“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….
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 qu
ick 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 hear
t 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.