She snapped upright in a single, eerily stiff motion and blinked at me, then glanced around her room like she’d never seen it before—easily one of the weirdest things I’d seen in my entire life.

In either world.

“Emma?” I backed slowly away from the bed, my phone clenched in my left hand, as a strange, heavy, fluttery feeling settled into my stomach. Like I’d swallowed a swarm of iron butterflies.

“Not exactly…” A low, scratchy, unfamiliar voice said as my best friend’s mouth moved.

My heart rate exploded and my pulse roared in my ears. “Who, then, exactly?”

“I am Alec. As presented through Emma Dawn Marshall.”

As presented…?

Whoa…

“Who are you, and what the hell are you doing in my best friend?” I backed farther from the bed, my empty hand stretched behind me to warn me before I bumped into anything. Part of me—most of me, in fact—wanted to make a break for the door. But I couldn’t leave Emma alone with…whatever was talking through her. Possessing her. Because that’s obviously what this was.

“I apologize for contacting you through an intermediary, but my options are pretty limited at the moment,” Emma said with Alec’s voice, and the effect was disjointed, like a bad voice-over in a foreign film. Except the actor and the voice were both speaking the same language. “I promise your friend won’t remember any of this. She might wake up sleepy and disoriented, but none the worse for wear.” He extended his borrowed arms, like he was testing the fit of a new shirt.

My stomach roiled at the casual gesture and the gruesome image that accompanied it, and my mind raced, trying to make sense of what I was seeing and hearing. Without much luck. Emma was speaking to me in someone else’s voice. She was being used as a human microphone—this “Alec’s” intermediary.

And suddenly a horrifying understanding clicked into place in my nearly scrambled brain. The blood seemed to drain from my face, leaving me cold.

Nash had said Avari contacted him through an intermediary—by possessing someone in our world. And several times in the past few weeks I’d fallen asleep with Nash, only to wake up disoriented and unsure where I was, even during his few covert visits while I was grounded. In the past week alone, it had happened on the way to work, then in the school parking lot during my lunchtime nap….

Nooo!

My hands clenched into fists at my sides, and I had to force my grip on my phone to loosen. Anger and fear rolled through me like thunder across the sky, dark, and low, and threatening. And accompanied by a vicious, white-hot bolt of betrayal that singed every nerve in my body.

I’d played intermediary between Nash and Avari. The hellion had used me as his own personal walkie-talkie.

And Nash had let it happen.

18

“GET OUT!”I GLANCED around Emma’s room for a weapon—until I realized I couldn’t hurt the hellion without hurting Emma, too. “Get out of her! She has nothing to do with any of this!” Whatever “this” was. “Emma’s human, and she knows nothing about hellions, or the Netherworld, or Demon’s Breath, or anything else to do with your warped, twisted, toxic hellhole of an alternate dimension.”

Keeping Emma in the dark about everything that went bump in the night was supposed to protect her from those bumps. So why was she now speaking to me with a hellion’s voice? What kind of “connection” could she possibly have to this Netherworld possessor? For that matter, what connection did I have to Avari?

My best friend’s carefully arched brows rose in surprise. “My warped, twisted…?” Then comprehension washed over her face. Alec grinned with Emma’s mouth, and I was floored by how unlike Emma that look was, considering that she smiled at me all the time with those same features. He swung both of her denim-clad legs over the edge of the bed. “You think I’m a hellion.” It wasn’t a question, and Alec sounded every bit as surprised as Emma looked.

He shook her head slowly, and their shared smile faded into a bittersweet melancholy. “I’m human. Only I have the misfortune to be stuck in the Netherworld.”

Surprised, I gripped the edge of Emma’s desk to anchor myself to the only thing that made sense while I tried to puzzle through Alec’s maze of misinformation.

He started to stand in Emma’s body, but I threw one hand out, fingers splayed. “Stay there!”

She shrugged and sank back onto the mattress. “If that makes you more comfortable…”

Like comfort was even a possibility.

“You’re lying.” I forced my other hand to relax around my phone, to keep from bringing it to his attention. “You’re not human.” He couldn’t be, because humans can’t survive in the Netherworld with both soul and body intact.

Which meant that Alec was either lying or soulless. Or that there were big things going on in the Netherworld. Things I didn’t understand well enough to fully grasp.

Knowing my luck, it was all three.

“Not solely human, no,” Alec admitted, tilting Emma’s head so that a strand of straight blond hair fell over her shoulder. “But I swear to you that I mean neither of you any harm.” I huffed in disbelief and he continued, furrowing the delicate lines of Emma’s forehead. “If I wanted to hurt her, I could have already fed her a bottle of pills or made her cut her own throat.” Alec drew one of Emma’s own long fingernails slowly across her slim neck, and terror crawled over me like an army of spiders marching up my spine. “But that’s not why I’m here.”