Before I Wake

alternative—suffering in ignorance—seemed infinitely worse.

“Sorry I’m late,” Thane said as he appeared in our midst, sunglasses sliding down the end of his nose. Before I could yell at him for what was obviously a betrayal of the deal we’d struck, he tugged on the hand he held and a waif of a girl with stringy blond hair stumbled forward.

“Lydia?”

“Kaylee?” Lydia’s eyes were wide and scared. Her clothes were dirty and her skin was pale. Where had Thane found her? Had she been living on the street?

“What the hell does this have to do with Lydia?” I demanded, but instead of answering, Avari looked around through Addison’s eyes at the group he’d assembled, then nodded his approval.

“If you want answers, you know how to get them,” he said with Addy’s voice. At her nod, Thane disappeared with Lydia in tow, and Belphegore disappeared with Sophie. And just like that, Aunt Val’s soul was gone, disintegrated and distributed across both worlds like dust scattered in an explosion for however long it would take all the bits to coalesce so she could be given a final rest. Or doomed to torture once again.

“Wait!” Tod shouted, and Avari turned to him with Addison’s wide-eyed look of expectance. “You said you wouldn’t cross if I didn’t go after Kaylee! You can’t go back on your word!” That no-lie rule was to hellions in the Netherworld what physics was to humans in our world—a law that could not be broken.

“No, what I said was that if you went after Kaylee, I would cross over. And that was no lie.” With that, the Addison-monster disappeared with Emma, and Em’s scream echoed even after her body was gone.

Tod shouted, a wordless expression of rage and despair. Addison was gone. We’d failed to save her. Again.

Then, for a single, tense second, Tod, Nash, Luca, and I stared at one another in shocked silence. Luca was the first to break it. “We’re going after them, right? We have to go after them!” But he couldn’t cross on his own, and neither could Nash.

“Yes, of course,” I said, closing my eyes. Trying to think. “But rushing in would be suicidal.”

“It’s not like we have any choice!” Luca cried. “They have Sophie and Emma. And…that other girl.”

“It’s a trap,” Nash said, running one hand through his mussed brown hair. He looked like he wanted to hit something, but all the bad guys had disappeared.

“How do you know?” Luca demanded.

“Because everything Avari does is a trap, and I’ve been caught in a couple of them.”

“They took our friends so we’d follow them into the Netherworld. Right where they want us,” Tod explained. “They’re looking for resurrected souls, like me and Kaylee.”

“You don’t know that,” Nash said. “Maybe this time they want Sophie and Emma and…”

“Lydia,” I supplied.

“Right,” he said. “Why would they bring Lydia here, when Sophie and Emma would have been plenty of bait on their own? The hellions brought them here for more than that.”

Tod and Nash started to argue, but I cut them off, beyond grateful that Nash was clean and sober. I’d almost forgotten how smart he could be. “Nash has a point,” I said. “Any one of them would have been enough bait. And if the hellions just wanted us in the Netherworld, Invidia would have kept me there earlier, and Avari would have let you cross after me.”

Tod nodded, grudgingly conceding the point.

“It doesn’t matter whether they want us here, or there, or in the next damn galaxy. They. Have. Sophie. Take me, or I’ll find my own way to cross,” Luca said, brown eyes blazing in fury and fear. I had no idea how he’d get himself there, but I didn’t doubt he could do it.

And his determination to save my spoiled, bitchy cousin was so damn sweet I almost wondered if I’d judged her too harshly all my life. Almost.

I glanced at Tod, and he nodded. Then Nash nodded. We were in agreement.

“Okay,” I said. “But we can’t cross here—this is where they’ll be expecting us. And don’t forget that Tod and I don’t have any undead abilities in the Netherworld. We can cross back over, and I assume we can function as bean sidhes, but no invisibility, inaudibility, or blinking from one place to the next. Understand? No shortcuts.” That thought terrified me beyond reason, especially considering that I’d been to the Netherworld a dozen times before I even had any undead abilities.

“I don’t care.” Luca glanced around the clearing. “Where should we cross?”

I looked around, thinking of my brief visit to the Nether minutes earlier. “Away from the water and out of the sand. Um… Over there. Beneath the trees.”

“You guys meet us there,” Tod said, one hand on my arm to catch my attention. Nash scowled, but when I didn’t object, he led Luca out of earshot. Tod stared down at me, his eyes swirling with nerves. “Kaylee, this isn’t going to end well. It could be worse than what happened with Alec, and I need you to promise me that if this goes bad, you’ll run. Just get the hell out of the Netherworld. I’ll be right behind you with Nash and anyone else I can reach to cross over with.”

“No. This is all or nothing, Tod. I’m not coming back without everyone.” What good would my afterlife be if I had to live it knowing I’d let my best friends die?

Tod exhaled slowly, obviously frustrated. “Fine. But I had to try.”

“And I love you for it.” I took his hand, and we blinked over to the trees just as Nash and Luca got there. “Ready?” Tod asked, and everyone nodded.

I sucked in one last deep lungful of human-world air and took Luca’s hand while Tod took Nash’s forearm. Then we crossed.

The Netherworld version of the tree limbs we stood beneath were heavily laden with fat, knobby purple fruit and long, thin leaves with serrated edges. Luca reached up like he’d touch one, then thought better of it. He was smarter than I’d been during my first trip to the Netherworld. Then I remembered that he’d been there before, with Sophie. Which was good. Experience counts for a lot in the Netherworld.

Uncommon sense counts for even more.

“Over there,” Tod said, and I followed his gaze to see Sophie, Lydia, and Emma, obviously terrified and in tears, sitting in a row on a concrete picnic bench that had bled through intact from the human world. Nothing else from the human park still stood in the Netherworld, except for the pavilion, its canvas covering ripped and flapping in a breeze that smelled faintly of the rot from the lake. The park wasn’t frequently or highly populated enough to bleed through in much detail.

In front of the bench, the three hellions stood arguing. I couldn’t make out every word, but the gist was clear. They were arguing over which hellion would get which girl. Belphegore wanted the pretty one—not sure if she meant Emma or Sophie—Invidia was jealous of whichever one Belphegore wanted, and Avari insisted that he would get the first choice, because he’d pulled the entire plan together.

But that was bullshit. He wanted first choice because he was a hellion of greed, and if he could possibly get away with taking all three of them, he would.

They argued like cartoon bad guys, but the hellions were omnipotent, damn near omnipresent, and immortal, as far as we could tell. Their only weaknesses were the character flaws they embodied and fed from. They couldn’t be hurt with anything originating from our world, and as far as I knew, they were impervious to most of the dangers the Netherworld had to offer.

We were in way over our heads.

I’d never seen Belphegore in her own skin before, but I wasn’t surprised to see that she was unspeakably beautiful, as a hellion of vanity ought to be. What did surprise me was that the moment I turned away from her, I couldn’t remember what she looked like. Not because she wasn’t beautiful—she was—but because she was so generically flawless that no one feature stood out enough to be remembered. She was average height, with skin that could have belonged to any human ethnicity. Her hair was neither short nor long, and neither light nor dark, but seemed to change slightly every time my gaze returned to her.

Was beauty so impossible to define? So pointless that it couldn’t be accurately remembered? What must it feel like to be the most beautiful creature in all of existence, but be forgotten the moment you leave the room?

Was that how Aunt Val had felt?

Luca was the first to ask the obvious question, pulling me from my own thoughts. “What do the demons want