Leon ground his teeth.
I remembered the Shadowbringer’s words as he had left Gran’s room at the nursing home.
“Have you come to call it in?” was all Leon said before Cas stepped into view, taking the opposite side of the gurney to gloat at us before he reached for the body bag as if he was going to open it.
I sucked in a breath, and Cas gave me a grin that made me wonder if that was what he had been taught in hell or if he had been born with it … given he had been born at all. How could anyone keep up with the specifics of that species?
“Not freezing today?” he asked me, shoving his free hand into his pocket, and leaned against the ambulance next to a paramedic who was writing a report.
I ignored him as best I could, reminding myself of what Leon had promised—that I would be safe with him; that the Shadowbringer wouldn’t try anything until the soul was secured.
“Oooh—” Cas grimaced, reading from the clipboard. “Broken neck and an open fracture of both thighs. The poor bastard bled out before help could even arrive.” He winked at me, watching me fight the nausea that threatened to make me double over, and braced one foot against the car. “So you are ready to transfer a soul?” he asked me with a voice full of stars and night, drowning out the rest of the world for a brief moment with a deep gaze into my eyes.
I shuddered, searching for a smart response. Something that would leave him in the dark about how miserable I was as the three of us were waiting for the soul to emerge from the bag—if that even was how it worked.
I was about to tell the Shadowbringer that he could go back to that hot place he so loved, and leave the soul to Leon, when a bright, silvery light rose from the body bag. I halted, mouth open, words lost, as I observed a man’s shape float up and hover.
“I lay claim to his soul,” Leon said harshly. He had let go of my hand for the benefit of stepping closer to the gurney.
Cas eyed Leon with a bored face. “You realize that he belongs in my domain as much as in yours,” he drawled before he glanced at the paramedic, who had put down the report and was now opening the doors to load the body into the back of the ambulance, oblivious to our presence—or the significance of what was happening to the lost patient.
As Cas spoke, I tried to sense it, where exactly that man stood on the scale between good and evil. If he was meant for heaven or hell. Yet there was little I felt but the squeamishness in my stomach that had replaced the nausea ever since I had turned my back on the wrecked vehicles, the red stains on the street, and all the thoughts and memories that came with them.
“Heaven,” Leon said, his tone businesslike despite the daggers he’d shot at the Shadowbringer from his eyes.
“I don’t know what that man did to want him in your domain so badly,” Cas retorted, “but I am willing to let you take him, if”—he turned to me, his eyes the gray of thunderclouds—“she does it.”
Several things happened at once. My heart picked up speed, fluttering along in my chest like a tortured butterfly. My knees started shaking as if someone had knocked into them with an iron bar. Leon shook his head beside me, making me feel even more useless than I already did—his sidekick while he saved the soul.
Not to forget the wide smile Cas gave me as he noticed the horror that rushed through me. I couldn’t. Even if I wanted to, I just couldn’t say the words. That I would do it.
It would save not only the soul, but it would save me from being hunted by the Shadowbringer. As soon as I’d taken my first soul to heaven, I’d be safe.
Was it irony that it was the Shadowbringer who suggested I rush into it and do it right now?
“You think you’re smart, don’t you?” Leon hissed, ignoring how I went to pieces beside him, his anger a controlled mask on his features now, but I knew him too well, not to see the white-hot rage beneath it. “You know the rules. Play by them.” Oh, Leon would punch the mattress when he got home, imagining it was the Shadowbringer’s face.
“Rules—” Cas shook his head before he winked at me again. “Are you up for it?”
“Halfway,” Leon interrupted before I could give an answer. “He is on the scale halfway between heaven and hell.” He folded his arms across his chest, eyeing the soul as it contracted into a silver star the way Gran had.
And there, it hit me. I knew that Leon was right. I just knew. Like my lungs knew how to breathe or my heart how to beat. I knew that the soul amidst us messengers of heaven and hell was on the exact centerline between our domains. He belonged to each of us equally.
“Give him a chance to purge himself of all his regrets,” Cas suggested, his voice smooth, unaffected by Leon’s rigidness. “Let him take a couple of decades in hell before I send him over.”
Leon growled.
“All right.” Cas shrugged. “Years then.”
“You can do that?” I blurted out into the middle of their bargaining, causing both their heads to snap to me. “You can send them to hell now and pick them up later?”
While Leon frowned, Cas fashioned an expression somewhere between humorous and wistful. “It is called purgatory, love.” He turned to Leon. “So, do you concur that our friend here could do with a couple of years before he joins you in your boring, fluffy realm?”
He didn’t even stop to gloat at my shock. Neither did Leon, who was so busy proposing an exact number of months that he didn’t seem to realize that he had never told me that the bargaining wasn’t about where the soul would be taken but about how long they had to remain in purgatory. And that purgatory wasn’t a place somewhere in between. It was right there, in the realm of eternal punishment.
The nausea returned, and I stumbled back, unable to draw a deep breath. The gurney had been loaded into the ambulance, and the thud of the doors falling shut behind it didn’t disturb the Lightbringer and the Shadowbringer who were both eager to place the soul in the right level of hell for its life choices. I didn’t hear the end of the bargain, the conclusion they came to, as I retreated step after step until I stood in the meadow on the corner where the two streets met and watched from a distance the way Cas leaned forward, mouth open, and the silver star floated between his lips.
Hell it was, then. If only temporarily. Hell.
“You didn’t think of telling me, did you?” I bit at Leon as we returned home only minutes later.
He had grabbed my hand after he had sealed the bargain with Cas, and we had traveled back to my bedroom. Less than twenty minutes had passed before my mother’s footsteps stopped at the head of the stairs as she called, “I’ll be back before dinner,” and was already on her way again when I answered that I’d be home for sure.
Whether or not she’d heard me, I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t even tell right now in what form I was. However, by the way I all but sensed Leon’s form in the room, I guessed it was non-corporeal. Which meant my words had been as silent to my mother as Leon, Cas, and I had been to the paramedic. And invisible, of course. That was something that I still had to get used to.
It might come in handy if I ever thought about playing a trick on Avery to get back at her for being extra-horrible.
My thoughts stuttered to a halt at the thought of what I had learned just minutes ago. Purgatory was a thing. It wasn’t heaven and hell, and one simple decision that would be made about my soul one day, but I would be sent to redeem myself—and it didn’t make my heart feel any lighter to think of that as a chance. It was still purgatory, run and maintained by the agents of hell, it seemed.
“I didn’t think it was important,” Leon defended himself.
“Not important?” I stared at him incredulously and wished I could switch into my corporeal form just to know the windows would shake in their frames when I yelled at him. “You thought that this little detail was something I should find out while the Shadowbringer is there to witness?”
Not that it was important whether or not Cas knew how much it had shaken me to learn that there was a chance I might end up in purgatory; it bothered me t
hat he had seen that Leon hadn’t told me about it. That he didn’t trust me enough, apparently, to tell me. Or that he thought I wasn’t ready.
“As I said, as soon as there is doubt that a soul belongs in one of the two domains entirely, there is bargaining.”
“Yes, but you didn’t tell me what exactly was being negotiated.” I drummed my fingers on the dresser and studied Leon with a feeling of betrayal.
“Now you know,” was all Leon said. “You did well for a first mission,” he added and gave me a soft gaze.
I didn’t feel like returning it. I didn’t feel like forgiving him … yet.
And then, I realized that not forgiving him might already buy me a ticket to hell. If only for a couple of weeks.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Cas
It was a darker day than I had expected. Quite honestly, with decades over decades, every day appeared darker than the last. There was no end to it. And nothing that would fill my time with some excitement other than those few hours I spent at school. The last time I had been to school had been shortly before I had been turned into what I was now. The memories were vague and painful, and they all ended in the same scene—
My head flipped to the side in reflex at the sound of the girl’s footfalls. Soft and light and bouncy. She was framed—as always—by two young women who seemed superior in wits and inferior in self-esteem. Avery, however, didn’t seem to care. They supported her stage. It was all they were good for.
“So you’ve been scarce,” Avery said in a honeyed tone, her hand braced on her hip right above where her low cut pants showed off her slender waist. I looked away, wondering if those many decades ago I would have felt a degree or two warmer at the sight.
“My apologies, Miss Avery,” I said and cocked my head, giving each of the girls beside her a tight-lipped smile.
“See?” Avery turned to the one on her left, who actually had eyes the color of firs and skin like fresh cream. “That’s how everyone should be addressing me.”
The girl gave a nervous nod.
I tuned out the other voices, the footsteps that were shuffling to classes in the mid-morning. There was nothing much for me to do than wait. It seemed to be the story of my—what was it exactly if it wasn’t a life?
“I am here now, aren’t I?” I pointed out with the version of my voice that I normally used to shape the shadows.
Avery frowned for a brief moment before she managed to straighten her face as she took in my tone—the lack of enthusiasm at her attention.
“And just in time to witness my exit.” She turned, tossing her reddish hair over her shoulder, and swaggered toward the classroom, leaving the fir-green-eyed girl to shrug at me in what seemed to be an apology.
“Never mind,” I whispered at her as if I were sharing a secret, and she smiled, her full lips like fresh berries and her nose crinkling with authentic amusement.
“Are you coming, Al?” the Queen of High School called from the threshold, and Al staggered after her as if stung by a bee.
Those mortals … so busy with their social games, their status, their popularity. If they knew where this took them. If they knew that seeking my attention was almost like knocking on the gates of hell.
With a sigh, I turned on my heels and followed the gaggle of girls to take my seat at the back of the room.
Laney walked in with the Lightbringer just before the teacher and hurried to her place near the quiet one whom I had carried to the nurse’s office. The Lightbringer, however, gave me a burning gaze that might have branded me had I not been indestructible.
I waited for him to sit and turn to the front of the room before I returned to studying Laney’s dark brown hair. It was braided today, unlike all the other days when she left if loose and I could find wavy patterns in its structure. Regardless, the braid exposed the column of her neck where a lace-trimmed, black shirt contrasted with her pale skin. The pattern reminded me of the fashion the women wore when I was little.
I flipped the book open and pretended to browse through the text as the teacher instructed while my focus remained on my target.
She was sitting rigidly in her chair as if she felt my gaze. As if she knew what it meant, too. The next class she would be spending apart from her protector, and I would finally get to talk to her again. It was necessary that she understood. I needed to—
The tug in my chest came as unwelcome as it came sudden, making me suck in a breath. But I wasn’t the only one who felt it. Laney was shifting uncomfortably, sweat collecting at the nape of her neck where she rubbed her hand over her skin. The Lightbringer felt it as much as I did—only, she wasn’t as skilled at hiding it.
A soul to bargain for if they felt it, too. Not just a one-way trip to hell for someone who had messed up their life.
The sensation was light, not yet urgent enough for me to leap out of my chair and skip into my non-corporeal form the second I was hidden from sight, but it was annoying enough to make me want to move around rather than sit and play teenager for the next forty-or-so minutes.
And if it was that difficult for me, how did the girl stand it?
She had almost collapsed the last time the Lightbringer had brought her to collect a soul. For a second, I had thought that he was serious. That she would take the soul and manifest as a Lightbringer right then and there. But by the state she’d been in—her greenish, sweat-sheathed skin, her flinching and cringing—I had known that if I taunted the Lightbringer to have her take the soul, he’d not allow it. She wasn’t ready. Which meant more time for me to get what I wanted.
I leaned back in my chair and crossed my arms over my chest, wondering if it would be worth it to simply bolt from the room and give up on the high school drama. I wasn’t made for it, anyway. I didn’t know how to act like them, to speak like them, to care like them. And it didn’t matter.
There was only one thing I knew, and that was giving souls a ride to hell. And that Laney’s soul would upgrade my existence.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Laney
Leon shot me a look that appeared to mean that I should stay put.
We hadn’t spoken much since the other day when he had brought me along to collect a soul, and he hadn’t apologized for leaving me in the dark about purgatory.
Nevertheless, he had spent his time making sure I was protected and cared for. Whether or not I liked it didn’t matter. It was necessary. The Shadowbringer had been circling closer and closer every day at school, waiting for me at corners, a sly grin on his face, hands in his pockets, and storm-gray eyes scanning me with expectation. As if I was his personal experiment about to happen.
Now, as I dared to glimpse at him, Cas gave me the same grin and leaned back in his chair. From the look in his eyes, I couldn’t make out whether or not he felt the tug … the pain, really.
So I hoped that this time, Leon and I would go alone and that I would manage to remain in my corporeal form long enough to make it out of the classroom once Leon gave the sign. He had promised he would do that even if I had called him all the names I could think of … and instantly regretted it with an image of Cas waiting there at the end of my life, forcing my soul into hell for a good period of time.
I had made it halfway through the hour when Jo bent closer and asked if I was all right. I nodded and remembered that I had been wanting to ask her the same thing since the conversation with Mom. There was something more going on with Jo than just being constantly tired.
By the time the bell rang, I was sweaty and sure I could no longer sit still without screaming. There was a soul calling for my attention, and if I didn’t answer the call, a Shadowbringer might come and claim it.
Leon met me by the door, his gaze anxiously darting to the back of the room, every now and then, to where Cas kept lounging in his chair as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He didn’t even look up at me when I searched his face for a sign of whether he would be getting in our way when collecting the soul. Instead, he called Avery’s
name the same way he had called mine, “Miss Avery.”
Avery flashed a smile at the world before she turned, mid-step, to the Shadowbringer, her waves dancing on her shoulders.
Cas waited until she was fully facing him before he cut me a glance and said to Avery, “How about sitting with me for lunch today?” His eyes wandered to Avery’s face, assessing as she was obviously displaying something on her features I couldn’t see, presented with the view on her red mass of hair. Cas’s smile of satisfaction had to be answer enough. So I rolled my eyes just as his gaze sought mine again, and then hurried to Leon, who was now tapping his foot against the linoleum.
“I don’t even want to think what he wants to achieve by having lunch with her,” he commented and held his arm open for me to slide under as we walked out.
I shrugged and felt his fingers closing around my shoulder in that familiar and newly exciting way that I denied myself to feel while I was still angry with him. However, the sensation was there. More by the day, and with my body struggling to change into its ethereal form, even more so. I felt him over the aching tug in my chest as if he were touching my bare skin.
Much to my dismay, I shivered at the thought.
“You cold?” he wanted to know, sensitive to my needs more than I could have ever imagined anyone capable of. But as a Lightbringer, it seemed he felt me on a different level—just as I felt him.
I shrugged again, a response I had perfected, and asked instead, “When can we go?”
The tug was becoming more pronounced now that we were in motion, and I could almost feel that the time had come. My Lightbringer senses seemed to improve as time was passing and as I was getting more exposure to the invisible world of the messengers of heaven and hell—and as I was slowly becoming one of them.
Too slowly. For the Shadowbringer was still after me. As long as I hadn’t advanced to collecting souls myself, I would be in danger of his cruel game.
Torn: A young adult paranormal romance (Breath of Fate Book 1) Page 14