Rachel Vincent - With All My Soul

We started at the hospital because as unlikely as I thought my uncle was to actually hide out there, I couldn’t help thinking he was very likely to have stopped there, at least for a little while, in search of medical supplies. Tod showed me where the easiest-to-access first-floor medical supplies were in the human world, and we crossed over one site at a time, armed with the sledgehammer Tod had dug up from somewhere—he was inspired by the one my uncle had used—and the large meat cleaver he’d taken from the hospital cafeteria for me.

I wasn’t surprised to see that all of the closets he showed me had bled through from the human world with at least some of their supplies intact, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Netherworld version of the hospital was virtually deserted. If Avari’s lackeys had looked for Uncle Brendon and Harmony there, they’d obviously long since moved on.

Finally, after checking out three different supply closets, we were rewarded in the fourth, where the doorknob had been beaten off, evidently with the fire extinguisher propped against the wall several feet away.

On the floor of the closet, we found empty bandage wrappers, bloody scraps of gauze and cotton swabs, and an open bottle of rubbing alcohol.

Tod stared at the mess for a minute, and I linked my hand with his, hoping he could feel both my sympathy and empathy in that one touch. I knew how he felt, as few others could—we knew even less about my dad’s current state than we knew about his mom’s. Tod squeezed my hand, then let it go and knelt to gather the trash my uncle had left behind.

“What are you doing?”

“They obviously haven’t found this yet, so I’m taking it. I don’t want them to know what my mom tastes like. I don’t even want to think about the possibility that one of them could develop a taste for her blood specifically, like Avari has for your...you. What if that sparks some kind of similar obsession, and they start hunting her like he hunts you? It’s bad enough that I can’t protect you. At least I can do this for her.”

I wanted to let him think that. I actually considered preserving his well-intentioned fantasy. But eventually he would realize his own mistake, and he’d know that I hadn’t told him the truth when I should have.

“Tod, they’ve already had a taste of her. Didn’t you say they were gathered around drops of her blood outside?”

His hands went still, one of them clenched around a handful of empty wrappers. “Fine. But I’m not going to give them any more of it to obsess over. This is part of her, Kaylee, and I’m not just going to leave it here for them to snort and drool and fight over.”

“I get it.” I would have done the same thing for my dad if I could’ve.

We traced my uncle’s most likely path out of the hospital from that closet, but we couldn’t find footprints or anything else to indicate which way he’d gone from there.

We were about to cross into the human world near the ambulance bay when something scraped concrete behind us. We both tensed and turned toward the sound. In the middle of the hall stood two small grayish creatures whose bulbous heads didn’t quite reach my waist. They were bald and wore no clothes, but even without the odd, arrhythmic jerking in their arms, legs, and thin gray tails—not to mention the occasional full-body twitch—I would have recognized them based solely on their double row of needle-sharp, metallic-looking teeth.

Fiends.

I hadn’t seen a fiend since the day a creeper vine had nearly ended my life several months ahead of schedule. Or thirteen years late, depending on your perspective. That was the day Nash was first exposed to Demon’s Breath, and though I didn’t know it at the time, the whole thing was my fault. I’d brought some latex balloons filled with the substance to give to three fiends in exchange for information, accidentally kicking off a series of events that led to Nash’s addiction, our eventual breakup, and Avari’s inexplicable obsession with owning my soul.

It was not my finest day.

“Victory!” the fiend on the left cried in a voice so high-pitched my ears tried to crawl into my skull. “We found the treasure. We get the prize.” He bounced forward, metallic teeth clinking together in excitement—or maybe that was his jaw twitching.

“Stay there!” I brandished the huge knife, suddenly glad we’d come armed.

Tod set the head of his sledgehammer on the ground, resting both palms on the end of the handle, and I had the sudden, irrational thought that he looked like Thor must have as a teenager. Assuming Norse gods were ever teens.

“Treasure!” the other fiend echoed, yellow eyes flashing with eagerness, and mentally I named him Thing Two. “We play the game. We find the treasure. We win the prize. Come! Maybe we will share the prize.”

“No!” Thing One turned on his little associate, snarling, and Thing Two sprang backward just in time to avoid losing a chunk of his thin gray arm to Thing One’s needle teeth. “No sharing!”

Thing Two snarled back, and they faced off, teeth snapping, thin tails whipping up dust at their feet. Any second, one would pounce.

“Fiends! Focus!” I snapped, my cleaver held ready. I’d had more practice with a blade than I cared to remember, but I’d never chopped anything...off. Which seemed to be what a cleaver was used for. “What prize?”

“The breath of hellions, of course.” Thing One cocked his head to one side. “What else would suffice?”

“Avari offered a reward for us,” I whispered, and on the edge of my vision, Tod nodded.

“He knew we’d come looking for Mom and Brendon.”

“Come!” Thing One shouted. He started to turn, and when we didn’t follow, his thin, dark gray brows furrowed at the bottom of his huge, smooth forehead. “Come!”

“Bite me.” Tod lifted the hammer and choked up on his grip as Things One and Two gave us scary metallic snarls.

“Maybe not the best choice of words...” I clenched the handle of my cleaver tighter. “They’re poisonous, right?” I had just enough time for a moment of thanks that, like Nash, Tod had played both football and baseball before the little monsters charged.

Things One and Two took a few running steps on the floor, then leaped like crazy little monkey-monsters and bounced off opposite walls as if the Sheetrock hid springs. They shrieked as they raced toward us, bounding from floor to wall and back, swapping sides without ever colliding, and I backed up, my heart pounding, my pulse racing. The hallway was wide, but Tod needed room to swing his hammer, and after watching the fiends bound through the hospital hallway like toddlers in a bouncy-house, I was no longer confident that either of us could actually hit them.

We’d backed into the waiting room by the time they got close enough to pounce, and the double doors swung shut between us and them just in time. One fiend slammed into the glass window and slid out of sight, and the thud that followed said his friend had hit too low for us to see.

“Ready to go?” I could hear the tension in my voice.

“In a minute.” Tod held the massive hammer like a baseball bat, and I gave him some more room. “We need to find out if they know where—”

The doors flew open, fast and hard, and not two, but a dozen or so fiends poured through the opening, evidently drawn by their freaky little brethrens’ shrieks. “Treasure!” several of them shouted, limbs twitching, yellow eyes flashing.

Tod groaned. “Never mind. Get back.”

I had half a second to process what he’d said, then I backpedaled just as the first fiend pounced, jaw open, metallic teeth shining in the light from overhead.