Rachel Vincent - With All My Soul

“So, how bad is this?” Em said from her bar stool, while I ran water into the glass carafe. “I mean, it feels like we’ve been in a constant state of emergency for the past few months, but is it just me, or do things seem extra dire today?”

I turned off the faucet and poured water from the carafe into the reservoir at the back of the coffeepot. “It’s not just you.” Avari had been taking things from us for months. People we knew and loved. Opportunities we could never get back. He’d taken Sophie’s naivety, Nash’s emotions, and Sabine’s foster mother and home. He’d been party to the scheme that took Emma’s body and Lydia’s soul. But throughout all of that, we’d always had a support network to rely on. Parents, older and wiser, who encouraged, overruled, and protected us out of love.

Now, they were gone. We were on our own, and beyond that forced independence, we were missing parts of our families, both blood and extended. Our positions had been reversed—now our parents needed us to find and protect them, without the advantage of their wisdom and guidance.

The game had changed. We now stood to lose much more than our own lives.

“So, what’s the plan?” Em asked as I dumped dry coffee grounds into the filter.

“We find them, and we bring them back.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.” That was possibly the scariest sentence I’d ever said aloud. “Footwork? Guesswork? Dumb luck? I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but it has to be done.” And that was the bottom line. “Quickly.”

I’d just pressed the brew button when someone gasped from the living room and I looked up to find Tod standing in the middle of the floor, in front of the TV. I only realized I’d reached for a knife from the block by the microwave when my hand closed over the handle.

I let go of the knife as Tod turned toward me, already fielding questions he seemed to have no answers for.

“Did you find them?”

“What about my dad?”

“Are the monsters hunting them? Was there any sign of blood?”

Emma and I stopped in the kitchen doorway while coffee dripped into the carafe.

Tod sat on the end of the coffee table. “I didn’t find them, and I really think that’s a good sign.”

“How on earth is that a good sign?” Sophie demanded. “They’re still missing!”

“Not finding them is a hell of a lot better than finding a pile of blood, bones, and shredded flesh,” Sabine said.

Sophie sobbed, and Luca glared at the mara, who didn’t seem to notice.

“I wasn’t going to put it like that, but yes,” Tod said. “I blinked in and out around the perimeter of the building, because that’s safer than actually walking around the Netherworld, and at first it looked pretty bad. There were creatures clustered in groups too tight for me to see what they were looking at. But eventually the groups started breaking up and I got close enough to see that they were gathered around several spots of blood. Just a few drops. They’re tracking Mom and Brendon, but they haven’t found them yet.”

“But they will,” Nash said, and Sabine took his hand.

“Yes, eventually, they will.” Tod flinched, as if the truth hurt coming out. “Unless we find them first. But the good news is that the blood trail has stopped. The last thing I saw them gathered around was a strip of material. It was part of your dad’s shirt.” He glanced at Sophie, whose eyes were wide and damp. “It looks like he bandaged my mom’s wounds, which has slowed—or maybe even stopped—the bleeding. Which makes them harder to track.”

“Okay. Good.” I sat next to Tod when he held one hand out to me. “So, we’ll keep looking, in shifts. Me, Tod, and Sabine.” Because we could cross over safely if we were smart about it.

“I’m coming, too,” Sophie said. Before anyone could object, she rushed on, “Not alone. I’m not stupid, and I don’t want to die. But I can get there and back, so there’s no reason I can’t go with one of you. I can help.”

The rest of us must have looked skeptical, because she scowled at us all. “Four eyes are better than two, right?”

She’d said the opposite to Chelsea Simms during the two years she’d been stuck in glasses before her parents let her get contacts. But whatever. I liked Sophie 2.0 better anyway.

“Fine,” I said, and my cousin gave me a grim smile of thanks. “You can come with me, but not until you learn how to control that wail of yours. You don’t have to unleash it at full volume, you know.” Saying that reminded me that Harmony wasn’t there to teach Sophie like she’d taught me. I wasn’t entirely sure I could do her lessons justice.

“You can come with me, too,” Sabine said. “But the first time you do something stupid or put either of us in danger, I’m dragging you back here.”

“That won’t happen.” Sophie looked slightly less thankful for Sabine’s concession than she had for mine.

After that, we took up a collection and Emma ordered dinner for those who needed it while Sabine took a shift searching in the Netherworld and I tried to teach Sophie what I knew about the one bean sidhe ability she’d inherited.

Turns out my cousin’s big mouth was more practical than I’d ever given it credit for.

Sabine’s shift took longer than it should have, because she couldn’t blink from place to place in the human world, nor could she become invisible to humans like Tod and I could. Which meant that she had to actually drive partway to the hospital to pick up the search where Tod had left off, and she had to be away from onlookers when she crossed over, so no one would see her disappear.

She was still gone when the Chinese food delivery arrived, and Sophie and I took a break so she could eat.

I left my cousin at the kitchen table with Luca and Emma scooping rice and chicken from cartons onto paper plates. Then I headed into the back of our small house in search of Tod and Nash.

Halfway down the hall, I heard them, one whispered masculine voice, then the other in answer, coming from my room. I stopped breathing so I could hear them better, torn between the knowledge that I shouldn’t be eavesdropping and the relief that for the first time since Nash and I had broken up, the Hudson brothers were alone in the same room and they weren’t fighting.

It was a moment I wanted to treasure. Definitely a moment I didn’t want to spoil. So I listened, just for a minute.

“The truth, Tod. You think she’s still alive?” Nash’s voice was low and strained. He was worried.

“Yeah, I do. I think Brendon would do just about anything to protect her.”

“He’s just one man.”

“Yeah, but he’s a smart man, and a big man, and a man who’s been around for more than a century and a half. He’s also a man who has every reason in the world to want to get both himself and our mom back here as soon as possible.” Tod paused, and I pictured him shrugging, though all I could see was my mostly closed door. “Anyway, if she were dead—if either of them were—Avari would want us to know. He’d want to feed from our suffering.”

“We’re suffering just from not knowing where they are. Or how they are.”

“But not like we would if we knew they were dead. Not knowing allows room for hope, and Avari can’t feed from worry and hope like he can feed from true pain.”

I snuck closer until I could see Nash through the gap between my door and its frame. He sat on the end of Emma’s bed, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, the toes of his shoes resting on the ground.

“Maybe they’re dead and he just doesn’t know it.” Nash’s gaze followed Tod as the reaper paced the rug in front of him, like he had energy to burn. Worried, angry energy. “Maybe one of those man-eating freaks killed them and ate them, and Avari hasn’t told us because he doesn’t know.”