“Yup,” Sabine said around another mouthful.
“No!” I glared at her, then turned back to my cousin. “He’s not there anymore,” I insisted. “He would have tried to get as far away from there as he could, as quickly as possible.”
Sophie frowned. “Then how the hell is Tod supposed to find them?”
“He’s not,” Nash said, and I wanted to argue, but I couldn’t. Not without lying. “Your dad is hiding, and if he does it right, Tod won’t be able to find him and neither will you.”
“Watch me.”
Luca stood and stepped into her path. “Sophie. Wait. On the not-gonna-happen scale, how impossible is it going to be for me to talk you out of this? Pick-up-trash-on-the-side-of-the-highway unlikely or leave-the-house-without-makeup unlikely?”
“Makeup.”
“Fine.” He nodded decisively. “Then I’m coming with you.”
“She’s not going,” I said. “Sabine, help me out.”
Sabine shrugged and stepped into the living room with the bag of chips, her focus set on Sophie. “You’re not going. And if you do, I’ll drag your ass back here in handcuffs. Chains, if that’s what it takes.” She folded the top of the cellophane bag. “Please give me a reason to go shopping for chains.”
“You have a broken arm.”
Sabine shrugged. “One of mine’s better than two of yours.”
Sophie’s eyes narrowed. “I dare you to stop me.”
“Oh, don’t dare her,” Emma groaned from her bar stool.
“Sophie, think about this,” Nash said. “I want to go, too. We all do. But if your dad were here, what would he say? Would he want you to put yourself in that kind of danger?”
My cousin rolled her eyes. “But he’s not here. That’s the point.”
Sabine scowled. “No, the point is that if I let you cross over, when your dad gets back—and he will get back—he’ll kick my ass for letting you out of my sight.”
“No, he—” Sophie began, but Sabine spoke over her.
“The hell he won’t. Face it, tiny dancer. The only real problem you have is that people actually give a damn about you.”
My cousin blinked in surprise. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Sabine stepped closer, her dark eyes flashing in anger, but there was something deeper than that, too. Something more raw peeking through the cracks in the fearless facade she wore like Sophie wore SPF foundation. “I’m talking about this room. This room is full of people who love you. Who don’t want you to get yourself killed searching a nightmare dimension for the father who loves you more than life itself.” Sabine shoved the chip bag at me, and I took it before I realized what I was doing. “Did you know I had six older sisters?”
“I didn’t...” Sophie looked confused. “You have family?”
“Had. I’m a mara—the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter—which means I had six older sisters and presumably a set of parents who liked kids enough to have at least seven of them. They must have loved kids. But they didn’t want me. They left me on a church doorstep, buckled into a car seat, when I was a toddler. So I don’t have those sisters anymore. I don’t have those parents. What I have is this.” She spread her arms to take in all of us. “These same people you have. And like it or not, they have me. And so do you. Your dad just took custody of me, which means you’re my sister now. You’re the only sister I have left—the only one I’m ever going to have—and I’m not gonna screw that up. I’m not going to throw you away, like they threw me away. I’m not going to let you get hurt. And I’m sure as hell not going to let you hurt yourself. So you put your bony little butt back on that couch and start using your head instead of your mouth, because it’s your head we need right now.”
“My head?” Sophie stared at Sabine in shock. We all stared at Sabine in shock.
“You know your dad better than anyone else here,” the mara said. “You know better than any of us where he’s most likely to go. Where he might hide. When we go back in, we’ll go together, and you’ll be the one telling us where to look. Got it?”
Sophie opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She blinked at Sabine. Then, finally, she nodded. And sat back down.
Luca sat with her, and while they talked softly about where her dad might have gone, I headed into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee, partly to give my hands something to do, partly because I like coffee, and partly because I could already tell it was going to be a long night—those who needed sleep would appreciate the offer of caffeine instead.
“So, how bad is this?” Em said from her bar stool, while I ran water into the glass carafe. “I mean, it feels like we’ve been in a constant state of emergency for the past few months, but is it just me, or do things seem extra dire today?”
I turned off the faucet and poured water from the carafe into the reservoir at the back of the coffeepot. “It’s not just you.” Avari had been taking things from us for months. People we knew and loved. Opportunities we could never get back. He’d taken Sophie’s naivety, Nash’s emotions, and Sabine’s foster mother and home. He’d been party to the scheme that took Emma’s body and Lydia’s soul. But throughout all of that, we’d always had a support network to rely on. Parents, older and wiser, who encouraged, overruled, and protected us out of love.
Now, they were gone. We were on our own, and beyond that forced independence, we were missing parts of our families, both blood and extended. Our positions had been reversed—now our parents needed us to find and protect them, without the advantage of their wisdom and guidance.
The game had changed. We now stood to lose much more than our own lives.
“So, what’s the plan?” Em asked as I dumped dry coffee grounds into the filter.
“We find them, and we bring them back.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.” That was possibly the scariest sentence I’d ever said aloud. “Footwork? Guesswork? Dumb luck? I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but it has to be done.” And that was the bottom line. “Quickly.”
I’d just pressed the brew button when someone gasped from the living room and I looked up to find Tod standing in the middle of the floor, in front of the TV. I only realized I’d reached for a knife from the block by the microwave when my hand closed over the handle.
I let go of the knife as Tod turned toward me, already fielding questions he seemed to have no answers for.
“Did you find them?”
“What about my dad?”
“Are the monsters hunting them? Was there any sign of blood?”
Emma and I stopped in the kitchen doorway while coffee dripped into the carafe.
Tod sat on the end of the coffee table. “I didn’t find them, and I really think that’s a good sign.”
“How on earth is that a good sign?” Sophie demanded. “They’re still missing!”
“Not finding them is a hell of a lot better than finding a pile of blood, bones, and shredded flesh,” Sabine said.
Sophie sobbed, and Luca glared at the mara, who didn’t seem to notice.
“I wasn’t going to put it like that, but yes,” Tod said. “I blinked in and out around the perimeter of the building, because that’s safer than actually walking around the Netherworld, and at first it looked pretty bad. There were creatures clustered in groups too tight for me to see what they were looking at. But eventually the groups started breaking up and I got close enough to see that they were gathered around several spots of blood. Just a few drops. They’re tracking Mom and Brendon, but they haven’t found them yet.”
“But they will,” Nash said, and Sabine took his hand.
“Yes, eventually, they will.” Tod flinched, as if the truth hurt coming out. “Unless we find them first. But the good news is that the blood trail has stopped. The last thing I saw them gathered around was a strip of material. It was part of your dad’s shirt.” He glanced at Sophie, whose eyes were wide and damp. “It looks like he bandaged my mom’s wounds, which has slow
ed—or maybe even stopped—the bleeding. Which makes them harder to track.”
“Okay. Good.” I sat next to Tod when he held one hand out to me. “So, we’ll keep looking, in shifts. Me, Tod, and Sabine.” Because we could cross over safely if we were smart about it.
“I’m coming, too,” Sophie said. Before anyone could object, she rushed on, “Not alone. I’m not stupid, and I don’t want to die. But I can get there and back, so there’s no reason I can’t go with one of you. I can help.”
The rest of us must have looked skeptical, because she scowled at us all. “Four eyes are better than two, right?”
She’d said the opposite to Chelsea Simms during the two years she’d been stuck in glasses before her parents let her get contacts. But whatever. I liked Sophie 2.0 better anyway.
“Fine,” I said, and my cousin gave me a grim smile of thanks. “You can come with me, but not until you learn how to control that wail of yours. You don’t have to unleash it at full volume, you know.” Saying that reminded me that Harmony wasn’t there to teach Sophie like she’d taught me. I wasn’t entirely sure I could do her lessons justice.
“You can come with me, too,” Sabine said. “But the first time you do something stupid or put either of us in danger, I’m dragging you back here.”
“That won’t happen.” Sophie looked slightly less thankful for Sabine’s concession than she had for mine.
After that, we took up a collection and Emma ordered dinner for those who needed it while Sabine took a shift searching in the Netherworld and I tried to teach Sophie what I knew about the one bean sidhe ability she’d inherited.
Turns out my cousin’s big mouth was more practical than I’d ever given it credit for.
Chapter Fifteen
Sabine’s shift took longer than it should have, because she couldn’t blink from place to place in the human world, nor could she become invisible to humans like Tod and I could. Which meant that she had to actually drive partway to the hospital to pick up the search where Tod had left off, and she had to be away from onlookers when she crossed over, so no one would see her disappear.
She was still gone when the Chinese food delivery arrived, and Sophie and I took a break so she could eat.
I left my cousin at the kitchen table with Luca and Emma scooping rice and chicken from cartons onto paper plates. Then I headed into the back of our small house in search of Tod and Nash.
Halfway down the hall, I heard them, one whispered masculine voice, then the other in answer, coming from my room. I stopped breathing so I could hear them better, torn between the knowledge that I shouldn’t be eavesdropping and the relief that for the first time since Nash and I had broken up, the Hudson brothers were alone in the same room and they weren’t fighting.
It was a moment I wanted to treasure. Definitely a moment I didn’t want to spoil. So I listened, just for a minute.
“The truth, Tod. You think she’s still alive?” Nash’s voice was low and strained. He was worried.
“Yeah, I do. I think Brendon would do just about anything to protect her.”
“He’s just one man.”
“Yeah, but he’s a smart man, and a big man, and a man who’s been around for more than a century and a half. He’s also a man who has every reason in the world to want to get both himself and our mom back here as soon as possible.” Tod paused, and I pictured him shrugging, though all I could see was my mostly closed door. “Anyway, if she were dead—if either of them were—Avari would want us to know. He’d want to feed from our suffering.”
“We’re suffering just from not knowing where they are. Or how they are.”
“But not like we would if we knew they were dead. Not knowing allows room for hope, and Avari can’t feed from worry and hope like he can feed from true pain.”
I snuck closer until I could see Nash through the gap between my door and its frame. He sat on the end of Emma’s bed, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, the toes of his shoes resting on the ground.
“Maybe they’re dead and he just doesn’t know it.” Nash’s gaze followed Tod as the reaper paced the rug in front of him, like he had energy to burn. Worried, angry energy. “Maybe one of those man-eating freaks killed them and ate them, and Avari hasn’t told us because he doesn’t know.”
Tod stopped pacing and sat on the edge of my desk. “I think it’s dangerous to assume there’s anything Avari doesn’t know.”
“He doesn’t know what we’d be willing to do to get our mom back.”
“Of course he does. Anything. The same thing Kaylee and Sophie would be willing to do to get their dads back. That’s what Avari’s counting on.”
“He’ll use our parents against us.”
“Yup.” Tod nodded. “He’ll use us all against one another if he gets the chance.”
“Do you think he’s found them?”
“No.” Tod didn’t hesitate. “But he wants to find them almost as badly as we do.”
Nash exhaled slowly. “What do you think he’ll do with them?”
“There are too many possibilities to even guess at.”
Tod was perfectly capable of an educated guess, but listing all the horrible ways our parents could die—or suffer for eternity—wouldn’t help anything.
“Think he’ll kill them?”
“Maybe.”
“Worse?”
“Maybe.”
For a moment—a very long moment—Nash was silent. Then he looked up, and his next words sounded fractured with pain. “We’re never going to see her again. You know that, right? She’s gone. She’s dead, or she’s wishing she were dead, and she’ll never be back.”
Wood creaked as Tod lifted his very corporeal weight from my desk, and a second later he sat next to Nash on Em’s bed. “I’m not going to let that happen.”
Nash laughed, a harsh sound that carried disbelief but no real hostility. “I get that you think you’re all badass, with the undead thing you’ve got going on, but it’s been nearly three years. The mystique has worn off, and we all know the truth. Reapers don’t save people—they kill people. Besides, if she dies in the Netherworld, there’s nothing you can do.” Nash stood, headed for the hall, walking backward, and I scurried away from the door. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I’m not the little brother anymore. You don’t need to coddle me. The truth is that if Avari wants Mom dead, there’s nothing either of us can do to stop that. Especially you. No offense, but you couldn’t even save Kaylee, and she was in the human world. Hell, she was in your reaping zone.”
A lump formed in my throat, and I pushed my bedroom door open. “Food’s here.” Nash turned, eyes wide with surprise, but Tod looked like he’d known I was there the whole time. He studied me, and I realized he was trying to figure out if I agreed with Nash. If I thought he’d failed me when I’d died. “Sabine’s not back yet,” I said. “Do you think you could go check on her?”
Tod nodded, almost reluctantly, then stood and slid one hand behind my head and into my hair. The goodbye kiss he gave me lingered, and it tasted like sorrow. “Be back in a few.” Then he disappeared.
When he was gone, I closed the door at my back, then leaned against it. Nash’s brows rose. “What are you doing?”
“We need to talk.”
He frowned. “Is it opposite day? ’Cause I think that’s my line.”
“I wish you could trust him as much as I trust him.” I let go of the doorknob and sat on the edge of my desk, where Tod had been moments earlier. “It would mean the world to him to look at you just once and not see contempt and suspicion.”
“Wow, seriously? I kinda thought he was lucky that I’m speaking to him at all, considering...what you two did behind my back. That’s not exactly the kind of thing that inspires trust.”
Granted. And we were obviously never going to be done paying for that. “But you trust me?”
Nash sat on my bed and thought in silence for a minute. “Yeah, actually, I do.”
“Wh
y?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “We were together for so long....”
“Six months. We were together for six months, about a quarter of which I spent grounded.” Since neither of us had to sleep, I’d actually spent more time with Tod in the month and a half we’d been together than I’d spent with Nash during our entire half year as a couple. “But you and Tod have been brothers your whole lives. Why would you trust me but not him? Especially considering that I’m responsible for everything you blame him for. I kissed him, Nash. Not the other way around. I kissed him.”
“I know. But...” He exhaled in frustration. “I understand why you would do that. I messed things up between you and me. Looking back, I’m surprised it took as long as it did for you to bail on me—”
“I didn’t bail. I—”
He held up one hand. “I know. Just let me finish. My point is that I practically pushed you toward him, so I can’t really blame you for your part in this. But I never pushed him toward you. He went after you all on his own.”
“But he didn’t,” I insisted. “And he wasn’t going to. If I hadn’t kissed him, he’d probably still be watching from the sidelines, holding everything inside because he’s your brother. Because he cares about you. Because he wants to protect you, even from himself.”
“Oh, that’s such bullshit!” Anger flashed behind Nash’s eyes, and I saw him struggle to control it. Which meant more to me than he could possibly imagine. “I’m sorry, but you’re wearing rose-colored glasses, Kay. You think that just because you have a heart of gold everyone else must, too, but that’s not—”
“I don’t have a heart of gold.” Lately it felt more like I had a heart of steel. Like full-body armor was the only way I could protect the muscle that didn’t always beat anymore but always felt bruised.
“Yeah, you do. What you don’t see is that Tod would do anything for you because he loves you, but he’s not like that with everyone else. He’s not like that with anyone else.”
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