My Soul to Keep ss-3

by Rachel Vincent

  “You!” I said as he ducked beneath the limbs into our private powwow.

  “You, too,” the boy said, in a voice I’d last heard from Emma’s mouth.

  “You know each other?” Tod’s eyes narrowed as he glanced back and forth between us. But I couldn’t tear my gaze from Avari’s proxy.

  “You’re Alec?”

  “Since the day I was born.” He shrugged, dark eyes watching me closely. “Though the name’s about all I have left from that existence.”

  “I saw you in the razor wheat on Wednesday.”

  Alec nodded. “I was looking for you, and your house seemed like a good place to start.”

  Great. A sarcastic demon proxy.

  “But I have to say you look better in formal wear than pajamas,” he continued, eyeing Sophie’s dress—and me in it—appreciatively. Suddenly I wanted a coat, to cope with more than just the cold.

  “Wait, why were you looking for her on Wednesday?” Tod asked. “Nash didn’t go missing until yesterday.”

  “Yes, but I wanted out of here two and a half decades ago, and she seemed like my best shot in years.”

  I propped both hands on my hips. As badly as I wanted to know who he was and how he’d known I could get him out, I had more important things to worry about at the moment. “I’m not taking you anywhere until you take me to Nash and my father.”

  “Are they at Prime Life?” Tod asked. The Netherworld version of Prime Life, one of the largest life insurance companies in the country, was Avari’s home base when he was in town.

  Addison shook her head in stiff, obviously painful motions. “Not that I could find. And I looked everywhere I had access.”

  “They’re in there.” Alec pointed off into the throng and I followed his finger toward the building rising over the heads of the crowd gathered in front of it. Eastlake High.

  Or the Netherworld version of it, anyway.

  “Why are they in the school?” I asked, dread clenching around my stomach with an iron grip.

  “Avari’s planning something big, and I think he wants them both nearby to boost his energy,” the proxy said, and Addison nodded.

  “He wants them near?” I repeated, glancing again at the second floor of the school, which was all I could see over the crowd. “Does that mean they’re not actually with him?”

  “They don’t have to be in the same room, no,” Alec said.

  “They just have to be close enough to draw power from.”

  I shrugged, a thin pulse of hope threading through me. “So, we can just go get them, right?”

  “In theory…” Addison started, and that was enough for me.

  “Let’s go.” Human-looking people were rare enough in the Netherworld that four of us together might be noticed, so Addy and Alec each started off on their own, one veering to the left and one to the right. Tod and I stayed together for strength in numbers, since neither of us belonged there or had any defensive abilities. We headed down the middle, hoping to avoid notice at the edge of the throng, where the crowd was least dense.

  The multitude swallowed us whole, and I let it, breathing deeply through my mouth as we walked, trying to calm my racing pulse in case any of the predators could hear it. Sophie’s skirt swished around my ankles, brushing other pieces of clothing made of rich, iridescent materials I didn’t recognize, several of which seemed to move independently of their wearers.

  A tail brushed my hand and I shivered. A soft, warm breeze caressed my face and exposed cleavage, and as it passed, I both heard and felt the words it whispered into my ears, though I couldn’t understand a bit of what was said.

  I clung to Tod’s hand as we crossed the crowded street, grateful for how very there he felt in the Netherworld, though no doubt his physical vulnerability made him feel exposed and defenseless. And finally, when we stepped past the edge of the crowd onto the sidewalk in front of the school, I exhaled. We were still alive, and we were almost there.

  “Ready?” Addison appeared at Tod’s side and took his hand, just as Alec emerged on my right.

  We both nodded. Then the double front doors of the school opened, and my gaze was drawn toward the literally dazzling figure that emerged.

  “Who’s that?” I stared at the girl, who looked completely human except that she glowed with a beautiful, intense inner light. As if she were lit from within, like a human candle, shining so brightly it hurt my eyes to look at her.

  Her eyes were dark pinpoints in a face so brilliant I couldn’t make out her actual features, and though her short, fitted dress was a pristine white, it was dull in comparison to flesh that gleamed and glittered like sunlight on the ocean. In one glowing hand, she carried a slim, dark cylinder I couldn’t identify from that distance.

  “That’s Lana. She’s one of the lampades,” Alec whispered as the girl sank onto the top step, like a school kid waiting for a ride. “She’s one of Avari’s favorite pets in decades. This whole celebration is for the lampades. About them. And Avari has two of them for the first time in living memory. Lana, and her sister, Luci. They just got here yesterday.”

  “What are they?” I asked, unable to drag my focus from the girl glowing like a living jack-o’-lantern, even though the light hurt my eyes.

  “Lampades are the only creatures I know of that exist in both worlds at once, in the exact same time and place.” Alec headed slowly away from the crowd and we followed him, the cold Netherworld wind seeming to push us along. “If you were to cross over, you’d see her sitting there in your world just like she is here. Lampades are walking liminalities. You see how Lana’s glowing like someone shoved a lightbulb up her butt?” Alec asked, and I nodded, amused by the visual in spite of the circumstances. “That’s liminal light, and it runs through her like blood runs through us. A concentration of that light can temporarily merge corresponding sections of the Netherworld and your world if she shines it at a liminal space, like a window, or a threshold.”

  Sudden brutal understanding uncoiled like a whip inside me, snapping tight around my brain. “Can someone go through that…merged space? Like a doorway?” I whispered, dreading the answer even as I asked the question.

  “Maybe…” Alec began, and I recognized comprehension as it swept over Tod, and the reaper met my gaze. “But he’d have to move fast. Shining her light is like bleeding for a lampade, and she’ll bleed to death if she’s not careful.”

  “But you said there are two of them, right?” I asked, and the proxy nodded, dark curls almost blending with the shadow of the building. “So if they worked together…”

  “…they’d only have to bleed half as much,” Alec finished, and the deep furrows in his forehead said he was starting to understand.

  “That’s how he got them,” Tod said, and I nodded. “These lampades took Nash and your dad.”

  My eyes closed in sudden cruel certainty. “And I could have stopped them.”

  “How?” Addison asked, stepping from the sidewalk onto the umber-colored grass on one side of the school’s front lawn.

  I gestured toward the steps, where Lana now sat with her hands clasped over her knees. “I think I met both of them last night. They came to Doug Fuller’s party with Everett. Nash ran them off, but they must have come back after Em and I left. After Doug died.”

  “What?” Tod’s eyes flashed in anger, and I knew exactly how he felt.

  “These lampades? I’d bet my life they were the arm candy hovering over Everett last night at the party. Only they didn’t glow then.”

  Alec rubbed one hand over his forehead, like he was fending off a headache. “They only glow here. In your world, they’d look like normal people.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, except they’re identical, and flawlessly gorgeous.” More than enough to give a regular girl an inferiority complex, without adding evil to the mix. “I’m going to cross over and make sure I’m right.”

  “Want me to come with you?” Tod asked, but I shook my head.

  “Stay here with them.�
�� I knew he didn’t want to leave Addy, and I needed him to keep an eye on Alec, whom I had no intention of bringing with me until we found Nash and my father. “I’ll be right back.”

  I rounded the corner of the building quickly to cross over without being seen in either world, and my silent scream came fairly easily that time, which scared me almost as much as the necessity of using it. I faded into my own world near the back corner of the parking lot, then hugged the wall of the building all the way to the front of the school, to keep from being seen. Sophie’s satin gown whispered against the rough bricks, and twice I had to tug the material free when it snagged. My cousin was going to kill me.

  Assuming I survived long enough to be murdered.

  At the edge of the building, I peeked around the corner to see Lana—definitely one of the girls I’d seen with Everett—sitting on the front step, exactly where she’d been in the Netherworld. Only now she held an ornately decorated metal flashlight. It was unlit—for the moment.

  I crossed back over and rejoined the group without bothering to lift the hem of Sophie’s skirt when I walked. “It’s her,” I said, shivering from the cold. “The lampades are the girls from the party.”

  “What are they doing here?” Addison asked as the front door of the school opened and Luci joined her sister on the top step, holding an identical unlit flashlight. “Waiting to be celebrated?”

  “They’re obviously waiting for something,” I said, and no sooner had the last word fallen from my lips than the girls twisted in unison to glance at the sky to the east of the school, where the sun was just starting to sink below the horizon, a mirror image to the sunset in the human world, but for the bruised green-and-purple of the Netherworld sky.

  “Uh-oh…” A heavy new dread anchored my sneakered feet to the sidewalk.

  “What?” Tod asked, but my gaze found Alec—the man with the answers.

  “What effect would other liminalities have on this doorway a lampade can create? Big liminalities. Like, once-a-year events.” Such as the winter solstice.

  Alec’s eyes closed in alarm as the reaper tensed visibly. “They would amplify the power of the liminal light.”

  “And would that make this doorway any bigger? Or hold it open any longer?”

  The proxy nodded, because words were no longer necessary. We finally understood the purpose of Avari’s Liminal Celebration. “He’s using the solstice to bridge the gap, when the veil between the two worlds is thinnest,” I whispered, terror rendering my voice a hoarse echo of itself.

  Even as I spoke, the lampade sisters stood and took up positions on either side of the double front doors, facing each other. And that’s when the last piece of the puzzle fell into place. “Crap!” I whispered fiercely, grabbing Addison’s scarred hand without thinking. “They’re about to start.”

  “Start what?” she asked, pulling her blistered hand firmly out of my grip.

  “Don’t you get it? Avari’s planned the whole thing out! The school, a carnival full of high schoolers, the solstice…Dusk is a liminal time, the lampades are liminal creatures, the front door is a liminal place, and teenagers are at a liminal age in life. Lana and Luci will shine their light across the threshold at dusk. And when the carnival opens, instead of heading into the front hall, a couple of hundred teenagers will cross directly into the Netherworld, like lambs to the slaughter.”

  25

  MY HEAD THROBBED in time with the stitched gash on my right arm, and my heart ached like never before. Of all the trouble I’d walked into since finding out I was a bean sidhe, nothing compared to this. To the abduction of a couple hundred teenagers right through the front door of our own school. Disappearances the human authorities would never be able to understand, much less solve.

  And we were the only ones who could stop it.

  “If he’s planning some kind of forced migration, why bother bringing Nash and your dad over?” Addison asked as Tod guided us subtly toward the right edge of the crowd. Suddenly, standing directly in front of the lampades didn’t seem like such a good idea.

  “For more power.” Alec rubbed his arms, fighting chills from the bitterly cold breeze. “I thought he was just being greedy, which makes sense, and is probably half-true. But he needs every bit of power he can get—as well as what he’d hoped to get from Kaylee. He’ll have to pour energy into Lana and Luci to keep them alive while they hold the doorway open.”

  “Would Nash and my dad survive that?” I asked, rubbing my own chill bump–covered arms.

  “No. And neither will they.” Alec nodded toward the lampades. “Though I doubt they know that.”

  “So, how do we stop it?” I asked. “Take away their flashlights?”

  Alec shook his head. “The flashlights are just focal points—decoys to fool the humans. The lampades shed their own light, and you can’t extinguish it without killing them.”

  Which I wasn’t ready to do yet, no matter how much of a threat to humanity they represented. Because despite everything they’d done, Lana and Luci were being used by Avari just like Nash and my father were, and death seemed like an unfair penalty for that. Especially considering they’d probably die, anyway, if Avari got what he wanted.

  “What if we take the girls?” I asked, still looking for an alternative to murder.

  “Take them where?” Tod ground his teeth in frustration, his fingers linked through those on Addy’s good hand. “It’s not like you can just cross over with them. They’re in both places at once.”

  “Can’t we just…chase them away from the doorway? And maybe separate them?” I propped both hands on the waist of Sophie’s gown, wishing I weren’t dressed like a china doll during what might turn out to be the last moments of my life. “If they’re not together—and at the threshold—they won’t be able to open this door, right?”

  “Well, not the big door Avari’s counting on,” Alec agreed.

  “So that might work, at least long enough to get Nash and your dad out of here. Which will rob Avari of the power he needs to make this work.”

  “If we’re gonna do it, we better do it now,” Tod whispered as the buzz of the crowd around us faded into an eerie quiet. Almost as one, the audience turned toward the school doors, clearly readying themselves for the main attraction—a building full of food, ready to be harvested. “Because we’re about to lose our chance.”

  We turned, too, to avoid standing out, as badly as it nauseated me to be standing among the wolves, waiting for the sheep to be slaughtered. Or eaten. Or slurped up. Or whatever.

  “We should do this from our world,” I said, so softly I could barely hear myself. “To keep Avari from interfering.”

  “I’m on it.” Tod squeezed Addy’s good hand again, then met my gaze, speaking softly through one corner of his mouth. “I’m gonna grab one of the walking Lite-Brites, then I’ll be back to help with Nash and your dad. Will you be okay here?”

  I nodded, careful not to let my uncertainty show. “Yeah. I’m good. But work fast.”

  An instant later, Tod was gone.

  A moment after that, one of the lampades let out a piercing scream, and Lana was suddenly pulled off her feet by…nothing we could see. The effect was bizarre, and reminded me of a scene in an old slasher movie, where a teenager stuck in a nightmare is hauled up her bedroom wall by an invisible evil force.

  Lana fell backward, smashing the front door open, then disappeared from sight.

  The crowd around us roared in surprise and outrage, shouts varying from high-pitched squeals to rumbles low enough to reverberate deep within my bones. There were even several protests I seemed to hear in my head, rather than through my ears.

  A minute later, as several dozen representatives from the mob raced toward the stunned and abandoned Luci, Tod reappeared at my side, wearing the biggest Cheshire cat grin I’d ever seen outside of Alice in Wonderland.

  And what a bizarre wonderland we’d fallen into…

  “Where is she?” I stood on my toes to yell into his
ear as the shouts around us reached a brain-numbing crescendo.

  “In the utility closet by the art room. I had to knock her out, but that should hold her for a while. Let’s find Nash and your dad, then get the hell out of here before Avari puts Humpty Dumpty back together again.” Then his gaze met Addison’s and regret took over his face. He took her hand as if to apologize for leaving her, but she only smiled and shook her head.

  “Go find your brother. We knew this would end sooner or later, and I’m grateful for the time we had. The time you gave me.”

  Tod nodded, then squeezed her hand and turned to follow me and Alec as we raced toward the other side of the school, hidden in plain sight among the outraged crowd. Alec was fast, and as the proxy’s head disappeared into the crowd ahead of me, my foot came down on something thick and lumpy. I lost my balance when whatever I’d stepped on was jerked out from under me, and a horrific, bleating roar trumpeted over my head. My right foot snagged in the hem of Sophie’s dress and one hand went automatically to my ear to protect my hearing, while the other flew out in front of me to keep my face from hitting the asphalt.

  But before my palm could hit the ground, someone hauled me to my feet, tearing the dress with a dull thread-popping sound. Tod pulled me back, pressing me into his own chest as the creature on our right drew himself up to a terrifying height. Gray, leathery wings beat at his back, stirring the heavy skirt of Sophie’s dress as his tail—which I’d obviously stepped on—whipped around his legs to lash my ankles.

  “I’m so sorry!” I cried as Tod backed us swiftly away from the beast whose grayish cheekbones were literally sharp enough to slice the flesh from his face. The creature roared again and knelt like a bull about to charge. But then his massive right wing clipped the shoulder of the hairy fellow at his back, and both Netherworlders exploded into sudden violence like two giant cats with claws bared.

  Tod and I raced away, thrilled to realize we didn’t represent a big enough threat to keep the beast’s attention.

  Ahead, Alec’s brown curls bobbed through the crowd, and we followed him, Tod occasionally pulling me out of the path of another stampeding monster. We didn’t stop to catch our breath until we rounded the corner of the building. The empty span of gray grass—representing the quad in my version of the school—was still unoccupied and relatively peaceful, at least until the Netherworld residents discovered that the building had more than one entrance.