Soul Screamers Volume Four: With All My Soul\Fearless\Niederwald\Last Request: 4 (61 page)

Troy’s brows bunched even lower and his nostrils flared. His wings tensed and seemed to retract toward his spine. Then he threw them open with a sound like sails unfurling in the wind and Tod jumped back, startled. Suddenly the man-harpy seemed to take up half the basement.

His wings were huge and black, framed with bony ridges and points like a bat’s. But the left hung lower—crippled—and I doubted it was actually functional.

“Sabine did good work,” Tod said, ignoring my pointed glances while he studied Troy’s wings. “There’s thick scar tissue and pronounced stiffness. I don’t think he can get airborne.”

But he still had claws.

Troy didn’t so much fly as swoop, and an instant later he was on me. My back hit the cluttered floor, and something hard dug into my spine. Claws ripped my shirt and scored my chest. Wings beat the air above me, and panic surged through my bloodstream, lighting my nerve endings on fire.

“Damn it! Hang on, I’m coming!” Tod shouted, and in my panic, it took me a second to understand why he was on the steps again, instead of pulling the winged psycho off me—if he’d become corporeal while he was standing
through
the sea of junk, it would have become part of him. So he’d blinked back to the steps—a psychic barrier, like floors and doors—where he could reclaim his physical form, unaltered.

I threw up my hands to protect my face, trying to decide where best to punch the harpy, and the pendant dangling from my hand caught his attention.

“Mine!” Troy grasped for the dragon pendant and nearly ripped my arm off with it.

“Let him have it!” Tod shouted, trudging through the junk on the floor, now corporeal, but still visible only to me, except for the path he cleared with each step. “I don’t need the charm, I just need the soul.”

I tried to let Troy have the dragon, but the chain was wound around my hand. And with the harpy alternately trying to claw my eyes out and rip my arm off, Tod couldn’t blink me out without taking Troy with us.

More footsteps tapped on the stairs, and through my fear and panic, I registered two new bodies and two more sets of leathery wings, which made the basement feel claustrophobic, even beyond the scope of the sea of junk.

“Save some for us!” one girl shrieked, while another wordlessly cheered Troy on.

I desperately blocked blow after blow, while Troy’s claws raked across my forearms and my chin, aiming for my eyes. Or maybe for my throat.

“Nash, let it go!” Tod shouted, still trudging toward us, glancing around for a weapon.

“I can’t!” I yelled back, and Troy paused in his assault.

“Can’t what?” he demanded. He still couldn’t see my brother.

I sucked in a deep breath. “I’m trying to give you your damn pendant back!” I shouted, when I could breathe again. “Here! Take it, and we’ll get out of your...roost.”

On the edge of my vision, Tod stood perfectly still, his steady gaze trained on the pendant. He was trying to remove the soul from it, which hadn’t been possible while I was waving it around, trying to fight Troy off.

I’d been in my fair share of fights—both on the field and off—but I’d never fought anyone with claws before. It was like trying to fight the love child of Wolverine and Freddy Krueger.

“We?”
Troy hauled me up, revealing far more strength than someone his size should have had—Netherworld genetics working against me yet again. “Who else is here?”

“No one. It was a figure of speech. I meant me and...my ego,” I said, and Tod laughed out loud, his concentration blown again. “Here. You can have your necklace and I’ll be on my way.” I unwound the chain from my chafed palm and handed it to the harpy, trying to ignore the stinging claw marks on my arms.

“Well, you’re half-right.” Troy tossed the pendant over his shoulder and the brunette harpy caught it in one fist. “What do you say, ladies? Should we play with our food, or just eat it?”

“Play!” The redhead shouted from the foot of the stairs. I hadn’t even seen her come in. The two other girl harpies glanced at her, then shouted in agreement.

Troy turned back to me, and I ducked, then sidestepped him. He lunged for me, and I lurched toward the brunette. She screeched and stumbled backward. I snatched the chain from her hand and immediately threw it to Tod.

“Catch!”

Tod’s hand shot up, and the pendant landed in it, the chain bouncing off his forearm. As his fingers curled around the dragon, Troy and the brunette each grabbed one of my arms.

“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.