And I couldn’t choose.

“This offer expires in two minutes, Kaylee…” Avari’s intimate whisper made me feel dirty, and promised much worse things to come when we met in his territory. Things that may have already happened to my father and Nash. And I couldn’t decide which of them to rescue….

Fortunately, before I could squeak out a desperate, impulsive answer, I heard a dull thud over the line, then the smack of something hitting the floor.

An instant later, Tod’s voice spoke to me over the line. “You were right. It was Sophie.”

“What did you do?” I demanded. My momentary relief was eclipsed by concern for my cousin, who hadn’t exactly volunteered her body for hostile occupation. Even if her own occupation of it was usually hostile.

Tod chuckled. “You can’t possess someone who doesn’t have control over his or her own body. That’s like stealing a horse without grabbing the reins—how are you supposed to control the animal?”

Had he just compared my pampered cousin to a beast of burden? I shouldn’t like the comparison, but I do….

Still… “So what did you do?” I repeated.

“I hit Sophie on the back of the head with a universal remote. This thing is huge. It’s like a cell phone from the ’90s.”

“You were supposed to get rid of Avari without hurting the host!”

“Yeah, I didn’t get that memo. Maybe next time you should be a little more specific when you boss me around while I’m saving your ass. Though, frankly, this whiny little shrew is lucky she only has one bump, ’cause she’s had this coming for a while.”

Well, I couldn’t argue with him there. “Is she still breathing?”

“It was a remote, not a sledgehammer. Anyway, it’s not her time. She’ll be fine.”

“She better be.” I sighed and sank onto the couch again, desperately hoping I hadn’t just signed my father’s death warrant. Or Nash’s. “But the real question is how can we keep it from happening again? What’s to stop Avari from taking over everyone I know?”

“Other than the qualifications for an intermediary? I mean, how many people do you know who have a connection to the Netherworld?”

Not many, fortunately. Not that I knew of, anyway. But there were a few—Emma, Sophie, Uncle Brendon, and Harmony—none of whom I wanted to see hurt. Especially because of me.

“Besides,” Tod continued, suddenly appearing in the middle of my living room floor, still holding Sophie’s home phone. “I think the key to keeping Avari out of your friends and family is right in front of us.”

“It is?” I dropped my phone back into its cradle as Tod nodded solemnly, ignoring the static bleeding from the receiver in his grip.

“Alec.”

“The proxy?” Finally wide-awake, I made my way toward the open kitchen window.

“Yeah.” The reaper’s gaze followed me, but in true Tod fashion, he made no move to help as I used most of my weight to force the first heavy pane of glass closed. “Possession takes an enormous amount of energy, and most hellions can only do it every now and then, and only for short periods of time. A few minutes, at the most. But Avari’s been possessing you regularly for a month now, right?”

I latched the kitchen window, then moved on to the two in the living room. “As near as I can tell.” I felt sick just thinking about it. How could Nash let Avari possess me? Had he even tried to evict the body snatcher? Even once I forgave Nash for lying about the Demon’s Breath—after all, he’d been exposed while helping me—I wasn’t sure I could forgive him for letting Avari inside me. And even if I could forgive, I could never forget….

“And he’s been able to do it twice in two days, since he got his hands on Nash and your dad,” Tod continued, dragging my thoughts back on topic. “Which suggests that he’s using them as additional energy supplements—logical for a hellion of greed, don’t you think?” The reaper raised one brow for emphasis.

“Yeah.” And that also supported my theory that Avari had no intention of returning them, no matter what I did. Especially now that I’d blown the “one now” deal.

“But without proxies to boost his energy level, Avari won’t have the power to possess his own wardrobe, much less the entire cast of the Kaylee Cavanaugh show.”

“Okay, that makes sense…” I nodded slowly as I reached into the fridge for another Coke. “But won’t he just get more proxies?”

The sides of Tod’s mouth lifted in the first true smile I’d seen from him in a very long time. “He’ll try. But we’re banking on the fact that proxies like he has now are few and far between.”

“Wait, Dad and Nash are bean sidhes—I get that. But Avari was possessing me way before he had either of them, back when Alec was his only walking snack. And Alec is human, right? He called himself a human proxy.”

The reaper shook his head slowly. “I don’t know exactly what this Alec is, but I’d bet my afterlife that he isn’t only human. If he were, there’s no way he could have possessed Emma for so long. Or twice in one night.”

So Tod was right. The key to disabling Avari’s human-telephone mode was to get Alec away from him. Not to mention my father and Nash. But since he’d just been physically expelled from my cousin’s body by an unknown third party, the hellion would probably guess that not only would I be coming for my men, but I’d have backup.