Soul Screamers Volume Four: With All My Soul\Fearless\Niederwald\Last Request: 4 (15 page)

“No.” Tod stepped into the bathroom and stood at my back, close enough that I could feel the warmth of his skin through my shirt but not close enough to actually touch me. “Sabine’s the exception, Kaylee. She’s native to our world. She’s the product of two human parents. She’s a predator, but not a monster. Beck was different. His son will be different. You know what Beck did to Traci. You know that he would have done the same thing to Emma. And to Sophie. And to you, if you weren’t immune to his abilities.” Because I was a
bean sidhe.
“He feeds to survive, just like everyone else in both worlds. The difference for incubi is...what he did to Traci. To your friend Danica. They had no choice.” He stopped talking, waiting for a response from me, but I had none. I didn’t know what to say.

“Kaylee, look at me, please. I need to know that you know I’m not just being cruel.” He closed what little distance stood between us and pressed his chest against my back. He ran his hands slowly down my arms, and finally I met his gaze in the mirror and saw the truth swirling in his eyes.

Regret. Disappointment. Fear.

He didn’t like telling me what he was telling me, but he felt it had to be done.

“If we help Traci bring another incubus into the world, he’s going to do what his father did, to hundreds of girls your age or younger. Maybe thousands over his lifetime. But I can’t live with the knowledge that he did it even once, and we helped make that possible.”

Finally, I turned, and he was so close I had to crane my neck to look into his eyes. “But you don’t know that. Incubi don’t have to feed during sex. They can feed from lust. Without...touching. Traci could raise him to do that. Surely nurture has as much as nature to do with how any kid turns out. Even incubi.”

Tod shook his head slowly. Sadly. “Kaylee, that won’t happen. Yes, it
could
happen, but it won’t. That’d be the incubi version of living on nothing but cabbage. He’d slowly starve until he got so desperate for sustenance that he gave in to hunger. And maybe that’s not entirely his fault. I’m in no position to judge a creature for doing what’s in his nature. But would you seriously want your teenage daughter anywhere near Traci’s son when he hits puberty and his appetite kicks in?”

“I’m not going to have a daughter.” Ever. Nor a son.

Tod exhaled slowly. “I know. Me, neither. But you get my point, right? What if it were you? What if you weren’t a
bean sidhe
and Beck had made you...do things?” The swirling in his eyes grew angrier and more intense at the thought. “But what if you didn’t
know
he’d made you do it? What if you thought you were just the kind of person who’d cheat on her boyfriend, or sleep with a teacher, or give away something that should mean something? What if
that
had been your first time?”

My stomach churned. What if I’d lost my virginity to my evil math teacher with no idea I’d been under the influence of incubus pheromones at the time? What would that have done to my relationship with Tod? What would that have done to the rest of my life?

“Do you really want some other girl to go through that because we helped bring an incubus into the world?”

I shook my head. “But I promised Emma I’d try.” And I wasn’t going to let those horrible things happen. If her son grew up to be dangerous, I was both prepared and willing to do what had to be done. At least, I would be by then. Surely.

“You did try. And it’s a moot point anyway, because I don’t have any extras. Reapers never have extras, unless they’ve gone rogue.”

I’d only met two rogue reapers, and that was two more than most people would ever meet. But one of them was dead, and the other—Thane—I had no way to find. And I wouldn’t go looking for him even if I knew how, because there’s a big difference between risky and dangerous. Between determined and stupid.

And anyway, I wasn’t that desperate just yet. There was still one more possibility....

But I clamped a lid on that thought before it could show in my eyes. I rarely disagreed with Tod, and I wasn’t sure this was actually one of those times. I needed more time to think, and there was no use worrying him before I knew there was anything for him to worry
about.

Chapter Nine

I stayed with Tod, and we made the most of the last half hour of the day, then, when he had to go to work, I blinked into my room at home to check on everyone.

My dad was asleep in his recliner in the living room with the TV on, his crutches on the floor next to the chair. “Dad.” I shook him awake, and he blinked at me slowly. Groggily. “You fell asleep in your chair again.”

He pulled the lever to retract the attached ottoman and I helped him stand, then handed him his crutches. He glanced at his watch. “Tod went to work?”

“Yeah.” No sense denying where I’d been until midnight.

He adjusted the crutches beneath his arms. “I know you don’t sleep here anymore, Kaylee. But I’m not mad. You’re as grown as you’re going to get.”

“I don’t sleep anywhere, Dad. Try not to read too much into that.”

He wouldn’t have said that if he were fully awake. If he weren’t on pain pills, because the stab wound in his thigh still hurt like hell. It bothered him that curfews, healthy meals, and a good night’s sleep were wasted on me. It bothered him that I spent so much time at Tod’s, where there wasn’t a door to leave open. It bothered him that there was little he could do to protect me now, and it bothered me that he seemed to think that meant I no longer needed a dad.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. I still needed him. I loved him more than ever. And there were days when I wanted nothing more than to be a normal seventeen-year-old, worried about her dad watching the clock on prom night, which was coming up in...four days.

How the hell had that snuck up on me?

Em and I had picked out our dresses together. She’d sworn that prom was exactly the motivation she needed to return to school after her own murder and that dress shopping would help her get to know her new body, but I saw her face in the mirror every time a slinky, sparkly gown fit too loose in the bust and hips and fell too long over her legs. She didn’t want to go to prom as Lydia.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to go at all, but I’d promised her months ago that we’d go together, with or without dates, and she’d been planning our first junior/senior prom since we were freshmen.

Her dress was red and sleek and dramatic, and it looked great with her darker Lydia hair.

My dress was gold. It was long and full, and it sparkled in every little bit of available light. My dad had spent money we probably couldn’t afford on that dress because he’d said that in it, I shined brighter than the sun. Just like my mother.

Tod said my dress glittered like sunlight on the ocean. He found a gold vest and tie to match, but he refused to show off his tux in advance for fear of forever tainting the other guys’ prom experience with feelings of inadequacy.

So I would have to wait to see him in it, but I had no doubt the wait would be worth it.

With my father in his room for the night, snoring two minutes after I’d closed the door, I opened my own bedroom door to find Styx sitting on the end of the bed staring at me, like she’d just been waiting for me to appear.

She probably had. Something about the fact that she was a Netherworld half-breed meant that she could see and hear me even when normal people couldn’t. She’d probably known I was home before I’d even woken up my dad.

As soon as I stepped into my room, she jumped down from the bed and ran at me expectantly, tiny pink tongue hanging from her mouth by half an inch. I picked her up and scruffed her fur, amazed for the millionth time how small and fluffy and normal-looking she was in that moment, considering that if there was danger lurking anywhere near me, on either plane of existence, she’d be baring small teeth sharp enough to shred human flesh all the way to the bone.

Em was asleep on her bed with her bedside-table lamp on, and I noticed that while Styx curled up with me anytime I sat in one place for more than five minutes, she never curled up with my best friend, even though they saw each other much more often now that Em lived here and I was dead. Styx tolerated her. She even seemed to like her. But Styx and I had bonded in her infancy, and she would forever be loyal to me above all others.

Sometimes I wondered what would happen to her if and when I died...permanently.

Before her death, Emma and Toto were just as close as Styx and I, but she’d decided to leave Toto—Styx’s littermate—with Traci, to protect her and the baby. Just in case.

I set Styx down and carefully untangled the knot of earbud wires from Emma’s hand, wrapped them around her iPod, then set it on the nightstand. Then I pulled her covers up to her waist—her feet looked cold—and turned off the lamp.

After I fed Styx and checked to make sure all the doors were locked—not that anything I truly feared needed an open door to get to me—I blinked out of my house and into the middle of Madeline’s office. She stood with her back to me, a stack of papers in her hand, like she’d just picked them up from the credenza behind her desk.

She turned and saw me and gave an uncharacteristically undignified little
yip
of surprise. And dropped the entire stack of papers to clutch her heart. As if she could possibly have a heart attack when she was already dead. I wasn’t sure how long she’d been dead, but we had a pool going, with a bonus included for whoever was able to actually obtain the answer.

“Kaylee! You’ve certainly gotten stealthier in the past few weeks.” She didn’t look entirely impressed by that fact.

“Thanks, I guess.”

“What can I do for you?” Madeline sat in the chair behind her large dark wood desk and waved a hand at the pair of leather-padded armchairs on my side. When her boss had found out exactly how dire our situation was, when Avari was stealing souls pell-mell from the human plane, he’d increased our department’s budget and tossed a little more manpower our way.

Too bad all of that came after all the death and chaos and after Thane stole the hellions’ collection of souls, which prevented them from appearing on the human plane again, at least until they could renew their supply.

I was assuming they hadn’t yet managed that, based on the fact that I’d only seen them in borrowed—possessed—bodies since then.

“I...um...” I sank into the chair on the right and clasped my hands in my lap to keep from fidgeting. Looking nervous wouldn’t do me any favors. “Well, Tod’s at work, and everyone else I know is asleep, and I...”

Her smile got a little kinder. “You’re bored.”

“Yeah.” That wasn’t entirely a lie. My boredom usually peaked in the middle of the night, and at first the shortage of company and the complete lack of anything to keep me busy had led to a dangerous melancholy period, during which I’d lost the desire to do...well, anything. I hadn’t snapped out of it until Avari started parading the ghosts of my past—everyone I’d failed to save—before me and making me “kill” them all over again.

The melancholy hadn’t returned. It had been replaced with a relentless thirst for justice.

Though Ira would call that rage.

“Well, fortunately, things have slowed down around here, and you know we have two new reclamation agents now.”

Yes, I knew. My dad called it the “hurry up and wait” phenomenon. They raised me from the dead to help them with a very
bean sidhe
–specific emergency job, and now that that job was over—at least, as long as Avari was stuck in the Netherworld—they had much less immediate need of me. And since I was the rookie among more experienced employees again, I got the smallest, simplest, least complicated jobs. Which I was fine with. I was still in high school, after all. But...

“I was thinking. Thane got away with several stolen souls. Shouldn’t we be...reclaiming them? I mean, if the others are too busy, I guess I could look into it.” That sounded casual. Right?

Madeline folded her hands on her desk. “Kaylee, Thane is a rogue reaper. He’s completely beyond our authority. The reapers police their own.”

“But he stole souls. Lots of them.” I hadn’t been able to rescue them from him at the time, because Em had just died and Lydia’s body was on the verge of death. I’d had to act quickly to save one of them. Or, a piece of each of them. “Besides, we deal with hellions who’ve stolen souls, and they’re way more dangerous than rogue reapers.”

Madeline nodded. “It’s not about the danger. It’s about the jurisdiction. There’s no other agency in place to deal with hellions when they steal souls, but the reapers have their own authority. Around here, that’s Levi, and I’m not going to step on his toes, especially after everything he’s done to help us recently.”

“But—”

“No.” She leaned closer to me over her desk. “Thane’s a reaper. Let the reapers deal with him.”

“They’re the ones who lost him in the first place!” When he’d killed my mother, then come back to kill me when I was three.

Madeline’s frown deepened. “Was there something else I can help you with, Kaylee?”

That was a dismissal if I’d ever heard one.

“No. Thanks.” I stood and headed toward the door, because using it seemed more polite than just disappearing right in front of her, and I’d obviously already pissed her off. I paused in the doorway with my hand wrapped around the doorframe. “Hey, Madeline?”

“Yes?” She sounded annoyed now.

“Whatever happened to Mr. Beck’s soul?”

“Mr. Beck?”

“The incubus. The one who killed me. His soul was in my dagger when I turned it in that first time. Did it get recycled along with the others?”

Madeline’s brows rose in sudden interest, and she put down the pen she’d picked up. “No. As it turns out, an incubus soul is a relative rarity, and it carries quite a bit of power. And since no one was expecting it at the recycling facility—your incubus wasn’t on the list, of course—Levi decided to keep it as a sort of...souvenir. A conversation piece.”

“Is he allowed to do that?”

“Well, no. Not technically. But he wasn’t allowed to bring back your young reaper suitor, either. He did that as a favor to me—” because I’d refused to work for her if she couldn’t bring Tod back to me “—so I will, of course, be overlooking his small indiscretion. As will you, naturally.”