“Tomorrow night!” I had to suck in deep, calming breaths through my nose. “You want me to leave him there for an entire day?”
Emma’s body sat up and her gaze went hard. “You don’t have any choice. You can’t get to him without me, and I can’t get him alone until then. Beyond that, if we miss our chance tomorrow, we may never get another one.”
The entire room tilted as I reeled from shock. I had to close my eyes and grip the sides of the chair to regain my balance.
“Do you understand, Kaylee? It’s tomorrow, or never.”
“I get it.” I swallowed thickly. “So, we wait until tomorrow night, and when you say the word, I cross over and haul you both out. Right? That’s it?”
“With any luck, yes.”
Luck? We were depending on luck?
Nash is so screwed….
“Is there anything else I need to know?” I leaned forward with both elbows propped on my knees. “Anything you’re not telling me? Are we expecting an ambush? Or a giant boot to descend from the sky and squish us all?”
Or a trap waiting to be sprung?
As scared as I was for Nash, I couldn’t quite buy the coincidence. Two days earlier, Scott’s shadow man—who turned out to be Avari—had tried to get me into the Netherworld, and now Alec the proxy was trying the same thing, on behalf of the same hellion. Albeit, this time the bait was much better, but I was far from prepared to trust him.
And frankly, I was proud of myself for remembering to expect the unexpected—a good rule of thumb when traveling to the Netherworld.
Well, that, and “expect to be eaten by everything…”
Alec only shrugged. “The only other thing I can tell you is this…” He leaned forward, peering at me earnestly through Emma’s eyes, her pouty lips pressed into a firm, pink line. “You’re going to cross over into a big celebration. The biggest event I’ve seen in my time here. The place will be crawling with Netherworlders.”
“And your point is…” Though, by then, I was pretty sure I already knew.
“I know you’re going to be tempted to bring backup. Someone older and wiser, maybe?”
My father, of course. I hadn’t actually decided to bring him in yet, but I’ll admit I was considering it. He knew much more about the Netherworld than I did, and Nash’s life was on the line.
When I refused to answer, Alec continued. “Kaylee, you may be able to cross back into your world with nothing more than a thought…”
Yeah, like it’s that easy!
“…but if you bring anyone who can’t cross over on his own, he’s as good as dead. You know that, right?”
My stomach flipped and twisted at the thought of getting separated from my father in the Netherworld. If that happened, he’d never make it out.
“And trying to get more than two of us out at a time will slow you down enough to get us all killed. Do you understand? It’s not just your life on the line here. Not just mine or Nash’s, either. If you bring help, you’re as good as slitting his throat. Though I can promise you his actual death will be neither that quick nor painless.”
I swallowed the sudden need to vomit and nodded. He was right. But I didn’t like it.
The growl of an engine outside broke through the excruciating silence Alec’s last words had woven. Ms. Marshall was home.
But Emma was not.
I spun in the chair, as if I could see through all the walls between me and the driveway. My heart raced, and I turned back to Alec. “You have to go. Now.”
He shook her head and stood, foreign panic playing behind Emma’s eyes. “We have to make plans. We’re only going to get one chance, and we can’t afford to mess it up.”
“I know. But not now.” I glanced toward the hall again as a key turned in the front door. “I need some time to get rid of her mother.” And talk to Tod.
As badly as I wanted to save Nash, I was not just going to jump into the Netherworld with someone I’d never met—someone whose humanity I couldn’t even confirm—without proof that Nash was actually missing.
And I definitely wasn’t going to do it without backup. Tod could get himself out, and he could take someone with him, if necessary. And if this whole thing turned out to be a trap—an attempt by Avari to regain the soul that got away—I wanted someone I mostly trusted in my corner.
“How long?” Alec asked as the front door swung open across the house.
“Shhhh…” I hissed, my pulse racing. Then, “Two hours. Can you do that, with the time difference?”
Emma nodded. “I think so.”
As loath as I was to subject Emma to another possession, I saw no other choice. “Fine. Now go!”
Alec frowned. Then Emma’s eyes closed, and she fell over backward on the bed.
“Em, are you home?” Ms. Marshall called, her heels clacking down the hall toward us.
“Mmm?” Emma’s eyes fluttered and she rolled over, one hand rising automatically to run through her hair.
“We’re back here!” I crossed the room and sank onto the bed next to Emma. “We fell asleep watching a movie.”
Ms. Marshall appeared in the doorway, leaning against the frame with one high-heeled foot crossed over the other, the empty ice cream carton in one hand. She lifted the carton and glanced at the DVD case on Emma’s dresser. “Wild night?”
You have no idea….
19
“TOD!” I WHISPERED as I slammed the car door shut, glancing frantically around the dark concrete maze at mostly empty parking spaces. The chances of the reaper being in the parking garage were slim to none, but honestly, Tod was hardly ever where I expected to find him.
When he didn’t answer, I clicked the automatic lock on my rented key bauble and headed for the entrance, wishing I’d thought to change clothes before I left Emma’s. But since I hadn’t, my walk across the dank parking garage was accented by the clunking of my wedge heels against the concrete and the flash of my shiny blouse in the dim industrial lights overhead.
When the glass door closed behind me with a soft air-sucking sound, I glanced around the empty, sterile hallway, desperate for a glimpse of the reaper Nash and I usually couldn’t get rid of. “Tod! Get your invisible butt down here!” Or up here, or over here, or whichever way he’d have to travel to get to me.
Regrettably, superhearing was not among a reaper’s many awesome abilities, so I’d have to be within normal hearing range to catch his attention. And since I couldn’t see him—he considered corporeality at work to be unprofessional, though evidently shouting at the patients to hurry up and die! didn’t offend his delicate moral fiber—putting myself within that hearing range could prove quite a challenge.
When he didn’t show up in the back hallway, I race-walked down the corridor and around the corner, then through the swinging double doors into the emergency room, where Tod spent most of his working hours. If I didn’t find him there, I was screwed, because there was no way a teenage girl would go unnoticed wandering around the intensive care unit by herself in the middle of the night.
Unfortunately, even at two in the morning, the emergency room was half-full and most of the patients looked awake enough to notice me calling out to someone who wasn’t there.
“Tod!” I whispered, stepping into the vending machine alcove. Stubbornly resisting a bag of Doritos taunting me from behind the glass, I checked both restrooms opposite the water fountain with no luck.
Back in the waiting area, I jogged past the triage nurse’s station and had one palm on the door leading into the bowels of the E.R. when a familiar voice spoke up from behind me. “Is Emma with you?”
Startled, my heart thumping, I whirled around to find Tod standing with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of a faded, baggy pair of jeans. His sleeves were short and his jacket missing, as usual. Evidently the mostly dead don’t feel the cold like the rest of us do. Or maybe that was part of his big bad reaper routine.
“No. Why?” I asked, and the triage nurse glanced at me in surpr
ise, clearly unable to see or hear the reaper. I was going to have to start wearing a Bluetooth headset, or talking to Tod was going to get me locked up again.
“Her boyfriend came in by ambulance a few hours ago, and it’s getting pretty tense back there,” he said, unbothered by the nurse’s presence as I smiled at her and subtly led him away from the double doors, hoping none of the staff recognized me from my visit the night before.
In the waiting area again, I raised my brows to tell him to go on, and Tod shrugged. “His dad’s some big-shot lawyer. The governor’s personal attorney, or some crap like that. He showed up about fifteen minutes ago, straight from the airport, and has been raising hell ever since. He’s threatening to sue the hospital for negligence, and the attending physician for malpractice, and the damned janitor who mopped the floor he slipped on, even though there was one of those orange ‘slippery’ signs right next to him when he went down.”
“So Doug’s still…alive?” I whispered as he followed me into the rear corridor.
“Nah. He was brain-dead but breathing when he got here, and I put him out of his misery about an hour later. The weird thing is that he isn’t on the list. Levi sent a runner with this about twenty minutes after Richie Rich came in.” Tod pulled an uneven square of yellow paper from his right pocket and handed it to me.
My hands shook as I unfolded it. It was the bottom half torn from a sheet of legal paper. Neat, loopy handwriting slanted across the lines: Douglas Aaron Fuller 23:47:33.
“What is this?” I couldn’t refold the paper fast enough. I shoved it at Tod, and he slid it back into his pocket.
“It’s an addendum. An unscheduled reaping. The job should have gone to whoever works the sector where Em’s boyfriend dropped, but our office didn’t get word in time. So they sent it to me here.”
Exhaustion and shock had taken their toll, and my eyes didn’t want to focus. The hallway blurred until I blinked to clear my vision. “So this didn’t have to happen…”
Tod shrugged. “It probably shouldn’t have happened. This is only the second addendum I’ve seen in two years, and it just happens to be Emma’s new boy toy. And she didn’t come in with him. What’s going on, Kaylee?”
And suddenly Doug’s death hit me—not as a bean sidhe, but as a person—grief suffocating me beneath the weight of my own guilt. I tripped over one wedge heel and caught myself against the wall, barely flinching at the pain in my bandaged arm because it was nothing compared to the ache in my heart.
“You okay?” Tod asked, and he sounded like he actually cared.
“No.” I pushed myself away from the wall and tugged him down the hall with me, grateful when my fingers didn’t sink right through his arm. “Do they know what Doug died of?”
Tod shrugged. “He had some cuts and bruises, but the doc thinks he got them during a seizure. Blood tests show alcohol, but not enough to kill him. Nothing else has come back yet, but Richie, Sr., insists his kid is clean, and if the tests show otherwise, he’ll sue the lab. Man, I hope I’m working when his name comes up on the list.”
I took the next left to put us farther from the E.R., and from Mr. Fuller. “Someday, someplace, karma is waiting to kick your teeth in, Tod.”
“I’m dead.” He made a sweeping gesture to encompass his entire body—which death had not damaged in the least. “My teeth have already been kicked in.”
Well, he had a point there….
“So, where’re Nash and Emma? And aren’t you a little overdressed for two-thirty in the morning?”
“Is it that late?” I glanced at my watch and groaned. Talking Emma back to sleep had taken half an hour, and hunting for Tod had taken longer than I’d expected. I now had less than forty-five minutes to be back in Emma’s room, waiting for another call on the human telephone.
“It’s a long story.” Flustered, I ran one hand through my tangled hair, then crossed my arms over my blouse. “And Nash is the reason I’m here. Did he come in with Doug?”
The reaper frowned. “No. Why would he?”
“Because he’s the reason Doug died.”
Tod’s confusion twisted into dark distress, and I could have sworn I saw blood drain from his face. Though I wasn’t sure that was even possible for a dead guy. “What the hell are you talking about?”
But before I could answer, the door at the end of the hall opened, admitting a gust of wind and a couple in their mid-forties, whose stress and fatigue showed in every line on their faces.
“I need to sit,” I suggested, irritated when the hand I wrapped around his arm went right through his flesh this time. “Cafeteria?” I whispered, shoving my hands into my pockets.
Tod huffed, already heading down the hall. “The coffee tastes like swamp water tonight, but sure.” He led me down the long hallway and around two corners, then through the double doors into an outdated but functional cafeteria dotted with old square tables and cheap ’70s-style, vinyl-covered chairs. “You know, you’re lucky you caught me here. My shift ended at midnight, and if I weren’t filling in for a friend, you’d be out of luck.”
Yeah, right. I passed by the stack of trays and pulled a bottle of Coke from a refrigerated shelf. After his shift, Tod would have had nothing to do but hang around and spy on either me or Nash. He was almost always around, whether we needed—or wanted—him or not. At least, he had been until Addison died.
But all I said, as I dug a five from my pocket to pay for my soda, was, “You have a friend?”
Tod scowled. “Well, I wouldn’t call him a friend according to the traditional definition, but in the sense that he imposes on me constantly and isn’t afraid to point out my flaws, I’d say he qualifies.”
“Sounds more like a cousin.” I picked the table farthest from the food line and sank into a chair against the wall. Tod sat on my left, where he could see the rest of the room.
“Okay, spit it out.” His chair squealed against the floor as he scooted toward the table, and I realized that he was now fully corporeal and visible to everyone in the room—and probably had been since we’d come through the doors.
“What’s Nash caught up in?” His brows were low and his voice was deep, but he didn’t sound surprised. He’d known something was wrong. Maybe he’d known longer than I had.
“Demon’s Breath,” I whispered, to keep from being overheard. “He’s been hooked for about a month, but last week a couple of his teammates got mixed up in it without knowing what they were taking. Doug found Nash’s red balloon and now he’s dead, and Scott’s strapped to a bed in the mental health unit. Did you already know about that? And now Nash is stuck in the Netherworld, and it may be a setup, but even if it is, we have to get him out!”
“Whoa, take a breath!” Tod reached for my hand across the table, physically unclenching my fingers so he could squeeze them, and I was surprised by his warmth. Weren’t dead guys supposed to be cold to the touch? Or was that only in the movies? “Nash is taking Demon’s Breath?”
“Yeah, but it gets a lot worse than that.”
“So I gathered.” His gaze strayed to the bandage forming a lump beneath my sleeve. “But none of the rest of that made any sense.”
“I know.” I wiped unshed tears from my eyes with the back of my free hand, and lowered my voice when I noticed the custodian staring at me. “It’s all messed up, and Alec says we only have one chance to get Nash back, but I’m not going to cross over until I know for sure that Nash is there.”
Tod’s eyes widened, thick blond boy-lashes nearly touching his eyebrows. “Okay, I need you to slow down and start over.” He leaned back in his chair and brushed a stray, pale ringlet from his forehead. I nodded, and he forced a smile. “First of all, what does Nash have to do with the Fuller kid’s unscheduled reaping?”
I took a deep breath and forced my throat to relax, though it felt hot and sore from holding back tears. “Demon’s Breath—the dealer calls it frost—is sold in black party balloons. Except for Nash’s. His are red.” I clenched my hands to
gether on the cracked, faded tabletop and looked into Tod’s bright blue eyes, somehow undulled by death. “Doug found Nash’s balloon and took a hit, but Nash’s concentration is too strong for humans. Or something like that. Then Doug started convulsing, and I started screaming, so Nash put me and Emma in my car—though, actually, it’s a rental—and told us to go. He was supposed to call us with an update, but he never did. Then this guy named Alec possessed Emma and said his boss has Nash in the Netherworld, and that if I want him back, I have to help him cross back into our world.”
“Wait…” Tod held both hands out to slow me down. “You have to help who cross over? Nash or Alec?”
“Alec. Well, both of them, really. But Alec won’t help me find Nash unless I promise to bring him back with us.”
“Who’s Alec?”
“I have no idea.” I shrugged helplessly. “He just…showed up tonight, talking through Emma’s mouth. He says he’s human, but he lives in the Netherworld. But humans don’t live in the Netherworld. They can’t, right? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Tod sighed. “It might, if you weren’t saying it so fast.”
“Sorry. But I have to be back in half an hour.” My mouth was so dry I could barely talk, so I opened my soda and drained half of it. I’d definitely need the caffeine, since I obviously wasn’t going to get any sleep for the third night in a row. “Alec says he’s a proxy for Avari, who’s holding Nash in the Netherworld. Have you ever heard of a proxy?”
Tod nodded slowly. Bleakly. “They’re like assistants you can snack on. If you’re a hellion. But they’re rare, because humans don’t hold up very well in the Netherworld, and eventually they’ll wear out. It sounds like this hellion is looking to upgrade. With Nash.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Alec didn’t sound very worn-out.”
“Okay, let’s start with Nash.” Tod leaned both elbows on the table, which put his eyes almost exactly level with mine.