Em took another bite from her apple and slid her cell into her pocket. As I followed her into the hall, the front door opened.

“Kaylee? Emma?” Nash called. We stepped into the living room as he slid his key—I’d given him an extra—into his pocket and Sabine pushed the front door closed. “Oh, good, you got her. Is she...okay?”

I deferred to Em, who shrugged. “‘Okay’ is a relative term at this point.”

“Tell me about it.” I dropped onto the couch again next to Styx. My head felt like it weighed fifty pounds, and my heart was even heavier. “They mistook her for Lydia and put her in Lakeside.”

“Oh, shit.” Sabine sat on the arm of my dad’s chair. “That complicates things. She just escaped again, I assume?”

I nodded.

“And now they know they can track her through the school,” Nash added.

“I’m not going back.” Em’s hand clenched around her apple. “I’m not crazy. Swear you’ll get me out over and over, if that’s what it takes.”

“I swear. But it won’t come to that. My dad can fix this.”  Surely he could, with the whole eye-color defense, plus the forged paperwork. “Sometimes completely unrelated people look a lot alike, and it’s not like they have your fingerprints on file.” Though they may have blood samples.

I decided not to worry her with the extremely unlikely possibility that the court could order a DNA analysis if Lydia’s parents pressed the issue. Which they wouldn’t, because my dad would talk them out of it. He was good at talking people out of things.

“So, what the hell happened?” Nash helped himself to a bottle of water from the fridge.

“I think she was possessed.”

“No shit.” Sabine leaned into Nash when he sat in the chair she’d claimed the arm of. “We could have told you that from what she was shouting.”

“What was I saying?” Em looked like she wasn’t sure she really wanted to know.

“Mostly you kept yelling that you wanted to talk to Kaylee, and that you weren’t Emily.” Nash fidgeted with the cap of his bottle but didn’t open it. “Then, when they let me try to calm you down, you grabbed my hand and said ‘ticktock.’”

“Ticktock?”

“Yeah.” He finally cracked the lid. “The creepy thing is that you said that part in Avari’s voice.”

“That would have been good to know from the beginning,” I said, scowling at Sabine.

The mara shrugged. “You left before I could tell you. If you want the whole story, stick around until the end.”

“I think, ‘Hey, Kay, your best friend’s been possessed by a hellion’ would have been the ideal way to start thatconversation.” I pushed Styx out of my lap and stood. I suddenly needed to move, to combat the feeling of helplessness. The certainty that there was nothing I could do to prevent...whatever else was coming. And something was definitely coming. I could feel it crawling like flies beneath my skin. “So, he spoke in Emma’s voice until you got close enough that no one else would hear, then he said ‘ticktock’ in his own voice?”

Nash nodded. “I assume that’s a warning intended to light a fire under us....”

“Warning us about what?” Em said as Styx curled up next to her, following my apparent abandonment.

“That time is running out, obviously.” Sabine took Nash’s water bottle and drank from it. “But...time for what? To find Brendon and Harmony? To rescue Aiden?”

“No.” I leaned against the half wall between the kitchen and living room, rubbing my forehead, thinking how unfair it was that dead girls could still get headaches. “He doesn’t expect us to do either of those. He’s warning us that time’s running out for me to turn myself in. That’s why Emma—Avari—was asking for me.”

“Wait, why can he use my voice?” Em frowned. “I thought he couldn’t do that very much. Didn’t you say he could only use Alec’s because he knew him so well?”

“That was my theory, yes.” Thinking about Alec and how he’d died—how Avari had manipulated me into killing him—made me angry all over again, on Alec’s behalf and my own. “But for all we know, he possessed Lydia once a week. We know he was familiar with Lakeside because Scott was there, and he regularly possessed Scott. So he probably knew who and what Lydia was. Or...maybe he’s getting better at that in general?” I shrugged. “Who knows?”

“Where were you?” Sabine asked, and everyone turned to look at me. “Where were you during third period, when we were all looking for you?”

I stared at the floor for a second, then made myself look up. “I kind of...summoned Ira in the kitchen of the empty doughnut shop down the street from the school.” I held my arm out so they could see the fresh bandage near my elbow, which was visible since I’d taken off the cardigan.

“Again?” Nash said. “Sounds like it’s getting serious. Does Tod know about this?”

Sabine elbowed him, and I nearly threw my own water bottle at his head. “Ha ha. It was a total waste of time, though. Except I did confirm that he was the one who tied Sabine to the ground with crimson creeper.” Which we were already virtually certain of. “And that he may or may not know where my uncle and your mom are.”

Nash’s hand clenched around his bottle. “He may know where my mom is?”