Rachel Vincent - With All My Soul

I was dirty and bruised, but not scarred and no thinner than when I’d arrived. Avari must have just put me back together, intending to rip me apart all over again.

I glanced at the filthy room around me, and I almost asked how long I’d been there. Was it four years to the day? The memories felt numerous enough to fill a century, though they were eerily hollow now, without the pain and anger he’d drained from them.

It worked. I hardly dared to believe it. What if this was part of the torture—what if Avari was letting me believe I was free, only to pull me back into hell, where I would suffer anew? He’d certainly done it before.

My toes curled in the dirt on the floor. “Is it over?” I looked up at Ira and found him smiling the smile of the thoroughly intoxicated. He was drunk on my pain and fury. On the insanity he’d slurped from my soul, leaving me only the bits I could handle.

So far, so good.

“Ira, is it over?” Candlelight flickered over the scrap of my clothing, and he finally looked down at me.

“Almost, little flame. Your knight has arrived.”

“You’re not my knight.” Please say you’re not my knight....

“No, that was a temporary role, and one that has never fit me well. Knights appear to work for honor, a concept I’m not sure I even fully understand. I work for profit.”

Of course he did. He was a hellion, and hellions were evil. He hadn’t helped me—he’d performed services in exchange for payment. Years worth of payment. Could it really have been only four? It felt like eternity....

“Your knight is fairer than I, and less powerful, but much more determined on his mission. Did I mention that he’s here?”

He’s here. Tod had come to say the words I’d left for him. Words he’d had no way of understanding until Ira delivered my second letter to him. Until he’d read—in my handwriting—that Levi had lied, and that I wasn’t gone.

I stood up straight and buried the memories, ignoring the desperate impatience nipping at the edges of my miserable existence. “Let’s go.”

The hellion held his hand out, and I took it. A second later, we stood in another room, so fast I had no time to process the change. This room was larger, and populated with dozens of terrifying species I didn’t quite recognize, but didn’t find unfamiliar, either. Had I seen them during my torture?

My bare feet were silent on the dusty stone floor. Linen whispered against my skin as I moved. Avari’s voice was like needles shoved through my ears and into my brain.

“Just because I cannot hurt you does not mean that no one in the Nether will. I cannot decide if you are flaunting courage or idiocy today, reaper.”

Reaper!

My heart jolted back to life when I saw him, standing alone among monsters, feet spread, fists clenched. His curls were golden like pure sunlight, which had surely never shone in the Netherworld. He looked the same. Like time had stood still around him while it had stretched monstrously around me.

“Neither. I’m flaunting words.” Tod’s voice touched places inside me that had not felt kindness in...longer than I could even comprehend. I had to bite my tongue to keep from calling out to him through the crowd. My hands itched to touch him. My mouth longed for a taste of him. But I couldn’t let Avari see me until the formalities were over. Until he knew he was bound by his own word to let me go. “Specifically, the ones she said to you.”

“Which words were those?” Avari demanded, and I could tell that he wasn’t yet angry, because he didn’t know what was coming. “She’s screamed and moaned a great many things to me over the years, though few of them have been coherent of late.”

Tod stiffened, livid with indignation on my behalf, and I wanted to cry out and tell him I was okay. Because he didn’t know. He didn’t know what had happened to me, or what state I was in, or whether I would ever again be the girl who’d kissed him in the school hallway, scandalizing everyone around us with what now seemed like such an innocent expression of attraction.

Ira stood in the background with me, practically buzzing with anticipation of the rage destined to glut him.

“My soul is yours,” Tod said, and the words burned through me. I remembered saying them, just like that. Just like I’d practiced. Just like I’d written...

“Yes? And?” Avari was losing patience, and surely soon he’d realize I was no longer suffering. That my pain was no longer feeding him.

“Her soul wasn’t her own to give, which means she had no right to surrender it to you or to anyone else. You had no right to accept it.” He stood straighter, confident and bold in spite of the monsters restlessly milling around him. “You can’t keep her.”

“Nonsense!” Avari roared, and Ira’s hand tightened around mine. He practically swelled, lapping up the anger Avari had started to exude like sweat from hellion pores. “Who else would own her soul?”

“I would.” Tod’s voice was strong. Clear. “Her soul is mine, and I have proof, written in her own hand.” He pulled a folded envelope from his back pocket, and even from a distance I recognized his name, in my handwriting. It was my first letter to him—the one I’d left for him the night Levi had told his lie. Tod opened the envelope and pulled out a piece of paper that had obviously been folded and unfolded so many times it was nearly falling apart. Then he read from it.

“‘I am yours, body, mind, heart, and soul. And I always will be.’” Tod looked up, and Avari’s eyes narrowed until they were slits leaking darkness into the Netherworld night. “See? She is mine, body, mind, heart, and soul. And if she’s mine, she can’t be yours. Let. Her. Go. ”

The demand was a formality. Avari had no choice but to stand by his word. To break it would mean rendering his promise to me a lie, and if I was sure of anything about hellions it was this: they cannot lie.

I knew I was free even before he opened his mouth, but the bellow of rage that he unleashed upon the Netherworld at large was more than confirmation. For a moment, I couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t do anything but cover my ears, trying to protect my brain from the sonic assault.

Ira spread his arms, like a child bathing in sunlight, and began to laugh. The sound of his joy swallowed Avari’s rage like a sponge soaking up water.

Avari’s mouth closed, and his eyes narrowed. Even without pupils, I could tell when his gaze found us. “You!” he thundered, and Ira laughed some more.

“Kaylee!” Tod shouted. He tried to run to me, but monsters poured into the path between us.

“It has been my pleasure to conspire with the young bean sidhe to provoke your wrath, an emotion certain to feed me for centuries to come, as you watch her live on, beyond your grasp.” Joy dripped from Ira’s voice. “Now, return her soul, and let the fun begin!”

Avari roared again, and again I covered my ears. His fists were clenched, and his featureless eyes glowed like black lights, gleaming in fury. He lifted one arm, and for a moment I was afraid his gesture was calling me closer for yet another demon kiss. Instead, he opened his hand and twisted it, curling his fingers in my direction, and something deep within me unfurled. It felt like a snake uncoiling in my stomach, a great, frozen serpent, chilling me from the inside out.

Avari jerked his hand back, and that serpentine coldness—his own breath—was ripped up through my core and out my mouth with a metaphysical brutality that made me gasp. For a single second, my insides were a gaping vacuum, sucking at the world—at eternity—in search of something substantial. Something to support my existence and anchor it to the physical reality of my resurrected body.