Before I Wake

soul in exchange for the one I now carry—the woman in the restroom.”

The dead woman was bait, chosen at random, to bring me to Avari. But why? “You want to trade my soul for hers?”

“Precisely.” The Heidi-thing leaned forward until her cheek brushed mine, and my heart stuttered to a stop. “I’ll tell you a secret,” she whispered into my ear, and I wondered what the shoppers would see, if one glanced at her then. Could they see her, and her malicious invasion of my personal space? Because they couldn’t see me. “I don’t think your noble streak runs that deep. I don’t think you’re willing to save a stranger’s soul at the expense of your own. Am I wrong?” She stepped back to look into my eyes, and hers were alight with vicious pleasure at my pain. “Will you suffer eternal torment in exchange for her peace?”

My chest tightened painfully. “You say that like it’s the only option, but we both know there’s another way.” My hand curled around the amphora hanging from my neck and I clutched it, wondering how my predecessors had met their true end. Had their souls been stolen? Were they now suffering in the Netherworld?

“Ah, the inevitable plan B.” Avari glanced at my fist, closed around the gold heart, and shook Heidi’s head slowly. “Like those who came before you, you are ill-equipped for the job. This isn’t as simple as taking a soul from a reaper. You’re going to need something more like this.”

The Heidi-thing held her hand between us. Lying across her palm was a very familiar double-bladed dagger. I gasped, so shocked it didn’t occur to me to run, and I only survived the next few seconds because Avari made no move to kill me.

I’d never carried a weapon before, and I’d only used one once. The night I killed my math teacher in self- defense. I knew that dagger by heart—after I was resurrected, it sat on my dresser for more than a month. Had he taken it from my room? When had he been in my room?

Chills ran the length of my spine and settled into my bones. “This is mine,” I whispered in shock.

The hellion in Heidi’s body looked distinctly amused. “That depends on how you define the concept of ownership.”

“I killed the incubus who killed me with this,” I insisted. “That makes it mine.”

The hellion’s manicured eyebrows rose. “I wrenched the metal from the ground and shaped it with my own hands, several of your human centuries ago, and it has been wielded by many other hands for many purposes since. But it always finds its way back to me eventually. Had I known yours was the soul that incubus intended to capture, I would never have sold him the blade.”

Because Avari wanted my soul for himself.

“Take it,” the hellion said with Heidi’s voice.

I picked up the dagger in a horrified mental fog, vaguely aware that Avari could kill me anytime he wanted, dagger or no dagger. Was I supposed to use it against him? If so, why would he give it to me?

The blood—both mine and Mr. Beck’s—had been scrubbed clean, but the hilt hummed in my palm with a familiar resonance, like a whispered echo of my own bean sidhe wail. Beck’s soul was still trapped inside, and it called to me every time I touched the hellion-forged steel.

“I don’t understand…” I said, and my voice sounded hollow.

“Yes, you do. You now hold the instrument that could have saved your predecessors’ lives. Surely you must have known this little confrontation could only end in violence.” Avari spread Heidi’s arms, offering her up for sacrifice. “Have it done, then. Slaughter the girl you failed to save.”

He wanted me to stab her. Him. Them—or whatever. He wanted me to shove my knife through flesh he’d proven to be solid and warm.

The dagger shook in my hand.

Heidi was already dead. I wouldn’t be killing her. Intellectually, I knew that. But this wasn’t self-defense. This wasn’t even a fair fight, because for no reason I could understand, Avari wasn’t trying to kill me.

“Ticktock, little bean sidhe. Kill me now, or the next blood I spill is on your hands. It might be her blood.” The Heidi-hellion glanced to the left, where a woman in a mall cop’s uniform walked past us in blissful ignorance. “Or his.” She nodded toward a boy not much older than me, in a fast-food restaurant uniform.

“Why would you let me kill you?” I whispered, tightening my grip on the dagger. I had no choice. I couldn’t let Avari kill again, nor could I let him leave with an innocent soul.

“Because you will suffer from this far more than I will,” Heidi whispered, and suddenly I understood. The hellion wouldn’t die just because his physical form did, but he would feed from my trauma. “Do it now, or I will take the small one.”

I followed his gaze and horror swallowed me whole when I found a toddler holding her mother’s hand, clutching a star-shaped Mylar balloon in the other.

“How many souls do you intend to reclaim today, Ms. Cavanaugh?” the Heidi-thing said, already inching toward the mother and child. “The choice is yours.”

Stab Avari and capture the soul he’d stolen in the dagger he’d forged, or abandon that soul and let an innocent child die.

There was really no choice at all.

I sucked in a deep breath and swallowed a sob, tightening my grip on the dagger. I tore my gaze from the toddler and stared into Heidi’s eyes, trying to see Avari staring back at me. Tears rolled down my cheeks. I shoved the double blades deep into Heidi’s stomach. Warm blood leaked sluggishly onto my hand, slower than what had flowed from Beck’s chest, but just as warm, and red, and gruesome.

Her eyes widened and she made a strangled sound of pain. “That truly hurts,” the hellion whispered, with a rare note of surprise. A silver bracelet slid down her arm as she grasped my shoulder for balance, hunched over my knife. “How extraordinary.”

I couldn’t hold her up, so we both fell, and distantly I noticed that no one rushed to help her. As solid and real as she was, they couldn’t see her, just like they couldn’t see me.

Heidi sprawled on the floor beneath me, her jaw clenched in pain, her gaze glued to mine as the hellion swallowed my agony, along with his own.

I didn’t want to spill blood. I didn’t want to fight hellions. I didn’t want to watch people die.

As I blinked through my own horrified tears, a colorless, shapeless haze leaked from Heidi and curled around the dagger, soaking into the hellion-forged steel like water pulled up into a sponge dropped into a puddle.

Her soul. Or maybe the soul of the woman Avari killed.

“Until we meet again,” the demon whispered with a dead girl’s voice. “And, Ms. Cavanaugh, next time it won’t be a stranger.”

His words sent fresh terror through me as I watched, paralyzed by the true pain racking the hellion’s borrowed features. The last of the soul soaked into the dagger and Heidi began to fade from existence, like a shadow dying slowly with the rising of the sun. When she was gone, I still held the double-bladed knife, on my knees on the second floor of the mall.

All that remained of Heidi Anderson was the blood on my knife and a dark bit of smoke where she’d lain, like the Nether-fog that constantly churned between worlds. And as I watched, breathing slowly through my own horror, that dark smudge of…something…began to fade into nothing, just like Heidi’s body had.

On the floor, where she’d been, lay the bracelet she’d been wearing moments earlier. And on the night she’d died.

11

“KAYLEE?” TOD RACED across the E.R. waiting room toward me, dodging chairs but running right through patients. “What happened? Are you okay?”

The dagger slipped from my grip and clattered to the floor as he reached me, and several people turned to stare at the strange, bloody knife that had appeared out of nowhere, from their perspective.

Tod bent to snatch it, and the onlookers’ eyes widened as the dagger disappeared from their sight. Several blinked and shuffled slowly toward the drops of blood still on the floor, the only evidence that they hadn’t imagined the whole thing. Several looked scared. Several more looked confused.