Rachel Vincent - With All My Soul

“That bit of her what? ” Em slapped her own sternum with one hand. “There’s part of Lydia’s soul still in here?” she hissed. “When were you planning to tell me that?”

“Sorry.” I shrugged and tried to look as guilty as I felt. Which was a lot. “I’ve been kind of preoccupied with the police investigation into your death, and the funeral plans, and figuring out where you were going to live, and how to get you back into school. The soul thing just kind of slipped my mind.”

“It’s not that bad, Em,” Nash said, when nothing I’d said seemed to be helping. “Lydia was syphoning some of your pain when you died, and when Kaylee captured your soul, she got part of Lydia’s, too.”

“What happened to the rest of it?”

I took a deep breath. There was no good way to say the next part. “It kind of...”

“Got disintegrated,” Sabine finished, when I held on to the thought for too long. “Poof. Dissipated throughout all four corners of both the human- and the Netherworld, for as long as it takes to coalesce again.”

“Wait. Her soul will coalesce?”

Luca nodded. “From what my aunt’s told me—” his aunt Madeline was my boss at the reclamation department “—it will slowly pull itself back together. Until then...it’s like being in limbo. Floating. We don’t think that it hurts. We don’t think they’re even aware, when that happens.”

“So...Lydia will be back when her soul...congeals, or whatever?” Emma was breathing too fast now, and her face was turning red. “Is it reasonable to assume she’s going to want her body back when that happens? Are we going to have to share?” Her hands gripped the picnic table so tightly her fingers looked like they might snap. “Or is she just going to throw me out? Am I going to be a homeless ghost, Kaylee?”

“Em, it could be centuries before that happens. That’s not on the list of things we need to worry about immediately.”

“It could be centuries? So it might not be? ”

“Okay, we need to focus on the positives.” Sophie laid both of her palms flat on the table. “That’s what we do in dance, when we place second. We don’t think about how second place is the first loser. We think about how many other teams we stomped into the dirt and how hard they’re probably crying.” She shrugged. “That always makes me feel better.”

For a moment, there was only silence while we stared at her. Even Luca looked a little...disturbed. But Sabine only shrugged. “Makes sense to me. And the positive side of this, if you ask me, is that now that you know what you are, you can learn how to control your abilities. Trust me, a little control makes all the difference.”

“I can control it?” Em looked almost hopeful.

I nodded. “Lydia could.” To some degree, anyway. “So, here’s what we know. What I think, anyway. At the funeral, you were fine when you were with us, because we knew you weren’t dead, so we weren’t as upset as the other mourners. But when your mom came over, you lost it because she was devastated by grief, and you took some of that from her. You calmed her down, at the expense of your own composure.”

“Okay...” Nash looked fascinated. “So, yesterday when you got all badass and hell-bent on revenge, you were probably taking a little of that from Kaylee. She’s been itching to make Avari pay since the day you died.”

Since before that. Since the day Avari tricked me into killing Alec. That’s when I’d started channeling my pain into anger—a much more useful emotion.

Luca frowned. “So then, whose anger was she syphoning today? Somebody must have been really pissed off, if the portion she took was strong enough to make her go off on you like that.”

Oh, shit. I hadn’t even thought about that. Em’s rage had a source, and considering how many hellions were known to frequent the Netherworld version of our school, chances were good that that anger wasn’t human in origin. Which meant that someone at Eastlake could be about to lose control.

Again.

“Where are you going?” Nash said when I stood, already pulling my phone from my pocket.

“To find whoever sent Em into anger overdrive before he explodes in someone’s face.” More violence was the last thing we needed at America’s most dangerous high school. Of its size. “You had chemistry before lunch, right?” I said, trying to remember her new schedule, and Em nodded. “Whose class?”

“Mr. Flannery.”

“Did anyone look angry in your chem class? Anyone lose his or her temper?”

Em shook her head. “Only me.”

“That just means that whoever it was did a good job of hiding his anger.” Which meant those around him would be completely unprepared when and if he snapped. “I gotta get a look at Mr. Flannery’s roll book before lunch is over. I’ll see you guys later.”

Before anyone could object, I took off across the quad, headed for the corner of the building, texting Tod on the way. His shift at the hospital had just ended. With any luck, he’d have time to come help me deal with...whatever was about to go horribly wrong.

As soon as I was out of sight of the quad, I let myself fade from human sight, then blinked into Mr. Flannery’s first-floor chemistry lab. The room was empty, thank goodness, and his roll book was open on his desk, which was another stroke of luck in itself. Most of the other teachers had long ago switched to an electronic attendance and grade program. Fortunately, Mr. Flannery was nearly sixty and set in his ways. I’d once heard him complain to a colleague about how long it took him to enter the grades into the computer all at once, at the end of each term.

Still invisible, in case anyone came in, I flipped through his roll book to the third period page and scanned the list. Emily Cavanaugh had been penciled in at the bottom. Most of the students were juniors, which meant I knew nearly all of them. All but four had been in the quad with us—underclassmen usually got stuck eating inside on nice days.

All four of the missing kids were members of the baseball team—Nash’s former teammates—who’d started eating in the practice field’s dugout in the two weeks since Brant Williams’s death. They seemed to think that was the best place to remember him. And to avoid adult supervision.

They kind of had a point.

I closed the roll book and blinked onto the baseball practice field, but a quick glance showed me that only three team members were in the dugout. Marco Gutierrez was missing.

After several more minutes of looking—I blinked into every men’s room in the building as well as both locker rooms—I finally found him under the bleachers in the gym, just as the bell rang. Lunch was over. In six minutes I’d be late to English.

I faded into the corporeal plane at his back—visible and audible only to him—then took a deep breath. “Marco? Are you okay?”

He turned, obviously startled, and the moment his gaze found me, it hardened in anger. His eyes narrowed. His nose flared. His fists clenched at his sides. And I knew one thing immediately, though it made no sense.

Marco Gutierrez wasn’t just angry. He was angry at me.

“Kaylee Cavanaugh. How kind of you to save me the trouble of searching for you.”

Chills raced up my spine and tingled at the base of my skull. Marco didn’t have such a formal, stilted speech pattern. And he had no reason to be mad at me, that I knew of. “Avari.”

Marco was possessed.

“You do not seem surprised to see me....” Marco lifted one brow and clasped his hands at his back in a gesture no high school junior makes, unless he’s standing at ease in ROTC.

“Surprised to hear from you? No. The escalating pattern of your intrusions into my life is pretty hard to miss. But I can’t say I expected to see you...there.” I waved one hand at the body he’d borrowed. The body of another relatively innocent, uninvolved classmate.