Tod looked sick. “This is my fault. Avari would never have figured all this out if I hadn’t thrown Thane at him,” he mumbled beneath his breath.

The only comfort I had to offer him was my hand intertwined with his.

“That’s right, lover boy.” Thane obviously enjoyed Tod’s self-torment. “No good deed goes unpunished.”

“So, how do we stop him?” I said, fighting the overwhelming, numbing lure of despair.

“Stop him?” Thane shrugged. “I have no idea how to stop him, and I don’t really care.”

“But we had a deal!” I stood, furious. “I snatch your soul from the grip of a demon and you tell us how to stop him.”

“Uh-oh. Someone wasn’t paying attention. I only promised to tell you what I know, and I’ve done that. What you do with the knowledge is up to you. And if you even think about defaulting on your end of the bargain, keep in mind that your little ‘circle the wagons’ routine can’t last forever. I spent days following you around in advance of your death, and just because there were times you didn’t see me doesn’t mean I wasn’t there. I know everyone you know. I know where all your friends and family live. If you don’t produce my soul in very short order, you won’t have to worry about Avari killing everyone you love. I’ll save him the trouble.”

* * *

“You can’t tell Madeline!” I cried, chasing my father down the hall as he went for his cell phone. He’d left work the minute I’d called him, as soon as Thane left.

“Oh, yes, I can. I can’t believe you’re even thinking about keeping this from her.”

“I didn’t have to tell you, either, you know.” I grabbed his arm, and he finally turned to face me, forehead deeply furrowed, irises stubbornly still so I couldn’t see how scared he really was. But I knew. He was almost as scared as I was.

“Kaylee, I’m glad you told me, but I can’t reward your good decision with a poor one of my own. Madeline knows much better than either of us how to deal with rogue reapers and runaway hellions,” he insisted, already on the move again, and I shouted after him.

“If that were true, she wouldn’t have lost all three of her other extractors!”

My father stopped cold in the hall, then turned to face me. “I’m not Madeline’s biggest fan, but even I know that wasn’t her fault. She did the best she could with the information she had, and you’ll only be making her job more difficult and dangerous by withholding more information from her.”

“There’s nothing she could do with this information, even if we gave it to her!” I insisted. “She doesn’t have any other extractors to put at risk—I’m the only one left. The ones Avari took are trapped in the Netherworld in cold storage—whatever that means—and I have no idea what state they’rein. Thane still has a body, but that could be because he’s useful. For all I know, Avari’s already disposed of the extractors’ bodies, so their souls can’t escape. And that’s assuming he hasn’t already sold them.”

“Sold them?”

“Yeah. To other hellions. Thane says there are hundreds of them, and once they know what Avari’s up to, they’re all gonna want in on the fun, and no matter how bad you’re thinking that’s gonna be, I promise it’ll be worse. Mass-slaughter of the human race. Bodies dead and defiled. Souls enslaved and tortured. The end of existence, as we know it.”

My father stared at me without speaking for close to half a minute, and I could practically see the rapid succession of thoughts and fears as they raced across his expression. Then he scrubbed his face with both hands and met my gaze again. “Is there any chance at all that this is some massive misunderstanding, or the product of an overactive teenage imagination?”

“Nope,” Tod said, and I turned to find him in the hall. “Nash and I heard the whole thing.”

“Okay, then, what are the chances that Thane made it all up and Avari’s feeding off of our panic?”

“That’s not impossible,” I admitted. “But everything Thane said lines up with what we already knew. Missing reapers and extractors. Avari haunting the human plane in the guise of the dead.”

“Mr. Cavanaugh, I think all hell really is breaking loose,” Tod said.

“And if I tell Madeline…?”

“She’ll tell Levi, who may or may not hunt Thane down and kill him by removing the Demon’s Breath keeping his body functioning in the absence of his soul.” And then we’d have lost our source of inside information and any chance of more help from the only person in either world who had free access to Avari and his evil scheme.

“Look, no one wants to kill Thane worse than I want to kill Thane,” my dad said. “But Levi—much like me—will understand that there are bigger problems at hand. He won’t act rashly at the expense of so much human life.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Thane knows Levi would never let me return his soul, so if he finds out we involved Levi or Madeline, he’ll consider our deal broken and he’ll go after everyone we care about on his own, without waiting for Avari to give the orders. Emma. Sophie. Harmony. Who knows how many other souls he’ll be able to reap before someone catches him?”

My father sighed so heavily I wondered if he had any air left in his lungs at all. “We’re all already in danger, and so long as you, Tod, or Luca are around, Thane can’t sneak up on anyone.” Because he couldn’t hide from the three of us. “Levi and Madeline need to know, Kaylee. You have to be willing to compromise here.”