and met my gaze again. “Is there any chance at all that this is some massive misunderstanding, or the product of an overactive teenage imagination?”
“Nope,” Tod said, and I turned to find him in the hall. “Nash and I heard the whole thing.”
“Okay, then, what are the chances that Thane made it all up and Avari’s feeding off of our panic?”
“That’s not impossible,” I admitted. “But everything Thane said lines up with what we already knew. Missing reapers and extractors. Avari haunting the human plane in the guise of the dead.”
“Mr. Cavanaugh, I think all hell really is breaking loose,” Tod said.
“And if I tell Madeline…?”
“She’ll tell Levi, who may or may not hunt Thane down and kill him by removing the Demon’s Breath keeping his body functioning in the absence of his soul.” And then we’d have lost our source of inside information and any chance of more help from the only person in either world who had free access to Avari and his evil scheme.
“Look, no one wants to kill Thane worse than I want to kill Thane,” my dad said. “But Levi—much like me— will understand that there are bigger problems at hand. He won’t act rashly at the expense of so much human life.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Thane knows Levi would never let me return his soul, so if he finds out we involved Levi or Madeline, he’ll consider our deal broken and he’ll go after everyone we care about on his own, without waiting for Avari to give the orders. Emma. Sophie. Harmony. Who knows how many other souls he’ll be able to reap before someone catches him?”
My father sighed so heavily I wondered if he had any air left in his lungs at all. “We’re all
I exhaled, my thoughts racing. “Fine. We tell everyone—including Levi and Madeline—what Thane told us, but we make it sound like we pounded the information out of him, and we don’t mention my promise to get his soul back from Avari. I don’t think we can keep Sabine from finding out, for obvious reasons—”
“I can keep a secret!” Nash shouted from the living room.
“We all know how good you are at keeping secrets,” Tod said, and I elbowed him. “What, he can take shots at me, but I can’t return fire?”
“Exactly,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because you won the war, and he’s still nursing his wounds,” my father said softly, glancing pointedly at Tod’s hand, which was wrapped around my own.
“There was no war,” Tod insisted, and I knew from the intimate resonance of his voice that Nash wouldn’t have been able to hear it even if he’d been standing right next to us. “We didn’t fight over Kaylee. She made a choice. And no one feels worse about how that happened than she and I do.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that…” my father whispered, glancing down the hall toward the living room to drive home his point.
“You know, just because I can’t hear you doesn’t mean I don’t know you’re talking about me,” Nash snapped.
I swallowed another upsurge of guilt. Then I pulled us back on track. “So, you’re not going to tell Madeline about our deal with Thane?” I said, where everyone could hear me.
My dad only hesitated a moment, then shook his head. “No, but I reserve the right to change my mind, at my own discretion.”
I nodded. That was the best we were going to get.
“Sabine’s bringing Sophie over,” Nash said when we rejoined him in the living room. “And Emma’s bringing Luca straight from school.” They’d cut the school day short because of Brant’s death—a hauntingly surreal déjà vu for a student body that had already lost several members since the start of the school year— but Luca’d had to stay to talk to the police and school officials. “My mom’s dropping by before her shift starts at eleven.”
“I expect to hear from Madeline any minute, and I’m about to text Alec,” I said.
My father sighed, resigned, already heading for the home phone. “Another full house. I’ll order a giant sub.”
“Okay, here’s what we know,” I said, leaning against the half wall separating the kitchen from the living room, where six of my closest friends—plus Sophie—watched me, listening, and for just a second, the surrealism threatened to overwhelm me. What qualified me for the position I’d somehow assumed? Nash, Sabine, and Tod were all better fighters. My father had way more life experience. So why were they all looking to me? What if their trust was misplaced?
What if I got us all killed?
I glanced at Tod, suddenly unsure of myself, and he smiled and nodded for me to continue. There was no doubt in his eyes. None at all. He had more confidence in me than I’d ever had in myself.
“Um, Avari will be back, and he may not be alone. We don’t know how many other hellions currently have the ability to cross over, but we know that when they show up, they’ll look like…well, like the person whose soul they’re wearing. And since you can’t fight an enemy you can’t see, I’m thinking the best way to start is by familiarizing ourselves with what the enemy might look like.”
“What does that even mean?” Sophie asked. Her face was still swollen and her eyes red from crying.
“The hellion you saw this afternoon is named Avari. Avari looked like Meredith Cole because he was wearing her soul, kind of like a costume. So what we’re going to do is make a list of souls—potential costumes—Avari and his demon buddies could be wearing.”
Behind me, cellophane crackled in the kitchen as my dad unwrapped a massive sub sandwich and set a stack of paper plates on the island. He’d set several six-packs of soda into a chest of ice. But I’d caught him eyeing the whiskey he’d confiscated from Nash.
He’d had a rough month, too.
“And how do we do that?” Em asked. “Wander through the cemetery playing ‘knock-knock, who’s there’ on the headstones?”
She was upset. Maybe as upset as Sophie was. She’d known Brant as long as I had, and she knew firsthand what kind of damage a single hellion could do, even without crossing into the human plane. The thought of several of them turned loose in our world was almost too much for her to think about.
I could totally sympathize. Her life would have been so much safer if she’d never met me.
“I thought we’d start with the obituaries instead,” I said at last. “That seems less disrespectful of the dead. Levi sent over this list… .” I glanced at Tod, and he held up a stack of printed pages Madeline had brought when she’d come to pick up the dagger. “It contains everyone in the local area who died on schedule in the past month. We’re going to compare this list with the local obituaries covering the same time period. What we’re looking for are people who died but are not on Levi’s list.”
“Why?” Sophie asked, but Sabine beat me to the answer.
“Because those are the people who weren’t supposed to die. And if they weren’t supposed to die, their souls weren’t turned into the proper authority by your friendly neighborhood reaper. Which means their souls are MIA. You see where I’m going with this…?”
Sophie nodded. “Any missing soul could be worn like a costume by a hellion like the bastard who killed Meredith.”
Meredith was killed by a reaper, not a hellion, but… “Close enough,” I said. She was catching on pretty quickly for a traumatized human. “Okay, everybody grab a sandwich and pick a partner. Each partner gets a laptop and you’ll go through the online obituaries in pairs.” Tod and I had already made lists of the local papers and paired them as best we could with sections of the list Levi had sent, which was organized by geographical zones.
Nash and Sabine settled onto the couch with his laptop, their portion of the reaper list, and a plate piled high with food. Sophie and Luca took her laptop and claimed the kitchen table. Tod sat between me and Em and our laptops at the bar, checking off names as we read them to him, while Em munched on her sandwich and I picked at mine with no real interest.
“You know, it’s amazing how much of this Netherworld creepy demon crap winds up involving a bunch of
