Rachel Vincent - Before I Wake

My hands curled into fists. “Don’t touch her!”

“Pay attention, now,” Belphegore said, her featureless, black-orb eyes trained on me. “We’re going to play a game. All you have to do is catch the soul. Then we’ll move on to the bonding.”

“No!” I shouted when she reached for Emma. Em screamed.

Invidia snapped her neck with one hand.

Em crumpled to the ground and the scream that tore from my throat had no equal. Sophie, Lydia, and Luca slapped their hands over their ears. Even the hellions winced. The canvas overhead flapped, stirred by the power of my voice. Tree branches shook in the distance, and several fat purple fruits dropped to the ground.

Still screaming, I fell to my knees at Emma’s side. I checked for a pulse, but there was none. I felt for breath, but she wasn’t breathing. Her beautiful brown eyes stared up at the yellowish Netherworld sky through the ripped canvas, but they had no focus.

Emma was dead. Not un dead, like me. She was gone, her life stolen, her lifeline aborted without a second thought from the hellion who’d ended it. And with her, I’d lost a part of myself that could never be replaced. Emma was my other half. The sister I’d never had. The cousin I’d always wanted. We’d shared every triumph, every failure, and every secret.

I’d promised I would protect her. Instead, I’d gotten her killed.

I held Emma’s head in my lap and screamed, and screamed, and screamed. Tears filled my eyes and poured over. Inside my head was a maelstrom of grief and fury that couldn’t be expressed by either thought or word. I was made of pain and loss.

Luca let go of one ear to stare at his hand, and distantly I noticed that it was smeared with blood, more of which dripped from his ear.

Jaw clenched in fury, Tod took something from his pocket and handed it to Nash, but I couldn’t see what it was through my tears, and I doubted Nash could, either. Neither of them were bothered by the female bean sidhe ’s wail. They heard only the song I sang for my best friend’s soul.

I would have screamed for Emma forever. I would have screamed for her soul until the earth crumbled beneath us both, just to keep from losing her. But Belphegore knelt in front of me and clamped her smooth, hard hand over my mouth.

“Nicely done,” she said in the sudden, deafening silence. “But you cannot install what hasn’t yet left the corpse.”

In my grief and outrage, it took me a minute to understand. I’d screamed so fast and so loud for Emma that her soul didn’t have a chance to leave her body. I’d suspended it in place, still inside her.

But the moment my scream ended, her soul began to rise. Belphegore opened her mouth and inhaled, and Em’s soul began to float toward her.

My heart hurt. My head hurt. My throat hurt. My entire existence was pain and bleak darkness. Em could not die.

But it was too late. She was already dead. And even if the hellions would let me put her soul back in her body, there was no guarantee she’d ever regain consciousness. Her neck would still be broken, her body irreparably damaged.

So this time I screamed for her soul. Belphegore wouldn’t get it. Neither would Avari or Invidia. No part of the Netherworld would have Emma, or any of the rest of my friends.

I sang for Emma’s soul, and when I held my amphora out, her soul slid into the heart around my neck like it was always meant to be there. It wasn’t. But at least she was safe there. Even if they took the amphora, they couldn’t destroy it, and they couldn’t remove her soul from it.

“Wonderful!” Belphegore clapped her flawless hands, her perfect lips curled into a forgettable smile. “Now bind her soul to me. Pull her out of your little heart and—”

“No.” I laid Emma’s body gently on the ground and stood, clutching the amphora in my fist, glaring at the world through fresh, furious tears. “ Hell, no. You’re not getting her. You’re not getting any of us. You can kill every single one of them, and I’ll put every single soul in here, where you can’t touch it.”

Sophie and Lydia cried harder behind me, and Luca tried to comfort them both through his own shock.

“And if we kill you?” Avari demanded. The hellions stood in front of me now, all in a row, united in their shared rage. In power so strong it radiated from them in waves that stung my skin.

“If you kill me, you will never, ever get what you want.”

Avari opened his mouth to make another threat, and Tod shouted over him. A single word that approached the power and volume of my own voice.

“Now!”

He charged Avari, and from the other side, Nash charged Belphegore. Both hellions screamed, then bent at odd angles, reaching for something behind them. When they turned, still reaching in vain, I understood. The hilt end of my broken dagger protruded from the center of Avari’s back, where he couldn’t reach it. The blade end was stuck in Belphegore, where she couldn’t reach it.

Only Invidia remained unhurt, and she was so confused by the chaos and competing demands from Avari and Belphegore for her help that for a moment she turned in circles, paralyzed by indecision.

Nash rushed around Belphegore and pulled Luca off the bench. I held Emma’s arm while each of the boys grabbed one of my wrists, and right before I blinked us into the human world, I realized that Thane was gone, but I had no idea when he’d left.

A minute later, Tod appeared next to us beneath the human-world pavilion, with both Lydia and Sophie.

I dropped onto the ground with Emma’s hand clutched in mine, and though the others stood around me, I saw nothing but Em. Until Nash picked her body up and her hand slid from my grip. He carried her toward the cars, while Luca herded the other girls and Tod pulled me to my feet. I walked, but I didn’t see where I was going.

I didn’t care.

After only a few steps, Lydia collapsed and I blinked, jarred out of my own shock. Tod and I knelt next to her. She was still breathing. She still had a pulse. But her eyes were closed and she wasn’t moving.

“We have to go,” Tod said, sliding one arm behind her shoulders to pick her up. “They’ll cross over as soon as they get the blades out and heal.”

“No, they won’t,” Thane said, and I jumped, startled, to find him behind us. “I cleaned out their stockpile, during your convenient distraction.”

“Their stockpile?”

“The restored souls. I took them all. Including mine.” He took off his glasses, and I was oddly relieved to see that he had both pupils and irises again. “Can’t have them coming after me, now can I? And the restored souls will fetch one hell of a price somewhere else. Anywhere else.”

Before I could demand that he turn the souls over to the proper authority, his gaze fell to Lydia, lying motionless on the ground. “I couldn’t get hers, though.”

“What? Her soul? Where is it?”

“In the Nether. Here. Everywhere. She was syphoning Emma’s pain when Emma died, and part of her soul went with Emma’s.”

“Part?” I wrapped my hand around the heart hanging against my sternum. It was unnaturally warm.

“The rest dissipated.”

“So she’s…empty?” Tod said, staring at Lydia, and his hand curled around mine, around the amphora, like he would help me protect it.

Thane nodded. “I’ve only seen that a couple of times—a living body with no soul. She’ll be dead in minutes.”

“If she doesn’t get a soul…” Tod said, his gaze holding mine. Challenging it. There was a choice to be made, and I had to make it.

I nodded. I understood.

I could save Emma. Part of her, anyway. And I could save part of Lydia. Nothing would be the same. But at least life would go on. I owed it to them both to try.