Rachel Vincent - With All My Soul

After I fed Styx and checked to make sure all the doors were locked—not that anything I truly feared needed an open door to get to me—I blinked out of my house and into the middle of Madeline’s office. She stood with her back to me, a stack of papers in her hand, like she’d just picked them up from the credenza behind her desk.

She turned and saw me and gave an uncharacteristically undignified little yip of surprise. And dropped the entire stack of papers to clutch her heart. As if she could possibly have a heart attack when she was already dead. I wasn’t sure how long she’d been dead, but we had a pool going, with a bonus included for whoever was able to actually obtain the answer.

“Kaylee! You’ve certainly gotten stealthier in the past few weeks.” She didn’t look entirely impressed by that fact.

“Thanks, I guess.”

“What can I do for you?” Madeline sat in the chair behind her large dark wood desk and waved a hand at the pair of leather-padded armchairs on my side. When her boss had found out exactly how dire our situation was, when Avari was stealing souls pell-mell from the human plane, he’d increased our department’s budget and tossed a little more manpower our way.

Too bad all of that came after all the death and chaos and after Thane stole the hellions’ collection of souls, which prevented them from appearing on the human plane again, at least until they could renew their supply.

I was assuming they hadn’t yet managed that, based on the fact that I’d only seen them in borrowed—possessed—bodies since then.

“I...um...” I sank into the chair on the right and clasped my hands in my lap to keep from fidgeting. Looking nervous wouldn’t do me any favors. “Well, Tod’s at work, and everyone else I know is asleep, and I...”

Her smile got a little kinder. “You’re bored.”

“Yeah.” That wasn’t entirely a lie. My boredom usually peaked in the middle of the night, and at first the shortage of company and the complete lack of anything to keep me busy had led to a dangerous melancholy period, during which I’d lost the desire to do...well, anything. I hadn’t snapped out of it until Avari started parading the ghosts of my past—everyone I’d failed to save—before me and making me “kill” them all over again.

The melancholy hadn’t returned. It had been replaced with a relentless thirst for justice.

Though Ira would call that rage.

“Well, fortunately, things have slowed down around here, and you know we have two new reclamation agents now.”

Yes, I knew. My dad called it the “hurry up and wait” phenomenon. They raised me from the dead to help them with a very bean sidhe –specific emergency job, and now that that job was over—at least, as long as Avari was stuck in the Netherworld—they had much less immediate need of me. And since I was the rookie among more experienced employees again, I got the smallest, simplest, least complicated jobs. Which I was fine with. I was still in high school, after all. But...

“I was thinking. Thane got away with several stolen souls. Shouldn’t we be...reclaiming them? I mean, if the others are too busy, I guess I could look into it.” That sounded casual. Right?

Madeline folded her hands on her desk. “Kaylee, Thane is a rogue reaper. He’s completely beyond our authority. The reapers police their own.”

“But he stole souls. Lots of them.” I hadn’t been able to rescue them from him at the time, because Em had just died and Lydia’s body was on the verge of death. I’d had to act quickly to save one of them. Or, a piece of each of them. “Besides, we deal with hellions who’ve stolen souls, and they’re way more dangerous than rogue reapers.”

Madeline nodded. “It’s not about the danger. It’s about the jurisdiction. There’s no other agency in place to deal with hellions when they steal souls, but the reapers have their own authority. Around here, that’s Levi, and I’m not going to step on his toes, especially after everything he’s done to help us recently.”

“But—”

“No.” She leaned closer to me over her desk. “Thane’s a reaper. Let the reapers deal with him.”

“They’re the ones who lost him in the first place!” When he’d killed my mother, then come back to kill me when I was three.

Madeline’s frown deepened. “Was there something else I can help you with, Kaylee?”

That was a dismissal if I’d ever heard one.

“No. Thanks.” I stood and headed toward the door, because using it seemed more polite than just disappearing right in front of her, and I’d obviously already pissed her off. I paused in the doorway with my hand wrapped around the doorframe. “Hey, Madeline?”

“Yes?” She sounded annoyed now.

“Whatever happened to Mr. Beck’s soul?”

“Mr. Beck?”

“The incubus. The one who killed me. His soul was in my dagger when I turned it in that first time. Did it get recycled along with the others?”

Madeline’s brows rose in sudden interest, and she put down the pen she’d picked up. “No. As it turns out, an incubus soul is a relative rarity, and it carries quite a bit of power. And since no one was expecting it at the recycling facility—your incubus wasn’t on the list, of course—Levi decided to keep it as a sort of...souvenir. A conversation piece.”

“Is he allowed to do that?”

“Well, no. Not technically. But he wasn’t allowed to bring back your young reaper suitor either. He did that as a favor to me—” because I’d refused to work for her if she couldn’t bring Tod back to me “—so I will, of course, be overlooking his small indiscretion. As will you, naturally.”

“Naturally...” I hardly heard the word as I spoke it, because my head was spinning with other thoughts. Other possibilities.

Levi still had Beck’s soul. If it would work for the father, it would work for the son. No one else would have to die to give Traci’s baby life—a pattern that would hopefully continue throughout the little parasite’s existence.

“What exactly is a conversation piece, anyway?” That wasn’t really a lie either, because I hadn’t actually said I didn’t know the definition. I’d just implied it.

“It’s a piece of art or decor intended to start conversations. Thus the name. In this case, it’s a highly stylized letter opener. It’s obviously just for show. Something interesting to set on his desk. And now when people ask about it, he can tell them not only the history of the letter opener itself—it’s hellion-forged steel he won in some kind of gambling game—but that it contains the soul of the only incubus ever known to have died at the hands of one of his victims.”

I started to argue with that statement. I wasn’t an incubus’s victim in the traditional sense. He hadn’t wanted my body; he’d wanted my soul. However, he had killed me, so Levi’s story wasn’t really inaccurate....

But I had just as much right to Beck’s soul as he did. More really. And I wanted Traci to have it.

“Thanks, Madeline. Just let me know when you need me. I’ll be...around.”

“Thank you, Kaylee.” I’d been dismissed again, and this time I was eager to go.

I blinked from Madeline’s office back into my bedroom, where I silently lifted the broken dagger from my dresser. I’d taken it from Beck—it was the weapon that had killed us both—and he’d bought it from Avari, who’d evidently ripped the metal from the Netherworld ground and forged the dagger himself.

That thought made me pause, stunned to realize that Avari, Beck, and I were tangled up in as intimate and distressing a knot as Nash, Sabine, Tod, and I. Hundreds of years before my birth Avari had made the blade that would kill me, but I’d survived its use—and my own death—to retain ownership of my own murder weapon. Which he no doubt wanted back.