Before I Wake

by Rachel Vincent

  Fresh rage blossomed inside me, fire shooting up my spine. He was playing on old fears that I would let her die. On doubt that I would be able to save her a second time.

  “Kaylee would never hurt me. On purpose,” she amended as blood continued to seep slowly between her fingers.

  “Tell her what really happened to Alec,” the hellion said, and my rage was drenched in a cold wash of dread as he met my gaze again. “Don’t your friends deserve the truth?”

  “I don’t want the truth.” Emma’s voice was weaker now from blood loss, and fear, and maybe from confusion. “I just want to go to the hospital. Please…”

  “She killed him,” the hellion whispered. “Kaylee stabbed Alec, and it wasn’t an accident, like the scratch she just gave you, which smells so deliciously painful.” The Jayson-thing pushed Emma’s hand aside and pressed his fingers into her wound. She gasped in pain. He lifted his hand and licked a smear of blood from it, his hungry gaze holding mine the whole time. “She stabbed him on purpose. It’s true. I can’t lie.”

  Em looked at me through tear-filled eyes, asking me for the truth without actually asking for anything.

  “That’s not how it happened,” Tod insisted when I made no attempt to defend myself. “He was possessed, but we thought Alec was already dead. We thought Avari was wearing his soul.”

  “Let her go,” I demanded.

  Jayson laughed and licked another smear of blood from his hand, his other arm tight around Emma’s waist. “Drop the knife, or I’ll take a real bite out of her, right here. I do love a picnic at the lake.”

  Emma’s breathing sped up and her face paled even more. My fist tightened around the hilt of the knife. I glanced at Tod, and he nodded. I blinked, sure I’d seen wrong. But he was still nodding, telling me to drop the knife.

  “Drop it and distract him,” Tod said, his lip barely moving, and I knew from Em’s lack of reaction that I was the only one who could hear him.

  I held up the knife, blade down, to catch Jayson’s attention. Then I dropped it. The knife speared the sand in front of my feet, stuck hilt up. “Now let her go. You said you would, when I put the knife down.”

  Jayson’s head cocked to the side, like he was thinking back over everything he’d said. “True…” He let her go, and Emma stumbled toward me, one hand clutching her bloodied side, relief and fear mixing in her features only to be overshadowed by pain. I reached for her, but the second her hand touched mine, the hellion snatched her back.

  Emma screamed, and he laughed. “I never said I wouldn’t take her back.”

  I looked around for Tod, but he was gone. I glanced toward the pavilion and saw several human shapes, but we were too far away for me to tell who I was looking at. Had they heard her scream? Why was no one running to help?

  “Distract him and move away from the knife,” Tod said from behind me and I realized no one else could see or hear him now.

  Distract him? How? What would distract a hellion who already had what he wanted? But then, he’d had what he wanted the whole time. So why were he and Em still there? Unless he didn’t have what he wanted…

  “Take me instead,” I said, stepping to my left. “You need me to go willingly, don’t you?” Because I was already dead, stealing my soul wasn’t as simple as just killing me for it.

  The hellion shrugged. “Willing, or unconscious. Similar to mating rituals here on the human plane, isn’t it?” He laughed at his joke, and my stomach churned.

  “Keep moving…” Tod said, and I stepped to my left again. This time the hellion had to turn Emma to keep me in sight. But in turning, he stepped closer to the dagger.

  “Fine. I’m willing. Let her go.”

  “Prove it.” The Jayson-monster lifted one foot and deliberately stomped on the hellion-forged dagger. The hilt broke off with less than two inches of blade, and a scream of despair rose up inside me, like a mockery of my bean sidhe wail. “Cross over.”

  “Shit!” Tod swore.

  “What?” I’d heard Jayson, but I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying. I couldn’t drag my gaze from the ruined dagger, and the loss it represented.

  “Cross into the Netherworld, and I will let her go,” Jayson said. “You have my word.”

  “No!” Tod said, and I glanced at him. The hellion followed my gaze, but he couldn’t focus on what he couldn’t see. “Kaylee, do not cross over.”

  “Cross. Now. Or I’ll chew her throat out, slurp up her blood, and keep her soul.”

  “Kaylee…” Emma was terrified.

  “Kaylee…” Tod was terrified.

  In the Netherworld, I wouldn’t have any of my undead advantages, except for the ability to cross back into the human world. But if I didn’t go, he’d kill Emma, and I’d have to chase him into the Netherworld to retrieve her soul, anyway—there was no way I’d let Em’s soul be tortured or worn like a costume.

  “I cross, and you let Emma go? Alive?”

  Jayson nodded. “That’s the deal.”

  I looked straight at Tod. “Take her to the hospital. I’ll be right back.” Then I crossed over.

  * * *

  In the Netherworld, I stood alone next to the lake. Except I wasn’t really alone. I couldn’t be.

  Everything looked the same, only different. The sand was too pale. White. More like salt than like sand. The trees were skeletal, as if they were caught out of season, and the few leaves still hanging had shapes I didn’t recognize.

  The lake was…not made of water. I don’t know what the Netherworld version of our lake was filled with, but it was thick, and dark, and it stank to high hell. Things slithered just beneath the surface, leaving ripples in the thin, foul membrane that had formed on top. I gagged just from looking at it, and without the ability to teleport, I couldn’t get far enough from the stagnant body of…fluid to avoid the smell.

  I’d done my part. I’d crossed over. I closed my eyes, preparing to cross back into the human world to make sure Em had been released, when someone shouted my name.

  I spun around to find Emma limping toward me from only feet away, leaving small drops of bright red blood on the sand. Behind her, long, black, multilegged creatures—carnivorous caterpillars?—crawled out of the sand and gathered around each new drop, fighting over her blood, scratching, clawing, and devouring until each stained grain was gone.

  Invidia stood at Emma’s back, stuck in her own form now that the Jayson-costume had expired with her trip back into the Netherworld. The hellion of envy looked just like I remembered. Thin hands sticking out of the long sleeves of her black dress. Gaunt cheeks. Dark circles beneath featureless black-orb eyes staring out at everything. Or at nothing.

  With a hellion you never could tell.

  Invidia’s long, ever-flowing rivulets of black hair dripped down her back and over one shoulder, shining with a green tint in the anemic light of the Netherworld sun. Each drop sizzled on the sand at her feet, but instead of gathering for a bite, the caterpillars scurried away from the noxious fluid. Except for one unlucky creature, who suffered a direct hit and was consumed alive by the acidic drop of liquid hair.

  “Em…” I threw my arm around her waist while hers went around my neck, and in the process, I stepped on several of the creepy little bugs still following the source of Em’s human blood. “You were supposed to let her go in the human plane!” I snapped at Invidia, then flinched over my own volume. Shouting in the Netherworld was like ringing a dinner bell in the Old West.

  “I don’t recall saying where I would release her,” Invidia said, and her cackle of laughter grated against my bones like nails on a chalkboard. “You should take her home while you still have a chance. They’ve had a taste of her, and they’ll want more.” Her grand, skinny-handed gesture took in the army of tiny cater-creatures marching around the threat of Invidia’s toxic hair drops on a steady path toward me and Em. “I’ve seen them strip slabs of meat twice your size to the bone in under a single of your human minutes.”

  I frow
ned in confusion, carefully backing Emma and myself away from the growing mass of bugs crawling over one another to get to us. “You’re letting us go?” It was a trick. It had to be.

  “If she is still here in ten seconds, I won’t leave enough scraps of that pretty little body to feed a single one of the bugs… .”

  She didn’t have to tell me twice—er, three times. I grabbed Em’s hand and closed my eyes. A second later, we stood on the lakeshore in the human world, where the sand was brown and nothing crawled out of it ready to devour us.

  Emma sagged against me, her breathing ragged, her grip on my shoulder weakening with every second. “Is that it? She just let us go?”

  “That’s what it looks like…” But my nerve endings were on fire, and every hair on my arms was standing straight up. Why would she let us cross over? It was almost like Invidia wanted us in the human world. “Something’s wrong. That was too easy.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “Oh, Em…” I lowered her to the ground carefully and she removed her hand from the wound long enough for me to take a look. But I couldn’t even tell what I was looking at, much less how bad it was. I only saw blood. “We’re going to get you to a hospital. They’ll fix you up.”

  “It’s going to be okay, though, right?” she asked, staring up into my eyes, her entire face lined in pain and fear. “I can’t die if I’m not on the list, right? And Tod would have told us if I were on the list?”

  “Yeah, if he saw your name, he’d definitely tell us. But…” Damn, I didn’t want to have to tell her this. “That knife—it’s actually a dagger made of hellion-forged steel.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Supernatural events trump the list. Which means…”

  “I could die,” she finished for me, and her gaze dropped in shock. “Again.”

  “Yeah.” Of a wound I’d inflicted. “But we’re not going to let that happen. We’re going to get you to the hospital.” I couldn’t take her that far in one jump, but maybe Tod could.

  Where was Tod? Why hadn’t he crossed into the Netherworld with us? He was gone, and so was the broken dagger.

  “Shit. Give me your hand.” I reached down, and Em placed her bloody left hand in mine, still clutching her wound with the other. I closed my eyes and blinked us to the pavilion my father had rented, then helped Em onto one of the picnic table benches.

  “Where is everyone?” she asked, and I glanced around, wondering the same thing.

  “Harmony took my dad and Sabine to the hospital. Nash and Luca went to find Sophie, but I don’t see any of them.”

  “What about Tod?”

  “I don’t know.” The chill bumps on my arms grew even fatter.

  The fire was still going in the grill, burning the burgers and charring the already-burned hot dogs. My dad’s spatula lay on the grass a few feet away. The soda cans he and Harmony had been drinking from still sat on the table nearest the grill. Nash hadn’t packed anything up yet, which meant they’d been gone since I went to confront Jayson/Invidia.

  “Kaylee!” Nash shouted, and I looked up to see him and Luca running around the curve of the lake toward us, from the shore opposite where Em had been taken hostage. I exhaled in relief—until I realized they were alone.

  “Hey, Emma’s hurt!” I said as they stopped beneath the pavilion, winded from their run. “Where are Tod and Sophie?”

  “We couldn’t find Sophie,” Nash said. “There were several sets of footprints in the sand—some of them ours—and hers seemed to head into the woods. But we couldn’t tell for sure.”

  “Didn’t know we were supposed to be looking for Tod,” Luca added, still trying to catch his breath from the sprint.

  “What happened?” Nash dropped to his knees in front of Em before I could pull another word out of him. She moved her hand so he could look at her wound, and her nose and forehead wrinkled in pain.

  “I accidentally cut her. I was aiming for Jayson, who turned out to be Invidia.”

  “Invidia?” Luca said.

  “The hellion of envy who turned Sabine and Kaylee against each other,” Em explained.

  “It wasn’t just us!” I insisted. “The whole school went crazy because of her!”

  “Emma needs a hospital,” Nash said.

  “I know, but I can’t blink her that far, and we can’t leave Sophie and Tod.” I dug my keys from my pocket. “Why don’t you take Em to the hospital, and Luca and I will stay here and find them.”

  Nash shook his head and refused the keys when I tried to hand them to him. “I’m not leaving you here.”

  “But, Em…”

  “I’m fine for a little while,” she insisted, but I found that hard to believe. “Besides, if you find Tod, he can get me there faster than driving, right?”

  I nodded. “In theory.”

  Em’s gaze focused on something behind me, and her frown deepened. “Shit. We have company.” She grabbed my hand and squeezed it before I could turn and look. “I don’t know what’s going on, but you guys have to make it stop,” she said, glancing from Nash to Luca, then back to me. “Before someone else gets caught in this like Jayson did.”

  And like Emma had. And Sophie. And Brant. And Scott. And countless others.

  She was right.

  I turned to follow her line of sight and froze, blinking in disbelief. A thin woman in designer jeans was rounding the corner of the jogging trail, where it disappeared into a thickly wooded area of the park. I knew that blond hair, perfectly cut and styled, and I knew that her eyes were blue, though I wasn’t close enough to see that for myself.

  “Oh, no…” I whispered, not surprised to hear the hollow, shocked quality of my own voice. “Aunt Val.”

  21

  “OH, SHIT,” NASH breathed, and Emma stiffened in my peripheral vision.

  “That’s Sophie’s mom?” Luca said.

  “Yeah. She traded her life for Sophie’s last September,” Nash said, and I have to admit, I bristled.

  “But it was Val’s fault Sophie died in the first place.” I didn’t want my aunt’s last-minute attempt to abort her own evil scheme to be confused with my mother’s genuine sacrifice on my behalf. They were two entirely different women. “And, no, that’s not Sophie’s mom. That’s a demon wearing her soul.”

  “Speaking of…” Em said, and I glanced up again to see Sophie round the corner of the trail, calling after her mother.

  “Sophie, no!” I glanced at Nash. “Stay with Em. Please.” Then I took off with Luca, headed for my cousin. “Sophie, that’s not your mom!” I yelled again, and Sophie stopped, startled, wiping tears from her shell-shocked, tear-reddened face.

  “I know, but…”

  Aunt Val crossed her arms over her chest and studied me without even looking back at Sophie. “You must be Kaylee.”

  I slowed to a stop ten feet away, but Luca ran past the hellion and hugged Sophie so tight he actually lifted her from the ground as he pulled her away from the hellion.

  “And you would be…?” I couldn’t tear my gaze from my aunt’s imposter. She wasn’t Sophie’s mom. Intellectually, I knew that. But there was something about the way she moved Aunt Val’s body, like she knew it. Like she truly identified with the soul she wore. And suddenly I understood. “Belphegore.” The hellion of vanity who’d offered my aunt eternal youth and beauty.

  “Who else?” Aunt Val’s mouth smiled, not too wide, not too much teeth. Just like she’d smiled in real life, to maximize the illusion of kindness and minimize wrinkles.

  “She has my mom’s soul,” Sophie sobbed, clinging to Luca’s hand when he finally let her go. “Don’t let her cross over.”

  I frowned at the hellion in confusion.

  “The younger Miss Cavanaugh has just been informed that when I cross back into the Netherworld, her mother’s soul will dissipate into the ether, scattered throughout both worlds for as long as it takes the soul to pull itself back together again. And that could take centuries.”


  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s like purgatory,” Tod said, and I whirled around to find him standing on my left. I started to reach for him, then stopped when I saw who stood next to him, her arm linked possessively through his.

  Addison Page. She looked just like she had the day she’d died. Beautiful long blond hair and bright blue eyes. She had everything my aunt had ever wanted and gave it all up for fame and fortune in exchange for eternity at Avari’s mercy.

  Whatever your weakness, there’s a hellion to exploit it.

  “Is that…?” I said, and Tod nodded stiffly, his jaw clenched in fury. He was angrier than I’d ever seen him. “Avari,” I said, but my greeting felt more like a curse.

  “Always a pleasure, Miss Cavanaugh,” the hellion said with Addy’s voice, and seeing him wear Addison bothered me more than any other form he’d ever taken—except for Alec’s. Avari glanced around at the rest of us through Addy’s wide blue eyes. “We appear to be missing a couple of guests… .”

  “Guests?” I asked, but instead of answering, Avari disappeared. “What the hell is going on?” I demanded, but the only one who could have answered—Val/Belphegore—only smiled.

  “Kaylee, I am so sorry,” Tod said as I stepped into the embrace he offered. “She—he—showed up the second you, Em, and Jayson crossed over, and he said you’d be fine. He gave his word.” And hellions couldn’t lie. “But he said if I went after you, he’d cross over, too, and Addy’s soul would…dissipate.”

  Before I could ask what the hell that meant, or what the somehow-unified hoard of demons wanted, Emma shrieked behind us, and Nash’s shout of outrage echoed hers. I turned toward the pavilion just in time to see Addison grab Emma’s arm and disappear with her. Before I could even think to run toward them—not that that would have helped—Addison/Avari reappeared next to Val/Belphegore, Emma’s arm gripped tightly in her fist.

  Em was crying, one hand pressed to her still-bleeding stomach. “What—?” she started, begging me with her gaze to explain.