“Do you really want some other girl to go through that because we helped bring an incubus into the world?”
I shook my head. “But I promised Emma I’d try.” And I wasn’t going to let those horrible things happen. If her son grew up to be dangerous, I was both prepared and willing to do what had to be done. At least, I would be by then. Surely.
“You did try. And it’s a moot point anyway, because I don’t have any extras. Reapers never have extras, unless they’ve gone rogue.”
I’d only met two rogue reapers, and that was two more than most people would ever meet. But one of them was dead, and the other—Thane—I had no way to find. And I wouldn’t go looking for him even if I knew how, because there’s a big difference between risky and dangerous. Between determined and stupid.
And anyway, I wasn’t that desperate just yet. There was still one more possibility....
But I clamped a lid on that thought before it could show in my eyes. I rarely disagreed with Tod, and I wasn’t sure this was actually one of those times. I needed more time to think, and there was no use worrying him before I knew there was anything for him to worry about.
Chapter Nine
I stayed with Tod, and we made the most of the last half hour of the day, then, when he had to go to work, I blinked into my room at home to check on everyone.
My dad was asleep in his recliner in the living room with the TV on, his crutches on the floor next to the chair. “Dad.” I shook him awake, and he blinked at me slowly. Groggily. “You fell asleep in your chair again.”
He pulled the lever to retract the attached ottoman and I helped him stand, then handed him his crutches. He glanced at his watch. “Tod went to work?”
“Yeah.” No sense denying where I’d been until midnight.
He adjusted the crutches beneath his arms. “I know you don’t sleep here anymore, Kaylee. But I’m not mad. You’re as grown as you’re going to get.”
“I don’t sleep anywhere, Dad. Try not to read too much into that.”
He wouldn’t have said that if he were fully awake. If he weren’t on pain pills, because the stab wound in his thigh still hurt like hell. It bothered him that curfews, healthy meals, and a good night’s sleep were wasted on me. It bothered him that I spent so much time at Tod’s, where there wasn’t a door to leave open. It bothered him that there was little he could do to protect me now, and it bothered me that he seemed to think that meant I no longer needed a dad.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. I still needed him. I loved him more than ever. And there were days when I wanted nothing more than to be a normal seventeen-year-old, worried about her dad watching the clock on prom night, which was coming up in...four days.
How the hell had that snuck up on me?
Em and I had picked out our dresses together. She’d sworn that prom was exactly the motivation she needed to return to school after her own murder and that dress shopping would help her get to know her new body, but I saw her face in the mirror every time a slinky, sparkly gown fit too loose in the bust and hips and fell too long over her legs. She didn’t want to go to prom as Lydia.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to go at all, but I’d promised her months ago that we’d go together, with or without dates, and she’d been planning our first junior/senior prom since we were freshmen.
Her dress was red and sleek and dramatic, and it looked great with her darker Lydia hair.
My dress was gold. It was long and full, and it sparkled in every little bit of available light. My dad had spent money we probably couldn’t afford on that dress because he’d said that in it, I shined brighter than the sun. Just like my mother.
Tod said my dress glittered like sunlight on the ocean. He found a gold vest and tie to match, but he refused to show off his tux in advance for fear of forever tainting the other guys’ prom experience with feelings of inadequacy.
So I would have to wait to see him in it, but I had no doubt the wait would be worth it.
With my father in his room for the night, snoring two minutes after I’d closed the door, I opened my own bedroom door to find Styx sitting on the end of the bed staring at me, like she’d just been waiting for me to appear.
She probably had. Something about the fact that she was a Netherworld half-breed meant that she could see and hear me even when normal people couldn’t. She’d probably known I was home before I’d even woken up my dad.
As soon as I stepped into my room, she jumped down from the bed and ran at me expectantly, tiny pink tongue hanging from her mouth by half an inch. I picked her up and scruffed her fur, amazed for the millionth time how small and fluffy and normal-looking she was in that moment, considering that if there was danger lurking anywhere near me, on either plane of existence, she’d be baring small teeth sharp enough to shred human flesh all the way to the bone.
Em was asleep on her bed with her bedside-table lamp on, and I noticed that while Styx curled up with me anytime I sat in one place for more than five minutes, she never curled up with my best friend, even though they saw each other much more often now that Em lived here and I was dead. Styx tolerated her. She even seemed to like her. But Styx and I had bonded in her infancy, and she would forever be loyal to me above all others.
Sometimes I wondered what would happen to her if and when I died...permanently.
Before her death, Emma and Toto were just as close as Styx and I, but she’d decided to leave Toto—Styx’s littermate—with Traci, to protect her and the baby. Just in case.
I set Styx down and carefully untangled the knot of earbud wires from Emma’s hand, wrapped them around her iPod, then set it on the nightstand. Then I pulled her covers up to her waist—her feet looked cold—and turned off the lamp.
After I fed Styx and checked to make sure all the doors were locked—not that anything I truly feared needed an open door to get to me—I blinked out of my house and into the middle of Madeline’s office. She stood with her back to me, a stack of papers in her hand, like she’d just picked them up from the credenza behind her desk.
She turned and saw me and gave an uncharacteristically undignified little yip of surprise. And dropped the entire stack of papers to clutch her heart. As if she could possibly have a heart attack when she was already dead. I wasn’t sure how long she’d been dead, but we had a pool going, with a bonus included for whoever was able to actually obtain the answer.
“Kaylee! You’ve certainly gotten stealthier in the past few weeks.” She didn’t look entirely impressed by that fact.
“Thanks, I guess.”
“What can I do for you?” Madeline sat in the chair behind her large dark wood desk and waved a hand at the pair of leather-padded armchairs on my side. When her boss had found out exactly how dire our situation was, when Avari was stealing souls pell-mell from the human plane, he’d increased our department’s budget and tossed a little more manpower our way.
Too bad all of that came after all the death and chaos and after Thane stole the hellions’ collection of souls, which prevented them from appearing on the human plane again, at least until they could renew their supply.
I was assuming they hadn’t yet managed that, based on the fact that I’d only seen them in borrowed—possessed—bodies since then.
“I...um...” I sank into the chair on the right and clasped my hands in my lap to keep from fidgeting. Looking nervous wouldn’t do me any favors. “Well, Tod’s at work, and everyone else I know is asleep, and I...”
Her smile got a little kinder. “You’re bored.”
“Yeah.” That wasn’t entirely a lie. My boredom usually peaked in the middle of the night, and at first the shortage of company and the complete lack of anything to keep me busy had led to a dangerous melancholy period, during which I’d lost the desire to do...well, anything. I hadn’t snapped out of it until Avari started parading the ghosts of my past—everyone I’d failed to save—before me and making me “kill” them all over again.
The melancholy hadn
’t returned. It had been replaced with a relentless thirst for justice.
Though Ira would call that rage.
“Well, fortunately, things have slowed down around here, and you know we have two new reclamation agents now.”
Yes, I knew. My dad called it the “hurry up and wait” phenomenon. They raised me from the dead to help them with a very bean sidhe–specific emergency job, and now that that job was over—at least, as long as Avari was stuck in the Netherworld—they had much less immediate need of me. And since I was the rookie among more experienced employees again, I got the smallest, simplest, least complicated jobs. Which I was fine with. I was still in high school, after all. But...
“I was thinking. Thane got away with several stolen souls. Shouldn’t we be...reclaiming them? I mean, if the others are too busy, I guess I could look into it.” That sounded casual. Right?
Madeline folded her hands on her desk. “Kaylee, Thane is a rogue reaper. He’s completely beyond our authority. The reapers police their own.”
“But he stole souls. Lots of them.” I hadn’t been able to rescue them from him at the time, because Em had just died and Lydia’s body was on the verge of death. I’d had to act quickly to save one of them. Or, a piece of each of them. “Besides, we deal with hellions who’ve stolen souls, and they’re way more dangerous than rogue reapers.”
Madeline nodded. “It’s not about the danger. It’s about the jurisdiction. There’s no other agency in place to deal with hellions when they steal souls, but the reapers have their own authority. Around here, that’s Levi, and I’m not going to step on his toes, especially after everything he’s done to help us recently.”
“But—”
“No.” She leaned closer to me over her desk. “Thane’s a reaper. Let the reapers deal with him.”
“They’re the ones who lost him in the first place!” When he’d killed my mother, then come back to kill me when I was three.
Madeline’s frown deepened. “Was there something else I can help you with, Kaylee?”
That was a dismissal if I’d ever heard one.
“No. Thanks.” I stood and headed toward the door, because using it seemed more polite than just disappearing right in front of her, and I’d obviously already pissed her off. I paused in the doorway with my hand wrapped around the doorframe. “Hey, Madeline?”
“Yes?” She sounded annoyed now.
“Whatever happened to Mr. Beck’s soul?”
“Mr. Beck?”
“The incubus. The one who killed me. His soul was in my dagger when I turned it in that first time. Did it get recycled along with the others?”
Madeline’s brows rose in sudden interest, and she put down the pen she’d picked up. “No. As it turns out, an incubus soul is a relative rarity, and it carries quite a bit of power. And since no one was expecting it at the recycling facility—your incubus wasn’t on the list, of course—Levi decided to keep it as a sort of...souvenir. A conversation piece.”
“Is he allowed to do that?”
“Well, no. Not technically. But he wasn’t allowed to bring back your young reaper suitor, either. He did that as a favor to me—” because I’d refused to work for her if she couldn’t bring Tod back to me “—so I will, of course, be overlooking his small indiscretion. As will you, naturally.”
“Naturally...” I hardly heard the word as I spoke it, because my head was spinning with other thoughts. Other possibilities.
Levi still had Beck’s soul. If it would work for the father, it would work for the son. No one else would have to die to give Traci’s baby life—a pattern that would hopefully continue throughout the little parasite’s existence.
“What exactly is a conversation piece, anyway?” That wasn’t really a lie, either, because I hadn’t actually said I didn’t know the definition. I’d just implied it.
“It’s a piece of art or decor intended to start conversations. Thus the name. In this case, it’s a highly stylized letter opener. It’s obviously just for show. Something interesting to set on his desk. And now when people ask about it, he can tell them not only the history of the letter opener itself—it’s hellion-forged steel he won in some kind of gambling game—but that it contains the soul of the only incubus ever known to have died at the hands of one of his victims.”
I started to argue with that statement. I wasn’t an incubus’s victim in the traditional sense. He hadn’t wanted my body; he’d wanted my soul. However, he had killed me, so Levi’s story wasn’t really inaccurate....
But I had just as much right to Beck’s soul as he did. More really. And I wanted Traci to have it.
“Thanks, Madeline. Just let me know when you need me. I’ll be...around.”
“Thank you, Kaylee.” I’d been dismissed again, and this time I was eager to go.
I blinked from Madeline’s office back into my bedroom, where I silently lifted the broken dagger from my dresser. I’d taken it from Beck—it was the weapon that had killed us both—and he’d bought it from Avari, who’d evidently ripped the metal from the Netherworld ground and forged the dagger himself.
That thought made me pause, stunned to realize that Avari, Beck, and I were tangled up in as intimate and distressing a knot as Nash, Sabine, Tod, and I. Hundreds of years before my birth Avari had made the blade that would kill me, but I’d survived its use—and my own death—to retain ownership of my own murder weapon. Which he no doubt wanted back.
On second thought, the Avari/Beck/me tangle was much more disturbing than anything forged in adolescent hormones and rooted in love.
I stared at the dagger in my hand for a moment, tracing the jagged, broken edges with my gaze. Invidia, the hellion of envy, had broken off both of the points on the night Emma had died. Afterward, Tod had gone back to the Netherworld to retrieve it for me, but he wasn’t able to find the severed points.
Fortunately, the jagged blades were just as scary—and almost as sharp—as the original weapon had been.
I slid the double-bladed dagger beneath the waistband of my jeans, at the base of my spine, uncomfortably aware that if I made the wrong move, I’d knick my own backside with both broken points. But I couldn’t exactly walk into reaper headquarters wielding a weapon.
In fact, I couldn’t just walk into reaper headquarters at all. I wasn’t even supposed to know where it was, and if Levi found out Tod had told me, he’d get in trouble. Which meant I couldn’t afford to wander around looking for his office. I’d need to know exactly where I was going. Or as exactly as possible, to cut down on the walking I’d have to do. I couldn’t make myself invisible to reapers.
And I only knew one person who might know where Levi’s office was and be willing to tell me.
I blinked into Madeline’s apartment and spared a moment for relief over the fact that I already knew she was still at work. Luca’s room was easy to find—there were only two bedrooms, and Madeline’s didn’t even have a bed. Did the woman truly never sleep?
Luca was out cold in a twin bed, covered only in a thin sheet, which I could see easily in the red glow of his alarm-clock numbers and the light from the bathroom across the hall.
Was Luca afraid of the dark?
I tiptoed silently to the side of his bed, but when I bent over to shake him awake, the broken dagger blades scratched the inside of my jeans. I pulled the blade out before I could accidentally slice open the seat of my own pants, then shook Luca awake with my other hand.
His eyes opened groggily, and that surprised me. For some reason, I’d expected a boy with such an intimate connection to death to be a lighter sleeper. It took him several seconds to focus on my face, and another one to recognize it.
“Kaylee?”
“Yeah. It’s me.”
And suddenly he was wide-awake. “What are you...?” His gaze fell on the broken dagger, which must have looked threatening from his perspective—flat on his back in the middle of the night with a dead girl standing over him—because he screamed like a little kid.
“Relax. I just need some help.”
“What happened? Was I possessed?”
It took me a second to figure out what he was talking about, and why my reassurance had failed to reassure him.
Alec.
Like the rest of my friends and family, Luca knew that I’d killed Alec when I’d mistaken him for Avari. I’d killed him in the middle of the night, with the very dagger I now held inches from Luca’s stomach. By total coincidence.
“No!” I reached back and slid the dagger into my waistband again, to get it out of sight. “I just need you to find something for me.”
Luca exhaled, then glanced at his alarm clock. “It’s two in the morning.”
“I know. Sorry.”
He leaned over and turned on his bedside lamp, then tossed off the sheet, and I had to admit that Sophie had good taste. The necromancer was hot. Which I could tell, because he slept in nothing but boxer briefs.
“You may as well sit down and let me put on some pants.” Luca knelt to pick up a pair of flannel pj bottoms from the floor at the foot of his bed. I pulled the dagger from my waistband again, then set it in my lap as I sank into his desk chair and glanced around his room, which was easier to see in the light.
He had a beanbag chair, which made me miss mine. His held three different soccer balls. There was a small TV on top of a chest of drawers, but no gaming system that I could see. Four different pictures of Sophie were wedged into the space between his mirror and its frame.
I suspected she’d stuck them there herself, but the fact that he’d left them said a lot.
“You sleep here alone?” I swiveled in his chair, one foot on the ground for stability.
He sat on the end of his bed, facing me, his bare feet dangling an inch from the floor. “I practically live here alone. Aunt Madeline doesn’t need to eat or sleep. I suspect she only rented this place for me.”
“That must get lonely.” I was lucky enough to have my dad, my dog, and now Emma to keep me company, even in the afterlife.