My Soul to Steal (21 page)

We followed the crowd toward the side entrance, and gossip buzzed all around us, people rehashing Trace’s psychotic
breakdown, Mona’s arrest for possession with intent, and Tanner’s locker vandalism, which had been largely outshined by the rest of the chaos. Then the shrill ring of the final bell cut through the animated chatter, and the foot traffic sped up.

Great. Another tardy
. Maybe Mr. Wesner’s sub wouldn’t notice.

As we jogged toward the building, a car pulled into the parking lot, and distantly, I noticed that it was Jeff Ryan’s rebuilt ’72 Chevelle. Nash had helped him work on it a couple of times, and Jeff had let him borrow it once, as a thank-you.

I waved to Jeff as I crossed the aisle, practically dragging Em along with me. We were only feet from the school door when an engine growled behind us. Tires squealed, and I turned toward the sound to see a sleek, low-slung black car racing down the center aisle. I sucked in a breath to shout a warning, but I was too late.

The black car slammed into the passenger side of Jeff’s Chevelle with the horrible
squealcrunchpop
of bending metal. I flinched and grabbed Emma’s arm. And for a second or two, a thick, shocked silence reigned complete in the parking lot.

Then Jeff’s door creaked open and he crawled out of his car, the passenger side of which was now wrapped around the crunched front of the other vehicle.

People raced toward the wreck. The other driver got out and started yelling at Jeff, but I couldn’t understand much of what he said. Jeff was wobbly and too stunned to reply, but after one good look at his ruined masterpiece, he blinked and shook his head, then jumped into the shouting match full-strength.

Teachers came running. Some gestured for onlookers to get to class while others tried to break up the fight that had
erupted between Jeff and the other driver, who were still shouting between blows.

“Holy shit, what’s that all about?” Emma asked, walking backward as slowly as possible, reluctant to tear her gaze from the latest violent outburst.

“That’s Robbie Scates,” someone said from my left, and I glanced over to see a guy I didn’t know staring longingly at Emma. “He and Jeff entered some kind of hot-rod show in Dallas on Saturday, and Jeff placed higher. His picture was in the Sunday paper. Guess Robbie’s a sore loser.”

“A stupid one, too,” I mumbled. At least fifty people had seen him T-bone Jeff’s car.

“Damn…” Emma breathed. “An arrest on Friday, and now two fights and a wreck today, before school even started!”

“Technically, school’s started,” I noted, dragging her by one arm toward the entrance. “We just missed the first few minutes.”

“I don’t think we’re the ones missing anything,” Em said, turning reluctantly to follow me to algebra, where our dead teacher’s desk was now occupied by a clueless long-term sub.

I
N SPITE OF THE BUSY
work the sub handed out—along with our tardy slips—Emma managed to fill the rest of the class in on the parking lot chaos, through a combination of whispered sentences and passed notes, until the sub finally gave up and pretended not to notice the crowd gathered around our desks.

“It’s the pressure,” Brant Williams opined, dark brows drawn low. “Trace needed that scholarship, otherwise he’ll end up at TCJC. But he fumbled twice in the first quarter, and the recruiter never even looked at him after that.”

“Well, they’re sure not gonna recruit him now,” Leah-the pom-squad-girl added. “Unless maybe the golf team’s really hard up.”

But whether it was senior year pressure or something dumped into the school’s water supply, the truth was that half the student body seemed to have gone insane over the weekend.

During second period, the fire alarm went off right about the time we started smelling smoke, and when we filed into the parking lot, the most prevalent rumor was that Camilla Edwards’s science fair project—brought to school so the yearbook staff could get pictures of the first state finalist in nearly a decade—had been doused with something flammable and lit on fire in one of the chemistry labs. Now those pictures were all that remained of a project she’d started more than eight months earlier.

“This is insane,” Emma said, when I snuck away from my class huddle to meet her by her car. The red and blue lights from the fire trucks and police cars flashed over her face, giving her expression a look of urgency, on top of the standard bewilderment. “Why would anyone trash Cammie’s project? Just to get out of second period?”

But I had no answer. All I knew for sure was that Eastlake High had lost its collective mind, and the timing was too precise to be a coincidence. I was already dealing with a new Nightmare of a student, dead teachers, and a hellion with more strength and abilities than he should have. And now some kind of violent mental defect was sweeping the student body.

It was all related. I could feel the connection in my gut, even if I couldn’t make sense of it. There was something I
wasn’t seeing. Some piece of the puzzle I hadn’t yet found. And the only thing I knew for sure was that until I put the whole thing together, no one at Eastlake High School would be safe.

W
HEN
I
WOKE UP
at 2:24 a.m. on Tuesday, something lay on my pillow, two inches from my face. I sat up, fumbling for my bedside lamp, instantly alert. It was a purple sticky note, taken from my own desk.

Ice surged through my veins as I reached for it, raising chill bumps all over my body, and those chill bumps blossomed into chill
mountains
when I read the note.

Three words. Infinite possibilities.

And sleeping, wake
.

There was no signature, and the handwriting was unfamiliar, with an old-fashioned, curly look to it.

Avari was back. And he wanted to play.

And that’s when I realized the house around me was silent. No snoring. No groaning couch springs or squealing metal recliner frame as someone shifted in sleep.

Swimming in panic, I pulled on the jeans I’d worn the day before and raced into the living room—then froze when I squinted into the dark and made out the empty recliner and the pillow lying next to it on the floor. Alec was gone.

I whirled toward the couch, but it was empty, too, except for my dad’s bedding, and for one long, horrible moment, I thought he was gone, too. Then something shifted in the shadows between the couch and coffee table, and I realized it was the rise and fall of my father’s chest.

Shoving the coffee table out of my way, I clicked on the end table lamp and dropped to my knees next to my dad. His hands were cuffed at his back and blood had pooled beneath his head, and when I brushed back his hair, I found a sticky lump above his left temple.

Avari had found the keys. He’d possessed my dad in his sleep, found the handcuff keys, then released Alec and restrained my father. My dad had obviously woken up at some point after Avari had taken Alec’s body—otherwise, why hit him? But I’d slept through the whole thing.

And now someone innocent would die, because I couldn’t master the art of defensive insomnia.

Well, that, and because Avari was a vindictive, soul-sucking demon with an appetite for chaos and a yen for my complete destruction. But I couldn’t help blaming myself, at least in part, because I’d failed to stop him. Again.

But maybe I could catch him. The others had all died at the school.

Since my father was safe for the moment, I pulled on my jacket, grabbed my car keys, then headed for the front door, where I froze with my hand on the knob. Stuck to the wood, half covering the peephole, was a second purple sticky note, displaying that same antiquated writing.

A walk I take
.

If it was a riddle, it was a very bad one. I already knew he’d gone somewhere. Probably to kill someone. So why start a new game now?

He wouldn’t, unless he was planning to feed from my pain, as well as from whatever energy he funneled through Alec. Which meant he was going after someone connected to me. And that narrowed things down. As did the fact that he was on foot.

But even knowing that, I could think of at least half a dozen people he might target, and I didn’t have time to check on them all individually.

As I stepped into my shoes, panic-fueled, anger-driven plans of action tumbled through my brain, their unfinished edges making mincemeat of my upper level logic. In the driveway, I slid into my driver’s seat and shoved the key into the ignition, and when the interior lights flared to life, I found myself staring at another sticky note in the middle of my steering wheel. My heart thumped painfully. Four words this time, in that antiquated scrolling print.

Fair maid to break
.

It was more poem than riddle, but hardly brilliant, either way.

And sleeping, wake

A walk I take

Fair maid to break

Emma.

No, wait. What if he meant Sophie? My cousin and best friend were the only two human girls I knew for a fact that he knew how to find. My hands clenched around the steering wheel in frustration. Emma was my refuge from all things twisted and non-human. Sophie was my own flesh and blood. I couldn’t lose either of them. But I couldn’t save them both; they each lived about a mile from me, but in opposite directions.

I slammed the gearshift into Reverse, anger at Avari burning bright beneath aching fear for my cousin and my best friend. I backed down the driveway and onto the road, then shifted into Drive and took off, dialing as I drove.

Nash answered on the third ring.

“Mmm… Hello?” He sounded groggy, and bedsprings creaked as he rolled over.

“Wake up, Nash. I need help.” I ran the first stop sign, confident by the lack of headlights that no one else was on the road in my neighborhood at two-thirty in the morning.

“Kaylee? Are you in the car?”

“Yeah. I need you to call Sophie and make sure she’s okay.” She wouldn’t answer the phone if she saw my number on the display, especially in the middle of the night.

“Avari?”

“He found the handcuff key, knocked my dad out, and left me this stupid, cryptic riddle about breaking a ‘fair maid.’ I’m on my way to Emma’s to check on her. So can you please call Sophie?”

“Yeah. I’ll call you right back.”

I got to Emma’s two minutes later, driving way over the suburban speed limit. There were two cars in the driveway and another parked at the curb, and I recognized them all. One was Emma’s, one her mother’s, and the third belonged to one of Em’s two older sisters. I saw no sign of Alec, or Avari, or evil of any kind.

I closed my car door softly and studied Emma’s house. The front rooms were dark, except for the lamp they always left on, and since I didn’t have a key, I wouldn’t be able to get in without waking someone up. But then, neither would Avari, unless Alec had some kind of walk-through-walls power I didn’t know about.

I practically tiptoed across the lawn and onto the front porch, where my hand hovered over the doorknob. An un locked door would mean that Avari had beat me there. But a locked door didn’t eliminate that possibility—he could have gone in through the backdoor or a window.

Holding my breath, I twisted the knob. It turned, and the door creaked open.

Uh-oh.

I stepped inside, and my blood rushed so fast the dimly lit living room seemed to swim around me. A few steps later, I could see down the hall, where a thin line of yellow light shone beneath the second door on the right. Emma’s room.

My sneakers made no sound on the carpet as I crept toward her door, and when I was close enough to touch it, I heard voices whispering from inside, one deep and soft, the other higher in pitch.

Wrapping determination around myself like a security blanket, I turned the knob and pushed the door all the way open. Then blinked in surprise.

Emma sat on her bed in a tank top and Tweety print pajama bottoms, her straight blond hair secured with an old scrunchy. Alec sat in her desk chair, pulled close to her nightstand. Neither of them looked surprised to see me.

“’Bout time!” Emma said, waving me inside. “Shut the door so we don’t wake my mom up.”

Bewildered, and more than a little suspicious, I closed the door, but hovered near it, unwilling to move too far from the exit until I was sure it was safe. I studied Alec, looking for any sign that he wasn’t…himself. “What color was my first bike?” I asked, and Emma laughed.

“You guys are obsessed with this game!”

But Alec knew it was no game. “White, with red ribbons,” he said, right on cue, and only then could I relax. Kind of.

“What’s going on?” My eyes narrowed as I ventured a little farther into the room. Even if he was Alec now, he’d been Avari when he planted those notes and left my house. Something felt wrong. How on earth had he explained this to Emma?

But before either of them could answer, my phone rang. I pulled it from my pocket and flipped it open when I saw Nash’s number. “Your cousin’s not a morning person,” he said, before I had a chance to say hi. “But she’s fine.”

“Thanks. I found Alec, and he and Em both seem okay. Do you think you could run over to my house and…look for that key?” Without it, I wasn’t sure how we’d ever get my father out of the cuffs. “If my dad wakes up, tell him I’ll be back in a few minutes, and I’m fine.”

“Yeah. See you in a few.”

I flipped my phone closed and slid it into my pocket, then looked up to find Emma watching me.

“Alec came to check on me,” she said, in answer to my question. “He said you’d be right behind him, and here you are.
He
brought ice cream, though.” She gestured to two spoons and a pint of Ben & Jerry’s on the nightstand. One of the very pints she’d left in my freezer, no doubt. “Just FYI, Kay, if you’re going to wake me up in the middle of the night for my own protection, then refuse to explain exactly what I’m in danger from, bringing ice cream is a good way to soothe my sleep-fuddled anger.”

“Huh?” Considering the time, my lack of sleep, and the fear-laced adrenaline still half buzzing in my system, that was as articulate a response as I could manage.

Alec leaned back in his chair. “Emma, would you mind bringing another spoon?”

Em frowned, then glanced from me to Alec. “You know, if there’s something you don’t want me to hear, you can just say, ‘Em, there’s something we don’t want you to hear.’”

He smiled, and I could practically see my best friend melt beneath the full power of his attention. “Em, there are things we don’t want you to hear. Also, we need another spoon.”

Emma sighed, but stood. “Whisper fast,” she said, then headed into the hall.

“There are notes all over my house and car from Avari,” I whispered as softly as I could, the minute her footsteps faded. “What the hell happened?”

“It sounds like he found the key.” Alec sat up straight, facing me as I sank onto Emma’s bed. “I was here, alone, not ten minutes ago. Then she came in with two spoons. Evidently he brought her ice cream, but I’m not fool enough to believe that’s the only reason for this little excursion.”

“You told her I’d be coming, too?”

Alec shrugged. “He must have said that…before.”

“So…he left notes for me and brought ice cream for Emma.” I closed my eyes, trying to think through exhaustion, anger, and an encroaching headache. “How did you get rid of him?”

Alec shrugged. “I didn’t.”

“He vacated on his own…” I mumbled, as Em’s muted, bare footsteps echoed toward us. “He never planned to kill her. He’s just playing some kind of twisted game.” But why?

Emma came back into the room before he could answer, but even if she hadn’t, I doubt he’d have had anything to say. Though he’d lived with the hellion for a quarter of a century,
he seemed no more privy to Avari’s thought process than I was.

“So…what’s up?” Emma asked, handing me the spoon. She sank onto the bed and pulled the lid from the carton of ice cream. “What’s the latest cloud on the horizon of my pathetic existence?”

“Dramatic, Em?” But I had to grin. Nothing ever seemed to get Emma down. Even being told she was in danger from some mysterious force she probably would never understand.

“It’s poetic. I like it,” Alec said, and I swear I saw Emma flush, which hadn’t happened much since the night she’d snuck into my room at one in the morning to tell me all about losing her virginity.

“You’re not pathetic, and you’re not in danger.”
Anymore…
“We had a scare, but it seems to be over.”

“A scare of the Netherworld variety?” Emma’s smile faltered. She knew just enough about the non-human side of my life to be scared senseless every time it was mentioned. And I intended to keep it that way. If she was scared, she was much less likely to dig for information. Her fear was keeping her safe. Or at least safer than she’d have been otherwise.

“Yeah, but it’s fine now.” I stood, eyeing Alec. “You ready?”

“Wait!” Em waved the spoons at him slowly, like she could hypnotize him with the lure of shiny metal. “Stay and have some ice cream.”

“Em, it’s almost three in the morning.” And I had to get back to my dad.

“Hey, you two woke me up from some very pleasant dreams. The least you can do is mollify me with ice cream.”

One look at Em—who only had eyes for Alec—and I knew I was fighting a losing battle. So I stayed for just a few bites, if
only to keep her from making any beyond-friendship overtures toward a man three times her age.

Then Alec and I headed home, where I cleaned my father’s head wound while Nash called his mom at the hospital and asked her to send Tod to the police station for another handcuff key.

We never found the one Avari had taken.