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Chapter 18

Cash

The room was spinning. Or maybe it was just my head. I blinked away a few of the purple spots that dotted my vision and squinted at the chicken scratch Mr. Reynolds had scrawled across the chalkboard. He was saying something about…the Magna Carta? I didn’t know. Hell, I didn’t even care. I was starting to lose count of the sleepless nights. One night of sleep with Anaya was not going to make up for the rest. Especially when she’d proceeded to drag my ass all over the afterlife.

It had been two days and I still hadn’t fully recovered. Last night had been yet another night of tossing and turning, listing to the hisses echo across my room in the dark. After a certain point, could you even call it insomnia anymore? Could a person die from a lack of sleep? It sure as hell felt like it. It felt like my insides were turning black like a banana you’ve left out on the counter too long. It felt like those little shadow bastards were killing me without even touching me. Like they were just waiting for that last puff of life to leave me.

I was waiting for it, too.

A wad of paper hit my shoulder and I flinched. I picked it up, fighting the urge to fling it back at someone, but stopped when I saw it was Finn. His eyebrows were all scrunched together. It’s how he looked when he was worried about Em, which was pretty much all of the time. I definitely didn’t need the guy looking at me like that. Especially after Anaya told me about him saving Em.

He lifted his hand and motioned to the paper. I unfolded it and laid it in my lap, so Mr. Reynolds wouldn’t get a bug up his ass about us passing notes. To be completely honest, I didn’t want anyone seeing me read his note. What were we, fifth-grade girls, for Christ’s sake? I unfolded it and searched for a part that wasn’t marked out.

You look like you need to talk

We can talk if you want after school.

We’ve seen each other in our underwear, so I think I’m allowed to say this now. You look like crap.

Finn

I rolled my eyes. Nice.
Very astute of you, Finn
. A wave of dizziness swept over me. Consuming me. Swallowing my vision for a few seconds before spewing it back up all tilted and off-balance. Every passing second it felt as if the life were draining out of me, or rather like it was being siphoned out of me. I felt something wet under my nose and swiped the back of my wrist over my face. It came back red. I stared at the crimson smear on my hand for a few seconds. I was so used to having paint on my hands, it took a few seconds to register that it was blood. Like the real kind. Not the make-believe kind I splattered across my canvases. This was real. It was happening. I was dying.

I pushed out of my seat, swearing under my breath. The blood had dripped all over me.

“Something wrong, Cash?” Mr. Reynolds stopped, looking me up and down, his eyes going wide with alarm. I could only imagine how I looked right now.

“Um… Just a nosebleed, I think.” I held my palm over my face. “Can I go to the bathroom?”

“Of course.” He tossed me the hall-pass key and I clutched it like a lifeline.

By the time I got to the bathroom I was freezing. Not the kind of chill that came with January—the kind that turns you to ice from the inside out instead of the other way around. But at least my nose had stopped bleeding. I filled my palms with water and doused my face. Watched the red water swirling in little circles around the silver drain before washing clear and disappearing into darkness. I half expected a shadow to crawl up through the hole. When one didn’t, I waited for Anaya’s face to show up in the reflection over my shoulder. I forced myself to ignore the little pulse of disappointment that throbbed in my chest when she didn’t.

I looked at my pale reflection in the mirror and pushed the dripping black hair that was falling over my forehead back out of my face. Finn was right. I looked like shit. How much longer was this going to last? What was going to happen to me when it was over?

“You don’t belong,” a voice said from behind me.

I spun around, fear crawling up my throat. My heart pounded in my chest, reminding me it was still alive and fighting. Adrenaline surged through my veins. There was a boy behind me. Maybe twelve, thirteen. His skin was too white. Purple bruises painted the hollow of his cheeks and under his eyes. A gaping gash split the side of his face. He looked like a character in a Tim Burton film.

“What do you want?”

He stepped forward and a dull shimmer rippled in the air around him.

“What are you?” He cocked his head to the side and shoved his hands into the pockets of his jean shorts.

I couldn’t hold the laugh in. That laugh was the last of my sanity leaving my body, crawling across my lips to escape. “Me? What the hell are you?”

“You don’t belong,” he said again. His voice sounded like static. He sounded like a dream. Or more like a nightmare. Like I needed more of those while I was awake. I pinched myself just to make sure I wasn’t passed out at my desk in Mr. Reynolds’s class. God, what I wouldn’t give to wake up in a puddle of my own drool on a cold desktop right now, but I didn’t. This was as awake as I was going to get.

“I…I don’t belong where?” I asked, pressing my tailbone against the sink. “What the hell are you talking about?”

The boy looked sad. His lips looked all blue, cracked and pulled down at the corners. He started to shake. “Not him,” he whispered.

“What? What is it?”

His frightened gaze was glued to the spot over my shoulder as he stumbled back. Someone sighed behind me and I turned around to find Noah. His ash-blond hair was flipped down over one eye and a feral scowl curled his lips.

“Great.” He leaned back against the row of sinks, shoving his hands into his coat pockets. “Now I’m going to have to chase him. Thanks for that.”

I looked over my shoulder to find the kid, and he…was gone. Just like that. The air was empty and cold. Absent of anything but me, Noah, and the stale scent of cigarette smoke and Pine-Sol.

“Why would you chase him?” I asked, stepping away to put some distance between us, thinking about the terrified look on that kid’s face the second he laid eyes on Noah. It was like he’d seen him before. The soul Anaya had taken hadn’t looked like that. If anything she’d looked…grateful. Even the one being shipped off to the Inbetween had looked confused more than anything, but not scared.

He folded his arms across his chest and his sleeves rode up enough to see a spiderwebbed map of black veins.

“If you’re here to help him, shouldn’t he be chasing
you
?”

“She’s getting to you, isn’t she?” he said. “You get that you’re falling right into the trap they have set for you, right? She lets you feel her up, tells you a few lies, and now you’re second-guessing everything I’m offering you.”

I clenched my fist and my knuckles cracked. I wanted to lay him out, but he was right. Anaya was getting to me. Hell, she was more than getting to me. She was consuming me.

“I’m not falling in anybody’s trap,” I snapped. “I’m just confused, all right?”

Noah nodded and kicked the back of his boot against the wall to knock what looked like a fine layer of ash off it. “You have questions? Ask them. I’m not here to lie to you, Cash. I’m here to help. I wish you could trust that.”

There was something inside me telling me that trusting him was the last thing I should do, a whisper that was getting louder every minute I spent with Anaya. But was it enough? Anaya was the one keeping something from me. I could see it in her eyes, a painful regret that took over every time I asked her about my future. Every time I touched her. I couldn’t stop myself from wanting her. That went beyond anything I could control, but trusting her? That was something else.

Noah, on the other hand, wasn’t holding anything back. He was an open book. If he had the answer he would give it. And whether I wanted to admit it or not, we were the same. I may not know how either of us got to be this way, but here we were, like two halves of a whole. Even now, standing a few feet from him, something dark pulsed in my veins, turning the blood almost black under my dying skin. I wanted to believe that Noah was good because that meant I’d be good, too, but I didn’t know anymore.

“I saw her take a soul,” I admitted, looking up from my wrist. “It didn’t look how you described it. It was messed up, but it wasn’t all bad. There was another side.”

Noah laughed. “Did she show you what they do to the lost? The ones like I take? The ones they let rot until they are nothing more than a starving shadow with absolutely no recollection of who they once were?”

I shook my head, not knowing what to trust or what to believe. There was more than one side to this.

“Yes, there is another side. A better side. But do you actually think that you are going to get to have any part of that perfect, pretty peace you saw?” He laughed. “No.
If
Balthazar doesn’t destroy you once you’re free from that body—and that’s a big
if
—you won’t be delivering happy souls to some peaceful, perfect existence. You’ll be turning them into
that
.”

Noah pointed to a shadow that was swirling out from under a bathroom stall, a sickening hiss seeping from its belly. Before I could look away, three more followed, churning the fear in my gut until it bubbled up into my throat.

“Every soul you touch will rot,” he whispered, stepping closer. “You will be hated. You will be feared. You will be the very thing inside of you that you’re trying to fight. Don’t let one pretty face trap you into that kind of existence.”

I didn’t want to believe what he was telling me, but it made sense. Why the fuck did this have to be so hard? The feelings inside me that were building for Anaya, the connection that had nothing to do with attraction, it was twisting everything that should have been clear.

“I’m offering you friendship,” Noah said, sounding deflated. “I’m offering you a kind of immortality they will deny you. The chance to do something good in this world.”

Noah clasped a hand over my shoulder and the chill from his skin seeped through my T-shirt, bringing the brigade of goose bumps on my arms to attention. If it was possible, he was even colder than me. A bell rattled out in the hall, starting the countdown until students would start to rush through that door.

“Just think about it,” he said. “I’ll see you soon.”

The touch on my shoulder disappeared and when I turned around, Noah was nowhere to be seen. Once again he’d left me not knowing what the hell to think or believe. Out of the corner of my eye, a flash of blue hovered behind an open bathroom stall.

“Hello?”

The kid who had taken off when Noah showed up crept out from behind its edge. “Is he gone?”

I nodded, not really knowing what to make of this kid who was obviously dead, or the fact that I was having a conversation with him. “Why are you afraid of him? He just wants to help you.”

The boy vigorously shook his head and wrapped his little arms around his middle. “The souls that go with him never come back,” he whispered. “He takes them down there.”

I knelt down in front of him, not wanting him to be afraid of me. I needed him to go on. “Down where?”

His gaze drifted to the shadow demons that were now hissing and snapping behind me. The kid backed up and they inched closer. “Down to them,” he finally answered before disappearing through the wall like a puff of blue smoke. The three shadows behind me zipped past in a black blur as they chased after him and I tripped over my own feet trying to stand up.

What had he meant that Noah took them down to them? As in, he delivered them to the shadow demons? That didn’t make any sense. He couldn’t know what he was talking about, could he? Maybe he had Noah confused with a reaper. You couldn’t really tell the difference after all.

Right?

Fuck, I didn’t need this. I needed to know who to trust. Maybe I couldn’t trust any of them. Maybe I really was alone in this. I grabbed the sides of my head to try to make the thoughts slow down. They wouldn’t. They just spun Tilt-A-Whirl circles in my skull over and over until they crept down my aching throat. Into my clenched fists.

Everything went black. A blinding, screaming black.

And when it was light again I was standing in front of a broken mirror. My fist was bleeding. My cheeks were wet. But at least the thoughts were gone. Everything in my brain was horribly blank, replaced by a hurt that wouldn’t go away.

The bathroom door swung open and I turned away from the broken reflection of my face in the mirror. Finn stood gawking at me, his green eyes sweeping over the bathroom like he was looking for who could have done this. Like he couldn’t believe that I’d done it myself.

“What happened?” he asked, walking over. Slow. Cautious. He pulled the gray sweatshirt he was wearing over his head and wrapped one of the sleeves around my trembling, bloody hand.

I didn’t know what to say to him. I still wasn’t ready to tell him about Noah, not when I didn’t know whose side he was really on—or what side I needed to be on, for that matter. What I did know was that Finn was keeping something from all of us and I wanted to know what it was. Seeing the hard look in his eyes as he talked about Balthazar that night in Emma’s room was enough to tell me that he knew exactly what this Balthazar guy was capable of.

Swallowing a lump of pride down my throat, I stared at my replacement. The guy who had everything I used to have. Emma. A life. A future. I wanted to hate him for it, but I couldn’t. Not when him having all of those things meant Emma being happy. Even if that meant I didn’t get to have them anymore. Finn took another hesitant step forward and laid a hand on my shoulder. I wiped my bloody hands on my jeans and shuddered out a breath full of want and loss and fear. Then I said three words I never thought I’d say to Finn.

“I need help.”

Chapter 19

Anaya

I stood outside Cash’s house in the sunshine. It felt right, here in the light. In the sun. Its rays clung to me, caressed my hair and skin, whispering goodness into my ears. I missed when this was all there was. Before I made this mistake that I’d give anything in the world to take away. I could feel Cash inside the house, his hurt and uncertainty tugging on the invisible threads between us. I finally gave in and stepped through the warm, wooden front door and into the empty hall.

There weren’t any voices to follow. Just the sound of memories being packed away into boxes. The rip and press of tape sealing it all away. I found them in the den. Cash sat in a pile of books. Surprisingly, Finn was with him, taping up a box, as if he belonged there.

“You’re sure you want to pack all of this away? Now?” Finn said, standing up. “We could wait, you know, until…”

Cash looked up when he trailed off. “Until what?” he said. “He’s not coming back. You should know that better than anybody.” He tossed a book into a box with a little more force than necessary and sighed. “Look, you said you wanted to help. So stop treating me like a fucking fragile little girl and help me already.”

Finn nodded and unfolded another cardboard box for a pile of jackets that were stacked on the big oak coffee table.

“Besides.” Cash ran his hand over the cover of a thick red leather-bound book. “I don’t want Em or her mom to have to deal with any of this when…”

“I told you nothing’s going to happen to you,” Finn said, voice tense. “We will think of something. So just stop talking like that, okay?” His shoulders sagged with the weight of the lie. Cash just shook his head and opened another book.

I took a deep breath, feeling myself fuse together cell by cell until the warmth was so intense it consumed me.

When the room came into focus, Cash was staring at me, jaw clenched, fingers stretched tight and white around the binding of a book. I’d left things badly between us. Refusing to let him see his father, then disappearing and leaving him alone with no explanation. I touched the spot on my chest that ached with guilt.

“I need to talk to him.” I spoke to Finn but didn’t take my eyes off this boy who sat in front of me. His eyes trained on my face, filling me with something so familiar it stole what little breath I was allowing myself to take.

“No.” Cash turned his attention to Finn, lips pressed together as a look of understanding passed between them. “I want him to stay.”

I sighed. “Suit yourself.”

Finn settled onto the arm of a shiny brown leather sofa. Cash stayed where he was, huddled in a pile of books that smelled like his father.

He shook his head, gaze fixed on his hands. There was a battle going on inside him. I could feel it. See it written all over his face.

“What’s going on?” I sank down onto the floor in front of him. “Did something happen?”

“Do you know what I am, Anaya?” His brown eyes connected with mine and they looked so tired. “Because I do.”

Shock fizzled through me. “H-how do you know?”

“How long have you known?” Cash growled. “How long have you known that I’m a shadow walker and how long have you been keeping it from me?”

Finn looked confused, but I could only shake my head. “I haven’t known the whole time,” I said in a panic. “I spoke to Easton and he…he showed me. I swear to you, Cash, I had no idea until a few days ago. I wasn’t even certain until the lake, after you crossed over with me.”

How did he know? Who had he been talking to who would have known, because I was certain he hadn’t found this in one of his books. This kind of information wasn’t even widely known in the afterlife, let alone the living world.

“Did you know?” I asked Finn, who was staring at Cash in disbelief.

“No way,” he said. “How the hell would I have known?”

“Tell me what it means,” Cash said.

“You’re a soul caught between life and death. It’s the only thing that would explain you being able to cross between worlds and force me into corporeality.”

“And why, exactly, does that make me so important?”

I shuddered, remembering the boy shoving souls over the cliff in Umbria. “It means you can be used to collect lost souls. At least that’s most likely what Balthazar wants you for. As for the shadow demons…”

“Yeah, I know,” he sneered. “I’m up next on the buffet line. I get it.”

“Cash,” I stopped him. “No. They wouldn’t want you for that. I mean they would, but you’re too valuable. They’d use you as a poacher, rounding up lost souls to deliver to the weaker ones below.”

Cash’s brows furrowed together and he shook his head mechanically. “No…he would have told me,” he whispered.

“Who would have told you?”

He ignored me, wringing his hands to ease the way they were shaking, if I had to guess. “Don’t lie to me about this, Anaya. If you’re just trying to scare me, to get me to side with you—”

“I’ve seen it,” I said.

Cash gritted his teeth and looked away. Someone had gotten to him. But who? And what kind of lies were they filling his head with?

“How did I become like this? Why me?”

I swallowed, uselessly. “When I brought you back. Didn’t take you. It must have triggered it. I thought…” I stopped and looked at him, bundled up in a black sweater, a burgundy scarf wrapped tight around his neck. A knit cap shoved over his raven-black hair even though it was obviously a warm spring day. His skin was pale. His eyes tired and dark. He didn’t look alive. He looked like Easton had said. Straddling the line.

“I’m sorry,” I choked out. “This shouldn’t have happened. I didn’t…I didn’t realize how old your soul was. I didn’t realize what you were or why Balthazar wanted you.”

“How old my soul is? What’s that supposed to mean?”

Finn stared at Cash with a little wonder in his eyes. “It means you’ve lived before. Lots of times. This isn’t your first life.”

Cash closed his eyes and shook his head. “No….
no
.” He said through gritted teeth. “If I’d been through all this more than once, don’t you think I’d remember something? Don’t you think I’d be a little better at it by now?”

“No,” I said. “You wouldn’t remember. It doesn’t work that way.”

“But Em remembers a little. From before.”

“That’s only because I helped her see.”

“Then help
me
see!” Cash stared at me, hope glinting in his eyes. “Help me see, so this feels real. So I don’t feel like a complete nutcase.”

I couldn’t show him. I couldn’t allow myself to see his past. I was already crossing too many lines, forming bonds that were going leave me in shreds when this was done. “I can’t. I won’t.”

Cash buried his face in his hands and trembled. The ends of his burgundy scarf dangled over his knees. I looked up at Finn and he nodded. He didn’t have to hear the words. He knew. At least we still had that between us. He stood and patted Cash on the shoulder, then walked out of the room. I soaked in the silence until I heard an engine roar to life outside.

Slowly, he pulled his face out of his hands. His dark eyes burned me. His lips, pressed into a hard line, broke me. I reached out and placed my hand over his. He just stared at it for a minute, but after a few shallow breaths he finally laced his fingers through mine. I knew he was only touching me for the warmth, but I’d take it.

“So is this the only reason you’re here?” he asked, refusing to look at me. “To you, I’m just another soul to deliver. Only I don’t get to go where the rest of your souls go. I get hand-delivered to your boss.”

“It’s not like that,” I whispered. “I wanted to take you the first time I saw you. I wanted to give you that salvation. I still want to. You have no idea what this is doing to me, to see you like this. I wish I had a choice.”

He shook his head like he didn’t believe me.

“Cash?” I asked, softly. “How did you find out? Who told you? If someone has been speaking to you, I need to know.”

He stared at our intertwined fingers, quiet, as his thumb traced circles over my wrist. “What does he have on
you
, Anaya?”

He lifted his eyes and my stomach sank with a sick feeling. Did he know this too? He couldn’t. Nobody knew but Balthazar and me.

“If you don’t want to be a part of whatever is happening to me, then what is Balthazar doing to make you do it?” he asked. “I know that babysitting a human probably isn’t in your job description. So I’m asking again. What are you getting out of this?”

Guilt stabbed at my insides, screaming,
tell him, tell him
! I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell him that I’d agreed to deny him everlasting peace so I could be with my family, with Tarik, again. I pulled my fingers from his. I didn’t deserve his touch. This wasn’t right. God…this was so wrong. What was I doing?

Cash studied my face for a moment, no doubt seeing the lie before it even formed on my lips. He grimaced and pushed to his feet. The connection between us pulsed with pain and regret. “That’s fine. Keep your secrets, Anaya. I’ll keep mine, too.”