Soul Screamers Volume Four: With All My Soul\Fearless\Niederwald\Last Request: 4 (27 page)

I could only shrug. “I don’t know.”

“And didn’t you say he could have killed you and Tod right before you crossed over?” Em said. “But he didn’t?”

“Because he doesn’t want me dead,” I tried to explain. “Well, no deader than I already am. He wants to...” I didn’t know how to say the rest of it, and I didn’t really want to hear it, even from my own mouth.

“He wants to take his time with her,” Tod said, and hearing it in his voice wasn’t much better. “He wants to take her apart at his leisure before eventually discarding her body and continuing with just her soul. He has eternity, remember? That’s a lot of time to kill, which means he has more patience than we do. And he knows how to make his toys last.”

“That may be the creepiest thing I’ve ever heard,” Luca whispered. “And that’s coming from someone who sees dead people on a daily basis.”

“Agreed,” I said, and Tod gave my hand a sympathetic squeeze.

“Hey, you guys, there’s something in her pocket,” Nash called from the living room. We all turned as he stepped into the kitchen. “I just noticed it sticking out.” He unfolded the piece of paper and spread it out on the island in front of us.

It was a note. One line.

Tag. You’re it.

Chapter Sixteen

“How is she?” I sat on the edge of my desk, and Nash answered without looking up. Without letting go of the fingers sticking out of Sabine’s cast.

“About the same. A little less swollen.” He’d rolled my desk chair next to her bed—my bed, technically—more than an hour ago and hadn’t moved since. “But she’s not waking up, and I can’t figure that out. When you got pricked, you didn’t lose consciousness.”

“Yeah, but she got at least three times the venom I got.” I shrugged, aiming for casual with the gesture. As if I wasn’t almost as worried as he was. “I’m sure she’ll be fine. She’ll wake up soon.”
I hope.
“And you know what? The fact that she’s not moving is kind of a blessing. With the dose of venom she got, if she’d been up moving around like I was after I got pricked—” I’d had no idea what creeper venom could do, at the time “—her heart would’ve beat faster, pumping poison all over her body.” Another casual shrug. “Instead, it looks pretty localized, and I’d call that a stroke of good luck.”

Unless...
I frowned at the thought drawing into focus.
Unless it wasn’t the creeper venom, but something Avari did that rendered Sabine unconscious.
In which case, he’d actually saved her life. Or at least prolonged it.

My private frown deepened, but Nash didn’t notice. He was watching Sabine again.

Why would Avari do that? Why would he poison her, then make sure she lasted long enough to... To what?

Normally I’d guess that he wanted to extend her suffering, but she was unconscious. How much pain could she possibly feel?

Was he trying to make sure she’d last long enough to be found?

Suddenly Sabine’s lack of consciousness scared me almost as much as her swollen skin and the thin puss oozing from every pinprick hole in her arm and legs. What the
hell
was Avari up to?

“Yeah, I’m trying to look at the bright side,” Nash said, clearly oblivious to the turn my own thoughts had taken. “She’s due for another shot in a couple of hours, and after that, she should get better pretty quickly. If she hasn’t woken up by then, though, I claim the right to completely freak out.”

“And I fully support that right. Here.” I pushed away from my desk and handed him the carton of fried rice I’d brought from the kitchen, with a fork sticking up straight from the center. I didn’t know whether or not he could use chopsticks, but I knew Tod could not. At all. “You should eat.”

“Thanks.” He took the carton and glanced at me, but then turned back to Sabine. I headed for the hall to give him space, but when he spoke, I stopped, one hand on the doorknob. “What if she dies?”

I let go of the door and turned around. “She’s not going to die.”

“But what if she does? What if she dies without ever waking up, and I don’t get the chance to tell her...all the things I need to say? All the things she needs to hear?” He exhaled slowly, and I could practically see his optimism die. “I’ve wasted
so
much time. And
so
many words. What if I don’t get the chance to make it right?”

He was looking at me now, as if I might have the answer. As if I
had
to have the answer. “Do you love her?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry, but I don’t think I ever really stopped. I just didn’t realize it until she came back and made me remember...everything we had. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t love you, too....”

I actually laughed, just a little, over the irony. I couldn’t help it. “You don’t have to apologize to me for loving your girlfriend, Nash. In fact, don’t
ever
apologize for loving someone. Just make sure that when she wakes up—and she
will
wake up—you tell her what you just told me.”

The door squeaked open at my back, and Tod stepped into the room. We’d both been making an effort to stay corporeal when we weren’t alone, for everyone else’s benefit. “Any change?” he asked with a concerned glance in Sabine’s direction.

“Nothing yet.” Nash cleared his throat nervously, and I realized what he was about to say just a second too late to prevent it. “While you’re here, I...um...I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”

Tod crossed both arms over his short-sleeved tee. “What did you do now?”

“Nothing. Nothing recent, anyway.”

“Then what are you sorry for?”

Crap, crap, crap!
I’d wanted to warn Tod that I’d broken my promise....

“Everything. I’m sorry for everything.” Nash shoved his hands in his pockets and stared at the ground for a second. When he looked up, I could see him struggling to hide the conflicting emotions stirring in his irises. “You should have told me what really happened. I could have handled it. But that’s not the point.” He took another deep breath, and I saw Tod’s posture slowly start to relax, though he didn’t uncross his arms. “What I’m trying to say is that what you did for me means something. It means
everything.
And I’m so damn sorry for wasting it.”

Tod blinked. Then he turned to me, his irises as still as I’d ever seen them. “You told him?”

“I’m sorry. It just kind of...came out. But, Tod, he needed to know. He
deserves
to know.”

“Why didn’t
you
tell me?” Nash said, and Tod turned back to him, struggling to keep a lid on what he was feeling. Locking us both out.

“Because I didn’t want it to be like this. I didn’t want you to think you owed me something. I didn’t want you to feel like you had to live your life like I would have lived mine. I wanted you to live your own way.”

“My way is
stupid,
Tod. Stupid and reckless.”

“I know.” The reaper finally cracked a small smile. “I knew that going into it. But stupid and reckless can be outgrown—death can’t.” Tod shoved that single, errant curl back from his forehead, and suddenly he looked serious again. “You’re smart enough to be someone important. To do something good. But you weren’t going to do any of that from a hole in the ground.” He shrugged. “When you died, I realized that the most important thing I could ever do with my life was to make sure you’d keep living yours.”

“You are so full of shit,” Nash said. Then he threw his arms around his brother, and their long-overdue fraternal hug blurred beneath my tears—the first happy ones I’d shed in ages.

* * *

“Well,
you’ve
had a busy day.” Tod sank onto the couch next to me with two glasses of soda and handed me one of them.

“Thanks.” I took a drink, then made myself meet his gaze. “I’m sorry I told your secret. I was going to tell you as soon as you got back, but then Sabine was hurt, and there just hasn’t been much of a break since then.” I sipped from the glass he gave me, then held it, letting condensation drip down my fingers.

Tod shrugged, and I noticed a mischievous tilt in the corners of his beautiful mouth. “I planned to tell him eventually anyway, but according to the official Big Mouth code of honor, you now owe me a new secret.” He took my glass and set it on the coffee table next to his, then took my cold, damp hand in his warm one. “That’s the only way to restore the balance of information in this relationship.”

“You already know everything worth knowing about me.”

His fingers threaded with mine and he leaned so close I could feel his breath on my ear. “You don’t have to
tell
me a new secret.” His intimate whisper echoed through me in all the best places. “You have to help me
make
one.”

My eyes widened. “Here? Now?” I frowned, trying to ignore the cravings that just being so close to him awoke in me. “Just because we
can
be invisible and inaudible doesn’t mean—”

Tod laughed, and Emma glanced our way from the kitchen, then turned back to the brainstorming session she, Luca, and Sophie were sharing. “Not now,” he whispered. “But soon. You have a
big
secret to replace, so put on your thinking cap. And just FYI, that’s the only article of clothing this particular process requires....”

I groaned as his lips grazed my neck and his hand tightened around mine. “This kind of makes me want to tell
all
your secrets.”

“Then we’d have even more to make up for.” His mouth trailed toward the hollow of my collarbone. “It’s a vicious, beautiful cycle.”

With another reluctant groan, I took his chin and pulled him back up to eye level. “That vicious, beautiful cycle is going to have to wait. We have nosy friends and missing parents.”

“That’s kind of my point.” The heat in his eyes was suddenly overwhelmed by pale blue twists of a deeper urgency. “Watching Nash watch Sabine makes me think we should all stop waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

“For anything. If we have something to say, we should say it. If we have something to do, we should do it.”

I rubbed the sudden chill bumps on my arms. “Because we might not get another chance?”

“Exactly.”

“That’s depressing.”

“Or liberating. If you think about it like that, we have no reason
not
to do whatever we want, right this minute. In fact, we have a
responsibility
to enjoy the time we have together, in case we’re about to lose that chance.” Tod’s brows rose, and that heat was back in his eyes in spite of ominous undertones I couldn’t quite dismiss.

“You do realize you’re just trying to justify your impulse-control issues, right?”

“I think it’s working.” His hand slid over my stomach and curled around my hip, and I caught my breath. “Can you guess what kind of impulse I’m not controlling right now?”

“I think we can all guess.” Em sank into my dad’s recliner across the coffee table from us. “So rein it in before my inner syphon decides your hormonal excess needs to be balanced. I don’t think
any
of us want to see that happen.”

Sophie dropped into the armchair in the corner. “I’ve never heard a truer statement.”

“I’ve got a few more true statements for you,” Tod mumbled, and I elbowed him, but not as hard as I probably should have. Her dad was missing, too.

“Any change with Sabine?” Luca said on his way in from the kitchen.

“No.” I turned to Tod, looking into his eyes for the guilt he no doubt saw in mine. “We shouldn’t have let her go. This is our fault.”

“Kaylee, Sabine is stronger and more independent than anyone else I know. Other than you and my mom, of course.” He squeezed my hand, holding my gaze. “She had as good a chance of walking out of there unhurt as any of us. Better than several of us.”

“Except that she didn’t. And there’s no telling how long we left her like that, tied to the ground, being poisoned, because we expected her to take longer than we would.” Because she actually had to drive to and from the crossover site.

“We did the best we could. Now we need to figure out our next move.”

I shrugged. “We keep looking. But this time, just the two of us.” I wasn’t going to put Sophie in danger of what had happened to Sabine. “Agreed?” I glanced around the room and was rewarded with three nodding heads.

“Yeah,” Tod said. “And this time I think we should go together.”

“Sophie, what do you have for us?”

“Oh. Just a second.” She headed into the kitchen and a chair scraped the floor, then she was back a second later with a small spiral notebook.

“Okay, here goes.” Sophie sat on the arm of Luca’s chair, staring at her notes, and his arm snaked around her. “My dad likes to go camping, remember?” she said, and I nodded. “He’s gone every fall as far back as I can remember, and last month he finally told me that those camping trips are usually retreats with my brothers.”

My uncle had grown sons from a marriage that had ended with the death of his first wife, nearly a century ago—a fact that continued to blow my mind every time I thought about it.

“And they’ve been going on these retreats into nature since before most modern camping conveniences were invented,” Sophie continued. “So I figure he knows how to live off the land, at least a little. He can find shelter and tie knots and fish without a pole, for sure, though I have no idea how handy those skills will be in the Netherworld. Personally, I think his best bet is to get inside, assuming that most buildings won’t be as heavily populated as the Netherworld version of our school is.”

“I truly hope they’re not.” And there was a decent chance of that, because Avari had drawn the current Netherworld populace of our school into the building by living there himself, like some kind of demonic landlord.

“We’re kind of assuming he’d forgo the buildings closest to the hospital, because those would be the first place Avari and his monster horde would look,” Luca said. “But he wouldn’t go too far, because your mom—” he glanced at Tod “—will start to feel heavy after a while.”

“And we have a general direction, based on the blood trail and rags Tod found, right?” Em said.