Authors: Rachel Vincent
“If you’re not back in half an hour, I’m coming after you,” I
whispered into his ear, standing on my toes so I could reach. “There’s no one
left here who can stop me.”
He clutched me tighter and nodded. “I’ll be back.” Then he let
me go and disappeared.
I took Sabine’s good hand in my left and Nash’s in my right,
then blinked all three of us into my backyard, where I was pretty sure we
wouldn’t accidentally land on someone. Or in something.
Styx barked her head off when we came in through the back door,
and even after she saw me, she kept barking until I picked her up and scruffed
her fur. Tensions were high, and she could feel that. Seeing me was no longer
enough to assure her that I was okay.
I heard the plastic clatter of the television remote being
dropped on the coffee table—a sound I made on a daily basis—then footsteps
pounded through the living room and into the kitchen.
“Well?” Em demanded, while Sophie and Luca fell into place
behind her. Their eyes were wide. Sophie clutched Luca’s hand. They were all
three scared.
“Okay, first of all, when someone walks in through the back
door unannounced, don’t assume it’s someone you know.” Sabine marched past me
and into the kitchen, where she pulled open the fridge door. “Assume it’s
someone—or some
thing
—that wants to kill you. And
come armed.” She turned to me with her good hand wrapped around the door handle.
“Where’s that baseball bat?”
“I gave it back to Nash.” But maybe she was right. Maybe we
should be arming ourselves, even on the human plane.
“Did you find your dad?” Luca asked as Nash marched past him
into the living room and I locked the back door.
“What’s wrong with him?” Em stared after Nash. “What
happened?”
“Where’s my dad?” Sophie said as I pulled a container of raw
meat from the fridge and plopped a chunk of it into Styx’s food bowl. She dug
in, and Sophie spoke again, quieter this time, as if she already knew the
answer. “Kaylee, where’s my dad?”
I turned on the kitchen faucet with my elbow and rinsed the
deer blood from my hands, then washed with soap. Then I made myself look at her.
“He’s still there. He’s okay, as far as we know.”
“As far as you
know?
” Sophie looked
stunned, and my heart ached for her.
Luca looked from me to Sabine, then to Nash. “What the hell
happened?”
“Avari blew the side out of the building!” Nash sat on the arm
of the couch and ran one hand through hair that was once artfully mussed but now
just looked messy. Then he swiped both hands over his face, angrily wiping away
frustrated tears. “The concrete wall fell on my mom. Sophie’s dad carried her
out, but he can’t cross over, so they’re kind of stuck there.”
“Shit.” Luca put an arm around Sophie, who stared at the floor
like she hadn’t heard what she’d expected and hadn’t quite processed that fact
yet. “Is your mom okay?”
“Don’t know yet,” Sabine said. When I turned, I found her
digging through the cabinet over the short kitchen peninsula. She pulled down a
bag of Doritos and removed the clip, then shoved a chip into her mouth.
We all stared at her while she chewed.
“What?” She swallowed, then dug out another chip. “Sometimes
you have to fix the problem that
can
be fixed. I
can’t get your parents back, but I can fix the munchies.”
“So, he’s still there?” Sophie sank into a squat on the kitchen
floor and wrapped her arms around her knees. “You
left
him there?”
Luca pulled her up, then guided her to the couch.
“No.” I refused the bag of chips when Sabine held it out to me.
“Tod went back for them.”
“Alone?” Sophie looked up from the couch, and her gaze speared
me with the weight of my own guilt. “We only have three good parents left
between us.” Except for Luca’s, who were half a country away and had no idea
their son was a necromancer. “You’re telling me that they’re
all three
trapped in the Netherworld, and only
one
of you went back for them?”
“We all wanted to go, but Tod thought putting more of us in
danger would be...well, dangerous. And he was right,” I insisted. “If we all go
back and get killed, who’ll be left to rescue them once we find them?”
“Find them?” Sophie demanded. “You don’t even know where they
are? You
lost
my dad?”
“He had to run,” Sabine said, another orange corn chip held at
the ready. “He had to get Harmony out of there before the ice melted and that
horde of monsters ate them alive.”
Emma sank onto a bar stool, from which she could see both rooms
at once. “That sentence is simultaneously unintelligible and terrifying.”
Sabine shrugged. “Unintelligible and terrifying is what the
Netherworld’s all about.”
“Screw this.” Sophie stood and jerked her hand from Luca’s when
he tried to take it. “I’ll go get him myself. Where did you last see him? At the
psych ward?”
“Yup,” Sabine said around another mouthful.
“No!” I glared at her, then turned back to my cousin. “He’s not
there anymore,” I insisted. “He would have tried to get as far away from there
as he could, as quickly as possible.”
Sophie frowned. “Then how the hell is Tod supposed to find
them?”
“He’s not,” Nash said, and I wanted to argue, but I couldn’t.
Not without lying. “Your dad is
hiding,
and if he
does it right, Tod won’t be able to find him and neither will you.”
“Watch me.”
Luca stood and stepped into her path. “Sophie. Wait. On the
not-gonna-happen scale, how impossible is it going to be for me to talk you out
of this? Pick-up-trash-on-the-side-of-the-highway unlikely or
leave-the-house-without-makeup unlikely?”
“Makeup.”
“Fine.” He nodded decisively. “Then I’m coming with you.”
“She’s not going,” I said. “Sabine, help me out.”
Sabine shrugged and stepped into the living room with the bag
of chips, her focus set on Sophie. “You’re not going. And if you do, I’ll drag
your ass back here in handcuffs. Chains, if that’s what it takes.” She folded
the top of the cellophane bag. “
Please
give me a
reason to go shopping for chains.”
“You have a broken arm.”
Sabine shrugged. “One of mine’s better than two of yours.”
Sophie’s eyes narrowed. “I
dare
you
to stop me.”
“Oh, don’t dare her,” Emma groaned from her bar stool.
“Sophie, think about this,” Nash said. “I want to go, too. We
all do. But if your dad were here, what would he say? Would he want you to put
yourself in that kind of danger?”
My cousin rolled her eyes. “But he’s
not
here. That’s the point.”
Sabine scowled. “No, the point is that if I let you cross over,
when your dad gets back—and he
will
get back—he’ll
kick my ass for letting you out of my sight.”
“No, he—” Sophie began, but Sabine spoke over her.
“The hell he won’t. Face it, tiny dancer. The only real problem
you have is that people actually give a damn about you.”
My cousin blinked in surprise. “What the hell are you talking
about?”
Sabine stepped closer, her dark eyes flashing in anger, but
there was something deeper than that, too. Something more raw peeking through
the cracks in the fearless facade she wore like Sophie wore SPF foundation. “I’m
talking about this room. This room is full of people who love you. Who don’t
want you to get yourself killed searching a nightmare dimension for the father
who loves you more than life itself.” Sabine shoved the chip bag at me, and I
took it before I realized what I was doing. “Did you know I had six older
sisters?”
“I didn’t...” Sophie looked confused. “You have family?”
“Had. I’m a
mara
—the seventh
daughter of a seventh daughter—which means I had six older sisters and
presumably a set of parents who liked kids enough to have at least seven of
them. They must have
loved
kids. But they didn’t
want me. They left me on a church doorstep, buckled into a car seat, when I was
a toddler. So I don’t have those sisters anymore. I don’t have those parents.
What I have is this.” She spread her arms to take in all of us. “These same
people you have. And like it or not, they have me. And so do you. Your dad just
took custody of me, which means you’re my sister now. You’re the only sister I
have left—the only one I’m ever going to have—and I’m
not
gonna screw that up. I’m not going to throw you away, like they
threw me away. I’m not going to let you get hurt. And I’m sure as hell not going
to let you hurt yourself. So you put your bony little butt back on that couch
and start using your head instead of your mouth, because it’s your head we need
right now.”
“My head?” Sophie stared at Sabine in shock. We
all
stared at Sabine in shock.
“You know your dad better than anyone else here,” the
mara
said. “You know better than any of us where he’s
most likely to go. Where he might hide. When we go back in, we’ll go together,
and
you’ll
be the one telling us where to look. Got
it?”
Sophie opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She blinked at
Sabine. Then, finally, she nodded. And sat back down.
Luca sat with her, and while they talked softly about where her
dad might have gone, I headed into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee, partly
to give my hands something to do, partly because I like coffee, and partly
because I could already tell it was going to be a long night—those who needed
sleep would appreciate the offer of caffeine instead.
“So, how bad is this?” Em said from her bar stool, while I ran
water into the glass carafe. “I mean, it feels like we’ve been in a constant
state of emergency for the past few months, but is it just me, or do things seem
extra dire today?”
I turned off the faucet and poured water from the carafe into
the reservoir at the back of the coffeepot. “It’s not just you.” Avari had been
taking things from us for months. People we knew and loved. Opportunities we
could never get back. He’d taken Sophie’s naivety, Nash’s emotions, and Sabine’s
foster mother and home. He’d been party to the scheme that took Emma’s body and
Lydia’s soul. But throughout all of that, we’d always had a support network to
rely on. Parents, older and wiser, who encouraged, overruled, and protected us
out of love.
Now, they were gone. We were on our own, and beyond that forced
independence, we were missing parts of our families, both blood and extended.
Our positions had been reversed—now our parents needed us to find and protect
them, without the advantage of their wisdom and guidance.
The game had changed. We now stood to lose much more than our
own lives.
“So, what’s the plan?” Em asked as I dumped dry coffee grounds
into the filter.
“We find them, and we bring them back.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.” That was possibly the scariest sentence I’d
ever said aloud. “Footwork? Guesswork? Dumb luck? I don’t know how we’re going
to do it, but it has to be done.” And that was the bottom line. “Quickly.”
I’d just pressed the brew button when someone gasped from the
living room and I looked up to find Tod standing in the middle of the floor, in
front of the TV. I only realized I’d reached for a knife from the block by the
microwave when my hand closed over the handle.
I let go of the knife as Tod turned toward me, already fielding
questions he seemed to have no answers for.
“Did you find them?”
“What about my dad?”
“Are the monsters hunting them? Was there any sign of
blood?”
Emma and I stopped in the kitchen doorway while coffee dripped
into the carafe.
Tod sat on the end of the coffee table. “I didn’t find them,
and I really think that’s a good sign.”
“How on earth is that a good sign?” Sophie demanded. “They’re
still missing!”
“Not finding them is a hell of a lot better than finding a pile
of blood, bones, and shredded flesh,” Sabine said.
Sophie sobbed, and Luca glared at the
mara,
who didn’t seem to notice.
“I wasn’t going to put it like that, but yes,” Tod said. “I
blinked in and out around the perimeter of the building, because that’s safer
than actually walking around the Netherworld, and at first it looked pretty bad.
There were creatures clustered in groups too tight for me to see what they were
looking at. But eventually the groups started breaking up and I got close enough
to see that they were gathered around several spots of blood. Just a few drops.
They’re tracking Mom and Brendon, but they haven’t found them yet.”
“But they will,” Nash said, and Sabine took his hand.
“Yes, eventually, they will.” Tod flinched, as if the truth
hurt coming out. “Unless we find them first. But the good news is that the blood
trail has stopped. The last thing I saw them gathered around was a strip of
material. It was part of your dad’s shirt.” He glanced at Sophie, whose eyes
were wide and damp. “It looks like he bandaged my mom’s wounds, which has
slowed—or maybe even stopped—the bleeding. Which makes them harder to
track.”
“Okay. Good.” I sat next to Tod when he held one hand out to
me. “So, we’ll keep looking, in shifts. Me, Tod, and Sabine.” Because we could
cross over safely if we were smart about it.
“I’m coming, too,” Sophie said. Before anyone could object, she
rushed on, “Not alone. I’m not stupid, and I don’t want to die. But I can get
there and back, so there’s no reason I can’t go with one of you. I can
help.”
The rest of us must have looked skeptical, because she scowled
at us all. “Four eyes are better than two, right?”
She’d said the opposite to Chelsea Simms during the two years
she’d been stuck in glasses before her parents let her get contacts. But
whatever. I liked Sophie 2.0 better anyway.