My Soul To Take

CHAPTER 16

My hand grasped Nash’s. He glanced my way, and his eyes went wide. “Again?” he whispered, leaning down so that his lips brushed my ear, but I could only nod. “Who is it?”

I shook my head, each breath coming quickly now. I hadn’t pinpointed the source yet. There were too many people, in too many tightly formed groups. All the bodies in dark colors were blending together in a virtual camouflage of funeral attire, and in some cases I couldn’t distinguish one form from another.

A bolt of uncertainty shot through my heart, piercing my determination like a spear through flesh. What if I can’t do this? What if I can’t find the victim, much less save her…?

“Okay, Kaylee, relax.” His whispered words flowed over me with an almost physical sliding sensation, trying to calm me even as his eyes churned in slow, steady fear. “Look around slowly. We can save the next one. But you have to find her first.”

I tried to follow his directions, but the panic was too loud, a private, frenzied buzzing as the scream built inside my head. It interrupted thought. Rendered logic an abstract concept.

Nash seemed to understand. He stepped in front of me so that we were facing, his nose inches from my forehead. He stared into my eyes and took both my hands in his. The crowd shuffled by, parting to flow around us like water around a river outcropping. Several people glanced our way, but no one stopped—I wasn’t the only young woman having a public breakdown in the gym, and most of the others were much louder than mine. For the moment, anyway.

I clenched my jaw shut, holding back the strongest soul song I’d ever felt as I let my gaze rove the crowd, passing over the boys and adults and lingering on the girls. She was here somewhere, and she was going to die. There was nothing I could do to stop that. But if I found her in time, and if I was truly capable of doing what Nash had explained to me, I could bring her back. We could bring her back.

Then all we’d have to worry about was avoiding the rogue reaper fury.

It may have been coincidence, or maybe my very real need, despite our strained relationship, to see that my cousin was safe, but my gaze settled first on Sophie. She stood beneath the basket at the far end of the gym with a group of teary-eyed friends, arms linked in a huddle of sorrow. But none of those red, damp faces intensified my panic, and not one of them was dimmed by a veil of shadows that only I could see. The girls were fine, but for their grief. Fortunately, I would not have to add to it.

Next my focus found another cluster of young women—freshmen, if I had to guess. Everywhere I turned there were more girls, some in dresses, some in dark pants, others in jeans, the official uniform of adolescence. It was like the boys and adults no longer existed. My eyes were drawn only to the girls.

But of all the faces—freckled, tear-streaked, thin, round, pale, dark, and tanned—none held my gaze. Not one cried out to my soul.

Finally, after what seemed like forever, but couldn’t have been more than a minute, my gaze found Nash again. My jaws ached from being clenched, my throat was raw from holding back the scream, and my fingernails had left impressions in his hands. I shook my head and blinked away the tears forming in my eyes. She was still there somewhere—based on the unprecedented strength of the cry building inside me—but I couldn’t find her.

“Try again.” Nash squeezed my hands. “One more time.” I nodded and made myself swallow the rising sound—an agony like gulping broken glass—but this time the consequences of repressing it were very real. Pressure built in my chest and throat, and I was increasingly certain that if I couldn’t release it soon or remove myself from the source, my body would rupture into one gaping wound of grief.

Desperate now, I looked over his shoulder, where people still pressed slowly toward the exit. Everyone in that direction faced away from me, identities obscured by the anonymous backs of their heads. A thin redhead, with long, loose curls. Two heavyset girls with identical black waves. A brunette with thin, fine hair as straight as a ruler. She turned, and I saw her profile, but the panic didn’t escalate.

Then one head caught my attention—another blonde, about fifteen feet away, her entire form dark with a thick, ominous shadow that somehow fell on no one else. The moment my gaze found her, my throat convulsed, fighting to release the wail my jaws held back. My chest ached for fresh air, but I was scared to take it in, afraid that would fuel the scream I wasn’t yet ready to release. The blonde was tall and curvy, her hair cut straight across the middle of her back. If she’d had a ponytail, I’d have sworn it was Emma.

But whoever she was, she was about to die.

I couldn’t speak to warn Nash, so I squeezed his hand, harder than I’d meant to. He started to pull away, but then comprehension widened his eyes and made a firm line of his mouth.

“Where?” he whispered urgently. “Who is it?”

Now weak from resisting the song, I could only nod in the blonde’s direction, but that was little help. My gesture took in at least fifty people, more than half of them young women.

“Show me.” He let go of my left hand but still clung to my right. “Can you walk?”

I nodded but wasn’t sure that I actually could. My head rang with the echo of screams unvoiced, my legs wobbled, and my free hand grasped the air. A soft, high-pitched mewling leaked from me now, the song seeping through my imperfectly sealed lips. And with it came a familiar darkness, that odd gray filter overlaying my vision. The world felt like it was closing in on me, while something else—anomalous forms and a world no one else could see—seemed to unfold before my eyes.

Nash pulled me forward. I staggered and gasped, and my jaw fell open. But he righted me quickly, and I clamped my mouth shut, biting my tongue in a hasty effort to keep from screaming. Blood flowed into my mouth, but the next step I took was under my own volition. Pain had cleared my head. My vision was back to normal.

I stumbled on, Nash guiding me, adjusting our slow course when I shook my head. It only took twelve steps—I counted to help myself focus—then the blonde was within reach, temporarily stalled in her progress toward the door by the crowd. I stopped behind her and nodded to Nash.

He looked sick. His face went suddenly pale, and his throat worked too hard to swallow back something he obviously didn’t want to say. “You sure?” he whispered, and I nodded again, my jaw creaking now with the effort to hold back my wail. I was sure. This was the one.

Nash reached out, his fingers trembling as they passed into the eerie shadow shroud, and glanced at me one last time. Then he laid his hand on the girl’s right shoulder.

She turned, and my heart stopped.

Emma.

She’d pulled her ponytail loose at some point and had shuffled ahead of us when I’d lagged behind, fighting the panic.

I had to make myself breathe, force my lungs to expand with my teeth still clenched together. And again my vision darkened. Went fuzzy. That eerie, dusky haze slipped over everything, so that I saw the world through a thin, colorless fog.

Emma stared at me through the gloom, wide eyes dimmed by their own private shadow. Her expression was full of understanding, yet missing that vital piece of the puzzle. “It’s happening again, isn’t it?” she whispered, taking my free hand in hers. “Who is it? Can you tell yet?”

I nodded, and when I blinked, two tears slid down my face, scalding me with thin, hot trails. As I watched, a boy from my biology class brushed Emma’s arm, passing into and out of her personal shade without the slightest flicker of awareness in his eyes. All around us students and parents moved with slow, aimless steps, edging gradually toward the doors. Oblivious to the Netherworld murk they walked through. To what the next few moments would bring.

On the periphery of my vision, something rushed through the grayness. Something large, and dark, and fast. My heart thumped painfully. A spike of adrenaline tightened my chest. My gaze darted to follow the odd form, but it was gone before I could focus on it, moving easily through the crowd without bumping a single body. But it walked like nothing I’d ever seen, with a peculiar, lopsided grace, as if it had too many limbs. Or maybe too few.

And no one else saw it.

My eyes slammed shut in horror. My mind rebelled against what I’d seen, dismissing it as impossible. I knew there were other things out there. I’d been warned. I’d even caught glimpses before. But this was too much; only a thin stream of sound leaked from my tightly locked throat!

“We have to wait,” Nash whispered, and my eyes opened, my attention snapping back to Emma and the terrible matter at hand. Yet the misshapen form lingered in my mind, its odd bulk imprinted indistinctly on the backs of my eyelids. “She has to die before we can bring her back, and singing too soon would be wasting your energy.”

No. My hair slapped my face as I shook my head, fervently denying what I already knew to be true. I couldn’t let Emma die. I wouldn’t. But there was nothing I could do to stop it, and we all knew that. Except for Emma.

“What?” She glanced from me to Nash, confusion lining her forehead. “What’s he talking about?”

Sweat gathered on my palms, and for once I was glad I couldn’t talk. Couldn’t answer her. Instead, I swallowed thickly, my throat tightening around the cry scalding me from the inside. The gray haze was darker now, though no thicker. I could see through it easily, yet it tainted everything my terrified gaze landed on, as if the entire gym had been draped in a translucent cloud of smog. And still things moved on the edge of my vision, drawing my eyes in first one direction, then another.

I would have given anything to be able to speak in that moment, not just to warn Emma—because that was evidently a moot point—but to ask Nash what the hell was going on. Could he see what I saw? More important, could they already see us?

My head swiveled quickly, my eyes following an eerie burst of motion, but I was too late. I spun in the opposite direction, squinting into the ghostly gloom as I tracked another movement. My jaws ached, my head pounded, and the keening deep in my throat rose in volume. Those closest to us stared at me now, only looking away when Nash drew me into an embrace, pulling my head down onto his shoulder as if to comfort me. Which was, in part, what he was doing.

“Kaylee, no,” he whispered into my hair, but this time his Influence was little help. The urge to wail was too strong, the death coming too fast—distantly I saw Emma watching us, still wrapped in an almost solid sheet of shadow. “Don’t look at them.”

He sees them too? That answered one of my questions….

“Focus on holding it back,” he said. “Your keening breaches the gap, but I don’t think they can see us yet. They will when you sing, but they’re not here with us, no matter what it looks like.”

Gap? Gap between what and what? Our world and the Netherworld? Not good. Not good at all…

I stepped out of his arms to see his face, looking for answers in his expression, but there were none to be found. Probably because I couldn’t ask the right questions.

Fine. I would ignore the weird gray reality-veil, as impossible as that seemed. But what about the reaper? If Emma was going to die—even if only temporarily—I would not let it be for nothing.

I glanced pointedly at Emma for effect, my heart breaking a little more at the alarm clear on her face, then exaggerated shrugging my shoulders for Nash, all the while choking back the scream that now felt immediate.

By some miracle, he understood.

“You can’t see him until he wants to be seen,” Nash reminded me gently, stepping close to murmur against my forehead. His very words, the almost-physical satin-soft glide of his Influenced voice against my skin, made the panic abate a bit. Not enough to offer much relief, but enough to hold back the screaming for a few more seconds. “And I’d bet my life savings he doesn’t want to be seen. You have to wait. Just hold it in a little longer.”

“What?” Emma repeated, squeezing my hand now to get my attention. “Can’t see who? Where—”

Then, in midsentence, she simply collapsed.

Emma’s legs folded beneath her with my hand still clenched in hers. Her head hit the person behind her. He stumbled and almost went down. I fell forward with her, tears flowing freely now. Nash’s hand was ripped from my grip as my knees slammed into the floor and the blow reverberated throughout my body. And Emma’s eyes stared up at nothing, the windows to her soul thrown wide open, though it was obvious no one was home.

“Kaylee!” Nash dropped to the ground on Emma’s other side. He stared at me imploringly as people turned to look, eyes wide, mouths hanging open.

I barely heard him. I no longer noticed the dimness or the odd movement creeping back into the edges of my vision. I couldn’t think about anything but Emma, and how she lay there, unmoving, staring at the ceiling as if she could see through it.

“Let it go, Kaylee. Sing for her. Call her soul so I can see it. Hold it as long as you can.”

I looked down at Emma, beautiful even in death. Her fingers were still warm in mine. Her hair had fallen over her shoulder, and the soft ends of it brushed my arm. I let my head fall back and my mouth fall open.

Then I screamed.

The shriek poured from me in an agonizing torrent of discordant, abrasive notes that scraped my throat raw and seemed to empty me, from my toes all the way to the top of my head. It hurt like hell. But beyond the pain, I felt overwhelming relief to no longer be the physical vessel for such an unearthly din and agonizing grief over having lost my best friend. The cousin I should have had. My confidante and, at times, my sanity.

The entire gymnasium went still in an instant. People froze, then turned to stare, most slapping hands over their ears and grimacing in pain. Someone else screamed—I could tell because her mouth was wide open, though I couldn’t hear her over the much more powerful noise coming from my own mouth.

And then, before I could even process all the gawking stares aimed my way, the whole world seemed to shift.

That fine gray mist settled into place all around me, over everything normal, though that was more a feeling than a physical fact. The strange, misshapen creatures I couldn’t focus on before were suddenly everywhere, interspersed with and in some cases overlaying the human crowd, ogling me just like the students and parents, but from the far side of the grayness. They were drab, as if the haze had somehow stolen their color, and they looked distant, as if I were watching them through some kind of formless, tinted glass.

Was that what Nash meant, when he said they wouldn’t actually be with us? Because if so, I didn’t quite understand the distinction. They were entirely too close for comfort, and drawing nearer every second.

On my left, a strange, headless creature stood between two boys in wrinkled khakis, blinking at me with eyes set into his bare chest, between small, colorless nipples. An odd, narrow nose protruded from the hollow below his sternum, and thin lips opened just above his navel.

No need to mention how I knew it was a he….

Horrified, I closed my eyes, and my scream faltered. But then I remembered Emma. Em needed me.

They’re not here with us. They’re not here with us. Nash’s voice seemed to chant from inside my head. I let the song loose again, marveling at the capacity of my lungs, and opened my eyes. I was determined to look only at Nash. He could get me through this; he’d done it before.

But my gaze snagged instead on a beautiful man and woman slinking their way toward me through the crowd. They looked almost normal, except for their hazy gray coloring and the odd, elongated proportion of their limbs—and the tail curled around the female’s slim ankle. As I watched, spellbound, the man walked through my science teacher, who didn’t so much as flinch.

That’s it. Enough. I couldn’t handle any more weird gray monsters. This time I would look at Nash, or at nothing.

My throat burned. My ears rang. My head pounded. But finally Nash’s face came into focus directly across from me. But to my complete dismay, his gaze did not meet mine. He stared, rapt, at the space over Emma’s body, eyes narrowed in concentration, face damp with sweat.

I looked up, and suddenly I understood. There was Emma. Not the body cooling slowly on the floor in front of me. The real Emma. Her soul hung in the air between us, the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. If a soul can be called a thing.

She wasn’t beautiful, like I’d expected. No glowing ball of heatless light. No Emma-shaped ghost fluttering in an ethereal breeze. She was dark and formless, yet translucent, like a clear, slowly undulating shadow of…nothing. But what her soul lacked in form, it made up for in feel. It felt important. Vital.

Cold fingers touched my arm and I jumped, sure one of the Nether-creatures had come for me. But it was only the principal, kneeling next to me, saying something I couldn’t hear. She was asking me what had happened, but I couldn’t talk. She tried to pull me away from Emma, but I wouldn’t be budged. Nor would I be silenced.

A short, round woman in a sacklike dress burst into the circle that had formed around us, shoving people out of her way. The gray creatures took no note of her, and I realized they probably couldn’t see her. Or any of the other humans.

The woman squatted by Nash and said something, but he didn’t answer. His eyes had glazed over; his hands lay limp on his lap. When she couldn’t get through to Nash, she tossed an odd glance my way and shot to her feet. She wobbled for a moment, then dashed around him and knelt at Emma’s head to check her pulse.

More people knelt on the ground, hands covering their ears, their mouths moving frantically, uselessly. They were oblivious to the creatures peppered throughout their midst, a condition which was apparently mutual. A tall, thin man made frantic motions with both arms, and the humans behind him backed up. The gray creatures seemed to press even closer, but I saw it all distantly, as the scream still tore from my throat, burning like razors biting into my flesh.

Then my eyes were drawn back to Emma’s soul, which had begun to twist and writhe frenetically. One smoky end of it trailed toward the corner of the gym, as if struggling in that direction, while the rest wrapped around itself, sinking toward Emma’s body like the heavy end of a raindrop.

Transfixed, I glanced at Nash to see sweat dripping down his face. His eyes were open but unfocused, his hands now clenching handfuls of his pressed khaki pants. And as I watched, the soul descended a little more, as if the gravity over Emma’s body had been somehow boosted.

People rushed all around us, staring in my direction, shouting to be heard over me. Human hands touched my arms, tugged at my clothing, some trying to comfort me and silence my cry, others trying to pull me away. Odd colorless forms gathered in groups of two or three, watching boldly, murmuring words I couldn’t hear and probably wouldn’t have understood. And Emma’s soul moved slowly toward her body, that one smoky tendril still winding off toward the corner.

Nash almost had her. But if he couldn’t do it quickly, it would be too late. My voice was already losing volume, my throat throbbing in agony now, my lungs burning with the need for fresh oxygen.

Then, at last, the lucent shadow settled over Emma’s body and seemed to melt into it. In less than a second, it was completely absorbed.

Nash exhaled forcefully, and blinked, wiping sweat from his forehead with one sleeve. My voice finally gave out, and my mouth closed with a sharp snap, loud in the sudden silence. And every single gray being, every last wisp of fog, simply winked out of existence.

For a moment, no one moved. The hands on me went still. The human onlookers were frozen in place as if they could feel the difference, though they clearly had no idea what had happened, other than that I’d stopped screaming.

My gaze settled on Emma, searching out some sign of life. Rising chest, jiggling pulse. I would even have taken a wet, snotty sneeze. But for several torturous seconds, we got nothing, and I was convinced we’d failed. Something had gone wrong. The unseen reaper was too strong. I was too weak. Nash was out of practice.

Then Emma breathed. I almost missed it, because there was no Oscar-worthy gasp for air. No panting, no wheezing, and no choking cough to clear sluggish lungs. She simply inhaled.

My head fell into my hands, tears of relief overflowing. I laughed, but no sound came out. I had truly lost my voice.

Emma opened her eyes, and the spell was broken. Someone in the crowd gasped, and suddenly everyone was in motion, leaning closer, whispering to companions, covering gaping mouths with shaking hands.

Emma blinked up at me, and her forehead furrowed in confusion. “Why am I…on the floor?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but the residual pain in my throat reminded me I’d lost my voice. Nash shot me a grin of total, exhilarating triumph and answered for me. “You’re fine. I think you passed out.”

“She had no pulse.” The round woman sat back from Emma, her face flushed in bewilderment. “She was…I checked. She should be…”

“She passed out,” Nash repeated firmly. “She probably hit her head when she fell, but she’s fine now.” To demonstrate, he held out his hand for one of hers, then pulled her upright, her legs stretched out on the floor in front of her.

“You shouldn’t move her!” the principal scolded from my side. “She could have broken something.”

“I’m fine.” Emma’s voice was thick with confusion. “Nothing hurts.”

A quiet murmur rose around us, as the news spread to those too far back to have seen the show. Whispered words, like “died” and “no pulse” set me on edge, but when Nash reached across Emma’s lap to take my hand, the anxiety receded.

Until a second scream shattered the growing calm.

Heads turned and people gasped. Emma and Nash stared in horror over my shoulder, and I twisted to follow their gaze.

The crowd still surrounded us, but through gaps between the bodies, I saw enough to piece together what had happened.

Someone else was down.

I couldn’t see who it was, because someone was already bent over her, performing CPR. But I knew by the straight black skirt and slim, smooth calves that it was a girl, and I knew from the pattern that she would be young and beautiful.

Nash’s hand tightened around mine, and I glanced up to find his face as tense with regret as mine surely was. We’d done the unthinkable. We’d saved Emma at the expense of someone else’s life. Not one of ours—an innocent, uninvolved girl’s.

I arched both eyebrows at him, asking silently if he was willing to try it again. He nodded gravely but looked less than confident that we could carry it off. And in the back of my mind, tragic certainty lingered: if we saved another one, the reaper would simply strike again. And again. Or he’d take one of us. Either way, we couldn’t afford to play his game.

But I couldn’t let someone else die for no reason.

I opened my mouth to scream—and nothing came out. I’d forgotten my voice was gone, and this time so was the urge to wail. There was no panic. No fresh pain clawing up the inside of my throat.

Horrified, I looked to Nash for advice, but he only frowned back at me. “If you can’t sing, she’s already gone,” he whispered. “The urge ends once the reaper has her soul.”

Which was why my song for Meredith had ended as soon as she’d died—we’d made no bid for her soul.

Devastated, I could only watch as people scurried around the dead girl, trying to help, trying to see, trying to understand. And in the middle of the confusion, one of the onlookers caught my eye. Because she wasn’t looking on. While everyone else was focused on the girl lying on the gym floor, one slim arm thrown across the green three-point line, one woman stood against the back corner, staring at…me.

She didn’t move, and in fact seemed eerily frozen against all the commotion surrounding us. As I watched, she smiled at me slowly, intimately, as if we’d shared some kind of secret.

And we had. She was the reaper.

“Nash…” I croaked, and groped for his hand, hesitant to take my eyes from the oddly motionless woman.

“I see her.” But he’d barely spoken the last word before she was gone. She blinked out of existence, as silently and suddenly as Tod had, and in the bedlam, no one else seemed to notice.

Frustration and fury blazed through me, singeing me from the inside out. The reaper was taunting us.

We’d known the possible consequence and had taken the risk anyway, and now someone had died to pay for our decision. And the reaper had probably known all along that we couldn’t stop her.

And the worst part was that when I looked at Emma, who had no idea what her life had cost, I didn’t regret my choice. Not even a little bit.