My Soul to Save

“Libby’s a very special reaper.” Tod’s short, blond goatee glinted in the blue-tinted overhead lights as he spoke. “She was called in because that—” he pointed to the substance the female reaper now was steadily inhaling from Eden’s body, over a twenty-foot span and dozens of heads “—isn’t a soul. It’s Demon’s Breath.”

Suddenly I was very glad no one else could hear Tod. I wished they couldn’t hear me, either. “Demon, as in hellion?” I whispered, as low as I could speak and still be heard.

Tod nodded with his usual slow, grim smile. The very word hellion sent a jolt of terror through me, but Tod’s eyes sparkled with excitement, as if he could actually get high on danger. I guess that’s what you get when you mix boredom with the afterlife.

“She sold her soul….” Nash whispered, revulsion echoing within the sudden understanding in his voice.

I’d never met a hellion—they couldn’t leave the Netherworld, fortunately—but I was intimately familiar with their appetite for human souls. Six weeks earlier, my aunt had tried to trade five poached teenage souls in exchange for her own eternal youth and beauty, but her plan went bad in the end, and she wound up paying in part with her own soul. But not before four girls died for her vanity.

Tod shrugged. “That’s what it looks like to me.”

Horror filled me. “Why would anyone do that?”

Nash looked like he shared my revulsion, but Tod only shrugged again, clearly unbothered by the most horrifying concept I’d ever encountered. “They usually ask for fame, fortune, and beauty.”

All of which Eden had in spades.

“Okay, so she sold her soul to a hellion.” That statement sound wrong in sooo many ways. … “Do I even want to know how Demon’s Breath got into Eden’s body in its place?”

“Probably not,” Nash whispered, as heavy black curtains began to slide across the front of the stage, cutting off the shocked, horrified chatter from the auditorium.

But as usual, Tod was happy to give me a morbid peek into the Netherworld—complete with irreverent hand gestures. “When the hellion literally sucked out her soul, he replaced it with his own breath. That kept her alive until her time to die. Which is why Libby’s here. Demon’s Breath is a controlled substance in the Netherworld, and it has to be disposed of very carefully. Libby’s trained to do that.”

“A controlled substance?” I felt my brows dip in confusion. “Like plutonium?”

Tod chuckled, running his fingers across a panel of dead electronic equipment propped against the wall. “More like heroin.”

I sighed and leaned into Nash, letting the warmth of his body comfort me. “The Netherworld is soooo weird.”

“You have no idea.” Tod’s curls bounced when he turned to face Libby again, where the lady reaper had now inhaled most of the sluggish Demon’s Breath. It swirled slowly into her mouth in a long, thick strand, like a ghostly trail of rotting spaghetti. “Come on, I want to talk to her.” He took off toward the stage without waiting for our reply, and I lunged after him, hoping he was solid enough to touch.

He was—at least for me. Though I was sure Nash’s hand would have gone right through the reaper.

“Wait.” I hauled him back in spite of the weird look I got from some random stagehand in a black tee. “We can’t just trot across the stage without being seen.” Though, there were certainly times I wished I could go invisible. Like, during P.E. The girls’ basketball coach was out to get me, I was sure of it.

“And I don’t think I want to meet this super-reaper.” Nash stuffed his hands in his front pockets. “The garden variety’s weird enough.”

Plus, most reapers hold no fondness for bean sidhes. The combined natural abilities of a male and female bean sidhe—the potential to return a soul to its body—are in direct opposition with a reaper’s entire purpose in life. Or, the afterlife.

Tod was the rare exception to this mutual species aversion, by virtue of being both bean sidhe and reaper.

“Fine, but don’t expect me to pass on any pearls of wisdom she coughs up….” Tod’s gaze settled on me, and his full, perfect lips turned up into a wicked smile. He knew he had me; I was trying to learn everything I could about the Netherworld, to make up for living the first sixteen years of my life in total ignorance, thanks to my family’s misguided attempt to keep me safe. And as creeped-out as I was by Eden’s sudden, soulless death, I wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to learn something neither Tod nor Nash could teach me.

“Nash, please?” I pulled his hand from his pocket and wound my fingers through his. I would go without him, but I’d rather have his company, and I was pretty sure I’d get it. He wouldn’t leave me alone with Tod, because he didn’t entirely trust his undead brother.

Neither did I.

I saw Nash’s decision in the frown lines around his mouth before he nodded, so I stood on my toes to kiss him. Excitement tingled along the length of my spine and settled to burn lower when our lips touched, and when I pulled away, his hazel eyes churned with swirls of green and brown, a sure sign that a bean sidhe was feeling something strong. Not that humans could see it.

Nash nodded again to answer my unspoken question. “Yours are swirling, too.”

I dared a grin in spite of the solemn circumstances, and Tod rolled his eyes at our display. Then he stomped off silently to meet this “special” reaper.

The fluttering in my stomach settled into a heavy anchor of dread as we followed Tod behind the stage, dodging shell-shocked technicians and stagehands on our way to the opposite wing. I needed all the information I could find about the Netherworld to keep myself from accidentally stumbling into something dangerous, but I didn’t exactly look forward to meeting more reapers. Especially the creepy, intimidating woman swallowing the ominous life-source that had kept Eden up and singing for who knew how long.

“So what makes this reaper such a legend?” I whispered, walking between Nash and Tod, whose shoes still made no sound on the floor.

For a moment, Tod gaped at me like I’d just asked what made grass green. Then he seemed to remember my ignorance. “She’s ancient. The oldest reaper still reaping. Maybe the oldest reaper ever. No one knows what name she was born with, but back in ancient Rome she took on the name of the goddess of death. Libitina.” I arched both brows at Tod. “So, you address the oldest, scariest grim reaper in history by a nickname?”

Tod shrugged, but I thought I saw him blush. Though, that could have been the red satin backdrop panels showing through his nearly translucent cheek. “I’ve never actually addressed her as anything. We haven’t officially met.”

“Great,” I breathed, rolling my eyes. We were accompanying Tod-the-reaper-fanboy to meet his hero. It couldn’t get any lamer without a Star Trek convention and an English-to-Klingon dictionary.

When we rounded the corner, my gaze found Libby just as she sucked the last bit of Demon’s Breath from the air. The end of the strand whipped up to smack her cheek before sliding between her pursed lips, and the ancient reaper swiped the back of one black-leather-clad arm across her mouth, as if to wipe a smudge of sauce from her face.

I didn’t want to know what kind of sauce Demon’s Breath swam in.

“There she is,” Tod said, and the eerie, awed quality of his voice drew my gaze to his face. He looked … shy.

My own intimidation faded in the face of the first obvious nerves I’d seen from the rookie reaper, and I couldn’t resist a grin. “Okay, let’s go.” I took Tod’s hand and had tugged him two steps in Libby’s direction before his fingers suddenly faded out of existence around my own.

I stopped and glanced down, irritated to see that he had dialed both his appearance and his physical presence down to barely-there, to escape my grasp. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing a little dignity wouldn’t fix,” Tod snapped. “So could we please not mob the three-thousand-plus-year-old reaper like tweens at a boy-band concert?” He ran transparent hands over his equally transparent tee and marched toward Libby with his shoulders square, evidently satisfied that his composure was intact.

He grew a little more solid with each step, and I glanced around, afraid someone would notice him suddenly appearing in our midst. But when his shoes continued to make no sound, I realized he hadn’t stepped into human sight. Not that it mattered. All eyes were glued to the stage, where the doctor still worked tirelessly—and fruitlessly—on Eden.

We followed Tod, and I knew by the sudden confidence in Nash’s step that he could now see his brother. And that he was probably secretly hoping Tod would do or say something stupid in front of the foremost expert in his field.

We caught up with him as he stopped, and since they were the same height, Libby’s bright green eyes stared straight into Tod’s blue with enough intensity to make even me squirm. “Hi,” Tod started, and I had to give him credit for not stuttering.

My own tongue was completely paralyzed.

Libitina was very old, very experienced, and clearly very powerful—all obvious in her bearing alone. She was also so impossibly beautiful that I was suddenly embarrassed by the makeup I’d probably sweated off during the concert and the long brown hair I could see frizzing on the edge of my vision, in spite of my efforts with a flatiron.

Libby wore a long, black leather trench coat, cinched at her tiny waist to show off slim hips. I would have said the coat was cliché for someone intimately involved with Death, except that as old as she was, she’d probably been wearing black leather much longer than it had been in vogue for hookers and superheroes alike.

Her hair was pulled back from her face in a severe ponytail that trailed tight, black curls halfway down her back. Her skin was dark and flawless, and so smooth I wanted to touch her cheek, just to assure myself she wasn’t as perfect as she looked. She couldn’t be.

Could she?

“Yes?” Libby said, her piercing gaze still trained on Tod. She hadn’t acknowledged either me or Nash, and I was suddenly sure that, like most reapers, she hated bean sidhes. Maybe we shouldn’t have tagged along after all.

Yet she hadn’t become invisible to us….

“My name is Tod, and I work for the local branch office.” He paused, and I was amused to realize Tod’s cheeks were blazing—and this time that had nothing to do with the stage backdrop. “Can I ask you a couple of questions?”

Libby scowled, and a chill shot up my spine. “You are dissatisfied with my services?” She bit off the ends of her words in anger, distorting an accent I couldn’t place, and we all three stepped back in unison, unwilling to stand in the face of her fury.

“No!” Tod held up both hands, and I was too busy choking on my own fear to be amused by his. “This has nothing to do with the local office. I’m off duty tonight. I’m just curious. About the process …”

Libby’s thin, black brows arched, and I thought I saw amusement flicker behind her eyes. “Ask,” she said finally, and suddenly I liked her—even if she didn’t like bean sidhes—because she could easily have made Tod feel about an inch tall.

Tod stuffed his hands into his pockets and inhaled slowly. “What does it feel like? Demon’s Breath. You hold it … inside. Right?”

Libby nodded briefly, then turned and walked away, headed toward a hallway identical to the one we’d followed to the stage.

We hesitated, glancing at one another in question. Then Tod shrugged and hurried after her. We actually had to jog to keep up as her boots moved silently but quickly over the floor.

“You breathe it in, deep into your lungs.” Her rich accent spoke of dead languages, of cultures long ago lost to the ravages of time and fickle memory. Her voice was low and gruff. Aged. Powerful. It sent shivers through me, as if I were hearing something I shouldn’t be able to. Something no one else had heard in centuries. “It fills you. It burns like frostbite, as if the Breath will consume your insides. Feed on them. But that is good. If the burning stops, you have held it too long. Demon’s Breath will kill your soul.”

The shivers grew until I noticed my hands trembling. I took Nash’s in my left, and shoved the right into my pocket.

A couple of technicians passed us carrying equipment, and Tod waited until they were gone to pose his next question. “How long do you have?” He paced beside the female reaper now. Nash and I were content to trail behind, just close enough to hear.

“An hour.” Her lips moved in profile against the white wall as she turned to half face him. “Any longer, and you risk much.”

“What do you do with it?” I asked—I couldn’t help it—and Libby froze in midstep. She pivoted slowly to look at me, and I saw time in her eyes. Years of life and death, and existence without end. The shivers in my hands became tremors echoing the length of my body.

I should not have drawn her attention.

“Who is this?” Libby faced Tod again.

“A friend. My brother’s girlfriend.” He nodded toward Nash, who stood tall beneath her hair-curling, nerve-crunching scrutiny. Then Libby whirled on one booted heel and marched on.

Cool relief sifted through me, and only then did I realize Tod hadn’t given her either of our names. Nash had practically beaten that precaution into him; it was never wise to give your name to Death’s emissaries. Though, if a reaper wanted to know your name, it was easy enough to find, especially in today’s world. Which is why it was also unwise to catch a reaper’s attention.

Sirens warbled outside the stadium then, and another gaggle of official-looking people rushed down the hall toward the stage, but Libby didn’t seem to notice them. “There are places for proper disposal of Demon’s Breath. In the Nether,” she added, as if there were any question about that.

“If a reaper wanted to get into that—collecting Demon’s Breath instead of souls—how might he get started?” Tod asked as we followed Libby around a sharp white corner, her feet silent on the slick linoleum.

“By surviving the next thousand years.” Her accent grew sharper, her words thick with warning. “If you still live then, find me. I will show you. But do not try it alone. Fools suffer miserable deaths, boy.”

“I won’t,” Tod assured her. “But it was awesome to watch.”

Libby stopped, eyeing him with a strange expression caught on her features, as if she didn’t quite know what she intended to say until the words came out. “You may watch again. I will return in five days.”

“For more Demon’s Breath?” I asked, and again her creepy green gaze slid my way, seeming to burn through my eyes and into my brain.

“Of course. The other fool will release hers on Thursday.”

“What other fool?” Tod demanded through clenched teeth, and I glanced at him, surprised by his sharp tone. His brows were furrowed, his beautiful lips thinned by dread.

“Addison Page. The singer,” Libby said, like it should have been obvious.

Tod actually stumbled backward, and Nash put a hand on his shoulder, but it went right through him. For a moment, I was afraid he’d fall through the featureless white wall. “Addy sold her soul?” Tod rubbed one hand across his own nearly transparent forehead. “Are you sure?”

Libby raised her brows, as if to ask if he were serious.

“When?”

“That is not my concern.” The reaper slid her slim, dark hands into the pockets of her coat, watching Tod with disdain now, as if her hunch that he wasn’t yet ready to collect Demon’s Breath had just been confirmed. “Mine is to gather what I come for and dispose of it properly. Time marches on, boy, and so must I.”

“Wait!” Tod grabbed her arm, and I wasn’t sure who was more surprised—Libby or Nash. But Tod rushed on as if he hadn’t noticed. “Addy’s going to die?”

Libby nodded, then disappeared without so much as a wink to warn us. She was just suddenly gone, yet her voice remained for a moment longer, an echo of her very existence.

“She will release the Demon’s Breath by taking her own life. And I shall be there to claim it.”

3

“ADDY SOLD HER SOUL.” Tod’s voice sounded odd. Distant. I think he was in shock. Or maybe that was just an echo from the empty hallway.

If a voice isn’t audible in the human range of hearing, can it echo?

“Um, yeah. Sounds like it,” I said. The very thought sent chills through me, and I rubbed my arms through my sleeves, trying to get rid of the goose bumps.

“She’s gonna kill herself.” Tod’s eyes were wide with panic and horror. I’d never seen him scared, and I didn’t like how fear pressed his lips into a tense, thin line and wrinkled his forehead. “We have to stop her. Warn her, or something.” Tod took off down the hall, and Nash and I ran after him. If we didn’t keep up, he’d disappear through a wall or something, and we’d never find him. At least, not in time to finish arguing with him.

“Warn her of what? That she’s going to kill herself?” Nash’s shoes squeaked as we rounded a corner. “Don’t you think she already knows that?”

“Maybe not.” Tod stopped when the hallway ended in a T, glancing both ways in indecision. “Maybe whatever’s supposed to drive her to suicide hasn’t happened yet.” He looked to the left again, then took off toward the right.

“Wait!” I lunged forward and grabbed his arm, relieved when my hand didn’t pass right through him. “Do you even know where you’re going?”

“No clue.” He shrugged, looking more like his brother in that moment than ever before. “I know where her dressing room is, but I don’t know how to get there from here, and I can’t just pop in without losing you two.”

I didn’t want to know how he knew where her dressing room was, but considering how often he’d gone invisible to spy on me, the answer seemed obvious.

“Yeah, physics is a real bitch.” Nash rolled his beautiful hazel eyes and leaned with one shoulder against the wall like he had nowhere better to be.

“You don’t have to wait for us.” As cool as it would have been to meet Addison Page, telling a rising star that she was going to end both her career and her life in less than a week was so not on my to-do list. “I think I’m going to sit this one out.” I propped my hands on my hips and glanced at Nash to see if he was with me, but he and Tod wore identical, half amused, half reluctant expressions. “What?”

“I’m dead, Kaylee.” Tod stopped in front of the first door we’d come to, his hand on the knob. “Addy came to my funeral. I can’t show up in her dressing room two years after I was buried and tell her not to kill herself. That would just be rude.”

I laughed at his idea of post-death etiquette, pretty sure that “rude” was a bit of an understatement. But I sobered quickly when his point sank in. “Wait, you want us to tell her?”

“If she sees me, she’ll freak out and spend the last days of her life in the psych ward.”

I bristled, irritated by the reminder of my own brief stay in the land of sedatives and straitjackets. “It’s called the mental health unit, thank you. And we are not going to go tell your famous ex-girlfriend to lighten up or she’ll be joining you six feet under. That would be rude.”

“She wouldn’t believe us, anyway,” Nash said, crossing his arms over his chest in a show of solidarity. “She’d probably call Security and have us arrested.”

“So make her believe you.” Tod gestured in exasperation. Like it’d be that easy. “I’ll be there to help. She just won’t be able to see me.”

I glanced at Nash and was relieved to see my reluctance still reflected in his features. As much as I wanted to help—to hopefully save Addison Page’s life—I did not want to be taken from her dressing room in handcuffs.

And my dad would be soooo pissed if he had to bail me out of jail.

But before I could even contemplate how bad that would be, something else sank in….

“Tod, wait a minute.” He let go of the knob when I stepped between him and the door, but his oddly angelic frown said he wasn’t happy about it. “How do we know this will even work? I mean, say she believes us and decides not to kill herself. Won’t she just die of some other cause next week, at the same time she would have killed herself? If her name’s really on the list, she’s going to die one way or another, right? You can’t stop Libby from coming for her, and frankly, I think you’d be an idiot to even try.”

Nash and Tod had explained to me how the whole death business works right after I found out I was a bean sidhe, during the single most stressful week of my life. Evidently people come with expiration dates stamped on them at birth—much like food in the grocery store. It was the reapers’ job to enforce that expiration date, then collect the dead person’s soul and take it to be recycled.

As far as I knew, the only way to extend a person’s life was to exchange his or her death date for someone else’s, to keep life and death in balance. So if we saved Addison Page’s life—which, as bean sidhes, Nash and I could technically do—someone else would have to die in her place, and that someone could be anyone. Me or Nash, or some random, nearby stranger.

As much as I wanted to help both Tod and Addison, I was not willing to pay that price, nor would I ask someone else to.

Tod blinked at me, and while his scowl remained in place, his sad eyes revealed the truth. “I know.” He sighed, and his broad shoulders fell with the movement. “But I haven’t actually seen the list yet, so I’m not going to worry about that right now. What I am going to do is try to talk her out of suicide. But I need help. Please, guys.” His gaze trailed from me to Nash, then back.

Nash frowned and leaned against the wall beside the door again, striking the I-cannot-be-moved posture I recognized from several of our own past arguments. “Tod, you’re the one who says it’s dangerous for bean sidhes to mess in reaper business.”

“And that knowing when they’re going to die only makes a human’s last days miserable,” I added, perversely pleased by the chance to throw his own words back at him.

Tod shrugged. “I know, but this is different.”

“Why?” Nash demanded, his gaze going hard as he glared at Tod. “Because this time it’s an ex? One you’ve obviously never gotten over …”

Anger flashed across the reaper’s face, mirroring his brother’s, but beneath it lay a foundation of pain and vulnerability even he could not hide. “This is different because she sold her soul, Nash. You know what that means.”

Nash’s eyes closed for a moment, and he inhaled deeply. When he met Tod’s gaze again, his held more sympathy than anger. “That was her choice.”

“She didn’t know what she was getting into! She couldn’t have!” the reaper shouted, and I was floored by the depth of his anger and frustration. I’d never seen him put so much raw emotion on display.

“What was she getting into?” I glanced from brother to brother and crossed my own arms, waiting for an answer. I hate always being the clueless one.

Finally Nash sighed and turned his attention to me. “She sold her soul to a hellion, but he won’t have full use of it until she dies. When she does, her soul is his for eternity. Forever. He can do whatever he wants with it, but since hellions feed on pain and chaos, he’ll probably torture Addison’s soul—and thus what remains of Addison—until the end of time. Or the end of the Netherworld. Whichever comes first.”

My stomach churned around the dinner we’d grabbed before the concert, threatening to send the burger back up. “Is that what happened to the souls Aunt Val traded to Belphegore?” Nash nodded grimly, and horror drew my hands into cold, damp fists. “But that’s not fair. Those girls did nothing wrong, and now their souls are going to be tortured for all of eternity? “

“That’s why soul-poaching is illegal.” Tod’s voice was soft with sympathy and heavy with grief.

“Is selling your soul illegal, too?” A spark of hope zinged through me. Maybe Addison could get her soul back on a technicality!