I wasn’t sure I wanted to go at all, but I’d promised her months ago that we’d go together, with or without dates, and she’d been planning our first junior/senior prom since we were freshmen.

Her dress was red and sleek and dramatic, and it looked great with her darker Lydia hair.

My dress was gold. It was long and full, and it sparkled in every little bit of available light. My dad had spent money we probably couldn’t afford on that dress because he’d said that in it, I shined brighter than the sun. Just like my mother.

Tod said my dress glittered like sunlight on the ocean. He found a gold vest and tie to match, but he refused to show off his tux in advance for fear of forever tainting the other guys’ prom experience with feelings of inadequacy.

So I would have to wait to see him in it, but I had no doubt the wait would be worth it.

With my father in his room for the night, snoring two minutes after I’d closed the door, I opened my own bedroom door to find Styx sitting on the end of the bed staring at me, like she’d just been waiting for me to appear.

She probably had. Something about the fact that she was a Netherworld half-breed meant that she could see and hear me even when normal people couldn’t. She’d probably known I was home before I’d even woken up my dad.

As soon as I stepped into my room, she jumped down from the bed and ran at me expectantly, tiny pink tongue hanging from her mouth by half an inch. I picked her up and scruffed her fur, amazed for the millionth time how small and fluffy and normal-looking she was in that moment, considering that if there was danger lurking anywhere near me, on either plane of existence, she’d be baring small teeth sharp enough to shred human flesh all the way to the bone.

Em was asleep on her bed with her bedside table lamp on, and I noticed that while Styx curled up with me anytime I sat in one place for more than five minutes, she never curled up with my best friend, even though they saw each other much more often now that Em lived here and I was dead. Styx tolerated her. She even seemed to like her. But Styx and I had bonded in her infancy, and she would forever be loyal to me above all others.

Sometimes I wondered what would happen to her if and when I died...permanently.

Before her death, Emma and Toto were just as close as Styx and I, but she’d decided to leave Toto—Styx’s littermate—with Traci, to protect her and the baby. Just in case.

I set Styx down and carefully untangled the knot of earbud wires from Emma’s hand, wrapped them around her iPod, then set it on the nightstand. Then I pulled her covers up to her waist—her feet looked cold—and turned off the lamp.

After I fed Styx and checked to make sure all the doors were locked—not that anything I truly feared needed an open door to get to me—I blinked out of my house and into the middle of Madeline’s office. She stood with her back to me, a stack of papers inher hand, like she’d just picked them up from the credenza behind her desk.

She turned and saw me and gave an uncharacteristically undignified little yip of surprise. And dropped the entire stack of papers to clutch her heart. As if she could possibly have a heart attack when she was already dead. I wasn’t sure how long she’d been dead, but we had a pool going, with a bonus included for whoever was able to actually obtain the answer.

“Kaylee! You’ve certainly gotten stealthier in the past few weeks.” She didn’t look entirely impressed by that fact.

“Thanks, I guess.”

“What can I do for you?” Madeline sat in the chair behind her large dark wood desk and waved a hand at the pair of leather-padded armchairs on my side. When her boss had found out exactly how dire our situation was, when Avari was stealing souls pell-mell from the human plane, he’d increased our department’s budget and tossed a little more manpower our way.

Too bad all of that came after all the death and chaos and after Thane stole the hellions’ collection of souls, which prevented them from appearing on the human plane again, at least until they could renew their supply.

I was assuming they hadn’t yet managed that, based on the fact that I’d only seen them in borrowed—possessed—bodies since then.

“I...um...” I sank into the chair on the right and clasped my hands in my lap to keep from fidgeting. Looking nervous wouldn’t do me any favors. “Well, Tod’s at work, and everyone else I know is asleep, and I...”

Her smile got a little kinder. “You’re bored.”

“Yeah.” That wasn’t entirely a lie. My boredom usually peaked in the middle of the night, and at first the shortage of company and the complete lack of anything to keep me busy had led to a dangerous melancholy period, during which I’d lost the desire to do...well, anything. I hadn’t snapped out of it until Avari started parading the ghosts of my past—everyone I’d failed to save—before me and making me “kill” them all over again.

The melancholy hadn’t returned. It had been replaced with a relentless thirst for justice.

Though Ira would call that rage.

“Well, fortunately, things have slowed down around here, and you know we have two new reclamation agents now.”

Yes, I knew. My dad called it the “hurry up and wait” phenomenon. They raised me from the dead to help them with a very bean sidhe–specific emergency job, and now that that job was over—at least, as long as Avari was stuck in the Netherworld—they had much less immediate need of me. And since I was the rookie among more experienced employees again, I got the smallest, simplest, least complicated jobs. Which I was fine with. I was still in high school, after all. But...