Maybe we didn’t belong together….
“It’s like mental anesthesia,” he continued, pleading with me silently to understand. “The things that used to hurt…” He shrugged. “Now they’re just…numb.”
“Numbness is a mercy?” What kind of screwed-up perspective was that? “Do you have any idea what I’d give for more memories of my mother, Nash? What I’d give to remember how she lived, and what it felt like when she died? And you’re just throwing your past away!”
“It’s not like that.” He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, in spite of the cold, sharp air. “I’m not losing the memories. They’re still there.”
“What does that matter, if you can’t feel them?” I’d never felt so frustrated or disappointed in my entire life. How could he let Avari have such an important part of himself?
Nash sighed again, and the small slip of air through his lips conveyed a devastating weight of hopelessness. Of despair. “It was the only acceptable price, Kaylee. It’s all I was willing to part with. And you’d understand if you knew what he really wanted from me.”
His soul? His blood? His service? That time I didn’t ask. Those were all unacceptable prices for me, but I’d never been in his position. What might I have given to save myself from the Creeper toxin, if we hadn’t made it back to the human world in time? Certainly not my soul. But would I have given my memory-emotions in exchange for my life?
Depends on the memories in question…
“What memories, Nash?” I demanded, suddenly afraid that he’d set no limits on what Avari could take. “Potty training? Pulling your first tooth? Your first independent bike ride? What did you lose?”
He shook his head slowly. “The most intense,” he admitted finally. “Only the ones with real value to me have value to him.”
I took a deep, cold breath and it caught in my throat, stuck behind a sob. “Us?” I closed my eyes, blinking back tears when I remembered all the times in the past few days when his irises had abruptly gone still instead of swirling with emotion. Had he been remembering something all those times? Trying to feel what used to be there?
“Do you still feel what you felt when we met? At Taboo?” I stepped closer for a better look at his eyes, testing the most painful theory I’d ever explored. “When you calmed me so I wouldn’t scream? When you figured out what I was? That I was like you?”
His eyes swam in tears, but his irises held painfully steady. Not so much as a twitch of color shifting in the browns and greens I’d always loved.
I swallowed thickly. “Kissing me for the first time?”
Nash closed his eyes to keep me from seeing the truth, and a whip of anger coiled tightly around my spine. No! How could he give that away? Did my most precious memories mean less to him than his next high?
What else had he sold?
“Your dad dying? Tod dying? Do you feel what you felt when I was dying?” I demanded at last, and when he shook his head, tears slipping from closed eyes, I’d had all I could take.
“It’s all gone, Kaylee.”
And so was I.
I shrugged out of his jacket and dropped it on the brick patio, gasping out loud when the cold hit me full force. The roar of my pulse in my ears drowned out the noise from the party as I ran across the stone path toward the quaint wooden gate.
“Kaylee, please…” Nash’s whisper hit my back with a last, desperate surge of Influence, but I stiffened my spine and kept going. I was too devastated by my own loss—the boyfriend who remembered why he loved me—to worry about his.
I swiped scalding tears from my frozen cheeks when I stopped to shove the gate open and was jogging again by the time I rounded the front corner of the house, headed for my car. And for my human best friend, who would soothe me with junk food, though she could never understand the source of my pain.
But bleak panic hit the moment I spotted my car, two blocks down the street. The instant I saw the form leaning against my front passenger’s side door, that familiar dark terror wound its way around my spine, sending thick, hot fingers toward the base of my throat.
The beam from a streetlight shone on the bright red balloon clasped between two pale hands, but darkness slanted across their owner’s broad torso, leaving the face obscured. Why had Emma left the balloon unattended?
“Kaylee, are you okay?” Emma asked, and I whirled to see her close Doug’s front door, already jogging down the steps toward me, wearing her jacket now. “Where’s Nash?”
I shook my head and clenched my jaw shut, unable to answer her without screaming as the death wail took me over. It wrapped around my throat like a thorn-spiked glove, and I tasted blood on the back of my tongue. This premonition was strong; he would die very, very soon.
I glanced pointedly from Emma to my car, trying to guide her gaze. To speak to her with only my eyes. But she wasn’t Nash. She didn’t understand.
“What’s wrong, Kaylee?”
Frustrated, I turned my back on her and ran for my car, racing toward death for the first time ever, because this time my effort wasn’t pointless. Nash had said deaths caused by Netherworld elements were unscripted, so whoever he was, if Demon’s Breath was the problem, I could save him—if I got there in time.
I’d just passed the dark, silent house next door when the old wooden gate squealed open again and winter-dead grass crunched under someone’s feet. “What’s wrong?” Nash called out behind me.
“I don’t know!” Emma shouted as his steps pounded after us. “She won’t tell me!”
And that was enough for Nash.
“Kaylee, stop!” he yelled, even as he raced after me. “Wait!” But I couldn’t stop. I’d let Nash down. I’d let Scott down. But I could save this one.
Thirty feet. My nose dripped, and my throat burned.
“Stay here,” Nash ordered Emma, but his footsteps never slowed. “Kaylee, stop!”
Twenty feet. The form against my car came into focus, his features coalescing in the swirling shadows to form a face I recognized. He raised the balloon. The weighted clip hit the ground.
Ten feet. My jaws ached from being clenched. My throat felt like I’d swallowed razors from holding back his soul song. My hands clenched into fists at my sides, pumping as I ran. And now I could hear him.
“Hudson, you’ve been holdin’ out on me!” His smile was joyous. Relieved. Uncomprehending. “I’ll pay you back….”
“No!” Nash shouted behind me, but I didn’t turn. There was no time. “It’s too strong!”
But Doug put the balloon to his mouth, anyway, and drew in a long, deep breath.
He smiled, even as he began to convulse….
17
“NO!” NASH YELLED AGAIN, and in the next instant, time seemed to shift into fast-forward. My world hurtled through space and time so quickly my head spun and the neighborhood around me swam in and out of focus.
Doug shook violently and fell against the car. Strands of shaggy brown hair flopped into his wide, empty eyes. His hands seized around the balloon. Demon’s Breath burst from it in a frosty white vapor. I skidded to a stop two feet from him, one hand over my mouth to hold the scream back. But I was out of breath and couldn’t help sucking in air through my nose to satisfy my abused lungs.
Strong hands grabbed my arms from behind, lifting me. The world spun around me as I inhaled. The air I pulled in was clear and cold. And clean. The hands shoved me forward and I stumbled onto the neighbor’s yard, my feet barely brushing the ground.
I fell facedown on cold, dead grass, recently sprayed green with fertilizer. My graceless landing jarred my mouth open, and the scream ripped free from my throat, calling out to Doug’s soul as it prepared to leave his body.