“I was thinking. Thane got away with several stolen souls. Shouldn’t we be...reclaiming them? I mean, if the others are too busy, I guess I could look into it.” That sounded casual. Right?

Madeline folded her hands on her desk. “Kaylee, Thane is a rogue reaper. He’s completely beyond our authority. The reapers police their own.”

“But he stole souls. Lots of them.” I hadn’t been able to rescue them from him at the time, because Em had just died and Lydia’s body was on the verge of death. I’d had to act quickly to save one of them. Or, a piece of each of them. “Besides, we deal with hellions who’ve stolen souls, and they’re way more dangerous than rogue reapers.”

Madeline nodded. “It’s not about the danger. It’s about the jurisdiction. There’s no other agency in place to deal with hellions when they steal souls, but the reapers have their own authority. Around here, that’s Levi, and I’m not going to step on his toes, especially after everything he’s done to help us recently.”

“But—”

“No.” She leaned closer to me over her desk. “Thane’s a reaper. Let the reapers deal with him.”

“They’re the ones who lost him in the first place!” When he’d killed my mother, then come back to kill me when I was three.

Madeline’s frown deepened. “Was there something else I can help you with, Kaylee?”

That was a dismissal if I’d ever heard one.

“No. Thanks.” I stood and headed toward the door, because using it seemed more polite than just disappearing right in front of her, and I’d obviously already pissed her off. I paused in the doorway with my hand wrapped around the doorframe. “Hey, Madeline?”

“Yes?” She sounded annoyed now.

“Whatever happened to Mr. Beck’s soul?”

“Mr. Beck?”

“The incubus. The one who killed me. His soul was in my dagger when I turned it in that first time. Did it get recycled along with the others?”

Madeline’s brows rose in sudden interest, and she put down the pen she’d picked up. “No. As it turns out, an incubus soul is a relative rarity, and it carries quite a bit of power. And since no one was expecting it at the recycling facility—your incubus wasn’t on the list, of course—Levi decided to keep it as a sort of...souvenir. A conversation piece.”

“Is he allowed to do that?”

“Well, no. Not technically. But he wasn’t allowed to bring back your young reaper suitor either. He did that as a favor to me—” because I’d refused to work for her if she couldn’t bring Tod back to me “—so I will, of course, be overlooking his small indiscretion. As will you, naturally.”

“Naturally...” I hardly heard the word as I spoke it, because my head was spinning with other thoughts. Other possibilities.

Levi still had Beck’s soul. If it would work for the father, it would work for the son. No one else would have to die to give Traci’s baby life—a pattern that would hopefully continue throughout the little parasite’s existence.

“What exactly is a conversation piece, anyway?” That wasn’t really a lie either, because I hadn’t actually said I didn’t know the definition. I’d just implied it.

“It’s a piece of art or decor intended to start conversations. Thus the name. In this case, it’s a highly stylized letter opener. It’s obviously just for show. Something interesting to set on his desk. And now when people ask about it, he can tell them not only the history of the letter opener itself—it’s hellion-forged steel he won in some kind of gambling game—but that it contains the soul of the only incubus ever known to have died at the hands of one of his victims.”

I started to argue with that statement. I wasn’t an incubus’s victim in the traditional sense. He hadn’t wanted my body; he’d wanted my soul. However, he had killed me, so Levi’s story wasn’t really inaccurate....

But I had just as much right to Beck’s soul as he did. More really. And I wanted Traci to have it.

“Thanks, Madeline. Just let me know when you need me. I’ll be...around.”

“Thank you, Kaylee.” I’d been dismissed again, and this time I was eager to go.

I blinked from Madeline’s office back into my bedroom, where I silently lifted the broken dagger from my dresser. I’d taken it from Beck—it was the weapon that had killed us both—and he’d bought it from Avari, who’d evidently ripped the metal from the Netherworld ground and forged the dagger himself.

That thought made me pause, stunned to realize that Avari, Beck, and I were tangled up in as intimate and distressing a knot as Nash, Sabine, Tod, and I. Hundreds of years before my birth Avari had made the blade that would kill me, but I’d survived its use—and my own death—to retain ownership of my own murder weapon. Which he no doubt wanted back.

On second thought, the Avari/Beck/me tangle was much more disturbing than anything forged in adolescent hormones and rooted in love.

I stared at the dagger in my hand for a moment, tracing the jagged, broken edges with my gaze. Invidia, the hellion of envy, had broken off both of the points on the night Emma had died. Afterward, Tod had gone back to the Netherworld to retrieve it for me, but he wasn’t able to find the severed points.

Fortunately, the jagged blades were just as scary—and almost as sharp—as the original weapon had been.