Before I Wake

by Rachel Vincent

  Nash tried to tackle Tina, but she dodged him, then laughed when he hit the ground rolling. I raced for my father, still clutching the dagger, and dropped to my knees at his side, staring in shock at the pocket knife sticking out of his thigh.

  Harmony screamed and her footsteps pounded toward us. My dad grabbed my hand. “Run,” he said as Sabine pulled the dagger from my other hand. When I only shook my head, he looked past me to Tod. “Get her out of here.”

  But when Tod reached for me, I shot him a warning look. “Help me with him.” I wasn’t leaving my father, or the rest of our group. So we each took one of my dad’s arms and pulled him away from the demon in the foster-mom suit.

  Tina laughed as the mara faced off against her, feet spread wide, double-bladed dagger held ready. “One down,” the imposter said, glancing at my dad. “One to go.” Her gaze flicked up to focus on Harmony, who’d almost reached us. “I find the adults just get in the way, don’t you?”

  “Nash!” Tod tossed his head toward his mother as we pulled my dad toward the nearest car, in spite of his protests. Nash rolled onto his feet and ran to intercept Harmony.

  “How did you know?” Tina asked as Tod joined Sabine and they herded the hellion away from me and my father, who was still bleeding on the ground.

  Sabine shrugged. “You knew stuff Tina would never know. Like my name and whereabouts. Also, FYI, very few twenty-first-century foster parents use the word forbade.”

  The demon nodded, like she was actually interested. “I shall keep that in mind.”

  “Tod!” Harmony shouted, and I twisted to see Nash physically holding his mother back from the action, while she watched her other son help confront a hellion who’d already stabbed my dad.

  My father pushed me back and started to get to his feet, knife and all. I could see where this was headed—more blood loss and heroics—so I grabbed his hand and blinked us both to the other side of the pavilion, then blinked myself back to Tod and Sabine before my dad could even wrap his head around what had happened.

  “Kaylee!” he shouted, but we all ignored him.

  Sabine rushed the imposter, and fake Tina kicked her in the chest, with more strength and speed than any normal foster mother would have. Sabine flew backward—her feet actually left the ground—and crashed to the earth several feet away. A grunt of pain exploded from her throat with the impact and the dagger fell from her hand.

  “Bitch broke my arm!” she shouted.

  I grabbed the dagger and blinked onto the grass at Tina’s back while Tod held her attention in the other direction. On my periphery, Harmony knelt next to Sabine to examine her arm and Nash raced to a halt at my side, irises twisting with fear and fury. Before I realized what he meant to do, he took the knife from me and grabbed Tina’s left shoulder from behind. Then he shoved my dagger into her right side.

  Tina collapsed to the ground and rolled awkwardly onto her back, her eyes wide with shock, one hand hovering uselessly over the knife still protruding from her side. Nash dropped onto her legs and shoved the heel of his palm against the hilt of the dagger, driving it deeper, and I realized that with the hellion-forged steel still inside her, she couldn’t just disappear. She was trapped with us, until her borrowed form died. “Who are you?” he demanded through clenched teeth, while I watched in shock.

  Tod pulled him off Tina and the imposter’s mouth widened in a cruel smile when Sabine stopped at her side. The mara clutched her left arm to her chest as foggy wisps of her foster mother’s soul curled around the hilt of the knife still in the monster’s side. “You’re a clever one…” the demon said. Then her body melted into nothing, leaving my bloody dagger on the ground.

  On the grass where Tina’s head had been a moment earlier lay the eighties’ vintage banana clip that had secured her thick hair on one side of her skull.

  “What the hell just happened?” Harmony demanded, one arm around my dad, who was limping toward us from the pavilion, a stack of paper napkins pressed to the wound in his leg.

  “Hellion sneak attack,” Tod said.

  “Who do you think it was?” Nash asked, studying Sabine’s injured arm, and she shrugged, her jaw clenched in pain.

  “Has to be someone who knows a little about me. Avari or Invidia.”

  “Or anyone they’re working with,” Tod said.

  My father limped to a stop next to me, one arm around Harmony’s shoulders. “I assume you all know what this means.”

  “Other than the fact that my foster mother is dead and I’m homeless?” Sabine handed me the bloody dagger, and I took it between my thumb and forefinger, reluctant to get yet more blood on my hands.

  “She was trying to get rid of the adults,” I said, staring at the place where the demon had died on the ground. “That means Avari’s finally finished setting up whatever game this has all been leading to. Now he’s ready to play.”

  20

  “OKAY.” I TOOK a deep breath, trying to gather my thoughts, and sank onto a picnic bench beneath the pavilion. “Whoever that was impersonating Tina, he’s down now, but not out. He’ll be back, and there’s no telling what he’ll look like.” Or she. The hellion could have been female.

  “So, what’s the plan?” Sabine asked, her face lined in pain as she laid her injured arm on the picnic table in front of her.

  “Well…” my father said from the opposite side of the table. He was naked from the waist up, his leg stretched out straight on the bench beneath him, pressing his shirt to the wound, like Harmony had shown him. “I’m sorry about your birthday party, Kaylee, but I think we all need to go. Now.”

  “Agreed.” I scanned the shoreline, looking for Em and Jayson, and Sophie and Luca. They’d paired up on opposite sides of the lake—no doubt for privacy—and were out of earshot. Fortunately, they’d missed the demon slaying. “Harmony, can you drive Sabine and my dad to the hospital? We’ll get the others and follow you.”

  “No…” my dad started to object. But I cut him off.

  “You’re bleeding all over the place. We’ll be right behind you, I swear. I’m not looking for any more hellion interaction today, of all days.”

  “You are still losing blood…” Harmony said, and my father sighed.

  “You swear you’ll be right behind us?”

  I nodded. “You’ll probably be able to see us in the rearview mirror.” When my father finally gave in, Tod and I helped Harmony get him into her car while Nash helped Sabine buckle her seat belt beneath her broken—and now swollen—arm. Then Nash headed to the pavilion to pack up the lunch stuff. Tod and I were about to blink to opposite sides of the lake to gather the rest of the troops when Luca came running toward us from the shore.

  “Kaylee!” he shouted, and all three of us turned. An instant later, and Tod and I would have been gone.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Dead guy. Or dead girl,” Luca said. “Either way, someone here is deader than either of you.”

  A jolt of fear shot up my spine, followed by an echoing bolt of anger. Not again…

  “It’s probably Tina’s body,” Tod said, while Nash filled Luca in on what had happened, and I was almost ashamed by how relieved that thought made me. As awful as it was to think that Sabine’s foster mother had been hauled around in her own car by the demon who’d killed her and stolen her soul, that was better than the alternative—yet another death. “Where?” I asked.

  “Over there somewhere.” Luca nodded toward the parking lot, and my relief swelled. If Tina’s body had arrived with her car, that would explain why Luca hadn’t sensed it before.

  “Show us,” I said, and we followed him away from the covered eating area toward the parking lot, with spaces for just six vehicles. Four of the spaces were occupied by cars we’d driven: mine, my dad’s, Tina’s, and Jayson’s.

  Luca stopped in front of our row of cars, then veered to the right, past my car, like he was being physically tugged that way. “Here.” He started down the aisle between Tina’s car and Jayson
’s, and my heart pounded so hard my chest ached. I didn’t want to think about Sabine’s foster mother lying dead in her own car. I didn’t want to think about anything. I wanted this moment to be over, before it had even begun.

  At the end of the aisle, Luca turned to the right—away from Tina’s car. He stepped slowly, hesitantly toward Jayson’s trunk, his eyes narrowed in concentration, and I could feel my own brow wrinkle in confusion. “It’s in there. Dead. Not rotting yet, so it’s very recent.”

  “What? No,” I said, frustrated by the fact that logic and the truth didn’t seem to line up. “Why would someone put a body in Jayson’s car? He doesn’t know anything about any of this.”

  “No, but his trunk obviously made a convenient delivery system.” Tod peered over the roof, and I followed his gaze to the shore, where Em and Jayson were two indistinct forms near the edge of the water, enjoying their normal day, and their normal lives, with no idea how much macabre horror had hitched a ride in Jayson’s normal car. “He’s not looking. I’m going to pop the trunk.”

  Tod disappeared, and an instant later he reappeared in Jayson’s driver’s seat.

  My hands shook and my mind raced. Who was in the trunk? It had to be someone I knew. Someone close to me. The pattern was escalating—Avari had said that himself. A stranger. A classmate. A friend.

  This time it was a relative. It had to be. Except that all of my relatives were alive and accounted for.

  Except for Uncle Brendon.

  “No…”

  My uncle had cared for me like a father when my own father hadn’t been able to deal with my mother’s death. Uncle Brendon had been there on every first day of school and every trip to the doctor. He’d turned on the bathroom light when I was scared of the dark and thrown away the steamed broccoli I hated, when Aunt Val wasn’t looking.

  But whatever he’d been to me, he was more to Sophie. He was all she had left. And no matter what she’d said and done to me in the past, she didn’t deserve this.

  Tod leaned forward in the driver’s seat and something popped inside the car. The trunk lid rose a couple of inches, but I only stared at it. I couldn’t look. I didn’t want to see.

  “Kaylee?” Luca said, but I shook my head.

  “I need a minute.” How was I going to tell my dad that his brother was gone? How was I going to tell Sophie that her father was dead? And that it was my fault?

  “Kay?” Tod appeared at my side and his arm wrapped around me from behind.

  “I can’t do it. It’s Uncle Brendon. Am I a total coward if I don’t look?”

  He squeezed me, then let me go and lifted the trunk. I turned my head. I didn’t want to see my uncle dead, and I especially didn’t want to see him dead in the trunk of Emma’s boyfriend’s car.

  Luca made a sound, deep in his throat, and for a second, I thought he’d choked on horror. I’d come close myself, several times. “What the hell?” the necromancer said. “I don’t understand.”

  “Kaylee,” Tod said, and something in his voice set off alarms in my head. He seemed to be calling me forward and warning me back at the same time. “It’s not your uncle.”

  Chill bumps sprouted all over my arms, and finally I looked, because I had no other choice. But at first, I couldn’t process what I was seeing.

  Tod was right; it wasn’t my uncle. This man was younger, thinner, with unruly brown hair and…

  My hands clenched around the edge of the trunk and I looked up at Tod, my eyes wide. He nodded in response to the question I couldn’t voice. “He said he brought you a gift.”

  Yes, that’s exactly what Jayson had said. Except it couldn’t really have been Jayson speaking, because Jayson was dead in the trunk of his own car.

  “So, who’s that with Emma?” Luca asked, and I glanced up in horror, searching the shoreline for her and for not-Jayson. I had to squint to see them clearly. They were a quarter of the way around the lake, standing in the sand. Em’s shoes dangled from the fingers of one hand. And she was kissing…him. She was kissing not-Jayson.

  My best friend was kissing the demon wearing her boyfriend’s stolen soul.

  “That son of a bitch played us.” And now he had Emma within his grasp. Literally.

  Tod saw my intent before it could possibly have surfaced in my eyes. “Kaylee, wait!”

  But I couldn’t wait. I couldn’t let him have her.

  Frantic with rage and impatience, I turned and stomped toward the picnic table, where my dagger lay, still smeared with blood. “Kaylee.” Tod followed me. “We need a plan.”

  “I have one: kill him, before he lays another hand on Emma.”

  “That’s not a plan, it’s a goal. Plans have steps, and forethought, and—”

  I grabbed the dagger, but Tod stood his ground, blocking me in between the table and the grill. “Step one. Kill him. Step two. Repeat as necessary.” I turned to Nash and Luca. “Will you guys go get Sophie?” When they nodded, I turned back to Tod. “You comin’?”

  Then I blinked out, without waiting for his reply. An instant later, I stood on the sand behind the Jayson-thing. Over his shoulder, Em saw my knife and gasped.

  Jayson turned and laughed out loud. “I wondered how long that would take.”

  “About this long.” I swung the knife at him, but he turned at the same time, with Emma in his grip. Em screamed. I tried to abort my swing, but the dagger sliced through the side of her blouse as he swung her around like a human shield. The blade scored her skin in an arc, just above her right hip.

  She screamed again, and I gasped, almost frozen by my own horror and regret. “Em, I’m so sorry!”

  “Ow, shit! What the hell, Kaylee?” Em slapped one hand over the wound, but Jayson nearly pulled her off balance when he dragged her backward, away from me.

  “Let her go,” I said, trying to divide my focus between his face and the blood seeping between her fingers.

  “Kaylee, put the knife down,” the Jayson-thing said. His voice was full of trepidation and fear, but his expression didn’t match. His grin was creepy and irrepressible, but Emma couldn’t see that with him at her back. He leaned down to speak directly into her ear. “I always heard she was crazy, but I didn’t think she was violent.”

  And that’s when I understood the game—the hellion was still playing his role.

  “Kaylee?” Emma’s face was white with pain, and her hands were red and slick with her own blood. She was breathing too hard. Too fast.

  “I’m so sorry, Em. I was aiming for him.” My focus shifted to his eyes, sparkling with new pleasure over her head. “Let her go. This isn’t about her.”

  “What is she talking about?” Jayson’s voice asked, practically shaking with fake fear, while his eyes shined in malicious pleasure. “And why is she armed?” He pulled her farther away from me, pretending to protect her, when he was really shielding himself.

  “What’s going on?” Em demanded, and the strength in her voice gave me hope. Surely if the wound was very bad, she’d weaken quickly. Right?

  “Don’t mean to scare you, Em,” Tod said, appearing on the left edge of my peripheral vision. “But there’s a better than average chance you may be dating a demon.”

  She glanced at him, then back to me. “What the hell is he talking about?”

  “That’s not Jayson. Jayson’s dead in his own trunk.”

  “What does that mean?” the Jayson-thing said. “They’re crazy, Em. How could I be standing here right now, if I were dead?”

  Tod made an exasperated sound. “Oh, let me count the ways… .”

  “Emma, listen to me, please.” I stepped forward, but he dragged her back again. “Jayson is dead. He’s in the trunk of his own car, in the parking lot. The thing holding you is Avari, and he’s not protecting you from me, he’s using you as a human shield.”

  “No…” Em flinched and pressed her hand harder against her wound. But she’d seen and survived too much to let fear and disbelief—or even pain—blind her to the dangerous truth
. That was one of the things I liked best about her. “Jayson’s dead?”

  “The word doornail comes to mind,” Tod said.

  I nodded and gestured toward the thing still clutching Emma to its chest. “Ask him. Hellions can’t lie.”

  Tears spilled from Emma’s eyes and trailed down her cheeks, and I couldn’t tell which hurt her worse: her bleeding cut or the thought that her new human boyfriend—innocent, and ignorant of the danger he’d walked into—had been killed by a monster. “Are you Avari?” Her words were halting, half choked with her own tears. “Did you kill Jayson?”

  The Jayson-monster’s brows rose at me over Emma’s head. “No, to both questions.” He was challenging me. Daring me to prove him wrong.

  But… Hellions couldn’t lie. Of course, they weren’t supposed to be able to cross over, either. What was I missing?

  “Okay. I believe you,” Em said, holding my gaze with a teary one of her own. She was talking to me, but he was supposed to think she was talking to him. “But I’m hurt, Jayson. Let me go, so they can take me to the hospital.”

  “I will.” He glanced over my shoulder toward the pavilion, probably making sure no one else had noticed the trouble yet. “As soon as she puts the knife down.”

  But I couldn’t do that.

  “Who are you?” I demanded. “Obviously you’re a hellion. Someone working with Avari.” But no self-respecting hellion would help out another without something to gain from the favor. Was Emma the payment? If so, why not just take her? Why would the Jayson-thing practically tell me he’d left something in his car for me, then walk down the shore with Em in plain sight, instead of just crossing over with her? “Belphegore?” I said. “Invidia?”

  “Oh, now you’re just guessing,” the hellion said. And with that, the charade was over.

  “Let me go,” Em said, her voice deep with hatred, haggard with pain. “Let go of me, you murdering, soul-stealing demon bastard!”

  Jayson laughed. “I like this one. Easy on the eyes and even better on the tongue.” He bent toward her ear again. “Do you think they’ll save you?” he stage-whispered loud enough for me and Tod to hear. “If she has to kill you to get to me, do you think she’ll even hesitate?”