With All My Soul

Chapter Sixteen

“How is she?” I sat on the edge of my desk, and Nash answered without looking up. Without letting go of the fingers sticking out of Sabine’s cast.

“About the same. A little less swollen.” He’d rolled my desk chair next to her bed—my bed, technically—more than an hour ago and hadn’t moved since. “But she’s not waking up, and I can’t figure that out. When you got pricked, you didn’t lose consciousness.”

“Yeah, but she got at least three times the venom I got.” I shrugged, aiming for casual with the gesture. As if I wasn’t almost as worried as he was. “I’m sure she’ll be fine. She’ll wake up soon.” I hope. “And you know what? The fact that she’s not moving is kind of a blessing. With the dose of venom she got, if she’d been up moving around like I was after I got pricked—” I’d had no idea what creeper venom could do, at the time “—her heart would’ve beat faster, pumping poison all over her body.” Another casual shrug. “Instead, it looks pretty localized, and I’d call that a stroke of good luck.”

Unless... I frowned at the thought drawing into focus. Unless it wasn’t the creeper venom, but something Avari did that rendered Sabine unconscious. In which case, he’d actually saved her life. Or at least prolonged it.

My private frown deepened, but Nash didn’t notice. He was watching Sabine again.

Why would Avari do that? Why would he poison her, then make sure she lasted long enough to... To what?

Normally I’d guess that he wanted to extend her suffering, but she was unconscious. How much pain could she possibly feel?

Was he trying to make sure she’d last long enough to be found?

Suddenly Sabine’s lack of consciousness scared me almost as much as her swollen skin and the thin puss oozing from every pinprick hole in her arm and legs. What the hell was Avari up to?

“Yeah, I’m trying to look at the bright side,” Nash said, clearly oblivious to the turn my own thoughts had taken. “She’s due for another shot in a couple of hours, and after that, she should get better pretty quickly. If she hasn’t woken up by then, though, I claim the right to completely freak out.”

“And I fully support that right. Here.” I pushed away from my desk and handed him the carton of fried rice I’d brought from the kitchen, with a fork sticking up straight from the center. I didn’t know whether or not he could use chopsticks, but I knew Tod could not. At all. “You should eat.”

“Thanks.” He took the carton and glanced at me, but then turned back to Sabine. I headed for the hall to give him space, but when he spoke, I stopped, one hand on the doorknob. “What if she dies?”

I let go of the door and turned around. “She’s not going to die.”

“But what if she does? What if she dies without ever waking up, and I don’t get the chance to tell her...all the things I need to say? All the things she needs to hear?” He exhaled slowly, and I could practically see his optimism die. “I’ve wasted so much time. And so many words. What if I don’t get the chance to make it right?”

He was looking at me now, as if I might have the answer. As if I had to have the answer. “Do you love her?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry, but I don’t think I ever really stopped. I just didn’t realize it until she came back and made me remember...everything we had. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t love you, too....”

I actually laughed, just a little, over the irony. I couldn’t help it. “You don’t have to apologize to me for loving your girlfriend, Nash. In fact, don’t ever apologize for loving someone. Just make sure that when she wakes up—and she will wake up—you tell her what you just told me.”

The door squeaked open at my back, and Tod stepped into the room. We’d both been making an effort to stay corporeal when we weren’t alone, for everyone else’s benefit. “Any change?” he asked with a concerned glance in Sabine’s direction.

“Nothing yet.” Nash cleared his throat nervously, and I realized what he was about to say just a second too late to prevent it. “While you’re here, I...um...I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”

Tod crossed both arms over his short-sleeved tee. “What did you do now?”

“Nothing. Nothing recent, anyway.”

“Then what are you sorry for?”

Crap, crap, crap! I’d wanted to warn Tod that I’d broken my promise....

“Everything. I’m sorry for everything.” Nash shoved his hands in his pockets and stared at the ground for a second. When he looked up, I could see him struggling to hide the conflicting emotions stirring in his irises. “You should have told me what really happened. I could have handled it. But that’s not the point.” He took another deep breath, and I saw Tod’s posture slowly start to relax, though he didn’t uncross his arms. “What I’m trying to say is that what you did for me means something. It means everything. And I’m so damn sorry for wasting it.”

Tod blinked. Then he turned to me, his irises as still as I’d ever seen them. “You told him?”

“I’m sorry. It just kind of...came out. But, Tod, he needed to know. He deserves to know.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Nash said, and Tod turned back to him, struggling to keep a lid on what he was feeling. Locking us both out.

“Because I didn’t want it to be like this. I didn’t want you to think you owed me something. I didn’t want you to feel like you had to live your life like I would have lived mine. I wanted you to live your own way.”

“My way is stupid, Tod. Stupid and reckless.”

“I know.” The reaper finally cracked a small smile. “I knew that going into it. But stupid and reckless can be outgrown—death can’t.” Tod shoved that single, errant curl back from his forehead, and suddenly he looked serious again. “You’re smart enough to be someone important. To do something good. But you weren’t going to do any of that from a hole in the ground.” He shrugged. “When you died, I realized that the most important thing I could ever do with my life was to make sure you’d keep living yours.”

“You are so full of shit,” Nash said. Then he threw his arms around his brother, and their long overdue fraternal hug blurred beneath my tears—the first happy ones I’d shed in ages.

“Well, you’ve had a busy day.” Tod sank onto the couch next to me with two glasses of soda and handed me one of them.

“Thanks.” I took a drink, then made myself meet his gaze. “I’m sorry I told your secret. I was going to tell you as soon as you got back, but then Sabine was hurt, and there just hasn’t been much of a break since then.” I sipped from the glass he gave me, then held it, letting condensation drip down my fingers.

Tod shrugged, and I noticed a mischievous tilt in the corners of his beautiful mouth. “I planned to tell him eventually anyway, but according to the official Big Mouth code of honor, you now owe me a new secret.” He took my glass and set it on the coffee table next to his, then took my cold, damp hand in his warm one. “That’s the only way to restore the balance of information in this relationship.”

“You already know everything worth knowing about me.”

His fingers threaded with mine and he leaned so close I could feel his breath on my ear. “You don’t have to tell me a new secret.” His intimate whisper echoed through me in all the best places. “You have to help me make one.”

My eyes widened. “Here? Now?” I frowned, trying to ignore the cravings that just being so close to him awoke in me. “Just because we can be invisible and inaudible doesn’t mean—”

Tod laughed, and Emma glanced our way from the kitchen, then turned back to the brainstorming session she, Luca, and Sophie were sharing. “Not now,” he whispered. “But soon. You have a big secret to replace, so put on your thinking cap. And just FYI, that’s the only article of clothing this particular process requires....”

I groaned as his lips grazed my neck and his hand tightened around mine. “This kind of makes me want to tell all your secrets.”

“Then we’d have even more to make up for.” His mouth trailed toward the hollow of my collarbone. “It’s a vicious, beautiful cycle.”

With another reluctant groan, I took his chin and pulled him back up to eye level. “That vicious, beautiful cycle is going to have to wait. We have nosy friends and missing parents.”

“That’s kind of my point.” The heat in his eyes was suddenly overwhelmed by pale blue twists of a deeper urgency. “Watching Nash watch Sabine makes me think we should all stop waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

“For anything. If we have something to say, we should say it. If we have something to do, we should do it.”

I rubbed the sudden chill bumps on my arms. “Because we might not get another chance?”

“Exactly.”

“That’s depressing.”

“Or liberating. If you think about it like that, we have no reason not to do whatever we want, right this minute. In fact, we have a responsibility to enjoy the time we have together, in case we’re about to lose that chance.” Tod’s brows rose, and that heat was back in his eyes in spite of ominous undertones I couldn’t quite dismiss.

“You do realize you’re just trying to justify your impulse-control issues, right?”

“I think it’s working.” His hand slid over my stomach and curled around my hip, and I caught my breath. “Can you guess what kind of impulse I’m not controlling right now?”

“I think we can all guess.” Em sank into my dad’s recliner across the coffee table from us. “So rein it in before my inner syphon decides your hormonal excess needs to be balanced. I don’t think any of us want to see that happen.”

Sophie dropped into the armchair in the corner. “I’ve never heard a truer statement.”

“I’ve got a few more true statements for you,” Tod mumbled, and I elbowed him, but not as hard as I probably should have. Her dad was missing, too.

“Any change with Sabine?” Luca said on his way in from the kitchen.

“No.” I turned to Tod, looking into his eyes for the guilt he no doubt saw in mine. “We shouldn’t have let her go. This is our fault.”

“Kaylee, Sabine is stronger and more independent than anyone else I know. Other than you and my mom, of course.” He squeezed my hand, holding my gaze. “She had as good a chance of walking out of there unhurt as any of us. Better than several of us.”

“Except that she didn’t. And there’s no telling how long we left her like that, tied to the ground, being poisoned, because we expected her to take longer than we would.” Because she actually had to drive to and from the crossover site.

“We did the best we could. Now we need to figure out our next move.”

I shrugged. “We keep looking. But this time, just the two of us.” I wasn’t going to put Sophie in danger of what had happened to Sabine. “Agreed?” I glanced around the room and was rewarded with three nodding heads.

“Yeah,” Tod said. “And this time I think we should go together.”

“Sophie, what do you have for us?”

“Oh. Just a second.” She headed into the kitchen and a chair scraped the floor, then she was back a second later with a small spiral notebook.

“Okay, here goes.” Sophie sat on the arm of Luca’s chair, staring at her notes, and his arm snaked around her. “My dad likes to go camping, remember?” she said, and I nodded. “He’s gone every fall as far back as I can remember, and last month he finally told me that those camping trips are usually retreats with my brothers.”

My uncle had grown sons from a marriage that had ended with the death of his first wife, nearly a century ago—a fact that continued to blow my mind every time I thought about it.

“And they’ve been going on these retreats into nature since before most modern camping conveniences were invented,” Sophie continued. “So I figure he knows how to live off the land, at least a little. He can find shelter and tie knots and fish without a pole, for sure, though I have no idea how handy those skills will be in the Netherworld. Personally, I think his best bet is to get inside, assuming that most buildings won’t be as heavily populated as the Netherworld version of our school is.”

“I truly hope they’re not.” And there was a decent chance of that, because Avari had drawn the current Netherworld populace of our school into the building by living there himself, like some kind of demonic landlord.

“We’re kind of assuming he’d forgo the buildings closest to the hospital, because those would be the first place Avari and his monster horde would look,” Luca said. “But he wouldn’t go too far, because your mom—” he glanced at Tod “—will start to feel heavy after a while.”

“And we have a general direction, based on the blood trail and rags Tod found, right?” Em said.

“Yes,” I said. “Unless those were intentionally misleading.” Which was a good possibility. “If it weren’t so close, I’d guess he’d taken her into the actual hospital. That’s where he’s most likely to find bandages and any other medical supplies that crossed into the Netherworld with the building.” And those supplies were likely to be plentiful, considering how highly and consistently populated the hospital was.

But the truth, even after we’d shared our intel and theories, was that we really had no clue where Uncle Brendon and Harmony were. In hiding from Avari and the rest of the Netherworld creatures, they were hiding from us, too.

Tod and I spent most of that night in the Netherworld, searching for his mom and my uncle in and around the buildings we’d decided they were most likely to target. We were looking for my dad, too, of course, but we had much less hope of actually finding him, since he was no doubt both hidden and guarded. And probably unable to call out to us if we got close.

We started at the hospital because as unlikely as I thought my uncle was to actually hide out there, I couldn’t help thinking he was very likely to have stopped there, at least for a little while, in search of medical supplies. Tod showed me where the easiest-to-access first-floor medical supplies were in the human world, and we crossed over one site at a time, armed with the sledgehammer Tod had dug up from somewhere—he was inspired by the one my uncle had used—and the large meat cleaver he’d taken from the hospital cafeteria for me.

I wasn’t surprised to see that all of the closets he showed me had bled through from the human world with at least some of their supplies intact, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Netherworld version of the hospital was virtually deserted. If Avari’s lackeys had looked for Uncle Brendon and Harmony there, they’d obviously long since moved on.

Finally, after checking out three different supply closets, we were rewarded in the fourth, where the doorknob had been beaten off, evidently with the fire extinguisher propped against the wall several feet away.

On the floor of the closet, we found empty bandage wrappers, bloody scraps of gauze and cotton swabs, and an open bottle of rubbing alcohol.

Tod stared at the mess for a minute, and I linked my hand with his, hoping he could feel both my sympathy and empathy in that one touch. I knew how he felt, as few others could—we knew even less about my dad’s current state than we knew about his mom’s. Tod squeezed my hand, then let it go and knelt to gather the trash my uncle had left behind.

“What are you doing?”

“They obviously haven’t found this yet, so I’m taking it. I don’t want them to know what my mom tastes like. I don’t even want to think about the possibility that one of them could develop a taste for her blood specifically, like Avari has for your...you. What if that sparks some kind of similar obsession, and they start hunting her like he hunts you? It’s bad enough that I can’t protect you. At least I can do this for her.”

I wanted to let him think that. I actually considered preserving his well-intentioned fantasy. But eventually he would realize his own mistake, and he’d know that I hadn’t told him the truth when I should have.

“Tod, they’ve already had a taste of her. Didn’t you say they were gathered around drops of her blood outside?”

His hands went still, one of them clenched around a handful of empty wrappers. “Fine. But I’m not going to give them any more of it to obsess over. This is part of her, Kaylee, and I’m not just going to leave it here for them to snort and drool and fight over.”

“I get it.” I would have done the same thing for my dad if I could’ve.

We traced my uncle’s most likely path out of the hospital from that closet, but we couldn’t find footprints or anything else to indicate which way he’d gone from there.

We were about to cross into the human world near the ambulance bay when something scraped concrete behind us. We both tensed and turned toward the sound. In the middle of the hall stood two small grayish creatures whose bulbous heads didn’t quite reach my waist. They were bald and wore no clothes, but even without the odd, arrhythmic jerking in their arms, legs, and thin gray tails—not to mention the occasional full-body twitch—I would have recognized them based solely on their double row of needle-sharp, metallic-looking teeth.

Fiends.

I hadn’t seen a fiend since the day a creeper vine had nearly ended my life several months ahead of schedule. Or thirteen years late, depending on your perspective. That was the day Nash was first exposed to Demon’s Breath, and though I didn’t know it at the time, the whole thing was my fault. I’d brought some latex balloons filled with the substance to give to three fiends in exchange for information, accidentally kicking off a series of events that led to Nash’s addiction, our eventual breakup, and Avari’s inexplicable obsession with owning my soul.

It was not my finest day.

“Victory!” the fiend on the left cried in a voice so high-pitched my ears tried to crawl into my skull. “We found the treasure. We get the prize.” He bounced forward, metallic teeth clinking together in excitement—or maybe that was his jaw twitching.

“Stay there!” I brandished the huge knife, suddenly glad we’d come armed.

Tod set the head of his sledgehammer on the ground, resting both palms on the end of the handle, and I had the sudden, irrational thought that he looked like Thor must have as a teenager. Assuming Norse gods were ever teens.

“Treasure!” the other fiend echoed, yellow eyes flashing with eagerness, and mentally I named him Thing Two. “We play the game. We find the treasure. We win the prize. Come! Maybe we will share the prize.”

“No!” Thing One turned on his little associate, snarling, and Thing Two sprang backward just in time to avoid losing a chunk of his thin gray arm to Thing One’s needle teeth. “No sharing!”

Thing Two snarled back, and they faced off, teeth snapping, thin tails whipping up dust at their feet. Any second, one would pounce.

“Fiends! Focus!” I snapped, my cleaver held ready. I’d had more practice with a blade than I cared to remember, but I’d never chopped anything...off. Which seemed to be what a cleaver was used for. “What prize?”

“The breath of hellions, of course.” Thing One cocked his head to one side. “What else would suffice?”

“Avari offered a reward for us,” I whispered, and on the edge of my vision, Tod nodded.

“He knew we’d come looking for Mom and Brendon.”

“Come!” Thing One shouted. He started to turn, and when we didn’t follow, his thin, dark gray brows furrowed at the bottom of his huge, smooth forehead. “Come!”

“Bite me.” Tod lifted the hammer and choked up on his grip as Things One and Two gave us scary metallic snarls.

“Maybe not the best choice of words...” I clenched the handle of my cleaver tighter. “They’re poisonous, right?” I had just enough time for a moment of thanks that, like Nash, Tod had played both football and baseball before the little monsters charged.

Things One and Two took a few running steps on the floor, then leaped like crazy little monkey-monsters and bounced off opposite walls as if the Sheetrock hid springs. They shrieked as they raced toward us, bounding from floor to wall and back, swapping sides without ever colliding, and I backed up, my heart pounding, my pulse racing. The hallway was wide, but Tod needed room to swing his hammer, and after watching the fiends bound through the hospital hallway like toddlers in a bouncy-house, I was no longer confident that either of us could actually hit them.

We’d backed into the waiting room by the time they got close enough to pounce, and the double doors swung shut between us and them just in time. One fiend slammed into the glass window and slid out of sight, and the thud that followed said his friend had hit too low for us to see.

“Ready to go?” I could hear the tension in my voice.

“In a minute.” Tod held the massive hammer like a baseball bat, and I gave him some more room. “We need to find out if they know where—”

The doors flew open, fast and hard, and not two, but a dozen or so fiends poured through the opening, evidently drawn by their freaky little brethrens’ shrieks. “Treasure!” several of them shouted, limbs twitching, yellow eyes flashing.

Tod groaned. “Never mind. Get back.”

I had half a second to process what he’d said, then I backpedaled just as the first fiend pounced, jaw open, metallic teeth shining in the light from overhead.

Tod swung. His hammer thunked into a bulbous skull with a crack like thunder, and the little monster flew across the room to smack into the opposite wall. I flinched at the sound, and the sight, and at the knowledge that what leaked from the massive rupture in the little beast’s head was what passed for brains in a fiend.

“You’re not going to trade us for a hit of Demon’s Breath,” Tod said. “But you are going to answer a question.”

But before he could ask, a murmur rippled through the small crowd, too soft and squeaky for me to understand until one fiend near the front narrowed his yellow-eyed gaze on me. “Wrong treasure,” he said. Then, “Wrong treasure!” He stepped toward me, and Tod tightened his grip on the hammer, ready to swing again. “Too tender. Too young.” His focus rose to my head. “No blood. Wrong treasure!”

With that, the murmuring grew in volume, and the crazy little fiends backed out of the lobby almost as one. The door swung shut behind them, and through the window, I caught a glimpse of several small gray bodies springing off the walls as they retreated down the hall without another glance back at us.

“What the hell...?” Tod lowered his hammer.

“They weren’t looking for us. They were looking for Harmony and Uncle Brendon.” Who weren’t so young and tender. And one of whom—Harmony, at least—was bleeding.

Tod turned to me, his hammer propped on the floor. “If they’re looking for Mom and Brendon, that means Avari hasn’t found them.”

And that was the best news we’d had all night.

In the human world, Tod disposed of his mother’s medical waste, and after texting Nash with an update, I stayed with Tod at the hospital so that between his few scheduled reapings, we could head back into the Netherworld to keep searching, temporarily bolstered by the knowledge that Avari didn’t yet have his mom and my uncle. We tried over and over that night to find them, moving in an ever-widening arc from the hospital and dodging roving bands of fiends searching for their next fix, but after the supply closet, we found no other sign of our missing authority figures.

The only bright spot that entire night was when Emma called around two in the morning to tell us that Sabine had regained consciousness. Tod had to stay at work, but I blinked into my room to find the mara sitting up in my bed, surrounded by the rest of my pajama-clad friends. And Sophie.

“Seriously, if you don’t get out of my face, I’m going to turn your dreams into a nightmare circus the minute you fall asleep. Creepy clowns and all.”

Emma laughed in relief. “Yeah, I think she’s back to normal. Well, as normal as she ever was anyway.” She turned to head for the hall and saw me about the same time Luca and Sophie did.

“Hey.” I gave Emma a relieved hug and noticed again how small she was now in Lydia’s body. “Now that she’s awake, why don’t you guys go get some sleep? We still have school tomorrow.”

“That’s not gonna happen.” Sophie crossed her arms over her chest, and I noticed that her eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot. “We’re in the middle of a supernatural crisis here.”

“If we only went to school when life was calm and not plagued by evil forces, I’d have already flunked out for truancy,” I said.

“My dad’s trapped in a scary alternate dimension, Kaylee. I’m not going to sit through algebra and geography with that on my mind.”

I shrugged. “Fair enough. I’m going, though.” I wasn’t going to let Avari drive me out of my own school, in part because it was my school. And in part because if he possessed anyone else, someone would need to be there to exorcize him from the stolen body.

But I was already planning several long bathroom breaks so I could keep up the search for those still trapped in that scary alternate dimension.

“I’m going, too.” Sabine threw back the covers and started to swing her legs out of bed, but Nash put one hand on her knee to stop her.

“You should rest.”

“I’ve been unconscious for, what, five hours?” She glanced at my alarm clock and frowned. “That’s more rest than any mara needs in one night.”

“Being unconscious isn’t the same as sleeping,” Nash insisted. “And anyway, you were poisoned.” He lifted her good arm to show her the ring of tiny red dots now permanently encircling her wrist. Just like the ones around her ankles. Just like the one around my ankle. “You need to rest, so your body can fight what’s left of the poison.”

“Bullshit. Just because it took Kaylee days to recover doesn’t mean it’ll take me that long. I’m a Nightmare. We’re kinda badass.”

I laughed, but Nash only crossed his arms over his chest. “If you don’t rest, I don’t rest. We’ll both be exhausted and vulnerable together at school tomorrow.”

Sabine rolled her eyes. “Fine. I’ll lie here and stare at the ceiling if you’ll go to sleep.”

“Deal.” Nash finally smiled, and I could see exhaustion warring with relief in his eyes.

“You can have my bed.” Em followed him into the hall. “I’m fine in the living room, in the recliner.”

“Thanks.” He ducked into the bathroom. When Em joined Sophie and Luca in the living room, I sat in the chair Nash had vacated next to my bed.

“He was here the entire time, you know,” I said softly, and Sabine looked like she didn’t know whether or not to believe me. “Seriously. He sat right here the whole time you were out. And he gave you two antivenom injections. And I doubt he ate a bite of his dinner.”

I’d rarely seen Sabine speechless. It looked kind of like a fish gasping for air.

“You should have seen him when Tod brought you back, unconscious and poisoned. I haven’t seen Nash that focused in a long time. He knew exactly what to do, and he did it well. But he was terrified that you’d die anyway. That he’d lose you.”

“Thank you,” she said, finally. “I know you didn’t have to tell me that.”

“Yeah, I did. I just...” I’d been thinking about what she’d said to Sophie, and what Nash had told me about the mara. “I want you to know that you’re one of us. You’re a total pain in the butt, and I may never forget that you tried to sell me to a demon, but I do forgive you for that. And you need to know that you belong here. With us. This place wouldn’t be the same without you here to throw the truth around like a weapon and call us on our own bullshit. So, try not to get yourself killed, okay?”

I could swear that her black eyes looked a little more damp than usual, but then she blinked, and that was gone. “Look who’s talking, living dead girl.”

“I know. I’m a total hypocrite.” The toilet flushed across the hall, then water ran in the bathroom sink behind the closed door. Nash was getting ready for bed, and my time alone with Sabine was running out. “Can you tell me what happened? What you remember, anyway? How did Avari catch you?”

Sabine’s expression darkened from something resembling contentment into anger blazing hot enough to singe my eyebrows. “It wasn’t Avari,” she said. “It was someone new. A hellion. Tall, with long red hair so dark it almost looked black. His tongue was the same color—like dried blood. His eyes were solid black like a hellion’s, but they had red veins running through them. I’m going to be working those details into my next nightmare, FYI. If they scared me, they’ll scare anyone.”

“That’s Ira.” My voice sounded sharp. Angry.

“The wrath hellion?” Sabine looked more intrigued than scared now, which worried me.

“Yeah. What did he do? What’s the last thing you remember?”

“I don’t remember much. I was sneaking around some bushes in front of a building about a mile south of the hospital when I started hearing things. Weird sounds. Wet, heavy breathing, like a giant with a sinus infection. And scratching sounds, like something digging in dry dirt. Then there was this weird hiss.... So I ducked as close to the building as I could and waited to see if I needed to cross over, or if they’d lose my scent and wander off. Then the hellion was just there. Out of nowhere. He was just standing in front of me, backlit by that weird-ass red moon. He had those weird eyes, and they were kind of glowing, and for a second, I couldn’t look away from him. Then the light from his eyes seemed to kind of flare, and he reached for me.”

Spitting sounds came from the bathroom as Nash brushed his teeth, drawing me out of the nightmare she was painting for me, this time with words. “Then what?”

Sabine shrugged. “He grabbed my arm, and I tried to cross back over, but I couldn’t concentrate enough to make it happen. All these thoughts kept spinning around in my head. All kinds of stuff. People who’ve pissed me off. The juvenile court judge who set me up for vandalism. You.” She shifted beneath the covers, like she was uncomfortable with whatever she was about to confess. “No offense, but when I first met you, I hated you like I’ve never hated anything before, and when Ira touched me, I couldn’t get you out of my head. You kissing Nash. Him touching you. The two of you dancing at some lame high school party to a song no one with actual ears has ever enjoyed. Stuff like that. Crap I never even saw but used to imagine during the worst days this past winter.”

“Yeah.” I tucked one leg beneath me in the rolling chair. “Ira’s M.O. seems to be fictionalized flashbacks designed to thoroughly piss you off, so he can feed from your anger.”

“Well, it musta worked. I couldn’t think with all that shit in my head, and then everything went dark.” She shrugged again and tugged the covers higher. “The next thing I saw was this.” Sabine spread her arms to take in my whole room. “I didn’t know how I got here until Nash told me how Tod found me. Crimson creeper? Seriously?”

“Yeah. Tod said you were tied to the ground with four vines of it. Baby vines. And you must not have been there very long, or you couldn’t have recovered this fast, even with Harmony’s antivenom. Especially with three sets of pinpricks.”

“Speaking of which...” Sabine held up her wrist, and I saw that the swelling was almost completely gone. Either maras healed faster than bean sidhes or Harmony had really perfected that antivenom. “Any way to get rid of the marks?”

“Not that I know of.” I propped my foot on the edge of the bed and pulled up the hem of my jeans to show her my own double row of red dots.

She dropped her arm into her lap. “Maybe people will think it’s some kind of obscure tattoo. Something tribal.”

“Maybe.” It was good to see her looking on the bright side.

Across the hall, the bathroom door opened. A second later, Nash stepped into the bedroom. “Did you and Tod have any luck?” he asked, sinking onto Emma’s bed as I vacated the desk chair.

“Nothing since the bandages we found at the hospital. But the good news is that Avari has evidently promised a whole horde of fiends that whoever turns them in wins the grand prize—Demon’s Breath, of course. Which means—”

“Avari doesn’t have them,” Nash finished for me.

“Not yet anyway. We haven’t found anything since then, but we’ll keep looking.”

“Be careful,” Sabine said. “I don’t want to have to go back in after you.” But she would if it came to that. That’s what she was really saying, and the unspoken promise was not lost on me.

“Don’t worry. Tod and I are going in together or not at all. We’ll watch out for each other.”

Before heading back to the hospital, I went into the living room to check on everyone else. Emma was already asleep in the recliner, stretched out as close to horizontal as the chair would go. Sophie and Luca were curled up on the couch together, even though the twin mattress he’d blown up for himself was only a couple of feet away. He slept on the outside, curled around my cousin with his arm draped over her stomach. Anything that wanted Sophie would have to go through Luca first, and seeing them together made my heart ache.

Seeing Emma alone made my heart ache even more.

Not seeing my dad in his bed—not hearing him snore in the middle of an otherwise quiet night—also made my heart ache so fiercely I let it stop beating altogether, just to spare myself the pain.