“Specifically…?”

I sighed and stopped to lean against the nearest locker. I was exhausted, physically and emotionally, and I was too worried about Alec’s serial body snatcher and the unchecked series of school disasters to concentrate on class work. Or to dwell on Sabine, and whether or not I’d falsely accused her of trying to bring the school to its knees.

“I had a fight with Sabine.”

“Again?” Nash forced a grin, but I wasn’t buying it. “It couldn’t have been too bad—your face is intact. What happened?”

But if the past week had taught me anything, it was that if I accused her of something, he would automatically come to her defense—another point in favor of Tod’s “they’re meant for each other” conviction. So I tried a different tactic. “Don’t you think this is weird? I mean, the school’s in total chaos. Everyone’s gone crazy.” I hesitated, giving him time to infer my point. But he only frowned harder. “Something’s wrong, Nash, and I don’t think it’s human in origin.”

And the truth was that I had no idea how to even trace the source of the problem on my own. Of my two prime suspects, one was physically inaccessible by virtue of a hellish alternate reality, and the other was socially inaccessible, due to the fact that she now wanted to knock my head clean off my body.

“Agreed,” he said at last, and I actually sighed with relief.

“Okay, I’m not saying Sabine’s behind all of it, necessarily.” Though that’s what I’d believed an hour earlier. “But she’s definitely involved somehow.”

“Kaylee…”

“Just listen. I saw her talking to several of the kids who’ve gone off the deep end, and she’s not exactly a social butterfly.” Sabine was more like a social cockroach, skittering around in the dark, making trouble. “She has Coach Peterson for geography.” I’d verified that during English, with one of her classmates. “Also, I swear I saw her in Mrs. Cook’s class the other day, on my way to the bathroom.”

Mrs. Cook was the teacher who’d lost it in the teachers’ lounge.

“Kaylee, there could be a hundred people who have both Cook and Coach Peterson. That doesn’t prove anything.”

“No, but this didn’t start until she came to Eastlake,” I insisted.

Nash put a hand on my arm and stared straight down into my eyes. “Your turn to listen. This has nothing to do with Sabine.” He glanced around the hall, then pulled me into the alcove near the restroom entrances. “This is a blitz. It has to be. I’ve never personally seen one, but my mom says they’re not that uncommon. The news usually reports them as mass suicides—like that Jonestown thing back in theseventies?—or mass hysteria, or mob mentality. There’ve been witch hunts and lynchings and riots. And if this one goes unchecked, eventually Eastlake will devour itself whole and the building will crumble into a pile of smoldering bricks. Or something less dramatic, but equally bad.”

“Wait.” I blinked, struggling to absorb so much information so fast. “You told your mom about this?”

“No, I didn’t figure it out until lunch. She told me all about blitzes when we studied herd behavior in psychology.”

“So…what exactly is a blitz?”

“It’s a full-scale assault on a specific population by some force in the Netherworld. In this case, that specific population is our school, obviously. But it has to be driven by a big force, because… Well, you know how hellions and some of the minor Netherworld creatures feed on the bleed-through of human energy?”

“Yeah.” Unfortunately, I was intimately familiar with that process.

“Well, to support a blitz, this Netherworld force has to be able to do the opposite. He has to push enough energy into our world to affect human behavior. Or at least our state of mind.”

Which sounded exactly like what was happening here.

“So…who could have that kind of power? A hellion?” Avari was the obvious suspect.

“Not on his own. But with help, yeah. I think it’s possible.” Nash sighed and glanced at his feet before looking up to meet my gaze. “Avari’s the dominant hellion in our area—well, the Netherworld version of our area—and his entire existence is powered by greed. There’s no way he’d let something like this go down without at least getting in on the profit. Which means he’s involved, but not acting alone.”

“What kind of profit are we talking about?” I asked, as pieces of the puzzle floated around in my head, looking for some place to fit.

“Energy, probably. There’d be lots of it to go around, with this large an operation. And with energy comes power.”

“Would this blitz be enough to…boost his abilities?” I asked, thinking of his recent cameo in my nightmare.

“Yeah, I guess. Why?” When I didn’t answer, Nash stepped closer, glancing around to make sure no one was near. The bell would ring any second, but another tardy seemed pretty petty compared to an entire school under attack by at least one hellion.

“I think Avari’s had an upgrade. He was in my nightmare. And I don’t mean that I had a dream about him. He was there. Controlling it. Hurting me. And I think he was feeding from my fear.”

“Kaylee, that’s impossible. Hellions can’t mess with your dreams, and that’s not how they feed.”