“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 brethren’s 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 exorcise 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 ones 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 worrie
d 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?”