Rachel Vincent - With All My Soul

On second thought, the Avari/Beck/me tangle was much more disturbing than anything forged in adolescent hormones and rooted in love.

I stared at the dagger in my hand for a moment, tracing the jagged, broken edges with my gaze. Invidia, the hellion of envy, had broken off both of the points on the night Emma had died. Afterward, Tod had gone back to the Netherworld to retrieve it for me, but he wasn’t able to find the severed points.

Fortunately, the jagged blades were just as scary—and almost as sharp—as the original weapon had been.

I slid the double-bladed dagger beneath the waistband of my jeans, at the base of my spine, uncomfortably aware that if I made the wrong move, I’d knick my own backside with both broken points. But I couldn’t exactly walk into reaper headquarters wielding a weapon.

In fact, I couldn’t just walk into reaper headquarters at all. I wasn’t even supposed to know where it was, and if Levi found out Tod had told me, he’d get in trouble. Which meant I couldn’t afford to wander around looking for his office. I’d need to know exactly where I was going. Or as exactly as possible, to cut down on the walking I’d have to do. I couldn’t make myself invisible to reapers.

And I only knew one person who might know where Levi’s office was and be willing to tell me.

I blinked into Madeline’s apartment and spared a moment for relief over the fact that I already knew she was still at work. Luca’s room was easy to find—there were only two bedrooms, and Madeline’s didn’t even have a bed. Did the woman truly never sleep?

Luca was out cold in a twin bed, covered only in a thin sheet, which I could see easily in the red glow of his alarm clock numbers and the light from the bathroom across the hall.

Was Luca afraid of the dark?

I tiptoed silently to the side of his bed, but when I bent over to shake him awake, the broken dagger blades scratched the inside of my jeans. I pulled the blade out before I could accidentally slice open the seat of my own pants, then shook Luca awake with my other hand.

His eyes opened groggily, and that surprised me. For some reason, I’d expected a boy with such an intimate connection to death to be a lighter sleeper. It took him several seconds to focus on my face, and another one to recognize it.

“Kaylee?”

“Yeah. It’s me.”

And suddenly he was wide-awake. “What are you...?” His gaze fell on the broken dagger, which must have looked threatening from his perspective—flat on his back in the middle of the night with a dead girl standing over him—because he screamed like a little kid.

“Relax. I just need some help.”

“What happened? Was I possessed?”

It took me a second to figure out what he was talking about, and why my reassurance had failed to reassure him.

Alec.

Like the rest of my friends and family, Luca knew that I’d killed Alec when I’d mistaken him for Avari. I’d killed him in the middle of the night, with the very dagger I now held inches from Luca’s stomach. By total coincidence.

“No!” I reached back and slid the dagger into my waistband again, to get it out of sight. “I just need you to find something for me.”

Luca exhaled, then glanced at his alarm clock. “It’s two in the morning.”

“I know. Sorry.”

He leaned over and turned on his bedside lamp, then tossed off the sheet, and I had to admit that Sophie had good taste. The necromancer was hot. Which I could tell, because he slept in nothing but boxer briefs.

“You may as well sit down and let me put on some pants.” Luca knelt to pick up a pair of flannel pj bottoms from the floor at the foot of his bed. I pulled the dagger from my waistband again, then set it in my lap as I sank into his desk chair and glanced around his room, which was easier to see in the light.

He had a beanbag chair, which made me miss mine. His held three different soccer balls. There was a small TV on top of a chest of drawers, but no gaming system that I could see. Four different pictures of Sophie were wedged into the space between his mirror and its frame.

I suspected she’d stuck them there herself, but the fact that he’d left them said a lot.

“You sleep here alone?” I swiveled in his chair, one foot on the ground for stability.

He sat on the end of his bed, facing me, his bare feet dangling an inch from the floor. “I practically live here alone. Aunt Madeline doesn’t need to eat or sleep. I suspect she only rented this place for me.”

“That must get lonely.” I was lucky enough to have my dad, my dog, and now Emma to keep me company, even in the afterlife.

Luca shrugged. “I really only sleep here. Sophie and I...” He shrugged, and I could fill in for myself the part he’d left out. He spent as much time at my cousin’s house as Tod spent at mine. The only difference was that they didn’t bring the party to his place after my uncle Brendon went to sleep. Though they might, if they could do it on the sly. “So, what’s up, Kay? Though something tells me I don’t really want to know.”

“Have you ever been to reaper headquarters?”

“Nope.”

“You know where it is, though, right?”

He shrugged. “I could make an educated guess. A very educated guess. The PhD of guesses, really. There’s only one spot in the city where more than a dozen dead people hang out 24/7. And those are only the ones off-shift.”

“Great. Do you happen to know where Levi’s office is in that building?”

“Again, I can only guess. I know where he spends most of his time....”

“And that would be?”

Luca frowned, like he was just now awake enough to have questions of his own. “Why? What are you doing?”

“Just a favor for a friend.”

“Without Tod? You wouldn’t need my help if he knew what you were up to.”

“He’s my boyfriend, not my dad.” Besides, Tod had warned me early in our relationship that he was no role model. I was starting to realize I might not be, either. “Anyway, I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m not even breaking any rules.” Taking back what should still belong to me wasn’t really stealing, right? “I just need to get something from Levi.”

“Something he doesn’t know about? Something that requires a scary-looking knife?”

Irritation flared in my chest. “Why do you care? I’m not doing anything wrong, and no one will get hurt. Haven’t you figured that out about me yet?”

But I could see the answer in his eyes, and it stung. He knew I wouldn’t intentionally hurt anyone. But he also knew that my friends and acquaintances had a shorter-than-normal life expectancy.

“Just help me. Please. I’ll owe you.”

Luca looked intrigued at that. “Fine. Levi’s usually in a room on the third floor. Northwest corner of the building. I’m pretty sure that’s his office.”

“Is he there now?”

Luca closed his eyes for a second, and his forehead wrinkled, like he was thinking. Or seeing something I’d never be able to see. “No. He’s down the hall with another reaper. And Tod.”

Crap. What was Tod doing in the reaper building, in the middle of his shift?

“Thanks.” I stood and replaced the dagger beneath my waistband. “I gotta go.”

“Okay, so when you say you’ll owe—”

I blinked out of his room before he could finish his sentence. We could work out the details at school.

Blinking into the reaper headquarters building was like playing hide-and-seek in pitch-dark—I had no idea where I’d wind up. Fortunately, I remembered to take the commonsense precaution Tod had taught me. I blinked out of Luca’s room and into the reaper building in incorporeal form. That wouldn’t keep reapers from seeing me, if there were any in the room when I appeared, but it would keep me from becoming a permanent piece of whatever furniture my arrival collided with. Which was good, because I landed in the middle of a table.