Rachel Vincent - With All My Soul

I wanted to tell Tod everything. Not telling him felt uncomfortable, like I was building a barrier between us. Like I couldn’t quite reach him through the wall neither of us could see or touch, but he was surely starting to feel. But I couldn’t tell him, because he’d be as determined to stop me as I was determined to go through with it. He’d be more determined, especially if his mother died, because then Nash and I would be all that he had left, and he’d be that much more determined to keep either of us from...

I blinked and buried that thought before he could see it swirling in my eyes. But I wasn’t as fast as he was observant.

“You okay?” He turned my face toward his and ran one finger all the way from the back of my jaw to the tip of my chin, and I almost confessed everything with one look at the maelstrom of grief, frustration, and devotion churning in every imaginable shade of blue in his irises.

“No. I’m not okay.” I let that one truth resonate in my voice and show in my eyes. “None of us are okay.” And we weren’t going to be until Avari was no longer a threat. Unfortunately, the longer I thought about the task in front of us, the more impossible it seemed to accomplish. On our own, anyway... “But we will be.”

He smiled and pulled me closer. “When you say it like that, with that look in your eyes, I can almost believe it.”

Well, that made one of us.

First and second periods dragged like no high school class has ever dragged before or since. I had no idea what I was supposed to learn in chemistry, and if the fate of the world ever came to hinge upon my understanding of time as the fourth dimension—which was only marginally relevant to the math lesson—we were all goners.

When the bell rang to end second period, I was the first one out of my chemistry classroom. I waved to Em in the hall and brushed off a question from Chelsea Simms, then ducked into the nearest restroom. As soon as I was sure it was empty—for the moment—I faded from human sight and spared a moment to hope Chelsea wasn’t waiting for me to come out of the bathroom.

Then I blinked into the kitchen of a local doughnut shop, which had sat empty since Thane had killed the owner a month earlier. The doughnut shop had both sharp objects and privacy, everything necessary to summon a demon, as far as I could tell. Which was fortunate, because there was no way I’d invite Ira into my home, even if I could be sure of my control over him while he was there under the power of my blood. And I was far from sure of that.

The cut on my left palm hadn’t yet healed and I wouldn’t be able explain an identical one on my opposite hand, so I made a cut at the top of my forearm instead, near my left elbow. That turned out to be ill-planned, at best. It was much harder to direct the flow of blood from halfway up my arm than from my hand, but after a couple of minutes and several drops spilled on my jeans, I had enough blood on the floor to write with.

I pressed a stack of folded napkins against the new cut and bent my arm at the elbow to hold it in place. Then I made the creepiest finger painting in history.

Ira appeared in front of me the second his name fell from my tongue. He stared down at me with featureless, red-veined black eyes, and though his lips didn’t actually curve up on the ends, I could swear he was smiling. “How wonderful to see you again, Ms. Cavanaugh. And you look so blisteringly angry!”

“You lied to me.”

Ira sank to the floor in one smooth movement. “That, my little fury, is impossible. In fact, lying is one of very few things I cannot do.”

I wanted to know what the other things were—and he obviously knew I wanted to know—but I wasn’t willing to bargain with a hellion for something I didn’t actually need.

“My dad wasn’t where you said he’d be, and because of the wild-goose chase you sent us on, more people are hurt.” And trapped in the Netherworld. But I wasn’t going to mention that, in case he didn’t already know about Harmony and my uncle. The last thing we needed was another hellion out there searching for them.

“I wasn’t asked where your father would be. You asked me where he was, and I told you exactly where he was at the time. Obviously, he was moved before you arrived.”

“Obviously.” I tried to keep the anger from my voice but failed miserably.

“Look on the bright side—at least you learned something.” He actually did smile that time, with lips the color of clotting blood. “You learned to act quickly, before the intelligence you paid for becomes moot, right?”

“Actually, the lesson I learned goes something like, ‘Never trust a hellion.’”

Ira laughed, a sound that felt more like an angry dog’s growl than a demonstration of joy. “I would have thought you’d learned that one long ago.”

I would have thought so, too. Which was part of the problem.

He leaned closer, over the blood on the floor, and it took most of my self-control to keep from backing away from him, which would have felt to both of us like an admission of fear. “But the fact remains—I did not lie to you.”

“But you did tie my friend to the ground with crimson creeper vines. Why?”

Somehow, Ira seemed even more amused by my question than by my belated wariness of hellions in general. “Are you surprised when a cat meows? Or when a siren sings her prey to sleep?”

“I’m surprised when someone who agrees to help me turns around and tries to kill one of my friends.”

He leaned back again, studying me from a different perspective, and I pretended that didn’t creep me out. “Little fury, I’m finding it difficult to express how very mixed-up you seem to be. First of all, I did not, nor will I ever, ‘help’ you. The information I provided was not a favor. It was a service rendered for payment. And, for the record, I’m only explaining that to you—with great patience, I might add—because I can feel you growing angrier with every word I speak. Which means that so far, I’m profiting from this little encounter without putting forth any effort whatsoever.”

“You’re... vile. ” I’m not sure where the word came from, but it felt like a good fit.

“Why, thank you. And to continue, I did not try to kill your friend the mara. Had I wanted her dead, I would simply have bitten her head off and sucked out the tasty filling. But the fact is that in most cases, death of the victim means an end to its anger, thus an end to my meal. You are the happy exception. Well, the angry exception, in this case.”

“The exception?” Why am I always the exception?

“Typically, the undead quickly start to lose touch with their human emotions, including anger. At first I thought you were simply too recently dead for that to have happened yet. And that could be the case. But upon subsequent study, I’ve discovered that you, little fury, are not the average dead girl. You are a dead girl imitating life, which means that you didn’t lose your connections to the human world when you died. You still love, and regret, and hope, and wish, and you still anger. So you still have use to me.”

I frowned, trying to untangle his words and rearrange them so that they made sense. “Was that your long-winded way of saying you poisoned Sabine to piss me off?”

He nodded. “Succinctly put. In fact, my original intent was to kill her. However, when I took a taste of her anger, both past and present, I found you prominently displayed among her grievances, in spite of the fact that she was obviously in the Netherworld in an ill-fated attempt to help you and your assorted collection of playmates. Which told me that hurting her would likely anger you.”

“So, should I assume that if you catch any of the rest of my ‘playmates,’ you will hurt them, too, to piss me off?”