Thane crossed his arms over his chest. “And if I just blink out of here right now?”
I shook my head slowly, in mock concern over his stupidity. “My brother has nothing but time. He’ll find you, and along the way, he’ll report every client you have to the reclamation department and spread word that you sold them out. We all know the Netherworld’s not safe for you anymore, since you stole those souls from Avari, and if you piss us off, the human world won’t be safe for you, either.” I gave him another shrug. “Your call.”
“For the next minute and a half,” Tod added. “Then I make the decision for you.”
For several seconds, Thane stared back and forth between us, thinking, his expression carefully blank. The only sound was the occasional thud from the glass case behind me, where Netherworld flytraps as big as my forearm continued to attack the glass separating us from them.
“Okay, you’ve clearly put some thought into this, so I almost hate to disappoint you,” Thane said at last. “But I don’t have Darcy’s soul.”
“Bullshit,” Tod spat. “If you’d sold it, it would have been devoured years ago, and the bit of Aiden’s soul that was wound up with it would have returned to him. He’d be whole again. But he’s not, so Darcy’s soul’s still intact and suffering. Which means you never sold it.”
“You’re right about that,” Thane said. “But I don’t have it. If I did, I’d tell you, so you’d know I’m the one dangling the carrot in front of your face.” He shrugged, his arms still crossed over his wrinkled white shirt. “But I don’t have it, and I don’t know where it is, and wreaking havoc with my customer base isn’t going to change that.”
“What happened to the soul, Thane?” Tod demanded, each word so low-pitched and steady that the question seemed to come from within my own head.
“I’m gonna give you the scoop for free, out of respect for our honored profession,” Thane said, and that time I snorted. I’d never met a reaper with less honor. Thane would cooperate—up to a point—in the interest of self-preservation. “I held onto Darcy’s soul for a while after I took it, letting it appreciate. Two or three years. Maybe four. Time starts to run together after a while.” The rogue reaper picked up a clipped rose stem and began systematically breaking off the thorns. “Have you noticed that yet, or are you still too young?”
“Each minute is like a year,” Tod said, and I wasn’t sure whether that was a yes or a no, but Thane seemed to understand.
“Yeah. Anyway, about a decade back, I entered into an ill-advised business dealing with some folks I didn’t know well enough to trust. Not that anyone’s truly trustworthy in the black market, but these guys...well, they made off with everything they could carry. Including Darcy’s soul.”
“You got robbed?” I laughed. Coming from an infamous thief of souls, the irony was too sweet.
“I wouldn’t characterize it as a robbery, so much as a snatching. And it was definitely a crime of impulse. I could see their eyes growing wider and wider with every item I put in front of them. I thought I was about to make a big sale.” Thane shrugged, and I could see the humiliation he tried to hide behind a casual delivery. “Instead, when I turned for my inventory chart, they grabbed everything they could carry, then flew off.”
“They flew off?” Surely he didn’t mean that literally. Unless the robbery took place in the Netherworld.
“Snatching?” Tod seemed to be tasting the word, and I could practically hear the gears turning in his head. “You got robbed by harpies.”
Thane shrugged again, and this time the gesture looked stiff. “Turns out they have a different interpretation of ‘free enterprise.’ Emphasis on the ‘free.’”
“What would harpies want with human souls?” I glanced from one reaper to the next, frustrated by my own ignorance. “Can they even use them?”
“They didn’t want the souls, did they?” Tod said, still pinning Thane with his gaze, and I frowned with the realization that my brother had figured out more than I had. “They just wanted the pretty trinkets. That’s why Darcy’s soul’s still intact.”
Thane huffed. “Harpies like shiny things. Who knew?”
“Everyone.” My brother’s dark blond brows rose over deep blue eyes. “Everyone knows that.”
I hadn’t known. I’d never even seen a harpy, so I covered the gap in my Netherworld education with another question. “Who were they? Did you get any names?”
“What was her soul in? What kind of bauble?” Tod demanded, and I could practically see his patience draining, like water swirling down the sink.
Thane’s grin morphed into a satisfied smirk. “I’ve been about as helpful as I plan to be today, boys. Happy hunting.”
Before the rogue reaper could blink out, Tod lunged forward and grabbed his wrist, below his rolled-up sleeve. My brother’s left fist was a blur of motion as it slammed into Thane’s jaw. Thane stumbled backward, but Tod refused to let go, even as he turned to me with a wicked grin of his own. “He smirked. You warned him about the smirking.”
Thane recovered his balance quickly and jerked free from Tod’s grasp. When I tried to grab him, to keep him from blinking out without us, his fist crashed into my ribs. I sucked in a stunned breath and was already swinging when Tod landed another blow to the reaper’s face.
I grabbed Thane’s wrists while he was still hunched in pain and pulled his arms behind him. “Get something to tie him up with.” We had to remain in physical contact to keep him from blinking away, and that’d be easier if he couldn’t fight.
“Who were these harpies?” I demanded, while Tod opened drawers and cabinets in Angie’s back room, and the reaper cursed and tried to pull free from my grasp. “There’s duct tape in the office!” I reminded him, then turned back to Thane. “Where do they—?”
Thane jerked free and swung on me. I ducked and he missed, then I buried my fist in his stomach. The reaper stumbled back and I pressed forward, shoving one of Angie’s folding tables out of my way. Thane panted and tried to stand, and I swung on him again; if he had a chance to catch his breath, we’d lose him.
Thane blocked my blow and threw one of his own, but it only glanced across my chin. When he stood, I shoved him backward. The rogue reaper crashed into the red curtain, and glass shattered.
Tod appeared in the doorway just as the curtain ripped free from its rod and the front of the case behind it broke into several large chunks of glass, which lodged in the fallen curtain and shattered into even smaller pieces on the concrete floor at our feet.
Thane gasped, then grunted. When he tried to pick himself up, he fell through the case and his back hit the front of the giant sundew plant. For a moment, he just hung there, snagged on the marble-size blobs of “dew” at the end of the sundew’s spines.
Then he started struggling.
“What the hell?” Thane tried to step forward, but his shirt and pants were glued to the huge, strong stalk, which hardly bent beneath his efforts. He tried to turn his head, and his right cheek caught three more sticky blobs, holding his head at an awkward, painful-looking angle.
Tod burst into laughter and glanced at me. “Did you do that on purpose?”
“Yeah. Totally.” Best accident ever. “You were taking too long with the duct tape.”
“What is this?” Thane demanded, arching his back for a better view of the room, and I noticed that the lashes edging his right eye were caught in a dewdrop of their own. He was well and truly stuck. To a plant. He could probably still blink out of the florist’s shop, but the deadly greenery would go with him.
“As near as I can tell, that is a giant sundew.” Tod chuckled again, and I realized he wasn’t just amused, he was delighted. I hadn’t seen him so happy since before Kaylee died. For the third time. “The harder you struggle, the more tightly you’re caught.”
Thane went still, and seemed to kind of hang there, suspended from the plant, one foot folded at an awkward angle just inside the case, the other wedged inside the edge of the big po
t. “For how long? When will it let go?”
I ducked into his limited field of vision to catch his gaze. “When have you ever known a predator to let go of its prey?”
Thane’s eyes widened and panic washed over him. “Get me out. Get me out, and I’ll tell you whatever you want.”
“Oh, now you want to talk.” Tod set the duct tape on the nearest table, and Thane rolled his eyes upward, trying to meet my brother’s gaze. “Fine. You start talking while I find some scissors. Where did you meet with these harpies?”
“Here.” Thane squirmed, trying to watch Tod as my brother opened more drawers and cabinets in his halfhearted search for a blade.
“Here, where?” I asked. “Here in Midlothian? Here in the U.S.? Here in Texas?”
“Here in Texas,” Thane said. “South. Somewhere near Austin.”
I nodded encouragingly. “Were they from Austin?”
“How the hell would I know that? They have wings. They could have come from anywhere.”
“No, they came from the Netherworld. They’re not native to our world, and they can’t fly during the day without being seen.” Tod closed a cabinet drawer and turned to pick up a pair of pruning shears from the table they’d been lying on all along. “So they’d probably only fly at night. Which means they couldn’t have come from more than a few hours away.”
I blinked at my brother, impressed. Then I turned on my own detective skills. “How many were there? Did you get any names?”
“Two,” Thane said, as Tod waved the shears in his face for motivation. “They wore long dark coats, with slits cut in the backs. When they flew off, their wings slipped right through the holes and spread out like bat wings.”
“Names?” I repeated.
Thane tried to shake his head, then winced when more of his hair got caught in the dewdrops. “If I heard them, I don’t remember.”
“Think harder.” Tod opened the shears. “Here’s a little inspiration.” He clipped the spine stuck to Thane’s eyelashes, and when the reaper blinked, the sticky blob bobbed with the movement.
“Troy,” Thane said at last. “The guy was named Troy. The girl had red hair, but I didn’t get her name.” His eye rolled more freely, untethered. “You realize I just pulled a miracle out of my ass for you, right? There’s no reason on earth I should remember that damned name.”
“Troy stole from you.” Tod’s voice was too cold and dead to come from anyone but a reaper. “I can’t believe you ever forgot his name in the first place.”
“What did it look like?” I said, while the reapers glared at each other. “The amphora with Darcy’s soul in it.” Only hellion-forged steel could hold a human—or bean sidhe—soul, but it could take the shape of anything from a weapon to a...well, a balloon weight.
I’d asked the question, but Thane responded to Tod. “Cut me loose, and I’ll tell you.”
“Tell us, or we won’t cut you loose,” I countered.
“We’ll meet you halfway.” Tod snipped the spines stuck to Thane’s face, and he could turn his head a little, now limited only by the dewdrops buried in his hair. Three amputated spines stuck up from his right cheek, like grotesque beard stubble.
“It was in a dragon charm, about two and a half inches long, with a ruby for its eye.”
“Charm, like for a necklace?” I asked.
Thane nodded, and a spine near his head suddenly...twitched. It was a small movement, but Tod and I both jumped back, startled.
“What?” Thane demanded. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
A second spine moved, then a third, and suddenly I could see the pattern. They were moving toward Thane. Slowly closing in on him. A second later, the top of the huge green stalk itself moved—the smallest of motions—bending toward the top of the reaper’s trapped head.
The plant was slowly curling up around him.
“What the hell is happening?” Thane demanded, and Tod made a strange choking sound in his throat, obviously as horrified as I was.
“Um... The plant seems to be...eating you.”
“It doesn’t have a mouth,” Thane snapped. “So how can it eat me?”
“Those ‘dewdrops’ will slowly dissolve your flesh and absorb the nutrients,” my brother explained. “Though I can’t imagine how nutritious you could possibly be, considering that you’re rotten to the core.”
“Cut me loose!” Thane shouted, as several more spines slowly curled forward to adhere to his left arm. The reaper waved his still-untethered forearm desperately. “I told you everything I know. Cut me out of this thing!”
I glanced at Tod, and he aimed an exaggerated shrug at Thane. “I would, but Levi’s kind of pissed at me right now for skipping work. He might be more inclined to forgive and forget if I hand over the fugitive he’s been hunting for over two years.”
“You promised to cut me loose if I told you about the harpies!” Thane shouted, and I was amazed at the transformation in him. From psychotic rogue reaper to whining baby in under ten minutes. And all it took was a man-eating plant.
Tod rolled bright blue eyes. “You promised to uphold reaper law and only reap those souls assigned to you. Which lie do you think Levi’s more likely to forgive?”
Finally Thane turned to me, desperation thick in his voice. “You’re going to let him do this? You’re not murderers. Neither of you. The guilt will eat you alive.”
Tod laughed and shook his head. “I don’t think it’ll even give us heartburn.” He turned to me with a brief, cobalt twist of satisfaction shifting in his irises. “I’ll be right back for you. Just stay put.”
I nodded and sat on the edge of one of Angie’s tables, spinning the shears with my finger stuck through one of the handles. “Say hi to Levi for me.”
My brother didn’t seem to hear me. He was staring right into Thane’s eyes. “You should never have come near Kaylee.”
“Maybe you never should have come near Kaylee. She let herself die to protect you. Maybe if you’d—”
Tod swung one more time, and his fist crashed into the side of Thane’s skull with a deep thud. “Never gets old,” he said, shaking out his hand, post-blow. My brother squatted in front of the unconscious reaper, wrapping one arm around the base of the huge plant pot and his opposite hand around Thane’s bare wrist, careful to avoid the sticky spines.
Then they both disappeared.
Tod
Levi’s office was empty when I got there, and Thane was still unconscious—both elements of the best-case scenario playing out in my head. The duct tape and notepad I found in my boss’s bottom desk drawer were the icing on my vigilante justice cake.
One piece of the tape went over Thane’s mouth, in case he woke up before Levi returned. The second piece attached the note I wrote to the front of his shirt. I actually considered stapling the paper to his chest, but was afraid that the pain would wake him up.
Levi,
Please find the attached rogue reaper, neatly bound in this Netherworld plant for your convenience. I hope he helps balance the scales tipped out of my favor by my recent absence.
Tod
P.S. Don’t touch the dewdrops.
P.S.2. Please don’t fire me today. I have yet more badassery to perform.
With the note taped to his chest, I arranged Thane and his giant potted plant on the rug in Levi’s office, facing the door, where my boss would be sure to see my gift as soon as he came in. Then I pressed Thane’s forearms to the sides of the huge stalk, to affix them to the sticky spines, further immobilizing him, just in case. I stepped back to admire my handiwork, and the whole thing looked so bizarrely awesome I couldn’t resist taking a picture. Which I texted to both Levi and Nash. Then I blinked out of the office and back into Angie’s floral shop to pick up my brother.
* * *
The sun was going down by the time we got back to Mom’s house, and Sabine was there waiting for us, eating the last of the butterscotch blondies my mother had made the night before. “Why are you here?” I said
, when she offered Nash a bite, but skipped over me.
“Same reason I’m always here. Your mom and Brendon are at my house, actively triggering my gag reflex.”
“Her” house was actually Brendon’s, because he’d been her foster father for the last few months before her eighteenth birthday. Sabine was twenty now, and long since old enough to move out, but because her personal economic philosophy scoffed at paying for something she could have for free—like room and board—she’d probably stay on until he kicked her out. Or until Nash got a place of his own and became even more eligible for mooching.
Since my mom spent most of her time at Brendon’s, where she would officially live, after the wedding, we’d effectively traded her for Sabine.
It was not an even trade. Sabine doesn’t bake.
“So, how’d it go?” she said, as I pinched a corner from the last untouched blondie on the plate.
Nash’s eyes practically glowed when he answered. “Any day you catch a rogue reaper with a man-eating plant is a good day!”
“Oooh, details!” Sabine said around a mouthful of butterscotch.
Nash and I filled her in, and when I got to the part where a giant sundew plant tried to devour Thane alive, Sabine and Nash traded meaningful looks.
“What?” I frowned, suspicious.
Sabine shrugged. “I haven’t seen you smile in at least a year.”
I plucked a forgotten butterscotch chip from the plate on the coffee table. “It’s not every day you get to feed your arch-nemesis to carnivorous produce.” They grinned at each other again, and I frowned. “Was this whole thing just to make me smile? Wouldn’t it have been easier just to dress Nash in a tutu?”