Rachel Vincent - With All My Soul

If this were a real negotiation, I would have argued. “Fine. And you will have no further contact with him, nor attempt to harm him in any way or bring him to the Netherworld, through any means, including but not limited to force, threat, or coercion, personally or through a third party, ever again.”

“Wow.” Tod whistled. “Where’d you learn all that lawyer-speak?”

“Internet user license agreements. They’re almost as hard to navigate as the Netherworld,” I said, and Tod chuckled. “Avari? Give me your word, or this discussion is over.”

The hellion’s jaw tightened, a surprisingly human reaction. “I do so swear. Now hand over your soul.”

“I’m not finished.”

“You most certainly are! ” he roared, and I jumped, startled. I couldn’t help it. A thin, lacy sheet of ice formed on the floor beneath his feet, flowing out in all directions. Excited murmurs and soft grunts spread throughout the audience. I couldn’t understand any of the actual words—if they could be called that—but the gist was clear. They were eager to see him lose his temper with me.

“Careful. You’re close to the goal,” I taunted, ignoring the fear crawling slowly up my spine. “Do you really want to blow it now?”

“Every word you speak brings your agony closer to hand,” Avari warned, and the ice spread until his audience began to step and slither toward the other side of the room, still watching. I wanted to back away from the ice, too—I’d once seen his temper freeze Addison solid—but this was not the time to show weakness or fear. “You will suffer more for the insolence you spew, and I will drink your pain straight from the source, for all of eternity.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so.” I met his black-eyed gaze as boldly as I could. “I think you already intend to hurt me as much as you possibly can, regardless of what I do or say.”

Avari scowled, and I think if he’d had normal eyes, I’d have seen realization dawn in them. I was right, and he’d just then realized it. Which meant he had nothing left to threaten me with, except...

“My friends and family.” I stood as straight as I could, framing my demand with confidence and determination I didn’t really feel. “I want your word that once you have my soul, you will never bother them again in any way, through your own efforts or by enlisting help. And that you won’t help anyone else hurt them or even contact them. Any of them.”

The sheet of ice thickened and spread in a burst of hellion anger, and on my right, one of the nameless Nether-creatures made a strange choking sound. I glanced over to see a small, vaguely humanoid woman—greenish in tone, with gray claws instead of hands—freeze where she stood. Literally. At her back, another monster cackled with echoing laughter, then shoved one huge fist through her frozen torso. The ice-woman cracked into several large chunks, which crashed to the floor amid splinters of ice and tar-colored frozen innards.

“You’ve outlasted my patience, little bean sidhe. Death and the attentions of your dark lover have already eroded your innocence. What makes you think you are worth the demands you’ve made?”

Eroded innocence? Seriously?

I glanced around the room again, looking for some sign of Harmony and my uncle or Nash and Sabine. For some indication of how much longer I should keep the hellion talking.

“The fact that we’re still having this conversation makes me think I’m worth it. The fact that you haven’t actually said I’m not worth it. But you know what? You’re right. I should go. I need my father back, but I don’t necessarily need you to give him to me. If I’m going to have to pay for his return either way, I think I’d rather pay someone else. Someone who’s already had a taste of me and my ‘eroded innocence’ and would be happy to have another.” My skin crawled at the very thought, but I refused to let that show.

“No one else can get to your father while I have him. You will deal with me, or know that you are responsible for his pain.”

“I don’t know, Kay,” Tod said in a stage whisper. “I think Ira offered you the better deal.”

“Ira?” Avari stalked closer, but I held my ground, though fresh thick ice formed beneath his feet with each step. “Another lie. You could never survive an encounter with the hellion of wrath.”

“Oh.” I frowned, pretending to second-guess my own memory. “Well then, I guess I never summoned him, either, did I? And I have no way of knowing that he’s powerful enough to answer a summons, but you’re not. And if none of that really happened, then I guess I never let him kiss me, either. Or taste my blood. Or feed my rage. If none of that was real, then you won’t mind if I leave you here and go imagine another encounter with Ira, who seems more than willing to work with my demands.”

“The king of rage gets my vote,” Tod said. “Hell, I may make him an offer myself.”

Avari threw his arm out, index finger pointed like a weapon, and a thick spear of ice shot across the room to impale a creature in the far corner, who squealed, then collapsed. “The next one goes through your reaper lover. I will not play these games with you, bean sidhe. Offer up your soul or go home, and rest assured that your father will suffer in your stead....”

The hellion’s words faded and his head turned to the left. He stared at the long south wall of the large room, and unease churned in my stomach. A closed door stood in the middle of that wall. And with sudden cruel insight, I realized he was hearing something we couldn’t.

Avari’s hand shot out again, and the muscles in his neck bulged above his stiff white collar. The wall to his left exploded in a shower of huge ice daggers and broken cinder blocks. Dust spewed in all directions, and I gasped, choking as Tod pinned me between his body and the other wall. The tension in his entire frame said he was seconds from crossing over, with me in tow. And he might have done that very thing, if not for...

“Oh, no...”

I shoved him back so I could peer through the choking gray haze to see what he’d seen.

As the dust and debris settled, I saw that Avari had blasted through not only the interior wall separating our room from the next, but through part of the ceiling of that other room and part of the floor above it. Through the gaping hole above a pile of still-settling chunks of concrete, I could see the Netherworld sky, a sickly shade of orange at the moment, like pumpkin soup that has started to spoil.

But then my gaze followed the wreckage and I saw what had upset Tod. What everyone was staring at. What Avari had heard through the wall.

In the other room, my uncle Brendon stood with his feet spread, a sledgehammer clenched in a two-handed grip, ready to swing. On the ground in front of him were three bodies, each misshapen and somehow wrong, with grayish skin and inverted knee joints.

One had obviously been smashed by the falling debris, when Avari blew the wall in. The other two were the source of the weird grayish blood—or maybe some other bodily fluid—dripping in congealing glops from the hammer my uncle must have found in that room full of old machinery, which had probably never functioned at all in the Netherworld version of the mental hospital.

For a moment, no one moved. My uncle adjusted his grip, eyeing the horde of monsters now twitching, wheezing, and slithering forward slowly in anticipation of some cry of attack by Avari.

I saw no sign of my father. So why was Uncle Brendon still there? Why hadn’t he and Harmony crossed over the instant Avari blew out the wall?

Then I saw Harmony’s long, pale curls trailing over a large cracked brick on the floor. The rest of her was there, too, surely, but so covered in gray dust and bits of brick that it was hard to see anything other than glimpses of color—blond hair, blue T-shirt, red blood pooling on the bricks downhill from her head.