“So, tell us everything you remember about both encounters with him,” Madeline said, and to my amusement, she pulled a small leather-bound notebook from an inside pocket of her jacket and started taking notes. “Did he have a physical form that you could tell? Or was he more of a specter?”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts, Aunt Madeline,” Luca said.

“Yes, but most varieties of the undead have a spectral form,” she insisted, and a lightbulb went off in my head.

“That’s what that’s called?” I wasn’t invisible; I was spectral. “Anyway, he was truly physically there, in both cases. I touched him. But no one else in the mall could see either of us.”

“Kaylee, what the hell happened?” Nash asked, and I looked up to find him standing in the living-room doorway with my dagger in one hand, my bloody shirt in the other.

I shrugged. “Turns out extracting a soul from a hellion involves actually stabbing it to death. It was totally traumatic.”

Madeline stood and took the dagger by the hilt, then held it up to the light as she examined it. “Hellion-forged steel…” she muttered, turning the blade over. “It’s inscribed, but I don’t recognize the language.” Finally she lowered the dagger and met my gaze. “It appears to function as an amphora in a basic, rather barbaric fashion.”

“Yeah. I gathered that when I barbarically stabbed a girl-shaped demon with it. Thus the trauma.”

“There was actual blood?” She set the dagger on the coffee table, then took my shirt from Nash and held it up for a better view.

“Yup. Blood. Melodrama. Threats. He said that if I didn’t stab him, he was going to kill this little girl carrying a balloon. Why would he do that? Why would he volunteer to die?”

“Because he knew it would traumatize you, and your trauma is like his chocolate-fudge brownie,” Alec said. “It’s yummy.”

Sabine shrugged. “That, and as a message.”

“What’s the message?” Em asked.

“That we’re nothing to him. We’re ants on the sidewalk, so small compared to his foot that he can’t even squish us one at a time. By making you banish him from one stolen body, he’s pointing out that he can get another one anytime, anywhere,” the mara said, and for about the billionth time, her insight scared me. More than ever, in fact, because this time she was demonstrating understanding of a hellion’s thought process.

“Well, the souls in the dagger should verify some of this for us,” Madeline said, exchanging the knife on the coffee table for my shirt. “And if this Heidi Anderson’s soul is among them, I’d call that fairly conclusive proof that Avari has in fact discovered how to wear the souls of the dead on the human plane.”

“The real question is how he got her soul in the firstplace,” Nash said. “Scott’s, I can understand. He could have sent Thane to kill him, or Avari might have done his own dirty work, if he was already on the human plane by then. But Heidi died months ago, and Avari didn’t get her soul.”

“How do you know that?” Madeline asked, and the unease churning deep in my stomach swelled.

He shrugged. “Because Belphegore got it.”

“Who is Belphegore?” Madeline and her nephew asked in unison, and even Alec looked confused.

“She’s the hellion of vanity my aunt made a deal with. Aunt Val hired a rogue reaper named Marg to collect the souls of five innocent, beautiful young women to trade in exchange for her own eternal youth and beauty. Heidi was the first of them. Marg tried to take my cousin Sophie’s soul as the fifth, and my aunt traded herself for her daughter. Belphegore got all five souls, including my aunt’s.”

“Sophie’s mom died to save her?” Luca said.

“Yeah, and she’s only known that for a few weeks.” Since the night I’d died and her father had come clean about the family secret.

“So, Belphegore is involved in this, too?” Emma had all but curled into a ball. Hers had been one of the souls Marg tried to take, and the minute and a half she was dead had made her eligible for possession by Avari, or any other hellion who decided to try.

“Sounds like it. How else would Avari get Heidi’s soul?” I said. Em had tears in her eyes. I gave her a hug, but that was the best I could do until someone invented a Band-Aid for pure terror. “I think we need to face the fact that Avari will be back, but we have no way of knowing where, when, or in what form.”

* * *

My dad got home from work shortly after Madeline left to extract and identify the souls in my dagger. She promised to fill Levi in and ask for his help.

When my dad heard what was going on, he immediately called both Harmony Hudson and my uncle Brendon, who showed up twenty minutes later with Sophie in tow. Our poor little house had never been so full, but everyone agreed that we had strength in numbers.

Everyone except Styx, who barked to be let back in, then walked around growling at everyone she didn’t know until I finally closed her in my bedroom to keep everyone from being bitten by a nervous half Nether-hound.

Sophie was sullen and uncooperative until Luca emerged from the bathroom, at which point she recruited him to help her take dinner orders and make a run to my dad’s favorite Chinese restaurant.

For the next hour, everything we’d already discussed was dissected ad nauseam over cardboard cartons of rice and noodles, and at some point, I realized I’d rather pull my hair out and spend eternity bald than have to explain one more time that I didn’t know how Avari had done what he’d done, or what he was up to.