I pressed as close to the wall as I could get without actually touching it, and stared out at the empty hall from the shadows hopefully hiding me.

“…very close now…” Avari said from around the corner, as I sucked in a silent breath tasting of fear and smelling of my own sweat. “When you have yours, and I have mine, this affiliation is over. You will slink back to your own corner of oblivion, and we shall see each other no more. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” said a second voice, smooth and seductive, like the first sweet taste of a chocolate-dipped pepper, before the fire inside it roasts you alive. “I shall have the lovely Nightmare child, and you shall have your little bean sidhe, and we shall feast on their souls for all of eternity….”

24

AS THEY ROUNDED the corner, I breathed shallowly through my mouth to keep from smelling whatever oozed down the wall behind me. Wishing with every single cell in my body that I was anywhere in the world but where I stood in that moment.

Avari stepped into sight, and I willed my heart to stop beating for a few seconds, afraid that even that small noise—plus the stench of my terror—would give me away. But he never even glanced at the restroom alcove. Evidently the flood of human emotion from the blitz in progress disguised my individual fear. And he was obviously too irritated at the creature who walked on his other side to bother checking the shadows for humans accidentally stranded in the Nether.

Lucky me.

The woman with him was shorter than Avari, and very thin, her hands a tangle of swollen joints and skeletal fingers beneath the tattered sleeves of a black velvet dress. Her cheeks were sharply pronounced, the hollows beneath them dark and deep. Her black orb eyes reflected a faint green glow in the little available light, and since she had no obvious pupils or irises, I couldn’t tell whether or not she was even looking in my direction.

But her most prominent feature by far was her hair—an ever-dripping flow of noxious liquid, streaming over her head and down her back in distinct currents and waves. The flow was thick and black, except where the light overhead gave it a dark green tint. As I watched, she brushed a streaming strand back from her hawkish face and several drops splattered on the floor at her back, sizzling in green-tinted fizz on the grimy tiles.

I’d never seen anything like her river of hair, and I had no doubt that if it splashed me, the drops would eat the flesh right off my bones.

I shivered in my shadows, fighting to keep my teeth from chattering, but the two hellions just walked on slowly, talking, and I strained to hear every word.

“My beautiful Nightmare is ripe for the plucking—so full of luscious envy,” the woman said, her words sliding over me like the seductive warmth of a fireplace. Suddenly I wanted her voice for myself, to replace the screeching abomination my own throat spewed into the world. Why should a monster likethat get such a beautiful voice, when I got a shriek that could drive grown men home to their mommies? “And I would pluck her now,” she continued, oblivious to how badly I wanted to rip her voice box from her emaciated throat and stomp it into the ground, to deny her what I couldn’t have for myself.

The thought that I might be capable of such a violent act should have shocked and scared me, but it didn’t. It felt…justified. Why should someone else—anyone else—have something I couldn’t have?

“Your impatience is tiresome, Invidia,” Avari said, drawing my thoughts from the wrong I ached to right. “I’ve readied both hosts, but pushing them into slumber in the same moment is rather an exact science, and one rash act could bring this whole tower tumbling down on top of us.”

“Nonsense.” Invidia tossed her hair again as she passed out of my sight, and several vines shrank away from the drops sizzling on the tiles. “You exhausted them for just this purpose, and this flow of youthful energy will not last forever. We should strike now, while the iron is hot, lest our hosts have time to cool their heels.”

“Soon, Invidia. I give my word, it will be soon….”

I didn’t release my breath until I was sure they’d turned the next corner and passed out of both sight and hearing range. Their conversation played over in my head as I tried to make sense of antiquated phrasing, using what little I knew of the Netherworld and the continuing catastrophe my school had become.

The “flow of youthful energy” seemed the most obvious: the increased bleed-through of human life force the blitz provided. But as for the rest…I needed a second, more enlightened opinion. All I knew for sure was that Avari and this Invidia—clearly a fellow hellion—were planning to somehow claim me and Sabine, body and soul, with the help of a couple of preselected “hosts.” And we didn’t have much time to defend against whatever they were about to throw at us.

Considering the seemingly steady flow of traffic in the Netherworld version of my school hall, I decided to risk crossing over in the bathroom instead of pressing on to the storage closet, which may or may not be locked from the outside in the human world.

I eased the door open slowly, and when I saw no sign of any Netherworldly occupants, I slipped inside and let the door close behind me. The row of sinks looked just like the sinks in my world, except that the one in the middle was steadily dripping a viscous-looking yellow fluid in place of water.

Swallowing my disgust, I knelt to peek beneath the doors of the two closed stalls, glad most of them stood open. On the human side of the crossing, the second to last stall was out of order. The toilet had been broken since we got back from the winter break, and a sign hung on the outside of the locked door.