Tod stared out at the crowd. “Okay, so we’re looking for someone who probably stands out almost as badly as we do. How hard can that be?”
It turned out to be pretty damn hard. People were everywhere—“people” defined as beings able to move under their own power—and while the vast majority of them looked terrifying to my humanoid-accustomed eyes, sprinkled throughout the array of extra limbs, missing extremities, backward joints, wings, horns, claws, and the odd tentacle were the occasional normal-looking beings with the proper proportions and standard number of appendages.
Some of these creatures, upon closer examination, were very definitely not human. One normal-looking woman turned out to have perfectly round, anime eyes with bright teal irises, surrounded by rich, deep rings of lavender. Another man’s flesh, when I saw it up close, was covered in shallow but pervasive wrinkles, like a Sphinx kitten, and for several seconds, I battled a horrifying impulse to tug on a flap of the skin drooping from his arm to see how far it would stretch.
Yet others could easily have been kids in my third-period class, or the parents who picked them up after school. The variety of shapes, sizes, and colors was truly astounding and almost too disorienting for me to process, with shock and fear still racing through my veins. So when my gaze finally settled on a familiar profile in the crowd, it was all I could do not to shout her name across the multitude, which would surely have gotten us all killed.
Instead, I grabbed Tod’s arm, trying to guide his gaze with my own. “Addison…” I whispered, standing on my toes to get as close as I could to his ear.
As if she heard me, Addy suddenly turned, and my breath caught in my throat, trapped by horror so profound it had no expression. Addison’s profile was just as I remembered it, bright blue eye, heavily lashed lid, and a flawless cheek and nose. But the other side of her face was a ruined mass of oozing red wounds and black crusted flesh, stretching from her scalp—where most of her beautiful blond hair had been burned off—to below her collarbone, where her skin disappeared beneath her shirt.
My hand tightened around Tod’s arm, but he only pried my fingers loose and squeezed them, then let me go.
I forced my gaze away from Addy to glance at Tod, who betrayed neither horror nor shock. He exhaled in relief, then headed for Addison with quick, determined strides.
Gathering Sophie’s stupid long skirt in both hands, I rushed after him and caught up as he sidestepped a tall, skeletal woman with dark eyes and cheeks hollow enough to cradle a pool ball. “What happened to her?” I whispered as we walked, my horror on Addison’s behalf almost eclipsing my terror of the creatures all around us.
“It looks like he lit her on fire today.”
“Today?”
Tod nodded grimly as Addy’s gaze found him, and her half-scarred mouth struggled into a gruesome smile. “What part of ‘eternal torture’ don’t you understand? Yesterday he peeled her flesh off while she screamed, and you could see her teeth through her cheek. He always leaves one side perfect, though, so she can mourn her own beauty. Her room is walled-in mirrors, and the damage goes all the way down her body.”
I couldn’t voice my horror; I had neither the words nor the nerve. Questions were all I could manage, and my voice croaked as I forced it into the bone-cold air. “How does she even have a body? We buried her. I saw her in the coffin.”
“Avari gave it back to her.”
I dodged a man with a suspicious lump roiling beneath his broad white shirt, lowering my gaze at the last second to avoid his. “But is it real?”
Tod’s jaw tightened. “Real enough to feel every second of agony.”
By then we’d reached Addison, and I forced my mouth closed, unwilling to embarrass either of us with my ignorance. Tod slid one arm around her waist and, though Addy winced, she didn’t shrug out of his grip. Without a word, he led us back toward that same weird tree, and only once we were hidden by the heavy branches did he exhale, and even Addison seemed to relax.
“Kaylee, you look beautiful!” She reached out with one mutilated hand—fingers fixed into a clawlike position by her fresh, puckered scars—to touch Sophie’s pristine white satin dress.
“Thanks.” I wished I could say the same to her, but the most I could manage was a small smile to cover my horror.
“It’s my cousin’s.”
It’s not your fault, I thought for at least the twelfth time as I stared at my skirt to avoid looking at her wounds. I hadn’t done this to Addison; she’d done it to herself when she sold her soul. All I’d done was fail to save her….
“Did you find him?” Tod said, rescuing me from my own guilt and denial.
Addy nodded eagerly, then winced when the skin on the right half of her face stretched. “I let him out. He’s supposed to meet us here when he finds your brother. And your dad,” she added, glancing at me in sympathy. “Hey, there he is!”
I twisted to peer between two low-hanging branches, and my eyes nearly fell out of my skull. Walking briskly toward us from the edge of the crowd was the trash-can-lid-wielding boy I’d seen in the field of razor wheat when I’d woken up in the Netherworld.
“You!” I said as he ducked beneath the limbs into our private powwow.
“You, too,” the boy said, in a voice I’d last heard from Emma’s mouth.
“You know each other?” Tod’s eyes narrowed as he glanced back and forth between us. But I couldn’t tear my gaze from Avari’s proxy.
“You’re Alec?”
“Since the day I was born.” He shrugged, dark eyes watching me closely. “Though the name’s about all I have left from that existence.”
“I saw you in the razor wheat on Wednesday.”
Alec nodded. “I was looking for you, and your house seemed like a good place to start.”
Great. A sarcastic demon proxy.
“But I have to say you look better in formal wear than pajamas,” he continued, eyeing Sophie’s dress—and me in it—appreciatively. Suddenly I wanted a coat, to cope with more than just the cold.
“Wait, why were you looking for her on Wednesday?” Tod asked. “Nash didn’t go missing until yesterday.”
“Yes, but I wanted out of here two and a half decades ago, and she seemed like my best shot in years.”
I propped both hands on my hips. As badly as I wanted to know who he was and how he’d known I could get him out, I had more important things to worry about at the moment. “I’m not taking you anywhere until you take me to Nash and my father.”
“Are they at Prime Life?” Tod asked. The Netherworld version of Prime Life, one of the largest life insurance companies in the country, was Avari’s home base when he was in town.
Addison shook her head in stiff, obviously painful motions. “Not that I could find. And I looked everywhere I had access.”
“They’re in there.” Alec pointed off into the throng and I followed his finger toward the building rising over the heads of the crowd gathered in front of it. Eastlake High.
Or the Netherworld version of it, anyway.
“Why are they in the school?” I asked, dread clenching around my stomach with an iron grip.
“Avari’s planning something big, and I think he wants them both nearby to boost his energy,” the proxy said, and Addison nodded.
“He wants them near?” I repeated, glancing again at the second floor of the school, which was all I could see over the crowd. “Does that mean they’re not actually with him?”
“They don’t have to be in the same room, no,” Alec said.
“They just have to be close enough to draw power from.”
I shrugged, a thin pulse of hope threading through me. “So, we can just go get them, right?”
“In theory…” Addison started, and that was enough for me.
“Let’s go.” Human-looking people were rare enough in the Netherworld that four of us together might be noticed, so Addy and Alec each started off on their own, one veering to the left and one to the right. Tod and I stayed together for strength in numbers, since neither of us belonged there or had any defensive abilities. We headed down the middle, hoping to avoid notice at the edge of the throng, where the crowd was least dense.