My Soul to Steal

25

TOD DISAPPEARED, and I headed straight for the gym, where Nash hung out during last period, now that football season was over.

I scanned the bleachers, glancing over several groups of students talking and watching the basketball team practice, but Nash found me before I spotted him. “Hey,” he called, and I turned to see him walking toward me from the boys’ locker room. “What happened?” he asked, falling into step with me when I gestured for him to follow me toward the gym doors, where we wouldn’t be overheard. “Emma said you disappeared during French. Like, literally disappeared.”

“Unscheduled trip to the Netherworld, courtesy of everyone’s least favorite mara.”

“Damn it, Kaylee, I’m so sorry.” He ran one hand through his hair in frustration. “Are you okay?”

I shrugged, trying not to show how pissed off I was, or how scared I’d been. Like it was no big deal that his ex had nearly gotten me killed. A lot.

“A little sticky…” I plucked at the drying gunk stuck to the back of my shirt. “But still in one piece. And I did accuse her of trying to incite a school-wide riot. Though for the record, I think the interdimensional field trip constitutes gross overkill.”

“I’ll talk to her…” he said, shrugging his backpack higher on his shoulders, and suddenly it felt weird for me to be whispering to Nash in the middle of class, carrying nothing but the weight of my own guilt and fear. I’d left my stuff in French class, after my involuntary departure from the human world.

“Don’t bother. We have bigger hellions to fry, before one of them drops me into the hot oil. Or Sabine.”

“What?”

“I’ll explain when we find Sabine,” I said, leaning back against the side of the bleachers. “For now, please tell me you found the sleepwalker.”

“Not even close.”

“Great.” I shoved a flyaway strand of hair back from my face. “Well, now we’re looking for two puppets. One will sound like Avari, the other like this demon chick named Invidia. I heard them plotting when I crossed over. I’m guessing she’s a hellion of envy.”

Nash’s brows arched halfway up his forehead. “Based on…?”

“Based on the fact that she’s obsessed with Sabine, because of the amount of jealousy she’s evidently festering with.”

“Envy. Shit,” Nash said, leaning against the wall by the first set of doors, and I could practically read his thoughts on his face as he put the puzzle together for himself. “So…this Invidia helped power the blitz?”

“Yeah.” I shrugged and glanced through the glass door into the hall, itching to get moving. But discussing Netherworld business in the empty school halls in the middle of last period would not only get us in trouble, it might just get us committed. The noisy gym was a much better place to go unnoticed. “My guess is that the power she shoved into our world to get the ball rolling came through as violent jealous impulses.”

“Thus, all the fights and property damage.”

“Exactly. And I’m pretty sure they wanted me to blame the whole thing on Sabine.”

“Because you’re jealous of her?” Nash said, nodding like he understood, and I bristled.

“I’m not jealous of her! I just don’t think she belongs on your bed at two o’clock in the morning.” Okay, maybe I was a little jealous of that part. “What I mean is that they framed her. I’m guessing Sabine’s envy drew this new hellion into the area, and Avari saw his chance. He probably knew your ex was here before we did. He killed the teachers in their sleep to make me think she was doing it, and Invidia overloaded the kids I saw Sabine reading fears from, so I’d think she was doing that, too.”

“Why?” Nash frowned. “Why do they care who you blame this on?”

“I haven’t figured that part out yet. Maybe to divert attention from Alec?” I glanced at the huge clock over the far set of bleachers, and my heart thudded harder. A quarter of last period was gone. We were running out of time. “I need you to get Sabine and meet me and Tod in the quad. We need to figure out who the hellions are possessing, and evict them.”

“No problem. We’ll be right there.”

Nash and I parted ways in the hall, where he headed right, toward Sabine’s sixth period class, and I went to the left, headed toward the French class I’d missed half of, where Mrs. Brown handed me my books, along with a pink detention slip.

Funny how “teenage hero” translates to “teenage delinquent” on my permanent record.

Next I headed toward my history class, approaching from the right, so I could check on Emma without being seen by Coach Rundell, who rarely left his desk during class. Like several of the other teachers, Rundell was showing a video instead of actually teaching, but I could hardly blame him, considering that his office had been trashed that morning and the inexplicable chaos had only gotten worse.

Emma was in her usual seat with her arms crossed over her chest, staring blankly at a television I couldn’t see. The entire classroom flickered with a familiar bluish light, and half the students had fallen asleep sitting up.

Satisfied that Emma was safe, I dropped my books off in my locker, then slipped outside through the parking lot exit and made my way around the building from the outside. The quad looked empty when I got there, but before I could take a seat at the nearest table, Tod appeared several feet away.

“It’s not Sophie,” he said, by way of a greeting. “She’s in the office, cryin’ like a baby, trying to explain why she cut some chick’s hair off.”

“Good.” At least that would keep her out of Avari’s grip for the time being.

More footsteps crunched on the grass behind me, and I turned to find Nash headed across the quad toward us. Alone.

“Where’s Sabine?” I asked, sliding onto the nearest bench seat.

Nash frowned, but sat down across from me. “Sabine’s a no-show.”

“From geography?”

“From school, as far as I can tell.” He stared at his hands, clasped together on the table, his jaw clenched in frustration, eyes swirling in true fear. For her. “I looked everywhere I could think of, and she’s just gone. Her books are in her locker—not that that’s any indication of…anything—and her car’s in the lot. And she definitely wouldn’t leave campus without her car.”

“You have her locker combination?” I asked, and they both just stared at me until I rolled my eyes. “It was a valid question!”

“You think she crossed over?” Tod asked, sitting on the end of the table next to ours, his legs hanging.

“I seriously doubt it,” Nash said. “She can cross, of course, being a mara. But she’d be just as vulnerable there as we are. And no matter what else you think about her, she’s not stupid.”

“No argument there,” I said reluctantly. If she were stupid, she’d be so much easier to deal with. “But if she didn’t cross…” My words faded into uneasy silence as a horrifying possibility occurred to me. “Avari can possess her,” I said, glancing from brother to brother.

“We’ve established this,” Nash said. “He used her to give you that nightmare about him pulling you into the Netherworld.”

Which was now starting to sound prophetic.

“That’s my point.” I stood, my thoughts racing too fast for me to process without freedom of movement. “When he possessed her, he had control of her abilities. So…does that mean he could possess her again and make her cross over?”

That thought was scary enough to make the fine hairs on my arms stand up. But even worse was the knowledge that if he could make Sabine cross over that way, he could make me do the same thing.

So why hadn’t he? Why would he need human hosts, if he could just make us cross over on our own?

“I don’t think that would work,” Tod said, and my relief came almost before I’d heard his rationale. “You have to have intent to cross over, and even when he’s in control of your body, he’s not in control of your willpower. He can’t make you want to cross over.”

“Sabine did,” I pointed out, frowning over the inconsistency—yet grateful for it.

“Sabine made you dream that you wanted to cross, right?” Nash asked, and I nodded. “She’s had a lot of practice weaving nightmares. Avari hasn’t. For the moment, I think you’re safe from that. But we have to find a way to keep him from possessing us, or this is going to keep happening.”

Tod shrugged. “Being dead seems to do the trick.”

I glanced at him, arms crossed over my chest. “I think we’re looking for something a little less drastic.”

Nash cleared his throat, bringing us back on target. “Okay, we have to find Sabine. And whoever else they’re planning to grab.”

“Any idea who that could be?” Tod asked.

I shook my head. “All I know is that Avari claims to have prepared both the hosts. Which I’m guessing means that he wore them out somehow, so they’d be tired enough to fall asleep at school today.”

“Well, then, the joke’s on him,” Nash said. “Everyone I know could fall asleep at school every day.”

“That doesn’t exactly narrow it down,” I snapped, as the pressure to do something started to overwhelm me. “And the fact that it has to be someone with a connection to the Netherworld narrows it down too much. I can’t think of anyone else who qualifies.”

“I could tell you…” a nauseatingly familiar, glacier-cold voice said from my left, and I turned slowly to find Alec watching us from the entrance to the quad. “But that would ruin the surprise.”

I stood so fast I nearly tripped over my own feet. “Let him go,” I demanded, wishing my own voice held half the authority the hellion’s did.

Avari sauntered toward us in Alec’s tall, lanky body, moving much too smoothly for a human. Or even a half human. “I’ve been in here for almost twelve hours now—thanks to the energy produced by the cesspool of envy that is your school—and I’ve grown much too comfortable to give him up now.”

“Twelve hours…?” But twelve hours ago, Alec was…

Dark rage washed over me, igniting tiny fires in my veins. “It was you the whole time, in Emma’s room. With the ice cream.”

Tod and Nash glanced at me nervously, eyes narrowed in identical questioning expressions, but I ignored them.

“You only pretended you’d let him go.”

Avari shrugged. “You’ve made it difficult to gain access to this body lately, so why give it up once I had it?”

“But the password… How did you know about my bike?” I asked, and both Hudson brothers frowned in confusion.

“Ahh, Ms. Marshall is a veritable fount of information.”

He’d tricked Emma into playing what she thought was a trivia game, then had manually hacked our password. Damn it! That never would have happened if I’d told her what was going on.

But… “I saw you.” I stepped closer, and Nash and Tod moved up to stand at my sides. “An hour ago, in the Netherworld. Talking to Invidia. You didn’t have Alec then.”

Avari smiled with Alec’s full lips, and the effect was too creepy to bear. “I had him in…what would you call it today? Limbo?”

“Paused? You had him paused?” Somehow, that sounded almost worse than being actively possessed. Where had Alec been, when neither he nor Avari were using his body? Some sort of mindless, metaphysical holding cell?

“Precisely. And that would never have been possible, if this generous educational institution hadn’t provided me with the power to control both his body and my own simultaneously.”

“Let him go.” Nash stepped forward when my horror proved too much to fight through for the moment. But Avari had come to make a deal, and he wouldn’t leave until he’d gotten what he wanted.

Or been physically evicted from his host.

“What do you want?” I demanded, trying to gather my thoughts and come up with a plan.

“I want you.” The brown eyes that stared at me were Alec’s but their expression was all hellion. “You come with me now, of your own free will, and I give you my word that I’ll never possess any of your friends again.”

“Stall him,” Tod said, and that’s when I realized Avari could neither see nor hear the reaper. And Tod had a plan. “Keep him talking. Blink if you understand,” he said, and I blinked, careful not to look at him and give away his presence.

“I’ll be right back,” he said. I blinked again, and Tod disappeared.

“No way,” I said to the hellion, hating every second that I was forced to address him in my friend’s body. “You’re gonna have to do better than that if you expect me to just hand myself over to you.”

Alec’s head cocked to the side, like he was studying a particularly interesting insect. “This isn’t a negotiation, Ms. Cavanaugh. If you don’t cooperate, you’ll be to blame every time I feed through this body, or try on Ms. Marshall’s form and find out exactly what she has to offer.”

I swallowed, fighting through horror and revulsion just to be able to speak. “You’re psychotic.”

“We don’t utilize that term in the Nether. The very concept is considered both obvious and redundant. Now, if you don’t cross over this instant, I swear I will take the reins of your boyfriend’s subconscious the next time he succumbs to slumber, and we’ll see how well you like him when I’m in control.”

“Don’t listen to him, Kaylee,” Nash insisted. “I’ll never let that happen.”

Avari laughed, and the cold, sterile joy sounded foreign and harsh coming from Alec’s throat. “We all know you can’t stop me.”

“But I can.”

I heard Tod before he appeared, and he appeared just a fraction of a second before he swung a big aluminum toaster in a two-handed grip—at the back of Alec’s head.

Alec’s eyes fluttered, then closed, and he collapsed to the ground, unconscious but still breathing, and at least temporarily free from the Netherworld body snatcher.

“One down,” Tod said, grinning over the still form on the grass. “Let’s go evict the other one.”