Soul Screamers Collection. Rachel Vincent

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СКАЧАТЬ She smiled in thanks when Tod draped the blanket over her lap and tucked it around her sides. “I just don’t want to think about what I did. About what I let him do.”

      I nodded sympathetically, and Nash cleared his throat. “Okay, so he kissed you …?”

      “Yeah, only it wasn’t really a kiss.” Addison leaned forward to sip from her can, then set it on the table and pulled the blanker tighter around herself. “His mouth opened, and he … sucked on me.”

      “He sucked on you?” I repeated, confused by her phrasing. “Isn’t that kind of what a kiss is?” Unless I’ve been doing it all wrong …

      Her teeth began to chatter, and it took obvious effort for her to speak clearly. “He sucked on me like I was a human Popsicle, and it felt like I’d swallowed a hurricane. Like he’d stirred something up, and I could feel it whipping around inside me. Then it just went. through my lips and into him.”

      Wow. Hellions suck. Literally.

      “When it was over, I was cold on the inside. I was shaking so badly I could hardly stand. I felt so empty I thought my body would collapse in on itself, like I was a vacuum that couldn’t be filled. I knew then that I’d made a mistake. But it was too late.”

      Addy leaned forward to pick up her can again, but it shook violently in her hands and sloshed soda over the sides. She set it down in disgust and pressed her hands together between her knees, trying in vain to stop shivering. “The man—the hellion—just stepped back and licked his lips, like I tasted good. He smiled at me, and I felt dirty. Like I could scrub for hours and never get rid of his filth.” Her hands rubbed at her jeans again, pressing so hard her fingers went white. “Then he leaned down and kissed me again, only this time he exhaled into my mouth, and his breath felt thick and heavy.”

      She paused and closed her eyes, rubbing her face roughly as if to wipe the memory from her mind. But it wouldn’t go. I knew that from experience. The worst memories stick with us, while the nice ones always seem to slip through our fingers.

      “I’d thought I was cold before, but that was nothing compared to being filled with his breath. Filled with him. The demon took part of me and left part of himself in its place. I could feel him rolling through me. Exploring me from the inside, so cold he burned every part of me he touched. The first few times I exhaled, my breath was white, like in the middle of winter. My teeth chattered for two days afterward. But the worst was the chill.” She shuddered and clutched the blanket tighter. “That awful, hollow cold, swallowing me from the inside out.”

      “When did that go away?” I asked, my voice so soft and horrified I barely heard it.

      Addison looked at me and smiled softly, her expression empty, and all the creepier for that fact. Then she reached up with one hand and pulled her left eyelid up. With her free hand, she pinched the front of her eye, and something fell out onto her palm.

      “When did the chill fade?” She blinked then, and when she looked at me, I saw that without her contact lens, her left eye was solid white, with no pupil and no iris. “It never did.”

       8

      “WHOA.” Nash leaned closer for a better view, as my heart leaped into my throat. And if I weren’t busy being horrified by Addison’s featureless eye, I might have been surprised by his fearless curiosity. “The demon did that to your eye?”

      Addison nodded. “Both of them.” She held out her hand so we could see the small, curved, plastic disk cradled in her palm. It was too big to be a regular contact lens, and she must have seen my confusion. “Demon technology. Dekker provides them, to make us look normal.”

      My pulse still racing uneasily, I leaned over for a better look and noticed that the lens was detailed with the specifics of a human eye. Addison’s eerie pale blue iris was right there in her palm, surrounding a pinpoint black pupil.

      “The pupils even dilate and constrict, depending on the amount of light in the room.” She smiled bitterly and blinked with a creepy, mismatched set of eyes. “Don’tcha just love foreign technology?”

      I had no answer for that, and hoped she was being ironic. I wasn’t particularly fond of technology that allowed elements of the Netherworld to hide in our world. But I did have questions. “Why did he do that? Wouldn’t it be in the hellion’s best interest to avoid making you stand out?”

      “He had no choice.” Tod scowled. “It’s a side effect of the process. You know how they say the eyes are the windows to the soul?” he asked, and I swallowed thickly before nodding. I didn’t like where this was headed. “Evidently they mean that literally. Once the soul is gone, there’s nothing to see through the windows.”

      Nash whistled softly. “That has to be the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.” And that meant a lot coming from a bean sidhe.

      “You want me to put the contact back in, don’t you?” Addison cocked her head and gave him a small, eerie smile.

      “That’d be great, thanks.” Nash nodded decisively.

      Addy stood and crossed into the attached bathroom. She was back in under a minute, and her eye looked normal. Only it also still looked weird, probably because I now knew what the contacts hid.

      “So, when she gets her soul back, her eyes will go back to normal?” Nash aimed his question at his brother, rather than Addison, and I realized he was avoiding looking at her. Her eyes freaked me out, too, but I couldn’t help being amused that Nash was more comfortable dealing with a grim reaper—a living dead boy who killed people and harvested human souls—than with an otherwise normal human girl who’d lost hers.

      “They should.”

      “Okay, wait a minute. I’ve seen several dead people—” not a statement I could have imagined saying a few months earlier “—and none of them looked like that, even after the reaper took their souls.”

      Tod nodded, Addy’s hand held between both of his. “When your heart and brain stop working, your eyes stop working. They reflect the state the soul was in when the person died. It’s kind of like when a clock battery runs down. The hour and minute hands don’t disappear, but they don’t keep ticking, either. They freeze on the last minute they measured.”

      “Okay, that makes sense.” In a really weird way. But I didn’t plan to dwell on it. I was ready to give Addison her privacy and go work on her problem somewhere her empty soul-windows didn’t stare at me from behind their eerie human facades. But first we needed the information we’d actually come for. “Addison, did you notice anything about the hellion that might help us identify him? A crooked nose or a dimpled chin? Bad teeth?”

      But even as I asked, I realized her answer probably wouldn’t help, even if she had noticed something. I didn’t know much about hellions, but I did know they could assume more than one form, so any description she gave us might not fit the hellion a moment after she’d met him.

      She shook her head slowly. “No. Other than the eyes, he looked normal. Brown hair. Average height. Normal clothes. And I didn’t see any birthmarks or anything.”

      “And you sure you didn’t hear the hellion’s name?” Nash asked.

      “If СКАЧАТЬ