Before I Wake

by Rachel Vincent

  A second later, Sophie squealed as Belphegore jerked her out of Luca’s grip with a single brutal tug. Then she shoved Luca closer to me and Tod. “You three stay put,” she said with my aunt’s voice. “One move from any of you while we’re waiting for the last player in this little game, and the humans will die in a great deal of pain.”

  Sophie whimpered and Emma moaned, in both pain and fear, as behind us, Nash’s footsteps thumped to a stop next to Tod. “What the hell?” he demanded, but I was just as confused and horrified as he was by the parade of demons wearing faces from our past.

  Belphegore ignored him and focused on Luca. “I can see what you’re thinking, necromancer. You think you can bring them back if they die, but they won’t be the same, will they? Do you really think either of them would appreciate your particular talents?”

  Luca shook his head slowly, eyes narrowed in anger while most of the rest of us looked on in confusion.

  “What’s up with all the dead people?” Nash stage-whispered.

  “Aunt Val is Belphegore and Addison is Avari,” I said. “And when they cross over, the stolen souls will dissipate, doomed to wander both worlds for centuries, trying to coalesce. Or something like that.”

  My explanation didn’t seem to help. “I’m assuming Kaylee didn’t invite the hellions to her birthday party, so the object of this little gathering would be…?”

  “We’re still waiting for the big reveal,” Tod said. And as much as I hated waiting in ignorance, the alternative—suffering in ignorance—seemed infinitely worse.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Thane said as he appeared in our midst, sunglasses sliding down the end of his nose. Before I could yell at him for what was obviously a betrayal of the deal we’d struck, he tugged on the hand he held and a waif of a girl with stringy blond hair stumbled forward.

  “Lydia?”

  “Kaylee?” Lydia’s eyes were wide and scared. Her clothes were dirty and her skin was pale. Where had Thane found her? Had she been living on the street?

  “What the hell does this have to do with Lydia?” I demanded, but instead of answering, Avari looked around through Addison’s eyes at the group he’d assembled, then nodded his approval.

  “If you want answers, you know how to get them,” he said with Addy’s voice. At her nod, Thane disappeared with Lydia in tow, and Belphegore disappeared with Sophie. And just like that, Aunt Val’s soul was gone, disintegrated and distributed across both worlds like dust scattered in an explosion for however long it would take all the bits to coalesce so she could be given a final rest. Or doomed to torture once again.

  “Wait!” Tod shouted, and Avari turned to him with Addison’s wide-eyed look of expectance. “You said you wouldn’t cross if I didn’t go after Kaylee! You can’t go back on your word!” That no-lie rule was to hellions in the Netherworld what physics was to humans in our world—a law that could not be broken.

  “No, what I said was that if you went after Kaylee, I would cross over. And that was no lie.” With that, the Addison-monster disappeared with Emma, and Em’s scream echoed even after her body was gone.

  Tod shouted, a wordless expression of rage and despair. Addison was gone. We’d failed to save her. Again.

  Then, for a single, tense second, Tod, Nash, Luca, and I stared at one another in shocked silence. Luca was the first to break it. “We’re going after them, right? We have to go after them!” But he couldn’t cross on his own, and neither could Nash.

  “Yes, of course,” I said, closing my eyes. Trying to think. “But rushing in would be suicidal.”

  “It’s not like we have any choice!” Luca cried. “They have Sophie and Emma. And…that other girl.”

  “It’s a trap,” Nash said, running one hand through his mussed brown hair. He looked like he wanted to hit something, but all the bad guys had disappeared.

  “How do you know?” Luca demanded.

  “Because everything Avari does is a trap, and I’ve been caught in a couple of them.”

  “They took our friends so we’d follow them into the Netherworld. Right where they want us,” Tod explained. “They’re looking for resurrected souls, like me and Kaylee.”

  “You don’t know that,” Nash said. “Maybe this time they want Sophie and Emma and…”

  “Lydia,” I supplied.

  “Right,” he said. “Why would they bring Lydia here, when Sophie and Emma would have been plenty of bait on their own? The hellions brought them here for more than that.”

  Tod and Nash started to argue, but I cut them off, beyond grateful that Nash was clean and sober. I’d almost forgotten how smart he could be. “Nash has a point,” I said. “Any one of them would have been enough bait. And if the hellions just wanted us in the Netherworld, Invidia would have kept me there earlier, and Avari would have let you cross after me.”

  Tod nodded, grudgingly conceding the point.

  “It doesn’t matter whether they want us here, or there, or in the next damn galaxy. They. Have. Sophie. Take me, or I’ll find my own way to cross,” Luca said, brown eyes blazing in fury and fear. I had no idea how he’d get himself there, but I didn’t doubt he could do it.

  And his determination to save my spoiled, bitchy cousin was so damn sweet I almost wondered if I’d judged her too harshly all my life. Almost.

  I glanced at Tod, and he nodded. Then Nash nodded. We were in agreement.

  “Okay,” I said. “But we can’t cross here—this is where they’ll be expecting us. And don’t forget that Tod and I don’t have any undead abilities in the Netherworld. We can cross back over, and I assume we can function as bean sidhes, but no invisibility, inaudibility, or blinking from one place to the next. Understand? No shortcuts.” That thought terrified me beyond reason, especially considering that I’d been to the Netherworld a dozen times before I even had any undead abilities.

  “I don’t care.” Luca glanced around the clearing. “Where should we cross?”

  I looked around, thinking of my brief visit to the Nether minutes earlier. “Away from the water and out of the sand. Um… Over there. Beneath the trees.”

  “You guys meet us there,” Tod said, one hand on my arm to catch my attention. Nash scowled, but when I didn’t object, he led Luca out of earshot. Tod stared down at me, his eyes swirling with nerves. “Kaylee, this isn’t going to end well. It could be worse than what happened with Alec, and I need you to promise me that if this goes bad, you’ll run. Just get the hell out of the Netherworld. I’ll be right behind you with Nash and anyone else I can reach to cross over with.”

  “No. This is all or nothing, Tod. I’m not coming back without everyone.” What good would my afterlife be if I had to live it knowing I’d let my best friends die?

  Tod exhaled slowly, obviously frustrated. “Fine. But I had to try.”

  “And I love you for it.” I took his hand, and we blinked over to the trees just as Nash and Luca got there. “Ready?” Tod asked, and everyone nodded.

  I sucked in one last deep lungful of human-world air and took Luca’s hand while Tod took Nash’s forearm. Then we crossed.

  The Netherworld version of the tree limbs we stood beneath were heavily laden with fat, knobby purple fruit and long, thin leaves with serrated edges. Luca reached up like he’d touch one, then thought better of it. He was smarter than I’d been during my first trip to the Netherworld. Then I remembered that he’d been there before, with Sophie. Which was good. Experience counts for a lot in the Netherworld.

  Uncommon sense counts for even more.

  “Over there,” Tod said, and I followed his gaze to see Sophie, Lydia, and Emma, obviously terrified and in tears, sitting in a row on a concrete picnic bench that had bled through intact from the human world. Nothing else from the human park still stood in the Netherworld, except for the pavilion, its canvas covering ripped and flapping in a breeze that smelled faintly of the rot from the lake. The park wasn’t frequently or highly populated enough to bleed through in much detail.

  In
front of the bench, the three hellions stood arguing. I couldn’t make out every word, but the gist was clear. They were arguing over which hellion would get which girl. Belphegore wanted the pretty one—not sure if she meant Emma or Sophie—Invidia was jealous of whichever one Belphegore wanted, and Avari insisted that he would get the first choice, because he’d pulled the entire plan together.

  But that was bullshit. He wanted first choice because he was a hellion of greed, and if he could possibly get away with taking all three of them, he would.

  They argued like cartoon bad guys, but the hellions were omnipotent, damn near omnipresent, and immortal, as far as we could tell. Their only weaknesses were the character flaws they embodied and fed from. They couldn’t be hurt with anything originating from our world, and as far as I knew, they were impervious to most of the dangers the Netherworld had to offer.

  We were in way over our heads.

  I’d never seen Belphegore in her own skin before, but I wasn’t surprised to see that she was unspeakably beautiful, as a hellion of vanity ought to be. What did surprise me was that the moment I turned away from her, I couldn’t remember what she looked like. Not because she wasn’t beautiful—she was—but because she was so generically flawless that no one feature stood out enough to be remembered. She was average height, with skin that could have belonged to any human ethnicity. Her hair was neither short nor long, and neither light nor dark, but seemed to change slightly every time my gaze returned to her.

  Was beauty so impossible to define? So pointless that it couldn’t be accurately remembered? What must it feel like to be the most beautiful creature in all of existence, but be forgotten the moment you leave the room?

  Was that how Aunt Val had felt?

  Luca was the first to ask the obvious question, pulling me from my own thoughts. “What do the demons want them for?”

  The moment he spoke, all three hellions turned to look at us, like they’d been expecting us all along. And, of course, they had been. Avari disappeared, then reappeared close enough to whisper in Luca’s ear. “Why don’t you join us and find out?”

  Before we could answer—or think, or plan, or run—he grabbed Luca and disappeared again, then reappeared beneath the pavilion, where he shoved Luca onto the bench next to Emma.

  “Okay, plan?” I whispered, glancing from one Hudson brother to the other.

  Nash huffed. “We probably should have come up with one before we crossed over.”

  “It’s not like we had notice or anything,” Tod said.

  “Only two of us can cross,” I said, eyeing our friends on the bench. “Even if we could get to them, I don’t know how many I can take at once.” And the hellions could probably hear every word we were saying.

  “Maybe you should go get help?” Tod whispered.

  “Your mom?”

  “No!” both Hudson brothers said.

  “Levi, or Madeline,” Tod suggested.

  “The more, the merrier,” Avari said, and somehow, his voice came from right next to me, though he hadn’t left the pavilion. “Bring Madeline. I haven’t yet made her acquaintance.”

  “No!” Emma shouted, with what may have been the last of her strength. “Don’t bring Madeline. Avari needs her.”

  Tod and Nash both glanced at me, and I knew what they were thinking. What could unite three hellions who hated one another, and why the hell would they want Madeline?

  Thane slapped Emma, and she gasped, then kicked him in the shin, still holding her side with one hand. He pulled his hand back to hit her again, but Luca stood and shoved Thane back, glaring silently, and the reaper actually stayed back. Tod wasn’t the only member of the undead unnerved by the necromancer.

  Sophie was sniffling quietly. Lydia looked paralyzed with fear and pain, and I realized she was syphoning some of Emma’s pain. Neither of them would last long like that.

  “Come on.” I wasn’t sure what the hellions were up to, but we couldn’t help anyone from fifty feet away. I marched down the slight incline toward the pavilion and both Tod and Nash followed me.

  “—don’t need Madeline,” Thane was saying when we got within earshot. “I told you, she can do it.” He looked pointedly at me.

  “I can do what?” I asked.

  “You lying, traitorous bastard,” Tod spat, but Thane only shrugged.

  “We do what we have to do to survive. You promised to try to recover my soul if I helped you. Avari promised to give it back if I helped him. The difference is that he can’t lie, and you can. I had to go with the sure thing.”

  “Is this a trade?” I asked Avari. “You want me? Fine. I’m here. I’ll trade myself for all four of them,” I said, glancing at my friends lined up on the bench.

  “Oh, we’re way beyond a simple trade,” Belphegore said. “Avari can no longer afford to keep you for himself, and these four meat sacks are all necessary for our little project.” She waved one hand at the bench and its occupants.

  “But we are not unreasonable,” Invidia said. “If you do what we ask, we will let both of your little men go free.” She gestured at Nash and Tod.

  “Hell, no,” Tod spat, just as Nash said, “No way.”

  “We don’t even know what they want yet,” I said, without taking my attention away from the hellions. And Thane.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Tod growled. “They don’t get you.”

  “They don’t get any of us. What do you want?” I asked Avari again.

  “You may have noticed that we’ve learned how to cross into your world,” he began, and I nodded. They’d gone to great pains to make sure I knew that. “The problem is that our current method of transportation requires a new human soul for each trip. We would like a more efficient way to utilize our resources. You help us, and both Hudsons will go free. You have my word.”

  “What about them?” I asked, glancing at the full bench again.

  “Unfortunately, they are all part of the permanent solution. As are you.”

  “No.” Tod grabbed my hand and started to haul me backward, and when I pulled free, he stood at my back, quietly fuming, strung so tight I could hear his teeth grinding.

  “What do you want?”

  “You and the necroanima will bind my life force with a resurrected soul already in my possession.”

  One of the reapers he’d snatched? And what the hell was a necroanima? Were they talking about Luca?

  “Then you will install both in the body of this young woman—” Avari gestured to Lydia “—so that I can come and go from your world at will. There is one for each of us.”

  “What?” I frowned at the hellion. “I don’t even know what that means. You want to live in Lydia’s body? Forever?”

  “Of course not.” He frowned like my guess was preposterous. “Only until her body wears out. Then I will select another.”

  “What the hell is he talking about?” Nash asked. But no one had an answer.

  “You will do as I instructed,” Avari said. “I will have a reusable body to use in the human world, and your men will go free. Or… I will kill every single one of you and feast on your souls for eternity.”

  “That’s not possible!” I insisted. “And even if it were, I can’t do that. I reclaim souls, not reinstall them.”

  “You can do both,” Invidia insisted. “Just like Madeline.”

  “Madeline?” I asked, and Luca’s gaze fell to the ground and stayed there. I was missing something.

  “Madeline reinstalled your soul,” Avari said. “After her nephew reanimated your body.”

  “What? Luca can’t reanimate dead people! He just finds them.”

  “Of course he can.” Belphegore laughed out loud. “What did you think the anima part of necroanima meant?”

  “I don’t know what any of that means! He’s a necromancer. Right? Luca?” I demanded, and finally he met my gaze.

  “Over here, they call me a necroanima. Which is technically more accurate. Madeline was afraid that knowing too much would put you
in danger, so she wouldn’t let me tell you what I can really do. Or what you can do.”

  “I can install souls? Into corpses?” As a bean sidhe, I’d only been able to help put them back into their own not-yet-truly-dead bodies.

  He nodded. “All extractors can.”

  “But you’re more special than that, aren’t you?” Avari reached out to touch my cheek, and Tod pulled me out of reach. After that, I didn’t want to let his hand go. But I did, because I couldn’t afford to look weak.

  “How? How am I more special?” And why the hell was I the last to know?

  “It takes the combined skills of both an extractor and a bean sidhe to bind a human soul to a non-human life force,” Avari said. “There hasn’t been one of those—one of you—in nearly a century, by the human calendar.”

  “What does that mean? It’s actually possible?” I asked Luca, because even though Avari couldn’t lie, I didn’t trust him.

  “In theory,” Luca said. “It’s never been done with a hellion, but it was done once with a lesser Nether-creature, so he could cross over and give testimony. The binding was done by a restored female bean sidhe. Just like you.”

  No. No. Where the hell was my copy of History of the Nether? Shouldn’t that have been issued to me upon my death?

  “That is the only reason I let your necroanima leave the Nether when he and your cousin crossed over by mistake,” Avari said. “So that he could reanimate you. If you’d stayed dead, I would have lost your soul.”

  “You…?” Avari had planned this. Probably from the moment Thane showed him how to cross into the human world.

  “Okay.” I turned back to Avari, fighting to maintain focus. “But even if I wanted to help you—” and I didn’t “—I can’t do it. I don’t know how.”

  “I think you’ll figure it out. Let’s practice the installation first. All you need is the proper…motivation.” Belphegore hauled Emma off the bench and shoved Luca down when he tried to pull her back. “This one is your… What is the word? The one you care about. Your friend?”