Raquel couldn’t believe her eyes, a state she was finding herself in all too often lately. One second, Resent had the king pinned to the ground, looking like he was going in for the kill. The next, poof—they were both gone. It took her about a full minute to accept that they weren’t coming back soon and start checking on the others.

She had been having a fitful, terror-filled sleep in the back of Adena’s car, when Rodrigo’s scream snapped her awake. Not once had she heard her brother cry out with such raw pain. She was desperate to believe the sound was her frightened imagination playing tricks on her, just a nasty parting gift from the forgotten nightmare she had been in the middle of. Because if it was real, it meant that something horrible had happened. The thought had frozen her to the car seat, until she heard that nerve-racking scrape of metal on metal.

Now, Raquel squinted through the furiously blowing wind to glance at the bodies sprawled all around her, her knees wobbling. As she saw the back of her little brother’s head, his mop of dark curly hair specked with the still falling snow, she swallowed in a dry throat and approached him.

“Carlito,” she murmured, kneeling to give him a gentle nudge. He didn’t respond, and feeling a surge of indignation as if he was ignoring her, Raquel shook him. “Come on, loser, wake up, naptime’s over!”

As she turned him over, she shrieked and skidded back on all fours. Dry streaks of blood ran down his face. His eyes were still wide open, but the whites in them were tinged with red where blood vessels had burst, and the light was gone from them. Raquel forgot how to breathe.

From day one, she had never been a decent sister to Carlito, much less a decent big sister. While the details were fuzzy in her memory, she remembered being the center of her family’s universe before he was born. But once the new model was rolled out, he sucked up all their praise and attention like a black hole. ‘Oh, how impressive it is Carlito’s stringing a few words together at eleven months old,’ their parents crowed. ‘Oh, how amazing Carlito’s reading a few sentences at eighteen months,’ her mom boasted to Auntie Emelina. Never mind that he didn’t use his stubby little legs to go anywhere, what with Rodrigo carrying him around like a backpack.

And that was what really got Carlito on her bad side. The way he stole her doting big brother, her best friend, from her just by being born a boy. From then on, it gradually became her against them. It only got worse with age when all his early developments as a baby couldn’t be written off as flukes. No, she was clever on a good day. Carlito was a grade-skipping genius. A star who could have burned even brighter if their mom had allowed him to. While Raquel could never bring herself to hate him, with how non-combative and squeaky clean he was, there had been plenty of bitter days when she wished he would disappear.

A firm hand grabbed Raquel’s shoulder, and she yanked away from it and spun, ripping her pistol from the holster on her hip. Through her flood of tears and shivering, she could barely make out who she was aiming at.

“Raquel, it’s just me,” Jett said, his voice thick with grief as he stared past her and down at Carlito. His right arm was hanging loosely at his side.

“Why are we still alive?” The groggy question came from Adena, who was walking toward them, unsteady.

“Not all of us are,” Jett muttered. Then he turned to Adena, his features twisting in such anger that Raquel knew she had slept through something divisive. “You know, I warned Rodrigo that you were sketchy the night we first met. I told him that this whole demon hunting bullshit was for crazies and bound to get someone killed. He didn’t listen to me, of course. Ruy sees a pretty face and wants to forgive the owner of all her sins.”

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Adena sighed like she was the most put upon person in the world. “Is this rant getting around to a point, or are you just looking to vent? I told you, Jezebeth showing up ruined everything I was working toward. Now, maybe we should get indoors before the rest of you catch hypothermia in this—”

“No! People are dead! A kid who never did anything bad to anyone in his life is dead because he trusted you!” Jett spat, veins bulging in his lean neck, as he jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at Carlito’s body. Noticing him for the first time, Adena inhaled sharply, and Jett continued, “Because you wouldn’t trust anyone with the truth, we got blindsided, so now you owe him and the rest of us better than some half-assed explanation.”

“He died fighting,” Adena said, her eyes still on Carlito.

“What?” Jett asked.

“The hemorrhaging. It’s the telltale sign of a human opposing a demon’s control over them. If he hadn’t done that, and Misery had killed him instead, Jezebeth could have just jumped into one of us next.”

Raquel felt a hollowness spreading through her, like this was all happening to someone else. Their conversation had her so lost that she couldn’t even form the questions that needed to be asked. Instead, her mind latched onto something Jett had said. ‘People are dead!’ As she wandered off, it didn’t take long to spot Leila flat on her back in the snow, a knife sticking out of the center of her chest. She was wearing a creepy gold mask Raquel didn’t recognize. The wound was bloody, but...shouldn’t there be more?

Jett and Adena were still arguing, so Raquel yelled, “Both of you shut up and come here!” By the time they reached Raquel, she had a bittersweet smile on her face, having confirmed it. “She’s alive.”

As if Raquel’s word wasn’t good enough, Adena knelt down and placed her fingertips on the side of Leila’s neck. Her eyes widened, and she had the beginnings of a smile. Then with her enviable strength, she scooped Leila up in her arms. “We need to find a hospital. The knife’s staunching the wound for now, and I can cauterize it on the way so that she doesn’t bleed out, but there’s no way of telling what internal damage there is. She’s lucky. The illusion of the mask must have thrown Jezebeth’s accuracy off by just enough.”

Adena melted the ice that had built up around the car’s tires over the hours. After Raquel used the snow to clean as much of the blood as she could from Carlito’s face, Jett put his body in one of the single seats, and closed his eyelids.

At Adena’s instruction, Jett brought up the partition between the driver and the passenger compartments, as much to give her the privacy to seal the wound, as to spare him and Raquel the smell. At first, it was quiet, which gave Raquel time to acknowledge that if she lived through these rotten demons, she would be going to her ten-year-old brother’s funeral. Did he want to be buried or cremated? Had such bleak things even occurred to him? She choked down a sob, and that was when Leila started shrieking. It was brief, but loud enough to startle her and Jett both.

When Adena finished, she took Jett’s place in the driver’s seat, and he went in the back with an unconscious Leila. The reek of seared flesh was trapped with nowhere to go since they couldn’t risk opening any windows and having the demons sense them. Still, they were all used to the stench of death at this point. Adena used the GPS to find the nearest hospital, which was twelve blocks away. Raquel hoped the doctors there were still alive. The farther they went, the more danger Leila was in.

“So, is someone going to tell me where Rodrigo is?” Adena asked.

“I don’t know,” Raquel said. “He...Resent was on top of the king, looked like he had him, when they both vanished.”

“Did Misery touch his crown at all?”

Raquel had been on the edge of a full-blown panic attack at the time, so it was only when Adena mentioned it that she recalled that tidbit. “I saw him put a finger or two on it. Why?”

“I needed to confirm that they transported back to Hell. Specifically, to the castle in the capital. I’ve heard that the crown can do that.”

Raquel bolted upright in her seat. “Wait, what? Why do you sound so calm about that?”

“Because in the best-case scenario, Resent’s killed Misery, and we don’t have to do a thing. The worst-case, Misery killed him, and we lost our best asset. What’s most likely, though, is that Resent’s been imprisoned like Misery planned from the start. That leaves us with time.”

Raquel had to suppress the urge to pistol-whip Adena for the unsettling, matter-of-fact way she talked about Rodrigo’s potential death. It gave her whiplash to think that less than two days ago, she had been thinking they’d make a good couple. “What are you saying? We need to head over there as soon as we can.”

“None of us are in top shape. We don’t have to—”

“Tell me how to get there and I’ll go myself! I already lost one brother to a demon. I won’t leave the other to rot in some cell surrounded by them!” And when Raquel saw Misery again, she would take far more than a chunk of his ear.

When Adena pulled to a stop, they only knew they were in the right spot because of the GPS. The entire hospital building had been knocked onto its back as if struck by a natural disaster. Shiny broken glass and debris everywhere. Bloodstained snow blanketed the shapes of the dead. Nothing living could be seen. An absolute waste. The priceless minutes spent getting here ticked away from Leila’s life.