Soul Screamers Volume Two

by Rachel Vincent

  “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 unde
r 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.”

  I would have thought so, too. Which was part of the problem.

  He leaned closer, over the blood on the floor, and it took most of my self-control to keep from backing away from him, which would have felt to both of us like an admission of fear. “But the fact remains—I did not lie to you.”

  “But you did tie my friend to the ground with crimson creeper vines. Why?”

  Somehow, Ira seemed even more amused by my question than by my belated wariness of hellions in general. “Are you surprised when a cat meows? Or when a siren sings her prey to sleep?”

  “I’m surprised when someone who agrees to help me turns around and tries to kill one of my friends.”

  He leaned back again, studying me from a different perspective, and I pretended that didn’t creep me out. “Little fury, I’m finding it difficult to express how very mixed-up you seem to be. First of all, I did not, nor will I ever, ‘help’ you. The information I provided was not a favor. It was a service rendered for payment. And, for the record, I’m only explaining that to you—with great patience, I might add—because I can feel you growing angrier with every word I speak. Which means that so far, I’m profiting from this little encounter without putting forth any effort whatsoever.”

  “You’re...vile.” I’m not sure where the word came from, but it felt like a good fit.

  “Why, thank you. And to continue, I did not try to kill your friend the mara. Had I wanted her dead, I would simply have bitten her head off and sucked out the tasty filling. But the fact is that in most cases, death of the victim means an end to its anger, thus an end to my meal. You are the happy exception. Well, the angry exception, in this case.”

  “The exception?” Why am I always the exception?

  “Typically, the undead quickly start to lose touch with their human emotions, including anger. At first I thought you were simply too recently dead for that to have happened yet. And that could be the case. But upon subsequent study, I’ve discovered that you, little fury, are not the average dead girl. You are a dead girl imitating life, which means that you didn’t lose your connections to the human world when you died. You still love, and regret, and hope, and wish, and you still anger. So you still have use to me.”

  I frowned, trying to untangle his words and rearrange them so that they made sense. “Was that your long-winded way of saying you poisoned Sabine to piss me off?”

  He nodded. “Succinctly put. In fact, my original intent was to kill her. However, when I took a taste of her anger, both past and present, I found you prominently displayed among her grievances, in spite of the fact that she was obviously in the Netherworld in an ill-fated attempt to help you and your assorted collection of playmates. Which told me that hurting her would likely anger you.”

  “So, should I assume that if you catch any of the rest of my ‘playmates,’ you will hurt them, too, to piss me off?”

  Ira’s mouth twitched, and I got the impression he was silently laughing at me. “That is a distinct possibility. It is also the last bit of information I will give you without compensation.”

  “Fine. I don’t need anything else from you anyway.”

  His dark brows rose in a skilled imitation of human surprise. “That tastes like a lie, little fury. And the fact that you haven’t yet dismissed me from the human plane seems to support my theory. What could you possibly need?” He crossed both arms over his chest, waiting, but I didn’t answer. I couldn’t without giving him as much information as I’d be asking him for.

  “Information, again?” He was guessing. He was a good guesser. “I think you need more information, but I do look forward to the day you write my name in blood and ask me to take action on your behalf.”

  “That won’t happen.” In part because I couldn’t afford it. And in part because dealing with Ira was dangerous, and the more I saw him, the more likely I was to forget that. To see him as just another Netherworld resource, like Harmony’s herbal remedies.

  That kind of casual disrespect would lead to things worse than death.

  “Oh, I think it will. Based on the escalation of your rage in the few days since we officially met, I would say our relationship is building toward a sharp crest. You will need something soon. Something beyond information. And when you become angry enough to pay the price...that will be a day to remember, surely.”

  I stayed silent, well aware that every second I didn’t swipe my hand through the bloody letters on the floor was another second confirming his theory that I still needed something from him.

  “But just information for now, am I right? You want to know where your father is?” His brows rose again. “Will you pay twice to have the same question answered? Far be it from me to offer unsolicited advice, but if I were you, I’d ask something new. Perhaps you’d like to know the whereabouts of your uncle and your lover’s mother? An attractive pair of bean sidhes. It would be a shame to see them devoured by the jungle, as it were.”

  My heart stopped beating for several seconds, and when it kicked into motion again, it overcompensated, pumping blood through my veins so fast my vision started to go dark. “You knew? You’ve been sitting here toying with me this whole time, when you knew what I wanted?”

  “Of course. If I’d told you immediately, we both would have missed out on the titillating climax of your anger.”

  “You bastard.”

  “Yes, yes...” Ira studied me while I fumed, too angry to form words. “Now, what are you willing to pay for the information I have?”

  “Nothing.” I’d finally caught on. “You don’t know where they are, do you?” He’d never actually said he did. He’d only implied it.

  “That’s an interesting question. And for ano
ther taste of your anger, I will answer it.”

  “No deal.” I stood, and he stared up at me.

  “Oh, little fury, do you really want to go away mad?” He laughed at his own joke, and I tried to remember if I’d ever heard a joke from a hellion. “Actually, that works for me, too. I look forward to our next—”

  I swiped the sole of my sneaker across the bloody letters on the floor, and Ira disappeared in midsentence. His surprised expression hung there for a second in my mind, but that minor moment of satisfaction wasn’t enough to soothe my anger or relieve my fear.

  When the echo of his voice faded from my ears, I backed away from the blood on the floor, suddenly horrified by what I’d done. By the fact that I’d summoned a hellion again. That I’d put myself at risk again, and fed him at my own expense again, and that this time, I had nothing to show for it.

  I was horrified most of all by the fact that I’d let him leave without telling me where my father was or whether or not he knew where Harmony and Uncle Brendon were. I was furious with myself for having the guts—the rash stupidity—to summon a hellion but not to finish what I’d started. To pay, again, for information that could have saved three lives.

  What the hell was wrong with me?

  I retreated from the red mess on the floor until my spine hit a stainless steel countertop, then I slid down the cabinet doors to sit with my knees tucked up to my chest, my arms clasped around them. Air slid in and out of my lungs as I stared at the puddle of my blood, trying to get a grip on my racing pulse and pounding heart. On the angry flush burning in my cheeks. Trying to decide how big a mess I’d made of the situation. Trying to figure out how to fix it.

  How on earth was I going to find three missing parents when multiple hellions were also hunting them?

  Then, when my body was finally under control—stupid leftover physiological reactions—and I’d calmed to the point that I could at least sort through my thoughts, I stood and did what had to be done. I found cleaning supplies and wiped up all the blood, then threw my trash into the Dumpster behind the doughnut shop. A glance at my watch showed that third period was almost over. With any luck, no one had noticed me missing during my free period. But my friends would notice if I skipped lunch.