LITMIR.BIZ

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horribly wrong.

      As soon as I was out of sight of the quad, I let myself fade from human sight, then blinked into Mr. Flannery’s first-floor chemistry lab. The room was empty, thank goodness, and his roll book was open on his desk, which was another stroke of luck in itself. Most of the other teachers had long ago switched to an electronic attendance and grade program. Fortunately, Mr. Flannery was nearly sixty and set in his ways. I’d once heard him complain to a colleague about how long it took him to enter the grades into the computer all at once, at the end of each term.

      Still invisible, in case anyone came in, I flipped through his roll book to the third period page and scanned the list. Emily Cavanaugh had been penciled in at the bottom. Most of the students were juniors, which meant I knew nearly all of them. All but four had been in the quad with us—underclassmen usually got stuck eating inside on nice days.

      All four of the missing kids were members of the baseball team—Nash’s former teammates—who’d started eating in the practice field’s dugout in the two weeks since Brant Williams’s death. They seemed to think that was the best place to remember him. And to avoid adult supervision.

      They kind of had a point.

      I closed the roll book and blinked onto the baseball practice field, but a quick glance showed me that only three team members were in the dugout. Marco Gutierrez was missing.

      After several more minutes of looking—I blinked into every men’s room in the building as well as both locker rooms—I finally found him under the bleachers in the gym, just as the bell rang. Lunch was over. In six minutes I’d be late to English.

      I faded into the corporeal plane at his back—visible and audible only to him—then took a deep breath. “Marco? Are you okay?”

      He turned, obviously startled, and the moment his gaze found me, it hardened in anger. His eyes narrowed. His nose flared. His fists clenched at his sides. And I knew one thing immediately, though it made no sense.

      Marco Gutierrez wasn’t just angry. He was angry at me.

      “Kaylee Cavanaugh. How kind of you to save me the trouble of searching for you.”

      Chills raced up my spine and tingled at the base of my skull. Marco didn’t have such a formal, stilted speech pattern. And he had no reason to be mad at me, that I knew of. “Avari.”

      Marco was possessed.

      “You do not seem surprised to see me.…” Marco lifted one brow and clasped his hands at his back in a gesture no high school junior makes, unless he’s standing at ease in ROTC.

      “Surprised to hear from you? No. The escalating pattern of your intrusions into my life is pretty hard to miss. But I can’t say I expected to see you…there.” I waved one hand at the body he’d borrowed. The body of another relatively innocent, uninvolved classmate.

      Still, seeing him by proxy was much better than seeing Avari in the flesh. And the fact that he hadn’t come in a body of his own told me he currently lacked the ability to come in a body of his own. Which was a huge relief.

      “What do you want? And how did you get in there?” Hellions could only possess people who’ve died—even if they were resuscitated minutes later—people who’ve been to the Netherworld, and people they have some kind of personal connection to…

      That last thought led me to the answer to my own question. “He huffed frost,” I concluded, and Avari frowned in confusion. “Demon’s Breath. Your breath.”

      “Ah. Yes, Mr. Gutierrez was among those who sampled the product your new lover delivered for me.”

      “I’m seventeen. Calling Tod my lover makes us sound ancient. Like, forty.”

      “An accurate term, though, is it not? You seem decidedly less innocent than when we first met.”

      “That’s number one on a huge list of things that are thoroughly none of your business.” Unless it made me less interesting to him. Less worthy of being captured and tortured for eternity. If that was the case, I’d happily brand myself a whore, complete with the scarlet letter A. Half the school seemed to think I deserved it anyway. “And Tod had no idea what he was ferrying into the human world for you.” He’d done it for the chance to help Addison. To keep her sane, even as Avari tortured her damned soul.

      But the frost he’d brought into our world had hurt countless people, including Marco Gutierrez. How many more were there like him? How many more of Nash’s friends and teammates had huffed Avari’s breath, unknowingly nominating themselves for hellion possession?

      “What do you want?” I repeated when I realized he was just staring at me. Studying me. Which was somehow even creepier than when he threatened me.

      Avari made a tssk-ing sound with Marco’s tongue—another gesture not native to human adolescence. “That question has been asked and answered so many times surely you are as bored by it as I am. The answer hasn’t changed, but the terms have. I want your anguish, both mental and physical. I want to take you apart and see what biological pumps and vessels make you bleed and what psychological gears and levers make you tick. Then I want to put you back together and begin again. I want to hear you scream. I want to see you writhe. I want to taste your flesh, and your blood, and your fears. I want to savor your ill-fated dreams as they burst like berries between my teeth, then melt like sugar on my tongue. I want you, Kaylee Cavanaugh.”

      I swallowed my own fear, so he couldn’t have it, and that left me with nothing but anger blazing like a furnace where my heart should have been. “It’s always nice to be wanted, but I don’t feel like being enslaved and tortured today. Sorry.”

      “I’m going to make this simple for you, little bean sidhe. If you don’t cross into the Nether and surrender—today—I will come for those you love most.” Because he couldn’t just take me. Even if he’d had a way to make me cross over, and at the moment he did not, he couldn’t have kept me in the Nether. Not while I was conscious and in my own body, anyway. Female bean sidhes can cross between worlds at will, which put us among those least likely to be held captive in the Netherworld.

      To keep me in the Nether against my will, Avari would have to keep me unconscious—which would be no fun for him—or dispose of my body and take physical possession of my soul, which was no doubt his intent. The hard part—for him—was getting to my soul. Since my unfortunate demise, he’d decided it would be easier to coerce me into willingly surrendering than to forcibly part my body from my soul.

      I rolled my eyes, displaying my disbelief in spite of the fear tightening my chest. “That threat has been posed and ignored so many times surely we’re both bored by it.” Throwing his words back at him felt good. Seeing the anger rage behind his eyes felt even better.

      He moved faster than I’d thought possible for a human body. One second he was three feet away, at proper threatening distance. The next, he had one hand around my throat. He slammed me into a support beam beneath the bleachers, and the blow reverberated down my spine in echoing waves of pain. My mouth fell open and I tried to drag in a shocked breath, but no air came. It couldn’t get past his fist squeezing my airway shut.

      “You will give me what I want,” Avari said into my ear with Marco’s voice. “Or I will destroy what you treasure most.”

      My heart pounded almost painfully while my back throbbed, and it took me a second to realize that my fear was remembered fear, virtually irrelevant to my current predicament. I didn’t need to breathe. Sure, I couldn’t talk with his hand around my throat, but I wasn’t going to suffocate, either.

      Remembering that helped me push fear back again, even farther this time, and anger roared in to take its place.

      “And frankly, Miss Cavanaugh, every time we meet like this I am less and less inclined to leave you unbruised. Standing here, touching you with this borrowed—but very real—hand it occurs to me that not all of my corrupt pleasures have to wait for your arrival in the Nether.”

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