A smile snuck up on me, in spite of his valid point and the grave reason for my call. “As a matter of fact, I was going to offer you something.”
For one long moment, the only sound over the line was the soft whisper of his next inhalation, then his voice sounded a little scratchier than usual. “What did you have in mind?”
“A field trip. You interested in doing something dangerous, and possibly illegal?”
“Does it involve underage girls, broken curfews and assorted fruit toppings?”
I dropped the empty can into the recycling bin and leaned against the kitchen peninsula, grinning like an idiot. “Two of the three. And I could probably scrounge up some strawberry jam, if you’re desperate.”
“I’m never desperate,” Tod said, only his voice hadn’t come from my phone. I whirled around to see the reaper standing behind me, still holding his cell. “But for the record, I prefer apricot.”
“Yuck. Nobody likes apricot jam.”
Tod shrugged and pocketed his phone. “Sure, strawberry is the more obvious choice, but I submit that apricot has a more complex, unusual flavor, with just enough tang to keep things interesting…” He raised one brow, grinning more with his eyes than with his mouth, and I had the sudden inexplicable urge to look away, before I saw too much. Then Tod blinked, and whatever I’d almost seen was gone. “So…what illegal adventure will I be aiding and abetting today?”
I closed my phone and slid it into my front pocket. “Remember when you snuck me into Nash’s room to watch him and Sabine?” At the time, he’d said it was so that I could better understand their friendship, but in retrospect, I think it was so that I could see for myself how connected they were. Tod had made no secret of the fact that he thought his brother and I were a bad match. It was one of the few things he and Sabine had in common.
“Are we playing spy again? That’s my second favorite game.” Tod followed me down the hall and into my room, where I pretended I didn’t want to know what his first favorite game was while I dug in the bottom of my closet for a pair of laceless, slip-on canvas shoes. If I got caught, shoelaces would be a dead giveaway that I didn’t belong at Lakeside—strings of any kind were banned from the facility.
“More like detective. I need to get into a secure building.”
His brows rose in interest. “The police station? Did Sabine get arrested again?”
I stepped into the first shoe. “If she had, I’d be laughing from afar, not busting her out. We’re breaking into Lakeside.”
Tod dropped into my desk chair and it bobbed beneath his very corporeal weight. “Don’t most people try to break out of the psych ward?”
“I’m not most people.” I stepped into the other shoe and slid my ID and a twenty-dollar bill into my back pocket.
“That’s what I like best about you. So why are we breaking into the loony bin?”
“I need to talk to one of the patients. And I figured I should check on Scott while I’m there.”
“Scott’s at Lakeside?” Tod appeared in the living room ahead of me, and when I tried to grab my keys from the empty candy dish, I found them dangling from his index finger instead.
“Your mom said he was moved there for long-term care last month.”
Scott Carter was Nash’s best friend and fellow frost addict. But because he was human, the drug had affected him much faster and stronger than it affected Nash. Scott suffered a psychotic breakdown and irreparable brain damage from his addiction, and he now had a permanent, hardwired mental connection to Avari, the hellion of avarice, whose breath they’d both been huffing.
Nash had visited him several times in the hospital, always hoping for improvement that never came, but he couldn’t get in to see Scott at Lakeside, where visitors had to be approved individually by the attending physician.
“You wanna ride with me, or meet me in the parking lot?” I asked, plucking my key ring from his finger. Obviously, it’d be faster for him to just blink himself there, but he didn’t yet have the strength—or maybe the skill—to materialize that far away with a passenger, so I’d have to drive myself.
Tod crossed his arms over his uniform shirt, a blue polo with a stylized pizza embroidered on the left side of his chest. “I haven’t said I’ll do it yet.”
I frowned, one hand on the doorknob, trying to decide whether or not he was joking. “What if I said this is my dying wish? You know, one last request?”
“Your last request is to break into a psychiatric hospital?”
I shrugged. “I’m kind of operating under the assumption that I get one last request from everyone who gives a damn that I’m dying.” I shoved my hands into my pockets and stared straight at his eyes, demanding the truth from them in a sudden surge of reckless courage. “Do you fall into that category?”
“Don’t play that game, Kaylee. You already know the answer to that.” There was just the slightest twist of emotion in his blue eyes, and my pulse spiked when his voice went deep, like his response meant more than the sum of the individual words.
“Then will you help me?”
“You know the answer to that, too,” he said, and I smiled in relief, then almost laughed out loud over the absurdity of that. You’d have to be crazy to break into a psychiatric hospital.
I held the front door for him, then locked it behind us, and when I looked up, Tod was already sitting in my passenger seat waiting for me, with all four doors locked. “You know, you’d make a great thief,” I said, sliding into the driver’s seat next to him.
“I’m a man of many talents.”
“Thanks for doing this,” I said as I backed down the driveway.
“I was bored at work anyway.” He shrugged as I shifted into Drive and took off toward the highway.
After several miles of me watching the road and him watching me, I finally huffed in exasperation. “What?”
“What’d you want from Nash, Kaylee?”
“Huh?” I glanced at Tod and found his irises holding steady in spite of clear tension in the line of his jaw.
“Your last request from my little brother. What did you ask him to do for you?”
My grip tightened around the steering wheel, and I could feel my face flush. “That’s none of your business, Tod.”
In my peripheral vision, he nodded stiffly. “That’s what I thought.”
“What, no lecture about how I’m too young, or I’m not ready?” Or I shouldn’t be with Nash in the first place?
“I’ve already said what I have to say about you and my brother.” Tod stared out his window, and it irritated me that I couldn’t see his face. “If that’s really what you want, go for it. I just thought…”
“What? You thought what?” I demanded, further irritated by his tone—which I couldn’t quite interpret.
Finally he turned to face me again, and my focus shifted back and forth between him and the barely past-rush-hour traffic. “I just thought… I thought you’d have something better to do with these last few days than spend them in bed with your boyfriend.”
I couldn’t think beyond the sting of his words, each like a needle puncturing my heart. Or maybe my pride. But then my surprise—and yeah, a tiny hint of shame—morphed into anger, sharp and clear. “Did you die a virgin, Tod?” I demanded.
He rolled his eyes. “No.”
“Then where the hell do you get off telling me I should?”
He sighed and leaned his chair back a little as I passed a slow-moving station wagon. “That’s not what I’m saying. If you wanna sleep with Nash, then sleep with Nash. You wouldn’t be the first to make that mistake.”
Anger made my heart beat harder. “Why are you so sure it’d be a mistake?”
“Because I know you! You’ve waited this long because it’s important to you and you want it to mean something. And if it’s with Nash, I think you’ll regret it later, when you realize the two of you don’t belong together.”
His insight scared me, and for a second, I couldn’t think beyon
d the shock of hearing some of my own thoughts coming from his mouth, albeit colored with his usual anti-Nash perspective. Then the reality of what he’d said kicked in and fear-fueled anger flared in me like living flames.
“There isn’t going to be a later, Tod! These next three days? That’s my life. That’s all I get. I’m not going to live to regret anything.”
“So—just to be clear—you’re doing it for the novelty of the act? Not because you love him or because it means something—just so you can say you’ve done it?”
Yes.
“No!” I shook my head, trying to jostle my conflicting thoughts into some semblance of order. “You’re such a hypocrite! Did your first time mean something? Did a choir of angels set the mood with an a cappella fanfare celebrating your union?” I demanded, and Tod just stared at me, his expression caught somewhere between surprise and regret. “Why do you even care if I sleep with Nash?”
Why did I care that he cared?
He turned to stare out his window again. “I just assumed you’d have something a little more meaningful on your last to-do list.”
And that’s when I realized he had no idea why we were breaking into Lakeside. “Not that it’s any of your business, but this little field trip we’re on has a purpose. I’m hoping a psych patient named Farrah Combs can give me the information I need to get rid of the incubus posing as my math teacher so that he can’t seduce and either kill or impregnate my best friend after I’m dead. Is that noble enough for you?”
Tod blinked. Then he blinked again, clearly stunned. “Yeah, actually. That’s more like what I thought you’d be doing.”
“Well, don’t read too much into it. I’m not a saint, and I don’t want to be. I just want to be normal. I want to have fights with my dad, and secrets with my best friend, and sex with my boyfriend. But most of all, I want to not be dead in a few days. I’m not done living! And I can’t fit everything else I want to do into the next ninety-six hours, and no matter how many dying wishes I make, that’s not going to change. And I hate it!”
Tod laughed, and my teeth ground together as I swerved smoothly onto the exit ramp. “Why the hell is that funny?”
“It’s not. It’s just a relief to hear you sounding less than rational and perfectly accepting of your own death. For a while it looked like you were going to ‘go gentle into that good night,’ or whatever. And that’s not you, Kaylee.”
I glanced at him, brows raised in surprise. Tod rarely ever said what I expected to hear, but poetry was new, even for him. “You like it better when I ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light?’”
“I like it when you ‘rage, rage’ against anything. It makes you look fierce and…alive.” The blues in his eyes started to swirl. “And if you tell anyone I quoted Dylan Thomas, I’ll… Well, I won’t have to do anything, because no one will believe you.”
The light ahead turned red, and I slowed to a stop in the left turn lane, then laid one hand over my heart and gave him a cheesy, wide-eyed double-blink. “I will take your secret to my grave.”
“I wish you didn’t have to.”
“Yeah, me, too.” My chest ached just thinking about it.
The light changed and I turned left, then pulled into the parking lot on the right. Lakeside was attached to Arlington Memorial, the hospital where Tod worked as a reaper—unbeknownst to the living—and his mother worked as a third-shift triage nurse, but it was a separate building, with a separate entrance and better security.
I parked in the last row and killed the engine, then sat there staring at the building for a minute, trying to calm the flutter of panic the sight of it raised in my stomach, even though I had no memory of being taken in. I’d just woken up inside, all alone, strapped to a bed in a featureless white room.
“You sure about this?” Tod asked, watching me.
“Yeah. Thanks for helping, even if it’s just to fulfill my last request,” I teased, trying to lighten the mood.
“How is it fair that you get, like, five dying wishes and I didn’t even get one?”
“No dying wish?” I frowned. “That’s criminal.”
Tod shrugged. “One of the many downsides to an unexpected death.”
“Better late than never,” I said, pushing my car door open. “I officially owe you one dying wish.”
Tod’s pale brows arched halfway up his forehead, and he looked suddenly, achingly wistful. “She knows not what she says…”
Maybe not. But I was starting to get a pretty good idea….
11
“So what’s the plan?” Tod asked, as we stared at the building, sitting side by side on the hood of my car.
I shrugged. “Nothing complicated. You get me in, we find Farrah, I ask her questions.”
“Sounds simple enough.”
“If you don’t count the million and one things that could go wrong. How long can you keep me invisible?”
“As long as we’re in physical contact.”
My throat felt suddenly dry. “Holding hands?” That’s how we’d done it last time.
“Unless you had something else in mind.”
“I…” Words deserted me until he grinned, and I realized he was kidding. “No wonder you and Nash can’t get along.”
“We get along.” He brushed that one stubborn curl back from his forehead. “We just don’t agree on anything.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It would if you had a brother.”
I could only shake off confusion and change the subject. “Last time we did this, you couldn’t keep me invisible and inaudible at the same time. Has that changed? Do you think you could make sure only Farrah can see and hear us?”
Another shrug. “Only one way to find out…” He stood and I slid off the hood, my palms suddenly damp from nerves, in spite of my determination to do what needed to be done. To protect Emma by getting rid of Mr. Beck and to face this, my worst fear, before I faced death. The thought of which was rapidly becoming my second worst fear.
Tod was already walking toward the building—no doubt moving corporeally for my exclusive benefit—but when he realized I wasn’t with him, he turned. “It won’t be like last time,” he said, with one look at my face.
“You don’t know what last time was like.” My hands started to shake at the memory of waking up strapped to a tall bed in an empty room.
“I know you couldn’t leave, and you didn’t know what was happening to you. And I know you’re more scared of going back in there than of crossing into the Netherworld.”
I stared at him, confused by the ache in my chest, like my heart suddenly needed more space.
“This time, you can leave whenever you want,” Tod said. “You just say the word, and I’ll make the rest of the world go away. I’ll take you someplace safe, where no one else can reach us.”
I couldn’t see anything but his eyes, staring into mine. I couldn’t take a breath deep enough to satisfy the need for one. I kept waiting for him to laugh, or grin, or do something to break the moment stretching between us. And when he didn’t—when he let that moment swell into something raw, and fragile, and too real for me to think about, I crossed my arms over my chest and scrounged up a challenging grin to lighten the moment. “You think I need to be rescued?”
“I think it doesn’t hurt to let someone else do the rescuing every now and then, when your own armor starts to get banged up.”
Maybe he was right. “And you think you’re up to the challenge?”
Some nameless emotion swirled in the blues of his eyes for just an instant. “I’m up to any challenge you could throw down. And several you’ve probably never thought of.”
I laughed out loud. “I’m starting to see the family resemblance.”
Tod frowned. “That’s not funny.”
“I know.” That time I took the lead and we stopped twenty feet from the back door, where the serene, manicured greenery gave way to cold concrete and two industrial trash bins.
; “You ready?” Tod held his hand out and I took it, twining my fingers around his. His palm was warm and dry, and I tried to ignore the wave of confusion and possibility that crashed over me. There was no time—and no real purpose—for either one.
“Close your eyes,” he whispered, and I was happy to comply, because I couldn’t deal with what I might still see in his. Not now, anyway. “Here we go…”
My stomach pitched with the sudden sensation that I was falling. I fought the urge to grab on to something and clung to Tod’s hand instead, surprised that it still felt warm and solid while my own body felt oddly insubstantial.
Then the world seemed to settle around me and I felt the floor beneath my feet. The air was cold and had that distinctive hospital smell, somehow both sterile and stale at the same time. Tod squeezed my hand and I opened my eyes.
And the fears of my present slammed into the terror of my past.
Nothing had changed. Lakeside still looked and felt exactly the same.
We stood in the open common area of the youth ward, where patients gathered to eat, watch TV, play games, and have group therapy. The nurse’s station was only feet away, and the girls’ wing stretched out on my right. At the end of the hall was the room I’d occupied, and I was overwhelmed with the perverse need to go see who lived there now, and whether her delusions could hold a candle to my own.
You’re not crazy, Kaylee.
I had to remind myself, because just being back in that place blurred the line between delusion and reality for me. The last time I was there, I hadn’t known I was a bean sidhe. I’d only known that I was seeing things no one else could see—dark, horrifying auras surrounding certain people, and odd smoke, and things skittering through it. I’d fought, and failed, against an overwhelming need to scream, and it was those fits—what I thought were panic attacks—that landed me in Lakeside in the first place.
“I don’t suppose you know her room number?” Tod said, and his volume alone told me no one else could hear him. I shook my head, unsure whether or not that benefit of his abilities extended to me. “I think you can talk,” he said, and I lifted both brows, silently asking if he was sure.