CHAPTER 19. Avari rose, placing both palms flat on the glossy work surface of a desk that stood empty in the Netherworld

Avari rose, placing both palms flat on the glossy work surface of a desk that stood empty in the Netherworld, but was probably cluttered with some worker-drone's papers, pens, and coffee mug in our world. "Come inside," he said, his words as smooth and dark as good fudge, but nowhere near as sweet.

His voice sent shivers through me, leaving tiny icicle shards to chill the blood in my veins.

Tod stepped inside and we followed him reluctantly. I brought up the rear, fighting to control the wince of pain my features wanted to form, and to deny the groan lodged in my throat. I would not expose myself as the weakest member of the herd.

With the casual wave of one hand, Avari closed the door behind us, from across the room. "Addison. Regan." The hellion nodded formally, rounding his desk to stand in front of it. "I assume you've come to invoke your respective out-clauses?"

"No." Addy spoke firmly and clearly, in spite of the trembling hands she clasped at her back. "We won't damn someone else to eternity with you. We're here to make a different sort of trade."

Avari sat with one hip on the corner of his desk, tugging the sleeves of an immaculate, coal-gray suit jacket into place. If not for the sunglasses—and the ability to close doors without touching them—he could have been any ordinary cog in the life-insurance machine. "What makes you think I'm open to such an exchange?" Power radiated from him in waves of bitter cold, drawing goose bumps from my skin, even beneath my jacket.

"You're a hellion of avarice," I began, but when the demon's head turned my way, the words froze in my throat, and I had to cough to force them up. "Why wouldn't you want more for less?"

Avari's brows rose above his sunglasses, and my heart thumped painfully from the knowledge that both his attention and his gaze were focused on me. Being scrutinized by a hellion was definitely not part of the plan.

Nash stepped protectively closer to me, his hand brushing mine, but Avari took no notice.

"You reek, bean sidhe. " The hellion's words wove through me on a gust of frigid air, coiling around my chest until I could hardly feel my heartbeat through the simultaneous numbing cold and stabbing, icy pressure. "The rot spreads inside you quickly. I smell it. I feel it, though you disguise your pain with uncommon strength and fortitude. Both qualities I find quite appetizing in a soul."

He rose from his desk and took a single stride toward me. I answered it with a backward step, swallowing a cry as my bad foot hit the floor. Needlelike pain shot down my foot and up my leg, this time enveloping my entire pelvis, as well.

I was getting worse. Fast.

The hellion's long, straight nose twitched as he inhaled, and a terrifying flash of hunger flickered across his otherwise empty expression. "I can eat your pain. I can spare your life."

Panic shot through me and I squelched it all, except the tremor in my hands. "When my death comes, you can't stop it, and I won't even try. If I'm supposed to die from crimson creeper venom, so be it." Not that I was exactly eager to go, but I would not die without my soul. Not even for the promise of a quick, painless death.

"And if you were not meant to die of such poison?" Avari's brows lifted once more as he stepped forward, and again I limped backward, my vision going gray with the sudden, harsh movement. "I see your lifeline spread before me like a length of road, and the miles should tick away your fleeting, insignificant life for some time to come. Yet the stench of death clings to you. It flows through your veins like a river through its channel, and the toxin will reach your heart within minutes."

He paused, and I thought I glimpsed a dark flash of pleasure, even through the opaque tint of his lenses. "If you stay in the Nether much longer, you will die here."

Fresh fear skittered up my spine to lodge in my throat, and my gaze flitted from Nash's horrified expression to the smug hellion. Then I asked the question he clearly wanted to hear, in spite of some strong instinct urging me to retreat into silence. I had to know. "But you said my lifeline goes on." I stopped to breathe through another agonizing wave of pain. "How can I die here?"

"The date stamped on your feeble body means nothing in the Netherworld. If you suffer a mortal injury or contract a deadly infection here, you will die among us. As one of us. But you have a few minutes yet. Enough time to barter for your friends. Or to escape to your own world."

Was he telling the truth?

Horror drew my hands into fists so tight my fingernails cut into my flesh. If I fled the Netherworld to save myself, there would be no one left to suspend Addy's and Regan's souls once the hellion released them, so Nash could guide them back into the proper bodies. But if I stayed to help them, I would die.

Unless I sold my soul to Avari.

"Which will it be, little bean sidhe? " The hellion's faux-sympathetic smile sent a spike of terror through my heart. "Your life, or your friends'? Or your soul?"

"Tod?" I turned on him, silently demanding the truth, keeping the hellion safely in my peripheral vision.

The reaper's tortured, conflicted expression greeted me. "Kaylee, he's just trying to buy your soul."

I knew that, of course. But I also knew Tod would say anything to save Addison's soul. He would also not say anything with that same goal in mind. "Tell me the truth, Tod. Can I die here?"

The reaper sighed but nodded. "Your expiration date means nothing here. You know, 'Offer not valid in the Netherworld, the Bermuda Triangle, and various undiscovered warp zones across the globe….'"

I closed my eyes briefly and exhaled. "Awesome, Tod. Thanks for that." Anger flamed through me, thawing some of the chill Avari's voice had left in my veins. But it could do nothing to ease the agony clawing its way up my right leg and into my torso. "Thanks for warning me before we crossed over."

And suddenly I realized. I remembered. "You knew!" He'd almost said something in the car. He'd started to tell me my ankle couldn't wait. But then he didn't.

On the edge of my vision, Nash's hands curled into fists at his sides, and his eyes churned furiously in fear and rage.

"I'm sorry, Kay," Tod began as Addy and Regan stared at me in horror. "I'm so sorry…."

I turned my back on him, ignoring his silent plea for forgiveness. "If I die, it will be with my soul in my possession," I said to the hellion, summoning every ounce of that fortitude he'd mentioned. "It will never be yours." I paused, as cold, treacherous anger flowed swiftly over the demon's face. "Got that, Tod?"

"I got it," he whispered from behind me. He would take my soul if I died, to keep it from the demon. It was the least he owed me. That, and a few tears spilled over my grave…

"So be it, bean sidhe. " Avari's voice was as still and deadly as an Arctic winter. He turned that toxic hunger on Addison. "What do you offer?"

Addy nodded at Tod, who'd recovered most of his composure. "Your colleague Bana is no longer with us," the reaper said. "Not in body, anyway."

The hellion's expression did not change, but I suffered in silence for several tense moments before he spoke again. "You have Bana's soul?"

"Yes." Tod let a slow smile stretch across his face. "She was more than one hundred years old. Her soul has more accumulated energy than both Addison's and Regan's combined, and I can personally attest to the quality of that energy." He patted his stomach, like he'd just eaten a particularly satisfying burger.

Again, Avari betrayed no thought or emotion, and frustration spiked with my pulse. I couldn't tell if he was even interested in our bait, much less how close we were to a deal.

The entire right side of my body throbbed during Avari's silence, pain cresting and falling with each beat of my heart. Small, sharp tongues of anguish licked at the base of my spine, replacing the numbing cold with a searing heat. I could almost feel the creeper venom flowing through me, taking over my body one cell at a time, one limb after another.

"No." Finally the hellion spoke, and I concentrated on his words to distract me from the pain that hunched my back and singed my nerve endings. "Human souls are pure, and particularly innocent are the souls of children." His gaze seemed to focus on Regan then, though I couldn't be sure with his eyes hidden. "If you want your souls back, you will offer a fair exchange. That is the agreement you signed."

Regan moaned, and Addy squeezed her sister's hand. "Please," the pop star begged, stepping in front of Regan to block her from the demon's sight, and vice versa. But the moment the word left her mouth, both Nash and Tod went stiff, and it didn't take me long to catch on. Addison had just shown the hellion another weak link in our chain, and exactly how to exploit it.

The demon smiled, and the temperature in the room plummeted. My goose bumps grew fatter, and my nose started to run, like I'd caught a cold. I began to shiver, and each small movement sent fresh waves of pain throughout my body, one after the other, cresting in my injured ankle.

"You want to save your sister?" Avari's voice pierced me like a massive icicle through the chest, and I couldn't hold back a gasp. I wasn't the only one; Regan looked like her blood had just frozen in her veins.

Addison hesitated, and Nash tried unsuccessfully to catch her eye without speaking. "Yes," Addy said finally, her pretty face twisted with fear and desperation.

The hellion's smile widened almost imperceptibly, and some small motion caught my eye from his desk. I glanced down to see a thin, blue-tinted film of frost forming on the glass desktop, crawling across the surface in tiny, flat ice-vines. The frost branched steadily in all directions, a network of captured snowflakes. It was beautiful.

It was also one of the scariest things I'd ever seen.

"I will trade one unspoiled human soul for this reaper's accumulated energy." Avari's soft words rolled over me like thunder as ice continued to spread toward the edge of the desk. "Show me Bana's soul."

"You first," I gasped, clutching my abdomen as the toxin spreading within me set my stomach on fire. Soon the poison's flames would meet the ice Avari's words had driven through my chest, and I knew better than to hope the two would simply cancel each other out. "Give us the soul first," I repeated, ignoring the shocked faces staring at me. "Or there's no deal."

A growl rumbled from the demon's throat to shake the entire room, and a sudden gush of frigid power sent more frost surging over the edge of the desk and onto the floor. Avari ripped the sunglasses from his face and they froze in his hand, tiny icicles hanging from the earpieces and the left lens. His fist closed, and the frozen plastic shattered, clinking to the floor like glass.

His eyes, now exposed, were spheres of solid black, just like Addison had said. But what her words had failed to convey was the utter darkness encompassed in those obsidian orbs. Looking into Avari's eyes was like looking into the depths of oblivion. Into the distillation of nothingness.

He was the very absence of all things light and good, and staring into his eyes called forth my own worst fear: that if I were to look into my own heart and soul, I would find nothing more. That I would be just as empty. That my own void would mirror his.

But I wouldn't let it. If I had to die, at least I could die helping a friend.

"You dare make demands of me?" the hellion roared, shattering a heavy stalactite of ice that had grown from the ceiling. It crashed to the floor, and both Page sisters jumped.

I only smiled. I was a little light-headed, and more than a little out of my mind with pain and with the very thought of my rapidly approaching demise. "I totally dare. You don't scare me." I barely noticed the sick look on Nash's face, growing worse with every word I spoke. He aimed eyebrow acrobatics my way, trying to shut me up, but I ignored him. What did I have to lose? "I'm going to die, anyway," I continued. "And if you don't release one soul now, Tod will take off with Bana's, as well as mine, and you'll have gained nothing from this little gathering."

How well did that concept sit with the demon of greed?

Avari growled again, and more spears of ice dropped from the ceiling to shatter at our feet. But then his growl died, and the floor went still beneath me, a temporary mercy for my tortured right leg. And when the sound faded, the hellion's lips turned up in the single most terrifying smile I'd ever seen.

"Fine. Have your soul, for what good it will do you…." He exhaled deeply, without sucking in a preparatory breath, and what I at first mistook for warm air puffing into the cold room soon revealed itself as a soul. A human soul.

We'd done it!

I glanced at Nash and Tod in relief and in pure joy, ignoring the pain that now wound its way over my ribs toward my right shoulder.

"Kaylee!" Nash whispered fiercely, desperately, and I followed his gaze to the soul now floating steadily toward the icicle-studded ceiling.

Oops. I'd forgotten the most important part. Since Regan wasn't actually dying, I'd had no urge to wail for her, and her soul was getting away. So I used what I'd learned from Harmony to call my wail up on demand, suspending the soul with the thin sliver of sound that leaked from my tightly sealed lips.

The soul bobbed just below the ceiling, surrounding one of the stalactites of ice. Sweat broke out on Nash's forehead, in spite of the freezing temperature, as he concentrated on guiding the soul into Regan's body while everyone else watched. Tod stared at his brother in relief, while Addy and Regan looked on in amazement—evidently in the Netherworld humans can see souls.

But Avari looked…amused?

Was I missing something?

I focused on my wail, on holding most of it back, to distract myself from the pain that now pierced my right shoulder and was inching its way down my arm. Nash brought the soul steadily closer to Regan, and in a sudden moment of comprehension, Addison pushed her sister toward the bobbing soul, to make Nash's work easier.

My heart beat harder in anticipation. The rush of adrenaline through my veins tried to overwhelm the pain in my bones. Any second, Regan and her soul would be reunited. We could claim success on the part of at least one Page sister.

We couldn't help Addy—she'd made her own choice—but we'd done what we could.

Nash's sudden wide-eyed, horrified expression was the first sign that something had gone wrong. "It doesn't fit!" he breathed, and I wasn't sure whether I'd actually heard him or read his lips. "It's not hers!"

Suddenly the hellion's unprecedented agreeableness and his amused expression made sense, and we all seemed to draw the same conclusion at once: Avari had tricked us.

He'd released Addison's soul instead of Regan's.