Emma leaned back in the driver’s seat, hands limp in her lap, keys dangling from one bent finger. “Okay, I’m going to need a minute. That’s a lot to process.”
“I know.”
She took a couple of deep breaths, then rolled her head on the headrest to face me. “I was only in Beck’s classroom for, like, an hour, right?” she asked, and I nodded, though it had felt like much less to me, in the Netherworld. “And in that time, you dumped your boyfriend, kissed his dead brother and found out you’re going to die?”
I stared at my hands, nervously fiddling with my keys in my lap. “Actually, I already knew that last part.”
“You already knew?” Em’s voice sounded strained, like when her feelings were hurt and she didn’t want me to know. I looked up to find her frowning at me. “How long?”
“Since Friday night,” I admitted, a thick undercurrent of guilt flowing in to supplant my good intentions in not telling her earlier.
“Five days? You knew five days ago, and you didn’t tell me?”
“I’m sorry, Emma. I didn’t want you to have to dwell on it, like I have.”
“Did it ever occur to you that I might want to dwell on it? Or at least know that it was coming?” Her eyes filled with tears, and her lower lip began to quiver. “How serious is this, Kay?” She blinked and wiped tears from her face with one hand, making an obvious effort to compose herself and her thoughts. “I mean, I know it’s death, but you’ve already died once, and I’ve died, and, hell, even Sophie’s died, so that’s less of a permanent state than I used to think it was.”
“This time it’s permanent.” And just saying the words triggered a new wave of fear inside me, beating at my spirit like waves against the cliffs, constantly eroding until there would soon be nothing left of me.
Emma shook her head, denying the inevitable. “But Tod? He can use his reaper connections to get you another extension—or whatever. Right?”
“No, Em.” I gripped the door handle so hard my fingers ached. “He can’t get me another exchange. No one gets more than one exchange. No exceptions.” And even if there were exceptions, Tod wasn’t in any position to secure one. He was still a rookie reaper, only two years dead, and still on the bottom rung of his afterlife.
“Wait, Tod can’t fix this?” Her bottom lip shook, and I knew that the reality was starting to sink in. “You’re seriously telling me you’re going to die in two days? For real? Like, gone forever?”
It wasn’t any easier to hear coming from her mouth, but I nodded, fighting to keep the facts closed off in some dark corner of my head with the other mental cobwebs I didn’t want to deal with. And suddenly I realized that my mind was becoming a very messy place.
“Does everyone else know? Nash and Tod?” she asked, and I nodded miserably. “Sabine?” Em demanded, and when I nodded again, a new layer of hurt swept over her features, like the curtain on a stage.
“I had to tell her to get her to help me with Mr. Beck,” I tried to explain, but I knew nothing I could say would help.
“So, I’m the only one you left out?”
“I wasn’t leaving you out. I was trying to spare you from anticipating it. And I didn’t tell Nash—my dad did. And Tod’s the one who told him. So, really, the only person I’ve told is Sabine.”
“What part of that is supposed to make me feel better?”
“None of it. None of it can make either of us feel better, which is why I didn’t want you to know. Hell, I wish I didn’t know. Em, I’m getting scared.” And suddenly there were tears. From nowhere. I’d known Emma longer than anyone else in my life, other than my uncle. I’d known her longer than I’d known my own father, and somewhere in the process of telling my best and oldest friend that I was going to die, I came to understand the truth of it for myself.
“Oh, Kaylee…” She dropped her keys in the center console and pulled me into a hug that shoved her water bottle into my ribs and my knee into the gear shift, but I wouldn’t have let go for anything in the world.
“I’ve been trying not to think about it, and that’s mostly been working, because nothing ever seems normal around here anymore,” I sobbed, half-choking on my words as they ran together and my tears soaked into the shoulder of her shirt. “But every time I close my eyes, or take a deep breath—every time things get quiet for just a second—there it is again. Waiting for me. It’s like my heart is a watch, and I know it’s going to stop ticking on Thursday, and every single beat shoves me a second closer to death, and I try to dig in, or grab on to something, but it keeps pushing me, and I keep sliding, and there isn’t much more space before I’ll just…fall off the edge.” By the end, I was sobbing, and squeezing her so tight she probably couldn’t breathe, but she kept holding on.
“Okay, take a breath, Kaylee,” she said at last, when my sobs finally began to fade. I let go of her to wipe my face with a dried-stiff paper napkin from her dashboard. “First of all, you should have told me. But in light of the circumstances, I’m gonna let that one slide. And second…what the hell are you even doing here? Why aren’t you skydiving, or mountain climbing, or on a plane to some fabulous city you’ve never seen before. Your dad would totally make that happen, if you asked him. Why would you want to spend your last two days on earth at school?”
I blinked and wiped my face on my sleeve. “Em, I have to get rid of Beck.”
“No you don’t! Let Nash and Sabine handle it. Tod and Alec can help. Or hell, tell your dad and let him do it!”
“I’m telling my dad tonight—I would have already, but he’s been so stressed out trying to find a way to exchange my date, which isn’t going to happen. But I seriously doubt Tod and Nash are going to be working together on anything in the near future. And even if they were, none of them know what to do any better than I do. I need to know this is handled before I die, Emma. Especially after what I just saw in there.” I nodded toward the school building. “Do you honestly think you could have told him no?”
“Yeah.” She shrugged. “The problem is that I didn’t want to. I still don’t want to.”
“And that’s why I have to do this. I want to know that you’re going to be safe before…you know.”
Emma looked at me for a second, then sighed. “You have to let it go. Let someone else handle it this time. You can’t save everyone, Kay. You can’t control everything.”
“You sound like Nash,” I said, and as his name faded from my tongue, another wave of guilt crashed over me. Em must have seen it on my face.
“How did he take it? About Tod, I mean.”
“Not well, but that’s my fault. He hates me, and I can’t blame him, and now I’m the reason he hates his own brother. And Nash thinks Tod’s using me to hurt him because he’s jealous that Nash is still alive.”
Emma shook her head. “I don’t blame him for being upset, but that’s not it. Tod’s been pining over you for months. Frankly, I’m impressed that you held out for so long.”
“You knew there was…pining?”
Emma actually smiled, and that felt good, after all the tears. “We all knew, Kaylee. Hell, I bet even your dad knew. I didn’t think Tod would ever say anything, though, because of Nash.”
“He didn’t. I mean, he told me Nash and I were wrong for each other, and he’s been hanging around a lot since Nash went into recovery, but he’s always been a flirt, so I didn’t really think anything about it until a couple of days ago. Then I saw him feed my reaper to Avari, and it just kind of…clicked. He did that for me.”
“He did what? What exactly does that mean, feeding someone to Avari?”
“The reaper who was supposed to end my life on Thursday—his name was Thane, and he was kind of stalking me. So Tod found him, beat him up, hauled him into the Netherworld, and gave him to Avari. He just…fed my reaper to a hellion. He could have gotten in serious trouble, Em. He still could. But he did it anyway.”
I glanced at Emma to find her watching me, her gaze half out of focus, but intense, like she
was hanging on every word. “I can’t get a guy to sit through an entire movie before he starts groping me, and Tod killed someone for you. And you’re not even a couple. Are you?”
I exhaled deeply in frustration, trying to make sense out of the tangled knot my thoughts had become. “I don’t know, Em. What would be the point? I’m not even going to be here in two days, but Nash will, and they’ll still be brothers, and he hates Tod now as it is. How much worse is that going to be if this turns out to be more than just a couple of kisses?” The echoes of which I could still feel. Was it possible to be haunted by a kiss?
“I don’t know,” Em said. “I’m sure Nash is upset, and pissed off, and I don’t blame him. But these aren’t exactly normal circumstances. Maybe if you told him what you just told me, he’d understand. Eventually.”
But I had my doubts.
I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead. We’d hurt Nash from both sides—as his brother and his girlfriend. It wouldn’t be fair of us to make that worse, just for two days of something that could never go any further. Would Tod even want to? Did he want to be with me badly enough to hurt his brother? Did I want him to? Should I want him, too?
“Okay you’re obviously overthinking this,” Emma said. “So just answer this one question. If Nash didn’t care—if it truly wouldn’t bother him to see you with his brother—what would you do?”
“But he does care…”
“That’s not the point. Just for the next minute—for the sake of argument—pretend there is no Nash,” she said, and I nodded slowly, trying to imagine something so impossible. “Now, since there’s nobody to get hurt, no matter what you decide, what do you want to do?”
I closed my eyes, and in my head, I saw a set of bright blue ones staring back at me. “I want to kiss Tod again.”
16
I followed Emma back to her house, and we spent the next two hours overanalyzing my ill-fated love life and ignoring her older sister’s unsolicited advice about that ill-fated love life—which she understood very little of. We didn’t talk about my impending death. In fact, we avoided the subject at all costs, by mutual, unspoken agreement.
Emma seemed to understand what I would have had to explain to anyone else—that I wanted just a couple of hours of normal with my best friend, before I returned to the maelstrom of bizarre the rest of my life had become. What little life I had left, anyway.
But when it was time for me to go, I accidently left my keys in her room, and when I went back for them, Emma was crying, facedown on her bed. Hard enough that she heard neither my footsteps, nor the rattle of my keys as I slid them into my pocket. My heart broke for us both as I snuck out again, so she wouldn’t know I’d seen.
Five minutes later, I opened my front door to find a huge bowl of popcorn on the coffee table, and I could tell from the scent and the way some of the kernels were shriveled that they were drizzled with real butter.
“Hey.” My dad stepped into the living room from the kitchen with two tall, clear glasses, topped in thick cream-colored foam.
“Is that what I think it is?” I pushed the door shut and dropped my keys into the empty candy dish, then took the glass he handed me. “Coke floats?” He used to make them when I was little—that was one of the few memories I had from before my mother died.
“None other. And I’ve got sour worms and Milk Duds for dessert.”
“So this is dinner?” I dropped onto the couch and grabbed a handful of greasy popcorn.
“Unless you want pizza.” My dad plopped onto the couch next to me and stuck a bendy straw into my float. “I happen to know the local delivery boy can be here in thirty seconds or less.”
I laughed, because that’s what he wanted to hear, but the mention of Tod made my heart ache, with a confusing combination of excitement and guilt. “No, this is fine. This is great.”
“Good.” He set his glass on the end table and picked up the remote control. “It looks like the movies recorded, but I’ll be damned if I know how to make them play.”
I swallowed my first mouthful of Coke and melted ice cream, then took the remote from him and pulled up the guide menu. “You know, you’re going to have to learn to do this for yourself, at some point. I’m not going to be around to program the DVR forever…”
I meant it as a joke, but my dad looked like I’d just stabbed him in the heart. Repeatedly.
“Sorry. Just kidding.” I shoved another handful of popcorn in my mouth to keep from making it worse.
“It’s okay,” my dad said, though it was clearly anything but. “However, I reserve the right to wallow in denial for as long as I see fit. And on that note, how was school today?”
Another sip from my glass, and I was ready to play along. “Well…I embarrassed Sophie at lunch, failed to turn in five homework assignments, lied to my French teacher, saw Tod feed my personal reaper to Avari in the Netherworld, broke up with my boyfriend, then propositioned my math teacher.” I shrugged and tried on a nervous grin. “Nothing worth writing home about.”
My father leaned back on the couch, holding his float in both hands. “I swear, Kaylee, sometimes it’s hard to tell when you’re joking.”
“Is this part of that whole wallowing in denial thing?” I reached for another handful of popcorn. “’Cause I was serious. All that really happened.”
His brows rose and his gaze narrowed on me. “The father of a non-emancipated minor might be a little overwhelmed right now.”
“A non-emancipated minor would never have told her father most of that.”
My dad sighed. “I don’t even know where to begin.” I started to make a suggestion, but he cut me off. “Oh, wait. Yes I do. Why the hell would you proposition your math teacher? And what exactly do you mean by ‘propositioned’?”
“I don’t think you want details on my definition of that word, Dad. But it wasn’t for real. Our math teacher is an incubus, and Em and I were trying to get him where we want him, so we can take him out. By…putting ourselves in the line of fire, tomorrow, at Emma’s house.” Before he could form a response—and his struggle with that was obvious—I pushed the play button on the remote. “How ’bout some Alien?”
“How ’bout some answers?” He grabbed the remote and pushed several buttons, and when he couldn’t get the movie to stop, he finally stood and stomped across the room, then slammed his whole hand down on the power button.
Dramatic, but effective.
“Okay, I’ll give you the short version,” I conceded. “But then I demand some serious Alien carnage.” My dad made a “go ahead” gesture, then reclaimed his seat next to me. “Mr. Beck is Mr. Wesner’s replacement, and last week we discovered he’s not human. He’s an incubus. And he’s in heat—or whatever. I would have told you, but that was the same day you and Tod told me I was going to die, and then everything started to pile up, and you were always gone trying to save my life. And as it turns out, there’s just never a good time to tell your dad you’re doing battle with an evil lust demon posing as your math teacher. Right?”
His pause was too long to precede anything good. “Is this what your little powwow this morning was about?”
“Yeah. We were pooling information and trying to come up with a viable game plan. If you want to help, we really need to know how to get rid of a possibly ancient incubus.”
“By letting your father kill him for even thinking about touching his little girl.”
The ache in my chest was warm and kind of wonderful, in the weirdest way. “Yeah, that’d be really awesome, if you could do that. ’Cause we actually don’t know how to kill him, and I need to make sure he’s gone before I die, ’cause he’s going after Emma next.”
“Next?”
“He’s already impregnated three girls that we know of. He’s also killed one woman and left another in a coma. But I’d bet there are others we don’t know about yet.” And with that thought, my appetite dried up like sweat on a Texas sidewalk.
“Damn it.” My father scrubbed
his face with both hands, and I felt awful for adding to the stress he was already under. “Harmony warned me it could get crazy around here, with Avari living in the high school. But I never saw this incubus thing coming.”
“Yeah, me, neither. It’s not one of the things you typically worry about, in suburban Texas.”
“Okay, if memory serves, your uncle Brendon ran up against an incubus once. I’ll call him later and see what he can tell me. But just to make me feel marginally involved in your life, what happened with you and Nash? Not that I disapprove of the outcome, but this seems like an odd time to dump your boyfriend.”
Oh, here we go… “Nash saw me kissing Tod.”
My father’s stare was almost vacant, and just when I was starting to wonder if he was still in there, he blinked. “I should have mixed something stronger than Coke floats.”
We only made it through the first Alien movie before my dad’s patience shattered beneath the cluster bomb I’d dropped on him and he excused himself to go call his brother. I couldn’t blame him. Even our rare, about-to-expire father-daughter bonding time was outweighed by the threat of an incubus preying on the local coed populace.
Dad made the call from his room, so I sat on my bed with my door open, trying to hear what he obviously wanted to chew over privately before passing on to me. But he was hard to hear through his closed door.
“No, we’re short on specifics, and even shorter on time,” my dad said. He’d told my uncle Brendon about my expiration date, and they’d planned a family dinner for the next night, Wednesday, possibly my last night in the land of the living, and the night I’d planned to lure my evil incubus teacher to his death. I couldn’t imagine how awkward that meal would be, though, considering my cousin Sophie’s complete ignorance of all nonhuman matters.