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.

Harmony wasn’t moving.

Chapter Fourteen

“Mom!” Tod shouted, and heads turned our way. He pulled me toward the hole in the wall. Hands reached for us. Fingers brushed my arms. Claws caught in my hair. Tails and tentacles tugged at my shirt. My heart beat harder than it ever had, even before my death. But we dodged and slapped and kicked our way through the crowd as it coalesced around us, almost casually slowing our progress, as if they were in no hurry to actually kill us.

As if our fear were enough—for now.

Uncle Brendon heard Tod shout and saw us coming. He turned, looking for Harmony, then let out an anguished cry when he found her. With the huge hammer still clenched in his right fist, he scrambled over the pile of broken cinder blocks to kneel at her side.

We were several feet from the hole in the wall when he swept bloodstained hair from her face and felt for her pulse. We were two feet away when Avari gave another grand sweep of his arm and a thin barrier of ice formed over the hole in the wall like a patch in a pair of jeans. The ice crackled as it thickened, bluish in color but almost perfectly transparent.

Tod pulled me to a stop inches away, and in the second it took us to recover from surprise, the ice thickened layer after layer, trapping tiny cracks and bubbles inside until it was too thick to break. Until it sealed us in and my uncle and his mother out.

Uncle Brendon looked up and hardly seemed to notice the new barrier. He said something, but we couldn’t hear him.

“What?” I shouted, my palm aninch from the ice, so close I could feel the cold but was afraid to touch it. For all I knew, making contact with it would freeze me solid, like the green woman, and I would shatter into a million pieces of Kaylee, never to be reassembled.

My uncle shouted again, and that time I heard enough to understand. “She’s alive!”

“Go!” I whispered to Tod. “Take them home.” He could blink into the human world, then back into the Netherworld on the other side of the ice nearly instantly.

“If Cain so much as twitches, I will have Abel’s head torn from his body.”

It took me a second to process the reference—an odd one coming from a hellion—but then Avari waved one hand at a door on the other side of the room and one of his monsters threw it open. Nash—Abel—appeared in the doorway, then was shoved through it by Belphegore, the hellion of vanity who’d killed Emma. Belphegore was the personification of beauty, with flawless features that defied ethnic classification but slipped from my memory the moment my gaze left her face.

She had one perfect, graceful hand around Nash’s arm, and though his forehead was furrowed in fury, he looked...sober. She hadn’t yet forced a dose of her own breath on him.

Behind them, Invidia hauled Sabine into the room. The mara took in the seething mob of monsters, and her dark eyes widened. But then her gaze returned to Nash. She could cross into the human world whenever she wanted, but she wouldn’t leave him, and with the hellions between them, she couldn’t reach Nash to take him with her.

“Your mother or your brother?” Avari watched Tod patiently, savoring his indecision.

Through the ice, we saw my uncle pick Harmony up and carefully begin climbing the huge mound of debris with her broken body limp in his arms. My fists opened and closed uselessly. The ache in my chest rivaled the fevered rush of my pulse, and I felt more helpless—more human—than I had since the day I’d died.

“Which will you choose, reaper?”

Nash saw us and exhaled in relief—until he looked past us through the ice. He and Sabine seemed to realize what they were seeing at the same time. “Mom!” He tried to push through the throng of claws, fangs, and horns ready to spill blood and devour flesh at one word from Avari, but Belphegore held him back with no visible effort.

“Go get her!” Nash shouted at his brother. For the first time since we’d met, Tod looked...unsure. Torn. His mother was badly hurt but alive. Yet Nash could lose his head in the blink of an eye.

“Your mortal attachments are like a puppet’s strings,” Avari said, both hands clasped casually at his back. “One need only pluck the right cord to make the puppet dance.” His smile was almost creepier than his threats.  “Dance, reaper.”