Nash had narrowly survived an addiction to frost, thanks to the fact that he wasn’t human, and I was not eager to put him within reach of the substance again.
“However, the souls are rare and expensive, and most humans don’t have any use for them anyway,” Angie continued. “Those orders come from very special and exclusive parties.” She frowned, crossing her arms over her apron again. “But you already said you’re not customers, and you’re definitely not with the reclamation department, so why are you here, and what’s the fastest way I can get you out of my shop?”
“Why would you keep these, if you can’t refill them?” Nash ignored her question, running one finger over the arched back of a tiny metal man writhing in torment. He seemed both fascinated by and sympathetic to the figure’s pain, and when he spoke, his voice sounded distant. Distracted. “They must be expensive. Surely you could recoup some of your losses by selling the weights.”
For just a second, Angie’s expression was unguarded, and I saw the truth written in every line of her middle-aged face.
“She can refill them.” I stepped closer, and though her eyes flashed in anger, she backed up until she bumped into her own desk. “She will refill them. Soon, I’m guessing. Which is why she’s eager to get rid of us.”
Nash turned away from the figurines, and his irises were a storm of shifting colors in every shade of anger, and aggression, and some terrible, dark hunger. “Your supplier’s on his way, isn’t he? When will he be here?”
“More important...” I said, drawing her attention away from Nash, who seemed to have strayed from the point. “Who is it? Who’s your supplier?”
“You wouldn’t know him,” the shop owner said, trying to edge away from both of us at once, and when I saw us reflected in her eyes, united in purpose, I realized what a powerful force we could be together, as long as Nash kept his eye on the prize and his head out of the potential clouds of Demon’s Breath.
“It’s a pretty small world, Angie,” he said, and I could feel his Influence roiling through each word like smoke rising from flames. “And we know a lot of people. Just give us his name, and we’ll take it from there.”
“Nash...” I let a little warning seep into my own voice. I hadn’t heard him use his Influence in years, and as a teenager, he’d had issues in the realm of self-control.
“I know what I’m doing,” my brother whispered, without taking his focus from the cornered florist. “Angie wants to tell us. She’ll feel a lot better if she tells us, won’t you, Angie?”
For a moment, she looked like she was about to vomit up some serious information. Then she burst into laughter instead.
Nash blinked in surprise, and I had to swallow a little shock of my own at the realization that we’d been played. Whatever Angie was, she wasn’t scared of us, now that she knew we weren’t there in an official capacity, intent on seizing her stock.
“I sell Demon’s Breath and black-market human souls to a clientele who—for the most part—have no business being in the human world. Do you really think I’m weak-willed enough to cave beneath the Influence of a baby bean sidhe?” She glanced at Nash in derision. “You’re, what, eighteen? Come back and see me when you’re a hundred and eighteen, and I’ll let you try your luck again. Maybe I’ll let you try more than that.” She looked him over as if she could see right through his clothes, and my brother looked more uncomfortable than I’d ever seen him in the presence of a woman. “If memory serves, you bean sidhes age well.”
“I’m twenty,” Nash mumbled, and I had to stifle a laugh. If she’d still be around to receive him in a century, the difference between eighteen and twenty wouldn’t mean a damn thing to her.
“A baby,” she repeated, staring up at him in appreciation. “A very pretty baby.”
Nash’s jaw clenched and his irises began to storm.
“He may be a baby,” I said, drawing Angie’s attention again. “But he has the right idea. I think you do want to tell us who your supplier is.” I let my will leak into my voice, feeding it to her one word at a time, so that it could corrupt her own thoughts and desires and slowly begin to replace them with my own. Angie was too stubborn for a sudden takeover—her will would have to be romanced. Slowly seduced.
Right or wrong, that’s what male bean sidhes do best.
“I think you’re dying to get that burden off your chest, so you can breathe easier,” I continued, and her derisive smile began to fade.
“Absolve yourself,” Nash said, when he caught on. “Tell us who he is, so we can get rid of him for you, and you can go back to being an upstanding, cougar-freak of a citizen.”
Her eyes flashed in irritation, but I could see our Influence starting to work. She might be able to resist one of us, but she couldn’t resist us both.
I’d never met a woman who could.
“Let it go, Angie.” I stepped closer, but she was already pressed against her desk and could not retreat. “Just say it,” I murmured. “Let his name slide over your tongue. It’ll feel good. I promise.” Her gaze dropped to my lips, and I swear she groaned.
My brother stepped forward and we stood side by side, a united force for the first time in years. For just a second, I felt invincible. “We need you, Angie.” Nash’s voice was low. More rumble than true words, but she understood every bit of it. “You’re the only one who can give us what we need. You want to give us what we need, don’t you?”
“He’s a reaper,” she breathed, her gaze flitting back and forth between us, taking in mouths, and eyes, and everything else she hungered for, with our voices crippling her willpower and driving her needs. “His name is Thane. He’ll be here in twenty minutes.”
Just what we’d been waiting to hear.
Nash stepped back and grinned at me, and my knuckles met his in a long-overdue fist bump of fraternal solidarity.
Nash
“You soulless little bastards!” Angie shouted, as I wrapped the length of duct tape around her wrist for a third lap.
“Oh, we both have souls,” Tod assured her, while I ripped the roll free from her wrist with my teeth. “But we came by them honestly, unlike you and your new inventory. Speaking of which, how big is the shipment?”
“I’m not telling you another damn thing!” she screeched, and Tod stood, finally finished taping her ankles to the legs of the chair.
I shrugged and sat on the edge of her desk, where she could see me. “Not that it matters. We’ll be turning them all over to his boss.” Except for Kaylee’s mother’s soul, on the slim chance that Thane still had it and carried it with him. And that was a slim chance.
We knew Darcy Cavanaugh’s soul hadn’t been devoured or destroyed because Aiden was still suffering her loss as if it’d happened yesterday. He couldn’t let her go because part of his own soul was still wrapped up with hers.
Angie’s head swiveled—it was the only part she could still move—and her gaze landed on Tod. “If you’re a reaper, how’d you do...that?”
My brother grinned at her, and his irises shifted in slow swirls of satisfaction and amusement. “How did I reduce you to a puddle of cougar goo?” She glared over his phrasing, but I laughed out loud. “Well, I had help.” Tod extended one arm toward me, and I bowed, taking credit for my half of our performance. “And you are looking at the reaper voted most likely to make women wish they could see death coming, two years running. But the truth is that though I’m a reaper now, I was a bean sidhe first.”
“And foremost, obviously,” I added. “I’ve never seen you lay it down like that!”
“I rarely need to.” He spread his arms, inviting both me and Angie to look at what nature had frozen in time. “Usually this is enough to do the trick.”
“Cocky little shits, aren’t you?” Angie grumbled. “I hope Thane rips you both limb from pretty limb.”
Tod laughed. “I’ve gone up against him twice, and I’ve won both times. I don’t think my odds get any lower with my brother here to help out.”
&
nbsp; “Especially if we can maintain the element of surprise,” I added. “Which is where this comes in.” Tod held her head still while I pressed the last length of duct tape across her mouth.
When we let her go, she cursed at us from behind the tape.
“You know, you’re really getting worked up over nothing,” Tod said. “You’ve served your purpose. Bad guys would just kill you, but all we’re asking for is a little quiet. And maybe a couple of those candy bars hidden in your bottom desk drawer.” Where we’d found the duct tape.
“Seems like a fair price for your life.” I ripped the wrapper from a chocolate-covered peanut bar and tossed something with nougat in it to Tod. “So, what do you think she is?” I said, with a glance at the bound freak of a florist.
He shrugged. “Some kind of parasite? Or maybe a half-breed? Something long-lived, but short on defensive abilities. Unless she was just playing with her food, before we busted out the vocal duet and prevented her from eating us.” He shrugged and took a bite of his candy bar, then spoke around it. “Either way, she can cross over, assuming she harvested all those weird-ass plants from the Netherworld herself. Let’s just hope she can’t cross while she’s all tied up.”
Angie was trying to say something from behind her sticky gag, but it sounded like more pointless yelling. “We better insulate her a little more.”
“Agreed.” He pulled open the only other door in her office, and I hauled Angie into her own closet, chair and all. When we closed the door, we could hardly hear her. “Tell the truth.” Tod glanced at me with the wicked grin he used to wear habitually, but I hadn’t seen in two years. “You’ve wanted to tape Sabine’s mouth shut. You’ve dreamed about it. You must have.”
“Nope.” I shook my head, letting him see the truth of that in my eyes. Then I gave him a lighthearted smile. “The only person I dream of shutting up is you. I like all Sabine’s parts. They work together. As a whole.” My hands mimed tracing her shape in the air in front of me.
Tod’s smile faded slowly, like air leaking from a balloon, and the morose stranger my brother had become since Kaylee’s death was suddenly back.
“She wouldn’t want to see you like this, you know. All sullen and listless.”
His raised brows were a challenge. “If she were here to see me, I wouldn’t be sullen and listless. Not that I am either of those. Would someone who’s sullen and listless dare you to go slap one of the meat-eating plants in the glass case, without getting your hand bitten off?”
His mischievous grin was forced, but it was the best I was gonna get, at the moment. “Is it poisonous?”
Tod’s smile grew when I didn’t immediately refuse the dare. “I don’t see how that’s relevant. And anyway, you know as much about Netherworld plants as I do.”
But I was pretty sure that wasn’t true. I couldn’t cross into the Netherworld on my own, and my brother went routinely. At least, he had until he’d stopped going to work.
In the back room, we stared through Angie’s long, tall glass case at an array of bizarre carnivorous plants, like nothing I’d ever seen. Yes, the human world has carnivorous plants—every kindergartner knows about the Venus flytrap—but the vast majority of those are only big enough to catch a housefly, thus the name, and while they do dissolve and devour living forms of protein for sustenance, they’re opportunists, not hunters. They don’t experience malice, or even hunger, in a truly predatory sense.
A Venus flytrap doesn’t “eat” until a fly lands in its “mouth” and gets trapped.
The monstrous versions Angie kept behind glass moved of their own volition, snapping at us as we stared through the case at them. Also, their serrated-leaf teeth looked razor-sharp.
“I’m not putting my hand in there,” I said, after about a minute and a half of serious contemplation. “That thing’s mouth is as big as my palm.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Tod tapped the center of the case, where a steel lock kept the doors from sliding open. “It’s locked.” One of the man-eaters—or hand-eaters, at least—rammed the glass where his finger was still pressed against it, and I laughed when Tod jumped back. I’d rarely ever seen a reaper startled.
“Relax. If they could break through the glass, she’d have them in something stronger. Right?”
Tod nodded, but looked far from sure. “Hey, what do you think she keeps he—” My brother yanked back a floor-to-ceiling red velvet curtain to reveal a single huge glass case, and the rest of his sentence faded in astonishment. “Holy shit.”
For several seconds, I could only stare, my slack jaw mirroring my brother’s. “What the hell is that?”
The plant was a single, seven-foot-tall green stalk, as thick as my bicep and as wide as my chest, covered in finger-width red spines. At the tip of every spine was a glistening, wet blob the size of a marble.
“It looks like a giant sundew.” Tod’s voice was soft with awe. “Those globs on the end of its spines are super-sticky. Nature’s version of flypaper.”
“Nature, my ass. There’s nothing natural about that thing. You’ve seen these before?”
“This? No.” He exhaled slowly and stepped closer to the case. “The ones here in the human world only grow a few inches high. A girl in my junior biology glass grew several for a science project. She fed them each a different kind of insect, to see which would grow tallest.”
“We have a winner...” I said, still staring at the gigantic plant in horrified astonishment. The pot holding it was three feet in diameter. “What do you think this thing eats?”
“The real question is ‘Who does it eat?’ I think Angie-the-florist has been up to no good.”
“‘Feed me, Seymour,’” I said, and Tod laughed uneasily, then pulled the curtain back into place.
“That thing’s creepy.”
“No argument here.” I turned back to the smaller case full of smaller plants. “Let’s go taunt the little man-eaters until it’s time to kick more ass.” Since Tod couldn’t keep us invisible or inaudible to a fellow reaper anyway, we had no reason to hide or be quiet.
He grinned. “Sounds like a plan.”
Minutes later, we were competing to see who could provoke the most plants into slamming themselves into the glass when metal creaked behind us. “Well, if it isn’t Cain and Abel.”
My pulse jumped and I spun to find Thane sitting on one of the florist’s prep tables, in the same black slacks and untucked white button-down he’d worn every time I’d seen him. He looked like a sloppy waiter. One who served only death and misery.
Dark hair fell over one eye as he smirked. “I see Angie’s having a sale—two jackasses for the price of one. And it’s not even my birthday. How are you boys getting along these days, without Ms. Cavanaugh to come between you?”
Tod sat on the edge of the table across from him and crossed his arms over his chest, and if he’d ever in his entire life been nervous or scared, I couldn’t tell it in that moment. My brother was born cool. He’d probably just grinned at the doctor who’d slapped his newborn butt. “Actually, we’re here on Kaylee’s behalf,” he said. “Tying up loose ends.”
Thane nodded, taking the announcement in stride. “I’m one of those ends?”
“The loosest,” I said, and the rogue reaper actually laughed.
“And Angie is...?”
“Indisposed.” I fought not to glance behind me at her office, where she was still hidden. “Our business is with you.”
“Are we gonna fight again? It’s been a while. I might need to limber up.” Thane extended one arm over his head and tugged on it with his opposite hand.
“No fighting,” I said. “We’re here to make a deal.”
Tod shot me an exaggerated frown. “That’s not what we agreed on. You’re kind of spoiling this for me.”
“Violence never solved anything,” I maintained, fully aware that my eyes were probably twisting with mirth.
“That’s not true!” Tod insisted, playing along. “Violence is the cornerstone of
negotiation!”
“Hey, Orville and Wilbur, I don’t have all day.” Thane thought about that for a second, then shrugged. “Well, I do, really, but I’m not spending it here with The Brothers Dim, so get to the point. Are we killing each other or not?”
“Actually, we were going to offer you a chance to continue with your miserable farce of an afterlife,” Tod said. “In exchange for one of the souls you stole.”
Thane snorted. “You couldn’t kill me if you tried.” As far as I knew, the only things powerful enough to revoke a reaper’s afterlife were a reaper with true authority—like Levi—or a hellion, and the process required actual physical contact. “But I am curious. What do you want with a black-market soul? Are you two dabbling on the dark side?”
“We don’t want just any soul,” I said. “We want Darcy Cavanaugh.”
“Darcy...?” Thane frowned, then comprehension brightened his dark eyes. “Wow, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. So...what? You two are trying to save your dead lover’s dead mother? What’s in it for you? It’s not like Kaylee’s around to show either of you how grateful she is.”
“You don’t get to say her name.” Tod’s voice was as dark and still as the grave, and chill bumps popped up the length of my body. “You don’t ever, ever get to say her name.”
Thane scowled. “Hey, I’m not happy about the way that went down, either, assuming the rumors are true. She forfeited her own afterlife? What kind of horseshit martyrdom is that? Do you have any idea what an undead bean sidhe’s soul would have been worth on the black market?”
Tod’s jaw was clenched so tight I was afraid he’d break a tooth, so I jumped in before he could lose it. “I’m going to say this simply, so even you can understand, Thane. Give us Darcy’s soul, and we part ways peacefully. Hold out on us—or smirk at me one more time—and we beat you into a pile of blood and bones, then turn you over to Levi for expulsion from the afterlife.” I shrugged. “I don’t really care which one you pick. I know saving an innocent soul is probably the right thing to do, but beating on you for a while sounds like fun, too, and I’m not exactly known for my stellar decision-making skills.”