If I Die (25 page)

“‘Religious rituals…’” Em continued, without even looking up for his rant. “‘Ceremony conducted by the high priest of a Wiccan church or a…Magickian’?” She looked up from the screen, frowning. “Is that even a real word?”

“Dunno.” I shrugged. “Do Wiccans have high priests?”

“I have no idea.” Emma leaned over to glance at my screen. “You having any better luck?”

“Not unless you believe that sleeping with scissors under your pillow will prevent midnight ninja incubus attacks.”

“That’s superstitious nonsense.” Tod sank into one of the kitchen chairs, looking more frustrated than I’d ever seen him. “A long time ago, people used to blame fictional incarnations of incubi to cover up an affair or pregnancy out of wedlock. It was this whole, ‘I was raped by a demon’ defense that absolved the ‘victim’ of guilt and gave everyone something intangible to blame. That created this whole legend of ethereal demons that could seduce people in their sleep, like some version of a mara who would molest you instead of scaring you, thus tempting you to damn your own soul by committing sinful acts of sex. Unfortunately, that means that al the methods of fighting these

‘demons’ that come out of that era assume that the incubus has no true physical form.”

“Which means they’re useless to us, since we know incubi are actually thoroughly physical psychic parasites,” I concluded, and Tod nodded.

“That kick to the groin method isn’t looking so bad now, is it?” Emma said.

“Neither are the scissors.”

“We’ll call that plan B,” Tod said, pulling open the fridge in search of another can of soda.

Two hours later, I was starving, and we’d still had no word from my dad or uncle about the family dinner, which I’d invited both Tod and Em to stay for.

Nor were we any closer to a decent plan A. Evidently no one in the history of the internet had ever successfully annihilated a real live incubus.

“I think we’re going to have to call it quits on the ambush,” Emma said, closing her laptop with a soft click. “At least for tonight.”

“No!” I refreshed my browser and typed in another variant of the same

“banish kill incubus” keyword search I’d been scouring the internet with. “I’m not going to have another night!” And I didn’t want to die without knowing Beck would be no threat to my best friend. “Besides, if we’re not there when he shows up tonight, he’s going to know something’s up, and we’ll have lost the element of surprise. And we—or you guys, since I’ll be dead—won’t get another shot at him if he knows you know what he is.”

Emma shrugged, meeting my gaze reluctantly. “Maybe that’s for the best, Kay. If he figures out what he’s up against, maybe he’ll just…move on.”

“But that’s just passing our problem on to someone else. Someone who won’t know how to fight him.”

“We don’t know how to fight him,” she pointed out, with infuriatingly sound logic. “The lack of information to the contrary suggests that incubi are probably immortal and practically invincible. So what choice do we have, Kaylee? You may be immune to the evil hotness, but I’m not, and I don’t want to walk away from this pregnant with a demon fetus. Or dead because I knew too much.”

“She’s right, Kay,” Tod said. “It’s not fair to involve her in this. Not when we can’t guarantee her safety.”

“I know.” I closed my laptop slowly, burning from the inside out with anger and frustration. “Maybe I could…”

“Not by yourself,” Emma interrupted. “I know you’re going to die anyway.” She swallowed and closed her eyes in a longer-than-normal blink.

“But that’s not how you want it to happen, is it?”

“Besides, if Beck shows up at Emma’s house and you’re the only one there—or at least the only one he can see—he’s going to know something’s up,” Tod said.

I couldn’t argue against their logic, but I couldn’t give up the fight, in either my head or my heart. At some point, I’d started equating a “good death”—the only thing I had left to aspire to—with defeating Beck and protecting my school. I didn’t want to die without knowing he’d gone first.

But before I could put any of that into words, my phone rang, and the display showed my dad’s number. I held up a one-minute finger to Em and Tod, then flipped my phone open. “Hey, are you on your way home?” I asked, when I recognized road noise in the background. “Uncle Brendon and Sophie are probably already on their way.”

“Kaylee, I didn’t go to work today. I’m with Brendon, and we’re not going to make it back for dinner. He’s already called Sophie. I’m so sorry, honey.”

Suddenly the kitchen felt too cold and goose bumps popped up on my arms. “Where are you?” I crossed into the living room and started to sit, until I realized I had an almost physical need to keep moving. To burn nervous energy. So I paced back and forth in front of the coffee table.

“On the way home from Tallulah.”

“Tallulah, Louisiana?!”

“Um…yeah. Brendon spent al night tracking down that incubus he ran up against fifteen years ago, and we got lucky.”

“You found him?” I asked, and Tod and Emma fol owed me into the living room, listening carefully, and dropped onto the couch.

“Yeah, his name is Daniel, and we set out this morning to pay him a visit.”

“Hey, Kay-bear,” my uncle cal ed to me over the line.

“Hi,” I returned, pausing in midstride to stroke Styx’s head when she jumped into the recliner. “So…did this Daniel tell you how to take out an incubus?”

“Well, he wasn’t very forthcoming with any information we could potential y use against him, but he did introduce us to his son—an eight-year-old incubus named Charles. It turns out that Charles is the only reason his father hasn’t relocated or changed his name—he’s trying to give the kid a stable childhood, at least until he comes into his psychic appetite, around puberty.” Which seemed to be typical for most nonhuman species.

“Okay, hurray for Charles and his father-of-the-year.” Unfortunately, I wasn’t hearing anything that would actually help us get rid of Beck.

“That’s not all,” my dad continued, in that “pay attention” tone. “Daniel is a very proud father, and he insisted on introducing Charles to us. Kaylee, the kid’s eyes swirl, and that can only mean one thing. His mother was a bean sidhe.”

“A bean sidhe?” I said, and on the edge of my vision, Emma turned to Tod in question. “I thought incubi had to breed with human women.”

“That’s what I said!” my uncle called, presumably from the driver’s seat.

“But Daniel said that inaccuracy is probably due to the fact that they usually do breed with human women for the simple ease of availability.”

“But it’s a bit of a trade-off,” my dad added. “Humans have trouble carrying incubi babies—”

“Yeah, we’ve noticed,” I said, thinking of both Farrah and Danica.

“—and even if they manage to give birth, the baby won’t live more than a few minutes without a soul.”

“Aren’t babies born with souls?” I asked, thoroughly confused.

“Evidently not incubus babies,” my uncle said.

“Okay, so how would a baby incubus get a soul?” I asked, far from sure I actually wanted the answer.

“Well, if the mother dies before the umbilical cord is cut, the baby just kind of…inherits its mother’s soul. That’s what happened with Charles’s mother, although your uncle and I are far from convinced that this poor bean sidhe just happened to die the moment after she gave birth. She wouldn’t have had the same trouble carrying an incubus fetus that a human woman would have.”

Meaning that Daniel had killed the mother of his child, to keep the hard-won infant alive.

I stopped pacing in the middle of the living room, one hand over my eyes, trying to block out that mental image. “That is beyond messed up!”

“What’s messed up?” Emma demanded, and I spared a moment to be grateful that she had decided on her own not to meet with Beck.

“It gets worse, if the mother’s human,” Uncle Brendon called over the traffic noise.

“Worse, how?” I asked, pacing again before I’d even realized my feet were moving.

“A human soul can’t sustain an incubus body,” my dad said, and I could hear the reluctance in his voice. “So if the baby is born from a human mother, there has to be some alternate source of a soul. And it needs to be ready and waiting, if the baby’s going to survive.”

Thoughts spun through my head fast enough to make me dizzy, and I struggled to bring all the facts into alignment. To make sense of the chaos.

Danica and Farrah were both human mothers, so how had Beck intended to keep his children alive after birth? Danica hadn’t made it very far into her pregnancy, so he’d probably thought he had plenty of time to find a soul for her child. But souls can’t be stolen from the living, which meant he must have been prepared to kill some poor nonhuman to donate his or her soul to his son.

And suddenly I was very, very grateful for the dissimulatus bracelets Harmony had given us, which had protected me, Nash and Sabine from notice.

Except that Sabine had read Beck’s fears and creeped him out. Had he figured out she wasn’t human? Had we painted a target on Sabine by sending her in to investigate? Would Beck be reluctant to leave Eastlake, if he knew there was at least one supernatural soul up for grabs there?

“Kaylee?” my father said into my ear, but I was too lost in my own thoughts—stil pacing frantically—to answer.

What about Farrah? Her pregnancy had progressed the furthest, thanks to Lydia, and in two short months, he’d have to…

“Oh, hell,” I whispered, as another little bit of understanding clicked into place in my head.

“What?” my dad asked, as Tod and Emma watched me expectantly.

“Lydia…” I dropped into the recliner, and hardly noticed Styx’s squeal when I landed on her tail. “It’s no coincidence they were rooming together.”

“What?” my dad repeated over the phone, while Tod echoed the same question from the couch. But Dad didn’t know about Lydia, and Tod and Em didn’t know incubi babies were born in need of a nonhuman soul. I was the only one with all the pieces of that particular puzzle.

“I just…I think I figured out where Beck was planning to get a supernatural soul,” I said into the phone.

“It’s not…?” my dad started, obviously unable to actually say what I knew he was thinking.

“No, it’s not me. He stil thinks I’m human, thanks to the dissimulatus.” I held my arm up to study the braided fiber that had kept me off Beck’s radar—

until I’d offered him a three-way with me and Em. “But I think he knows something’s off about Sabine, and one of his earlier victims had a syphon for a roommate.” And suddenly any doubt I’d had about the wisdom of breaking Lydia out of Lakeside was gone. Tod and I had saved not just her life, but her soul.

I wondered if Beck knew yet that his backup soul had flown the coop….

“In case it isn’t obvious,” my dad said. “I do not want you and Emma to go through with this idiotic plan to get your teacher alone tonight.”

“It is obvious. And don’t worry, we’ve already called that off. In fact, I think Emma should stay the night here, just in case.”

“Good idea,” my dad said, and Uncle Brendon piped up with something I couldn’t quite hear.

“What’d he say?”

“He said you should try to get the rest of Emma’s family out of the house tonight, too, just in case.”

Especially considering that Beck had a track record of feeding from his victims’ mothers, and Em’s mom had been alone with Em and her older sisters for as long as I’d known them. The Marshall house was practically an incubus buffet.

“Okay, we’ll come up with something,” I said as Styx laid her head on my lap and closed her eyes. “What time will you be home?”

“We’re still almost six hours away, but hoping to be home a little after midnight. I don’t want to miss any of your last day.”

“I’ll wait up for you.” My heart ached, and I couldn’t quite separate sadness for his loss from my own fear. “I gotta go.”

“Okay, see you tonight.”

I flipped my phone closed, then leaned back in the recliner to slide it into my pocket.

“What are we coming up with?” Em asked, before I could organize everything I needed to tell them into anything resembling coherence. “And what was he saying about babies and souls?”

“It sounds like Beck’s incubus children need a nonhuman soul to survive,” Tod said.

“Yeah.” I was impressed with how much he’d put together based on what little he’d heard. “If the mother’s not human, the incubus will kill her to provide the baby with her soul. But if the mother’s human, he has to find an alternate source.”

Tod nodded grimly. “And you think Beck had something to do with Farrah and Lydia rooming together?”

“I think it’s too much of a coincidence to have happened on its own,” I said. Em still looked confused, but I’d have to explain in the car. It was almost six-thirty. Beck would come calling at eight, if not before. “We need to go get your over night stuff and talk your mom and sisters into leaving for the night.

Right now.”

“Hey, Kaylee!” Ms. Marshal stuck her head out of the bathroom when I followed Emma down the hall toward her room. “What are you girls up to tonight?”

“Sleepover at Kaylee’s,” Em said, pulling her sleeping bag from the top of the hal closet.

“On a school night?” Ms. Marshall frowned, her lips out lined, but not yet filled in with lipstick. “I don’t think so….”

“We’re cramming for a big math test,” I said, leaning against the door frame, where I could see them both. “And I swear we’ll get plenty of sleep.”

Lies, all lies… When had my life become a series of disasters barely strung together with lies?

“Mr. Cavanaugh’s fine with it, Mom.” Em crossed her room and started pulling clothes from her dresser, as if her mother had already agreed. “And he’l be there the whole time. This is total y legit.”

Yeah. Legitimately guaranteed to save Emma’s life and keep her uterus unoccupied. Her mother should have been thanking us.

“Besides, you’re going out with Sean tonight, right?” Em zipped her duffel. “This way you could stay the night.”

“Emma!” Ms. Marshall stuck her head into the hall again, curling iron wrapped around a strand of hair all the way up to her skull.

“Oh, come on, Mom. I’m seventeen. I know what happens when the lights go out, and this way you won’t have to drive home in the middle of the night and try to sneak in without waking anyone up.”