Eroded innocence? Seriously?
I glanced around the room again, looking for some sign of Harmony and my uncle or Nash and Sabine. For some indication of how much longer I should keep the hellion talking.
“The fact that we’re still having this conversation makes me think I’m worth it. The fact that you haven’t actually said I’m not worth it. But you know what? You’re right. I should go. I need my father back, but I don’t necessarily need you to give him to me. If I’m going to have to pay for his return either way, I think I’d rather pay someone else. Someone who’s already had a taste of me and my ‘eroded innocence’ and would be happy to have another.” My skin crawled at the very thought, but I refused to let that show.
“No one else can get to your father while I have him. You will deal with me, or know that you are responsible for his pain.”
“I don’t know, Kay,” Tod said in a stage whisper. “I think Ira offered you the better deal.”
“Ira?” Avari stalked closer, but I held my ground, though fresh thick ice formed beneath his feet with each step. “Another lie. You could never survive an encounter with the hellion of wrath.”
“Oh.” I frowned, pretending to second-guess my own memory. “Well then, I guess I never summoned him, either, did I? And I have no way of knowing that he’s powerful enough to answer a summons, but you’re not. And if none of that really happened, then I guess I never let him kiss me, either. Or taste my blood. Or feed my rage. If none of that was real, then you won’t mind if I leave you here and go imagine another encounter with Ira, who seems more than willing to work with my demands.”
“The king of rage gets my vote,” Tod said. “Hell, I may make him an offer myself.”
Avari threw his arm out, index finger pointed like a weapon, and a thick spear of ice shot across the room to impale a creature in the far corner, who squealed, then collapsed. “The next one goes through your reaper lover. I will not play these games with you, bean sidhe. Offer up your soul or go home, and rest assured that your father will suffer in your stead....”
The hellion’s words faded and his head turned to the left. He stared at the long south wall of the large room, and unease churned in my stomach. A closed door stood in the middle of that wall. And with sudden cruel insight, I realized he was hearing something we couldn’t.
Avari’s hand shot out again, and the muscles in his neck bulged above his stiff white collar. The wall to his left exploded in a shower of huge ice daggers and broken cinder blocks. Dust spewed in all directions, and I gasped, choking as Tod pinned me between his body and the other wall. The tension in his entire frame said he was seconds from crossing over, with me in tow. And he might have done that very thing, if not for...
“Oh, no...”
I shoved him back so I could peer through the choking gray haze to see what he’d seen.
As the dust and debris settled, I saw that Avari had blasted through not only the interior wall separating our room from the next, but through part of the ceiling of that other room and part of the floor above it. Through the gaping hole above a pile of still-settling chunks of concrete, I could see the Netherworld sky, a sickly shade of orange at the moment, like pumpkin soup that has started to spoil.
But then my gaze followed the wreckage and I saw what had upset Tod. What everyone was staring at. What Avari had heard through the wall.
In the other room, my uncle Brendon stood with his feet spread, a sledgehammer clenched in a two-handed grip, ready to swing. On the ground in front of him were three bodies, each misshapen and somehow wrong, with grayish skin and inverted knee joints.
One had obviously been smashed by the falling debris, when Avari blew the wall in. The other two were the source of the weird grayish blood—or maybe some other bodily fluid—dripping in congealing glops from the hammer my uncle must have found in that room full of old machinery, which had probably never functioned at all in the Netherworld version of the mental hospital.
For a moment, no one moved. My uncle adjusted his grip, eyeing the horde of monsters now twitching, wheezing, and slithering forward slowly in anticipation of some cry of attack by Avari.
I saw no sign of my father. So why was Uncle Brendon still there? Why hadn’t he and Harmony crossed over the instant Avari blew out the wall?
Then I saw Harmony’s long, pale curls trailing over a large cracked brick on the floor. The rest of her was there, too, surely, but so covered in gray dust and bits of brick that it was hard to see anything other than glimpses of color—blond hair, blue T-shirt, red blood pooling on the bricks downhill from her head.
Harmony wasn’t moving.
Chapter Fourteen
“Mom!” Tod shouted, and heads turned our way. He pulled me toward the hole in the wall. Hands reached for us. Fingers brushed my arms. Claws caught in my hair. Tails and tentacles tugged at my shirt. My heart beat harder than it ever had, even before my death. But we dodged and slapped and kicked our way through the crowd as it coalesced around us, almost casually slowing our progress, as if they were in no hurry to actually kill us.
As if our fear were enough—for now.
Uncle Brendon heard Tod shout and saw us coming. He turned, looking for Harmony, then let out an anguished cry when he found her. With the huge hammer still clenched in his right fist, he scrambled over the pile of broken cinder blocks to kneel at her side.
We were several feet from the hole in the wall when he swept bloodstained hair from her face and felt for her pulse. We were two feet away when Avari gave another grand sweep of his arm and a thin barrier of ice formed over the hole in the wall like a patch in a pair of jeans. The ice crackled as it thickened, bluish in color but almost perfectly transparent.
Tod pulled me to a stop inches away, and in the second it took us to recover from surprise, the ice thickened layer after layer, trapping tiny cracks and bubbles inside until it was too thick to break. Until it sealed us in and my uncle and his mother out.
Uncle Brendon looked up and hardly seemed to notice the new barrier. He said something, but we couldn’t hear him.
“What?” I shouted, my palm an inch from the ice, so close I could feel the cold but was afraid to touch it. For all I knew, making contact with it would freeze me solid, like the green woman, and I would shatter into a million pieces of Kaylee, never to be reassembled.
My uncle shouted again, and that time I heard enough to understand. “She’s alive!”
“Go!” I whispered to Tod. “Take them home.” He could blink into the human world, then back into the Netherworld on the other side of the ice nearly instantly.
“If Cain so much as twitches, I will have Abel’s head torn from his body.”
It took me a second to process the reference—an odd one coming from a hellion—but then Avari waved one hand at a door on the other side of the room and one of his monsters threw it open. Nash—Abel—appeared in the doorway, then was shoved through it by Belphegore, the hellion of vanity who’d killed Emma. Belphegore was the personification of beauty, with flawless features that defied ethnic classification but slipped from my memory the moment my gaze left her face.
She had one perfect, graceful hand around Nash’s arm, and though his forehead was furrowed in fury, he looked...sober. She hadn’t yet forced a dose of her own breath on him.
Behind them, Invidia hauled Sabine into the room. The mara took in the seething mob of monsters, and her dark eyes widened. But then her gaze returned to Nash. She could cross into the human world whenever she wanted, but she wouldn’t leave him, and with the hellions between them, she couldn’t reach Nash to take him with her.
“Your mother or your brother?” Avari watched Tod patiently, savoring his indecision.
Through the ice, we saw my uncle pick Harmony up and carefully begin climbing the huge mound of debris with her broken body limp in his arms. My fists opened and closed uselessly. The ache in my chest rivaled the fevered rush of my pulse, and I felt more helpless—more human—than I had since
the day I’d died.
“Which will you choose, reaper?”
Nash saw us and exhaled in relief—until he looked past us through the ice. He and Sabine seemed to realize what they were seeing at the same time. “Mom!” He tried to push through the throng of claws, fangs, and horns ready to spill blood and devour flesh at one word from Avari, but Belphegore held him back with no visible effort.
“Go get her!” Nash shouted at his brother. For the first time since we’d met, Tod looked...unsure. Torn. His mother was badly hurt but alive. Yet Nash could lose his head in the blink of an eye.
“Your mortal attachments are like a puppet’s strings,” Avari said, both hands clasped casually at his back. “One need only pluck the right cord to make the puppet dance.” His smile was almost creepier than his threats. “Dance, reaper.”
Tod’s eyes flashed with storms of midnight-blue fury. “You knew.”
“That you and the little bean sidhe were a distraction? Of course. She might very well have been willing to sacrifice her own soul in exchange for her father’s life, but you would never go along with that. So now the question is what will you give up for your brother? What is his life worth to you?”
“Just go!” Nash shouted, and Belphegore jerked his head back by a handful of his thick brown hair, stretching his neck at a painful angle. “Tod, go!”
My uncle was shouting again, and when I turned back to the ice, I found him halfway up the pile of rubble, headed for the hole in the building, cradling Harmony to his chest while her arms and head hung limp.
He was shouting for us to go, too, but he couldn’t see Nash and Sabine. He wanted us to leave him and Tod’s mom and my dad in this Nether-hell and escape with only our own afterlives.
But we couldn’t leave without Nash and Sabine, yet we couldn’t get to them without abilities that didn’t work in the Nether. Sabine could get him out, if she could reach him. But for that, she’d need a distraction. An opportunity.
“My dad’s not here, is he?” I demanded, and Avari actually laughed.
“No.” And that had to be the truth, because hellions couldn’t lie.
“Go get him. This negotiation is over if I don’t see him here, alive, in three minutes.”
More hellion laughter, and this time it resonated in my spine like a physical blow. “This negotiation was never real.”
“I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to her.” I looked past Avari to the hellion of vanity, who still clutched one of Nash’s arms. “I don’t like the way Avari plays, so I’m going to offer you the same deal I offered him. Send my friends and family back to the human world, and my soul is yours. This offer expires in one minute.”
“She’s lying!” Avari shouted. “She doesn’t have to keep her word.”
No one listened to him.
“Why would I trade those four souls for your one?” Belphegore called, and Invidia’s focus volleyed eagerly between us.
“Because Avari wants mine. Think of what you could get out of him for the trade,” I said, and Belphegore’s perfectly arched brows rose over the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen. They seemed to be every color all at once. “You could get anything you want.”
“Kaylee...” Tod said, but I ignored him.
“Thirty seconds,” I said while Belphegore studied me, trying to assess my sincerity. “If I don’t have my dad in thirty seconds, Invidia gets the same offer.”
“Done!” the hellion of envy shouted. She turned on Belphegore with an eagerness bordering on mania, and a murmur rolled over the throng of monsters. “I want her. Give me the boy....” She let go of the mara to reach for Nash, and Belphegore tried to pull him out of reach.
Sabine saw her shot and burst into motion, like I’d hoped she would. She lunged for Nash just as Avari disappeared, right in front of me.
“Go!” I shouted. “Sabine, get him out of here!”
The mara grabbed Nash’s hand. They both disappeared the very instant Avari appeared behind them, grasping for Sabine. Nash’s screams of protest echoed into eternity, eclipsed only by the hellion’s shout of rage when he was left with only a thin handful of Sabine’s long, dark hair.
Invidia snarled and pounced on Belphegore, cursing her in some language I couldn’t identify, which seemed to be made entirely of consonants and birdlike screeches.
Avari bellowed in rage, and I turned to the ice to see my uncle put Harmony on the ground outside the hole in the basement, then climb out with her. The crowd seethed around me, twitching, growling, and panting with impatience, and my nerves buzzed like live wires beneath my skin.
I fumbled for Tod’s hand, and it wrapped firmly around mine. Avari’s roar echoed in my head even as we materialized in the human-world basement a second later.
Tod dropped my hand as soon as he saw Sabine and Nash, their fear and anger barely visible in the dark as she rubbed a spot on the back of her head. “I’m going back for Mom.”
“No!” I reached for him again, but for the first time since I’d met him, Tod pulled away from me. “If he catches you, he’ll tear you apart.”
“What happened?” Nash demanded, scrubbing angry tears from his face in the deep shadows. “Where’s Mom?”
“I’m not just going to appear in the middle of the crowd and ring a dinner bell, Kaylee.” Tod’s shoes shuffled on the dirty concrete as he stepped closer and kissed me, lingering just for a moment in the dark. A moment we couldn’t really afford but that he obviously knew I needed. “I know what I’m doing.”
“What happened to Mom?” Nash shouted, and I turned to him, suddenly conscious of the fact that we were in the human world, and that he couldn’t make himself inaudible. He was going to bring anyone within hearing range downstairs, and we’d be caught. At least, he and Sabine would.
“Avari blew out the wall, and your mom got hit by the debris. But Uncle Brendon took her out through the hole in the wall.” I wasn’t sure if he’d seen that part. “He’ll protect your mom.” Or die trying. I had no doubt of that.
“Bullshit! Avari will catch them,” Nash said through clenched teeth, frustrated, angry tears shining in his eyes in the light from Sabine’s cell screen. “You know he’s probably catching them right now. Those monsters probably came pouring out of that building like bees from a hive, and your uncle can’t cross over.”
“I’ll find them,” Tod promised his brother. “I’ll bring them back.”
“I’m going with you.”
“No.” Tod turned back to me, and his irises were achingly still. I couldn’t tell if he was hiding something from me or from Nash. “Take Nash and Sabine back to your house, please, and I’ll meet you there. I won’t stay long. I just want to cross over and check around the building, in case Brendon’s hiding her somewhere where I can get to them quickly. Maybe this isn’t as bad as it seems.”
But I was pretty sure I wasn’t the only one who wished my uncle could have carried both Harmony and the giant hammer.
Nash grabbed his brother’s shoulder and pulled him around. “You’re not going without me. She’s my mother, too.”
“And I would take you, if you could get back on your own. But you can’t, which means I’d have to look out for you while I look for Mom. Stay here. Help Kaylee and Sabine keep an eye on the others. That’s the best way you can help.”
“That’s bullshit!” Nash shouted.
“Shh.” Sabine took his hand in her half-casted one. “You have to shut up, or we’re going to get caught.” He started to argue, but she clamped one hand over his mouth. “If you promise to shut the hell up, I’ll go with him and help find your mom.”
“No!” He pulled her hand away, and his next words were clearer. “Putting yourself in danger isn’t going to help her.” About a second after he’d said the words, Nash seemed to realize they applied to him, too. “Fine. Point taken. I’ll stay if you stay.” When Sabine nodded, Nash turned back to Tod. “You sure you got this?”
The reaper nodded grimly. “And the longer
I wait, the harder they’ll be to find. Assuming they got away.”
Please let them have gotten away.... “I’ll take Nash and Sabine back, then join you.”
“No,” Tod said. My temper flared, and I started to argue, but he spoke over me. “Please stay here. I may be able to get to my mom and your uncle, but we have no idea where your dad is. And if something happens to you, who’s going to find him?”
“He wasn’t in that basement,” Sabine added. “You got false information.”
“That’s impossible.” I pushed hair back from my face, wishing I had a ponytail holder. “Hellions can’t lie.”
She shrugged, shining her cell phone screen in my face. “Okay then, your hellion was wrong.”
“He’s not my hellion.” Ira would devour my soul just as soon as Avari would if he could get it.
“He’s as much yours as I ever was,” Nash said, eyes flashing in anger. “And he got to first base a hell of a lot faster.” I gaped at him in shock. Tod’s fist was already in motion when Nash backed up, warding off the blow with two open palms. “I’m sorry. That was out of line.”
“Sure as hell was,” Tod growled.
“I take it back. I’m sorry. I’m just...” He blinked and made a visible effort to push back the fear and frustration obviously sharpening his tongue. “This is messed up. Avari has my mom.”
“He has my dad, too. And Sophie’s,” I pointed out. We were all in the same position.
“Shit,” Sabine swore. “Who’s going to tell her?”
“Isn’t scaring the crap out of my cousin kind of your raison d’être?” Look at that. You can use French outside of French class!
Sabine shrugged. “She’s not horrible all the time. And you gotta respect a girl who travels with a pair of scissors in her purse.”
A designer purse, no doubt. Maybe designer scissors.
I exhaled heavily. Until there was no air left in my body. “She’s my cousin. I’ll tell her.” I owed her that much.
“Okay. I’m going back in,” Tod said, and I pulled him into another hug before he could blink out.
Soul Screamers Volume Four: With All My SoulFearlessNiederwaldLast Request: 4 Page 18
