My Soul to Keep (21 page)

A very odd statement coming from my father…
But I knew what he meant.

“I’m fine, Dad. I’m being careful.” Whatever that meant…I was too tired at the moment for much coherence.

“You’re not fine, Kaylee.” His mug clunked against the countertop. “You can’t function on so little sleep, and you’re only going to make yourself sick by trying.”

“So what do you suggest?” I asked as the waitress set a plate of chocolate chip pancakes on the table in front of me. Sugar would keep me awake, right? I thanked her, then pushed the melting scoop of butter around with my knife.

My dad sighed. “I don’t know. We’re still working on it. Can you stay with Nash or Harmony? As little as I trust that boy in some respects, I do trust him to wake you up if you start screaming.”

Unfortunately, hanging out with Nash wasn’t an option, unless I was willing to cross into the Netherworld and hand over my soul for the privilege. And I couldn’t stay with Harmony without having to explain her son’s absence. So maybe Emma, once Tod went to work…?

“Yeah,” I said around a sweet, chocolaty mouthful. “Don’t worry, I won’t be alone.”

“Okay, I have to go.” He paused, and I heard doubt and concern in the short silence. “I’ll call to check up on you, so answer your phone when it rings. And I’ll see you tonight.”

“Count on it,” I said, desperately hoping I wasn’t jinxing myself with that one.

I hung up my phone and slid it into my front pocket, then
looked up to find Tod eyeing my pancakes. “Do you want something? Do reapers even need food?” To my surprise, he was already halfway through his juice, but I couldn’t remember ever seeing him actually eat.

“We don’t need it, just like we don’t need sleep, but all the same pleasure sensors are still there and functioning. Including taste buds,” he clarified when I grinned with one raised brow.

“Unfortunately, the reaper gig doesn’t pay in human currency, so I’m perpetually low on funds.”

Oh.
Now
that
I understood.

“Here. This is more than I need, anyway.” I pushed my plate to the center of the table, and handed him a napkin-wrapped bundle of silverware. “I can’t eat with you drooling like a starving child.”

“Thanks.” He dug in, and I watched, amused by the thought that Death had a sweet tooth.

“So, I assume I’m not the only one who isn’t buying this Winter Carnival/Liminal Celebration coincidence, right?” We hadn’t been able to talk it through before, with Emma around—or even dozing.

Tod swallowed his first bite, nodding. “There’s no way they’re unrelated. My guess is that Avari’s planning a big Netherworld feast to take advantage of such a large concentration of human energy when the boundary between the worlds is so thin. They’ll be able to soak it all up with minimal effort in the hour surrounding dusk.”

I nodded, chewing my own syrup-soaked bite. “But surely that’s not all there is to it. I mean, really? A big picnic? That’s Avari’s master plan? That makes him sound about as dangerous as Yogi Bear.”

Tod shrugged. “Yeah. If Yogi were a soul-sucking, body-stealing, boyfriend-snatching, damned-soul-torturing evil demon from another world. Besides, what else could he be planning?”

“I don’t know. But the winter solstice happens every year, and Alec said this was their first festival in decades. Why? What’s different about this year?” I took another bite, chewing while I waited for an answer neither of us had. “Whatever it is, we need to know before we get there. Are you supposed to see Addison today?”

Tod nodded and dropped his fork on the plate. “Yeah. But if I refuse to take the shipment afterward, Avari’s going to know something’s up.”

I shrugged and cut another bite. “So take it. Just don’t deliver it to Everett. We’ll figure out how to get rid of it after we’ve gotten Nash out of there.”

Tod frowned, a bite hovering halfway to his mouth. “Kaylee, we don’t even know if Alec is going to show up, now that Avari caught E.T. phoning home. For all we know, he’ll have his proxy locked up even tighter than Addison, and we’ll cross over into this massive chaos swarming with freaks ready to chew our eyeballs and slurp up our intestines.”

I felt my brows arch halfway up my forehead. “Eyeballs and intestines? You’ve been crossing over every day for a month. Has anyone even looked twice at your soft tissues?”

“No, but I was there working for Avari.” He leaned closer to whisper over the table. “Or maybe it’s because I’m dead, and even most Netherworlders won’t eat dead meat. But you’re not dead and you don’t have permission to be there. So it’s
your
soft tissues we should be worrying about.” He shrugged when I swallowed thickly, and leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms over the tee stretched across his well-toned chest. “I just thought you should know what you’re getting into.”

A chill shot down my spine in spite of the hot coffee warming my belly. “Which is why I need you to keep your eyes and ears open while you’re with Addison,” I said. “We need to know what happened to Alec, and where they’re
keeping Nash, and what kind of shape he’s in, in case Alec isn’t there to help us. We also need everything you can find out about this Liminal Celebration And even if you can manage all that, I have a feeling we’ll be walking into a very unpleasant surprise tonight.”

“Agreed.” Tod mopped up a puddle of syrup with the last bite of pancake. “But I’m not making any promises on this spy mission. It’s not like I have free rein of the Netherworld.”

I hadn’t assumed he did, but… “Don’t you do half of your job there? I mean, isn’t that where you take the souls to be recycled?”

Tod’s brows shot up, and I couldn’t tell if he was amused or horrified by that thought. “To the Netherworld? No. If I took souls there, they’d be eaten, instead of recycled. Reapers have access to the Netherworld by virtue of being dead, Kaylee. Not as an employee benefit.”

Ohhhh…
I felt my face flush at my own stupidity. “So, where do you take them?”

“I can’t tell you that.” And that time, his grin looked genuine. “Company policy. And as for my business in the Netherworld, I pop into Avari’s office—the one we were in when Addy died—and he brings her in. We get an hour, most of which I spend talking to her, to keep her mind from slipping under the strain of constant torture and abuse.”

“She has a mind?” I couldn’t wrap my own mind around that one, though I couldn’t imagine why he would visit her if she didn’t. “But she’s dead.”

“So am I.” Tod set his fork on my empty, syrup-smeared plate. “You have to stop thinking of death as the end of everything. Yes, in most cases the soul is recycled, but if that doesn’t happen, there are a bunch of ways to be dead, with or without a body, a memory, and a soul. Addy has everything but her body, and I’m not even missing that, as you may have noticed.” He spread his very corporeal arms for emphasis
and almost smacked some poor waitress carrying a huge tray of food.

“I know. But how does Addy have her soul if she sold it to Avari?”

“She and her soul have been reunited in the Netherworld, but he actually owns it. Thus the constant torture.”

“Oh.” I made a mental note to keep my mouth shut about things I didn’t understand. And to let Tod go invisible whenever he wanted—though I would never have believed it, he actually caused less trouble that way. “Just keep your ears open while you’re there, okay?”

Tod nodded reluctantly, and I understood his frustration. The only special skills a reaper could use in the Netherworld were his actual soul-harvesting ability and the ability to cross back over, which made sense, now that I knew he didn’t work there. He couldn’t go invisible, or walk through walls, or project his voice to only select occupants in a room.

He’d be practically human, and he didn’t look very pleased by the thought.

“What about you? What are you going to do?” He glanced to the left, at a clock hanging over the door into the commercial kitchen. “We still have nine hours to kill. Eight, if you want to get there early.”

Which I did, for obvious reasons.

“I’m going to see if I can crash at Emma’s. It’s okay to tell her about my sleeping issues, right, since they have nothing to do with the Demon’s Breath epidemic or Nash being missing?”

But Tod shook his head slowly. “Kay, I think you should stay away from Emma for a while.”

I frowned, my nearly empty mug of heavily doctored coffee hovering in front of my mouth. “Why?” We could keep an eye on each other. Her, for the demons in my dreams, and
me for the demons in her body. “I need to know if Avari possesses her again.”

Tod leaned forward with his arms crossed on the table, eyeing me intently. “I know, but the truth is that if you’re with her, that’s much more likely to happen. Emma is a very convenient direct line of communication to you. But if you’re not with her, no one can talk to you through her.”

So the best way to protect Emma was to stay away from her.

Well, crap. Looks like I’m on my own today.

Tod glanced at the table for a moment before meeting my eyes. “I’ll have a little time between visiting Addy and going to work.” And he would
have
to work at least a half shift, because an unemployed reaper was a dead reaper, and a dead reaper was no good to anyone. “So I’ll pop in then and you can take a nap.”

I couldn’t stifle the yawn that came at the very thought of sleep. “Thanks.” A nap sounded
sooo
good. Assuming I could keep myself in my own world long enough to enjoy it.

O
VER THE NEXT HOUR
and a half, I drank an entire pot of coffee in front of the TV and fielded phone calls from Emma and my dad, while avoiding one call each from Harmony and Sophie. Emma called in tears, and it took me nearly twenty minutes to calm her down. Thanks to his father’s position in the community and his threat to sue the hospital, Doug’s death was getting a lot of coverage on the local stations. I felt horrible about not being able to comfort her in person, but Tod’s warning kept me firmly on my own couch, telling myself over and over again that I was staying away from Emma for her own good.

My dad was just calling to check up on me, and as bad as I felt about having to lie to him, if I’d told him I was alone, he would have left work—and possibly lost his job—to come sit with me while I napped.

Sophie left me a furious voice mail demanding to know why my presence at a party—or anywhere else, for that matter—seemed to usher in disaster. She’d seen the news and one
of her friends had told her Nash and I were at the party. Fortunately, Sophie seemed to have no clue that Nash was missing, which meant I wouldn’t have to call her back to find out if she’d seen him before he disappeared.

Harmony called the home phone looking for Nash, who wasn’t answering his cell. But since she’d just gotten home from work, she didn’t know how long he’d been gone, and she didn’t sound too worried yet. Though that would no doubt change as the day wore on with no contact from him. Especially once she heard about Doug’s death on the news.

At the end of the message, she said she might have found a way to keep me anchored to our world when I slept. As grateful as I was for that little tidbit of hope, I sat on my hands to keep from answering the phone for details, because then I’d have to lie to her, too, and for some reason, lying to Nash’s mom made me feel even worse than lying to my own father.

An hour after her phone call, I was sitting on the couch sipping from the last can of Jolt, watching the loudest action movie I could find on one of the cable networks, shivering in a short-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of jeans. I’d turned off the heat and opened all the windows, hoping cold air would help keep me awake. Yet in spite of the caffeine, the temperature, and the noise, my eyes were just starting to close when the home phone startled me upright with its sharp, electronic bleating.

The caller ID read
Unknown,
so I dropped the phone back onto the cradle without answering. But my gaze stayed glued to the phone dock as the answering machine kicked in.

My father’s voice filled the room, asking the caller to please leave a message after the tone, then an obnoxious electronic beep skewered my exhausted, overworked brain. For a moment, the machine produced only soft static, and I started to relax, assuming it was a wrong number.

Then a familiar voice called my name, and I whirled around so fast I nearly fell off the couch.

“Kaaayleeeee,” Avari said, and the discordance of a hellion’s voice on my regular, human-manufactured answering machine was enough to make me dizzy. “I know you’re there. Where else would you be without your boyfriend to keep you warm, or your father to keep you safe?”

What?

I scrambled over the couch so fast my knee slammed into the armrest and my bad arm brushed the rough upholstery, but I barely felt the pain in my rush to get to the phone. “What do you know about my dad?” I demanded, before the phone even made it to my ear.

“I know that he’s sitting four feet from me, unconscious but breathing. For the moment.”

“You’re lying!” I shouted, panic thudding in my head with each beat of my heart. “He can’t cross over.”

Avari laughed, and the sound was like shards of ice shattering on concrete. “Neither can Mr. Hudson, yet here they sit, waiting for you to come save them.”

Noooo…
He was lying. He had to be. “Prove it.”

The hellion laughed again, and the callous racket was sharp enough to scrape the flesh from my bones. “Your father is a large man, but about as frightening as a stuffed bear. And when he cries in his sleep, as he’s doing at this moment, he calls you ‘Kay-Bear.’ He also asks for a woman named Darcy, whom I can only assume was your ill-fated mother.”

Anguish crashed over me, and I sank onto the couch. For a moment, I heard nothing but the beating of my own heart and felt nothing but a hopeless, almost pleasant numbness crawling over my entire body.

“What do you want?” I asked when I was capable of speech again, and my voice sounded like it was being whispered from the other end of a long tube.

“I have already answered that question,” Avari said. “And my answer hasn’t changed. Cross over now, and I will let them go.”

Or
…he’d keep all three of us, and I would officially qualify as the dumbest girl on the face of the planet. But if I refused to come, would he kill them? Could I bluff him, or stall him somehow?

The room around me swam with my tears. My hand clenched around the phone. My chill bumps now had nothing to do with the cold room.

“Kaylee? What’s wrong?” Tod asked, and I looked up to find him standing on the other side of the coffee table, watching me in concern. For once I was too upset to be startled by his sudden appearance. “And why is it colder than
polar bear
piss in here?”

“Shhhh…” I whispered, covering the mouthpiece with one hand while I wiped hot tears from my face with the other.

He waved my warning off. “No one else can hear me. Who is that?”

“He has my dad…” But before I could say any more, the hellion spoke again.

“Time waits for no
bean sidhe,
Ms. Cavanaugh. Are you coming or not?”

“Avari? On the phone?” Tod’s jaws bulged with fury, and he spun around like he’d punch something, but there was nothing within reach. “How the hell did he…?” The reaper swung back around to face me, eyes narrowed on me. “Who is he
in?
”

Oh, crap.
I hadn’t even thought of that.

I covered the mouthpiece again, and the words fell from my lips so quickly even I could hardly understand them, but Tod seemed to have no trouble. “Emma. It has to be. Can you help her?”

He scowled, his fists clenching around air at his sides. “I don’t know. I’ll be right back.” Then Tod was gone, and I was alone in my freezing living room with the very voice of evil.

“How did you get to him?” I demanded, uncovering the
receiver. Yes, I was stalling, but I also needed to know how he’d crossed my father over, so I could stop him from doing it again. Otherwise, bargaining for my dad’s freedom, or even his life, would be like holding ice in my palm in July; it would only melt away again.

“My resources are vast, Ms. Cavanaugh, and unlike you, I have no moral qualms preventing me from using them to my advantage.”

I stood, pacing the length of my living room as I spoke. “Is that your way of saying you have people?”

He chuckled again, sounding genuinely amused that time. “I suppose so. I have many, many people. One more, in fact, than I had an hour ago.”

My anger raged again at his implication, but I did my best to contain it. Avari was trying to make me mad. Trying to rush me into a snap decision that would likely get all three of us killed.

Out of the corner of my eye, something moved, and I glanced up to see that Tod had returned. “It’s not Emma,” he said, breathing hard, as if he’d actually had to exert himself for that piece of information. Or as if he was too furious to breathe properly. “She’s having brunch with her mom and one of her sisters. It’s not my mom, either. I already checked.”

Crap!
Who else could it be?

“So what about your people, Ms. Cavanaugh?” Avari asked, blessedly oblivious to the other conversation I was holding. “What are you willing to do to save them?”

I covered the mouthpiece again and sank onto the edge of the coffee table, my head spinning with anger, frustration, and exhaustion. “It could be anyone…” I moaned to Tod, staring up at him in desperation. “What are there now, six billion people on the planet?”

Tod shook his head. “He can’t just possess some random
sleeping stranger, Kaylee. The host has to be someone with a connection to the Netherworld. Someone who’s left a psychic imprint there, either by crossing over or by tasting death in one form or another. Which is how he got Emma. She was technically dead for a couple of minutes back in September, right?”

I nodded, my thoughts as scattered as dandelion fuzz on the breeze. Em had died, and I’d crossed over. Those were our connections. Were we both now fair game for demon possession?

“It probably also has to be someone with a connection to you. Otherwise, how would he get your phone number? It’s unlisted right?”

“Kaylee?” Avari’s impatience reclaimed my attention, as Tod’s new information began to process in the back of my mind.

“It’s not about what I’m willing to risk!” I snapped into the phone, having hit the limit of my own tolerance. “It’s about what I stand to gain from that risk. Which is nothing, because we both know you’ll never let them go if I cross over.” After all, he was a hellion of greed.

“I might not,” the hellion agreed, and in my mind, I saw a featureless, borrowed head nodding sagely. “But you’ll have to take that chance if you ever want to see your father and boyfriend again.”

I covered the mouthpiece and met Tod’s eyes. “Someone who’s tasted death and has a connection to me. Like Emma…” Oh, no.
No, no, no…
“It’s Sophie.” My eyes closed in horror, but I knew I was right. “Avari’s in Sophie.”

Tod frowned, then he was gone again.

“Well?” Avari said into my ear. “Which do you value more—their lives, or your freedom?”

But I had no answer to that because it wasn’t a fair ques
tion—if I crossed over, I’d be giving up both options. “Give me a gesture of goodwill,” I demanded. “A sign that you intend to keep your word.”

Avari laughed so hard they probably heard him in the next dimension. “What did you have in mind?” he asked, amusement still ringing loud and clear in his voice. “A pinkie swear?”

I rolled my eyes. Where did he get his cultural references, Hannah Montana? “Send one of them back now,” I clarified. “And I’ll cross over, then you can release the other.” Of course, I had no intention of crossing over, because I didn’t believe for a second that he’d actually give back either my father or Nash. So his next question stunned me into speechlessness.

“Which one?”

“What?” I asked when his words finally sank in.

“Which one will you trade yourself for? Which one will you save?”

“Oh, right,” I snapped, digging deep to find the courage for a few more words—and desperately hoping my bravado didn’t get anyone killed. “Like you’re actually going to let one of them go.”

Avari chuckled softly, and the sound skittered up my spine like spiders crawling on long-dead bones. “I’m just intrigued enough by your proposition to actually send one of them back. But only because your agony over the decision promises to be a rare and extravagant treat.”

As if I would ever let him snack on my pain…

Still, it was a chance to get one of them out alive, immediately, which meant Tod and I would only have to escape the Netherworld with two passengers, instead of three.

“So, which one will it be? The father or the lover? Which do you love more?”

I don’t know.
My father, who loved me, but abandoned me
to his brother. Or my boyfriend, who loved me, but lied to me, Influenced me, and let a hellion wear my body.

There were no guarantees that I’d make it out of the Netherworld alive with whichever one I left in Avari’s…care. So the only one whose safety was guaranteed—assuming the hellion’s
people
couldn’t get to him again—was whichever one he sent over immediately.

And I couldn’t choose.

“This offer expires in two minutes, Kaylee…” Avari’s intimate whisper made me feel dirty, and promised much worse things to come when we met in his territory. Things that may have already happened to my father and Nash. And I couldn’t decide which of them to rescue….

Fortunately, before I could squeak out a desperate, impulsive answer, I heard a dull thud over the line, then the smack of something hitting the floor.

An instant later, Tod’s voice spoke to me over the line. “You were right. It was Sophie.”

“What did you do?” I demanded. My momentary relief was eclipsed by concern for my cousin, who hadn’t exactly volunteered her body for hostile occupation. Even if her own occupation of it was usually hostile.

Tod chuckled. “You can’t possess someone who doesn’t have control over his or her own body. That’s like stealing a horse without grabbing the reins—how are you supposed to control the animal?”

Had he just compared my pampered cousin to a beast of burden?
I shouldn’t like the comparison, but I do….

Still… “So what did you do?” I repeated.

“I hit Sophie on the back of the head with a universal remote. This thing is huge. It’s like a cell phone from the ’90s.”

“You were supposed to get rid of Avari without hurting the host!”

“Yeah, I didn’t get that memo. Maybe next time you should
be a little more specific when you boss me around while I’m saving your ass. Though, frankly, this whiny little shrew is lucky she only has one bump, ’cause she’s had this coming for a while.”

Well, I couldn’t argue with him there. “Is she still breathing?”

“It was a remote, not a sledgehammer. Anyway, it’s not her time. She’ll be fine.”

“She better be.” I sighed and sank onto the couch again, desperately hoping I hadn’t just signed my father’s death warrant. Or Nash’s. “But the real question is how can we keep it from happening again? What’s to stop Avari from taking over everyone I know?”

“Other than the qualifications for an intermediary? I mean, how many people do you know who have a connection to the Netherworld?”

Not many, fortunately. Not that I knew of, anyway. But there were a few—Emma, Sophie, Uncle Brendon, and Harmony—none of whom I wanted to see hurt. Especially because of me.