shook with each soft sob, and as I watched, she raised one arm to wipe her face with her jacket sleeve.

“Are you okay?” I flicked on my blinker for the next turn, then slowed to a stop at the red light.

“No. Is he dead?”

“I don’t know.” I wished I wasn’t driving so I could really look at her. So I’d know how she was handling this. “But if he isn’t yet, he will be soon.”

Emma twisted toward me, her brown eyes wide. Imploring. “Can’t you save him? Like you saved me?” Her voice cracked on the last word, and she reached up to wipe more tears.

I shook my head slowly, sadly, then glanced at her as passing streetlights lit the car, one after another. Would this explanation ever get any easier? “Em, if we’d saved him, someone else would have to die in his place.” Because even though we hadn’t seen him or her, there was a reaper somewhere nearby waiting to claim Doug’s soul, and if we snatched it back, the reaper would simply take another.

At least, that’s how it usually worked. I wasn’t sure about unscripted cases, but I wasn’t gonna risk it. “You, Nash, and I were the only ones there to choose from, and I’m not willing to sacrifice any of us to save someone else.” Not even your boyfriend. Though I couldn’t say that aloud.

“What if it’s not really his time to die? It wasn’t my time when I died.”

Okay, she had a good point. And a very hard question.

I closed my eyes and exhaled softly, then forced my gaze back to the road. I’d wondered the same thing. But ultimately… “It wouldn’t really matter.” I slowed for the next turn and flicked my blinker on. “You, and those other girls, and Sophie—none of you were supposed to die. But saving you still meant killing someone else. I can’t risk that again.”

“Wait…Sophie?” Emma said, and for a moment, surprise eclipsed the hurt and confusion she wore like a funeral veil.

“Sophie died, too?”

Crap. “Yeah. But she doesn’t know, so please don’t tell her.”

“Like I’m gonna go looking for a reason to talk to Sophie.” Emma paused, and curiosity shined through her tears. “What happened?”

I stepped on the gas to make it through a yellow light, then dropped back to the speed limit. Getting pulled over while Emma still had beer on her breath would not be a good way to end the most horrible week in the history of…weeks.

“Aunt Val took her place.” Making the very same sacrifice for her daughter that my mother had made for me. Except that it was Aunt Val’s fault Sophie died in the first place. Which kind of mitigated her sacrifice, in my eyes.

“That’s how your aunt died?” Em wiped tear-damp mascara onto her sleeve.

I shrugged. “Sophie thinks she passed out from shock, and when she woke up, her mother was dead. She has no idea why or how it happened, but she knows I was involved and she’s decided I’m somehow responsible.” Which couldn’t have been further from the truth, but no one—including me—wanted to tell my cousin that her mother had tried to trade five innocent souls for her own everlasting youth and beauty.

“No wonder she hates you…”

“Yeah.” But the truth was that Sophie had never exactly been warm and fuzzy.

For several minutes, Emma stared out the window, though I had a feeling she wasn’t really seeing the dark houses we passed. Then she turned to look at me, and the weight behind her gaze was devastating. “Kaylee, what was in the balloon?”

I blinked at the road and exhaled slowly. “Nothing you want to know much about.”

“I saw how Nash pulled you away.” Leather creaked as she shifted in her seat. “He didn’t even want you to get a whiff of it, so whatever it is, it must be pretty damn scary.”

“It is.” Yet he hadn’t hesitated to kiss me and breathe all over me while he was taking it. How much could I possibly mean to him if he’d risk exposing me?

“I should have done something.” Emma groaned. “I knew he was taking too much, and I just let him!” She stomped the floorboard hard enough to rock the whole car, and my heart broke for her.

“Em, you couldn’t have stopped him.” I was sure of that, yet I was equally sure that Nash and I could have. I’d failed Scott and Doug, but it wasn’t too late to help Nash. No matter what he’d done, I couldn’t live with myself if I let him turn out like his friends.

“I should be there.” Emma sat straighter, oblivious to the turn my thoughts had taken. “Can you take me to the hospital? He might not be gone yet, and I should be there. I know that sounds stupid—it’s not like we were in love or anything—but I feel awful for just leaving him.”

I shook my head slowly and made the turn onto her street. “It doesn’t sound stupid. But Em, they’re not going to let you in. You’re not family.” And Doug’s family—just the father and stepmother, as far as I knew—were still in New York on a working vacation. Did that mean Doug would die alone? Surely Nash could Influence his way into the room…. “Besides, Emma, the last place you need to be is in a hospital swarming with cops.”

Emma sighed and sank into her seat as I pulled to a stop on the street in front of her mailbox. Her house was dark.

“Where is everybody?” The hum of the engine faded as I pulled the keys from the ignition.

“Traci’s working, and Cara’s at her sorority’s Christmas party,” Emma said as I pushed my car door opened. I hadn’t really expected either of her sisters to be home on a Friday night, but I was worried about her mom catching Emma before we’d washed her shirt and brushed her teeth. “And Mom has a date, if you can believe that.” She shoved her own door open and stepped onto the grass, surprisingly steady.

Evidently death is sobering. No real shock there.

I grabbed my overnight bag—now minus one T-shirt—then swung the door shut and locked the car. Emma was already halfway up the cute stone path, digging in her pocket for her keys before she remembered that I’d taken them. I gave them to her, but her hand shook too badly to slide the key into the lock, so I took it back and opened the door myself.

“I feel so helpless!” Emma dropped onto the overstuffed couch as I bolted the door behind us. “Worthless. So frustrated and…impotent!” She sat up straight then and punched the arm of her couch so hard I wasn’t surprised when her knuckles came away skinned and oozing blood from the rough weave.

I handed her a tissue from a box on the end table. “That’s not a phrase you hear very often from girls.” I forced a smile, but my joke landed like a brick dropped from a skyscraper.

I knew exactly how she felt.

“I’m serious.” She dabbed at her fist, then dropped the tissue on the coffee table. “What’s the point of knowing someone’s going to die if you can’t do anything about it? How can you stand this?” she demanded. “All this death? How can you stand knowing about it before anyone else does?”

I took my shoes off and lined them up with the others in the front closet, then sank onto the couch beside her, leaning my head on her shoulder. “Have you ever known anyone who died?” Her parents had divorced when Em was only four, but I was pretty sure her dad was still alive. Somewhere.

“Just Roger.”

“Who’s Roger?”

“The hamster we had when I was seven. Does he count?”

“I don’t think so.” I almost smiled, but held it back when I realized she might be offended. For all I knew, she and Roger had been very close.

“Then, no.” She folded one leg beneath the other and twisted to face me. “And I’ve certainly never had to look at someone, knowing he’d be dead soon. How can you stand this?” she asked again. And in that moment, I came very close to telling her the truth: that I couldn’t. Not without Nash.

“It’s not easy.” I stood and pulled Emma up by both hands.

“In fact, it sucks. Do you have ice cream?”

“Yeah.” She wiped fresh tears from her face and gestured vaguely toward the kitchen. “Traci’s boyfriend dumped her yesterday. Fourth one this year.” Which made no sense to me. The Marshall girls were gorgeous beyond all reason. “There’s a pint of Phish Food in the freezer.”

“Great. Pick out a movie while I get the ice cream.”

Emma nodded hesitantly, then crossed the living room toward the rack of DVDs to the left of a slim, simple entertainment center. “Bring two spoons!” she shouted over her shoulder as she knelt to scan the titles.

For the first half hour of the movie—a lighthearted, predictable romantic comedy—Emma shoveled ice cream into her mouth and glanced regularly at my cell lying on her nightstand, obviously willing it to ring with an update from Nash.

But my phone never rang.

By the time the credits rolled, Emma had fallen asleep, her spoon still dangling from one hand, several drops of chocolate ice cream dotting the front of the shirt she’d borrowed from me. When I got up to turn off the movie, her spoon thumped to the floor, so I rolled carefully off the bed and took both spoons and the empty ice cream container into the kitchen, yawning so hard my jaw ached.

The clock on the microwave read a quarter to one, and I wondered idly how late Ms. Marshall would be out. I had no frame of reference for adult dating.

I grabbed a Coke from the fridge, then padded back to Emma’s room, intending to call Nash. But when I reached for my phone from the nightstand on Emma’s side of the bed, her eyes popped wide-open, as if some unseen clasp holding them closed had just been released.

Startled, I squealed and jumped back. “Em, you okay?” But even when she finally blinked, her face still pressed into the pillow, her eyes didn’t lose that sleep haze, nor did they focus on me. Or on anything else. “Em?”

She snapped upright in a single, eerily stiff motion and blinked at me, then glanced around her room like she’d never seen it before—easily one of the weirdest things I’d seen in my entire life.

In either world.

“Emma?” I backed slowly away from the bed, my phone clenched in my left hand, as a strange, heavy, fluttery feeling settled into my stomach. Like I’d swallowed a swarm of iron butterflies.

“Not exactly…” A low, scratchy, unfamiliar voice said as my best friend’s mouth moved.

My heart rate exploded and my pulse roared in my ears. “Who, then, exactly?”

“I am Alec. As presented through Emma Dawn Marshall.”

As presented…?

Whoa…

“Who are you, and what the hell are you doing in my best friend?” I backed farther from the bed, my empty hand stretched behind me to warn me before I bumped into anything. Part of me—most of me, in fact—wanted to make a break for the door. But I couldn’t leave Emma alone with…whatever was talking through her. Possessing her. Because that’s obviously what this was.

“I apologize for contacting you through an intermediary, but my options are pretty limited at the moment,” Emma said with Alec’s voice, and the effect was disjointed, like a bad voice-over in a foreign film. Except the actor and the voice were both speaking the same language. “I promise your friend won’t remember any of this. She might wake up sleepy and disoriented, but none the worse for wear.” He extended his borrowed arms, like he was testing the fit of a new shirt.

My stomach roiled at the casual gesture and the gruesome image that accompanied it, and my mind raced, trying to make sense of what I was seeing and hearing. Without much luck. Emma was speaking to me in someone else’s voice. She was being used as a human microphone—this “Alec’s” intermediary.

And suddenly a horrifying understanding clicked into place in my nearly scrambled brain. The blood seemed to drain from my face, leaving me cold.

Nash had said Avari contacted him through an intermediary—by possessing someone in our world. And several times in the past few weeks I’d fallen asleep with Nash, only to wake up disoriented and unsure where I was, even during his few covert visits while I was grounded. In the past week alone, it had happened on the way to work, then in the school parking lot during my lunchtime nap….

Nooo!

My hands clenched into fists at my sides, and I had to force my grip on my phone to loosen. Anger and fear rolled through me like thunder across the sky, dark, and low, and threatening. And accompanied by a vicious, white-hot bolt of betrayal that singed every nerve in my body.

I’d played intermediary between Nash and Avari. The hellion had used me as his own personal walkie-talkie.

And Nash had let it happen.