Suddenly I was very glad no one else could hear Tod. I wished they couldn’t hear me, either. “Demon, as in hellion?” I whispered, as low as I could speak and still be heard.
Tod nodded with his usual slow, grim smile. The very word hellion sent a jolt of terror through me, but Tod’s eyes sparkled with excitement, as if he could actually get high on danger. I guess that’s what you get when you mix boredom with the afterlife.
“She sold her soul….” Nash whispered, revulsion echoing within the sudden understanding in his voice.
I’d never met a hellion—they couldn’t leave the Netherworld, fortunately—but I was intimately familiar with their appetite for human souls. Six weeks earlier, my aunt had tried to trade five poached teenage souls in exchange for her own eternal youth and beauty, but her plan went bad in the end, and she wound up paying in part with her own soul. But not before four girls died for her vanity.
Tod shrugged. “That’s what it looks like to me.”
Horror filled me. “Why would anyone do that?”
Nash looked like he shared my revulsion, but Tod only shrugged again, clearly unbothered by the most horrifying concept I’d ever encountered. “They usually ask for fame, fortune, and beauty.”
All of which Eden had in spades.
“Okay, so she sold her soul to a hellion.” That statement sound wrong in sooo many ways. … “Do I even want to know how Demon’s Breath got into Eden’s body in its place?”
“Probably not,” Nash whispered, as heavy black curtains began to slide across the front of the stage, cutting off the shocked, horrified chatter from the auditorium.
But as usual, Tod was happy to give me a morbid peek into the Netherworld—complete with irreverent hand gestures. “When the hellion literally sucked out her soul, he replaced it with his own breath. That kept her alive until her time to die. Which is why Libby’s here. Demon’s Breath is a controlled substance in the Netherworld, and it has to be disposed of very carefully. Libby’s trained to do that.”
“A controlled substance?” I felt my brows dip in confusion. “Like plutonium?”
Tod chuckled, running his fingers across a panel of dead electronic equipment propped against the wall. “More like heroin.”
I sighed and leaned into Nash, letting the warmth of his body comfort me. “The Netherworld is soooo weird.”
“You have no idea.” Tod’s curls bounced when he turned to face Libby again, where the lady reaper had now inhaled most of the sluggish Demon’s Breath. It swirled slowly into her mouth in a long, thick strand, like a ghostly trail of rotting spaghetti. “Come on, I want to talk to her.” He took off toward the stage without waiting for our reply, and I lunged after him, hoping he was solid enough to touch.
He was—at least for me. Though I was sure Nash’s hand would have gone right through the reaper.
“Wait.” I hauled him back in spite of the weird look I got from some random stagehand in a black tee. “We can’t just trot across the stage without being seen.” Though, there were certainly times I wished I could go invisible. Like, during P.E. The girls’ basketball coach was out to get me, I was sure of it.
“And I don’t think I want to meet this super-reaper.” Nash stuffed his hands in his front pockets. “The garden variety’s weird enough.”
Plus, most reapers hold no fondness for bean sidhes. The combined natural abilities of a male and female bean sidhe—the potential to return a soul to its body—are in direct opposition with a reaper’s entire purpose in life. Or, the afterlife.
Tod was the rare exception to this mutual species aversion, by virtue of being both bean sidhe and reaper.
“Fine, but don’t expect me to pass on any pearls of wisdom she coughs up….” Tod’s gaze settled on me, and his full, perfect lips turned up into a wicked smile. He knew he had me; I was trying to learn everything I could about the Netherworld, to make up for living the first sixteen years of my life in total ignorance, thanks to my family’s misguided attempt to keep me safe. And as creeped-out as I was by Eden’s sudden, soulless death, I wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to learn something neither Tod nor Nash could teach me.
“Nash, please?” I pulled his hand from his pocket and wound my fingers through his. I would go without him, but I’d rather have his company, and I was pretty sure I’d get it. He wouldn’t leave me alone with Tod, because he didn’t entirely trust his undead brother.
Neither did I.
I saw Nash’s decision in the frown lines around his mouth before he nodded, so I stood on my toes to kiss him. Excitement tingled along the length of my spine and settled to burn lower when our lips touched, and when I pulled away, his hazel eyes churned with swirls of green and brown, a sure sign that a bean sidhe was feeling something strong. Not that humans could see it.
Nash nodded again to answer my unspoken question. “Yours are swirling, too.”
I dared a grin in spite of the solemn circumstances, and Tod rolled his eyes at our display. Then he stomped off silently to meet this “special” reaper.
The fluttering in my stomach settled into a heavy anchor of dread as we followed Tod behind the stage, dodging shell-shocked technicians and stagehands on our way to the opposite wing. I needed all the information I could find about the Netherworld to keep myself from accidentally stumbling into something dangerous, but I didn’t exactly look forward to meeting more reapers. Especially the creepy, intimidating woman swallowing the ominous life-source that had kept Eden up and singing for who knew how long.
“So what makes this reaper such a legend?” I whispered, walking between Nash and Tod, whose shoes still made no sound on the floor.
For a moment, Tod gaped at me like I’d just asked what made grass green. Then he seemed to remember my ignorance. “She’s ancient. The oldest reaper still reaping. Maybe the oldest reaper ever. No one knows what name she was born with, but back in ancient Rome she took on the name of the goddess of death. Libitina.” I arched both brows at Tod. “So, you address the oldest, scariest grim reaper in history by a nickname?”
Tod shrugged, but I thought I saw him blush. Though, that could have been the red satin backdrop panels showing through his nearly translucent cheek. “I’ve never actually addressed her as anything. We haven’t officially met.”
“Great,” I breathed, rolling my eyes. We were accompanying Tod-the-reaper-fanboy to meet his hero. It couldn’t get any lamer without a Star Trek convention and an English-to-Klingon dictionary.
When we rounded the corner, my gaze found Libby just as she sucked the last bit of Demon’s Breath from the air. The end of the strand whipped up to smack her cheek before sliding between her pursed lips, and the ancient reaper swiped the back of one black-leather-clad arm across her mouth, as if to wipe a smudge of sauce from her face.
I didn’t want to know what kind of sauce Demon’s Breath swam in.
“There she is,” Tod said, and the eerie, awed quality of his voice drew my gaze to his face. He looked … shy.
My own intimidation faded in the face of the first obvious nerves I’d seen from the rookie reaper, and I couldn’t resist a grin. “Okay, let’s go.” I took Tod’s hand and had tugged him two steps in Libby’s direction before his fingers suddenly faded out of existence around my own.
I stopped and glanced down, irritated to see that he had dialed both his appearance and his physical presence down to barely-there, to escape my grasp. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing a little dignity wouldn’t fix,” Tod snapped. “So could we please not mob the three-thousand-plus-year-old reaper like tweens at a boy-band concert?” He ran transparent hands