Authors: Rachel Vincent
I could swear that her black eyes looked a little more damp
than usual, but then she blinked, and that was gone. “Look who’s talking, living
dead girl.”
“I know. I’m a total hypocrite.” The toilet flushed across the
hall, then water ran in the bathroom sink behind the closed door. Nash was
getting ready for bed, and my time alone with Sabine was running out. “Can you
tell me what happened? What you remember, anyway? How did Avari catch you?”
Sabine’s expression darkened from something resembling
contentment into anger blazing hot enough to singe my eyebrows. “It wasn’t
Avari,” she said. “It was someone new. A hellion. Tall, with long red hair so
dark it almost looked black. His tongue was the same color—like dried blood. His
eyes were solid black like a hellion’s, but they had red veins running through
them. I’m going to be working those details into my next nightmare, FYI. If they
scared me, they’ll scare anyone.”
“That’s Ira.” My voice sounded sharp. Angry.
“The wrath hellion?” Sabine looked more intrigued than scared
now, which worried me.
“Yeah. What did he do? What’s the last thing you remember?”
“I don’t remember much. I was sneaking around some bushes in
front of a building about a mile south of the hospital when I started hearing
things. Weird sounds. Wet, heavy breathing, like a giant with a sinus infection.
And scratching sounds, like something digging in dry dirt. Then there was this
weird hiss.... So I ducked as close to the building as I could and waited to see
if I needed to cross over, or if they’d lose my scent and wander off. Then the
hellion was just there. Out of nowhere. He was just standing in front of me,
backlit by that weird-ass red moon. He had those weird eyes, and they were kind
of
glowing,
and for a second, I couldn’t look away
from him. Then the light from his eyes seemed to kind of flare, and he reached
for me.”
Spitting sounds came from the bathroom as Nash brushed his
teeth, drawing me out of the nightmare she was painting for me, this time with
words. “Then what?”
Sabine shrugged. “He grabbed my arm, and I tried to cross back
over, but I couldn’t concentrate enough to make it happen. All these thoughts
kept spinning around in my head. All kinds of stuff. People who’ve pissed me
off. The juvenile court judge who set me up for vandalism. You.” She shifted
beneath the covers, like she was uncomfortable with whatever she was about to
confess. “No offense, but when I first met you, I hated you like I’ve never
hated anything before, and when Ira touched me, I couldn’t get you out of my
head. You kissing Nash. Him touching you. The two of you dancing at some lame
high school party to a song no one with actual ears has ever enjoyed. Stuff like
that. Crap I never even saw but used to imagine during the worst days this past
winter.”
“Yeah.” I tucked one leg beneath me in the rolling chair.
“Ira’s M.O. seems to be fictionalized flashbacks designed to thoroughly piss you
off, so he can feed from your anger.”
“Well, it musta worked. I couldn’t think with all that shit in
my head, and then everything went dark.” She shrugged again and tugged the
covers higher. “The next thing I saw was this.” Sabine spread her arms to take
in my whole room. “I didn’t know how I got here until Nash told me how Tod found
me. Crimson creeper? Seriously?”
“Yeah. Tod said you were tied to the ground with four vines of
it. Baby vines. And you must not have been there very long, or you couldn’t have
recovered this fast, even with Harmony’s antivenom. Especially with three sets
of pinpricks.”
“Speaking of which...” Sabine held up her wrist, and I saw that
the swelling was almost completely gone. Either
maras
healed faster than
bean sidhes
or
Harmony had really perfected that antivenom. “Any way to get rid of the
marks?”
“Not that I know of.” I propped my foot on the edge of the bed
and pulled up the hem of my jeans to show her my own double row of red dots.
She dropped her arm into her lap. “Maybe people will think it’s
some kind of obscure tattoo. Something tribal.”
“Maybe.” It was good to see her looking on the bright side.
Across the hall, the bathroom door opened. A second later, Nash
stepped into the bedroom. “Did you and Tod have any luck?” he asked, sinking
onto Emma’s bed as I vacated the desk chair.
“Nothing since the bandages we found at the hospital. But the
good news is that Avari has evidently promised a whole horde of fiends that
whoever turns them in wins the grand prize—Demon’s Breath, of course. Which
means—”
“Avari doesn’t have them,” Nash finished for me.
“Not yet anyway. We haven’t found anything since then, but
we’ll keep looking.”
“Be careful,” Sabine said. “I don’t want to have to go back in
after you.” But she would if it came to that. That’s what she was really saying,
and the unspoken promise was not lost on me.
“Don’t worry. Tod and I are going in together or not at all.
We’ll watch out for each other.”
Before heading back to the hospital, I went into the living
room to check on everyone else. Emma was already asleep in the recliner,
stretched out as close to horizontal as the chair would go. Sophie and Luca were
curled up on the couch together, even though the twin mattress he’d blown up for
himself was only a couple of feet away. He slept on the outside, curled around
my cousin with his arm draped over her stomach. Anything that wanted Sophie
would have to go through Luca first, and seeing them together made my heart
ache.
Seeing Emma alone made my heart ache even more.
Not seeing my dad in his bed—not hearing him snore in the
middle of an otherwise quiet night—also made my heart ache so fiercely I let it
stop beating altogether, just to spare myself the pain.
Chapter Seventeen
“Are you sure you want to go to school? You could just
stay here with me.” Tod patted the vinyl cushion next to him on the hospital
waiting room couch, and I sat sideways to face him, trying to ignore the dozen
early morning patients, none of whom could see or hear us.
“I wish I
could
stay here with you.
I wish I never had to go anywhere else. But Em, Nash, and Sabine are going.
We’re still hoping to turn the hellions against one another, and if one of them
possesses someone at school, I might be needed.”
That was true. But it wasn’t the whole truth. I needed to talk
to Ira again, and if Tod knew what I was thinking, he’d insist on going with me.
I couldn’t let that happen for two reasons.
First, I didn’t want them to meet. I didn’t want Tod
manipulated by the hellion of rage like I’d been. I didn’t want him touched by
evil any more than he already had been.
Second, I didn’t want Tod to be upset by—or stand in the way
of—any payment made to Ira if I needed to buy more information, and as badly as
I hated to think about it, that possibility was looking pretty...um...possible.
He understood the lines I would cross—and those I wouldn’t—to get my dad back,
because he’d do just about anything to protect his mother. But he didn’t need to
actually see payment rendered. Especially considering that his anger would just
make it even easier for Ira to feed from him.
I felt bad about lying to Tod—even a lie of omission—but I’d
feel worse if my inaction led to someone else’s death. Especially my
father’s.
“I only have one more reaping this shift, so I’ll cross over
and keep looking as much as I can.”
“Alone?” My heart thumped painfully. “We decided not to go
alone.” What if Avari caught him? What if something else caught him? What if he
disappeared into the Netherworld never to be seen again, and I never found out
whether he died, or got lost, or fell victim to eternal torture, or—
“I’ll be fine.” His blue-eyed gaze cut through the fear
spiraling up my spine. “My mom’s hurt, and I don’t know how bad it is. I need to
get her out of there. And while I’m there, I’ll be composing a huge list of
places your dad isn’t.” He shrugged. “We’ve got to narrow it down somehow,
right?”
I gave him a halfhearted nod, trying not to think about the
possibility that Avari could be moving him around. How, if that were the case,
we might never find him. “Just...be careful, and text me once an hour, or I’ll
assume you’ve been captured and I’ll come after you. I swear I will.”
He smiled. “I believe you. And I’ll see you at lunch.” We’d
learned early in our relationship that I couldn’t concentrate on school when he
came to class with me, even though no one else could see him.
“I’ll be there.” But lunch felt like an eternity away. Like one
of those mirage illusions that got farther away the longer you walked toward
it.
Thoughts of what was coming—what I might have to do—churned in
my stomach and weighed heavily in my heart. I wanted to tell him about the idea
that had taken root in the back of my brain overnight, and about how I would do
almost anything to avoid what was starting to look like the only way out of
this, for my friends, my family, and for me. For us.
I wanted to tell Tod everything. Not telling him felt
uncomfortable, like I was building a barrier between us. Like I couldn’t quite
reach him through the wall neither of us could see or touch, but he was surely
starting to feel. But I couldn’t tell him, because he’d be as determined to stop
me as I was determined to go through with it. He’d be more determined,
especially if his mother died, because then Nash and I would be all that he had
left, and he’d be that much more determined to keep either of us from...
I blinked and buried that thought before he could see it
swirling in my eyes. But I wasn’t as fast as he was observant.
“You okay?” He turned my face toward his and ran one finger all
the way from the back of my jaw to the tip of my chin, and I almost confessed
everything with one look at the maelstrom of grief, frustration, and devotion
churning in every imaginable shade of blue in his irises.
“No. I’m not okay.” I let that one truth resonate in my voice
and show in my eyes. “None of us are okay.” And we weren’t going to be until
Avari was no longer a threat. Unfortunately, the longer I thought about the task
in front of us, the more impossible it seemed to accomplish. On our own,
anyway... “But we will be.”
He smiled and pulled me closer. “When you say it like that,
with that look in your eyes, I can almost believe it.”
Well, that made one of us.
First and second periods dragged like no high school class has
ever dragged before or since. I had no idea what I was supposed to learn in
chemistry, and if the fate of the world ever came to hinge upon my understanding
of time as the fourth dimension—which was only
marginally
relevant to the math lesson—we were all goners.
When the bell rang to end second period, I was the first one
out of my chemistry classroom. I waved to Em in the hall and brushed off a
question from Chelsea Simms, then ducked into the nearest restroom. As soon as I
was sure it was empty—for the moment—I faded from human sight and spared a
moment to hope Chelsea wasn’t waiting for me to come out of the bathroom.
Then I blinked into the kitchen of a local doughnut shop, which
had sat empty since Thane had killed the owner a month earlier. The doughnut
shop had both sharp objects and privacy, everything necessary to summon a demon,
as far as I could tell. Which was fortunate, because there was no way I’d invite
Ira into my home, even if I could be sure of my control over him while he was
there under the power of my blood. And I was far from sure of that.
The cut on my left palm hadn’t yet healed and I wouldn’t be
able explain an identical one on my opposite hand, so I made a cut at the top of
my forearm instead, near my left elbow. That turned out to be ill-planned, at
best. It was much harder to direct the flow of blood from halfway up my arm than
from my hand, but after a couple of minutes and several drops spilled on my
jeans, I had enough blood on the floor to write with.
I pressed a stack of folded napkins against the new cut and
bent my arm at the elbow to hold it in place. Then I made the creepiest finger
painting in history.
Ira appeared in front of me the second his name fell from my
tongue. He stared down at me with featureless, red-veined black eyes, and though
his lips didn’t actually curve up on the ends, I could swear he was smiling.
“How wonderful to see you again, Ms. Cavanaugh. And you look so blisteringly
angry!”
“You lied to me.”
Ira sank to the floor in one smooth movement. “That, my little
fury, is impossible. In fact, lying is one of very few things I cannot do.”
I wanted to know what the other things were—and he obviously
knew
I wanted to know—but I wasn’t willing to
bargain with a hellion for something I didn’t actually need.
“My dad wasn’t where you said he’d be, and because of the
wild-goose chase you sent us on, more people are hurt.” And trapped in the
Netherworld. But I wasn’t going to mention that, in case he didn’t already know
about Harmony and my uncle. The last thing we needed was another hellion out
there searching for them.
“I wasn’t asked where your father
would
be. You asked me where he was, and I told you exactly where he
was at the time. Obviously, he was moved before you arrived.”
“Obviously.” I tried to keep the anger from my voice but failed
miserably.
“Look on the bright side—at least you learned something.” He
actually did smile that time, with lips the color of clotting blood. “You
learned to act quickly, before the intelligence you paid for becomes moot,
right?”
“Actually, the lesson I learned goes something like, ‘Never
trust a hellion.’”
Ira laughed, a sound that felt more like an angry dog’s growl
than a demonstration of joy. “I would have thought you’d learned that one long
ago.”
I would have thought so, too. Which was part of the
problem.
He leaned closer, over the blood on the floor, and it took most
of my self-control to keep from backing away from him, which would have felt to
both of us like an admission of fear. “But the fact remains—I did not lie to
you.”
“But you did tie my friend to the ground with crimson creeper
vines. Why?”
Somehow, Ira seemed even more amused by my question than by my
belated wariness of hellions in general. “Are you surprised when a cat meows? Or
when a siren sings her prey to sleep?”
“I’m surprised when someone who agrees to help me turns around
and tries to kill one of my friends.”
He leaned back again, studying me from a different perspective,
and I pretended that didn’t creep me out. “Little fury, I’m finding it difficult
to express how very mixed-up you seem to be. First of all, I did not, nor will I
ever, ‘help’ you. The information I provided was not a favor. It was a service
rendered for payment. And, for the record, I’m only explaining that to you—with
great patience, I might add—because I can feel you growing angrier with every
word I speak. Which means that so far, I’m profiting from this little encounter
without putting forth any effort whatsoever.”
“You’re...
vile.
” I’m not sure where
the word came from, but it felt like a good fit.
“Why, thank you. And to continue, I did not try to kill your
friend the
mara.
Had I wanted her dead, I would
simply have bitten her head off and sucked out the tasty filling. But the fact
is that in most cases, death of the victim means an end to its anger, thus an
end to my meal. You are the happy exception. Well, the
angry
exception, in this case.”
“The exception?” Why am I always the exception?
“Typically, the undead quickly start to lose touch with their
human emotions, including anger. At first I thought you were simply too recently
dead for that to have happened yet. And that could be the case. But upon
subsequent study, I’ve discovered that you, little fury, are not the average
dead girl. You are a dead girl imitating life, which means that you didn’t lose
your connections to the human world when you died. You still love, and regret,
and hope, and wish, and you still anger. So you still have use to me.”
I frowned, trying to untangle his words and rearrange them so
that they made sense. “Was that your long-winded way of saying you poisoned
Sabine to piss me off?”
He nodded. “Succinctly put. In fact, my original intent was to
kill her. However, when I took a taste of her anger, both past and present, I
found you prominently displayed among her grievances, in spite of the fact that
she was obviously in the Netherworld in an ill-fated attempt to help you and
your assorted collection of playmates. Which told me that hurting her would
likely anger you.”
“So, should I assume that if you catch any of the rest of my
‘playmates,’ you will hurt them, too, to piss me off?”
Ira’s mouth twitched, and I got the impression he was silently
laughing at me. “That is a distinct possibility. It is also the last bit of
information I will give you without compensation.”
“Fine. I don’t need anything else from you anyway.”
His dark brows rose in a skilled imitation of human surprise.
“That tastes like a lie, little fury. And the fact that you haven’t yet
dismissed me from the human plane seems to support my theory. What could you
possibly need?” He crossed both arms over his chest, waiting, but I didn’t
answer. I couldn’t without giving him as much information as I’d be asking him
for.
“Information, again?” He was guessing. He was a good guesser.
“I think you need more information, but I do look forward to the day you write
my name in blood and ask me to take action on your behalf.”
“That won’t happen.” In part because I couldn’t afford it. And
in part because dealing with Ira was dangerous, and the more I saw him, the more
likely I was to forget that. To see him as just another Netherworld resource,
like Harmony’s herbal remedies.
That kind of casual disrespect would lead to things worse than
death.
“Oh, I think it will. Based on the escalation of your rage in
the few days since we officially met, I would say our relationship is building
toward a sharp crest. You will need something soon. Something beyond
information. And when you become angry enough to pay the price...that will be a
day to remember, surely.”
I stayed silent, well aware that every second I didn’t swipe my
hand through the bloody letters on the floor was another second confirming his
theory that I still needed something from him.
“But just information for now, am I right? You want to know
where your father is?” His brows rose again. “Will you pay twice to have the
same question answered? Far be it from me to offer unsolicited advice, but if I
were you, I’d ask something new. Perhaps you’d like to know the whereabouts of
your uncle and your lover’s mother? An attractive pair of
bean sidhes.
It would be a shame to see them devoured by the jungle,
as it were.”
My heart stopped beating for several seconds, and when it
kicked into motion again, it overcompensated, pumping blood through my veins so
fast my vision started to go dark. “You knew? You’ve been sitting here toying
with me this whole time, when you knew what I wanted?”
“Of course. If I’d told you immediately, we both would have
missed out on the titillating climax of your anger.”
“You
bastard.
”
“Yes, yes...” Ira studied me while I fumed, too angry to form
words. “Now, what are you willing to pay for the information I have?”
“Nothing.” I’d finally caught on. “You don’t know where they
are, do you?” He’d never actually said he did. He’d only implied it.