“Yeah. But he didn’t call.” And my next trip to see Nash would involve much more than a mile-and-a-half drive through suburban Texas.
“He will.” Emma pushed herself to her feet. Her eyes were already trying to close, and her next words were stretched through a lion-size yawn. “And everything will be okay. Because Nash loves you, and that’s all that matters. Right?”
I nodded as Em sank back onto the bed, and I couldn’t help wishing that, for once, things really were that simple.
“HEY, DAD,” I SAID into my phone, then covered the mouthpiece to thank the waitress pouring ice water into my glass.
“You’re up awfully early after a sleepover,” my father said, relief obvious in his voice. This time I couldn’t blame him for worrying, even though I’d left voice messages several times throughout the night to tell him I was okay. And still in the human world.
“It doesn’t count as a sleepover if you don’t sleep,” I said, stifling a yawn. “But Emma was nice enough to help me stay awake all night.” Which was technically true. After seeing her body taken over by two different Netherworld entities, I couldn’t have slept if I’d wanted to. “We watched movies and ate ice cream.”
Across the table, Tod rolled his eyes, apparently feeling cheated by the lack of slumber party clichés. After all, what were a couple of teenage possessions compared to the half-naked pillow fight he’d hoped for in reward for staying the rest of the night with us—invisibly—just in case I fell asleep. Or Avari reappeared.
Not that my dad needed to know about either the reaper or the hellion. I saw no reason to worry him, since even the noblest of intentions on his part would only get him trapped in the Netherworld. Or worse.
Tod nodded in thanks when the waitress set a glass of orange juice in front of him. I’d refused to talk to him if he didn’t go completely corporeal at the restaurant.
Over the line I heard the clink of glass-on-plastic as the coffeepot bumped the rim of my father’s travel mug. “I’m about to leave for work.” Which he had no choice but to do, even in the middle of a bean sidhe crisis, if we wanted to be able to make next month’s rent. And honestly, the only thing I could think of worse than being wanted by a hellion was being homeless and wanted by a hellion. “I don’t want you alone today. You need rest, and it’s not safe for you to sleep alone right now.”
A very odd statement coming from my father… But I knew what he meant.
“I’m fine, Dad. I’m being careful.” Whatever that meant…I was too tired at the moment for much coherence.
“You’re not fine, Kaylee.” His mug clunked against the countertop. “You can’t function on so little sleep, and you’re only going to make yourself sick by trying.”
“So what do you suggest?” I asked as the waitress set a plate of chocolate chip pancakes on the table in front of me. Sugar would keep me awake, right? I thanked her, then pushed the melting scoop of butter around with my knife.
My dad sighed. “I don’t know. We’re still working on it. Can you stay with Nash or Harmony? As little as I trust that boy in some respects, I do trust him to wake you up if you start screaming.”
Unfortunately, hanging out with Nash wasn’t an option, unless I was willing to cross into the Netherworld and hand over my soul for the privilege. And I couldn’t stay with Harmony without having to explain her son’s absence. So maybe Emma, once Tod went to work…?
“Yeah,” I said around a sweet, chocolaty mouthful. “Don’t worry, I won’t be alone.”
“Okay, I have to go.” He paused, and I heard doubt and concern in the short silence. “I’ll call to check up on you, so answer your phone when it rings. And I’ll see you tonight.”
“Count on it,” I said, desperately hoping I wasn’t jinxing myself with that one.
I hung up my phone and slid it into my front pocket, then looked up to find Tod eyeing my pancakes. “Do you want something? Do reapers even need food?” To my surprise, he was already halfway through his juice, but I couldn’t remember ever seeing him actually eat.
“We don’t need it, just like we don’t need sleep, but all the same pleasure sensors are still there and functioning. Including taste buds,” he clarified when I grinned with one raised brow.
“Unfortunately, the reaper gig doesn’t pay in human currency, so I’m perpetually low on funds.”
Oh. Now that I understood.
“Here. This is more than I need, anyway.” I pushed my plate to the center of the table, and handed him a napkin-wrapped bundle of silverware. “I can’t eat with you drooling like a starving child.”
“Thanks.” He dug in, and I watched, amused by the thought that Death had a sweet tooth.
“So, I assume I’m not the only one who isn’t buying this Winter Carnival/Liminal Celebration coincidence, right?” We hadn’t been able to talk it through before, with Emma around—or even dozing.
Tod swallowed his first bite, nodding. “There’s no way they’re unrelated. My guess is that Avari’s planning a big Netherworld feast to take advantage of such a large concentration of human energy when the boundary between the worlds is so thin. They’ll be able to soak it all up with minimal effort in the hour surrounding dusk.”
I nodded, chewing my own syrup-soaked bite. “But surely that’s not all there is to it. I mean, really? A big picnic? That’s Avari’s master plan? That makes him sound about as dangerous as Yogi Bear.”
Tod shrugged. “Yeah. If Yogi were a soul-sucking, body-stealing, boyfriend-snatching, damned-soul-torturing evil demon from another world. Besides, what else could he be planning?”
“I don’t know. But the winter solstice happens every year, and Alec said this was their first festival in decades. Why? What’s different about this year?” I took another bite, chewing while I waited for an answer neither of us had. “Whatever it is, we need to know before we get there. Are you supposed to see Addison today?”
Tod nodded and dropped his fork on the plate. “Yeah. But if I refuse to take the shipment afterward, Avari’s going to know something’s up.”
I shrugged and cut another bite. “So take it. Just don’t deliver it to Everett. We’ll figure out how to get rid of it after we’ve gotten Nash out of there.”
Tod frowned, a bite hovering halfway to his mouth. “Kaylee, we don’t even know if Alec is going to show up, now that Avari caught E.T. phoning home. For all we know, he’ll have his proxy locked up even tighter than Addison, and we’ll cross over into this massive chaos swarming with freaks ready to chew our eyeballs and slurp up our intestines.”
I felt my brows arch halfway up my forehead. “Eyeballs and intestines? You’ve been crossing over every day for a month. Has anyone even looked twice at your soft tissues?”
“No, but I was there working for Avari.” He leaned closer to whisper over the table. “Or maybe it’s because I’m dead, and even most Netherworlders won’t eat dead meat. But you’re not dead and you don’t have permission to be there. So it’s your soft tissues we should be worrying about.” He shrugged when I swallowed thickly, and leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms over the tee stretched across his well-toned chest. “I just thought you should know what you’re getting into.”
A chill shot down my spine in spite of the hot coffee warming my belly. “Which is why I need you to keep your eyes and ears open while you’re with Addison,” I said. “We need to know what happened to Alec, and where they’re keeping Nash, and what kind of shape he’s in, in case Alec isn’t there to help us. We also need everything you can find out about this Liminal Celebration And even if you can manage all that, I have a feeling we’ll be walking into a very unpleasant surprise tonight.”
“Agreed.” Tod mopped up a puddle of syrup with the last bite of pancake. “But I’m not making any promises on this spy mission. It’s not like I have free rein of the Netherworld.”
I hadn’t assumed he did, but… “Don’t you do half of your job there? I mean, isn’t that where you take the souls to be recycled???
?
Tod’s brows shot up, and I couldn’t tell if he was amused or horrified by that thought. “To the Netherworld? No. If I took souls there, they’d be eaten, instead of recycled. Reapers have access to the Netherworld by virtue of being dead, Kaylee. Not as an employee benefit.”
Ohhhh… I felt my face flush at my own stupidity. “So, where do you take them?”
“I can’t tell you that.” And that time, his grin looked genuine. “Company policy. And as for my business in the Netherworld, I pop into Avari’s office—the one we were in when Addy died—and he brings her in. We get an hour, most of which I spend talking to her, to keep her mind from slipping under the strain of constant torture and abuse.”
“She has a mind?” I couldn’t wrap my own mind around that one, though I couldn’t imagine why he would visit her if she didn’t. “But she’s dead.”
“So am I.” Tod set his fork on my empty, syrup-smeared plate. “You have to stop thinking of death as the end of everything. Yes, in most cases the soul is recycled, but if that doesn’t happen, there are a bunch of ways to be dead, with or without a body, a memory, and a soul. Addy has everything but her body, and I’m not even missing that, as you may have noticed.” He spread his very corporeal arms for emphasis and almost smacked some poor waitress carrying a huge tray of food.
“I know. But how does Addy have her soul if she sold it to Avari?”
“She and her soul have been reunited in the Netherworld, but he actually owns it. Thus the constant torture.”
“Oh.” I made a mental note to keep my mouth shut about things I didn’t understand. And to let Tod go invisible whenever he wanted—though I would never have believed it, he actually caused less trouble that way. “Just keep your ears open while you’re there, okay?”
Tod nodded reluctantly, and I understood his frustration. The only special skills a reaper could use in the Netherworld were his actual soul-harvesting ability and the ability to cross back over, which made sense, now that I knew he didn’t work there. He couldn’t go invisible, or walk through walls, or project his voice to only select occupants in a room.
He’d be practically human, and he didn’t look very pleased by the thought.
“What about you? What are you going to do?” He glanced to the left, at a clock hanging over the door into the commercial kitchen. “We still have nine hours to kill. Eight, if you want to get there early.”
Which I did, for obvious reasons.
“I’m going to see if I can crash at Emma’s. It’s okay to tell her about my sleeping issues, right, since they have nothing to do with the Demon’s Breath epidemic or Nash being missing?”
But Tod shook his head slowly. “Kay, I think you should stay away from Emma for a while.”
I frowned, my nearly empty mug of heavily doctored coffee hovering in front of my mouth. “Why?” We could keep an eye on each other. Her, for the demons in my dreams, and me for the demons in her body. “I need to know if Avari possesses her again.”
Tod leaned forward with his arms crossed on the table, eyeing me intently. “I know, but the truth is that if you’re with her, that’s much more likely to happen. Emma is a very convenient direct line of communication to you. But if you’re not with her, no one can talk to you through her.”
So the best way to protect Emma was to stay away from her.
Well, crap. Looks like I’m on my own today.
Tod glanced at the table for a moment before meeting my eyes. “I’ll have a little time between visiting Addy and going to work.” And he would have to work at least a half shift, because an unemployed reaper was a dead reaper, and a dead reaper was no good to anyone. “So I’ll pop in then and you can take a nap.”
I couldn’t stifle the yawn that came at the very thought of sleep. “Thanks.” A nap sounded sooo good. Assuming I could keep myself in my own world long enough to enjoy it.
22
OVER THE NEXT HOUR and a half, I drank an entire pot of coffee in front of the TV and fielded phone calls from Emma and my dad, while avoiding one call each from Harmony and Sophie. Emma called in tears, and it took me nearly twenty minutes to calm her down. Thanks to his father’s position in the community and his threat to sue the hospital, Doug’s death was getting a lot of coverage on the local stations. I felt horrible about not being able to comfort her in person, but Tod’s warning kept me firmly on my own couch, telling myself over and over again that I was staying away from Emma for her own good.
My dad was just calling to check up on me, and as bad as I felt about having to lie to him, if I’d told him I was alone, he would have left work—and possibly lost his job—to come sit with me while I napped.
Sophie left me a furious voice mail demanding to know why my presence at a party—or anywhere else, for that matter—seemed to usher in disaster. She’d seen the news and one of her friends had told her Nash and I were at the party. Fortunately, Sophie seemed to have no clue that Nash was missing, which meant I wouldn’t have to call her back to find out if she’d seen him before he disappeared.
Harmony called the home phone looking for Nash, who wasn’t answering his cell. But since she’d just gotten home from work, she didn’t know how long he’d been gone, and she didn’t sound too worried yet. Though that would no doubt change as the day wore on with no contact from him. Especially once she heard about Doug’s death on the news.
At the end of the message, she said she might have found a way to keep me anchored to our world when I slept. As grateful as I was for that little tidbit of hope, I sat on my hands to keep from answering the phone for details, because then I’d have to lie to her, too, and for some reason, lying to Nash’s mom made me feel even worse than lying to my own father.
An hour after her phone call, I was sitting on the couch sipping from the last can of Jolt, watching the loudest action movie I could find on one of the cable networks, shivering in a short-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of jeans. I’d turned off the heat and opened all the windows, hoping cold air would help keep me awake. Yet in spite of the caffeine, the temperature, and the noise, my eyes were just starting to close when the home phone startled me upright with its sharp, electronic bleating.
The caller ID read Unknown, so I dropped the phone back onto the cradle without answering. But my gaze stayed glued to the phone dock as the answering machine kicked in.
My father’s voice filled the room, asking the caller to please leave a message after the tone, then an obnoxious electronic beep skewered my exhausted, overworked brain. For a moment, the machine produced only soft static, and I started to relax, assuming it was a wrong number.
Then a familiar voice called my name, and I whirled around so fast I nearly fell off the couch.
“Kaaayleeeee,” Avari said, and the discordance of a hellion’s voice on my regular, human-manufactured answering machine was enough to make me dizzy. “I know you’re there. Where else would you be without your boyfriend to keep you warm, or your father to keep you safe?”
What?
I scrambled over the couch so fast my knee slammed into the armrest and my bad arm brushed the rough upholstery, but I barely felt the pain in my rush to get to the phone. “What do you know about my dad?” I demanded, before the phone even made it to my ear.
“I know that he’s sitting four feet from me, unconscious but breathing. For the moment.”
“You’re lying!” I shouted, panic thudding in my head with each beat of my heart. “He can’t cross over.”
Avari laughed, and the sound was like shards of ice shattering on concrete. “Neither can Mr. Hudson, yet here they sit, waiting for you to come save them.”
Noooo… He was lying. He had to be. “Prove it.”
The hellion laughed again, and the callous racket was sharp enough to scrape the flesh from my bones. “Your father is a large man, but about as frightening as a stuffed bear. And when he cries in his sleep, as he’s doing at this moment, he calls you ‘Kay-Bear.’ He also asks for a woman named Darcy, whom I
can only assume was your ill-fated mother.”
Anguish crashed over me, and I sank onto the couch. For a moment, I heard nothing but the beating of my own heart and felt nothing but a hopeless, almost pleasant numbness crawling over my entire body.
“What do you want?” I asked when I was capable of speech again, and my voice sounded like it was being whispered from the other end of a long tube.
“I have already answered that question,” Avari said. “And my answer hasn’t changed. Cross over now, and I will let them go.”
Or…he’d keep all three of us, and I would officially qualify as the dumbest girl on the face of the planet. But if I refused to come, would he kill them? Could I bluff him, or stall him somehow?
The room around me swam with my tears. My hand clenched around the phone. My chill bumps now had nothing to do with the cold room.
“Kaylee? What’s wrong?” Tod asked, and I looked up to find him standing on the other side of the coffee table, watching me in concern. For once I was too upset to be startled by his sudden appearance. “And why is it colder than polar bear piss in here?”
“Shhhh…” I whispered, covering the mouthpiece with one hand while I wiped hot tears from my face with the other.
He waved my warning off. “No one else can hear me. Who is that?”
“He has my dad…” But before I could say any more, the hellion spoke again.
“Time waits for no bean sidhe, Ms. Cavanaugh. Are you coming or not?”
“Avari? On the phone?” Tod’s jaws bulged with fury, and he spun around like he’d punch something, but there was nothing within reach. “How the hell did he…?” The reaper swung back around to face me, eyes narrowed on me. “Who is he in?”
Oh, crap. I hadn’t even thought of that.
I covered the mouthpiece again, and the words fell from my lips so quickly even I could hardly understand them, but Tod seemed to have no trouble. “Emma. It has to be. Can you help her?”
He scowled, his fists clenching around air at his sides. “I don’t know. I’ll be right back.” Then Tod was gone, and I was alone in my freezing living room with the very voice of evil.