The Kat Dubois Chronicles: The Complete Series (Echo World Book 2)

by Lindsey Fairleigh

  “You forget, little sister,” Dom said, smile sly, “I cannot be hurt. In this form, I am truly immortal.”

  I chewed on the inside of my lip. “Alright. We’ll give it a try.” I pulled my hand away and started back toward the door to the hallway. “Hang tight,” I told him. “I’ll be back in a sec.” Hopefully with an extra shadow in tow.

  I pushed the locker room door open and jogged out into the hallway, heading for the doors to the gym. I could hear the squeak of tennis shoes on the gym floor and the thunk of rubber balls hitting bodies. There were bound to be some heightened emotions in the gym right about now. Dodgeball tended to bring out some people’s inner predator, separating the weak from the strong and generally pissing everyone off. I figured that should get the shadow souls riled up.

  I silently thanked Nik, wondering if that had been his plan all along.

  A girl pushed through the gym doors, nearly smacking me in the face. I stopped the door with the toe of my boot, and the girl shouldered past me, running toward the locker room, her hand covering the lower half of her face. She was crying. Perfect.

  I waited for her to go into the locker room, then followed. I paused at the door, fingers curled around the handle. At first, I thought I was imagining the faint sound of girls giggling: another trick of the mind, like before. An echo of the echo.

  Until three girls came hurrying down the hallway, passing the alcove where I was standing. The same three girls from the dream. This was it.

  “I hope you’re ready, Dom,” I whispered. Then I yanked the door open and hurried into the locker room.

  The girl who’d fled into the locker room was sitting on the bench, exactly where she was supposed to be, hunched over and crying into her hands. I snuck past her to the mirror. According to the echo, the shadow would turn up any second now.

  “Dom?” I tapped on the mirror. He was nowhere in sight. “Where are you?”

  “I am here,” he said, appearing beside my reflection in the mirror. He flexed his fingers, his old prefight ritual. “And I am ready.”

  “Good,” I said with a nod and glanced at the girl hunched over on the bench.

  A shadow lurked just behind her, its arms curling around her in a ghastly embrace. The lockers nearest her started to shake and shudder, the metal baskets rattling on their rails. The girl looked up, tear-streaked cheeks draining of color and eyes opened wide in terror. She knew one of the “ghosts” was nearby. She had no idea how close it really was.

  The girl stood stiffly, intending to flee, but she was too late. The shadow already had her. Its arms encased her, holding her immobile despite having no real substance in this reality, as though its grip on her soul was enough to keep her there. She couldn’t move. All she could do was stare at me. And scream.

  I stood there, frozen by the memory of what it was like to fall victim to a shadow. I knew, firsthand, what it was like to feel this girl’s fear. I’d been in her shoes. I would have died, if not for Nik stepping in and fighting the shadows off. But this girl didn’t have Nik and his slashing At blades. All she had was me.

  That snapped me the hell out of my fear-triggered paralysis.

  I stalked across the locker room toward them, eyes only for the shadow. “Leave her alone, dickwad,” I said as I drew my foot back.

  I soccer-kicked the thing right where its face should’ve been. The contact sent a shudder through me, and I skittered back several steps.

  The shadow lost its grip on the girl, and she slumped onto the floor and started to crawl away. The shadow’s head righted, its eyeless gaze locked on me.

  “Oh, I’m sorry . . . did I disturb your snack?” I said as I skipped backward a few steps. I turned to race the shadow back to the mirror. And ran straight into a solid wall of cold.

  A second shadow had joined the party. It wrapped its arms around me before I could duck away, already feeding off my energy. Stealing my fight. I struggled, but my arms and legs were weakening by the second.

  Not that it stopped me from trying. Maybe I couldn’t fight the shadow the old-fashioned way, but there was something else I could do.

  Calling out to the collective soul-energy, I gripped the thing’s arms with both of my suddenly glowing hands. The multitude of voices exploded through my mind, the soul-energy bolstering my waning life-force and lending me strength.

  Strands of At and anti-At burst out of me, writhing all around me. They latched onto the shadow holding me captive even as they reached out for the one closing in from behind. Everywhere those vines of At and anti-At touched the shadows, brilliant streaks of color appeared, shining through the putrid darkness suffocating their souls.

  It was working. I could feel the shadow’s taint siphoning into me through those otherworldly strands. I could feel it losing its potency, becoming nothing more than inert matter, then flowing out into Duat, harmless debris floating along in the river of soul-energy.

  It was working, until the second shadow reached me. Until a third joined in on the fun.

  The balance shifted, no longer in my favor. The moment when I’d held victory in my sights passed in a wave of nausea and dizziness. My knees gave out, and my head slumped forward. I was weakening far faster than that unrelenting darkness was draining from their souls. I couldn’t beat them. I couldn’t win.

  Which meant I was going to die.

  I could see Dom on the other side of the mirror, slamming his hands against the surface. He was shouting, but I couldn’t hear him because I wasn’t touching the glass. And he couldn’t help me. He was right there, but he might as well have been on the other side of the universe for all the good it would do me.

  Using every ounce of energy that I had left, I raised my head a few inches and looked past the shadow standing in front of me to the girl sitting in the far corner of the locker room, hugging her knees to her chest and watching on in horror. Her eyes weren’t focused on me. She was staring at the shadows. She could see them.

  “Get Nik,” I said, voice guttural. “The sub—go get him, now.”

  My tunnel vision narrowed, until there was only darkness. My lungs struggled for breath, my heart straining to beat. I couldn’t hold out much longer. But I wouldn’t let these mindless, starving creatures render me into nothing. They wouldn’t destroy me. I wouldn’t let them.

  I managed to suck in one last, shuddering breath, and on my exhale, I clamped down on the final spark of energy left in my ba and fled my dying body.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Once again, I felt that strange, out-of-body disorientation. Probably because my soul was literally outside of my physical body.

  I floated above the trio of shadows, watching with little interest as they released my body, letting it fall to the cement floor. It was merely the discarded shell that had housed my ba while I’d been living in the physical realm. I no longer needed it, and I felt nothing but a calm sense of rightness as the distance between my ba and my body grew.

  Now that I was an energy being, not restricted by the limitations of my old body, I could see the shadows for what they truly were—warped, twisted human souls desperate to feel alive again. The three shadows who’d stolen my life-force hovered around my body, staring down at it, clearly confused. I’d been the tastiest thing on campus a second ago, and now I was ashes in their incorporeal mouths.

  There was a faint pop, and I was suddenly watching the scene through a transparent film, the discordant song of ma’at clashing and crashing in my ears. The not-so-gentle flow of the thinning soul-energy formed a maelstrom that roared all around me. It swept me up, thrashing me about. It screamed and cried out, a million—billion—voices joining as one in mutual outrage. It overwhelmed me, absolutely and completely, until I felt my emotions merging with the collectives. Until my anger swelled to match theirs. Until their thoughts became my own.

  We’d been defeated. Our only weapon on the earthly plane had been bested. Our only chance to fight back . . . gone. We no longer had any way to defend ourselves
against the abominations. They were consuming more and more of us by the second, all around the human world. And there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it.

  She was supposed to be the one. She was supposed to save us.

  In some distant part of my mind, I recognized that she was me.

  A moment later, the deepest, blackest darkness swallowed me up, muting the collective’s outrage and returning independent thought to my mind. I could no longer hear the song of ma’at, and the soul-energy’s multitude of voices was a mere memory.

  Which meant I was no longer in Duat.

  Fear took hold, deep within my soul.

  Because I was in Aaru.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  I ran through a string of curse words that included every filthy word or phrase I’d ever heard. I was trapped in Aaru, which meant I wouldn’t be able to stop the massacre at the high school. I wouldn’t be able to stop the shadows from consuming all of the soul-energy. I wouldn’t be able to find a way to return Dom to the land of the living or test my bond with Nik to see if it wasn’t fully formed yet—if it truly was, I’d pretty much just locked his fate. And I sure as hell wouldn’t be able to break Isfet out of Aaru if I was imprisoned in here with her.

  Which meant the universe was doomed.

  All because I’d gone and fucked things up. Again.

  Through my rage, I watched the darkness surrounding me fade, thinning to a nearly transparent, glittering mist. I could just make out shapes in the distance. People-shaped shapes.

  A sharp pain stabbed into my chest, and I grunted. It came again, harder. It felt like my heart was being torn out—it didn’t matter that I no longer actually had a heart.

  The pain came again, and I doubled over, tying to hold myself together. Again it came, sizzling and searing out to my fingertips and down to my toes, lighting my soul on fire.

  Was this my fate—an eternity of agony? Was this what it meant to spend an eternity in Aaru? In hell?

  I dropped to my knees, threw my head back, and screamed.

  Suddenly I was lying on my back, the pain gone. I sucked in a breath, gasping for air and looking around, blinking in confusion. I was back in the locker room.

  Somehow, impossibly, I was alive. I’d been sucked into Aaru—I’d gone to the place that nobody ever, ever returns from—and I’d made it back out.

  “This is getting to be a bad habit, Kitty Kat,” Nik said.

  Dying is disorienting, but it has nothing on being brought back to life. My chest rose and fell as quickly as if I’d been running sprints, and my heart rammed against the inside of my sternum in its effort to make sure that it never stopped again.

  Nik slipped an arm beneath my shoulders and helped me sit up. Had he really just yanked me out of Aaru? Was the bond between our souls truly that strong? If so, I felt pretty certain that it wasn’t only partially formed. There was no way out of it. When I died for good—and at the rate I was going, it was pretty much guaranteed to happen one of these days—he would die, too.

  My brain snapped back into living mode, replaying all that had happened in the moments before my death. The trip into Duat, and then into Aaru, now felt dreamlike, dulled by the vibrancy of this reality. The threat of Aaru felt far away, the danger posed by the shadows who’d sent me there, fresh and terrifying.

  I searched the spaces between rows of lockers for the three shadows, but found no sign of them. “Where are they?” I asked, voice thready. I gripped Nik’s arm with clawlike fingers. “There were three. They—”

  “Over there,” Nik said, pointing behind me with his chin.

  I spun around on my butt, clambering to my knees and then, with a hand on a nearby bench, climbing to my feet. My legs were shaky, my head spinning.

  When my eyes landed on the shadows, I stumbled back a step. They were near the mirror, wrapped in vines of combined At and anti-At, the two universal materials forming a cocoon around their tainted souls. They appeared far more defined than I’d ever seen them before, their heads thrashing from side to side, their jaws gnashing, revealing the yawning void within their mouths.

  “They’re solid,” Nik said. “At least for now.” Like before, feeding on me had made them more substantial, bringing them further into this world.

  I nodded and moved closer to the restrained shadows. This was my first real chance to get up close and personal without having to fear for my life. I couldn’t waste this chance.

  I walked a slow circle around the trio. Maybe this is what I had to do: work with Nik. Maybe if we got them all to feast on a whole crowd of people, then they would gain enough substance that Nik could restrain them, and then I would be able to cleanse them—and survive the process. It just might work.

  I took a step closer to the shadows, raising my hand until it was within a few inches of the nearest shadow’s thrashing head. It stretched out its neck, reaching for my fingers.

  “Not this time, shitstain,” I said, watching the tendrils of At and anti-At extend from my fingertips with the merest of thoughts. They latched onto the thing’s face, punching through the surface of its shadowy exterior.

  Brilliant, poppy red shone through around the puncture marks, spreading across the shadowy surface like a cancer eating away at the twisted, tainted part of the soul. As the darkness shrank, I could feel the tainted matter siphoning into my ba through those otherworldly tendrils, only to filter back out, utterly harmless.

  It took fifteen seconds, maybe twenty, and suddenly the remaining patches of darkness marring the soul’s crimson perfection flaked away. The now-pristine soul slipped out of Nik’s restraints and faded away as it finally entered Duat.

  Breathing hard, I lowered my hand. It had worked.

  I looked at Nik. “One down, about a bajillion to go . . .” I shifted my attention to the mirror and did a double take. My appearance was back to normal, the mirror showing plain old me in the reflection. Apparently, dying had banished the disguise. I looked at Dom. “Maybe we don’t need to use the mirrors to trap them after all.”

  The silvery image of my half-brother nodded slowly, and then his eyes opened wide. He raised a hand, shouting as he pointed to something behind me. I wasn’t touching the mirror, so I couldn’t hear him, but I could make out his words clear as day. “Behind you!”

  “Kat!” Nik yelled, a vine of At shooting past me.

  Icy fingers clamped around my arms, searing into my skin. In the reflection, I could see the shadow. One of the two amped up on my stolen energy still struggled against its restraints, but the other must have lost its corporeal substance and slipped through those At and anti-At vines.

  With all of my strength—what little I had left—I reached behind me over my head and gripped the thing by the neck. It might have been incorporeal to the rest of the world, but I was different. I could still touch it. I shouted in agony as I threw the shadow over my head, intending to body-slam it against the mirror.

  Except it didn’t stop at the mirror. It went through the mirror. And as it passed through the surface, its shadowy exterior melted away. Its lower half glowed like silver moonlight, its upper half, still on my side, remained as dark and tainted as ever.

  From the other side, Dom grabbed the shadow soul’s legs and tugged, pulling it deeper into the mirror, revealing inch after inch of shimmering, unblemished soul. I backed away several steps, but the shadow snagged my ponytail and started dragging me into the land beyond the surface of the mirror right along with it.

  My head smacked into the glass, my body unable to pass through the hard surface. But my soul could.

  My ba dislodged from my body, and I was dragged into the mirror. It felt like a million shards of glass were clawing through my skin. The world beyond was foggy, everything but Dom and the struggling shadow clouded in a glittering mist.

  I recognized that mist. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen before today . . . before I was sucked into Aaru.

  I stared around me, stunned into stillness.

 
; The world on the other side of the mirrors was Aaru.

  The shadow let go of my hair all of a sudden, and I had just a moment to meet its very human eyes. The taint on its soul was gone.

  Dom lunged at me, shoving me out of the mirror.

  My ba snapped right back into my body, and I stumbled backward, falling to the cement floor. “That’s not possible,” I said, crab-crawling backwards, eyes locked on the mirror.

  If the world on the other side of the mirrors was Aaru, then that meant Dom was trapped in Aaru.

  “That’s not possible,” I said.

  But I couldn’t ignore the truth. Dom was trapped in Aaru. And I’d put him there.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “What the hell was that?” Nik asked as he gripped my arm and hoisted me up off the cement floor.

  I shook my head, staring at the mirror, transfixed by the scene on the other side of the glass. The shadow, or former shadow, was gone. Only Dom’s image remained, his back to me, and everything else looked like a normal reflection of this reality. There was no sign of the glittering mist. No sign at all that the place beyond the mirror was Aaru.

  I lunged at the mirror, slapping both hands against the cool, smooth surface. “What the hell, Dom?”

  He turned around and looked at me with those dark, silvery eyes, expression guarded.

  “You’re in Aaru?”

  He set his jaw.

  “Is it true, Dom?” I yelled as I banged on the glass once more. Cracks snaked out from the place where my fist struck. “Is it?”

  The fissures in the mirror crept across Dom’s ghostly face. He nodded once, right before the mirror shattered. Shards of glass rained down on the sinks and clattered onto the cement floor.

  I stumbled backward, running into Nik.

  He steadied me with hands on my arms, then spun me around to face him. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “Tell me.”