Authors: Rachel Vincent
If this were a real negotiation, I would have argued. “Fine.
And you will have no further contact with him, nor attempt to harm him in any
way or bring him to the Netherworld, through any means, including but not
limited to force, threat, or coercion, personally or through a third party, ever
again.”
“Wow.” Tod whistled. “Where’d you learn all that
lawyer-speak?”
“Internet user license agreements. They’re almost as hard to
navigate as the Netherworld,” I said, and Tod chuckled. “Avari? Give me your
word, or this discussion is over.”
The hellion’s jaw tightened, a surprisingly human reaction. “I
do so swear. Now hand over your soul.”
“I’m not finished.”
“You most certainly
are!
” he
roared, and I jumped, startled. I couldn’t help it. A thin, lacy sheet of ice
formed on the floor beneath his feet, flowing out in all directions. Excited
murmurs and soft grunts spread throughout the audience. I couldn’t understand
any of the actual words—if they could be called that—but the gist was clear.
They were eager to see him lose his temper with me.
“Careful. You’re close to the goal,” I taunted, ignoring the
fear crawling slowly up my spine. “Do you really want to blow it now?”
“Every word you speak brings your agony closer to hand,” Avari
warned, and the ice spread until his audience began to step and slither toward
the other side of the room, still watching. I wanted to back away from the ice,
too—I’d once seen his temper freeze Addison solid—but this was not the time to
show weakness or fear. “You will suffer more for the insolence you spew, and I
will drink your pain straight from the source, for all of eternity.”
“Yeah, I don’t think so.” I met his black-eyed gaze as boldly
as I could. “I think you already intend to hurt me as much as you possibly can,
regardless of what I do or say.”
Avari scowled, and I think if he’d had normal eyes, I’d have
seen realization dawn in them. I was right, and he’d just then realized it.
Which meant he had nothing left to threaten me with, except...
“My friends and family.” I stood as straight as I could,
framing my demand with confidence and determination I didn’t really feel. “I
want your word that once you have my soul, you will never bother them again in
any way, through your own efforts or by enlisting help. And that you won’t help
anyone else hurt them or even contact them.
Any
of
them.”
The sheet of ice thickened and spread in a burst of hellion
anger, and on my right, one of the nameless Nether-creatures made a strange
choking sound. I glanced over to see a small, vaguely humanoid woman—greenish in
tone, with gray claws instead of hands—freeze where she stood. Literally. At her
back, another monster cackled with echoing laughter, then shoved one huge fist
through her frozen torso. The ice-woman cracked into several large chunks, which
crashed to the floor amid splinters of ice and tar-colored frozen innards.
“You’ve outlasted my patience, little
bean
sidhe.
Death and the attentions of your dark lover have already
eroded your innocence. What makes you think you are worth the demands you’ve
made?”
Eroded innocence? Seriously?
I glanced around the room again, looking for some sign of
Harmony and my uncle or Nash and Sabine. For some indication of how much longer
I should keep the hellion talking.
“The fact that we’re still having this conversation makes me
think I’m worth it. The fact that you haven’t actually
said
I’m not worth it. But you know what? You’re right. I should go.
I need my father back, but I don’t necessarily need
you
to give him to me. If I’m going to have to pay for his return
either way, I think I’d rather pay someone else. Someone who’s already had a
taste of me and my ‘eroded innocence’ and would be happy to have another.” My
skin crawled at the very thought, but I refused to let that show.
“No one else can get to your father while I have him. You will
deal with me, or know that you are responsible for his pain.”
“I don’t know, Kay,” Tod said in a stage whisper. “I think Ira
offered you the better deal.”
“Ira?” Avari stalked closer, but I held my ground, though fresh
thick ice formed beneath his feet with each step. “Another lie. You could never
survive an encounter with the hellion of wrath.”
“Oh.” I frowned, pretending to second-guess my own memory.
“Well then, I guess I never summoned him, either, did I? And I have no way of
knowing that he’s powerful enough to answer a summons, but you’re not. And if
none of that really happened, then I guess I never let him kiss me, either. Or
taste my blood. Or feed my rage. If none of that was real, then you won’t mind
if I leave you here and go
imagine
another encounter
with Ira, who seems more than willing to work with my demands.”
“The king of rage gets my vote,” Tod said. “Hell, I may make
him an offer myself.”
Avari threw his arm out, index finger pointed like a weapon,
and a thick spear of ice shot across the room to impale a creature in the far
corner, who squealed, then collapsed. “The next one goes through your reaper
lover. I will not play these games with you,
bean
sidhe.
Offer up your soul or go home, and rest assured that your
father will suffer in your stead....”
The hellion’s words faded and his head turned to the left. He
stared at the long south wall of the large room, and unease churned in my
stomach. A closed door stood in the middle of that wall. And with sudden cruel
insight, I realized he was hearing something we couldn’t.
Avari’s hand shot out again, and the muscles in his neck bulged
above his stiff white collar. The wall to his left exploded in a shower of huge
ice daggers and broken cinder blocks. Dust spewed in all directions, and I
gasped, choking as Tod pinned me between his body and the other wall. The
tension in his entire frame said he was seconds from crossing over, with me in
tow. And he might have done that very thing, if not for...
“Oh, no...”
I shoved him back so I could peer through the choking gray haze
to see what he’d seen.
As the dust and debris settled, I saw that Avari had blasted
through not only the interior wall separating our room from the next, but
through part of the ceiling of that other room and part of the floor above it.
Through the gaping hole above a pile of still-settling chunks of concrete, I
could see the Netherworld sky, a sickly shade of orange at the moment, like
pumpkin soup that has started to spoil.
But then my gaze followed the wreckage and I saw what had upset
Tod. What everyone was staring at. What Avari had heard through the wall.
In the other room, my uncle Brendon stood with his feet spread,
a sledgehammer clenched in a two-handed grip, ready to swing. On the ground in
front of him were three bodies, each misshapen and somehow
wrong,
with grayish skin and inverted knee joints.
One had obviously been smashed by the falling debris, when
Avari blew the wall in. The other two were the source of the weird grayish
blood—or maybe some other bodily fluid—dripping in congealing glops from the
hammer my uncle must have found in that room full of old machinery, which had
probably never functioned at all in the Netherworld version of the mental
hospital.
For a moment, no one moved. My uncle adjusted his grip, eyeing
the horde of monsters now twitching, wheezing, and slithering forward slowly in
anticipation of some cry of attack by Avari.
I saw no sign of my father. So why was Uncle Brendon still
there? Why hadn’t he and Harmony crossed over the instant Avari blew out the
wall?
Then I saw Harmony’s long, pale curls trailing over a large
cracked brick on the floor. The rest of her was there, too, surely, but so
covered in gray dust and bits of brick that it was hard to see anything other
than glimpses of color—blond hair, blue T-shirt, red blood pooling on the bricks
downhill from her head.
Harmony wasn’t moving.
Chapter Fourteen
“Mom!” Tod shouted, and heads turned our way. He pulled
me toward the hole in the wall. Hands reached for us. Fingers brushed my arms.
Claws caught in my hair. Tails and tentacles tugged at my shirt. My heart beat
harder than it ever had, even before my death. But we dodged and slapped and
kicked our way through the crowd as it coalesced around us, almost casually
slowing our progress, as if they were in no hurry to actually kill us.
As if our fear were enough—for now.
Uncle Brendon heard Tod shout and saw us coming. He turned,
looking for Harmony, then let out an anguished cry when he found her. With the
huge hammer still clenched in his right fist, he scrambled over the pile of
broken cinder blocks to kneel at her side.
We were several feet from the hole in the wall when he swept
bloodstained hair from her face and felt for her pulse. We were two feet away
when Avari gave another grand sweep of his arm and a thin barrier of ice formed
over the hole in the wall like a patch in a pair of jeans. The ice crackled as
it thickened, bluish in color but almost perfectly transparent.
Tod pulled me to a stop inches away, and in the second it took
us to recover from surprise, the ice thickened layer after layer, trapping tiny
cracks and bubbles inside until it was too thick to break. Until it sealed us in
and my uncle and his mother out.
Uncle Brendon looked up and hardly seemed to notice the new
barrier. He said something, but we couldn’t hear him.
“What?” I shouted, my palm an inch from the ice, so close I
could feel the cold but was afraid to touch it. For all I knew, making contact
with it would freeze me solid, like the green woman, and I would shatter into a
million pieces of Kaylee, never to be reassembled.
My uncle shouted again, and that time I heard enough to
understand. “She’s alive!”
“Go!” I whispered to Tod. “Take them home.” He could blink into
the human world, then back into the Netherworld on the other side of the ice
nearly instantly.
“If Cain so much as twitches, I will have Abel’s head torn from
his body.”
It took me a second to process the reference—an odd one coming
from a hellion—but then Avari waved one hand at a door on the other side of the
room and one of his monsters threw it open. Nash—Abel—appeared in the doorway,
then was shoved through it by Belphegore, the hellion of vanity who’d killed
Emma. Belphegore was the personification of beauty, with flawless features that
defied ethnic classification but slipped from my memory the moment my gaze left
her face.
She had one perfect, graceful hand around Nash’s arm, and
though his forehead was furrowed in fury, he looked...sober. She hadn’t yet
forced a dose of her own breath on him.
Behind them, Invidia hauled Sabine into the room. The
mara
took in the seething mob of monsters, and her
dark eyes widened. But then her gaze returned to Nash. She could cross into the
human world whenever she wanted, but she wouldn’t leave him, and with the
hellions between them, she couldn’t reach Nash to take him with her.
“Your mother or your brother?” Avari watched Tod patiently,
savoring his indecision.
Through the ice, we saw my uncle pick Harmony up and carefully
begin climbing the huge mound of debris with her broken body limp in his arms.
My fists opened and closed uselessly. The ache in my chest rivaled the fevered
rush of my pulse, and I felt more helpless—more
human
—than I had since the day I’d died.
“Which will you choose, reaper?”
Nash saw us and exhaled in relief—until he looked past us
through the ice. He and Sabine seemed to realize what they were seeing at the
same time. “Mom!” He tried to push through the throng of claws, fangs, and horns
ready to spill blood and devour flesh at one word from Avari, but Belphegore
held him back with no visible effort.
“Go get her!” Nash shouted at his brother. For the first time
since we’d met, Tod looked...unsure. Torn. His mother was badly hurt but alive.
Yet Nash could lose his head in the blink of an eye.
“Your mortal attachments are like a puppet’s strings,” Avari
said, both hands clasped casually at his back. “One need only pluck the right
cord to make the puppet dance.” His smile was almost creepier than his threats.
“
Dance,
reaper.”
Tod’s eyes flashed with storms of midnight-blue fury. “You
knew.”
“That you and the little
bean sidhe
were a distraction? Of course. She might very well have been willing to
sacrifice her own soul in exchange for her father’s life, but
you
would never go along with that. So now the
question is what will you give up for your brother? What is his life worth to
you?”
“Just go!” Nash shouted, and Belphegore jerked his head back by
a handful of his thick brown hair, stretching his neck at a painful angle. “Tod,
go!”
My uncle was shouting again, and when I turned back to the ice,
I found him halfway up the pile of rubble, headed for the hole in the building,
cradling Harmony to his chest while her arms and head hung limp.
He was shouting for us to go, too, but he couldn’t see Nash and
Sabine. He wanted us to leave him and Tod’s mom and my dad in this Nether-hell
and escape with only our own afterlives.
But we couldn’t leave without Nash and Sabine, yet we couldn’t
get to them without abilities that didn’t work in the Nether. Sabine could get
him out, if she could reach him. But for that, she’d need a distraction. An
opportunity.
“My dad’s not here, is he?” I demanded, and Avari actually
laughed.
“No.” And that had to be the truth, because hellions couldn’t
lie.
“Go get him. This negotiation is over if I don’t see him here,
alive, in three minutes.”
More hellion laughter, and this time it resonated in my spine
like a physical blow. “This negotiation was never real.”
“I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to her.” I looked past
Avari to the hellion of vanity, who still clutched one of Nash’s arms. “I don’t
like the way Avari plays, so I’m going to offer you the same deal I offered him.
Send my friends and family back to the human world, and my soul is yours. This
offer expires in one minute.”
“She’s lying!” Avari shouted. “She doesn’t have to keep her
word.”
No one listened to him.
“Why would I trade those four souls for your one?” Belphegore
called, and Invidia’s focus volleyed eagerly between us.
“Because Avari wants mine. Think of what you could get out of
him for the trade,” I said, and Belphegore’s perfectly arched brows rose over
the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen. They seemed to be every color all at
once. “You could get anything you want.”
“Kaylee...” Tod said, but I ignored him.
“Thirty seconds,” I said while Belphegore studied me, trying to
assess my sincerity. “If I don’t have my dad in thirty seconds, Invidia gets the
same offer.”
“Done!” the hellion of envy shouted. She turned on Belphegore
with an eagerness bordering on mania, and a murmur rolled over the throng of
monsters. “
I
want her. Give me the boy....” She let
go of the
mara
to reach for Nash, and Belphegore
tried to pull him out of reach.
Sabine saw her shot and burst into motion, like I’d hoped she
would. She lunged for Nash just as Avari disappeared, right in front of me.
“Go!” I shouted. “Sabine, get him out of here!”
The
mara
grabbed Nash’s hand. They
both disappeared the very instant Avari appeared behind them, grasping for
Sabine. Nash’s screams of protest echoed into eternity, eclipsed only by the
hellion’s shout of rage when he was left with only a thin handful of Sabine’s
long, dark hair.
Invidia snarled and pounced on Belphegore, cursing her in some
language I couldn’t identify, which seemed to be made entirely of consonants and
birdlike screeches.
Avari bellowed in rage, and I turned to the ice to see my uncle
put Harmony on the ground outside the hole in the basement, then climb out with
her. The crowd seethed around me, twitching, growling, and panting with
impatience, and my nerves buzzed like live wires beneath my skin.
I fumbled for Tod’s hand, and it wrapped firmly around mine.
Avari’s roar echoed in my head even as we materialized in the human-world
basement a second later.
Tod dropped my hand as soon as he saw Sabine and Nash, their
fear and anger barely visible in the dark as she rubbed a spot on the back of
her head. “I’m going back for Mom.”
“No!” I reached for him again, but for the first time since I’d
met him, Tod pulled away from me. “If he catches you, he’ll tear you apart.”
“What happened?” Nash demanded, scrubbing angry tears from his
face in the deep shadows. “Where’s Mom?”
“I’m not just going to appear in the middle of the crowd and
ring a dinner bell, Kaylee.” Tod’s shoes shuffled on the dirty concrete as he
stepped closer and kissed me, lingering just for a moment in the dark. A moment
we couldn’t really afford but that he obviously knew I needed. “I know what I’m
doing.”
“What happened to Mom?” Nash shouted, and I turned to him,
suddenly conscious of the fact that we were in the human world, and that he
couldn’t make himself inaudible. He was going to bring anyone within hearing
range downstairs, and we’d be caught. At least, he and Sabine would.
“Avari blew out the wall, and your mom got hit by the debris.
But Uncle Brendon took her out through the hole in the wall.” I wasn’t sure if
he’d seen that part. “He’ll protect your mom.” Or die trying. I had no doubt of
that.
“Bullshit! Avari will catch them,” Nash said through clenched
teeth, frustrated, angry tears shining in his eyes in the light from Sabine’s
cell screen. “You
know
he’s probably catching them
right now. Those monsters probably came pouring out of that building like bees
from a hive, and your uncle can’t cross over.”
“I’ll find them,” Tod promised his brother. “I’ll bring them
back.”
“I’m going with you.”
“No.” Tod turned back to me, and his irises were achingly
still. I couldn’t tell if he was hiding something from me or from Nash. “Take
Nash and Sabine back to your house, please, and I’ll meet you there. I won’t
stay long. I just want to cross over and check around the building, in case
Brendon’s hiding her somewhere where I can get to them quickly. Maybe this isn’t
as bad as it seems.”
But I was pretty sure I wasn’t the only one who wished my uncle
could have carried both Harmony and the giant hammer.
Nash grabbed his brother’s shoulder and pulled him around.
“You’re not going without me. She’s my mother, too.”
“And I would take you, if you could get back on your own. But
you can’t, which means I’d have to look out for
you
while I look for Mom. Stay here. Help Kaylee and Sabine keep an eye on the
others. That’s the best way you can help.”
“That’s
bullshit!
” Nash
shouted.
“Shhh.” Sabine took his hand in her half-casted one. “You have
to shut up, or we’re going to get caught.” He started to argue, but she clamped
one hand over his mouth. “If you promise to shut the hell up, I’ll go with him
and help find your mom.”
“No!” He pulled her hand away, and his next words were clearer.
“Putting yourself in danger isn’t going to help her.” About a second after he’d
said the words, Nash seemed to realize they applied to him, too. “Fine. Point
taken. I’ll stay if you stay.” When Sabine nodded, Nash turned back to Tod. “You
sure you got this?”
The reaper nodded grimly. “And the longer I wait, the harder
they’ll be to find. Assuming they got away.”
Please
let them have gotten
away....
“I’ll take Nash and Sabine back, then join you.”
“No,” Tod said. My temper flared, and I started to argue, but
he spoke over me. “
Please
stay here. I may be able
to get to my mom and your uncle, but we have no idea where your dad is. And if
something happens to you, who’s going to find him?”
“He wasn’t in that basement,” Sabine added. “You got false
information.”
“That’s impossible.” I pushed hair back from my face, wishing I
had a ponytail holder. “Hellions can’t lie.”
She shrugged, shining her cell phone screen in my face. “Okay
then, your hellion was
wrong.
”
“He’s not
my
hellion.” Ira would
devour my soul just as soon as Avari would if he could get it.
“He’s as much yours as
I
ever was,”
Nash said, eyes flashing in anger. “And he got to first base a hell of a lot
faster.” I gaped at him in shock. Tod’s fist was already in motion when Nash
backed up, warding off the blow with two open palms. “I’m sorry. That was out of
line.”
“Sure as hell was,” Tod growled.
“I take it back. I’m sorry. I’m just...” He blinked and made a
visible effort to push back the fear and frustration obviously sharpening his
tongue. “This is messed up. Avari has my
mom.
”
“He has my dad, too. And Sophie’s,” I pointed out. We were all
in the same position.
“Shit,” Sabine swore. “Who’s going to tell her?”
“Isn’t scaring the crap out of my cousin kind of your
raison d’être?
”
Look at that. You
can
use French outside of French
class!
Sabine shrugged. “She’s not horrible
all
the time. And you gotta respect a girl who travels with a pair
of scissors in her purse.”
A designer purse, no doubt. Maybe designer scissors.
I exhaled heavily. Until there was no air left in my body.
“She’s my cousin. I’ll tell her.” I owed her that much.
“Okay. I’m going back in,” Tod said, and I pulled him into
another hug before he could blink out.