“That’s not it.” I pulled her inside and mostly closed the door, to keep Traci from overhearing. “Nash said his mom did the same thing after their dad died, then after Tod died, not because she wanted to forget about them, but because it hurt too much to look at everything that reminded them of what they’d lost.”
Her chin quivered. She didn’t look like she believed me.
“They’re packing this stuff up because they miss you, Em. Not because they’re glad to be rid of you. Besides—” I glanced into several of the open boxes “—most of these are still empty. Grab one and pack up what you want.”
For a couple of minutes, I went through the clothes in her closet, looking for anything that might still fit, while she went through what little remained on her shelves. Her mom and sisters had claimed everything but some elementary school soccer medals, a participation trophy from the one year she’d tried middle school cheerleading, and the first-place ribbon from fourth-grade field day, when we’d won the egg toss.
“Is that all you want?” I set the shirts I thought Em could still wear in the box she was using, on top of the medals and several pictures of the two of us, dating all the way back to third grade.
Emma shrugged. “They took most of the good stuff. And I think I’m happy about that. I don’t need stuff to remember myself by, right? I’m still here. And I want them to remember me.”
She had a valid point. And she seemed to be in good spirits, considering.
“Any luck with my jeans? Or some shorts? It’s already getting warm outside.”
“The pants are a total loss. Sorry. You just don’t have the hips for them anymore. Maybe a couple of skirts, though....”
We were going through the last of her clothes when Harmony called us from the living room. “Girls? I think she’s ready.”
My heartbeat was a hollow thump my chest suddenly felt too small to contain.
Em looked as nervous as I felt. We put down the clothes and filed into the living room, where Harmony now sat next to Traci on the couch. Em and I took the two armchairs facing the couch at opposite angles.
“Traci? You okay?” She frowned at her sister in concern. Traci looked...confused.
“I feel weird. Tired.” She looked like she could fall asleep where she sat.
I scooted to the edge of my chair to take the can of soda Harmony offered me. Traci had a cup of what looked like hot tea. I peered into it, but saw no trace of whatever Harmony had spiked it with. “So...how does this stuff work?”
“‘This stuff’ is just water from a natural source in the Netherworld. Water there has various properties, and this one—” she held up a plastic vial, very much like the one Sabine kept her liquid envy in “—works like an amnesic. Traci is sleepy, but her cognition is not impaired, so she can talk to us just like she normally would. But she won’t remember anything that happens in the next hour or so.”
“What about after that?” Em asked.
“She’ll probably fall asleep, then wake up here and only remember that she took a nap.”
I glanced at Traci, who was watching us in mounting confusion. “So we can tell her everything?”
Harmony nodded.
“Everything, everything?” Em clenched the arms of her chair. “Like, about me?”
“If that’s what you want to do.”
Emma didn’t look sure, and I was hyperaware that the clock was ticking. So I started. “Traci, we have some things to tell you, and most of them are going to be hard for you to believe. But don’t worry about that, because you’re not going to remember this anyway.” We only needed her to understand long enough to make a very difficult decision.
Traci focused on me sluggishly. “This feels like a dream.”
“Are you sure that stuff won’t hurt the baby?” Em asked.
Harmony smiled and leaned back on the couch, still facing Emma. “I’m sure. It’s really just water. And the baby’s way too young to worry about memory loss.”
“What does this have to do with my baby?” Traci laid one hand across her mostly flat stomach.
“Okay. Here goes....” I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, then swallowed my own nerves and uncertainties and met her gaze. “Traci, there’s a better than average chance that your baby isn’t human.”
Traci blinked. Then she laughed kinda sluggishly. “Have you two been drinking? It’s, like, three in the afternoon.” She seemed to have forgotten Harmony was even there.
“No.” Em gripped the arms of her chair. “Your baby’s not human, but that’s okay, ’cause Kaylee’s not, either. In fact, she’s dead.”
“Who are you again?” Traci frowned at her.
“We’ll get to that in a minute.” I stood. “Traci.” She turned to see me and suddenly seemed more drunk than tired. “I’m a bean sidhe. Most people call us banshees, but whatever you know about banshees is probably wrong. Incomplete, at the least. Also, like she said, I’m dead.”
There were probably a million better ways to tell her what she needed to know and a million people better prepared than I was to deliver the news—like Harmony—but we were short on time and on volunteers Traci knew well enough to trust.
“You’re dead.” It wasn’t a question. Yet she obviously didn’t understand. “And you’re a banshee.”
“I know it sounds weird. I didn’t believe it at first either. But I can prove it. At least, I can prove the part about being dead. Are you ready?”
“Sure.” She shrugged listlessly, then crossed her arms beneath a well-endowed chest, obviously humoring us. “Knock yourself out. Be as dead as you want to be. ’Cause we haven’t had enough of that around here.”
Valid point.
I caught Traci’s skeptical gaze and held it. Then I let myself fade from sight. I didn’t actually go anywhere, but they couldn’t see me.
As soon as I started to fade, Traci sat up straight. She didn’t look sleepy anymore.
“What the hell just happened?” She turned to Em and Harmony. “Did you see that? Did she just disappear?”
Em nodded solemnly. “She does that now. A lot. Because she’s dead.”
“How did...? When did she...?” Traci closed her eyes and shook her head, then opened her eyes to stare at the spot where I stood, though she still couldn’t see me. “What?”
“Remember the night I got stabbed?”
Traci actually jumped. Her gaze flitted over the room but couldn’t find me until I let myself reappear. “You got stabbed, and now you can do that?” She waved a hand in my general direction. “So you’re saying...you died? When you got stabbed by...?”
She couldn’t say the name of the man who’d fathered her child and stolen my life.
I couldn’t blame her. And for the first time, I thought about what that whole thing must have been like for her. What it must still be like. I was all over the news for weeks—the girl who’d survived being stabbed by her teacher. What most people didn’t know was that I hadn’t really survived.
What even fewer people knew was that before Mr. Beck had gotten to me, he’d gotten to Traci Marshall, who’d had no choice about what they did together, though she didn’t know her will was being subverted.
Now she was carrying the inhuman child of a serial rapist and murderer. The daily reminder of even what little of that she understood must have been hell.
“Yeah. I died.” I stared at the floor for a moment, pushing back remembered terror, blazing pain, and the overwhelming memory-scent of my own blood. “I’ve been faking life ever since. There was a whole cover-up and everything.”
“I don’t... How is that possible? If you’re really dead, why are you still here? How are you here?”
“The how part is a little complicated. The short version is this—there are lots of things out there you don’t know about. Things you’ll never know about, if you’re lucky. Most of those things are dangerous and scary. I’m neither, I hope. But I am dead. I can make my heart beat, but it doesn’t do that on its own,
and when it doesn’t pump blood, I get cold. Not refrigerator-cold, but cooler than the natural body temperature. I don’t have to eat, but I can if I want to. I can get hurt, and if I do, I heal really slowly, because my body isn’t as alive as it used to be.”
Though in some ways, I was more alive than I’d ever been. Thanks to Tod.
“And you can...disappear?”
“Yeah. That’s one of the convenient aspects. The downside is that I’ll never age, which means I’ll never get to live in one spot for very long.” At least, not visibly. “And I’ll never grow up or have children.”
Traci looked so sad that I wished I’d left that last part off.
“But there’s more.” I sat in my chair again, and Emma scooted hers closer. “The night I died was the night you got pregnant. Do you remember that?”
Traci flushed with the memory. “But I never told anyone...?”
“I know because the father of your baby is the man who killed me.”
“How the hell did you know that?” She leaned forward so far I was afraid she’d fall off the couch. “I never told anyone who he is. Not even my mom. I couldn’t, after I found out what he did to you.”
“He told me.” Beck had wanted me to know exactly what he’d done to Traci, and that it was all my fault, and that he would do the same to Sophie and Emma if I put up a fight while he killed me and stole my soul for his unborn son.
Traci’s gaze lost focus. “It was so weird. I’d never even met him, but the moment I saw him on the front porch, I wanted him. I didn’t want to want him—he was a total stranger—but I couldn’t help it. Then I saw him on the news and heard what he’d done, and after that, I couldn’t tell anyone....” Her eyes filled with tears, and her hand spread over her stomach.
“Traci, Mr. Beck wasn’t human,” Harmony said, and I envied the control she had over her voice. How she was able to sound calm and soothing, when surely she was as affected by Traci’s trauma as Em and I were. “He was a predator and a parasite. What he did to you wasn’t your fault. In fact, it had nothing to do with you—you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Her tears fell. “I was at home!”
“I know.” My heart ached for her, but the terrifying truth was that sometimes home is the wrong place. It certainly was for me the night I’d died. “Unfortunately, it gets worse. Traci, if your child is what his father was, there’s a really good chance you won’t survive this pregnancy. So...you have to make a decision. We’ll give you all the information we have, but the choice is yours.”
Thank goodness. I’d had to make several impossible decisions recently, but nothing like the one Traci was facing. I’d never had to decide the fate of a child.
“Wait...” She scrubbed her face with both hands, like she was trying to wake herself up, and Harmony handed Traci her teacup. Traci pushed hair back from her face, then drained the rest of her tea, though it must have been cold by then. “What was Mr. Beck? What is my baby?”
The cool thing about disappearing before someone’s eyes is that they tend to believe anything you say afterward, which cuts down on a lot of the time I would normally have spent trying to convince someone that humans are not alone in the world. Either world. Traci had taken the expressway to all things supernatural. For me, that was kinda nice.
For her, it was understandably traumatic, and the more of the truth she heard, the worse that would get.
“Beck was an incubus,” Emma said. “That’s basically a sex demon.”
“A sex demon?” Traci stared at the coffee table like it might contain a translation of that phrase that was easier to stomach. “I had...” She swallowed thickly. “With a demon?”
“Actually, an incubus is just one of several kinds of psychic parasites. This kind happens to feed on...desire.”
“Lust,” Emma corrected, her voice sharp enough to sting. “Don’t sugarcoat it. She needs to know what really happened.” Em turned to her sister. “He came here that night looking for us, and he found you instead.”
“Why would he be looking for you here?” Traci’s frown deepened. “Who are you?”
Emma groaned, frustrated by the reminder that her own sister still didn’t recognize her. “Who I am doesn’t matter. The point is that he was mad that we stood him up, and he took that out on you, and I’m so sorry. He raped you, Traci.”
“No...” She shook her head, confusion momentarily overridden by denial that bruised me all the way to my soul. “I wanted to....”
“You didn’t have any choice,” Harmony said softly, and I could have hugged her for stepping in. Em and I...we were in over our heads. I didn’t know how to explain the truth to Traci without further upsetting her. “He made you want to. It’s as much a violation of your will as of your body. There’s nothing you could have done any differently.”
“No.” She shook her head again and swiped tears from her cheeks in one determined motion. “That’s not how it happened. I—”
“Traci.” Emma reached for her hand, but her sister pulled away from the touch she didn’t recognize, and my heart ached for Em. “Under what other circumstance would you have opened the door for a perfect stranger, then invited him straight to your bed?” Fresh tears swelled in Traci’s eyes, and her sister continued, “The only difference between Mr. Beck and half the men in prison for assault right now is that he violated you on multiple levels. Which makes me wish Kaylee could kill him all over again. And that I could help this time.”
Traci stared at the floor, her gaze unfocused, one hand still spread over her stomach. I wasn’t sure how much more of this she could take. Or how well she was handling what she’d already heard.
Hell, I wasn’t sure how well I was handling it.
“So the baby...?”
“Your baby is almost certainly an incubus,” Harmony said. “So we need to discuss the best way for you to...survive.”
Traci blinked, then frowned, and my heart ached as I watched her struggle to bring Harmony into focus through pain, confusion, and the Netherworld contaminate in her system. “Why wouldn’t I survive?”
“Because incubus babies are notoriously hard for human women to carry. They...” Harmony only hesitated for a moment, but I could see how much she dreaded speaking the necessary truth. “Well, they drain their mothers, from the inside out.”
Em set her soda on the coffee table and ran one hand through her hair. She seemed surprised when there was less hair than she remembered. “Then, when they’re born—if they’re born—they have no soul of their own, and if there isn’t one ready for the baby, it’ll take the mother’s soul. Unless she’s human.”
“Even if she’s human,” Harmony clarified, to my horror and confusion. “A human soul can’t support an incubus baby for long, but that’s no help to a mother who’s already passed away for want of a soul by the time her baby dies. Usually the father spends most of the gestational period hunting for a non-human soul for his child, but in this case, there’s no father.”
“May he rot in hell for all of eternity,” Em added.
“I don’t...” Traci shook her head, like she was trying to clear cobwebs from her mind. “That’s a lot of information about something I’m not sure I understand.” She glanced from one to the other of us in mounting fear. “What does all that mean?”
Harmony exhaled slowly. “It means that if you manage to carry the baby to term and deliver it, at birth he will take your soul, which will kill you. Then, when your soul fails to support him long-term, the baby will die anyway.”
Em met her sister’s gaze with a wide-eyed, urgent one of her own. “So, basically, the only way for you to survive an incubus pregnancy is for your baby...not to.”
Traci nodded. Then she stared at her hands, sitting idly in her lap, obviously thinking. Hard. When she finally looked up, I was impressed by how calm she seemed, and I wondered how much of that was because of what Harmony had put in her drink. “So, what are the chances that the baby is actually an incubus? I
mean, I’m human, so the baby could be human, too, right?”
I nodded, but Harmony shook her head. “Traci, hon, your baby is an incubus. I can tell that from looking at you. At how sick you are. You’re sick because your baby is sharing your soul at the moment, just like it’s sharing your blood and everything you eat. All of that puts a huge strain on you, and, frankly, you’re older than anyone I’ve heard of who’s successfully delivered an incubus.”
“But I’m only twenty-two.”
“The younger, the better. Evidently,” I said. Which was why Beck had posed as a high school math teacher—for virtually limitless access to underage girls. The bastard.
“Okay.” Traci took a deep breath and stared at her hands. Then she took another deep breath and looked up, her mouth set in a firm line. “I’m not ending my pregnancy—I don’t care what kind of baby I’m carrying. I don’t care who or what his father was. I care that this baby is mine and I want him. So...what do we do?”
Harmony frowned, and I recognized the worry lines in the center of her forehead—the only sign that she might be older than the thirty-year-old she looked like. She got those same lines every time she saw Nash and Sabine together.
Emma exhaled heavily. “Trace, you’re not thinking this through. If you try to have this baby, you’re going to die. That’s, like, ninety-nine percent certain. You can’t do that to Mom and Cara. Not after the funeral.”
“Who are you?” Traci’s eyes flashed with anger, and in that moment she looked so much like Emma—the old Emma—that I caught my breath. “I don’t even know you!”
Em’s eyes filled with tears again. “Traci. It’s me.” She waited, searching her sister’s face for some sign of recognition, and when she found none, she turned to me, heartbreak drawn in every feature on her face. “I thought she’d be able to see it, at least in my eyes.”
I got up to sit on the arm of Emma’s chair so I could put one arm around her, hating how helpless I felt in the face of her pain. “Traci, this is Emma. Your sister. She didn’t really die. Well, she did. But...it’s complicated, and now she has a new body.”