Maybe their relationship was starting to heal.

With that thought on my mind and a relatively peaceful day behind me, I went home right after school, feeling additionally fortunate that the theater where I worked most afternoons had given me a couple of weeks off to mourn Emma, who’d worked there, too.

Maybe I could get Emily hired.... That would be at least one part of Em’s life that I could give back to her.

Emma had stayed after school to meet with the guidance counselor—something to do with being a new student—and Sabine and Nash had promised to give her a ride home, so I had the house to myself for the first time in weeks.

I was reaching for the remote control, intending to scroll through the menu for an action movie, when my gaze caught on the blinking red light on our answering machine.

Weird. We hardly ever used the home phone, because both my dad and I had cell phones. Even Em had a new one, on our family plan.

I dropped the remote on the coffee table and crossed the room. That’s the problem with answering machines and home phones—you have to actually get up to go use them. I pressed the button, and my dad’s boss started speaking, asking if he was okay and why he hadn’t called in sick. Or answered his cell.

I tried not to panic. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that my dad might skip work, considering everything he’d been through recently. Everything I’d put him through. It wasn’t much like him not to at least call in sick, though.

“Dad?” I pressed the button to save his boss’s message, then glanced into the kitchen to confirm that it was empty. That he wasn’t lying on the floor having a heart attack or convulsion. He was still relatively young for a bean sidhe, but you never know....

“Hey, Dad? Are you here?” I checked the garage, the bathroom, and even my bedroom before heading into his room at the end of the hall. The last room in the house.

My father’s bed was made. His curtains were closed. His clothes were folded and still sitting on the chair in the corner, where I’d left them that morning—I felt bad about him getting stabbed by a demon, so I was doing more chores than usual, but I drew the line at putting his clothes in his dresser.

I was about to leave the room when I noticed my dad’s cell phone lying on his pillow. I picked it up and pressed a button to wake up the screen, then froze. Staring. I couldn’t think past the horror of what I saw on the screen. My father’s cell phone background had been changed to a picture of him, bound and evidently unconscious, sitting on the floor of a room I didn’t recognize. Propped up on his lap was a sign written in unidentifiable and strangely gloppy ink—please let it be ink—in handwriting I didn’t recognize.

The sign read, “Come and find me.”

On the edge of the photo, less than a foot fromhis shoe, was a familiar green vine. I zoomed in on the photo to be sure. To confirm my worst fear.

Sure enough, the serrated edges of the leaves on that vine were bloodred. The thorns between the leaves were very thin and at least an inch long. Crimson creeper only grows in one place.

The Netherworld.

My shock lasted for about a minute and a half. Then there was another fraction of a moment when I wondered how on earth Avari had gotten to my father in the human world. But then I realized that “how” didn’t matter. There would probably always be some minion with crossover potential willing to do the hellion’s bidding for a price.

Avari’s return to active-threat status was inevitable, and it always would be until we managed to turn the other hellions against him. But my plan obviously wasn’t working fast enough.

Fear chased away my shock, and hot on its tail was a blinding fury unlike anything I’d ever felt. Avari and his hellion colleagues had already taken so much from me and from my friends and family. They weren’t going to get my father, too.

Well, they weren’t going to get to keep him, anyway.

Uncle Brendon was the first person I called. His phone rang in my ear three times, then Sabine answered. “Hey, Kaylee, what’s up?”

“Why the hell are you answering my uncle’s phone?” I could hear the anger in my voice. It echoed back at me over the line and from every corner of my own house. I regretted it—for once, Sabine wasn’t the problem—but I couldn’t control it.

“Whoa, rein it in. Just ’cause we’re friends now doesn’t mean you get to raise your voice at me.”

“Sorry. I just... Where’s Uncle Brendon?”

“He’s kinda tied up with Sophie right now.”

“Well, untie him. It’s an emergency.”

“Those must be going around. We’re at the police station.”

“Why? What did you do?”

“Why do you assume I did something?”

“Because you have an arrest record and two convictions? Because no one knows how or if you paid for your car? Because you tried to sell me and Emma into eternal torture in the Netherworld?”

“You know, eventually you’re going to have to get over that. But you make a valid point.”

“I made several valid points.”

“Whatever. Sophie slashed some chick’s tires in the parking lot, and the school cop caught her walking away from the scene with a pair of scissors in her hand. Rookie mistake.”

“Why on earth would Sophie slash someone’s tires?”

“Because the girl who owns the car hit on her boyfriend. And she mighta...kinda...been overwrought with jealousy.”