Tod led me toward an empty hall without even a glance at them.
“Kaylee. Are you hurt?” He took a step back to look me over, but I couldn’t see anything except my own right hand, still trembling and covered in blood. And Heidi’s bracelet, clenched in my left fist.
“I’m fine,” I whispered, only vaguely frightened by the pitiful sound of my own voice, like a mere echo of my thoughts. “It’s not my blood. I killed her.”
“Who? Who did you kill, Kaylee?”
“Heidi,” I said as he led me down the hall toward an empty grouping of chairs near the radiology department. “Only she was already dead, so it wasn’t really her. It was Avari. But he didn’t really die. I don’t think he can, but I killed him, and now she’s gone but he’s not, and her blood is literally on my hands.” I held my hand out to show him, and that’s when I noticed that my shirt was soaked in it, too. “And there was this bracelet on the floor.”
“Okay, you’re not making any sense, but you
Before I could pull together enough focus to blink myself out of the hospital, Tod did the work for us both. We appeared in my living room, and he tugged me toward the hall and into the bathroom. He lowered the toilet lid and turned on the sink faucet. “Sit down, and let’s get you cleaned up.”
“I’m sorry,” I said as he set the bloody dagger on the countertop and rummaged beneath the sink for a clean rag. “I didn’t mean to go to the hospital. I was just standing in the mall, holding a bloody knife, wishing you were there, and the next thing I knew, I was in the E.R.”
“No better place to be, when you’re covered in blood,” he said, running tap water over his fingers in the sink, to check the temperature.
“This is better.” I glanced around the bathroom, but my gaze was drawn to him as my hands turned the bracelet in aimless circles.
When the water was warm enough, he held the rag beneath it, then turned the faucet off and wrung the rag out. It steamed from the hot water.
Tod sat on the edge of the tub and turned me by my knees to face him. I closed my eyes, and more tears fell. Behind my eyelids, I saw Heidi as she’d been in the club seven months ago. Right before she’d died. She’d danced and people had watched her. She’d glowed with youth and beauty—the very vitality that had nominated her for death by the rogue reaper who’d killed her and stolen her soul.
“What happened?” Tod asked, and I gasped when I felt the warm rag on my cheek.
I opened my eyes as he wiped away my tears, and his blue-eyed gaze chased away thoughts of blood, and death, and the horrible, visceral resistance Heidi’s very solid flesh had presented against my dagger. The images were still there, but they were memories now instead of moments extracted from time, playing over and over in my head and behind my eyelids.
“The soul thief killed again.” I set the bracelet on the edge of the tub, then cradled my bloody hand in my clean one, resting on my leg. “Madeline said I had to go get the soul. It had to be me, because there’s no one else left. I’m the last one.” I could hear the uplift of panic in my voice on the last word.
Tod picked up my bloodied right hand and began to wipe my palm clean, slowly. And the panic eased again. The chaos raging inside my head and my heart couldn’t survive the calm, rhythmic strokes of the warm rag as it cleaned away all evidence of what I’d done. What I’d had to do.
“What happened to the other extractors?” he asked, and his voice was like his hands. Steady. Too strong and measured to give in to confusion.
“Avari killed them. He’s the soul thief, but I don’t know what he’s doing. Or how he’s doing it. Or why he didn’t kill me.”
“How could he steal souls from the Netherworld? How would he have killed you from across the barrier? Please tell me you didn’t cross over…?” he said, rotating my hand to wipe my knuckles clean.
“No. I was at the mall—the version in our world. But he was there, wearing a dead girl’s skin like he wore Scott’s. It’s not possession, Tod. He was really there, in the flesh. Just, not his own flesh.”
Tod set my hand back in my lap and frowned at me, and the twists of color in his irises deepened in hue as his concern grew. “Could people see him?”
“Not when I was there, but he killed a woman in the bathroom. Like, physically killed her. And I touched him. He was solid. Flesh and blood.” I held my hand up for emphasis, though most of the evidence was now on the rag, which he was rinsing in the sink again. “He said that if I didn’t kill him—he called it sacrificing the pawn—he’d kill this little girl who was there with her mother. And it would be my fault. So I had to stab him. I had to kill Heidi… .”
The tears were back, and I couldn’t stop them.
“Who’s Heidi?”
“The dead girl. She’s been dead for months, but he looked just like her. Clothes and all, just like the night she died. But when I stabbed her and she disappeared, that didn’t.” I glanced at the bracelet on the counter.
Tod studied it, then laid it on the edge of the sink again. “I have no idea what that means.”
“Me, neither.”
“And you’re sure she’s not just undead?” He sat on the tub again and started wiping the remaining blood from my hand.
“I’m sure. He said she was rotting in her grave, and hellions can’t lie. They can’t possess the dead, either, right?” Which was the only real bright side to my new state of being.
“Right.” Tod frowned and draped the rag over the edge of the tub to his left. “So, he took a corporeal form that looked and felt like a girl who’s been dead for months. And the other day he took a corporeal form that looked like Scott, at least twelve hours after he died.”
“Yeah. It makes no sense. It’s like he’s cloning dead people and possessing them, but that’s not possible, is it?”
The reaper shrugged. “I’m not ready to call anything truly impossible at this point, but that doesn’t sound very likely, does it?”
“No. He’s killing people, Tod. He says people are his pawns, and the world is full of them, and he’ll kill as many as it takes.”
“As many as it takes for what?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that he acted like Avari, but he looked and sounded like a girl I saw once, and I had to kill her. He
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t keep killing people, even if they weren’t really people, because killing not-Heidi had felt like murder. And Avari knew that.
Tod took my hands and looked straight into my eyes. “It’s not murder, Kaylee. You didn’t kill a person, you killed a demon. And you saved a little girl’s life in the process.”
“I know.” But it didn’t feel like I’d saved anything. The woman in the bathroom was still dead, and she’d suffer the postmortem indignity of being found propped up on a public toilet. It was hard to feel like I’d done anything right at all, knowing that.
“Let’s get your shirt off,” he said. “I think we’re going to have to call this one a total loss.”
I glanced down in surprise. I’d forgotten about the blood drying stiff on my clothes. That was two ruined shirts in two days.
“How can there be blood?” I demanded, staring down at the evidence of what I’d done. “Do hellions bleed?” Their breath was toxic and addictive. There’s no telling what random evil properties their blood had.
“I don’t think this is hellion blood,” Tod said, staring at my top button. “A hellion can’t physically cross the world barrier, so whatever flesh he was wearing wasn’t his own. It wasn’t Netherworld in origin. Which means the blood isn’t, either.”
“Then what did I kill?” My words lacked volume because I hadn’t taken in enough air to give them voice. Because I could hardly comprehend the question I’d just asked. That was the root of the problem. How could it not be murder, if there was blood? And if it was murder, what did I kill?
“I don’t know what you killed,” Tod admitted, and that cold horror began to unfurl within me again. “But I know it was evil. You did what had to be done, Kaylee, and you saved lives.”
