Soul Screamers Volume Four: With All My Soul\Fearless\Niederwald\Last Request: 4 (16 page)

“Naturally...” I hardly heard the word as I spoke it, because my head was spinning with other thoughts. Other possibilities.

Levi still had Beck’s soul. If it would work for the father, it would work for the son. No one else would have to die to give Traci’s baby life—a pattern that would hopefully continue throughout the little parasite’s existence.

“What exactly is a conversation piece, anyway?” That wasn’t really a lie, either, because I hadn’t actually said I didn’t know the definition. I’d just implied it.

“It’s a piece of art or decor intended to start conversations. Thus the name. In this case, it’s a highly stylized letter opener. It’s obviously just for show. Something interesting to set on his desk. And now when people ask about it, he can tell them not only the history of the letter opener itself—it’s hellion-forged steel he won in some kind of gambling game—but that it contains the soul of the only incubus ever known to have died at the hands of one of his victims.”

I started to argue with that statement. I wasn’t an incubus’s victim in the traditional sense. He hadn’t wanted my body; he’d wanted my soul. However, he had killed me, so Levi’s story wasn’t really inaccurate....

But I had just as much right to Beck’s soul as he did. More really. And I wanted Traci to have it.

“Thanks, Madeline. Just let me know when you need me. I’ll be...around.”

“Thank you, Kaylee.” I’d been dismissed again, and this time I was eager to go.

I blinked from Madeline’s office back into my bedroom, where I silently lifted the broken dagger from my dresser. I’d taken it from Beck—it was the weapon that had killed us both—and he’d bought it from Avari, who’d evidently ripped the metal from the Netherworld ground and forged the dagger himself.

That thought made me pause, stunned to realize that Avari, Beck, and I were tangled up in as intimate and distressing a knot as Nash, Sabine, Tod, and I. Hundreds of years before my birth Avari had made the blade that would kill me, but I’d survived its use—and my own death—to retain ownership of my own murder weapon. Which he no doubt wanted back.

On second thought, the Avari/Beck/me tangle was much more disturbing than anything forged in adolescent hormones and rooted in love.

I stared at the dagger in my hand for a moment, tracing the jagged, broken edges with my gaze. Invidia, the hellion of envy, had broken off both of the points on the night Emma had died. Afterward, Tod had gone back to the Netherworld to retrieve it for me, but he wasn’t able to find the severed points.

Fortunately, the jagged blades were just as scary—and almost as sharp—as the original weapon had been.

I slid the double-bladed dagger beneath the waistband of my jeans, at the base of my spine, uncomfortably aware that if I made the wrong move, I’d knick my own backside with both broken points. But I couldn’t exactly walk into reaper headquarters wielding a weapon.

In fact, I couldn’t just walk into reaper headquarters at all. I wasn’t even supposed to know where it was, and if Levi found out Tod had told me, he’d get in trouble. Which meant I couldn’t afford to wander around looking for his office. I’d need to know exactly where I was going. Or as exactly as possible, to cut down on the walking I’d have to do. I couldn’t make myself invisible to reapers.

And I only knew one person who might know where Levi’s office was
and
be willing to tell me.

I blinked into Madeline’s apartment and spared a moment for relief over the fact that I already knew she was still at work. Luca’s room was easy to find—there were only two bedrooms, and Madeline’s didn’t even have a bed. Did the woman truly never sleep?

Luca was out cold in a twin bed, covered only in a thin sheet, which I could see easily in the red glow of his alarm-clock numbers and the light from the bathroom across the hall.

Was Luca afraid of the dark?

I tiptoed silently to the side of his bed, but when I bent over to shake him awake, the broken dagger blades scratched the inside of my jeans. I pulled the blade out before I could accidentally slice open the seat of my own pants, then shook Luca awake with my other hand.

His eyes opened groggily, and that surprised me. For some reason, I’d expected a boy with such an intimate connection to death to be a lighter sleeper. It took him several seconds to focus on my face, and another one to recognize it.

“Kaylee?”

“Yeah. It’s me.”

And suddenly he was wide-awake. “What are you...?” His gaze fell on the broken dagger, which must have looked threatening from his perspective—flat on his back in the middle of the night with a dead girl standing over him—because he screamed like a little kid.

“Relax. I just need some help.”

“What happened? Was I possessed?”

It took me a second to figure out what he was talking about, and why my reassurance had failed to reassure him.

Alec.

Like the rest of my friends and family, Luca knew that I’d killed Alec when I’d mistaken him for Avari. I’d killed him in the middle of the night, with the very dagger I now held inches from Luca’s stomach. By total coincidence.

“No!” I reached back and slid the dagger into my waistband again, to get it out of sight. “I just need you to find something for me.”

Luca exhaled, then glanced at his alarm clock. “It’s two in the morning.”

“I know. Sorry.”

He leaned over and turned on his bedside lamp, then tossed off the sheet, and I had to admit that Sophie had good taste. The necromancer was hot. Which I could tell, because he slept in nothing but boxer briefs.

“You may as well sit down and let me put on some pants.” Luca knelt to pick up a pair of flannel pj bottoms from the floor at the foot of his bed. I pulled the dagger from my waistband again, then set it in my lap as I sank into his desk chair and glanced around his room, which was easier to see in the light.

He had a beanbag chair, which made me miss mine. His held three different soccer balls. There was a small TV on top of a chest of drawers, but no gaming system that I could see. Four different pictures of Sophie were wedged into the space between his mirror and its frame.

I suspected she’d stuck them there herself, but the fact that he’d left them said a lot.

“You sleep here alone?” I swiveled in his chair, one foot on the ground for stability.

He sat on the end of his bed, facing me, his bare feet dangling an inch from the floor. “I practically live here alone. Aunt Madeline doesn’t need to eat or sleep. I suspect she only rented this place for me.”

“That must get lonely.” I was lucky enough to have my dad, my dog, and now Emma to keep me company, even in the afterlife.

Luca shrugged. “I really only sleep here. Sophie and I...” He shrugged, and I could fill in for myself the part he’d left out. He spent as much time at my cousin’s house as Tod spent at mine. The only difference was that they didn’t bring the party to his place after my uncle Brendon went to sleep. Though they might, if they could do it on the sly. “So, what’s up, Kay? Though something tells me I don’t really want to know.”

“Have you ever been to reaper headquarters?”

“Nope.”

“You know where it is, though, right?”

He shrugged. “I could make an educated guess. A very educated guess. The PhD of guesses, really. There’s only one spot in the city where more than a dozen dead people hang out 24/7. And those are only the ones off-shift.”

“Great. Do you happen to know where Levi’s office is in that building?”

“Again, I can only guess. I know where he spends most of his time....”

“And that would be?”

Luca frowned, like he was just now awake enough to have questions of his own. “Why? What are you doing?”

“Just a favor for a friend.”

“Without Tod? You wouldn’t need my help if he knew what you were up to.”

“He’s my boyfriend, not my dad.” Besides, Tod had warned me early in our relationship that he was no role model. I was starting to realize I might not be, either. “Anyway, I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m not even breaking any rules.” Taking back what should still belong to me wasn’t really stealing, right? “I just need to get something from Levi.”

“Something he doesn’t know about? Something that requires a scary-looking knife?”

Irritation flared in my chest. “Why do you care? I’m not doing anything wrong, and no one will get hurt. Haven’t you figured that out about me yet?”

But I could see the answer in his eyes, and it stung. He knew I wouldn’t intentionally hurt anyone. But he also knew that my friends and acquaintances had a shorter-than-normal life expectancy.

“Just help me. Please. I’ll owe you.”

Luca looked intrigued at that. “Fine. Levi’s usually in a room on the third floor. Northwest corner of the building. I’m pretty sure that’s his office.”

“Is he there now?”

Luca closed his eyes for a second, and his forehead wrinkled, like he was thinking. Or seeing something I’d never be able to see. “No. He’s down the hall with another reaper. And Tod.”

Crap.
What was Tod doing in the reaper building, in the middle of his shift?

“Thanks.” I stood and replaced the dagger beneath my waistband. “I gotta go.”

“Okay, so when you say you’ll owe—”

I blinked out of his room before he could finish his sentence. We could work out the details at school.

Chapter Ten

Blinking into the reaper headquarters building was like playing hide-and-seek in pitch-dark—I had no idea where I’d wind up. Fortunately, I remembered to take the commonsense precaution Tod had taught me. I blinked out of Luca’s room and into the reaper building in incorporeal form. That wouldn’t keep reapers from seeing me, if there were any in the room when I appeared, but it would keep me from becoming a permanent piece of whatever furniture my arrival collided with. Which was good, because I landed in the middle of a table.

Fortunately, the room—some kind of break room, with a coffee bar and a couple of vending machines—was empty.

I stayed incorporeal, so that if I saw anyone coming before I was spotted, I could step through a door and into another room. Where I had an equal chance of being seen, come to think of it.

Reaper headquarters was
not
a good place for a dead girl to hang out.

The hall outside the break room was empty, but I could hear voices coming from several of the rooms that opened into the hall. The plaques outside the doors read things like The West End, and Downtown, and DFW. As near as I could tell, those were zones of the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, each of which had obviously been assigned an office and probably a crew of reapers.

Would a rookie like Tod have an office?

The door at the end of the hall—at the northwest corner, unless my navigation was off—was a door marked Administration.

Bingo.

I tiptoed down the hall, my heart pounding from nerves, like it had when I was still alive, until I realized that the more suspicious I looked, the greater my chance of being identified as a trespasser. But if I walked through the hall like I belonged there, maybe anyone who saw me would assume I was a reaper.

After all, who’d be stupid enough to break into reaper headquarters?

Well, me, obviously. But I tried the confidence approach anyway, and I stuck with it even when my pulse began to race like it hadn’t since the day I’d died. I walked past two open doors, through which I caught glimpses of reapers at work. Or on break. I couldn’t really tell the difference, since no one was swinging a scythe or donning a long black cape.

The other rooms were empty, and when I got to the end of the hall, I walked right through Levi’s door, trusting that Luca was right. That the boss wasn’t home.

When I saw the empty room, I actually exhaled with relief. Then I jogged across the good-size room and snatched the letter opener from its obviously custom-made wooden stand.

The moment my hand touched the metal, I knew Madeline had been right. It hummed against my flesh, more a feeling than a sound—the soul trapped inside calling out to me.

With the letter opener in my left hand, I held the broken dagger in my right, ready to make the switch. Until I realized I had no idea how to do that. Calling the soul from its current home should be easy, but leading it into the dagger? I wasn’t sure how to do that. Normally, the soul would be attracted to the dagger on its own, because hellion-forged steel seems to call to displaced souls. But both the letter opener and my dagger were made of the same material, and I had no male
bean sidhe
around to help guide the soul.

Nor did I have time to stand around and think for very long. So, with my mouth closed, to keep most of the volume in, I let just a thin ribbon of my
bean sidhe
wail leak from my throat, calling to the displaced soul. That used to be a very difficult task for me. I’d only known my true species for eight months, and since then I’d learned what I could do mostly through trial and error. And a little trial by fire. And a lot of help from Harmony, the only other female
bean sidhe
I knew.

She’s the one who’d taught me to call for a soul without letting loose the full power of my scream, which humans found painful, at the very least.

After less than a second, the soul within the letter opener began to leak out in a thin stream of foglike substance, attracted to the muffled version of my soul song. But I still had no idea how to get it into the dagger. I tried waving the severed blades through the ethereal stream of...soul, but nothing happened. My rough chopping motions sliced through the disembodied soul, which flowed right back together afterward.

Finally, when I heard footsteps outside Levi’s office, and my pulse began to race in panic, I set the letter opener back on its stand and backed away from it, still singing softly for the soul. It followed me, trailing out from Levi’s “conversation piece” until it hung in the air. When the soul, the dagger, and I were all as far from the desk as we could get without walking through the door, I let my wail fade into silence.

The soul hung in the air for just a second, and when I held the dagger up near it, the soul soaked into the hellion-forged steel on its own. To my immense relief.