Thing Two snarled back, and they faced off, teeth snapping, thin tails whipping up dust at their feet. Any second, one would pounce.

“Fiends! Focus!” I snapped, my cleaver held ready. I’d had more practice with a blade than I cared to remember, but I’d never chopped anything...off. Which seemed to be what a cleaver was used for. “What prize?”

“The breath of hellions, of course.” Thing One cocked his head to one side. “What else would suffice?”

“Avari offered a reward for us,” I whispered, and on the edge of my vision, Tod nodded.

“He knew we’d come looking for Mom and Brendon.”

“Come!” Thing One shouted. He started to turn, and when we didn’t follow, his thin, dark gray brows furrowed at the bottom of his huge, smooth forehead. “Come!”

“Bite me.” Tod lifted the hammer and choked up on his grip as Things One and Two gave us scary metallic snarls.

“Maybe not the best choice of words...” I clenched the handle of my cleaver tighter. “They’re poisonous, right?” I had just enough time for a moment of thanks that, like Nash, Tod had played both football and baseball before the little monsters charged.

Things One and Two took a few running steps on the floor, then leaped like crazy little monkey-monsters and bounced off opposite walls as if the Sheetrock hid springs. They shrieked as they raced toward us, bounding from floor to wall and back, swapping sides without ever colliding, and I backed up, my heart pounding, my pulse racing. The hallway was wide, but Tod needed room to swing his hammer, and after watching the fiends bound through the hospital hallway like toddlers in a bouncy-house, I was no longer confident that either of us could actually hit them.

We’d backed into the waiting room by the time they got close enough to pounce, and the double doors swung shut between us and them just in time. One fiend slammed into the glass window and slid out of sight, and the thud that followed said his friend had hit too low for us to see.

“Ready to go?” I could hear the tension in my voice.

“In a minute.” Tod held the massive hammer like a baseball bat, and I gave him some more room. “We need to find out if they know where—”

The doors flew open, fast and hard, and not two, but a dozen or so fiends poured through the opening, evidently drawn by their freaky little brethrens’ shrieks. “Treasure!” several of them shouted, limbs twitching, yellow eyes flashing.

Tod groaned. “Never mind. Get back.”

I had half a second to process what he’d said, then I backpedaled just as the first fiend pounced, jaw open, metallic teeth shining in the light from overhead.

Tod swung. His hammer thunked into a bulbous skull with a crack like thunder, and the little monster flew across the room to smack into the opposite wall. I flinched at the sound, and the sight, and atthe knowledge that what leaked from the massive rupture in the little beast’s head was what passed for brains in a fiend.

“You’re not going to trade us for a hit of Demon’s Breath,” Tod said. “But you are going to answer a question.”

But before he could ask, a murmur rippled through the small crowd, too soft and squeaky for me to understand until one fiend near the front narrowed his yellow-eyed gaze on me. “Wrong treasure,” he said. Then, “Wrong treasure!” He stepped toward me, and Tod tightened his grip on the hammer, ready to swing again. “Too tender. Too young.” His focus rose to my head. “No blood. Wrong treasure!”

With that, the murmuring grew in volume, and the crazy little fiends backed out of the lobby almost as one. The door swung shut behind them, and through the window, I caught a glimpse of several small gray bodies springing off the walls as they retreated down the hall without another glance back at us.

“What the hell...?” Tod lowered his hammer.

“They weren’t looking for us. They were looking for Harmony and Uncle Brendon.” Who weren’t so young and tender. And one of whom—Harmony, at least—was bleeding.

Tod turned to me, his hammer propped on the floor. “If they’re looking for Mom and Brendon, that means Avari hasn’t found them.”

And that was the best news we’d had all night.

* * *

In the human world, Tod disposed of his mother’s medical waste, and after texting Nash with an update, I stayed with Tod at the hospital so that between his few scheduled reapings, we could head back into the Netherworld to keep searching, temporarily bolstered by the knowledge that Avari didn’t yet have his mom and my uncle. We tried over and over that night to find them, moving in an ever-widening arc from the hospital and dodging roving bands of fiends searching for their next fix, but after the supply closet, we found no other sign of our missing authority figures.

The only bright spot that entire night was when Emma called around two in the morning to tell us that Sabine had regained consciousness. Tod had to stay at work, but I blinked into my room to find the mara sitting up in my bed, surrounded by the rest of my pajama-clad friends. And Sophie.

“Seriously, if you don’t get out of my face, I’m going to turn your dreams into a nightmare circus the minute you fall asleep. Creepy clowns and all.”

Emma laughed in relief. “Yeah, I think she’s back to normal. Well, as normal as she ever was anyway.” She turned to head for the hall and saw me about the same time Luca and Sophie did.

“Hey.” I gave Emma a relieved hug and noticed again how small she was now in Lydia’s body. “Now that she’s awake, why don’t you guys go get some sleep? We still have school tomorrow.”