Rachel Vincent: My Soul to Steal

“Twelve hours…?” But twelve hours ago, Alec was…

Dark rage washed over me, igniting tiny fires in my veins. “It was you the whole time, in Emma’s room. With the ice cream.”

Tod and Nash glanced at me nervously, eyes narrowed in identical questioning expressions, but I ignored them.

“You only pretended you’d let him go.”

Avari shrugged. “You’ve made it difficult to gain access to this body lately, so why give it up once I had it?”

“But the password… How did you know about my bike?” I asked, and both Hudson brothers frowned in confusion.

“Ahh, Ms. Marshall is a veritable fount of information.”

He’d tricked Emma into playing what she thought was a trivia game, then had manually hacked our password. Damn it! That never would have happened if I’d told her what was going on.

But… “I saw you.” I stepped closer, and Nash and Tod moved up to stand at my sides. “An hour ago, in the Netherworld. Talking to Invidia. You didn’t have Alec then.”

Avari smiled with Alec’s full lips, and the effect was too creepy to bear. “I had him in…what would you call it today? Limbo?”

“Paused? You had him paused? ” Somehow, that sounded almost worse than being actively possessed. Where had Alec been, when neither he nor Avari were using his body? Some sort of mindless, metaphysical holding cell?

“Precisely. And that would never have been possible, if this generous educational institution hadn’t provided me with the power to control both his body and my own simultaneously.”

“Let him go.” Nash stepped forward when my horror proved too much to fight through for the moment. But Avari had come to make a deal, and he wouldn’t leave until he’d gotten what he wanted.

Or been physically evicted from his host.

“What do you want?” I demanded, trying to gather my thoughts and come up with a plan.

“I want you.” The brown eyes that stared at me were Alec’s but their expression was all hellion. “You come with me now, of your own free will, and I give you my word that I’ll never possess any of your friends again.”

“Stall him,” Tod said, and that’s when I realized Avari could neither see nor hear the reaper. And Tod had a plan. “Keep him talking. Blink if you understand,” he said, and I blinked, careful not to look at him and give away his presence.

“I’ll be right back,” he said. I blinked again, and Tod disappeared.

“No way,” I said to the hellion, hating every second that I was forced to address him in my friend’s body. “You’re gonna have to do better than that if you expect me to just hand myself over to you.”

Alec’s head cocked to the side, like he was studying a particularly interesting insect. “This isn’t a negotiation, Ms. Cavanaugh. If you don’t cooperate, you’ll be to blame every time I feed through this body, or try on Ms. Marshall’s form and find out exactly what she has to offer.”

I swallowed, fighting through horror and revulsion just to be able to speak. “You’re psychotic.”

“We don’t utilize that term in the Nether. The very concept is considered both obvious and redundant. Now, if you don’t cross over this instant, I swear I will take the reins of your boyfriend’s subconscious the next time he succumbs to slumber, and we’ll see how well you like him when I’m in control.”

“Don’t listen to him, Kaylee,” Nash insisted. “I’ll never let that happen.”

Avari laughed, and the cold, sterile joy sounded foreign and harsh coming from Alec’s throat. “We all know you can’t stop me.”

“But I can.”

I heard Tod before he appeared, and he appeared just a fraction of a second before he swung a big aluminum toaster in a two-handed grip—at the back of Alec’s head.

Alec’s eyes fluttered, then closed, and he collapsed to the ground, unconscious but still breathing, and at least temporarily free from the Netherworld body snatcher.

“One down,” Tod said, grinning over the still form on the grass. “Let’s go evict the other one.”

TOD STARED AT ME over Alec’s unmoving form on the grass, still holding the toaster, the flat left side of which was now massively dented. “Kaylee? You okay?”

“Not even kind of.” I shoved hair back from my face and glanced from Tod to Nash, then back. “But having known you both for several months now, I’m starting to see ‘okay’ as a relative term.”

Nash gave me a grim, confident smile, and Tod actually chuckled without letting go of the toaster.

“Okay. I need you to check Sabine’s house, and if you find her, call us,” I said, and Tod nodded. I didn’t think she’d left campus, since her car was still in the lot, but with Sabine, I’d learned to expect the unexpected. And the impulsive. And the vindictive. And the just plain crazy.

“If she’s not at her house, try mine,” Nash added, just before his brother blinked out of sight. “I’ve already checked everywhere she hangs out when she skips class,” he said, as we headed toward the cafeteria entrance.

I shrugged. “So we’ll check again. And if we don’t find her here, we’re gonna have to cross over.”

Nash nodded reluctantly, obviously much more willing to put us both in danger to save Sabine than he’d been for Addison.

He pulled open the door and held it for me, and I stepped past him into the lunchroom—where I could only stare. The cafeteria was trashed .

“What happened?” My gaze wandered the food-smeared walls, then snagged on a huge plastic jug of nacho cheese that lay busted open on the floor, oozing smooth orange processed cheese product a couple of feet from my shoes.

“Giant food fight. I’m not sure who started it, but a couple dozen people trashed the place before Goody could get it under control. She suspended thirty-eight kids. The cafeteria staff got pissed when she told them to clean it up, so they walked out, and now all those suspended kids have to spend tomorrow scrubbing the walls. Which is why they sold pizza for lunch in the hall. You didn’t see any of that?”

I shook my head, still stunned. “I was busy falsely accusing Sabine during lunch.” Then I’d sat in my car to cool off until the bell rang for fourth period. Somehow I’d missed the entire spectacular disaster.

Normally, I would have assumed that food fights were a little juvenile for high school, but based on the number of dented pots and busted food containers, I’d say this one was really more of a riot than anything. “This isn’t going to smell any better tomorrow…” I said, stepping over the busted cheese container, on my way to the main entrance. “Let’s go.”

But I’d only taken a few steps when Nash’s hand landed on my arm. “Wait. Did you hear that?”

I’d only heard the sticky squeak of my shoes on the filthy floor, so I stopped and listened. And I heard it, too. A voice, soft and smooth, and feminine, in spite of the low pitch.

My chest seemed to constrict around my heart. I knew that voice, though I’d only heard it once. “Invidia,” I whispered. “She’s already here.” And Sabine would be with her.

Suddenly I wished I hadn’t divided our resources by sending Tod to look for her.

Nash held one finger to his lips and I nodded as I followed him toward the kitchen, carefully sidestepping most of the mess. We followed the empty serving lane past the glass-topped ice cream freezer and into the heart of the Eastlake cafeteria, a maze of commercial-size stoves, dishwashers, and deep stainless-steel sinks. And there at the back, between one of the sinks and a tall metal shelf filled with commercial-size cans, stood Sabine.

And Emma.

“Em?” I asked