Soul Screamers Volume Four: With All My Soul\Fearless\Niederwald\Last Request: 4 (29 page)

“Thank you,” she said, finally. “I know you didn’t have to tell me that.”

“Yeah, I did. I just...” I’d been thinking about what she’d said to Sophie, and what Nash had told me about the
mara.
“I want you to know that you’re one of us. You’re a total pain in the butt, and I may never forget that you tried to sell me to a demon, but I do
forgive
you for that. And you need to know that you belong here. With us. This place wouldn’t be the same without you here to throw the truth around like a weapon and call us on our own bullshit. So, try not to get yourself killed, okay?”

I could swear that her black eyes looked a little more damp than usual, but then she blinked, and that was gone. “Look who’s talking, living-dead girl.”

“I know. I’m a total hypocrite.” The toilet flushed across the hall, then water ran in the bathroom sink behind the closed door. Nash was getting ready for bed, and my time alone with Sabine was running out. “Can you tell me what happened? What you remember, anyway? How did Avari catch you?”

Sabine’s expression darkened from something resembling contentment into anger blazing hot enough to singe my eyebrows. “It wasn’t Avari,” she said. “It was someone new. A hellion. Tall, with long red hair so dark it almost looked black. His tongue was the same color—like dried blood. His eyes were solid black like a hellion’s, but they had red veins running through them. I’m going to be working those details into my next nightmare, FYI. If they scared me, they’ll scare anyone.”

“That’s Ira.” My voice sounded sharp. Angry.

“The wrath hellion?” Sabine looked more intrigued than scared now, which worried me.

“Yeah. What did he do? What’s the last thing you remember?”

“I don’t remember much. I was sneaking around some bushes in front of a building about a mile south of the hospital when I started hearing things. Weird sounds. Wet, heavy breathing, like a giant with a sinus infection. And scratching sounds, like something digging in dry dirt. Then there was this weird hiss.... So I ducked as close to the building as I could and waited to see if I needed to cross over, or if they’d lose my scent and wander off. Then the hellion was just there. Out of nowhere. He was just standing in front of me, backlit by that weird-ass red moon. He had those weird eyes, and they were kind of
glowing,
and for a second, I couldn’t look away from him. Then the light from his eyes seemed to kind of flare, and he reached for me.”

Spitting sounds came from the bathroom as Nash brushed his teeth, drawing me out of the nightmare she was painting for me, this time with words. “Then what?”

Sabine shrugged. “He grabbed my arm, and I tried to cross back over, but I couldn’t concentrate enough to make it happen. All these thoughts kept spinning around in my head. All kinds of stuff. People who’ve pissed me off. The juvenile court judge who set me up for vandalism. You.” She shifted beneath the covers, like she was uncomfortable with whatever she was about to confess. “No offense, but when I first met you, I hated you like I’ve never hated anything before, and when Ira touched me, I couldn’t get you out of my head. You kissing Nash. Him touching you. The two of you dancing at some lame high school party to a song no one with actual ears has ever enjoyed. Stuff like that. Crap I never even saw but used to imagine during the worst days this past winter.”

“Yeah.” I tucked one leg beneath me in the rolling chair. “Ira’s M.O. seems to be fictionalized flashbacks designed to thoroughly piss you off, so he can feed from your anger.”

“Well, it musta worked. I couldn’t think with all that shit in my head, and then everything went dark.” She shrugged again and tugged the covers higher. “The next thing I saw was this.” Sabine spread her arms to take in my whole room. “I didn’t know how I got here until Nash told me how Tod found me. Crimson creeper? Seriously?”

“Yeah. Tod said you were tied to the ground with four vines of it. Baby vines. And you must not have been there very long, or you couldn’t have recovered this fast, even with Harmony’s antivenom. Especially with three sets of pinpricks.”

“Speaking of which...” Sabine held up her wrist, and I saw that the swelling was almost completely gone. Either
maras
healed faster than
bean sidhes
or Harmony had really perfected that antivenom. “Any way to get rid of the marks?”

“Not that I know of.” I propped my foot on the edge of the bed and pulled up the hem of my jeans to show her my own double row of red dots.

She dropped her arm into her lap. “Maybe people will think it’s some kind of obscure tattoo. Something tribal.”

“Maybe.” It was good to see her looking on the bright side.

Across the hall, the bathroom door opened. A second later, Nash stepped into the bedroom. “Did you and Tod have any luck?” he asked, sinking onto Emma’s bed as I vacated the desk chair.

“Nothing since the bandages we found at the hospital. But the good news is that Avari has evidently promised a whole horde of fiends that whoever turns them in wins the grand prize—Demon’s Breath, of course. Which means—”

“Avari doesn’t have them,” Nash finished for me.

“Not yet anyway. We haven’t found anything since then, but we’ll keep looking.”

“Be careful,” Sabine said. “I don’t want to have to go back in after you.” But she would if it came to that. That’s what she was really saying, and the unspoken promise was not lost on me.

“Don’t worry. Tod and I are going in together or not at all. We’ll watch out for each other.”

Before heading back to the hospital, I went into the living room to check on everyone else. Emma was already asleep in the recliner, stretched out as close to horizontal as the chair would go. Sophie and Luca were curled up on the couch together, even though the twin mattress he’d blown up for himself was only a couple of feet away. He slept on the outside, curled around my cousin with his arm draped over her stomach. Anything that wanted Sophie would have to go through Luca first, and seeing them together made my heart ache.

Seeing Emma alone made my heart ache even more.

Not seeing my dad in his bed—not hearing him snore in the middle of an otherwise quiet night—also made my heart ache so fiercely I let it stop beating altogether, just to spare myself the pain.

Chapter Seventeen

“Are you sure you want to go to school? You could just stay here with me.” Tod patted the vinyl cushion next to him on the hospital waiting-room couch, and I sat sideways to face him, trying to ignore the dozen early morning patients, none of whom could see or hear us.

“I wish I
could
stay here with you. I wish I never had to go anywhere else. But Em, Nash, and Sabine are going. We’re still hoping to turn the hellions against one another, and if one of them possesses someone at school, I might be needed.”

That was true. But it wasn’t the whole truth. I needed to talk to Ira again, and if Tod knew what I was thinking, he’d insist on going with me. I couldn’t let that happen for two reasons.

First, I didn’t want them to meet. I didn’t want Tod manipulated by the hellion of rage like I’d been. I didn’t want him touched by evil any more than he already had been.

Second, I didn’t want Tod to be upset by—or stand in the way of—any payment made to Ira if I needed to buy more information, and as badly as I hated to think about it, that possibility was looking pretty...um...possible. He understood the lines I would cross—and those I wouldn’t—to get my dad back, because he’d do just about anything to protect his mother. But he didn’t need to actually see payment rendered. Especially considering that his anger would just make it even easier for Ira to feed from him.

I felt bad about lying to Tod—even a lie of omission—but I’d feel worse if my inaction led to someone else’s death. Especially my father’s.

“I only have one more reaping this shift, so I’ll cross over and keep looking as much as I can.”

“Alone?” My heart thumped painfully. “We decided not to go alone.” What if Avari caught him? What if something else caught him? What if he disappeared into the Netherworld never to be seen again, and I never found out whether he died, or got lost, or fell victim to eternal torture, or—

“I’ll be fine.” His blue-eyed gaze cut through the fear spiraling up my spine. “My mom’s hurt, and I don’t know how bad it is. I need to get her out of there. And while I’m there, I’ll be composing a huge list of places your dad isn’t.” He shrugged. “We’ve got to narrow it down somehow, right?”

I gave him a halfhearted nod, trying not to think about the possibility that Avari could be moving him around. How, if that were the case, we might never find him. “Just...be careful, and text me once an hour, or I’ll assume you’ve been captured and I’ll come after you. I swear I will.”

He smiled. “I believe you. And I’ll see you at lunch.” We’d learned early in our relationship that I couldn’t concentrate on school when he came to class with me, even though no one else could see him.

“I’ll be there.” But lunch felt like an eternity away. Like one of those mirage illusions that got farther away the longer you walked toward it.

Thoughts of what was coming—what I might have to do—churned in my stomach and weighed heavily in my heart. I wanted to tell him about the idea that had taken root in the back of my brain overnight, and about how I would do almost anything to avoid what was starting to look like the only way out of this, for my friends, my family, and for me. For us.

I wanted to tell Tod everything. Not telling him felt uncomfortable, like I was building a barrier between us. Like I couldn’t quite reach him through the wall neither of us could see or touch, but he was surely starting to feel. But I couldn’t tell him, because he’d be as determined to stop me as I was determined to go through with it. He’d be more determined, especially if his mother died, because then Nash and I would be all that he had left, and he’d be that much more determined to keep either of us from...

I blinked and buried that thought before he could see it swirling in my eyes. But I wasn’t as fast as he was observant.

“You okay?” He turned my face toward his and ran one finger all the way from the back of my jaw to the tip of my chin, and I almost confessed everything with one look at the maelstrom of grief, frustration, and devotion churning in every imaginable shade of blue in his irises.

“No. I’m not okay.” I let that one truth resonate in my voice and show in my eyes. “None of us are okay.” And we weren’t going to be until Avari was no longer a threat. Unfortunately, the longer I thought about the task in front of us, the more impossible it seemed to accomplish. On our own, anyway... “But we will be.”

He smiled and pulled me closer. “When you say it like that, with that look in your eyes, I can almost believe it.”

Well, that made one of us.

First and second periods dragged like no high-school class has ever dragged before or since. I had no idea what I was supposed to learn in chemistry, and if the fate of the world ever came to hinge upon my understanding of time as the fourth dimension—which was only
marginally
relevant to the math lesson—we were all goners.

When the bell rang to end second period, I was the first one out of my chemistry classroom. I waved to Em in the hall and brushed off a question from Chelsea Simms, then ducked into the nearest restroom. As soon as I was sure it was empty—for the moment—I faded from human sight and spared a moment to hope Chelsea wasn’t waiting for me to come out of the bathroom.

Then I blinked into the kitchen of a local doughnut shop, which had sat empty since Thane had killed the owner a month earlier. The doughnut shop had both sharp objects and privacy, everything necessary to summon a demon, as far as I could tell. Which was fortunate, because there was no way I’d invite Ira into my home, even if I could be sure of my control over him while he was there under the power of my blood. And I was far from sure of that.

The cut on my left palm hadn’t yet healed and I wouldn’t be able to explain an identical one on my opposite hand, so I made a cut at the top of my forearm instead, near my left elbow. That turned out to be ill-planned, at best. It was much harder to direct the flow of blood from halfway up my arm than from my hand, but after a couple of minutes and several drops spilled on my jeans, I had enough blood on the floor to write with.

I pressed a stack of folded napkins against the new cut and bent my arm at the elbow to hold it in place. Then I made the creepiest finger painting in history.

Ira appeared in front of me the second his name fell from my tongue. He stared down at me with featureless, red-veined black eyes, and though his lips didn’t actually curve up on the ends, I could swear he was smiling. “How wonderful to see you again, Ms. Cavanaugh. And you look so blisteringly angry!”

“You lied to me.”

Ira sank to the floor in one smooth movement. “That, my little fury, is impossible. In fact, lying is one of very few things I cannot do.”

I wanted to know what the other things were—and he obviously
knew
I wanted to know—but I wasn’t willing to bargain with a hellion for something I didn’t actually need.

“My dad wasn’t where you said he’d be, and because of the wild-goose chase you sent us on, more people are hurt.” And trapped in the Netherworld. But I wasn’t going to mention that, in case he didn’t already know about Harmony and my uncle. The last thing we needed was another hellion out there searching for them.

“I wasn’t asked where your father
would
be. You asked me where he was, and I told you exactly where he was at the time. Obviously, he was moved before you arrived.”

“Obviously.” I tried to keep the anger from my voice but failed miserably.

“Look on the bright side—at least you learned something.” He actually did smile that time, with lips the color of clotting blood. “You learned to act quickly, before the intelligence you paid for becomes moot, right?”

“Actually, the lesson I learned goes something like, ‘Never trust a hellion.’”

Ira laughed, a sound that felt more like an angry dog’s growl than a demonstration of joy. “I would have thought you’d learned that one long ago.”