Body and Soul (Body and Soul Trilogy) (12 page)

Chapter 16

Kate woke up screaming. She tried to make herself stop, but ended up having to shove a pillow in her mouth to stifle the sound. She heard someone running upstairs and forced herself to stop before her mother and father thought she was crazy.

“Honey, what’s wrong?” Kate’s mother burst into the room, slamming into the door before rushing toward her daughter. She picked Kate up and held her, rocking her back and forth like she did when Kate was younger.

“Kate, baby, did you have a nightmare?” she asked worriedly. She pushed Kate’s hair away from her face, tucking it behind her ears.

Kate sobbed and held on to her mother, afraid of thinking about the dream too much. The only thing she wanted after her horrendous night with Rico and Adriana was her mother.

Blaire held her daughter for a long time. She hummed a soft tune and ran her fingers through Kate’s curls, comforting her. Kate felt herself snuggling in to her mother, and let herself embrace the hope that was surging through her veins. Blaire was finally connecting with Kate, and Kate didn’t want to let the moment go. When Kate stopped crying, Blaire let her go.

“Honey,” she said. “It was only a bad dream. Go ahead and take a quick shower. I’m going to make you some blueberry pancakes. After that I think we should have a girls’ day. What about a movie and a manicure?”

Kate nodded, unable to speak.

Blaire stood up and smiled
at Kate. It was warm and comforted Kate, almost erasing her worries. Blaire kissed the top of Kate’s head before she left the room. Kate could hear her humming as she descended the stairs and sat there for a minute before getting up.

The shower was just what she needed.
Kate let the water fall over her, fully erasing her thoughts. Kate blocked them out, mentally placing them inside a safe that she locked. She made sure to throw away the key, knowing that she would find it when she was ready to figure the mess out. When Kate stepped into the living room twenty minutes later, she felt much better.

“Here you go, baby.”
Blaire placed a stack of pancakes in front of Kate. She watched as Kate ate them, smiling the whole time.

“What?” Kate asked.

“I’m just enjoying spending this time with you,” Blaire said in response.

Kate offered a warm smile in return. She was happy to spend this time with her mother as well. In fact, it was nice to momentarily forget about anything other than her desire to spend time with her mother more often. She let that desire, and her happiness at seeing it come true, consume her thoughts during the day.

“I love the pale pink polish you chose, baby. It’s beautiful,” Blaire said to Kate as they walked toward their beach house.

“Thanks, Mom. I like yours too; I wouldn’t have thought you’d pick a dark color. I imagined you as a coral or sea foam kind of person.”

“This is the color of the ocean at night, baby. It’s when I love the water the best. That’s why I work so late.”

“Oh,” Kate murmured. She looked into her mother’s saddening eyes, worried that she hadn’t known this about Blaire. She wondered what else she didn’t know about her mother; she hoped that she would find out more as they watched the movie they rented, a depressing love story that didn’t consist of a happy ending.

Kate stepped into her bedroom sometime later, her freshly painted nails and the love story plot swirling through her thoughts. She almost felt ready to face her friends and her increasingly disastrous life. The times that she spent forgetting all of it helped strengthen her, so that she was ready to fight again.

Kate
found Rico in her room. He sat on her bed reading a book. He closed it when she walked in and put it back on the bookshelf. His hair was disheveled and he looked like he hadn’t slept.

“Adriana told me what she told you,” he said. “She shouldn’t have told you, but now that you know I need to know how you feel about the whole thing.”

“I don’t feel any different anymore,” Kate said. “At first I felt betrayed. I was shocked but could see the signs that were right in front of me all along. Adriana mentioned falling in love like she had done it a hundred times. Donovan was too young to be her father. All three of you are perfectly beautiful, unearthly almost.” Kate stopped there, frightened of saying too much.

“You aren’t afraid of us?”

“No. I don’t have a reason to be afraid of you.”

Rico seemed to accept her answer.
He nodded then stood.

Kate could sense that he wanted to leave, but she didn’t want him to leave yet. She had to know who he was, who he had been before Adriana, before Kate.

“Wait,” she begged.

Rico turned and waited for her to speak.

“Please tell me about your life. I don’t care what you have to say. I just need to hear it from you. I can’t spend the rest of my life wondering who you are, who you were. I have to hear the truth; it can’t be any worse than what I could make up in my mind.”

“It is worse, Kate, m
uch worse.” Rico’s cobalt eyes seemed to fade. Kate could sense that he was sifting through his memories, reliving them almost.

“I don’t care,” she said. She moved closer to him. She looked into his eyes and reached out her hand
until she was touching his face.

“I just need to know who you are,” she said. “Nothing you say will scare me. I don’t think anything could make me stop liking you. I just need to know what you did
and who you were. I want to know what experiences led you up to this point. To me, you’re good. You will always be good.”

R
ico pulled away from her touch, and Kate lowered her hand. She blushed fiercely and turned away from him.

“Kate,” he said, rea
ching out to grab her wrist. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. It’s just that I can’t touch you.” He released her wrist then.

She turned around
slowly. “You can’t touch me?”

He shook his head in response to her question.

“Why?” she asked again.

“Have you ever noticed that my skin feels warm when it touches you?”

“Yes, it feels like you have a fever.”

“It’s because my skin is burning yours. I have no soul to keep me warm. My body temperature is below freezing, but to you it feels warm. When I touch you, when any demon touches you, your body temperature is lowered. It’s a way to disarm the humans we attempt to possess. It’s sort of like a built in weapon.”

Kate thought a moment, remembering that her mother had told her that her skin was like ice after the man had attacked her the night that they ate at The Beach House. She felt a feeling of dread. If he had held her for another moment, would she have survived? How long did it take to completely destroy a human body?

“What’s wrong?” Rico asked.

“I was thinking about the night I was attacked. The first attack from the demon that you fought below my window. My mother said that my body was freezing when I reached her. He didn’t hold me for very long, Rico. How could he have cooled my body temperature down that much?”

“It doesn’t take long, Kate. How long did he hold you? Do you know?”

“No more than thirty seconds.”

Kate watched as Rico’s eyes turned to stone. He began muttering and whispering to himself, and then stood up suddenly, his eyes determined.

“Look, I’ll be back later. I need to go talk to Adriana,” he said. He got up and walked toward the window.

“Wait,” Kate said. “I need to come with you.”

Rico nodded. “I’ll meet you outside,” he said before jumping out the open window.

Kate rushed downstairs, her lavender skirt floating around her. By the time she made it to the back door she had to rearrange her cream tank top, tucking it back in to her lace skirt.

“Honey, where are you going?” her mother called from the kitchen.

“I’m going to show Adriana my nails and tell her ab
out the movie,” she called before walking outside.

Rico stood there waiting, his hands in his pockets. He wore dark sunglasses and a grim expression. They walked in silence all the way to Adriana’s.

Adriana was sitting on the deck out back, listening to soft indie music while flipping through magazines. She shut the magazine and turned off the music when she caught sight of Rico’s expression.

Rico dove straight into the story that Kate had just told to him. Kate watched Adriana’s eyes get bigger and bigger with every word. She wondered, absently, where Donovan was. Did he really work at the bait shop?

“This is worse than I thought,” Adriana said. “I can’t believe that
this mystery demon is somehow stronger than we are. I didn’t know it was possible.”

“It gets worse,” Kate said. She looked as Adriana and Rico focused their gazes on her face. “I have a few things to tell you,” she said.

They nodded.

“When you guys went investigating last week, I did some investigating of my own. I called up Mr. Evans, the gardener, and asked him some questions about Cole. He
didn’t even remember working with Cole that day, almost as if his memory was erased. He did mention that my parents rented the house from someone named Mr. Kern. It’s him, isn’t it?” she asked them.

“I’m sure it’s him,” Rico said.

“I agree,” said Adriana.

“Now we just need to find out whether he
placed Kate and her family there on purpose. I have a feeling that he did,” Rico muttered angrily.

“Why?” Kate asked. “Why would he choose my soul? I’m just a sixteen-year-old girl.
I don’t know how he could find my soul so appealing.”

“That’s what we need to figure out next,” Adriana said. “What else did you have to tell us? You said you had some
things
, right?”

Kate nodded. She looked down at her lap and straightened out her skirt. She knew that Adriana and Rico would wait patiently, but she knew she couldn’t put it off forever.

“I remember the alternate reality,” she admitted. She waited for Adriana to stick out her tongue or sing an I-told-you-so, but neither happened. Kate went on. “It showed me the things I desired most. It showed me with my family; then it switched to a different me that was surrounded by hundreds of people that begged to be my friends, and then you,” she said looking at Rico. “It showed me you.”

Rico blushed and Adriana flashed a smile. She elbowed Rico and looked at Kate out of the corner of her eye. Rico muttered something to her that sounded like “stop it” and Adriana stopped grinning at him.

“I know that alternate realities are tangible. It’s out there somewhere. I know it is. I just want to know why Cole took me to that reality and not another one.”

“Is that all that you saw, Kate?” Adriana asked, knowing that Rico wouldn’t.

“Yes,” she said. She wasn’t ready to tell her friends about the burning world quite yet. It was easy for her to accept them for who they were; their deepest desires didn’t center on the world catching flame. She wasn’t sure what they would say when they found out about Kate’s hidden desires. She wondered, briefly, if it meant that she was the evil one here.

“Thank you for telling us, Kate. It was very brave of you,” Adriana said.

It would be braver of me to tell you everything
, Kate thought.

“Kate,” Adriana started, “Rico and I need to figure this out. Let me walk you home. We’ll contact you when we find some news. I promise.”

Kate nodded and let Adriana lead her home.

Once a
t home, Kate milled around the house, hanging out downstairs with her parents. She was beginning to appreciate them. She had parents, whereas Adriana and Rico had never had any. They were created, these gorgeous and immortal creatures, to appear as young adults their entire lives, but they were never given the opportunity to be children. They were never given the chance to fall in love and grow old together. Kate wondered vaguely if they could have children.

That night Kate lay in bed thinking about the dream she had the night before. She wondered if she could fall back into that dream world on purpose. She had to find out what it
was she wanted with the burning world. What did it mean? Was it actually going to happen or did it symbolize something?

Kate couldn’t shake the real connection she had with it. She had actually drawn it in the sand. The images that she saw in her dream were exact replicas; there were just more of them.

Kate also thought about the unknown demon, trying to pull details from the shadow that had grabbed her. She remembered that he was strong but didn’t have large muscles like Cole. She remembered his deep, rough voice, taunting her. She remembered feeling stubble press against her soft cheek, clawing and tearing at her delicate skin. Try as hard as she might, she still couldn’t put a face with that rough voice. Kate lay there exhausted. Her head hurt from thinking so much, and she let herself drift off into an uneasy slumber.

Kate was back. This time she found herself standing in the street in front of her house. She began to turn toward it but felt a pull from another direction. She began to walk toward Adriana’s house, assuming that the pull was going to take her there.