“You don’t belong,” a voice said from behind me.
I spun around, fear crawling up my throat. My heart pounded in my chest, reminding me it was still alive and fighting. Adrenaline surged through my veins. There was a boy behind me. Maybe twelve, thirteen. His skin was too white. Purple bruises painted the hollow of his cheeks and under his eyes. A gaping gash split the side of his face. He looked like a character in a Tim Burton film.
“What do you want?”
He stepped forward and a dull shimmer rippled in the air around him.
“What are you?” He cocked his head to the side and shoved his hands into the pockets of his jean shorts.
I couldn’t hold the laugh in. That laugh was the last of my sanity leaving my body, crawling across my lips to escape. “Me? What the hell are you?”
“You don’t belong,” he said again. His voice sounded like static. He sounded like a dream. Or more like a nightmare. Like I needed more of those while I was awake. I pinched myself just to make sure I wasn’t passed out at my desk in Mr. Reynolds’s class. God, what I wouldn’t give to wake up in a puddle of my own drool on a cold desktop right now, but I didn’t. This was as awake as I was going to get.
“I…I don’t belong where?” I asked, pressing my tailbone against the sink. “What the hell are you talking about?”
The boy looked sad. His lips looked all blue, cracked and pulled down at the corners. He started to shake. “Not him,” he whispered.
“What? What is it?”
His frightened gaze was glued to the spot over my shoulder as he stumbled back. Someone sighed behind me and I turned around to find Noah. His ash-blond hair was flipped down over one eye and a feral scowl curled his lips.
“Great.” He leaned back against the row of sinks, shoving his hands into his coat pockets. “Now I’m going to have to chase him. Thanks for that.”
I looked over my shoulder to find the kid, and he…was gone. Just like that. The air was empty and cold. Absent of anything but me, Noah, and the stale scent of cigarette smoke and Pine-Sol.
“Why would you chase him?” I asked, stepping away to put some distance between us, thinking about the terrified look on that kid’s face the second he laid eyes on Noah. It was like he’d seen him before. The soul Anaya had taken hadn’t looked like that. If anything she’d looked…grateful. Even the one being shipped off to the Inbetween had looked confused more than anything, but not scared.
He folded his arms across his chest and his sleeves rode up enough to see a spiderwebbed map of black veins.
“If you’re here to help him, shouldn’t he be chasing you?”
“She’s getting to you, isn’t she?” he said. “You get that you’re falling right into the trap they have set for you, right? She lets you feel her up, tells you a few lies, and now you’re second-guessing everything I’m offering you.”
I clenched my fist and my knuckles cracked. I wanted to lay him out, but he was right. Anaya was getting to me. Hell, she was more than getting to me. She was consuming me.
“I’m not falling in anybody’s trap,” I snapped. “I’m just confused, all right?”
Noah nodded and kicked the back of his boot against the wall to knock what looked like a fine layer of ash off it. “You have questions? Ask them. I’m not here to lie to you, Cash. I’m here to help. I wish you could trust that.”
There was something inside me telling me that trusting him was the last thing I should do, a whisper that was getting louder every minute I spent with Anaya. But was it enough? Anaya was the one keeping something from me. I could see it in her eyes, a painful regret that took over every time I asked her about my future. Every time I touched her. I couldn’t stop myself from wanting her. That went beyond anything I could control, but trusting her? That was something else.
Noah, on the other hand, wasn’t holding anything back. He was an open book. If he had the answer he would give it. And whether I wanted to admit it or not, we were the same. I may not know how either of us got to be this way, but here we were, like two halves of a whole. Even now, standing a few feet from him, something dark pulsed in my veins, turning the blood almost black under my dying skin. I wanted to believe that Noah was good because that meant I’d be good, too, but I didn’t know anymore.
“I saw her take a soul,” I admitted, looking up from my wrist. “It didn’t look how you described it.
It was messed up, but it wasn’t all bad. There was another side.”
Noah laughed. “Did she show you what they do to the lost? The ones like I take? The ones they let rot until they are nothing more than a starving shadow with absolutely no recollection of who they once were?”
I shook my head, not knowing what to trust or what to believe. There was more than one side to this.
“Yes, there is another side. A better side. But do you actually think that you are going to get to have any part of that perfect, pretty peace you saw?” He laughed. “No. If Balthazar doesn’t destroy you once you’re free from that body—and that’s a big if—you won’t be delivering happy souls to some peaceful, perfect existence. You’ll be turning them into that.”
Noah pointed to a shadow that was swirling out from under a bathroom stall, a sickening hiss seeping from its belly. Before I could look away, three more followed, churning the fear in my gut until it bubbled up into my throat.
“Every soul you touch will rot,” he whispered, stepping closer. “You will be hated. You will be feared. You will be the very thing inside of you that you’re trying to fight. Don’t let one pretty face trap you into that kind of existence.”
I didn’t want to believe what he was telling me, but it made sense. Why the fuck did this have to be so hard? The feelings inside me that were building for Anaya, the connection that had nothing to do with attraction, it was twisting everything that should have been clear.
“I’m offering you friendship,” Noah said, sounding deflated. “I’m offering you a kind of immortality they will deny you. The chance to do something good in this world.”
Noah clasped a hand over my shoulder and the chill from his skin seeped through my T-shirt, bringing the brigade of goose bumps on my arms to attention. If it was possible, he was even colder than me. A bell rattled out in the hall, starting the countdown until students would start to rush through that door.
“Just think about it,” he said. “I’ll see you soon.”
The touch on my shoulder disappeared and when I turned around, Noah was nowhere to be seen.
Once again he’d left me not knowing what the hell to think or believe. Out of the corner of my eye, a flash of blue hovered behind an open bathroom stall.
“Hello?”
The kid who had taken off when Noah showed up crept out from behind its edge. “Is he gone?”
I nodded, not really knowing what to make of this kid who was obviously dead, or the fact that I was having a conversation with him. “Why are you afraid of him? He just wants to help you.”
The boy vigorously shook his head and wrapped his little arms around his middle. “The souls that go with him never come back,” he whispered. “He takes them down there.”
I knelt down in front of him, not wanting him to be afraid of me. I needed him to go on. “Down where?”
His gaze drifted to the shadow demons that were now hissing and snapping behind me. The kid backed up and they inched closer. “Down to them,” he finally answered before disappearing through the wall like a puff of blue smoke. The three shadows behind me zipped past in a black blur as they chased after him and I tripped over my own feet trying to stand up.
What had he meant that Noah took them down to them? As in, he delivered them to the shadow demons? That didn’t make any sense. He couldn’t know what he was talking about, could he? Maybe he had Noah confused with a reaper. You couldn’t really tell the difference after all.