Soul to Keep Read online

  “It’s Jill,” she said with a wince.

  “I know. Where—”

  Just then, Rodrick appeared, eyes wild and glowing, his cell phone pressed to his ear. “Here.” He held out the phone and pressed the speaker button. “Our sister-queens are here. Say that again, Timothy.”

  Tim’s shaky voice came through the phone. “Jill! Jill just came out of Hamilton covered in blood! We—we walked her over here to get something from her partner and then she came out, and I think—I think she killed that Brayley chick.”

  “Oh my God,” I said, the breath rushing out of my lungs.

  “Where is she now?” Camila said.

  “I don’t know, like a hundred feet in front of us. It looks like she’s heading back toward the house. We don’t—something’s wrong with her. What should we do?”

  “Tell them to stop following her,” I said.

  “Did you hear that, Timothy? Stay where you are. Don’t follow her.”

  “That demon has her, Tim! I don’t want you guys to get hurt!” I yelled so he could hear me.

  “Okay, okay. Fuck, there was a lot of blood.”

  “Go back to Hamilton and wait for the cops or security. I’m sure the lobby monitor called someone already.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. She did. Fuck. Fuck. Yeah, she was screaming, and I saw her grab the emergency phone as soon as we saw Jill. We’ll go back.”

  Rodrick took them off speaker but refused to hang up. Probably the best idea, just in case whatever had Jill doubled back.

  “Come on.” I followed as Camila led Ginger into their office. Rodrick was right behind me. Camila helped Ginger into the chair then fired up her security monitors. There was one in every room of the upper floors of the house. They had privacy blind spots, but they did the trick.

  At least eleven girls were in the house, D’Monique included. Three girls were with Florencia, watching her stories.

  Faeth and Kina appeared and then Omi, right on cue. Camila started giving out orders.

  “Faeth, text all the girls and tell them to stay away from the house,” she said as she whipped out her own phone. I saw Florencia answer hers a moment later on the monitor. “Get all of the girls out of the house right now. This is a code white. Now!”

  Florencia stood calmly but faster than I’d ever seen her move before she was running up the stairs. Girls all over were checking Faeth’s text and gathering themselves to get out of the house. Once she had all eleven girls gathered in the foyer, we could see them spilling out the front door and across the street, for the panic room in the OBA house. The front door of the OBA house was open, and Josh was waving the girls in. I felt better for a moment when they were inside, but only for a moment. I could feel Jill and whatever the fuck had her getting closer and closer to the house.

  Omi and Kina vanished, and I saw them a second later stepping into the elevator where they changed form and shifted into massive dogs. The emerged in the pantry, ready, waiting when Florencia came running back in the front door. She had a baseball bat in her hand. She closed the door and waited.

  ❖

  It took an eternity. But it was only ten or so minutes before Jill, or a shell of Jill, barged through the door. But it felt like years, and in that time, Cleo arrived.

  “Dalhem sent me,” was all she said.

  Florencia kicked the door closed behind Jill and blocked it, just as Jill swung around, seeing she wasn’t alone. Omi and Kina in their canine form slowly crept toward her and, carefully, the three of them started herding Jill toward the pantry. She almost seemed to be cooperating like that was her plan the whole time. But then she turned and tried to lunge at Florencia. Florencia was quick though. She jumped out of the way and swung for Jill.

  “Oh, God. Oh please, oh please. Don’t hurt her,” I said under my breath. The second time, she didn’t miss. Florencia clocked Jill in the side of the head and dropped her like a sack of dirty laundry. Omi and Kina went for the hems of her jeans and started pulling Jill toward the pantry. Florencia followed, gripping the bat. Once she was in the elevator and the door closed, I could see Florencia nodding, like she was counting. Of course she knew exactly how long it took the elevator to get to the lower floor. She ran to the emergency panel and hit the button that locked the basement door. Nothing was getting back up to the surface levels. Not unless it could vanish through walls.

  ❖

  The six of us stood in a semicircle facing Jill who was now tied to Camila’s office chair. Luckily, I had some extra rope lying around. Her head was bleeding, but not too badly, and her eyes were gray. She was bruised to fuck on the side of her face and her arms. I was sure her back was all scraped up from being dragged. We’d heal her, as soon as we helped her. As soon as this was over.

  Ginger still couldn’t stand. She was on the couch though, trying to breathe. I felt what she felt, a fist trying to grab my lungs, but somehow for me it was bearable. Ginger, though, she was bound by the blood.

  We tried the protection spell. It didn’t work. So all that was left was a full-scale exorcism, and only one of us had any firsthand experience with that type of thing.

  I turned to Kina. “Okay. So Tarel said they used a rabbit to draw the thing out of Jessi.”

  “You have to—uh—you have to destroy the vessel.” Kina looked like she was going to hurl too.

  “Then let’s get a rabbit,” I said.

  “From where?” she asked. “It’s fucking high noon, and I know Florencia thinks she’s a thug with that bat, but I’m not telling her to set foot back in this house until we’re done with this. Not until this thing is gone.”

  “We have dogs back at the house,” Cleo said. Her eyes were eerily focused on Jill. “Dalhem loves those dogs. So does Benny, but they’re dogs. And I mean, it’s Jill.”

  I looked at Kina. She was mulling something over. “Whichever one is Dalhem’s least favorite—”

  “Easy. Kepper.”

  “Have Leanne’s driver bring Kepper down here now and offer our sincerest apologies to the family, but I think they’ll understand.” She frantically gestured to Jill, who suddenly started laughing. A creepy, thundering laugh, and then she started to speak. Or it. It started to speak. I couldn’t understand a thing it was saying.

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “It’s—” Kina took a step closer. Natasha grabbed her arm, but Kina waved her off. “It’s the Unspoken.” The language of the Angels. None of us knew the tongue of Dalhem and his kind-borne. We weren’t allowed to know it. It would singe our ears, melt our brains from the inside out, I was told. It was forbidden. But Kina knew.

  “What’s it saying?” Ginger groaned.

  “This is—this isn’t the demon that took Jessi. This is something else and he’s not going without—”

  The demon ground out a final word, like particles of the driest gravel rolling off Jill’s tongue.

  “Proof. No. A prize.”

  “It wants to take Jill with it?” Ginger asked. She was crying now. The pain was too much for us both. Jill was in there. I could feel her. She was fighting, but I couldn’t tell for how much longer.

  “Ginger, you have to release her,” I said.

  “No! Are you crazy? No!”

  “No. Tokyo’s right. What do all of these feeders have in common? Us. These things aren’t even going after regular bound humans. They are going after humans that are bound to a nest. It’s our connection. Maybe if you release her it will be easier to exorcise this thing.”

  “And what if it kills her?”

  “What if we don’t try it and it kills her anyway?” Kina said.

  “Red. Please.” The fear in Camila’s voice drew my attention from the gray of Jill’s eyes. Camila was terrified—terrified for Jill, but more terrified for Ginger. “Red, let her go. Just for now. You’ll get her back, but please try. Let Kina save her.”

  “Okay. Okay.” Ginger looked Jill in the eye for a long, hard moment, probably searching for some shred of evidence that
this was the right thing to do. Then she got up from the couch and made her way across the room.

  “Don’t touch her,” Kina said. Ginger didn’t respond, but she kept her hands to herself when she bent over to whisper in Jill’s ear.

  “Jill Marie Babineux, I release you. I release you from the bond you have made to me, my sister-queens, and your sisters. I release you.”

  Jill and Ginger gasped at the same time, and just as Ginger stood up and reclaimed her strength, Jill’s eyes cleared. And then she started screaming.

  “Please! Please, let me go! Guys! It’s going to kill me! Please—” A deep growl rolled up from her chest, filling her eyes with grayness. I almost threw up. I could still feel Jill, almost stronger than before. She was still in there, still fighting.

  “Forget Kepper!” I said. “Get Motherfucker from across the street. I will personally buy the OBA boys another dog. We have to get this thing out of her.”

  The creature answered me, answering in its forbidden tongue as it focused in my direction. I locked eyes with it.

  “Kina.”

  “It’s taking one of us. One of us or the girl. Righteousness is coming to the Earth and—”

  “And what?”

  “This is only the start. One by one.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Tokyo

  More time passed. Five minutes, an hour. I don’t know. Too long for Jill to be sitting there waiting for us to decide what to do, and then I realized way too fucking long for one of us to step up and save her. I looked at my sister-queens and Cleo. Married, married, married to each other, too young and too scared to even move, the only one who knew what the fuck this demon was saying and how to get rid of it, and smarties with a nine-month-old baby. People would miss them, but not many would miss me. Not in any real way.

  I stood and paced over to the office door, rolling my neck. An attempt to reach Dalhem across our mental link failed. There was nothing but silence. A silence that let me know there really was no point in waiting. I had to do this now.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s do this. Use me.”

  A combination of “What?”, “No!” and, “What the fuck? No!” erupted around the room.

  “No,” Cleo said with a bit of finality. It didn’t matter though. My mind was made up.

  “For once, we’re not gonna make a decision as a group. And, Cleo, you don’t even live here anymore so your vote doesn’t count.”

  “If I’m Dalhem’s proxy then my vote counts.” That explained a lot. Our Master was purposefully off our grid.

  “And if Dalhem knew I wanted to sacrifice myself for one of the girls, he would hate it, but he would say yes. Ginger, give Hattie clearance to the house. We’re running out of time and I want to say good-bye.”

  “I don’t like this,” Kina said.

  “I know, but we can’t do this to Jill, just sit here and wait and debate. I felt Rory’s terror after she’d been half-possessed by this thing for one minute. So how long do we wait before this does irreversible damage to Jill’s mind, to her soul? You want to draw straws?”

  “It should be me,” Ginger said. Camila’s whole body tensed up beside her, and I almost laughed. Like Camila would let her go.

  “No. You’re always saying I need to step up and take responsibility, show how much I care for the girls—”

  “This is not what I meant! You don’t have anything to prove.”

  Hattie appeared, just as shocked and confused as the rest of my sisters. I crossed the room and took her hand. “You still don’t get it. I love her. I want to do this for her. Saving the rest of you from uncertain death is just a bonus.” Finally, I turned and faced Hattie. Tears were already lining her eyes. She wasn’t dumb. She knew what this was.

  “Thank you. Thank you for giving me this amazing second life. Thank you for loving me,” I told her.

  She leaned forward just enough, her forehead touching mine. “And I’m so proud of what you’ve done with that life. Your blood-ties sustained me. Save this young woman. The universe will embrace you for it.”

  I broke down and pulled her into my arms. “Please take care of Ansley and Juniper. Tell them I love them and I’m sorry.”

  “I will. I swear it.”

  I held on for another long minute. No one had loved me the way Hattie had, not even Dalhem, ’cause her love for me went beyond the blood we shared. Hattie was my true friend.

  “Okay.” I stepped away from my maker, wiping my face ten or twenty times. “We’ve got to kill me proper, right? Head and heart?”

  “Uh, either should do it,” Kina said. “Both might be overkill.”

  “Let’s do the heart. I’ll only be whole for like three seconds after you get it out, but I like my head where it is. We need a human, right? And what time is sunset?”

  “Four thirty,” Faeth said. “Twenty minutes.”

  “Well, fuck. Get Florencia on standby and let’s do this.”

  There was hesitation all around the room. That shit was not gonna work. “Listen, if we don’t do this now you run the risk of having a possessed vampire on your hands all night. Or we leave Jill like this till sunup. You all decide, but we are on a tight schedule here.”

  Camila vanished and was back a moment later with one of her ceremonial daggers, used for superficial flesh wounds. Hopefully, it could cut through a rib cage.

  “Tokyo, once the jump is complete, you have to fight, okay?” Kina said. “Don’t relax. Don’t surrender. Don’t let it take you. It won’t take long to get your heart out, but if this thing takes over, we won’t just have a possessed vampire on our hands. We’ll have a possessed vampire who knows how to use your powers, who knows all your strengths and weaknesses, where all your feeders live, with the ability to vanish at sunset. Don’t let this thing win.”

  “Okay.” I let out another deep breath. “Okay. If I die, that’ll automatically release the girls from our blood bond. So yeah, okay. Let’s do this.”

  “Tokyo—” Faeth said.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” My eyes started leaking uncontrollably. I wasn’t crying. I was weeping, ’cause what the fuck. “I love all of you guys. Even you, Ginger. You asshole. I love you and I’ll miss you. Just take care of the girls. Tell them I’m sorry. Oh, and Moreland too. I’m holding forty grand for one of her feeders so make sure he gets that.”

  Ginger laughed through her tears. “Yeah. We’ll handle it.”

  I walked over to Jill, but Omi stopped me and hugged me, then kissed me on the lips. Then Faeth, then Natasha, then Kina and Ginger and Camila. Cleo didn’t move from her spot by the couch, but she was in my head. No words, just pure, uncut emotion. Everything that needed to be said flooded the walls of my veins.

  “I’ll make sure Dalhem knows exactly what you did here,” she said for the others to hear. It was all that was left to say.

  Kina had me lie down on the floor with my feet touching Jill’s. Then she had Omi, Faeth, Natasha, and Ginger all take a limb. I had to fight, and they had to finish the job.

  Kina said the words, the spell in the tongue of the Angels that would free us all. My body started to burn as she said the same words over and over. I tasted burning wood and this time, flesh. And then, for the second time in almost two hundred years, I died.

  ❖

  Jill

  I woke up tied to a chair with the worst taste in my mouth. The smell of something burning. Tokyo. Our sister-queens were holding her down. She was flailing, fighting, and Camila was stabbing her in the chest. A massive pool of blood was forming on the carpet. Tokyo’s blood.

  “What are you doing? Let me go! You’re killing her!”

  “Jill! Hold on. Let me help you.” I looked up and Hattie was there. She rushed over to my side and started untying my restraints.

  “What’s going on? Stop!” I yelled at Camila, but it was too late. Her hand was in Tokyo’s chest. Inside her chest. I heard a sickening pop, and when she pulled her arm back, she was holding Tokyo’s heart. Tokyo s
topped struggling.

  “Tokyo saved you. That demon got you.”

  “So you guys ripped out her heart?” I was finally free from the chair. I rushed to Tokyo’s side, but it was already too late. Tokyo was dead. “She took the demon from me?”

  “Yes. She wouldn’t let it go down any other way,” Cleo said, somewhere in the distance. There was a hurricane roaring in my ears.

  “Five minutes, you guys. Florencia is waiting outside,” Faeth said.

  “Waiting for what?” I looked up as Camila was crossing the room with Tokyo’s heart. “Wait!”

  “Jill, we have to destroy this or else that demon will stick around in Tokyo’s body,” Ginger explained.

  “Destroy it how?”

  “In the sun. I’m sorry, Jill, but the sun’s setting. We have to get this thing out of here,” Camila said. She opened the door. Florencia was waiting, ready to take the heart. The part of Tokyo that mattered to me the most.

  “No!”

  I stood, letting go of Tokyo’s clammy hand.

  “Jill. We don’t have time.”

  “Let me do it.”

  Camila paused, probably checking in with Ginger or debating whether or not she should hand me the beating heart of my now dead girlfriend.

  “Okay. Come on.”

  I followed Camila down the hall. We ran all the way to the underground garage. I had no clue there was an emergency storm door, but Camila showed me the secret exit. And then she handed me the heart. “The code is 3681. Then straight into the sun. Don’t hesitate.”

  “Okay. Okay. Oh, my goodness.”

  Camila shoved me through the inner door. I was in the dark for just a second until an emergency light came on revealing a short set of stairs. At the top was a door with a keypad. My bloody fingers managed the code. I made it outside and found only a small patch of sunlight left near the rear fence. I could hear sirens, police sirens and helicopters overhead, nearby, but I ignored them and ran for the fence, thinking if I hurried I’d have some time to say good-bye. A moment to at least tell this last bit of the best thing that had ever happened to me that I loved her and I always would. But the moment I stepped into that sliver of sunlight, Tokyo’s heart ignited in my hands and instantly turned to ash.