Before I Wake (21 page)

Alec frowned. “Like that kid in the movie?”

“Not really. But close enough,” Luca said, crossing the room to
shake Alec’s hand. “No ghosts, but I see the undead, even when no one else does,
and I can sense corpses until they’re preserved or start to rot.”

Alec shook his hand. “No offense, man, but that’s creepy.”

I rolled my eyes. “This, coming from a psychic parasite.”

“Half,” Alec insisted. “
Half
-psychic parasite. My mother was human.”

“Okay, so everyone knows everyone else now, right?” I said, and
heads all over the room nodded.

“Don’t you wanna call in Tod before we get started?” Alec
said.

“He’s filling in for a missing reaper at the hospital, but
he’ll be here when he can. He already knows all this, anyway.”

“Missing reaper? Is that what this is about?” Alec sank onto
the couch and I sat between him and Emma.

“No,” Madeline said, just as I said, “Yeah, in part.”

“Maybe start from the beginning?” Alec suggested. “For those of
us just joining the party?”

“Okay.” I took a deep breath and did a mental search for the
beginning of the story. “For those who may not know this, Madeline recruited me
specifically to help hunt and take out a serial soul thief—”

“I call him Cap’n Crunch,” Luca interrupted, and was rewarded
with a roomful of frowns. “You know. Because he’s a
cereal
thief?”

“Wouldn’t that make him more like the Cookie Crook?” Alec said,
then shrugged at all the blank stares. “Am I the only one who remembers
breakfast food from the eighties?”

“You’re the only one who remembers
anything
from the eighties,” Nash said, and Madeline frowned.

“That’s the wrong kind of ‘serial’ entirely, and we do not have
time for anecdotal tangents. Kaylee, please continue.”

Sabine muttered something bitter and profane beneath her
breath, and Nash laughed.

“Anyway…” I said. “The serial soul thief turned out to be
Avari. Also, he is now officially a serial
killer,
which is how he comes by the souls ready to be stolen.”

“So, how’s he getting them into the Netherworld?” Alec asked.
“Sounds like you’re actually looking for whoever’s working for him.”

“Nope. You know how they say old dogs can’t learn new tricks?
Well, they’re wrong. Avari’s figured out how to cross over.”

13

“THAT’S
IMPOSSIBLE,” ALEC
said. “He doesn’t have a soul. He can’t cross
over.”

“Yeah.” Emma tucked her feet beneath her, like she did during
scary movies, so nothing evil could grab her ankles from beneath the couch. “The
only reason I get any sleep at all anymore is because you told me he couldn’t
cross over. No way, no how. That’s the rule. How is he breaking it now?”

“Kaylee,” Madeline said, before I could even try to answer Em.
“I’ve been dead for more than half a century, and my superiors have been here
even longer, and in all that time, I’ve never heard of a hellion crossing
through the fog. It can’t be done. If it could, they would have taken over the
human realm centuries ago.”

“The realm? The
whole
realm?” Em
was close to panic.

“Stop saying the word
realm,
”
Sabine said. “I’m having sci-fi convention flashbacks.”

“When were you at a sci-fi convention?” Alec asked, and the
mara
shrugged.

“Nerds give good nightmare. They’re afraid of everything.”

“Could we focus, please!” I snapped. Then I turned to Alec. “If
a soul is all that’s keeping hellions from crossing over, why has it taken them
this long to make the trip? I can think of half a dozen souls Avari’s stolen
this school year alone.”

“It’s not that easy,” Alec explained. “Devouring a soul isn’t
the same as having one of your own. He’s been trying to make that work for
centuries, but once he eats the soul, it’s gone, and he can’t make it past the
fog. To cross over, he’d have to be able to sort of…install a soul in his own
body. And that’s impossible.”

“Well, he’s figured something out. I spoke to him here, on the
human plane, twice in two days, and both times he was wearing the skin of a dead
person. First Scott Carter, then Heidi Anderson.”

Em shrugged. “So maybe he’s just possessing them, and not
really crossing over. Not that that is any less terrifying.”

“What’s the difference, in practical application?” Luca asked,
and I nodded to Alec, tossing the question his way.

“Hellions can only possess the sleeping and unconscious, and
even then, only those who have some link to the Netherworld. Possession victims
have to have died—even if just for a minute—or have traveled across the fog at
least once. And since possession is merely borrowing someone else’s body, his
abilities would be limited to those his victim already has.”

“Like when he possessed Sabine and gave you nightmares?” Em
asked, and I nodded, while the
mara
scowled over the
reminder that she’d lost control of her own body, even briefly.

“But none of that is applicable here,” Alec insisted. “Because
he can’t possess the dead. No one can. It can’t be done. Period.”

“Are you sure about that?” Nash asked, and Alec nodded firmly.
So Nash turned to me. “Are you sure Scott was already dead when you talked to
him? No chance there was a misprint in the obituary?”

I shrugged. “I seriously doubt it. But even if Scott was still
alive and Avari was possessing him, that doesn’t explain how he showed up as
Heidi Anderson. She died seven months ago. No misprint can explain that
away.”

“Okay, so what do Scott and Heidi have in common?” Sabine
asked, glancing at each of us in turn.

“You’ve never met them?” Nash said.

Sabine gave an exaggerated nod. “And I never will. Because
they’re both dead.”

“Which means they’re no longer using their souls…” I said,
starting to catch on. Then I turned to Alec. “He’s figured it out. Somehow,
Avari’s figured out how to install a soul in his body. Or whatever.”

“Not possible,” Alec said again, but no one was listening to
him.

“And that makes him look like the person the soul belongs to?”
Em asked.

“More likely—assuming any of this is true—it makes him take the
form that soul last took,” Madeline said. “Souls don’t really belong to anyone,
once they’ve departed their most recent bodies. They’ll be recycled, and they’ve
been recycled before. But until that happens, they retain the psychic memory of
the life they just lived, including perfect recall of the physical form.”

“It’s much more than that,” Alec insisted. “Disembodied souls
retain much more than a psychic memory. If they didn’t, how would hellions be
able to torture them for all of eternity? Life has two parts,” Alec said,
leaning forward on the couch, and I was both amused and relieved to realize that
everyone else leaned toward him a little, ready and willing to hear the wisdom
that could save us all.

“There’s the physical body, and the soul—the life force that
supports it. When the body dies, a reaper takes the soul to be recycled, but
that process isn’t death like we understand it. The soul doesn’t cease to exist.
It’s just wiped clean of the existence it supported most recently. Until then,
the soul still thinks and feels, and it can be tortured for a hellion’s pleasure
or nutrition. So if Avari has figured out how to install a soul in his body,
what he’s actually discovered is how to absorb a human life force, something he,
as a hellion, lacks entirely. And if he’s really figured that out, we are
all—all seven billion of us—in very big trouble.”

“Okay, you’re really starting to freak me out,” Em said, and
her voice trembled.

“Good.” Alec reached over my lap to squeeze her hand, but his
tone of voice lacked any comforting qualities. “If Kaylee’s right, we should all
be very freaked out. And we should be willing to do whatever it takes to stop
Avari from crossing over, much less handing out tickets to the rest of his
hellion garden club.”

“Okay, let’s talk strategy,” Madeline said, and I couldn’t help
noticing that no one had touched the popcorn. “But first, Kaylee, where is the
soul you extracted?”

“Um, the dagger’s in the bathroom. I’ll get it.”

“The dagger?” Madeline frowned, and I realized I hadn’t
actually made my report to her yet.

“Yeah. Avari had it when I got there. He said my amphora
wouldn’t work on him—maybe because of whatever method he’s found of crossing
over?—and that the other extractors died because they didn’t have my
dagger.”

“How did
he
get it?” Alec asked,
his forehead deeply furrowed in concern.

“I’m assuming he took it from my room.” And that was one of the
scarier parts of this whole thing. “He obviously has at least some of the
standard undead abilities when he crosses over.”

“Let me see this dagger, please,” Madeline said, and I stood,
but Nash was already up.

“I got it,” he said. “I’m headed that way, anyway.”

“Thanks,” I said as he crossed the living room toward the hall.
“If we’re right about Avari figuring out how to harness a human soul, there
should be two in the dagger. Heidi Anderson’s, and the soul of the woman Avari
killed in the restroom.” I frowned with another realization. “Well, make that
three, with Beck’s.” And I couldn’t help wondering how many souls the dagger
could hold.

“So, tell us everything you remember about both encounters with
him,” Madeline said, and to my amusement, she pulled a small leather-bound
notebook from an inside pocket of her jacket and started taking notes. “Did he
have a physical form that you could tell? Or was he more of a specter?”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts, Aunt Madeline,” Luca
said.

“Yes, but most varieties of the undead have a spectral form,”
she insisted, and a lightbulb went off in my head.

“That’s what that’s called?” I wasn’t invisible; I was
spectral.
“Anyway, he was truly physically there, in
both cases. I touched him. But no one else in the mall could see either of
us.”

“Kaylee, what the hell happened?” Nash asked, and I looked up
to find him standing in the living-room doorway with my dagger in one hand, my
bloody shirt in the other.

I shrugged. “Turns out extracting a soul from a hellion
involves actually stabbing it to death. It was totally traumatic.”

Madeline stood and took the dagger by the hilt, then held it up
to the light as she examined it. “Hellion-forged steel…” she muttered, turning
the blade over. “It’s inscribed, but I don’t recognize the language.” Finally
she lowered the dagger and met my gaze. “It appears to function as an amphora in
a basic, rather barbaric fashion.”

“Yeah. I gathered that when I barbarically stabbed a
girl-shaped demon with it. Thus the trauma.”

“There was actual blood?” She set the dagger on the coffee
table, then took my shirt from Nash and held it up for a better view.

“Yup. Blood. Melodrama. Threats. He said that if I didn’t stab
him, he was going to kill this little girl carrying a balloon. Why would he do
that? Why would he volunteer to die?”

“Because he knew it would traumatize you, and your trauma is
like his chocolate-fudge brownie,” Alec said. “It’s yummy.”

Sabine shrugged. “That, and as a message.”

“What’s the message?” Em asked.

“That we’re nothing to him. We’re ants on the sidewalk, so
small compared to his foot that he can’t even squish us one at a time. By making
you banish him from one stolen body, he’s pointing out that he can get another
one anytime, anywhere,” the
mara
said, and for about
the billionth time, her insight scared me. More than ever, in fact, because this
time she was demonstrating understanding of a hellion’s thought process.

“Well, the souls in the dagger should verify some of this for
us,” Madeline said, exchanging the knife on the coffee table for my shirt. “And
if this Heidi Anderson’s soul is among them, I’d call that fairly conclusive
proof that Avari has in fact discovered how to wear the souls of the dead on the
human plane.”

“The real question is how he got her soul in the first place,”
Nash said. “Scott’s, I can understand. He could have sent Thane to kill him, or
Avari might have done his own dirty work, if he was already on the human plane
by then. But Heidi died months ago, and Avari didn’t get her soul.”

“How do you know that?” Madeline asked, and the unease churning
deep in my stomach swelled.

He shrugged. “Because Belphegore got it.”

“Who is Belphegore?” Madeline and her nephew asked in unison,
and even Alec looked confused.

“She’s the hellion of vanity my aunt made a deal with. Aunt Val
hired a rogue reaper named Marg to collect the souls of five innocent, beautiful
young women to trade in exchange for her own eternal youth and beauty. Heidi was
the first of them. Marg tried to take my cousin Sophie’s soul as the fifth, and
my aunt traded herself for her daughter. Belphegore got all five souls,
including my aunt’s.”

“Sophie’s mom died to save her?” Luca said.

“Yeah, and she’s only known that for a few weeks.” Since the
night I’d died and her father had come clean about the family secret.

“So, Belphegore is involved in this, too?” Emma had all but
curled into a ball. Hers had been one of the souls Marg tried to take, and the
minute and a half she was dead had made her eligible for possession by Avari, or
any other hellion who decided to try.

“Sounds like it. How else would Avari get Heidi’s soul?” I
said. Em had tears in her eyes. I gave her a hug, but that was the best I could
do until someone invented a Band-Aid for pure terror. “I think we need to face
the fact that Avari will be back, but we have no way of knowing where, when, or
in what form.”

* * *

My dad got home from work shortly after Madeline left to
extract and identify the souls in my dagger. She promised to fill Levi in and
ask for his help.

When my dad heard what was going on, he immediately called both
Harmony Hudson and my uncle Brendon, who showed up twenty minutes later with
Sophie in tow. Our poor little house had never been so full, but everyone agreed
that we had strength in numbers.

Everyone except Styx, who barked to be let back in, then walked
around growling at everyone she didn’t know until I finally closed her in my
bedroom to keep everyone from being bitten by a nervous half Nether-hound.

Sophie was sullen and uncooperative until Luca emerged from the
bathroom, at which point she recruited him to help her take dinner orders and
make a run to my dad’s favorite Chinese restaurant.

For the next hour, everything we’d already discussed was
dissected ad nauseam over cardboard cartons of rice and noodles, and at some
point, I realized I’d rather pull my hair out and spend eternity bald than have
to explain one more time that I didn’t
know
how
Avari had done what he’d done, or what he was up to.

After dinner, my uncle Brendon took Luca for a drive around
town—Sophie insisted on going—to see if he could sense either Thane or Mareth,
who had yet to turn up. We were pretty sure Thane had snatched her and taken her
to Avari, but no one wanted to admit defeat on that front. Not yet, anyway. And
we still had no idea why Avari wanted another reaper.

Tod turned up as they were leaving and took one look around at
the chaos and the mess, then tugged me toward my room to escape the noise.
“There are several advantages to invisibility,” he said, closing the door at his
back.

“The word of the day is
spectral,
”
I said as my arms slid around his neck. “We’re not invisible right now, we’re
spectral.
”

“I don’t care what you call it, so long as it’s just the two of
us. It’s crazy in there.”

“Yeah, but it could be worse. I, um, wasn’t able to keep this
afternoon a total secret.”

“This afternoon?” He glanced at the bed for confirmation, and I
could feel myself flush as I nodded. “Em, right?” he said, and I nodded again.
“Kaylee, I don’t care who knows, as long as you’re comfortable with it. Assuming
you made me sound good.”

I laughed. “She didn’t get the details she was hoping for.” I
sat on the edge of my desk and pulled him closer, one hand on his chest as I
looked into his eyes. “That’s between us.”