Addy nodded hesitantly and squeezed Regan’s hand until she nodded, too.

“Good. Let’s do this.” Tod put one hand on the knob. My heart raced so fast I felt dizzy. He twisted the knob, and my pulse pumped scalding ribbons of adrenaline through my veins. He pushed the door open, and I had to swallow back vomit.

Behind a desk in the middle of a normal-looking office sat a normal-looking man in a suit, tie, and pair of sunglasses. He showed no surprise at our arrival. This was the hellion of greed?

“Avari?” Tod said, and the man nodded slowly, silently. “We’re here to bargain for the souls of Addison and Regan Page.”

And as the impossibility of what we were about to attempt truly sank in, I focused on one thought to keep myself calm: Weirdest. Wednesday. Ever.

19

AVARI ROSE, placing both palms flat on the glossy work surface of a desk that stood empty in the Netherworld, but was probably cluttered with some worker-drone’s papers, pens, and coffee mug in our world. “Come inside,” he said, his words as smooth and dark as good fudge, but nowhere near as sweet.

His voice sent shivers through me, leaving tiny icicle shards to chill the blood in my veins.

Tod stepped inside and we followed him reluctantly. I brought up the rear, fighting to control the wince of pain my features wanted to form, and to deny the groan lodged in my throat. I would not expose myself as the weakest member of the herd.

With the casual wave of one hand, Avari closed the door behind us, from across the room. “Addison. Regan.” The hellion nodded formally, rounding his desk to stand in front of it. “I assume you’ve come to invoke your respective out-clauses?”

“No.” Addy spoke firmly and clearly, in spite of the trembling hands she clasped at her back. “We won’t damn someone else to eternity with you. We’re here to make a different sort of trade.”

Avari sat with one hip on the corner of his desk, tugging the sleeves of an immaculate, coal-gray suit jacket into place. If not for the sunglasses—and the ability to close doors without touching them—he could have been any ordinary cog in the life-insurance machine. “What makes you think I’m open to such an exchange?” Power radiated from him in waves of bitter cold, drawing goose bumps from my skin, even beneath my jacket.

“You’re a hellion of avarice,” I began, but when the demon’s head turned my way, the words froze in my throat, and I had to cough to force them up. “Why wouldn’t you want more for less?”

Avari’s brows rose above his sunglasses, and my heart thumped painfully from the knowledge that both his attention and his gaze were focused on me. Being scrutinized by a hellion was definitely not part of the plan.

Nash stepped protectively closer to me, his hand brushing mine, but Avari took no notice.

“You reek, beansidhe.” The hellion’s words wove through me on a gust of frigid air, coiling around my chest until I could hardly feel my heartbeat through the simultaneous numbing cold and stabbing, icy pressure. “The rot spreads inside you quickly. I smell it. I feel it, though you disguise your pain with uncommon strength and fortitude. Both qualities I find quite appetizing in a soul.”

He rose from his desk and took a single stride toward me. I answered it with a backward step, swallowing a cry as my bad foot hit the floor. Needlelike pain shot down my foot and up my leg, this time enveloping my entire pelvis, as well.

I was getting worse. Fast.

The hellion’s long, straight nose twitched as he inhaled, and a terrifying flash of hunger flickered across his otherwise empty expression. “I can eat your pain. I can spare your life.”

Panic shot through me and I squelched it all, except the tremor in my hands. “When my death comes, you can’t stop it, and I won’t even try. If I’m supposed to die from crimson creeper venom, so be it.” Not that I was exactly eager to go, but I would not die without my soul. Not even for the promise of a quick, painless death.

“And if you were not meant to die of such poison?” Avari’s brows lifted once more as he stepped forward, and again I limped backward, my vision going gray with the sudden, harsh movement. “I see your lifeline spread before me like a length of road, and the miles should tick away your fleeting, insignificant life for some time to come. Yet the stench of death clings to you. It flows through your veins like a river through its channel, and the toxin will reach your heart within minutes.”

He paused, and I thought I glimpsed a dark flash of pleasure, even through the opaque tint of his lenses. “If you stay in the Nether much longer, you will die here.”

Fresh fear skittered up my spine to lodge in my throat, and my gaze flitted from Nash’s horrified expression to the smug hellion. Then I asked the question he clearly wanted to hear, in spite of some strong instinct urging me to retreat into silence. I had to know. “But you said my lifeline goes on.” I stopped to breathe through another agonizing wave of pain. “How can I die here?”

“The date stamped on your feeble body means nothing in the Netherworld. If you suffer a mortal injury or contract a deadly infection here, you will die among us. As one of us. But you have a few minutes yet. Enough time to barter for your friends. Or to escape to your own world.”

Was he telling the truth?

Horror drew my hands into fists so tight my fingernails cut into my flesh. If I fled the Netherworld to save myself, there would be no one left to suspend Addy’s and Regan’s souls once the hellion released them, so Nash could guide them back into the proper bodies. But if I stayed to help them, I would die.