Rachel Vincent - Before I Wake

“Why would you let me kill you?” I whispered, tightening my grip on the dagger. I had no choice. I couldn’t let Avari kill again, nor could I let him leave with an innocent soul.

“Because you will suffer from this far more than I will,” Heidi whispered, and suddenly I understood. The hellion wouldn’t die just because his physical form did, but he would feed from my trauma. “Do it now, or I will take the small one.”

I followed his gaze and horror swallowed me whole when I found a toddler holding her mother’s hand, clutching a star-shaped Mylar balloon in the other.

“How many souls do you intend to reclaim today, Ms. Cavanaugh?” the Heidi-thing said, already inching toward the mother and child. “The choice is yours.”

Stab Avari and capture the soul he’d stolen in the dagger he’d forged, or abandon that soul and let an innocent child die.

There was really no choice at all.

I sucked in a deep breath and swallowed a sob, tightening my grip on the dagger. I tore my gaze from the toddler and stared into Heidi’s eyes, trying to see Avari staring back at me. Tears rolled down my cheeks. I shoved the double blades deep into Heidi’s stomach. Warm blood leaked sluggishly onto my hand, slower than what had flowed from Beck’s chest, but just as warm, and red, and gruesome.

Her eyes widened and she made a strangled sound of pain. “That truly hurts,” the hellion whispered, with a rare note of surprise. A silver bracelet slid down her arm as she grasped my shoulder for balance, hunched over my knife. “How extraordinary.”

I couldn’t hold her up, so we both fell, and distantly I noticed that no one rushed to help her. As solid and real as she was, they couldn’t see her, just like they couldn’t see me.

Heidi sprawled on the floor beneath me, her jaw clenched in pain, her gaze glued to mine as the hellion swallowed my agony, along with his own.

I didn’t want to spill blood. I didn’t want to fight hellions. I didn’t want to watch people die.

As I blinked through my own horrified tears, a colorless, shapeless haze leaked from Heidi and curled around the dagger, soaking into the hellion-forged steel like water pulled up into a sponge dropped into a puddle.

Her soul. Or maybe the soul of the woman Avari killed.

“Until we meet again,” the demon whispered with a dead girl’s voice. “And, Ms. Cavanaugh, next time it won’t be a stranger.”

His words sent fresh terror through me as I watched, paralyzed by the true pain racking the hellion’s borrowed features. The last of the soul soaked into the dagger and Heidi began to fade from existence, like a shadow dying slowly with the rising of the sun. When she was gone, I still held the double-bladed knife, on my knees on the second floor of the mall.

All that remained of Heidi Anderson was the blood on my knife and a dark bit of smoke where she’d lain, like the Nether-fog that constantly churned between worlds. And as I watched, breathing slowly through my own horror, that dark smudge of…something…began to fade into nothing, just like Heidi’s body had.

On the floor, where she’d been, lay the bracelet she’d been wearing moments earlier. And on the night she’d died.

“KAYLEE?” TOD RACED across the E.R. waiting room toward me, dodging chairs but running right through patients. “What happened? Are you okay?”

The dagger slipped from my grip and clattered to the floor as he reached me, and several people turned to stare at the strange, bloody knife that had appeared out of nowhere, from their perspective.

Tod bent to snatch it, and the onlookers’ eyes widened as the dagger disappeared from their sight. Several blinked and shuffled slowly toward the drops of blood still on the floor, the only evidence that they hadn’t imagined the whole thing. Several looked scared. Several more looked confused.

Tod led me toward an empty hall without even a glance at them.

“Kaylee. Are you hurt?” He took a step back to look me over, but I couldn’t see anything except my own right hand, still trembling and covered in blood. And Heidi’s bracelet, clenched in my left fist.

“I’m fine,” I whispered, only vaguely frightened by the pitiful sound of my own voice, like a mere echo of my thoughts. “It’s not my blood. I killed her.”

“Who? Who did you kill, Kaylee?”

“Heidi,” I said as he led me down the hall toward an empty grouping of chairs near the radiology department. “Only she was already dead, so it wasn’t really her. It was Avari. But he didn’t really die. I don’t think he can, but I killed him, and now she’s gone but he’s not, and her blood is literally on my hands.” I held my hand out to show him, and that’s when I noticed that my shirt was soaked in it, too. “And there was this bracelet on the floor.”

“Okay, you’re not making any sense, but you are covered in blood. Let’s get you home.”

Before I could pull together enough focus to blink myself out of the hospital, Tod did the work for us both. We appeared in my living room, and he tugged me toward the hall and into the bathroom. He lowered the toilet lid and turned on the sink faucet. “Sit down, and let’s get you cleaned up.”

“I’m sorry,” I said as he set the bloody dagger on the countertop and rummaged beneath the sink for a clean rag. “I didn’t mean to go to the hospital. I was just standing in the mall, holding a bloody knife, wishing you were there, and the next thing I knew, I was in the E.R.”

“No better place to be, when you’re covered in blood,” he said, running tap water over his fingers in the sink, to check the temperature.

“This is better.” I glanced around the bathroom, but my gaze was drawn to him as my hands turned the bracelet in aimless circles.

When the water was warm enough, he held the rag beneath it, then turned the faucet off and wrung the rag out. It steamed from the hot water.

Tod sat on the edge of the tub and turned me by my knees to face him. I closed my eyes, and more tears fell. Behind my eyelids, I saw Heidi as she’d been in the club seven months ago. Right before she’d died. She’d danced and people had watched her. She’d glowed with youth and beauty—the very vitality that had nominated her for death by the rogue reaper who’d killed her and stolen her soul.

“What happened?” Tod asked, and I gasped when I felt the warm rag on my cheek.

I opened my eyes as he wiped away my tears, and his blue-eyed gaze chased away thoughts of blood, and death, and the horrible, visceral resistance Heidi’s very solid flesh had presented against my dagger. The images were still there, but they were memories now instead of moments extracted from time, playing over and over in my head and behind my eyelids.

“The soul thief killed again.” I set the bracelet on the edge of the tub, then cradled my bloody hand in my clean one, resting on my leg. “Madeline said I had to go get the soul. It had to be me, because there’s no one else left. I’m the last one.” I could hear the uplift of panic in my voice on the last word.

Tod picked up my bloodied right hand and began to wipe my palm clean, slowly. And the panic eased again. The chaos raging inside my head and my heart couldn’t survive the calm, rhythmic strokes of the warm rag as it cleaned away all evidence of what I’d done. What I’d had to do.

“What happened to the other extractors?” he asked, and his voice was like his hands. Steady. Too strong and measured to give in to confusion.

“Avari killed them. He’s the soul thief, but I don’t know what he’s doing. Or how he’s doing it. Or why he didn’t kill me.”

“How could he steal souls from the Netherworld? How would he have killed you from across the barrier? Please tell me you didn’t cross over…?” he said, rotating my hand to wipe my knuckles clean.