Before I Wake (17 page)

My hands were shaking again, and my heart was pounding like it
hadn’t since the night I died. “You’re not coming with me?”

Madeline shook her head. “Since you’re new, under normal
circumstances, I’d go to observe and help out where I can. However, I have a
meeting with the head of my old district in five minutes, wherein I plan to beg
for some emergency manpower.”

I nodded slowly, and a cold numbness blossomed in my stomach,
then began to spread.
On my own.
I was going to be
on my own. If I died, there’d be no witness to tell my friends and family what
happened to me.

“Kaylee, listen to me,” Madeline said, and I forced my eyes to
bring her back into focus. “If this goes badly, run. We need the thief, but we
need you worse. Do you understand?”

“Yeah.” Tod had said the same thing the night before. I turned
to Luca and could hardly hear the words coming from my own mouth. “Where am I
going?”

“Second floor of the mall. East end.” He shrugged, and I was
relieved to realize he looked as stunned by all of this as I was. “That’s where
the body is, anyway, though someone may have found it by now.”

I nodded. Then I concentrated on the mall and blinked out of
the quad before I could lose my nerve.

Three miles was too far for me to go in one shot, at least
without more practice, so I had to stop twice on the way, but I still arrived at
the east end of the mall just seconds after I’d left school.

The mall was pretty quiet in the middle of a weekday, when most
people were still at work and school, but the indoor playground was crowded with
toddlers and their mothers, the gossip and giggles floating up to me from the
floor below. Two elderly ladies race-walked past without seeing me, their arms
pumping, sneakers squeaking on the floor. Other than that, I saw only a handful
of shoppers carrying bags, most of them women in their thirties, and the
occasional man in a suit, who’d stopped at the mall for lunch.

None of them looked like a murderer, which forced me to admit
that I had no idea what a murderer looked like. The police had thought Nash
looked like a killer, but he was innocent. Tod killed people for a living—only
those whose time was up—and no one would ever know, just from looking at him. If
they could’ve seen him. Mr. Beck could have been a movie star, but he was guilty
as hell. And if we were being really nitpicky about the definition, I was a
killer, too.

So the only thing I could be certain of as I scanned the faces
around me, glad I was incorporeal so no one could see me clutching the
heart-shaped amphora hanging from a chain around my neck, was that no one had
found the body yet. There wasn’t a security guard or an EMT in sight.

As I walked, heading toward the department store at the very
end of the mall, I let a thin ribbon of my
bean
sidhe
wail leak from my lips, satisfied that no one else could hear
it when a Sears employee walked right past me with a large fountain drink in
hand. Any disembodied soul should have been pulled toward the sound, and I, in
return, should have been pulled toward the soul. But I felt nothing.

Was I too late? Had the thief already taken his stolen soul and
fled?

Frustrated, I stopped at the end of the mall, in front of the
cornerstone department store, and crossed both arms over my chest, scanning the
few shoppers for something—anything—that stood out. I was just about to admit
defeat and return to Madeline empty-handed—secretly relieved at not having found
the monster that would most likely have stolen my soul and ended my
afterlife—when someone stepped out of the back hall that housed restrooms,
storage, and the mall’s security office.

My gaze probably wouldn’t have snagged on the girl for very
long, if hers hadn’t already snagged on me. She shouldn’t have been able to see
me, yet she was looking right at me. And she looked familiar. Eerily, thoroughly
familiar—every single part of her, including her short, sparkly dress, sequined
sandals, and her long, reddish blond hair.

Familiarity bled into recognition, and chills shot through me,
settling into my fingers and toes, reverberating the length of my spine. I’d
never actually met her, and I’d only seen her once, but I would have recognized
her anytime, anywhere, even if she weren’t still wearing the clothes she’d had
on the night I saw her. The night I predicted her death. The night she died on
the floor of the bathroom at Taboo, the eighteen-and-over dance club where
Emma’s sister worked.

Heidi Anderson. Her death was the very first prediction I’d
ever been able to verify, and that led to my discovery of my
bean sidhe
heritage, which threw me and Nash together
as a couple and brought my father home from Ireland. Heidi’s death had changed
my life and set into motion the events that had led to my death. Which was how I
knew for a fact that I couldn’t
possibly
be seeing
what I was seeing.

Heidi was dead, yet there she stood. Then she started walking.
Toward me. She could clearly see me, even though I was
sure
I’d done the invisibility thing right this time.

I backed up, eyes wide, still clenching the heart around my
neck, and still she came, smiling that creepy dead-girl smile, long hair
swishing behind her with every step. I retreated until my spine hit the wall and
there was nowhere left to go unless I blinked out of the mall. But I couldn’t do
that. Someone was dead, and a soul had been stolen, and Heidi’s presence
couldn’t be a coincidence.

Was she a ghost? Was there any such thing? I made a mental note
to ask Tod or Luca when this was over and I wasn’t staring into the eyes of a
dead girl. It takes one to know one, right? So was she like me? Was she undead?
If so, where had she been for the past seven months? She wasn’t a reaper. Not a
local one, anyway—Tod would have told me if she were. And she
definitely
didn’t work for reclamation.

“Kaylee, right?” Heidi said, and her voice wasn’t familiar,
because I’d never heard her speak. “We almost met once. Do you remember?”

I nodded, my insides cold from shock, my hands shaking at my
sides.

“Oh, you’re trembling!” Her smile brightened, but her gaze was
cold. “Is that fear or guilt?”

It was actually confusion and terror, but admitting that seemed
unwise, so I started with something more basic. “Are you real?”

“As real as you are.” She reached for my right hand, then held
it in both of hers. Her hands were warm around mine, and undeniably solid.

“How…?” She was dead. I
knew
she
was dead. Was she the corpse Luca had sensed? If so, what was she doing here?
Was this a trap?

I couldn’t make sense out of all the possibilities, and I
couldn’t make sense out of her.

“You’re asking the wrong question. How doesn’t matter,” Heidi
said, and she laughed when I pulled my hand from her warm grasp. “What should
matter to you is
why.
Ask me why.”

I blinked, but no words came out. I was drowning in shock and
horror, followed closely by a devastating confusion.

“Okay, I’ll say your lines, but just this once.” Heidi cleared
her throat and closed her eyes, and when they opened again, she frowned at me in
a mask of bewilderment obviously meant to mimic my own. “Why are you here,
Heidi, when we both know you died months ago?” she said in a falsetto that
sounded nothing like me.

“I’m so glad you asked,” she continued in her normal voice.
“I’m here because of you, Kaylee. Also, not coincidentally, I’m dead because of
you. I wasn’t supposed to die, and you failed to save me, just like you failed
to save all those other girls. Just like you failed to save the woman propped up
on a toilet in the bathroom. I left the stall open. Someone will find her soon,
and they may never know her death was your fault, but I’ll know it. And
you’ll
know.”

I was breathing too fast, and I wasn’t even sure how that was
possible, but I couldn’t make it stop. Luca had only sensed one corpse, and if
there was a dead woman in the bathroom, she
had
to
be what he’d felt. Which meant Heidi wasn’t dead.

How could she not be dead?

“You can’t hyperventilate anymore, but I appreciate the drama.
Very angsty. But even if you could pass out, this would all be here waiting for
you when you wake up. Me. The woman in the bathroom—a random, innocent soul,
plucked in its prime. And she’s only the start. Every life I take will be on
your shoulders. You couldn’t stop it then, and you can’t stop it now. All you
can do is squeeze your eyes shut and scream for their souls. Isn’t that right,
little
bean sidhe?
”

I don’t know if it was the way she called me a “little
bean sidhe
” or the way her gaze narrowed on me, her
mouth open slightly, like she could taste my fear on the air. Either way, in
that moment, I realized I wasn’t talking to Heidi Anderson.

I never had been.

“Avari,” I whispered. “You’re the soul thief?”

Heidi threw her head back and laughed. She sounded like a girl,
but that look in her eyes, that brutal mirth in response to my pain—that was all
hellion. “That shall be my new epithet,” he said, abandoning the borrowed
teen-speech pattern altogether. “Avari, thief of souls. I like it. Although,
‘devourer’ has more of a menacing undertone. But we can work on the details
later.”

I blinked, resisting the urge to shake my head in denial. This
made no sense. But then, neither did my existence.

“What is this? First Scott and now Heidi? How are you
possessing dead bodies?” I demanded, trying to find even one connection between
the jumble of mismatched puzzle pieces in my head.

Had he taken Scott’s corpse, then returned it to the morgue?
Why didn’t Luca sense Heidi as a walking corpse? And how could Heidi possibly
look exactly as I remembered her, seven months after she’d died? How was she
still dressed the same?

“You haven’t figured it out yet,” the Heidi-thing taunted. She
put one hand on my shoulder and circled me slowly, trailing her hand across my
back, then down my arm, and I could only shudder in revulsion. “The dead can’t
be possessed, and even if they could, the real Heidi Anderson would not be fit
for public viewing. She has long since started to decompose.”

“Then what is this? How are you here?” Was this some kind of
illusion? Was I dreaming? Sabine could design one hell of a nightmare, but she
couldn’t manipulate the fears of the dead, so this couldn’t be her work.

“I’ve learned a new trick. And I have a new toy.” Avari spread
his borrowed arms and turned Heidi slowly, for my appraisal. “Isn’t she
pretty?”

“She’s not a toy.”

“You’re right. She’s more like a pawn, and pawns exist to be
sacrificed. Fortunately, your world is full of pawns.” Avari waved one arm at
the shoppers ambling from store to store, but the gesture had greater meaning.
Greater horror. His chessboard wasn’t the mall; it was the world.
My
world. “And I will use as many of them as it
takes.”

“They’re not pawns, they’re people,” I said through gritted
teeth.

“And you want to save them?” he asked. I didn’t bother to
answer. “You can’t save them all, Ms. Cavanaugh. Even in your new state of
being, you don’t have that kind of power. But you can save one. I will gladly
accept your soul in exchange for the one I now carry—the woman in the
restroom.”

The dead woman was bait, chosen at random, to bring me to
Avari. But why? “You want to trade my soul for hers?”

“Precisely.” The Heidi-thing leaned forward until her cheek
brushed mine, and my heart stuttered to a stop. “I’ll tell you a secret,” she
whispered into my ear, and I wondered what the shoppers would see, if one
glanced at her then. Could they see her, and her malicious invasion of my
personal space? Because they couldn’t see me. “I don’t think your noble streak
runs that deep. I don’t think you’re willing to save a stranger’s soul at the
expense of your own. Am I wrong?” She stepped back to look into my eyes, and
hers were alight with vicious pleasure at my pain. “Will you suffer eternal
torment in exchange for her peace?”

My chest tightened painfully. “You say that like it’s the only
option, but we both know there’s another way.” My hand curled around the amphora
hanging from my neck and I clutched it, wondering how my predecessors had met
their true end. Had their souls been stolen? Were they now suffering in the
Netherworld?

“Ah, the inevitable plan B.” Avari glanced at my fist, closed
around the gold heart, and shook Heidi’s head slowly. “Like those who came
before you, you are ill-equipped for the job. This isn’t as simple as taking a
soul from a reaper. You’re going to need something more like this.”

The Heidi-thing held her hand between us. Lying across her palm
was a very familiar double-bladed dagger. I gasped, so shocked it didn’t occur
to me to run, and I only survived the next few seconds because Avari made no
move to kill me.

I’d never carried a weapon before, and I’d only used one once.
The night I killed my math teacher in self-defense. I knew that dagger by
heart—after I was resurrected, it sat on my dresser for more than a month. Had
he taken it from my room? When had he been in my room?

Chills ran the length of my spine and settled into my bones.
“This is mine,” I whispered in shock.

The hellion in Heidi’s body looked distinctly amused. “That
depends on how you define the concept of ownership.”

“I killed the incubus who killed me with this,” I insisted.
“That makes it mine.”

The hellion’s manicured eyebrows rose. “I wrenched the metal
from the ground and shaped it with my own hands, several of your human centuries
ago, and it has been wielded by many other hands for many purposes since. But it
always finds its way back to me eventually. Had I known yours was the soul that
incubus intended to capture, I would never have sold him the blade.”