Stunned and a little nauseated, I sank into my father’s chair and shoved hair back from my face. “What’s the long game? What is he doing, Thane?”
The reaper shrugged. “That, I don’t know. But he’s obsessed with it. Everything he’s doing plays into it. And you have a central role.”
“Okay, let’s go back to the basics.” Because if I thought any more about the people I could have saved—and the people I would have been damning in their place—I was going to lose what was left of my mind. “He’s using your resurrected soul to cross through the fog into our world. What about this second soul? The one that gives him a physical form. How does that work?”
“I don’t know all the details. He figured that part out himself, by accident, so—”
“Whoa, what does that mean?” Tod demanded. “Who figured out the first part?”
Thane shrugged. “Not to give myself too much credit, but… I did. Decades ago.”
“And you told Avari that he could use your soul to cross over?” I frowned, watching him through narrowed eyes. “Why would you do that? Why would you give him a reason to need your soul?”
“Your boyfriend didn’t give me much of a choice!” Thane shouted, pushing away from the countertop to gesture angrily at Tod. “One sucker punch from a rookie, and I’m staring at the business end of a hellion!”
“Yeah, he’s all about the sucker punches,” Nash mumbled.
“As long as Avari needs my soul, he’ll keep me alive. More or less. Anyway, it shouldn’t have mattered.” The rogue reaper shrugged. “What I showed him let him cross over, but gave him no physical form. Like a visitor’s pass, where you can’t touch anything. He figured the rest of it out on his own, when he was playing around with another soul.”
“Okay, so back to the part where Avari shows up in the guise of the dearly departed. What
“I know that it’s a one-way trip. He needs a human soul and something that belonged to the deceased. He crosses over with both of those in his possession and takes the form that soul had when it died. Down to the clothes it was wearing.”
“The bracelet…” I said, and Tod nodded. “How did Avari get Heidi Anderson’s bracelet?”
“How the hell do you think? He sent me after it. But you’re missing the point. Once he crosses back into the Netherworld, that nonresurrected soul is useless. Gone. Poof.” He made an exploding gesture with both hands. “It can’t be worn again.”
“Disposable packaging,” Tod said. “It works for bottled water, why not for hellions?”
“I don’t understand.” And I wasn’t sure I really wanted to. “How does wearing a human soul give him a physical body?”
“I truly don’t know how it works. But his physical restrictions seem to be the same as mine, maybe because he’s using my soul as his passport. Selective corporeality and audibility. Transportation. But no hellion superpowers.”
“So he’s vulnerable when he’s here?”
Thane shrugged again. “As vulnerable as I am. But as you may have noticed, killing him doesn’t really kill him. When his physical body dies, he just gets sucked back into the Netherworld, along with my soul.”
“So, is there any chance we can get your soul back without having to cross over?” I asked.
“I don’t know. And I don’t really care. How you fulfill your end of the deal is up to you.”
“You said you’d help,” I reminded him.
Thane nodded. “But I’ve told you everything I know, so I don’t know how much more help I can be.”
“You can find out why my amphora doesn’t capture your soul from him when I take the others,” I said, picturing the two human souls that last sank into the hilt of my dagger. “And find out how to fix that.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
I shrugged and enjoyed throwing his own words back at him. “How you fulfill your end of the deal is up to you.”
“So, let me get this straight,” Nash said, before Thane could blink out in anger. “Avari’s going to keep showing up disguised as dead people, and while he’s here, he’s going to kill even more of them? Just for fun?”
Thane nodded. “At the moment, human souls are easy for him to come by, so he doesn’t mind losing them every time she stabs him, because her trauma is worth more than the lost soul.”
I shoved more hair back from my face and rubbed my forehead. Can dead people get headaches? “And since he’s sold a resurrected soul to Belphegore, we can expect her to show up any day, but we have no idea when, or what she’ll look like. Right?”
Another nod. “Though you may never see her. I can’t imagine she’s as obsessed with your shiny little soul as Avari is.” He glanced at Tod then—as near as I could tell, considering his eyes were featureless white orbs. “Just think. None of this would have happened if Avari and I had never met.”
Tod looked sick. “This is my fault. Avari would never have figured all this out if I hadn’t thrown Thane at him,” he mumbled beneath his breath.
The only comfort I had to offer him was my hand intertwined with his.
“That’s right, lover boy.” Thane obviously enjoyed Tod’s self-torment. “No good deed goes unpunished.”
“So, how do we stop him?” I said, fighting the overwhelming, numbing lure of despair.
“Stop him?” Thane shrugged. “I have no idea how to stop him, and I don’t really care.”
“But we had a deal!” I stood, furious. “I snatch your soul from the grip of a demon and you tell us how to stop him.”
“Uh-oh. Someone wasn’t paying attention. I only promised to tell you what I know, and I’ve done that. What you do with the knowledge is up to you. And if you even think about defaulting on your end of the bargain, keep in mind that your little ‘circle the wagons’ routine can’t last forever. I spent days following you around in advance of your death, and just because there were times you didn’t see me doesn’t mean I wasn’t there. I know everyone you know. I know where all your friends and family live. If you don’t produce my soul in very short order, you won’t have to worry about Avari killing everyone you love. I’ll save him the trouble.”
“You can’t tell Madeline!” I cried, chasing my father down the hall as he went for his cell phone. He’d left work the minute I’d called him, as soon as Thane left.
“Oh, yes, I can. I can’t believe you’re even thinking about keeping this from her.”
“I didn’t have to tell you, either, you know.” I grabbed his arm, and he finally turned to face me, forehead deeply furrowed, irises stubbornly still so I couldn’t see how scared he really was. But I knew. He was almost as scared as I was.
“Kaylee, I’m glad you told me, but I can’t reward your good decision with a poor one of my own. Madeline knows much better than either of us how to deal with rogue reapers and runaway hellions,” he insisted, already on the move again, and I shouted after him.
“If that were true, she wouldn’t have lost all three of her other extractors!”
My father stopped cold in the hall, then turned to face me. “I’m not Madeline’s biggest fan, but even I know that wasn’t her fault. She did the best she could with the information she had, and you’ll only be making her job more difficult and dangerous by withholding more information from her.”
“There’s nothing she could do with this information, even if we gave it to her!” I insisted. “She doesn’t have any other extractors to put at risk—I’m the only one left. The ones Avari took are trapped in the Netherworld in cold storage—whatever that means—and I have no idea what state they’re in. Thane still has a body, but that could be because he’s useful. For all I know, Avari’s already disposed of the extractors’ bodies, so their souls can’t escape. And that’s assuming he hasn’t already sold them.”
“Sold them?”
“Yeah. To other hellions. Thane says there are hundreds of them, and once they know what Avari’s up to, they’re all gonna want in on the fun, and no matter how bad you’re thinking that’s gonna be, I promise it’ll be worse. Mass-slaughter of the human race. Bodies dead and defiled. Souls enslaved and tortured. The end of existence, as we know it.”
My father stared at me without speaking for close to half a minute, and I could practically see the rapid succession of thoughts and fears as they raced across his expression. Then he scrubbed his face with both hands
