“I think it’s working.” His hand slid over my stomach and curled around my hip, and I caught my breath. “Can you guess what kind of impulse I’m not controlling right now?”
“I think we can all guess.” Em sank into my dad’s recliner across the coffee table from us. “So rein it in before my inner syphon decides your hormonal excess needs to be balanced. I don’t think any of us want to see that happen.”
Sophie dropped into the armchair in the corner. “I’ve never heard a truer statement.”
“I’ve got a few more true statements for you,” Tod mumbled, and I elbowed him, but not as hard as I probably should have. Her dad was missing, too.
“Any change with Sabine?” Luca said on his way in from the kitchen.
“No.” I turned to Tod, looking into his eyes for the guilt he no doubt saw in mine. “We shouldn’t have let her go. This is our fault.”
“Kaylee, Sabine is stronger and more independent than anyone else I know. Other than you and my mom, of course.” He squeezed my hand, holding my gaze. “She had as good a chance of walking out of there unhurt as any of us. Better than several of us.”
“Except that she didn’t. And there’s no telling how long we left her like that, tied to the ground, being poisoned, because we expected her to take longer than we would.” Because she actually had to drive to and from the crossover site.
“We did the best we could. Now we need to figure out our next move.”
I shrugged. “We keep looking. But this time, just the two of us.” I wasn’t going to put Sophie in danger of what had happened to Sabine. “Agreed?” I glanced around the room and was rewarded with three nodding heads.
“Yeah,” Tod said. “And this time I think we should go together.”
“Sophie, what do you have for us?”
“Oh. Just a second.” She headed into the kitchen and a chair scraped the floor, then she was back a second later with a small spiral notebook.
“Okay, here goes.” Sophie sat on the arm of Luca’s chair, staring at her notes, and his arm snaked around her. “My dad likes to go camping, remember?” she said, and I nodded. “He’s gone every fall as far back as I can remember, and last month he finally told me that those camping trips are usually retreats with my brothers.”
My uncle had grown sons from a marriage that had ended with the death of his first wife, nearly a century ago—a fact that continued to blow my mind every time I thought about it.
“And they’ve been going on these retreats into nature since before most modern camping conveniences were invented,” Sophie continued. “So I figure he knows how to live off the land, at least a little. He can find shelter and tie knots and fish without a pole, for sure, though I have no idea how handy those skills will be in the Netherworld. Personally, I think his best bet is to get inside, assuming that most buildings won’t be as heavily populated as the Netherworld version of our school is.”
“I truly hope they’re not.” And there was a decent chance of that, because Avari had drawn the current Netherworld populace of our school into the building by living there himself, like some kind of demonic landlord.
“We’re kind of assuming he’d forgo the buildings closest to the hospital, because those would be the first place Avari and his monster horde would look,” Luca said. “But he wouldn’t go too far, because your mom—” he glanced at Tod “—will start to feel heavy after a while.”
“And we have a general direction, based on the blood trail and rags Tod found, right?” Em said.
“Yes,” I said. “Unless those were intentionally misleading.” Which was a good possibility. “If it weren’t so close, I’d guess he’d taken her into the actual hospital. That’s where he’s most likely to find bandages and any other medical supplies that crossed into the Netherworld with the building.” And those supplies were likely to be plentiful, considering how highly and consistently populated the hospital was.
But the truth, even after we’d shared our intel and theories, was that we really had no clue where Uncle Brendon and Harmony were. In hiding from Avari and the rest of the Netherworld creatures, they were hiding from us, too.
Tod and I spent most of that night in the Netherworld, searching for his mom and my uncle in and around the buildings we’d decided they were most likely to target. We were looking for my dad, too, of course, but we had much less hope of actually finding him, since he was no doubt both hidden and guarded. And probably unable to call out to us if we got close.
We started at the hospital because as unlikely as I thought my uncle was to actually hide out there, I couldn’t help thinking he was very likely to have stopped there, at least for a little while, in search of medical supplies. Tod showed me where the easiest-to-access first-floor medical supplies were in the human world, and we crossed over one site at a time, armed with the sledgehammer Tod had dug up from somewhere—he was inspired by the one my uncle had used—and the large meat cleaver he’d taken from the hospital cafeteria for me.
I wasn’t surprised to see that all of the closets he showed me had bled through from the human world with at least some of their supplies intact, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Netherworld version of the hospital was virtually deserted. If Avari’s lackeys had looked for Uncle Brendon and Harmony there, they’d obviously long since moved on.
Finally, after checking out three different supply closets, we were rewarded in the fourth, where the doorknob had been beaten off, evidently with the fire extinguisher propped against the wall several feet away.
On the floor of the closet, we found empty bandage wrappers, bloody scraps of gauze and cotton swabs, and an open bottle of rubbing alcohol.
Tod stared at the mess for a minute, and I linked my hand with his, hoping he could feel both my sympathy and empathy in that one touch. I knew how he felt, as few others could—we knew even less about my dad’s current state than we knew about his mom’s. Tod squeezed my hand, then let it go and knelt to gather the trash my uncle had left behind.
“What are you doing?”
“They obviously haven’t found this yet, so I’m taking it. I don’t want them to know what my mom tastes like. I don’t even want to think about the possibility that one of them could develop a taste for her blood specifically, like Avari has for your...you. What if that sparks some kind of similar obsession, and they start hunting her like he hunts you? It’s bad enough that I can’t protect you. At least I can do this for her.”
I wanted to let him think that. I actually considered preserving his well-intentioned fantasy. But eventually he would realize his own mistake, and he’d know that I hadn’t told him the truth when I should have.
“Tod, they’ve already had a taste of her. Didn’t you say they were gathered around drops of her blood outside?”
His hands went still, one of them clenched around a handful of empty wrappers. “Fine. But I’m not going to give them any more of it to obsess over. This is part of her, Kaylee, and I’m not just going to leave it here for them to snort and drool and fight over.”
“I get it.” I would have done the same thing for my dad if I could’ve.
We traced my uncle’s most likely path out of the hospital from that closet, but we couldn’t find footprints or anything else to indicate which way he’d gone from there.
We were about to cross into the human world near the ambulance bay when something scraped concrete behind us. We both tensed and turned toward the sound. In the middle of the hall stood two small grayish creatures whose bulbous heads didn’t quite reach my waist. They were bald and wore no clothes, but even without the odd, arrhythmic jerking in their arms, legs, and thin gray tails—not to mention the occasional full-body twitch—I would have recognized them based solely on their double row of needle-sharp, metallic-looking teeth.