8

“WHOA.” Nash leaned closer for a better view, as my heart leaped into my throat. And if I weren’t busy being horrified by Addison’s featureless eye, I might have been surprised by his fearless curiosity. “The demon did that to your eye?”

Addison nodded. “Both of them.” She held out her hand so we could see the small, curved, plastic disk cradled in her palm. It was too big to be a regular contact lens, and she must have seen my confusion. “Demon technology. Dekker provides them, to make us look normal.”

My pulse still racing uneasily, I leaned over for a better look and noticed that the lens was detailed with the specifics of a human eye. Addison’s eerie pale blue iris was right there in her palm, surrounding a pinpoint black pupil.

“The pupils even dilate and constrict, depending on the amount of light in the room.” She smiled bitterly and blinked with a creepy, mismatched set of eyes. “Don’tcha just love foreign technology?”

I had no answer for that, and hoped she was being ironic. I wasn’t particularly fond of technology that allowed elements of the Netherworld to hide in our world. But I did have questions. “Why did he do that? Wouldn’t it be in the hellion’s best interest to avoid making you stand out?”

“He had no choice.” Tod scowled. “It’s a side effect of the process. You know how they say the eyes are the windows to the soul?” he asked, and I swallowed thickly before nodding. I didn’t like where this was headed. “Evidently they mean that literally. Once the soul is gone, there’s nothing to see through the windows.”

Nash whistled softly. “That has to be the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.” And that meant a lot coming from a bean sidhe.

“You want me to put the contact back in, don’t you?” Addison cocked her head and gave him a small, eerie smile.

“That’d be great, thanks.” Nash nodded decisively.

Addy stood and crossed into the attached bathroom. She was back in under a minute, and her eye looked normal. Only it also still looked weird, probably because I now knew what the contacts hid.

“So, when she gets her soul back, her eyes will go back to normal?” Nash aimed his question at his brother, rather than Addison, and I realized he was avoiding looking at her. Her eyes freaked me out, too, but I couldn’t help being amused that Nash was more comfortable dealing with a grim reaper—a living dead boy who killed people and harvested human souls—than with an otherwise normal human girl who’d lost hers.

“They should.”

“Okay, wait a minute. I’ve seen several dead people—” not a statement I could have imagined saying a few months earlier “—and none of them looked like that, even after the reaper took their souls.”

Tod nodded, Addy’s hand held between both of his. “When your heart and brain stop working, your eyes stop working. They reflect the state the soul was in when the person died. It’s kind of like whena clock battery runs down. The hour and minute hands don’t disappear, but they don’t keep ticking, either. They freeze on the last minute they measured.”

“Okay, that makes sense.” In a really weird way. But I didn’t plan to dwell on it. I was ready to give Addison her privacy and go work on her problem somewhere her empty soul-windows didn’t stare at me from behind their eerie human facades. But first we needed the information we’d actually come for. “Addison, did you notice anything about the hellion that might help us identify him? A crooked nose or a dimpled chin? Bad teeth?”

But even as I asked, I realized her answer probably wouldn’t help, even if she had noticed something. I didn’t know much about hellions, but I did know they could assume more than one form, so any description she gave us might not fit the hellion a moment after she’d met him.

She shook her head slowly. “No. Other than the eyes, he looked normal. Brown hair. Average height. Normal clothes. And I didn’t see any birthmarks or anything.”

“And you sure you didn’t hear the hellion’s name?” Nash asked.

“If I had, I don’t think I could have forgotten it.”

“What about your contract?” I asked, struck by a sudden bolt of brilliance. “He signed, too, didn’t he? Did you see what he wrote?”

She shook her head miserably. “They must have done that after I left. The spot for his name was still blank when I signed.”

My hand tightened around Nash’s; my frustration was getting harder to control. “Okay, then, think carefully. Did he say anything to you? Or to the woman who took you to him?” No need to tell her the woman was a reaper. I wasn’t sure how much she knew about Tod, or the Netherworld in general.

“Um…” Addy closed her eyes in concentration, but opened them after only a few seconds. “No. He never spoke. I never even heard his voice.”

“What about the woman?” Nash’s foot bounced on the carpet, and his knee bumped the coffee table over and over. He was obviously as eager to go as I was. “Did she say anything to either of you?”

“No.” Addy didn’t hesitate that time. “No one spoke while we were in…that place.” Her nose wrinkled in disgust, or maybe in fear.

“What about when you got back?” I laid my hand on Nash’s knee to make it stop bouncing. “Did she say anything when you got back to Dekker’s office?”

“Yes!” Addy’s weird, fake eyes widened, and I noticed absently that the pupils did dilate with varying levels of light. That would have been cool, if it weren’t so strange. “When we got back, Dekker was still there. On her way out of the room, the woman kind of trailed her hand up his arm and over his shoulder, smiling at him like he was edible. She said, ‘Your avarice is secure for another year.’ Then she just walked out the door.”