Rachel Vincent - My Soul to Steal

To all the real-life couples, exes, and unrequited romantic interests, tangled up in love and nightmares. Sometimes that frayed knot is the best lifeline in the world. Other times, it works more like a straitjacket…

BY THE TIME the second semester of my junior year began, I’d already faced down rogue grim reapers, an evil entertainment mogul, and hellions determined to possess my soul. But I never would have guessed that the most infuriating beast of all, I had yet to meet. My boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend was a thing of nightmares. Literally.

“I WON’T BITE.” Nash looked up at me with a green bean speared on his fork, and I realized I was staring. I’d stopped on the bottom step, surprised to see him at school, and even more surprised to see him sitting alone at lunch, outside in the January cold, where I’d come to get away from the gossip and stares in the cafeteria.

Obviously he’d had the same idea.

I glanced over my shoulder through the window in the cafeteria door, looking for Emma, but she hadn’t shown up yet.

Nash frowned when he noticed my hesitation. But I wasn’t worried about him. I was worried about me. I was afraid that if I got within touching distance of him—within reach of the arms that had once been my biggest comfort and those gorgeous hazel eyes that could read me at a glance—that I would give in. That I would forgive, even if I couldn’t forget, and that would be bad.

I mean, it would feel good, but that would be bad.

The past two weeks had been the most difficult of my life. In the past few months alone, I’d survived horrors most sixteen-year-old girls didn’t even know existed. But a couple of weeks without Nash—our entire winter vacation—had nearly been enough to break me.

Whoever said it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved was full of crap. If I’d never loved Nash in the first place, I wouldn’t know what I was missing now.

“Kaylee?” Nash dropped his fork onto his tray, green bean untouched. “I get it. You’re not ready to talk.”

I shook my head and set my tray on the table across from his, then sank onto the opposite bench. “No, I just… I didn’t think you’d be here.” I hadn’t gone to see him, because that would have been unfair to us both—being together, when we couldn’t really be together. But I knew he’d been very sick from withdrawal, because my father, of all people, had called regularly to check on him.

And based on his brief reports, withdrawal from Demon’s Breath—known as frost, in human circles—was hell on earth.

“Are you…okay?” I asked, poking at runny spaghetti sauce with my own fork.

“Better.” He shrugged. “Still working toward okay.”

“But you’re well enough for school?”

Another shrug. “My mom was giving me a sedative made from some weird Netherworld plant for a while, to help with the shakes, but it just made me sleep all the time. Without dreams,” he added, when he saw my horrified expression. The hellion whose breath he’d been huffing had communicated with Nash through his dreams sometimes. And through me, the rest of the time. By hijacking my body while I slept.

I’d been willing to work through the addiction with Nash—after all, it was my fault he’d been exposed to Demon’s Breath in the first place. But his failure to stop the serial possession of my body—or even tell me it was happening—was the last straw for me. I couldn’t be with him until I was sure nothing like that would ever happen again.

Unfortunately, what my head wanted and what my heart wanted were two completely different things.

“I still don’t have much appetite, but what I do eat is staying down now.” Nash stared at his full tray. He’d lost weight. His face looked…sharper. The flesh under his eyes was dark and puffy, and he hadn’t bothered to artfully muss his hair that morning. The bright, charismatic Nash I’d first met had been replaced with this dimmer, somber version I barely recognized. A version I was afraid I didn’t know on the inside, either. Not like I’d known my Nash, anyway.

“Maybe you should have stayed home a little longer,” I suggested, slowly twirling noodles around my plastic fork.

“I wanted to see you.”

The fissure in my heart cracked open a little wider, and I looked up to find regret and longing slowly twisting the greens and browns in his irises. Humans wouldn’t see that, even if we’d had company. But because Nash and I were both bean sidhes —banshees, to the uninformed—we could see the colors swirling in each other’s eyes, and with a little practice, I’d learned to interpret what I saw in his. To read his emotions through the windows of his soul—when he let me see them.

“Nash…”

“No pressure,” he interrupted, before I could spit out the protest I’d practiced, but hoped not to have to use. “I just wanted to see your face. Hear your voice.” Translation: You didn’t visit me. Or even call .

I closed my eyes, trying to work through an awkwardness I’d never felt with Nash before. “I wanted to.” More than I could possibly express. “But it’s just too hard to…”

“To see, but not touch?” he finished for me, and I met his rueful gaze. “Trust me, I know.” He sighed and stirred a glob of mass-produced peach cobbler. “So, what now? We’re friends?”

Yeah. If friends could be in love, but not together. In sync, but out of touch. Willing to die for each other, but unable to trust.

“I don’t think there are words for what we are, Nash.” Yet I could think of at least one: broken.

Nash and I were like the wreckage of two cars that had hit head-on. We were tangled up in each other so thoroughly that I could no longer tell which parts of us were him and which were me. We could probably never be truly untangled—not after what we’d been through together—but I had serious doubts we could ever really recapture what we’d had.

“I just… I need some time.”

He nodded, and his eyes shone with the first flash of hope I’d seen from him in ages. “Yeah. We have time.”

In fact, we had lots and lots of time. Bean sidhes age very slowly from puberty on, so while I’d likely be carded until I was forty, if Nash and I actually managed to work things out, we’d have nearly four hundred years together, barring catastrophe.

Although actually barring catastrophe seemed highly unlikely, considering that since the school year began, my life had been defined by a series of disasters, barely held together by the beautifully strong thread of Nash’s presence in my life. At least, until recently. But now I was clinging to the wreckage of my existence, holding the pieces together on my own, trying to decide if I would be helping us both or hurting us by letting him back in.

“So, how’s Em?” Nash asked, his voice lowered as he glanced at something over my shoulder.

I twisted to see Emma Marshall, my best friend, heading toward us across the nearly deserted quad. Everyone with half a brain—or nothing to hide—was eating inside, where it was warm. Em carried a tray holding a slice of pizza and a Diet Coke, content to eat with us outside, not because she couldn’t face the crowd ready to judge her, but because she didn’t care what they thought.

“Em’s strong. She’s dealing.” And though she didn’t know it, in many ways, Emma was my hero, based on her resilience alone.

Doug Fuller, Em’s boyfriend of almost a month, had died from an overdose of frost two weeks earlier, and though they’d been connected at the crotch, rather than at the heart, she’d been understandably upset by his death. Especially considering that she couldn’t comprehend the Netherworld origin of the drug that had killed him.