“What the hell?” The redhead scowled from the bottom step, staring in confusion at the point where—as far as she could see—the pendant had vanished in midair. When Tod caught it. “Where’d it go?”
“The necklace?” the brunette said. “Who cares, Mae? It’s on the floor somewhere.”
“No, it disappeared!” Mae insisted. “He threw it, and it disappeared!” She launched herself across the drifts of junk between us until her face was inches from mine, her sour breath wafting over my skin, while her friends—or siblings, or whatever—held my arms in sharp-fingered grips. If I tried to pull free, their claws would shred my skin. “How did you do that?” she demanded. “Where did it go? What are you?”
Instead of answering her, I turned to Tod. “Go. Take Darcy and go.”
“Who the hell are you talking to?” Troy demanded, with a vicious yank on my arm. “Make use of your tongue, or I’ll rip it out.”
I tried to pull away, and two of his clawed fingernails pierced my skin. He was too strong. They all were, and four on one wasn’t fair even in the human world.
“He’s talking to me,” Tod said, and when the harpies gasped, I realized my brother had revealed himself. “Let him go.”
“What are you?” Mae demanded, tossing red hair over her shoulder, where it fanned out over the point of her left wing. “Succubus?”
“He’s a reaper,” the brunette said. “They’re both reapers.”
“No way.” Troy snorted and gave my arm another yank. “If this one was a reaper, he’d have already disappeared. And he wouldn’t be sweating.”
I couldn’t argue with the truth, so I twisted to look at my brother. “Tod, take the dragon and go!”
“I’m not lea—”
Mae lunged for him, wings tucked against her spine, but my brother disappeared and she grasped at air.
“I’m not leaving you!” Tod said, appearing on the steps behind her. “Sacrificing yourself doesn’t make you a hero, it makes you an idiot. Especially considering that this isn’t that dire a situation.”
The third harpy hissed, baring sharp teeth, her back arched like an angry cat. “This is totally dire.” She lunged at Tod, and instead of dodging the swooping bird, he enclosed her in a bear hug, then they both disappeared.
“Where’d they go?” Mae demanded, and I could only shrug. “Where did he take Desi?”
A second later, as a keening, panicked sound began to leak from the redhead’s throat, Tod reappeared—without Desi. “Show-off,” I said, and he actually smiled.
“I’m not done yet.”
That time he grabbed Mae, and when they disappeared, Nea screeched. I took advantage of her distraction and jerked my arm from her grasp. Three lines of blood appeared on my forearm from her claws, and several droplets landed on the mounds of junk. I swung my free fist at Troy. He took the unexpected blow on his chin, but came up swinging.
Tod reappeared alone again, and when he reached for Nea, Troy tried to come between them. I grabbed his crippled left wing and pulled as hard as I could.
Tod disappeared with a shrieking, struggling Nea, and Troy turned on me, screeching and swinging with both clawed hands. I ducked and punched him in the stomach, and when he bent over the blow, I twisted and gave his injured wing another sharp tug.
Troy screeched again, and I kicked him in the gut. He went down on his back, and something gristly popped. His wing bent at an unnatural angle—as if anything about a male harpy can be considered natural.
When Tod reappeared a second later, I took the hand he held out to me. Troy glared up at us from the floor. “I’ll find you,” he swore, spitting in anger and pain.
“Yeah. Good luck with that.” Tod squeezed my hand, and the world went fuzzy around me. An instant later, we stood in the parking lot of the reaper headquarters, on the outskirts of Dallas.
My head still rang with Troy’s screech, and the sudden dark, silent parking lot was both a shock and a letdown. “Wow, that was...fun,” I said, on the tail of a long, slow exhale. “We should do that more often.”
“Or never again.” Tod shrugged. “Never works for me.”
“You were the one taunting the lions.”
“Troy’s no lion,” he insisted. “Besides, when am I going to get another chance to study a harpy up close?” My brother smiled, but there was something in his eyes that shouldn’t have been there. Something twisting through the slow, pleasant swirls of satisfaction. It looked like...resignation. “Here.” He pulled the pendant from his pocket and set it in my palm. “Give this to Levi for me. And tell Aiden I’m sorry it took so long.”
“What? No. Give it to Levi yourself.” Fear unfurled deep in my chest. “He’s your boss.”
“Not anymore.” His words were soft, but heavy with conviction. “I’m done, Nash. I’ve drawn this out much longer than I should have, but I’m glad I did, so we could do this. For Kaylee. For her parents.”
“Tod...” My fear swelled into a bleak sense of doom, casting its shadow on my entire world at once.
“I just...I want to say thanks.” His gaze held mine. “For helping me tie it all up. Darcy’s soul. You and me. We’re good now, right? All forgiven and forgotten?” His irises swirled slowly as he watched me. Waiting for my answer, as if it might mean everything.
“We already were.”
The blues in his eyes burst into a storm of relief, like cool rain at the end of a hot day. “Good.” He pulled me into a hug and panic tightened my grip on him, as if I could physically keep him from going. “I’m sorry for everything that went wrong between us. I should have said it earlier. I’m sorry I didn’t. But now that that’s all fixed, I’m ready to move on, Nash. Like Kaylee.”
Suddenly everything was moving too fast. We were barreling toward some end I hadn’t seen coming, and I didn’t know how to stop the train.
“No!” I didn’t realize how loud my voice was until its echo rolled across the parking lot around us. “That wasn’t the point of all this,” I insisted through teeth clenched against words I wanted to shout. “I wasn’t helping you tie up loose ends so you can die. This was so you can live! So you can let her go!”
Tod frowned, and the swirling in his eyes sped up for a second, then slowed almost to a stop. “Nash, I don’t want to let her go.” His voice was heavy with finality. “I want to go with her!”
“No.” I shook my head firmly. Emphatically. “You can’t leave us. It’d kill Mom.” I looked him straight in the eye, so he could see the truth swirling in mine. “You can’t go because it would kill me.”
He shook his head, and my heart cracked open. “That’s guilt talking. Survivor’s guilt. You don’t mean it, and you don’t have to say it. Don’t ruin this for me, Nash. I’m trying to make a graceful exit.”
“You’re wrong,” I snapped. “I don’t feel as guilty as you probably think I should. I didn’t mess things up between us all on my own. You gave as good as you got, and there’ve been times I honestly wished you’d stayed dead. But that’s not true anymore. Dead, alive, or somewhere in between, you’re my brother. The only one I have. I need you. I want you in my life.” I couldn’t imagine the next three hundred years without him. “You have to let her go.”
“I can’t.” Tod sank onto the curb at the edge of the parking lot, and I sat next to him. “It’s not that easy. You have Sabine and Mom. Mom has you and Brendon. Em has her new boyfriend. Sophie and Luca have each other. But there’s nothing left here for me.”
“We’re here for you,” I insisted, resting my elbows on my knees. Anyone watching would think I was talking to myself.
“And the truth is that that makes it worse.” Raw pain echoed in his words. “Seeing you all. Watching you move on, like she doesn’t mean anything to you anymore.”
“That’s not—”
“Yes it is,” he insisted. “And maybe it should be. But it’s not like that for me, Nash. It doesn’t feel like she’s gone. It feels like she’s...late. I keep forgetting that she’s
dead. I keep thinking that after my shift, I’ll go see Kaylee, or when I get back to my room, she’ll be there waiting for me, and I’ll be able to touch her, and then everything will be better. That’s what it still feels like. Then I remember that she’s dead, and it hurts all over again, just like the day it happened.” He clutched the handful of cotton over his heart. “It’s a fresh, sharp pain, every day. It never wanes. I never adjust to her absence. I just keep expecting her, then I remember she’s gone, and she’s never coming back, and it’s like I’ve lost her all over again. Every. Single. Day.” His eyes pled with me to understand. To see his pain and tell him it was okay for him to let it all go.
To let life go.
I stared into his eyes, where the agony he’d described looked out at me from the depths of his soul. Then my hand tightened around the pendant cradled in my palm, which held parts of both of Kaylee’s parents’ souls, and suddenly I understood.
Kaylee and Tod were soul mates. When she’d died, she’d taken part of him with her and he’d kept a bit of her soul. But something must have gone wrong. Somehow, he’d never gotten that bit of his soul back when Levi took hers to be recycled. He still carried a bit of Kaylee inside him, and some small part of his soul had died with hers.
Tod would never get over losing her. Not even if he lived for a thousand years. Not ever.
I almost told him. I almost explained what I’d figured out, so he’d know he wasn’t losing his mind. But in the end, I didn’t because if he knew his pain would never end—that part of his soul had already moved on with Kaylee—he would give up his afterlife to gain peace.
I would lose him. My mom would lose him. We would all lose him.
But if he didn’t know... If he had hope, however false, then we could keep him. At least for a little while longer.
After years of wishing off and on that he would move on and accept true death, suddenly I wasn’t ready to let him go.
“Stay, Tod. We need you. All of us. Losing Kaylee was hard enough. Don’t do that to us again. Don’t do that to Em. Don’t do it to Mom. Don’t do it to me, Tod. Haven’t we all lost enough already?”
He hesitated, and I knew I’d struck the right angle. He would do for us what he wouldn’t do for himself. He and Kaylee had that in common.
“It’ll get better.” I placed the pendant back in his palm. “I’ll help. We’ll all help. And it will get better, I promise.”
Finally Tod nodded. He slid the pendant into his pocket and looked into my eyes, searching for the truth, but I kept it hidden deep, deep inside. Because I had no other choice. “Thank you.” He pulled me into another hug, and his whole body hitched with sobs as he whispered into my ear. “I knew I was doing the right thing that night. I knew you had to live. I’ve never regretted it. Not even for a single second.”
I didn’t realize I was crying with him until he let me go, and the air displaced in his wake was cold on the tear tracks trailing down my cheek.
As we walked into reaper headquarters together, a united front once again, I wondered how long it would be before the lie I’d told for all the right reasons would begin to rot my own soul.
Tod
Late that night, I dropped in on Nash at home. His home. The house he and our mother still technically shared was never mine. I’d never lived there.
I wanted to thank him. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to eat nachos and shoot video-game zombies and pretend that I wasn’t dead, and that he wasn’t grown, and that we’d never loved and lost a girl named Kaylee.
Not that I wanted to forget about her. I wanted to forget losing her, just for one night.
But when I got there, Nash had his head buried in a college textbook as thick as my forearm, his forehead wrinkled in concentration, his future as bright with possibility as the bulb shining down on the words as he read them. I watched him for a while, marveling at his attention span and at his dedication to an education so irrelevant to my existence that we seemed to be living on parallel planes.
I stayed until Sabine showed up and he abandoned his book for her arms. Seeing them together made me ache deep inside with a hunger that could not be satiated. A need that could not be fulfilled. When they cast off books, and words, and clothes, I gave them the only gift I had left to give: my absence.
I popped in on my mom and Brendon, and found them arguing good-naturedly over the menu for their wedding. Sophie and Luca were curled up in front of a movie with Emma and Chad, and the only thing worse than watching the four of them, with their popcorn, and drinks, and inside jokes I didn’t understand was seeing Aiden asleep in his armchair, all alone.
That, I understood.
When I had no one left to check on and nowhere else to be, I wound up at the cemetery. Those who actually know about reapers probably think we hang out at the cemetery all the time, but that’s not true. The entire basis of my afterlife is death, so before Kaylee died, hanging out in graveyards felt...redundant.
After her memorial, I came every day, at first. Kaylee wasn’t buried there—Levi’d said she’d asked to be cremated, and Aiden kept her ashes at home—but she had a tombstone next to her mother’s, and that felt like the best place to be close to her. To talk to her, even though I knew better than most that she couldn’t hear me. She would never hear anything, ever again.
As the months passed, I came less often, not because I came to terms with her death—I didn’t—or because the pain began to fade—it didn’t—but because it became too tempting to spend every day sitting in front of her headstone, pretending she could hear whatever I wanted to tell her.
It took effort to stop going to the cemetery. To stop visiting her memory and talking to a hunk of stone carved with her name.
Before the night of the harpies, I hadn’t been in weeks. The grass had grown since my last visit, and many of the vases were filled with flowers. I sat on the ground in front of her headstone and stared at the epitaph.
We are better for having known her.
Truer words were never carved.
“I saw Nash today.” I spoke softly, even though no one could see or hear me. “He’s doing well. They all are. I wish you could see them. They’re all grown up, and they think about things like tuition and car insurance. They’re boring now, Kay. You’re not missing much.”
Kaylee’s epitaph blurred in front of me, and when I blinked, tears rolled down my cheeks and left wet spots on my jeans.
“I saw your dad today, too.” I plucked a blade of grass and shredded it absently as I spoke. “He’s...about the same. Lonely. He misses you, and he’s still in pain, but that’s about to end. That’s what I wanted to tell you, and damn I wish you could really hear me, because this is important.”
I sniffed back more tears and swallowed the lump in my throat, then I sat up straight, trying to give the news the delivery it deserved.
“We found your mom, Kay. We found her, and we turned Thane in, and Levi’s already reclaimed his soul. He’s dead. He’s gone, Kaylee, and your mother is... Well, she’s fine. That’s what I wish I could tell you. She wasn’t tortured, and she’s not in any pain, and her soul is in good hands. Levi’s giving her peace right this very moment, and that means your dad will find peace, too. He’s going to be okay, Kaylee. He’s going to be able to move on. To let her go and find something to live for.
“I wish...” I wish I could say the same for me. But I couldn’t lay that burden on her. Even if she couldn’t really hear me. “I wish I could see you one more time. I miss your eyes. There are no blues left in the world as blue as your eyes. There’s nothing as beautiful as your smile. I wish I could touch you. Just one more time. I would give up the rest of my afterlife for the chance to hold you one more time.”
But that trade wasn’t on the table. Nash was right. Giving up my own life wouldn’t bring her back. And that wasn’t what she would have wanted.
Giving up my afterlife after she died to protect me and everyone else she loved would be like slapping Kaylee in the face. I
t would be defiling her memory. Rejecting her sacrifice.
“I’m going to live, Kaylee. As much as any reaper ever lived, anyway.” I wiped my face with both hands and pushed an errant curl from my forehead. “I owe you that, so I want you to know that I’m going to make it work. They’ll have to rip my soul from my body to get rid of me.”
Standing, I brushed grass from my jeans and laid one hand on top of her headstone. “I love you. I will love you until the sun devours the earth and takes us all to a fiery grave, and when that happens, the last word on my lips will be your name.
“Until then...I will carry on.”
* * * * *
ISBN-13: 9781460326596
SOUL SCREAMERS VOLUME FOUR
Copyright © 2014 by Harlequin Books S.A.
The publisher acknowledges the copyright holder
of the individual works as follows:
WITH ALL MY SOUL
Copyright © 2013 by Rachel Vincent
FEARLESS
Copyright © 2010 by Rachel Vincent
First published in KISS ME DEADLY by Running Press Teens
Refreshed version of FEARLESS, revised by the author
NIEDERWALD
Copyright © 2011 by Rachel Vincent
First published in ENTHRALLED by HarperCollins
Refreshed version of NIEDERWALD, revised by the author
LAST REQUEST
Copyright © 2014 by Rachel Vincent
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
Soul Screamers Volume Two Page 48
