My Soul to Steal (17 page)

But when I pulled open the fridge, a familiar, disembodied voice spoke to me from the other side of the door. “It’s not the pizza,” Tod said, and I slammed the door shut without grabbing the cans. But the kitchen was completely empty.

“Where are you?” I demanded in a whisper, as the front door creaked open from the living room. “And how do you know it’s not the delivery guy?”

Tod suddenly appeared between me and his mom’s small kitchen table, wearing a royal blue polo with a stylized pizza—missing one slice—embroidered on the left side of his chest. “Because I have your pizza right here, and I didn’t drive.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. An undead reaper was one thing. But an undead pizza delivery driver? The jokes wouldn’t stop coming.

“It’s not funny!” Tod snapped. “This was your idea.”

“I was joking!” I hissed, opening the fridge again.

“Well, I wasn’t. Being dead doesn’t have to mean mooching off all my friends, right?” he said, and I shrugged, pulling two cold cans from the top shelf. “Plus, you were right about the free pizza.”

I couldn’t resist another grin. “So…is there a family discount?”

“Hell, no. Nash is paying full price. Plus tip.”

Before I could reply, hushed voices from the living room caught my attention. “Who’s that?” I demanded, setting the sodas on the table. I headed for the swinging door, but Tod grabbed my arm before I’d made it two steps.

“It’s her, isn’t it? That’s Sabine’s car? You saw her?”

He nodded reluctantly, brushing a curl from his forehead. I
started forward again, and again he pulled me back. “Let go. What, you’re on her side now?”

“I’m just trying to keep this from going bad, fast.”

“Shh…” I said, when I realized I could make out words from the other room.

“Kaylee’s here?” Sabine said, obviously refusing to be shushed by Nash. And it’s not like she didn’t know I was there—my car was in the driveway! “I thought it was just going to be us.”

“I didn’t think she’d come. Bina,
please
go before she hears you.”

I couldn’t hear what came next, so I snuck closer to the door. Tod clenched his jaw, but let me go.

“Sabine, no! I’ll make it up to you, but you have to go n—”

Then there was no more talking from either of them, and my blood boiled.

I shoved open the swinging kitchen door and froze with my foot holding it open, unable to truly process what I saw. Sabine Campbell had her shirt off, and she’d latched onto Nash like the parasite she really was. She had him pressed against his own front door, her tongue surely halfway down his throat. But the worst part…

He held her shirt, dangling from one fist—and he was kissing her back.

I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even form a coherent thought until Tod cleared his throat at my back, and Sabine reluctantly peeled herself off my boyfriend.

Nash’s face flamed, but Sabine only grinned. “Hey, Kay. Sorry I’m late to the party, but the more the merrier, right?”

“You two look merry enough without me,” I snapped
through clenched teeth. Then I stepped forward and let the kitchen door swing through Tod, who barely seemed to notice.

“Kaylee, wait…” Nash pushed Sabine away from him. “I didn’t… She…”

“I know. She was all over you like a tick on blood.” But I also knew that he hadn’t pushed her away. He may not have started it, but he’d let it happen, and I couldn’t help wondering, if I hadn’t been there, how much farther he would have let it go.

I glanced pointedly at the shirt he still held in one hand, and his cheeks flushed nearly scarlet.

Nash whirled on Sabine and shoved the shirt at her and she took it, reluctantly covering herself. Then he pulled open the front door, grabbed her arm, and shoved her onto the porch, still clutching the material to her chest. “Don’t come back,” he growled, an instant before slamming the door in her face.

“Kaylee…” He turned to face me, leaning against the door.

“You didn’t stop her.”

“I was about to…”

“Yeah. You can tell from how far down her throat your tongue was…” Tod said, sarcasm threaded boldly through each word.

Nash turned on him. “This is none of your business. What are you even doing here?”

“You owe me $15.99. Plus tip.”

Nash looked confused until he noticed Tod’s uniform. “I’ll owe you,” he finally snapped. “Get out.”

“I’m going, too.” I headed for the door as Sabine’s car started in the driveway.

“Kaylee, wait.”

“Where’s her bra?” I asked, my hand already on the doorknob.

Nash closed his eyes and exhaled slowly, miserably. “She wasn’t wearing one.”

“K
AYLEE
!”

Someone grabbed my shoulder and my head flopped forward as he shook me.

My eyes flew open. Alec stood over me, his hair rendered even darker by the halo of light shining around his skull from the fixture overhead. His brown eyes were wide and worried, his generous lips thinned into a tight frown.

“What?” I wasn’t even dreaming, much less having a nightmare. In fact, he’d interrupted the first almost-peaceful sleep I could remember getting in the past few days.

And even as that thought faded, I realized the problem—I was supposed to be watching him, not dozing. I’d insisted that he take the first shift sleeping under the assumption that my dad would get back from my uncle’s house—where they were conferring about the sudden spike in the teacher mortality rate at Eastlake—while Alec was still asleep. That way I could explain about Avari’s murder-by-proxy without having to break my promise to Alec to his face.

Obviously I’d underestimated my own exhaustion.

“Sorry.” I sat up and wiped an embarrassing dribble from the corner of my mouth. “Is my dad home yet?”

“No,” Alec said, and I glanced at my alarm clock in surprise. It was just after midnight. “Kaylee, this isn’t going to work.” He sank onto the edge of my rumpled bedspread, broad shoulders sagging in frustration and obvious fatigue. “How are we supposed to watch each other if neither of us can stay awake?”

“I’m fine,” I insisted, standing to stretch. “I just need some coffee.”

“If you guzzle caffeine, you won’t be able to sleep when it’s your turn, either, and that’ll just make everything worse.” Alec hesitated, and I read dread clearly in his expression. “You’re gonna have to tie me up.”

“What? No.” I sat on the edge of my desk and pushed tangled hair back from my face, hoping I’d heard him wrong. “I’m not going to tie you up, or down, or any other direction!”

“Kay, I don’t think we have any choice. Avari’s just waiting for a chance to get back into my head, and how happy do you think Sabine’s going to be with you, after her little stunt tonight failed?”

I’d given him the short version of my visit with Nash, skipping my promise to fill my dad in on everything.

“If either of us falls asleep at the wrong time, things are going to get a whole lot worse.”

My tired brain whirred, trying to come up with a viable alternative, but in the end, I was too worn out to think clearly, much less argue. Survival and a good night’s sleep trumped my deep-seated aversion to restraints—born of my week-long stay in the mental health ward—so I finally relented and trudged into the garage for the coil of nylon rope looped over a long nail on the wall.

In my room again, I turned my stereo on and cranked the volume, hoping the noise would keep me awake. Then Alec helped me cut the rope into workable sections and showed me how to tie a proper knot. Evidently he’d had practice restraining…things…for Avari in the Netherworld.

I bet the hellion never thought that particular skill could be used against him, and that thought made me smile, in spite of encroaching exhaustion, and the disturbing reality of what I was about to do.

The plan was for me to tie Alec to the chair in one corner of my room—the one I’d woken up in—but the back was one solid, padded, curved piece of wood, with nothing to tie his hands to. The desk chair was no better, and since I wasn’t willing to tie him up in the living room, where my dad would see him before I’d had a chance to explain, our only other option was my bed.

I cannot begin to describe my mortification—or the flames burning beneath every square inch of my skin—when I knelt at the head of my bed to secure Alec’s right arm to my headboard. “It’s okay, Kaylee,” he insisted, head craned so he could watch me while he voluntarily submitted to something that would have sent me into a blind panic. “This’ll keep us both safe.”

“I know.” But I didn’t like it, and my revulsion didn’t fade when I tied his other hand, or bound his first foot to the metal frame beneath the end of my mattress. I had trouble with the final knot, but had almost secured his right ankle when a sudden hair-prickling feeling and a subtle shift in the light told me that someone was behind me.

“What in the hell are you doing?” my father demanded, his voice low and dark.

I whirled around so fast I fell onto one knee, and the end
of the rope trailed through my fingers to hang slack. My dad stood in my doorway, his irises swirling furiously in some perilous combination of anger and bewilderment.

The music had covered his footsteps, and evidently the sound of his car.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” Alec mumbled at my back, and my father’s harsh laugh sounded more like an angry bark.

“Considering your current predicament, I’m betting that’s the first smart thing you’ve said all night!”

“This isn’t what it looks like.” I frowned and shoved myself to my feet, then glanced back at Alec, who could only stare at me in humiliation. “Actually, I’m not sure what it looks like,” I admitted, turning back to my father. “It’s to keep us both safe…” I ended lamely, wishing I could just melt into my bedroom carpet and disappear.

“Safe from what?” my father demanded softly.

“From…” I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, then met his stare again and started over. “I was gonna tell you everything when you got home. Nash made me promise.”

Behind me, Alec shifted on the bed—as best he could, with three limbs bound to it—and I could practically taste his anxiety.

“What does Nash have to do with you tying Alec to your bed?” But honestly, he looked like he didn’t really want to know the answer to that.

I perched on the corner of my desk and turned off my stereo. “I’m assuming you want the short version….”

“That would be good.”

So I sucked in another deep breath, then spat the whole thing out. “Avari’s been possessing Alec and killing my teachers—we have no idea why he picked teachers—so we’ve
been sleeping in shifts for the past couple of nights, to stop it from happening again. But now I’m so tired that I can’t stay awake—” no need to tell him about Sabine just yet, since she wasn’t immediately relevant to the hellion or the dead teachers “—so Alec thought I should tie him up, in case I fall asleep and Avari gets back into his body. You know, to keep everybody safe.” I shrugged miserably, then watched my father, waiting for the fireworks.

“I don’t even know where to start,” he said. But he got over that pretty quickly. “Avari’s the one killing teachers?” he said, and I nodded. “And he’s using Alec to do it?” Another nod from me. “And you’ve known this for two days without telling me?”

“I was afraid you’d kick him out. And even if it were okay to do that to a friend—and it’s not—if you kick him out, there won’t be anyone around to make sure Avari can’t use him as a murder weapon again,” I finished, proud of my own coherence, considering how incredibly tired I was.

For several moments, my father stood mute, obviously thinking. Then his focus shifted from me to Alec. “Those teachers died without a mark on them,” he said, and I could see in the angry, frustrated line of his jaw that he’d come to the right conclusion, with far fewer clues than I’d needed. “What are you?”

“I’m half hypnos.” Alec met my father’s gaze unflinchingly—his species wasn’t his fault, after all—but looked genuinely sorry for the danger he’d involuntarily exposed us all to.

“Please tell me your other half is human,” my father said, and Alec and I both nodded.

My dad sighed and pulled a folding knife from his back pocket. “Well, Kaylee, you’re right about one thing—we can’t
leave him on his own. Not unless we want the next blood spilled to fall on our hands.”

My relief was almost as strong as my confusion when he strode forward purposefully and cut Alec’s left ankle free.

“Mr. Cavanaugh, it’s not safe to let me sleep free,” Alec insisted, as my father rounded toward the head of the bed.

“Which is precisely why you won’t be sleeping in my daughter’s room.” He slashed the rope around Alec’s left arm, then leaned over him to repeat the process with the remaining knot. “Ever.”

A few minutes later, we all stood in the living room, my father unwinding a new rope he’d produced from a pile of not-yet-unpacked cardboard boxes in the garage. Alec sank into my dad’s recliner and positioned a pillow beneath his head, then my father tied his feet to the metal frame of the foldout ottoman. While I spread a blanket over our poor houseguest, my dad pulled Alec’s arms toward the back of the recliner, where he tied his wrists to each other, linked by a taut length of nylon spanning the back of the chair.

But even with this new precaution and my dad’s much sturdier knot work, he wasn’t willing to let Alec sleep alone, just in case. So when I finally headed to bed at almost one in the morning, my father was settling onto the couch with his pillow and a throw blanket, determined to protect us all from the most recent Netherworld threat. Even in his sleep.

“H
E KICKED HER OUT
topless?” Emma shoved her spoon into the pint of Phish Food and dug out a chocolate fish, her brown eyes shining in the light pouring in through the kitchen window. After a long, mostly sleepless night, Saturday morning had dawned bright and clear, in blatant disrespect of my foul mood.

Fortunately, Emma had come bearing ice cream. Two reserve pints sat in the freezer.

I nodded, letting my bite melt in my mouth. Chocolate may not cure everything, but it goes down a lot better than any other medicine I’ve ever tasted.

The front door opened before I could respond, and Alec walked in, carrying a newspaper under one arm, nose dripping from the cold. He closed the door, then noticed us in the kitchen.

Before he could speak, I pointed the business end of my spoon at him and said, “Where were you? You weren’t on the schedule today.” He’d been gone when I woke up, both the ropes and bedding stowed somewhere out of sight.

Alec dropped the newspaper on the kitchen counter. “Apartment shopping.”

My eyes narrowed. “I thought you didn’t have the money yet.”

“I don’t. But I will soon, thanks to the new job.” And I had a feeling that after the big revelation, my father had suggested Alec move forward with his plans for financial and residential independence.

Still…
I wasn’t taking any chances after meeting Avari at the theater. “Just humor me. What color was my first bicycle?”

“White, with red ribbons,” he replied, without hesitation.

“What’s with the twenty questions?” Em asked, scraping the inside edge of the carton with her spoon.

I shoved another bite in my mouth, buying time to think. But Alec was faster. “It’s this stupid trivia game.” He winked at me. “I’m winning.”

“Oh, I wanna play!” Em said, sitting straighter. “What was the name of my first bra?”

I nearly choked on my bite. “You named your first bra?”

She frowned. “You didn’t?” When I could only laugh, she turned to Alec. “You gonna guess?”

He hesitated, pretending to think. “I gotta go with Helga.”

She threw the ice cream lid at him. Alec laughed, then dropped it into the trash. “One carton of Ben & Jerry’s, two girls, two spoons. I’m guessing this is about Nash?”

Emma nodded, watching as Alec took off his jacket and draped it over the half wall between the kitchen and the entry. She’d made no secret of the fact that she thought he was hot, and I couldn’t exactly tell her he was nearly three times her age.

Alec raised one brow and grinned. “Isn’t the ice cream therapy thing kinda cliché?”

I shook my head. “It’s a classic for a reason.”

“And that reason is ’cause we’re underage,” Em insisted. “If I could’ve gotten my hands on anything stronger last night, we’d be recovering from strawberry daiquiri therapy this very moment.”

He laughed, heading for the silverware drawer. “So, is this girl-only ice cream, or can a sympathetic guy get a bite?”

Emma leaned over the table much farther than she had to for her next bite, to be sure he could see down her shirt. “What’s mine is yours.”

I kicked her under the table, as Alec dug in the fridge for a soda. He was older than her mother! And he was currently being used as the murder weapon for a Netherworld demon. Not that she knew any of that.

One more point in favor of full disclosure. I was probably going to have to tell Emma soon….

“What?” Em pouted, then licked ice cream from her spoon with it inverted over her tongue.

“That’s
all
you’re gonna share with him,” I whispered

She stuck her tongue out at me, then took another bite.

“What were you doing at Nash’s, anyway?” Alec asked, taking the chair on my other side. I think Emma scared him. Thank goodness.

“Makin’ up.”

Em grinned. “More like makin’ out.”

“Not that it matters now.”

“Why?” Alec dug in, his small spoon dwarfed by both of ours. Obviously an ice cream drama rookie. “If
she
kissed
him,
what’s the problem?”

I stared at him like he’d just volunteered for a lobotomy. “He kissed her back. I saw it. He didn’t push her away. He let her take her shirt off and stick her tongue down his throat.”

Alec licked his spoon, then set it on the table and popped his drink open. “Okay, I may be breaking some kind of girl-bonding rule or something, but can I offer you a guy’s perspective on this?”

I frowned, my spoon halfway to my mouth. “Is this gonna make me want to hit you?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. But it’s the truth. Here goes: kissing back is instinct. Unless the girl smells like a sewer or has tentacles feeling you up independently, a guy’s first instinct is to kiss back. That’s how it works. What’s important is how long that kissing back lasted. So…how long?”

“You can’t be serious.” I could feel my temper building like the first spark in what could soon be a roaring blaze. “You think it’s
okay
for him to kiss her back just because she isn’t hideous? Aesthetically speaking.” I was no suffragette, but I
was pretty sure the he-can’t-control-himself defense was a big, stinky load of horseshit.