With All My Soul. Rachel Vincent

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СКАЧАТЬ want to hear you scream. I want to see you writhe. I want to taste your flesh, and your blood, and your fears. I want to savor your ill-fated dreams as they burst like berries between my teeth, then melt like sugar on my tongue. I want you, Kaylee Cavanaugh.”

      I swallowed my own fear, so he couldn’t have it, and that left me with nothing but anger blazing like a furnace where my heart should have been. “It’s always nice to be wanted, but I don’t feel like being enslaved and tortured today. Sorry.”

      “I’m going to make this simple for you, little bean sidhe. If you don’t cross into the Nether and surrender—today—I will come for those you love most.” Because he couldn’t just take me. Even if he’d had a way to make me cross over, and at the moment he did not, he couldn’t have kept me in the Nether. Not while I was conscious and in my own body, anyway. Female bean sidhes can cross between worlds at will, which put us among those least likely to be held captive in the Netherworld.

      To keep me in the Nether against my will, Avari would have to keep me unconscious—which would be no fun for him—or dispose of my body and take physical possession of my soul, which was no doubt his intent. The hard part—for him—was getting to my soul. Since my unfortunate demise, he’d decided it would be easier to coerce me into willingly surrendering than to forcibly part my body from my soul.

      I rolled my eyes, displaying my disbelief in spite of the fear tightening my chest. “That threat has been posed and ignored so many times surely we’re both bored by it.” Throwing his words back at him felt good. Seeing the anger rage behind his eyes felt even better.

      He moved faster than I’d thought possible for a human body. One second he was three feet away, at proper threatening distance. The next, he had one hand around my throat. He slammed me into a support beam beneath the bleachers, and the blow reverberated down my spine in echoing waves of pain. My mouth fell open and I tried to drag in a shocked breath, but no air came. It couldn’t get past his fist squeezing my airway shut.

      “You will give me what I want,” Avari said into my ear with Marco’s voice. “Or I will destroy what you treasure most.”

      My heart pounded almost painfully while my back throbbed, and it took me a second to realize that my fear was remembered fear, virtually irrelevant to my current predicament. I didn’t need to breathe. Sure, I couldn’t talk with his hand around my throat, but I wasn’t going to suffocate, either.

      Remembering that helped me push fear back again, even farther this time, and anger roared in to take its place.

      “And frankly, Miss Cavanaugh, every time we meet like this I am less and less inclined to leave you unbruised. Standing here, touching you with this borrowed—but very real—hand it occurs to me that not all of my corrupt pleasures have to wait for your arrival in the Nether.”

      And suddenly my fear was back, and very relevant to the situation. I could blink out anytime I wanted, but if he was touching me, he’d come with me.

      “I’ve never truly understood the human fondness for nude rutting and the eager exchange of bodily fluids.” He stared down into my eyes, studying my panic while I clawed at his hand, but I saw nothing of Marco in Avari’s expression. I saw only hellion, and the dramatically dilated pupils that told me he was feeding from my fear. He was nearly drunk on it. “But this borrowed body seems willing, and you’re clearly terrified by the prospect of such an encounter. And naturally, fear makes you taste so much better.…” He leaned toward my neck and inhaled, and my stomach churned, though I hadn’t eaten much in days.

      Avari stepped back without letting go of my neck, and his gaze assessed me with almost clinical detachment. “It’s the strangest thing. I don’t understand what all the fuss is about, but every time I borrow a human form, my sense of touch is…Well, it’s exaggerated. Sensitive. You mortals feel everything so intensely. Is it the same for you, or is this a trait exclusive to the human male?”

      His free hand—Marco’s hand—slid down the side of my arm, and his pupils dilated even farther when my nails broke through the skin on his arm. I made a quick wish for luck, then threw my knee up into his groin, as fast and hard as I could.

      Avari yelped, and it was the most satisfying sound I’d ever heard. His hand fell away from my throat, and he hunched over the hopefully paralyzing pain.

      “That is a trait exclusive to the human male.”

      Tod laughed out loud, and I looked up just as he appeared behind the demon in stolen flesh. He swung something with both hands, hard enough that the muscles in his arms stood out against his skin, and his weapon slammed into Marco’s head with a dull thunk. Marco’s legs folded, and he collapsed on the gym floor.

      Tod stood behind him, holding Emma’s three-inch-thick chemistry book. “You know, next time you text to tell me you may need help, I could get here a lot faster if you also tell me where you are. I’m a reaper, not a necromancer. Am I going to have to have you fitted with a GPS chip?”

      “Sorry. I didn’t know where I’d be.” I glanced at poor Marco, thoroughly unconscious and probably in a lot of pain, then stepped over him and threw my arms around Tod. “And thank you. How’d you find me?”

      “I tried about eight different places, then I found Luca. He said it felt like you were in the gym.”

      As a necromancer, Luca was like a compass for all things dead but not yet decaying. Including reapers. And me.

      Tod let me go and ran one hand through his short curls, and the blue-eyed gaze that met mine was intense. Scared. And kinda…angry. “You have to stop doing this, Kaylee. You’re dead, not invincible. Reclaiming souls when Madeline sends backup is one thing. That’s your job. I get that. But you can’t just go around confronting hellions on your own. Even in a human body they’re dangerous. Especially when that human body is bigger than yours, and they’re all bigger than yours.”

      The fear in his voice made my chest ache. “I didn’t know he was possessed. And anyway, I can handle myself. See?” I made a sweeping gesture toward Marco’s unconscious form. “Now he knows that being a teenage guy isn’t all getting high and threatening girls.”

      “Yeah, and that was awesome, even if I can’t help but sympathize with the pain he’s going to be in when he wakes up. But Avari will be ready for that next time. One of these days you’re going to get in too deep, and I’m not going to get there fast enough, and…bad things are going to happen, and that will kill me more than my actual death did.”

      “I think I was born ‘in too deep,’ and bad things happen every day. Sometimes I have to stab hellions. Sometimes I have to frame friends for murder, and stab evil math teachers, and watch my best friend die. Again. We deal with it, then we move on.”

      “Well, maybe next time you could let the bad things find you, instead of searching them out for yourself. Or take someone with you. I know Nash isn’t as much fun to look at, but he’d be decent backup, and even with a broken arm, Sabine’s a force to be reckoned with.”

      “But I’m not?”

      “That’s not what I’m saying. I think the evidence speaks for itself.” He glanced pointedly at Marco, still unconscious on the floor. “But six hands are better than two. Especially when my hands aren’t close enough to get to you.”

      “They’re close enough now…” I pulled him toward me, and I could see that he was trying to resist СКАЧАТЬ