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If I Die
Rachel Vincent


KAYLEE CAN SEE DEATH COMING. NOW SHE MUST FACE HER OWN. As a teen banshee, Kaylee’s blood-curdling screams are a death knell for others. Yet she never expected to see her own name at the top of a reaper’s list. Scheduled to die within days, Kaylee knows her magic can’t change her fate.Worse, on top of worrying about her own demise, she needs to save mortal best friend Emma from the clutches of a deadly Netherworld creature. As Kaylee’s time on earth slips away, troubled banshee boyfriend Nash and his reaper brother Tod refuse to give up on Kaylee.They’re ready to unearth murky family secrets to give her a last chance at life, as their fight to save Kaylee becomes a battle for her love.‘Vincent is a welcome addition to the genre’ Kelley Armstrong SOUL SCREAMERS The last thing you hear before you die










Praise for the novels of

New York Times bestselling author

RACHEL VINCENT

“Twilight fans will love it.” —Kirkus Reviewson My Soul to Take

“A high-octane plot with characters you can really care

about. Vincent is a welcome addition to this genre!”

Kelley Armstrong on Stray

“I liked the character and loved the action. I look

forward to reading the next book in the series.”

Charlaine Harris on Stray

“Fans of those vampires will enjoy this new

crop of otherworldly beings.”

—Booklist

“My Soul to Take grabs you from the very beginning.” —Sci-Fi Guy

“Wonderfully written characters … A fast-paced,

engrossing read that you won’t want to put down.

A story that I wouldn’t mind sharing with my

pre-teen … A book like this is one of the reasons that

I add authors to my auto-buy list.

This is definitely a keeper.”

—TeensReadToo.com


Also available fromRachel Vincent

Published by






Soul Screamers MY SOUL TO TAKE MY SOUL TO SAVE MY SOUL TO KEEP MY SOUL TO STEAL IF I DIE

Coming soon …

BEFORE I WAKE



If I Die




Rachel Vincent















www.miraink.co.uk (http://www.miraink.co.uk)


This one is for everyone who wrote to ask

what happens next.

Here you go.

Now ask me again.




Acknowledgments


Thanks, as always, to my critique partner Rinda Elliot, who listens (and believes me) every time I swear that this one is the BEST ONE YET!!!

Thanks to my editor, Mary-Theresa Hussey, for unwavering enthusiasm for the Soul Screamers series, and for never even flinching at what I’ve put Kaylee and her friends through.

Thanks to Natashya Wilson, for input and encouragement.

Thanks to everyone behind the scenes at Harlequin Teen. You’ve made this possible. Kaylee and I thank you.

And, of course, thanks to #1, who puts up with me and with the multitude of fictional characters who take up most of my time and attention. Someday, more of both will be yours. I swear.




1


I used to think death was the worst thing that could happen to a person. I also used to think it was the last thing that could happen. But if I’ve learned anything from surrounding myself with reapers, and living nightmares, and my fellow bean sidhes, it’s this: I was wrong on both counts….

“What are you doing here before the warning bell?” I asked, sliding into my seat in first period algebra II with four minutes to spare. “Isn’t that one of the signs of an impending apocalypse?”

“If so, this is how I want to go out.” Emma Marshall sighed, digging the textbook from the bag on her lap. “Enjoying the view.”

I followed my best friend’s gaze to the front of the class, where Mr. Beck—hired in the wake of Mr. Wesner’s untimely demise—was writing math problems on the white board with green ink. His numbers were blockish and completely vertical; he had the best handwriting of any teacher at Eastlake. But Emma’s focus was several feet below his numbers, where the jeans encouraged by the new “Spirit Fridays” policy proved that Mr. Beck was much more dedicated to physical fitness than the average high school faculty member.

“And I suppose your sudden interest in math is purely academic, right?”

Her grin widened as she set the book on her desk, and it fell open to the place marked with a fat, purple-print emery board. “I don’t know if ‘pure’ is totally accurate, but I haven’t figured out how to entirely avoid academia in the school setting. I think the most we can hope for is something pretty to look at, to distract us from the inherent pain of the educational process.”

I laughed. “Spoken like a true underachiever.”

Emma could have been a straight-A student, but she was satisfied coasting by on effortless Bs, except in French and math, the only subjects that didn’t seem to come naturally for her. And the hot new math teacher had done nothing to improve her grades. Thanks to the aesthetic distraction, she was less inclined than ever to pay attention to what was written on the board and in the book.

Not that I could blame her. Mr. Beck was undeniably yummy, from his dark, tousled hair to his bright green eyes and the scuffed sneakers he always wore, even with slacks.

“He’s only twenty-two,” Em said, when she caught me looking. “Less than a year out of college. I bet this is his first teaching job.”

“How do you know that?” I asked, as Mr. Beck set his marker down and dug through his desk drawer for something.

“Heard it from Danica Sussman. He’s been tutoring her after school, to keep her eligible for softball.”

“Where is Danica?” I asked, on the tail end of the late bell. She’d been out sick for a couple of days, but she’d never missed on a game day before—Danica was supposed to pitch that afternoon.

“Still sick, I guess,” Em whispered, as Mr. Beck started taking roll. She unfolded a half-blank sheet of notebook paper. “Did you do the homework?”

I rolled my eyes and pulled out my own work. “What happened to your new interest in math?”

“It doesn’t extend to homework.”

“Kaylee Cavanaugh?” Mr. Beck called from the front of the room, and I glanced up, startled, certain we’d been caught cheating. But Beck was just standing there with his roll book in hand, waiting for my answer.

“Oh. Here,” I said, and he’d called three more names when the door opened and Danica Sussman stepped into the classroom. She was pale, except for dark patches beneath her eyes, which she hadn’t even tried to cover.

“Danica, are you okay?” Beck asked, as she crossed toward the front of the room, a blue late slip in hand.

“I’m fine.” She handed him the slip, but he balled it up in one fist and dropped it into the trash can next to his desk.

“I haven’t called your name yet, so you’re not really late,” he said, frowning, like he wasn’t convinced by her answer.

“Thanks, Mr. B.” But when she headed toward her desk, Danica had one hand pressed to her stomach, her face scrunched up in obvious pain.

Halfway through class, as Emma scrambled to finish her homework without ever taking her focus from Mr. Beck’s face, a familiar, sharp pain began to scratch at the back of my throat.

No! My heart beat so hard I practically shook in my chair. It couldn’t be happening again. Not at school. Not just six weeks after the loss of three teachers in a two-day span. My winter had felt like a series of deaths connected only by my advanced knowledge of them. I’d been hoping for a spring reprieve.

But a bean sidhe’s wail is never wrong. When someone near me is about to die, an overwhelming urge to scream—to cry out to his soul—consumes me. And the scream clawing its way up my throat at that very moment could only mean one thing.

I clenched my teeth so tight my jaws ached, denying the scream an exit. My hands gripped the sides of my desk, muscles so tense I accidentally pulled it back an inch, and Emma glanced up when she heard it squeal on the dingy linoleum tile.

She took one look at my face and frowned. Again? she mouthed, and when I could only nod, her frown deepened. Emma had seen me resist screaming for someone’s soul often enough to recognize the symptoms. At first it had freaked her out, and a large part of me wished it still did. I didn’t like how accustomed she was becoming to the cocoon of death that seemed to surround me.

Yet there were definite advantages to having a best friend in the know. Like the fact that she didn’t panic as she watched my gaze travel over my classmates, waiting for the dark aura to materialize around someone and show me who was about to die. But I saw no aura, and the scream remained a steady, painful pressure at the back of my throat—fairly easily stoppered, since I knew what I was doing—as if the soon-to-be-deceased and I weren’t actually in the same room. That thought made me relax enough that I raised my hand to be excused.

Mr. Beck started to nod in my direction, but before he could, Danica Sussman slid right out of her chair and onto the floor. Unconscious.

The entire class gasped, and chairs squealed against the floor as people stood for a better view. I was so surprised my mouth almost fell open, which would have released my painfully shrill shriek into the school.

Mr. Beck stared at Danica, blinking in shock and confusion.

Was it her? Was Danica about to die? If so, why wasn’t my urge to scream getting any stronger?

Mr. Beck rushed down the aisle, but before he got there, Chelsea Simms dropped onto the floor and stuck her hand in front of Danica’s face, an inch from her nose. “She’s still breathing….” Chelsea sat back and glanced over our fallen classmate, obviously looking for an injury. Then she gasped again, sharper than before. “Shit, she’s bleeding!” Chelsea scrambled backward on her knees and bumped her shoulder on the nearest desk, as shocked whispers echoed across the room.

Mr. Beck knelt beside Danica, features tense with worry. “Chelsea, call the office from the phone on my desk. Just dial nine.” When Chelsea stood, I saw what everyone else had already reacted to: the pool of blood spreading beneath Danica’s thighs.

That’s when the scream hit me full force. While everyone else whispered and stared, gathering around our fallen classmate until Mr. Beck ordered them back, I sat stiff in my chair, gripping the sides of my desk again, swallowing compulsively to fight back the scream that was scalding me from the inside out.

But Danica was still breathing. I could see her chest rising between the shoulders of two basketball players standing in the aisle. Her breathing wasn’t even labored. But the strength of the scream within me said that someone was going to die any minute. If it wasn’t Danica, who was it?

“You okay?” Emma asked, leaning close to me, eyes wide, forehead furrowed. “Is it her?”

I could only shrug. The only way I know how to check was …

I let a thin thread of the scream trail from my lips, an emaciated sound so soft no one else heard it over the steady, stunned buzz of the gathered spectators. But it was enough. With that sound calling out to the soul, I would be able to see it when it left Danica’s body. Assuming she was the one about to die.

But the insubstantial form hovering over Danica Sussman was like no soul I’d ever seen. Usually, a soul’s appearance—merely its representation in the physical world—mimicked its owner’s size, at least. But this soul was tiny. No bigger than my fist, and irregular in shape. And Danica’s breathing had not slowed.

And that’s when I understood. Danica wasn’t dying. She was losing her unborn child.

“I don’t think I can eat today.” Emma stirred a paper bowl of tomato soup with a plastic spoon. “This just isn’t in good taste.”

I cracked open my soda lid without glancing at her lunch, for fear I’d be sick at the sight. “I’m pretty sure they plan the menu months in advance.” But that was little solace after what we’d seen that morning. Somehow, even after all the death I’d both witnessed and heralded, I’d never even considered the possibility of a miscarriage triggering my instinct to wail for a yet-unborn soul. The usual helplessness, frustration and horror that accompanied any death for me were magnified almost beyond my own comprehension. This was a baby. A child who would never be. And I didn’t know how to deal with that.

“It does look pretty gory, though,” Sabine insisted from across the table, ignoring her own tray as the spring breeze blew long black hair into her face. She tucked the stray strands back, exposing a mismatched set of silver hoops in her upper ear. “So is it true that Danica Sussman hemorrhaged all over the floor in first period?”

“Both true and gruesome.” Em dropped her spoon and pushed her meal back as Nash settled onto the bench seat next to me with a cardboard tray of nachos. “I hope she’s okay.”

An ambulance had come for Danica, and though she was still unconscious, I was long past wailing for her baby by the time they wheeled her away on a stretcher. And I was the only one who knew for sure that she would live—but that a tiny, hidden part of her had already died.

“I hope so, too.” Nash slid one arm around my waist and squeezed me, then dug into his chips, and I couldn’t help wondering if we would have been able to save Danica’s baby, if we’d both been there when it happened. As a male bean sidhe, Nash didn’t wail for the souls of the dying. His gifts included Influence—the ability to compel people to do things just by speaking to them—and the capacity to guide a disembodied soul. Together, we could reinstate a person’s soul and save his or her life—but only in exchange for someone else’s. A life for a life. That’s how it worked.

But I had no idea if it would work at all on an unborn child, without a fully formed body in which to reinstate the soul. Or if it would last, even if it did work. I mean, miscarriages happen for a reason, right? Because there’s something wrong with the baby, or because the mother can’t handle the stress. Or something like that. So … really, a miscarriage is a blessing, right?

Or maybe I was just desperate to find a silver lining to go with the single darkest, most horrifying cloud of a death I’d ever witnessed.

“People are saying it was a miscarriage,” Emma said softly, and I flinched when a guy in a green-and-white senior class shirt turned around on the bench behind her, his brown eyes shiny with unshed tears, face flushed with anger. Max Kramer was Danica’s boyfriend of almost a year, and his pain and anger were so raw I felt like I was violating his privacy just by witnessing them.

“Well, people are wrong,” he snapped, and Emma froze, obviously embarrassed, then turned to face him slowly.

“I’m sorry, Max. I didn’t mean …”

Max stood without letting her finish, towering over our entire table. “They’re all wrong.” He didn’t raise his voice, but made no special effort to lower it either, so half the quad heard him when he continued. “Danica couldn’t have been pregnant. We’ve never even done it. So find someone else to talk about. Or better yet, why don’t you all just shut the hell up.”

We stared after him as he stomped off toward the cafeteria doors, and one look at Emma told me she felt just as bad for him as I did.

“Poor fool,” Sabine said, one of Nash’s cheese-covered chips halfway to her mouth. “I think he really believes that.” As a mara, Sabine could read people’s fears and feed from the nightmares she wove for them while they slept. But even beyond her mara abilities, she had an uncanny ability to read people’s expressions and body language. To my constant irritation.

“Of course he believes it.” Emma would have taken any excuse to argue with the mara—Sabine had dragged her into the Netherworld six weeks earlier and almost sold her to a hellion, body and soul. But this time her anger was obviously about more than that; Em felt guilty for passing along what she’d heard in front of Max. “Just ‘cause people are saying something doesn’t make it true. My aunt had a miscarriage last year, and it looked nothing like that. There was hardly any blood. Mostly just some cramping.”

Sabine shrugged, unfazed. “I’m no doctor, but if you ask me, she was pregnant, and the baby didn’t belong to good ol’ Max. But he obviously hasn’t figured that out yet.”

“Well, no one asked you,” Emma insisted. “So mind your own business.”

The mara frowned. “It’s not like I was going to tell him!”

“Sabine …” Nash half groaned.

Normally, I like it when he’s irritated with her. Sabine was my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, and she wasn’t too happy about the “ex” part.

“She’s right,” I said, as softly as I could speak and still be heard at my own table.

“How do you …?” Emma asked, and I met her gaze reluctantly.

“Because I felt the baby die.”

The silence at our table was almost heavy enough to feel. Then Emma breathed a soft, “Ohhh,” of understanding. “That’s why you needed to scream. I didn’t even think about it, after Danica fell out of her chair. I guess I thought she’d die once she got to the hospital.”

“No, she’ll be fine, as far as I know,” I said, glad to have at least that bit of good news to report. “But she definitely lost a baby, right there in first period. And Max obviously wasn’t the father.”

“I wonder who knocked her up?” Sabine bit into another of Nash’s chips, staring off into the clouds, like she could actually puzzle that one out on her own.

Nash pulled his cardboard tray away from her. “That’s none of our business.”

“Maybe it is,” Sabine insisted. “I bet it was Mr. Beck’s.”

“You are so full of shit!” Emma snapped, even angrier at having her favorite teacher’s name dragged through the mud by her least favorite person.

Sabine rolled black eyes. “It’s just a theory. And it’s not even that far-fetched. I mean, if he’s hiding his species, there’s no telling what else he’s hiding.”

My spoon slipped from my grip and plopped into my own untouched bowl of soup. “Beck isn’t human?” I demanded, as Emma’s brown eyes widened. Even Nash looked surprised.

Sabine shrugged again. “I thought you knew.”

“Hell no, we didn’t know!” Nash stared at her over the table. “Are you sure?”

“As sure as I am that Kaylee dreams about some very interesting things she’d never even consider when she’s awake.”

Nash pushed aside his lunch and leaned over the table, lowering his voice even further. “How do you know?”

The mara’s focus tightened on me and her eyes darkened, like a cloud had just passed over the sun. Only the day was still bright and warm, for mid-March. “I played around in her slumbering subconscious a couple of months ago, remember? And in her dreams, Miss Prim-n-Proper doesn’t have all those stifling control issues and that pesky trust deficit.”

“How do you know about Beck,” Nash clarified through clenched teeth, while I tried to redirect the heat in my cheeks into a death ray aimed right at Sabine.

She frowned, like the answer should have been obvious. “I read his fears. He knows this is a hotbed of Netherworld activity and he’s afraid of being caught fishing in the communal pond by something bigger and badder before he has what he came for.”

“And what’s that?” Emma asked, obviously stunned.

“How the hell should I know?” Sabine snatched another chip from Nash’s carton. “I’m a mara, not a psychic. Not that mind reading would help anyway. It’s not like people go around thinking, ‘I’m a monster from another world, hell-bent on wreaking havoc. Gee, I hope no one hears my thoughts …’”

“You could have just said, ‘I don’t know,’” I snapped.

Sabine raised one eyebrow in silent challenge. “I don’t know,” she said, managing to make her own ignorance sound smug. “But as usual, I know more than you do.”

I wasn’t surprised by her jab, and I shouldn’t have been surprised to find out that Beck wasn’t human. Especially considering that in the Netherworld—a hellish reflection of our own world, from which all evil springs—our school was the new hot spot for the monster A-list.

After a four-to-eight Friday-night shift at the Cineplex, where scooping popcorn and filling soda cups couldn’t drive the image of Danica bleeding on the floor from my head, I pulled into my driveway exhausted, but ready for my second wind. Nash was coming over at nine to watch a movie, and my dad had promised to stay in his room all night. But before I could relax with my boyfriend, I wanted to shower off the scents of popcorn and butter-flavored oil. Also, I should probably tell my dad that my new math teacher wasn’t human—that’s the kind of thing he usually wanted to know.

I’d just dropped my keys into the empty candy dish on the half wall between the kitchen and living room when the sudden silence made me realize my dad had been talking when I’d come in. Until I’d come in.

Hmm …

“Dad?” I kicked my shoes off and dropped them on the floor of the front closet, then headed down the hall toward his room. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine, hon.”

His bedroom door was ajar, so I pushed it open to see him standing in the middle of the floor, his hands in his hip pockets. I’d expected to find him on the phone—he had to be talking to someone, right?

“What’s up?” I frowned when he hedged. “Dad …?”

And suddenly Tod appeared in the room, several feet away, staring right at me.

“Okay … This is even weirder than the suspicious silence,” I said, expecting one or the other of them to laugh and spit out one of the logical explanations my father always seemed to have ready. But there was only more silence. “Okay, now you two are really starting to scare me.”

Tod generally only acknowledged my father’s existence when an opportunity arose to drive him nuts. And my dad had no use for Tod at all, unless he needed information only a rookie Grim Reaper could gain access to. So this private powwow had to be about something important.

“Guys? I can only stand here pretending you’re not scaring me for another second or two before I completely lose it. T minus five … four …”

“It’s nothing, honey,” my dad started to say, but the scowl on Tod’s face exposed the lie before my father could even finish it.

“If you don’t tell her, I will,” the reaper threatened.

“Tod, I can handle this—”

Tod turned his back on my father and met my gaze with a frighteningly honest weight. “Kaylee, the new list came out today.” By which he meant the reaper list, detailing every death scheduled in his district in the next seven days.

Oh, shit. Someone’s going to die. I took a deep breath, but couldn’t stop my hands from shaking. Please don’t be Emma. Or Nash. Or my dad. I couldn’t lose another parent.

I tried to ask—I tried to summon that much strength—but in the end, it just wasn’t there. I couldn’t stand the thought of losing someone else. Someone I loved.

So Tod answered the question I didn’t have the courage to ask.

“It’s you, Kaylee. You’re on the list.”




2


“Where’s Styx?” I turned my back on my father and the reaper and closed my eyes, trying not to let them see how shocked I really was. Fear would kick in soon, surely, once the reality had set in. But for the moment, I was numb and oddly chilled, like I’d jumped into the lake instead of letting my body adjust to the temperature a bit at a time.

“Kaylee?” My dad’s footsteps thumped behind me as I stepped into my room, questions whirling around in my head so fast I got dizzy, just standing still. “Did you hear Tod?”

“Of course I heard him.” Though, admittedly, that was never a guarantee. Reapers could choose who they wanted to be seen and heard by, on an individual basis, and Tod had an irritating habit of appearing to just one person in the room at a time—usually me.

“I think she’s in shock,” the reaper said as I scanned the floor, the rumpled covers, and the laundry piled in my desk chair, looking for a breathing lump of fur.

“Styx?” I called, but nothing moved. Tod materialized at the foot of the bed, studying me closely for my reaction, and I jumped, startled by his sudden appearance. “I’m not in shock. Not yet, anyway.” At a glance, he looked nothing like his brother, beyond their similar athletic builds. Tod had his mother’s blue eyes and blond curls, while Nash obviously took after his father, who’d died long before I met either of the Hudson boys.

“For the moment, I am firmly entrenched in denial, which—honestly—feels like the healthiest stage of acceptance. And I’d really appreciate it if you’d let me wallow there for a while.” I brushed past my father into the hall, headed toward the kitchen. “Styx!”

“I let her into the backyard,” my dad said at last, following me into the kitchen. “She doesn’t like Tod.”

“That’s because Tod never brings anything but death and bad advice,” I snapped, beyond caring that I was being unfair—it wasn’t the reaper’s fault that my number was up.

“That’s not true.” Tod tried to grin, and I had to respect his effort to lighten the mood. “Sometimes I bring pizza.”

Because the reaper gig—he extinguished life and reaped souls at the local hospital from midnight to noon—didn’t pay in human currency, Tod had begun delivering pizza for spending money during his free time. At my suggestion.

At first, I’d been amused by the fact that you could get both death and a large pepperoni delivered by the same person. But after Danica Sussman’s first period miscarriage and the news of my own impending demise, nothing seemed very funny at the moment.

“Styx is probably starving,” I mumbled, pulling open the fridge. My father’s warm hand landed firmly over mine on the handle and he pushed the door closed.

“Kaylee, please sit down. We need to talk about this.”

“I know.” But I was terrified that if I stopped moving for more than a second, that cloud of denial would clear and leave me staring at the ugly truth. And I’d already faced more than my share of ugly truths in the almost-seventeen years of my life.

Finally I nodded reluctantly. For all I knew, I didn’t have the luxury of avoiding the truth for very long.

I opened the fridge again and pulled out a can of Coke, then followed my dad into the living room, where Tod was already seated in my father’s recliner. For once, Dad didn’t yell at him to move. Instead, he sat on the couch with me, and I could see that he wanted to hug me, but I couldn’t let him, because that gesture of grief would make it real, and no matter how little time I had left, I wasn’t ready for that. Not yet.

So I would focus on the facts, rather than the truth. Because no matter what it sounds like, there’s actually a very big difference between the two.

“Are you sure?” I asked, holding the cold can with both hands, relishing the discomfort because it meant that I was still alive.

Tod nodded miserably. “Normally I don’t see the names more than a day or two in advance, but because you’re already on borrowed time, your name came on the special list.”

Special …

I was on borrowed time because I’d already died once. I was only three at the time, and thirteen years later, I only knew what I’d been told long after the fact: I was scheduled to die that night, on the side of an icy road in an accident. However, my parents couldn’t stand the thought of losing their only child, so my father tried to exchange his death date for mine. But the reaper was a vicious bastard, and he took my mother’s life instead.

I’d been living my mother’s life—literally—since I was three years old. And now her lifeline was coming to its end. Which meant that I would die. Again.

“Aren’t you just a rookie?” My father frowned skeptically.

“How do you even have access to this special list?” Normally, my dad wouldn’t hesitate to question the reaper, based solely on the fact that they didn’t get along. But his disbelief this time had a deeper root. One I understood.

If Tod was wrong, or even lying for some reason, then maybe I wasn’t going to die. Maybe my borrowed lifeline wasn’t really sliding through my fingers faster than I could cling to it.

“That’s the weird thing,” Tod said, unbothered by my dad’s skepticism. “Normally, I wouldn’t have access to it. If I’d known it was coming up, I could have looked up the specifics on the sly.” Tod had his boss’s passwords because he’d set them up in the first place—he was one of only two reapers in the district young enough to have grown up with computers. “But this time I didn’t have to. When I went in this afternoon to pick up my own list, Levi sent me into his office for something. And the special list was sitting right there on his desk, in plain sight.”

“And naturally, you read it,” my father added.

“I’m a reaper, not a saint. Anyway, I think he wanted me to see it. Why else would he have left it out, then sent me in alone with it lying right there?”

“Why would he want you to see it?” I asked, curious in spite of the huge dark cloud hanging over my truncated future.

Tod shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he likes me. Maybe he likes you.” I’d only met Levi, Tod’s boss, once, but he had seemed impressed with my ingenuity. Impressed enough to give me a heads-up about my own death? Maybe, but …

“Why?” I asked, focused on Tod’s eyes in search of an answer. If I’d been looking at Nash, I’d have known what he was feeling just by watching the colors twist in his irises. But, like my dad, Tod was too good at hiding what he was feeling.

He rarely ever let his emotions show through the windows to his soul.

“Why would he like you?” Tod’s eyes held steady. “Well, you do have this sort of magnetic effect on the darker elements of life. And the afterlife.” As evidenced by Avari the hellion’s obsession with claiming my soul. “And Levi’s definitely on the murky side of things.”

I had no idea how old Levi was—though my best guess was in the mid-triple digits—but he looked like an eight-year-old, freckled, redheaded little boy. That, combined with the fact that all reapers were technically dead, made him hands down the creepiest reaper I’d ever met. And, unfortunately, in the last six months, I’d had occasion to meet several.

But that wasn’t what I’d meant.

“No, why would he want me to know? Why would you want me to know? Nash said we’re not supposed to tell people when they’re going to die, because that just makes their last moments miserable. And I gotta say, he was right.” I didn’t know my exact time of death yet, but just knowing it was coming was enough to make my stomach revolt against the entire concept of food.

“In general, that’s true …” my father began, but Tod cut him off, sporting a characteristic dark grin.

“But you seem to be the exception to so many rules, why should this one be any different?”

“Does that mean you want me to suffer through anticipation?” I asked, hoping I’d misinterpreted that part.

“No.” My dad shook his head. “It means that forewarned is forearmed. We couldn’t have fought this if we didn’t know it was coming.”

“We’re going to fight this?” That possibility hadn’t occurred to me. I mean, someone had already fought that battle for me once, and won. I’d been saved, at the expense of my mother’s life. As badly as I wanted to live, it hardly seemed fair for me to cheat death again. No one else I knew had even had one second chance, much less two.

Then there was the other problem. The big one: extending my lifeline—again—would mean killing someone else instead. Again. And I couldn’t live with that.

“Of course we’re going to fight it!” my dad insisted. “There are ways around death, at least temporarily. We know that better than anyone. We’ve done it, once.”

“That’s the problem,” Tod said softly, his grin notably absent. “One of them, anyway.”

My father scowled at the reaper. “What does that mean?”

“The rules are very clear about second extensions.” He hesitated, and I heard what he was going to say next before he even formed the words. “There are none.”

For a long moment, there was only silence, and the deep, cold terror that settled into my chest was like hands of ice massaging my heart. In spite of my determination not to let anyone else pay for my continued existence, the death of that possibility echoed into eternity, like no fear I’d ever felt.

“There have to be exceptions,” my father insisted, as usual, the first to recover his voice after severe systemic shock. “There are always exceptions.”

Tod shook his head slowly, and a single unruly blond curl fell over his forehead. “Not for this. I already asked around, and … well, it just doesn’t happen. It can’t.”

“But you’re a reaper!” My dad stood, his voice thundering throughout the room. I felt like I should do something. Make him stop yelling, or at least try to calm him down. “What good are you if you can’t even help out a friend?”

“Dad …” I protested, uncomfortably aware that he’d never referred to Tod as a friend before. But I guess that’s what they say about desperate times …

“Kaylee, this is your life we’re talking about,” my father said, and a chill raced through me when I realized his hands were shaking. “We’re not going to let this happen. We’ll do whatever it takes. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

And suddenly I understood what he was saying. He’d tried to give me his lifeline before, and he’d do it again without a second thought.

“No, Dad …” I whispered, fear and shock rendering my voice a pathetic whisper.

My father ignored me and turned to look at Tod. “But I can’t do it without help.” The blues in my dad’s eyes churned with desperation, the strongest emotion I’d ever seen displayed there, and I was only seeing it now because he couldn’t hide it. He’d lost control, and that scared me more than anything. “Please, Tod.” My dad sank onto the opposite end of the couch, elbows on his knees, scrubbing his face with both hands. “I’m begging you. I’ll do whatever you want. Please make an exception for my daughter.”

Tod looked almost as stunned as I felt. I’d never heard my father beg for anything, not even for his own life, when Avari dragged him into the Netherworld, using him to get to me.

“Mr. Cavanaugh, I’d do it in a heartbeat.” Tod looked so earnest and frustrated that I wanted to comfort him. Especially when he turned those sad blue eyes on me, silently begging me to believe him. “Kaylee, I’d do it if I could. You know that. But it’s not up to me. I’m not your reaper.”

For one surreal moment, I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or upset about that.

“They don’t let rookies reap under special circumstances. They’ll call in an expert. I don’t even know what zone you’re actually supposed to be in when … when it happens,” he finished miserably.

I sucked in a deep breath, trying to process everything I’d just heard. Trying to push past the tangle of frighteningly useless words and grasp something I could actually use. “Who?” I said at last. “Who will they bring in? Libby?”

Libitina was the dark reaper—one of the oldest in existence—who’d come to execute Addison’s death and dispose of the Demon’s Breath that had kept her alive in place of the soul she’d sold. Libby had done what she could to help us return Addy’s soul, but in the end, she’d also done her job. She’d taken Addison’s life and damned her disembodied soul to eternal torture.

I wouldn’t find leeway with Libitina.

“I don’t know,” Tod said. “If the reaper’s been chosen, I haven’t heard about it.”

But at least I wouldn’t have to worry about Tod killing me, which seemed like an odd thing to be grateful for.

“How?” I set the sweating soda can on the end table and clasped my hands in my lap to keep them from shaking. “Do you know how it’ll happen?” I asked, not sure that I really wanted to know. Knowing too much could make me paranoid—would I walk around staring up to avoid anvils falling from the sky?

But Tod shook his head. “We never know that, because the method isn’t predetermined. Sometimes there’s an obvious choice. Like, if it’s an old man with a weak heart, the reaper will just let his heart stop beating. But with young people, it’s usually an accident, or an overdose, if there’s no preexisting illness. We work with what we have. It’s easier for the family and the coroner if they have something to blame it on.”

“Wow. You make death sound so courteous.”

Tod exhaled slowly. “We both know it’s not.”

Yeah. I knew.

“So …” I stared at the floor between my feet, and I couldn’t stop my leg from jumping as I worked my way up to the question I’d been avoiding.

“Do you know when? Does the list at least tell you how long I have?”

I was avoiding my father’s gaze—my own fear was hard enough to swallow at the moment—but I could see in my peripheral vision that he was watching Tod closely, waiting for the answer just as nervously as I was.

Tod cleared his throat, avoiding the question.

“Tod …?” My father’s voice was barely a whisper.

“Next Thursday,” the reaper said finally, looking right into my eyes. His irises roiled with a sudden maelstrom of pain and distress, and I was pretty sure he was watching the same storm rage in mine. “You’re going to die in six days.”




3


I stood so fast the room spun around me, and it felt like my head was going to explode.

Is this how I go? A stroke in my own living room, when the stress of knowing I’m going to die becomes too much? Could knowing I was going to die actually bring about my death? And if so, did that make it Levi’s fault? Or Tod’s? Or my dad’s, for letting him tell me?

But the truth was that it was no one’s fault. I’d overstayed my welcome, and death had finally caught up to me. There was no more natural, more necessary part of life than this end to the whole thing. Yet I was overwhelmed by the need to stomp my feet and pound my fists and shout it’s not fair! at the top of my fearsome bean sidhe lungs.

“Kaylee …?” Tod repeated, when I didn’t answer my dad.

Six days …

I headed down the hall and into my room, where I pulled my shirt over my head without remembering to close the door. They both followed, and when my dad realized I was changing, he stepped out of the doorway and shoved a very corporeal Tod farther down the hall.

“Kaylee, say something,” he called, but I couldn’t. I barely even registered his voice. All I could hear was the raucous clamor of panic in my own head, insisting I do something—anything—to take my rapidly fracturing mind off the fact that I had less than a week to live.

No senior year.

I unbuttoned my uniform pants and let them pool around my ankles, then stepped into the pair of jeans draped over my bed.

No graduation.

I pulled open the second drawer of my dresser and pawed through the contents for my favorite blue ribbed T-shirt.

No college.

I pulled the shirt on and tugged my hair from the collar, then stepped into a pair of sneakers.

No career. No family. No anything, beyond whatever catastrophe next Thursday had waiting for me.

“Kaylee, where are you going?” my father demanded as I stomped past him and Tod on my way to the front door.

“Out.” I turned to face them as I scooped my keys from the candy dish, and the panic clear in my father’s expression could have been a reflection of my own. “I’m sorry. I have to … I can’t think about this right now, or I’m going to lose my mind. And I don’t want to spend my last week on earth in a straitjacket. I’ll be back … later. Could you feed Styx for me, please?”

Without waiting for an answer, I opened the front door and jogged out to my car. A moment later, I glanced up as I backed down the driveway to find them both standing on the front porch, staring after me.

As it turns out, you can’t outrun death. No matter how fast you drive, you can’t even outrun thoughts of death, when you know it’s coming for you. Is this how Addy felt? Like she couldn’t breathe without choking on the knowledge that she’d soon be breathing her last?

I drove for nearly forty minutes, paying little attention to the direction, blasting music on the radio in an attempt to drown out my own thoughts. But none of it worked, and by the time I’d made my way back to familiar surroundings, I’d realized that the only way to get my mind off my own problems was to focus on someone else’s.

When I glanced up, I realized the hospital was several blocks ahead, as if my subconscious had known where I was going the whole time.

I found front-row parking in the visitors’ lot, which was nearly empty because visiting hours were over. The lady at the front desk gave me Danica Sussman’s room number, but warned me that I wouldn’t be able to see her this late. I thanked her and headed back toward the parking lot—then looped around to another entrance, where I took an elevator up to the third floor.

There was only one person at the third floor nurse’s station, and it was easy to sneak past when she got up for coffee. Room 324 was around the corner and four doors down. I hesitated, loitering outside Danica’s door for a couple of minutes, trying to dial up my courage and think of an opening line that wouldn’t make me sound like a nosy gossip in search of tomorrow’s high school headline. But when shoes squeaked from around the corner, I hurriedly pulled the door open and stepped inside.

After all, what was the worst that could happen? I’d babble like an idiot and get tossed out of her room? The embarrassment could only last six days, max, and after that, nothing would matter anyway.

The hospital room smelled sterile and felt cold, and it was lit only by a horizontal strip of light over the head of the bed.

Danica was asleep on her right side, facing me. She looked pale and small beneath the thin covers. Too young to have been a mother. Not that that mattered now.

I watched her sleep for several minutes, thinking about how very different our lives must be. She’d obviously done at least one thing I hadn’t, and that had led to pregnancy—another experience I would never have—and to a loss I could never personally understand.

But Danica would live. If she wanted another baby, she’d have time for that, whenever she was ready.

I would not. I wouldn’t have time for anything. No more firsts, and only one more last. My time was up.

What the hell am I doing here? I couldn’t help Danica. It was none of my business who her baby’s father was, even if he was a teacher, on the odd chance that Sabine was right. Even if that teacher wasn’t human. I was just using Danica and her problems to distract myself from my own, and that wasn’t fair for either of us.

Half ashamed of myself and half irrationally irritated, I had one hand on the door handle when the bed creaked behind me.

“You’re not a nurse.”

I turned slowly, suddenly nervous. I had no idea what to say to her. How to explain my presence. We weren’t friends. I didn’t have any similar personal experience or wisdom to share with her. I was just snooping. And now I’d been caught.

“Kaylee Cavanaugh?” Danica squinted into the shadows beyond her bed, and I nodded.

“Yeah. Hi.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I was … visiting a friend. Then I remembered you were here, and thought you might like some company.”

She didn’t smile and wave me over. But she didn’t yell for security, either. “Isn’t it kinda late for visitors?”

I shrugged and came forward slowly, my hands in my pockets. “Yeah, but I can hang till I get caught, if you want.”

Danica stared at the hands she was twisting together, and I knew she was going to tell me to get lost. But then she looked up, and there were tears standing in her eyes, and I realized that maybe her problems were as rough as mine. Maybe even rougher—after all, mine would soon be over. “That’d be cool. If you want.”

I sat in the armchair by the window, and we avoided looking at each other, neither of us sure what to say. But finally Danica sighed and pressed the button to raise the back of her bed, then she leaned against the pillow and rolled her head to face me. “So, I guess everyone’s talking about what happened?”

“Well, it’s probably safe to say that the girls’ quarter-final basketball loss is no longer big news.”

Danica nodded slowly. “What are they saying?”

“The most extreme theory I’ve heard so far is that you’re dying of colon cancer.” Another shrug. “But most people think you had a miscarriage.” Which I knew for sure.

Danica rubbed tears from her eyes with the heels of both hands. “Everything’s so messed up….”

“Messed up seems to be my natural state of being. But if it makes you feel any better, Max has your back. He’s telling everyone you couldn’t be pregnant, ‘cause you guys never …” I let my words trail off toward the obvious conclusion, and Danica’s eyes overflowed again.

I felt bad about manipulating her. I really did. But I couldn’t tell her I knew the rumors were true, because she’d ask how I knew. So I needed her to tell me herself.

“Yeah. Max doesn’t have my back anymore,” she sniffled.

“He came to see me after school, and I had to tell him the truth.” Another sniffle, and this time she reached for a tissue from the rolling tray table.

“The truth?” I held my breath. She wouldn’t tell me. I mean, I wouldn’t tell me, if I were Danica. She didn’t owe me any answers.

“I was pregnant. But it wasn’t his.”

I actually glanced around the room in surprise, looking for evidence of medical malpractice in the form of unregulated, judgment-impairing pain medication. But then I saw her watching me, looking for something in my expression, and I realized that she wasn’t overmedicated. She just needed a friend.

“Wow.” And suddenly I felt guilty for pumping her for information just to distract myself from my own encroaching expiration date, when all she wanted was a friendly ear. “So … how’d he take it?”

I can do this. It didn’t have to be either-or, right? I could listen like a friend and still dig for answers like … um … an ill-fated amateur detective trying to solve one last case before she kicks the proverbial bucket. Right?

Danica wadded her tissue in one hand, then dropped it onto her lap. “At first he just looked at me, like he wasn’t sure he’d heard me right. Then he got this awful heartbroken look, like I’d told him I murdered his puppy. Then he just turned around and walked right out the door without a word.” She sighed and tossed the tissue toward the can, where it landed a foot and a half shy. “The only visitor I’ve had, until you, and he leaves hating me. But I guess I deserve that.”

Her only visitor? “Your parents didn’t come?”

“My mom’s … sick. And my dad won’t talk to me. The doctor told him what happened, and he left without even coming in to say hi. Because, you know, the shame is contagious.”

For a moment, biting sarcasm eclipsed the obvious pain in her voice, and I found myself hating a father who wasn’t mine. A man I’d never met. “And now I’ve lost Max, too. And I don’t even know how this happened!”

“You don’t …?” I started, brows raised, but Danica rolled her tear-reddened eyes.

“I mean, I know how it happened. I just can’t figure out why. I remember … getting pregnant. But I can’t remember what I was thinking. I don’t do things like that. I love Max, and I can’t remember why I was willing to throw him away for one stupid night….”

“It was just one night?” I said, stunned by the thought that a single mistake could throw her whole life into chaos.

Danica nodded miserably. “Less than that, really. It was just a couple of hours about a month ago. Afterward I tried to put it behind me and move on, but every time I see him, I want him all over again, even though I hate myself for what I did to Max. How horrible does that make me?” She covered her face with both hands. “Why can’t I get him out of my head?”

I waited, hoping she’d let a name slip, but when her hands fell, she only stared at the wall across from her bed, shoulders slumped, eyes starting to lose focus. Maybe she was a little medicated after all.

“Did you know you were pregnant?” I whispered, wondering if I’d worn out my welcome. She looked like she wanted to go back to sleep for a long, long time.

Danica nodded slowly. “I found out last week. That was the only bright spot.” She blinked, then faced me again. “I was going to keep it. I don’t know how—my dad would rather kick me out than claim a bastard grandchild—but I would have found a way. Then this morning, I passed out in first period and woke up in the hospital, and bam, my whole life’s ruined.” She let the tears fall that time, and they rolled down her face to drip on the white blanket.

I leaned forward, hurting for her and desperate to help. But I was in over my head. I had no experience with peer counseling, and no matter what Sabine had to say about my inexperience and naivety, I wasn’t exactly a shining example of the adolescent ideal. Just ask my dad.

“Your life isn’t ruined, Danica,” I insisted, scrambling for something to support that statement. “Max might get over this, if you tell him how much he means to you. And even if he doesn’t, you have a whole lifetime to decide who you want to be with, and if you want kids later, you can …”

“No, I can’t.” Danica stared down at her fingers, shredding a second tissue all over the bedspread, and the flat, dead quality of her voice sent chills through me. “I can’t have kids, Kaylee. Not anymore. Whatever went wrong with this one ruined it for the rest of them.”

Ohh …

I leaned back in my chair, devastated for her and stunned beyond words.

“I know I wasn’t ready,” Danica began, and this time her voice was alive with bitter pain. “It was probably stupid of me to think I could handle it. But now I don’t even have that option. What kind of screwed-up world is this, when the doctor can stand there and tell a seventeen-year-old that her insides are so messed up that she can’t support life. Ever. And they can’t even tell me why. That’s the real bitch.”

I nodded for lack of a better response, oddly relieved to find her anger outshining her grief. “They don’t know what happened?”

She shook her head miserably. “They have more tests to run, but all they know now is that this morning I was pregnant, and now I’m not, and I lost a ton of blood in the process.

That doesn’t usually happen in a first trimester miscarriage, according to the doc, but I needed a transfusion.”

She got quiet then, with her head against the pillow, and I thought she was falling asleep.

Last chance, Kaylee …

“Danica, who was the father?” I whispered, leaning forward in my chair again.

“Doesn’t matter,” she whispered back, her eyes closed. “Not anymore.” She fumbled for the controller and pressed a button to lower the head of the bed again. “I need to sleep now,” she mumbled, clearly exhausted by the visit. “Thanks for coming …”

I stood and watched her doze for a second, then I was heading for the door when Danica groaned, and I glanced back at her.

“Maybe this would have happened later anyway,” she mumbled, so low I could barely hear her. “Maybe I wasn’t meant to have kids. But I wanted this one …”

“Visiting hours were over two hours ago,” a sharp female voice barked as I closed Danica’s door, and I spun around to find an elderly nurse—her name tag read Debbie Nolan, RN—in pale purple scrubs frowning at me.

Oops. Busted …

“Sorry. I didn’t get off work in time to visit, and she’s my cousin, so.” I was almost disturbed by how easily the lie flowed. When had I gotten so good at that?

“Oh …” Nurse Nolan’s frown melted into a bruising look of sympathy. “I’m sorry. It’s so sad, with her so young.” She glanced behind her, like someone might be watching, then gestured for me to come closer as her voice dropped into a conspiratorial whisper. “Do you want to see your aunt, too, while you’re here?”

“My …?”

My aunt was suffering an eternity of torture in the Netherworld at the hands of the hellion she’d sold her soul to. But Nurse Nolan meant Danica’s mom. When Danica said her mother was sick, I’d assumed from the way she said it that “sick” was a euphemism for drunk, or stoned, or psychotic.

“Sure.” I said at last, hoping the nurse hadn’t followed the progression of my thoughts across my expression. What kind of fake cousin would I be if I didn’t visit my fake aunt while I was there?

“Room 348, at the end of the hall,” she said, still whispering. “I’ll give you ten minutes, if you promise not to tell….”

“Of course. Thank you.” I’d hoped to sneak out when she went back to the nurse’s station, but I never got the opportunity because she escorted me down the hall to a perfect stranger’s hospital room, while my heart pumped panic-fueled fire through my veins.

How the hell am I going to explain this to my not-aunt? If Mrs. Sussman ratted me out, my dad was going to be pissed. Especially considering I hadn’t yet told him about the gruesome miscarriage or my nonhuman math teacher, or Sabine’s theory about a possible connection between the two. I wonder if encroaching death is a plausible excuse for temporary insanity?

I held my breath as Nolan opened the door, scrambling for some way to explain and excuse my intrusion. But if hearing about Danica’s private pain and loss was heartbreaking, meeting her mother was downright creepy.

Mrs. Sussman—Amanda, according to the bracelet on her wrist—was sleeping. Deeply. So deeply that her chest barely moved with each breath.

“How long has she been like this?” I asked, and the nurse looked at me strangely, like I should already know the answer to that. “The days all run together….” I said, scrambling to fix my mistake.

“It’s been almost four weeks now,” the nurse said as we stood at the bedside, shaking her head over the tragedy. “Her daughter comes in on the weekends, and her ex-husband has even come a couple of times. But there’s nothing any of us can do for her.”

“What happened?” I asked, before I realized that a real niece would already know the answer to that. Fortunately, Nurse Nolan thought I was asking for medical specifics.

“The doctors aren’t sure. And they’ve brought in several of them. She came in like this—your cousin found her, you know.”

I nodded, like I’d really known.

“Brain-dead from the moment she arrived, but she keeps breathing, and as long as they keep feeding her—” Nolan ran one hand gently over the tube protruding from Mrs. Sussman’s left arm “—she’ll be here just like this.”

“How awful …” At least my mother’d had a clean death. This was … I didn’t even have words for what this was, though it had to come close to my own aunt’s eternal torture. “Thanks, but I … I have to go.” I backed away from the bed, suddenly grateful for the knowledge that I wouldn’t have to linger like this. At least, not for more than six days.

In the hall I jogged for the elevator, running away from pain and anguish that put my own into startling perspective, and ran right into Tod. Literally.

“You okay?” he said, and I knew without asking that no one else could see or hear him, though he was fully corporeal for me.

“What are you doing here?” I whispered, tugging him toward the elevator, grateful that Nurse Nolan had evidently found something to do in Mrs. Sussman’s room.

Tod dug for something in his pocket while I jabbed the call button. “Your dad asked me to find you. You forgot your phone.” He handed me my cell, and when my fingers brushed his, there was a sudden swell of color in his eyes—not quite a swirl, but … something. “And that’s not all you forgot….”

“Huh?” I stepped into the elevator, and he stepped in after me, grinning, the teasing light in his eyes comfortable for its familiarity when everything else around me now felt cold, and foreign, and sharp.

“You forgot your date.”

Crap! I closed my eyes, cursing myself silently. I’d forgotten all about Nash.




4


“What were you doing at the hospital?” Tod asked, as I shifted into Reverse and backed out of my parking space.

“Trying to distract myself from the fact that next week, my address changes from a house number to a plot number.” But that distraction had proved temporary, and without Danica’s problems to occupy my mind, my own tumbled back in, clamoring for attention like a dog willing to howl until it’s fed.

Tod chuckled, and oddly enough, coming from a reaper, laughter in the face of death didn’t seem terribly inappropriate. “Yeah. Been there.”

And suddenly, as I pulled out of the lot and onto the street, I realized Tod was the only person I knew who might possibly understand how I felt.

I glanced at his profile as I braked for the stop sign at the corner. “Did you know you were going to die before it actually happened?” My voice was barely a whisper—a trembling reflection of the quiet terror lurking at the back of my mind, leaping into the spotlight every time a failed distraction left me vulnerable.

“Only for about five minutes.”

“Were you scared?” Because I felt like the pendulum on a grandfather clock, ticking toward my last seconds, dizzy from the motion, but unable to stop….

“Like I’ve never been, before or since.”

I had a million other questions, but his answers wouldn’t help me. They probably wouldn’t even be relevant, because my death wouldn’t mirror his, or anyone else’s. I was on my own, in death. I knew that, if little else.

“Kaylee?” Tod said, as I turned the corner into my neighborhood.

“Yeah?” I was hardly listening now, lost in my own thoughts, and the effort not to think them.

“I’m scared now.”

Something in his voice made me look at him, in the fading glow from a passing streetlight. Then something in his eyes made me pull over, two streets from home, in front of a house I didn’t recognize.

“Why are you scared?” I asked, and suddenly the night seemed so quiet, beyond the soft rumble of the engine.

“Because I can’t fix this.” He swallowed thickly, one hand braced on the dashboard. “There’s nothing I can do, and that’s hardly ever true for me, and I hate how helpless and useless it makes me feel. But at the same time, that makes me feel human, and I haven’t felt human much lately, either.”

“Because Addison’s gone?”

He nodded slowly, like there was more to it than that, but he wasn’t ready to elaborate. “I did everything I could for her, but sometimes everything you can do isn’t enough, and you just have to … let go.”

“I’m not ready to let go of life,” I whispered.

“I’m not either—for you or for me. But knowing I have no power over death this time makes me feel terribly, wonderfully normal. And some deep part of me likes that. And that scares me.”

I blinked, trying to make sense of the tangle of words that had just tumbled from his mouth. “You hate feeling useless, but you like that feeling useless makes you feel human?” I asked, fairly certain I’d missed something.

Tod thought about that for a second, then nodded. “Yeah. Does that make any sense?”

I could only shrug. “Right now, nothing makes much sense to me, so I may not be the best judge.” I stared at my hands, tense around the wheel. “I don’t expect you to fix this, Tod. It doesn’t make any sense for you to put your job—” and thus his afterlife “—in danger, when I’m going to die no matter what you do.”

“Kaylee.” he said, but I interrupted, determined to have my say.

“I heard what you said earlier. And I totally respect the ‘no second exchanges’ policy.” Even if it killed the only ray of hope trying to shine on what remained of my life so far. “But my dad doesn’t. I need you to promise me that you won’t let him trade. Because he’s going to try. And if you let him, I swear I’ll haunt your afterlife for all of mine.”

“It’s not going to be an issue,” Tod assured me. “He’ll never even see your reaper. No dark reaper worth his job would ever appear to a grieving relative.”

“Good.” At least I could stop worrying about that part of it.

I shifted into Drive again, and Tod’s hand landed on mine, still on the gearshift. “Kaylee,” he said, and I turned to meet his gaze. “If there was anything I could do, I would do it.”

“I know.” And in that moment, that was about all I knew.

Styx lifted her head from Nash’s lap when I opened the front door. Some guard dog. But then, she was supposed to guard me from hellion possession, not boyfriends I’d forgotten about. He stood, and Styx hopped down from the couch and trotted toward me, half Pomeranian, half Netherworld … something or other. And all mine. We’d bonded while she was an infant—she wasn’t much more than that now—and she would obey no one else’s orders until the day I died.

Which had seemed like a much better deal, a couple of hours earlier.

“Hey,” I said, and Nash folded me into a hug so tight, so desperate that I couldn’t breathe.

“Are you okay?” He finally let me go, but only to stare into my eyes, looking for more than he should have been able to see there.

“They told you?” I bent to pick up Styx, petting her frizzy fur out of habit.

“I thought you’d want us to,” my dad said, and I looked up to find him in the kitchen doorway, cradling a steaming mug of coffee, in spite of the late hour.

Did I? Did I want Nash to know? There was nothing he could do, and I couldn’t imagine keeping a secret that big from him. But now he was looking at me like I would break if he so much as breathed on me. Like I was fragile and must be protected.

“Yeah. Thanks,” I said, to keep from hurting my dad’s feelings.

The front door closed at my back, and I turned to thank Tod for bringing my phone—but he was gone.

“You hungry?” my dad asked, and I could only stare at him for a moment, until I understood what he was doing. He was taking care of me, the only way he knew how. He couldn’t save my life—not this time—but he could solve my hunger.

“No. Thanks, though.” I set Styx down, and she hopped onto my dad’s chair and stared out at the room, on alert from this new height.

“No popcorn for the movie?”

“I’m not really in the mood for a movie anymore.” A sappy tearjerker just wasn’t a good way to follow the news that you’re going to die. “I think we’re just going to hang out in my room.” I tugged Nash toward the hall and he came willingly, but looked like he couldn’t decide whether I’d just come to my senses or lost them completely.

“Leave the door open,” my dad said, the second most common warning in his arsenal. Right behind, “Nash, go home.”

I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it. I had six days to live, and he was worried about an unsupervised visit with my boyfriend?

I dropped Nash’s hand and crossed my arms over my chest, trying to figure out how best to say what needed to be said. “Dad, this is no slight against your parenting skills, which are seriously formidable. No worries there. But I’ve only got six days to live. I’m never going to turn eighteen. I’m never even going to turn seventeen. The only part of my adult life I’m going to get to experience is the part I can claim in the next week. So I’d kinda like to spend these next six days—my last six days—as an emancipated minor.” Or at least an honorary adult.

“Kaylee …” His voice was deep with warning, yet a little unsteady.

“I’m not talking about moving out, Dad,” I insisted, hoping to avoid a parental meltdown—I really didn’t want his last memories of me to include a temper tantrum. “I’m just saying I don’t want to spend my last week on earth following a bunch of rules that don’t even really apply to me anymore. I mean, would you tell an eighty-year-old woman with terminal cancer to leave her door open?”

“You’re not going to die, Kaylee.” My dad was scowling now, his arms crossed to mirror my own.

I lifted both brows in challenge. “You know somethin’ I don’t?”

“I know I’m going to find a way around this, and we’re going to laugh about it when you’re a very old woman. And yes, if you’re still living here when you’re eighty, I will damn well tell you to leave the door open.”

My chest ached fiercely and I had to swallow to speak past the lump in my throat. “I tell you what—if I’m still alive on Friday morning, you can consider me happily un-emancipated.”

My dad’s frown deepened and his irises churned slowly in a rare display of fear and frustration, but he didn’t object when I tugged Nash down the hall and into my room. Where I closed the door behind us. Then had to open it again to let Styx in.

Nash sank into my desk chair looking up at me, and though his irises held steady—obviously a struggle—his eyes were … shiny. “Why’d you let your dad tell me? Why didn’t you tell me yourself?”

I blinked, surprised by the amount of pain in his voice. “He beat me to it. I would have told you.” But I’d needed some time to process the information myself before I had to consider anyone else’s reaction.

“This is messed up, Kaylee.” He pulled me closer and wrapped his arms around my waist, clutching the back of my shirt, his face pressed into my stomach. “Scott, and Doug, and now you … Why is everyone leaving me? What the hell am I going to do without you?”

He was going to lean on his mom, and Tod. And Sabine. The three of them would do anything to protect Nash, and they’d be there for him when I couldn’t be. I was much more worried about my father….

“Don’t think about that right now,” I said, talking to myself as much as to Nash. I stepped back so that he had to look up at me. “Think about all the privacy I just bought us. Too bad I waited until the week I’m gonna die to join the teenage resistance, huh?”

“That’s not funny.” Nash frowned as I sat on the edge of the bed.

“I wasn’t joking.”

“Your dad thinks he can stop it.”

“Yeah, well, Tod says he can’t.” I leaned back on the bed and let my legs dangle over the side while I studied my ceiling. How had I never noticed that crack, directly over my pillow? How often had I stared at that very spot and never noticed it?

Nash swiveled toward me and the chair creaked. “And you believe him over your dad?”

“Do I believe the reaper with insider’s knowledge on how death works over the desperate bean sidhe? Yeah. I do.”

“Why are you acting like this?” he demanded, walking the rolling chair forward until his knees hit the mattress.

I rolled onto my side to watch him. “My expiration date didn’t come with instructions. What am I supposed to be acting like?”

Nash sighed and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “I just don’t understand how you can take this so lightly.”

“What do you want me to do, slap on some black eye shadow and host my own wake? I’m gonna die, Nash. There’s nothing anyone can do to stop that. But I’ve got six days left, and I don’t want to spend them thinking about how it’s all gonna end.”

I sat up on the bed and studied him, trying to see him like I had six months earlier, when we’d first started going out. Before he’d betrayed me to feed an addiction to Demon’s Breath that was my fault in the first place. I’d spent the past month and a half learning to trust him again—letting him convince me that was possible—but now I was out of time. As with everything really good in life, I’d have to either jump in headfirst, or not at all.

“What?” Nash said when I just stared at him, thinking. Wondering if I could really go through with the idea taking root in my brain. Or maybe someplace a little lower. “You better not be thinking something stupid, like breaking up with me now will make next Thursday easier for me.”

“Nash, if I thought there was any way to make my death easier for you, we wouldn’t be together in the first place. I just … I don’t want to dwell on all the things I’m not gonna get to do.” I took a deep breath and ignored my racing pulse. I couldn’t choose when or how my life ended, but I could choose how I spent what time I had left.

I can do this.

I took his hand and pulled him out of the chair. I didn’t have to pull very hard—it was more an issue of guiding him where I wanted him. Onto the bed. With me. “I wanna do some of them, before it’s too late.”

I scooted backward and he crawled over my legs and up my torso as I lay back on the pillows, and my heart beat so hard I could hear it echo in my ears.

“This is why you closed the door?” he whispered, dropping a series of tiny kisses at the back of my jaw.

“It wasn’t premeditated….” I breathed, running my hands over the front of his shirt, feeling the planes beneath. Was his heart beating as hard as mine? Was that even possible?

“Coulda fooled me.”

“Shut up.” I slid one hand behind his neck and pulled him down until his mouth met mine. His lips were warm and soft, and the taste of him brought back nothing but good memories—the only advantage to having been possessed by a hellion is that you don’t actually remember what happened while you were away from your body. Which made it just a little easier for me to push aside the knowledge that he’d been less than trustworthy in the past and just decide to trust Nash now.

I’d been unable to do that completely so far, but knowing I was going to die soon—knowing I was about to lose my chance—made me bold. Not quite fearless, like Sabine, but definitely brave. And more than a little eager.

My mouth opened beneath his, and Nash kissed me deeper. His weight settled onto me, heavy and warm, and very, very real. A nervous tingling started in the pit of my stomach and spread like pins and needles everywhere Nash touched me. I’d never felt more alive, and the irony in that thought did not escape me.

This is going to happen. I was ready, mostly because there was no more time to not be ready—not unless I wanted to die a virgin. And of all the things I still wanted to do before I died, this was the only one within reach.

Nash’s mouth trailed down my throat, and I closed my eyes, concentrating on the electric feel of his hands, the scalding heat from his lips. Letting it all overwhelm the sharp edge of fear holding steady like the eye of the storm raging around me. I had a lot of things to be scared of—real things—but this wasn’t one of them. And slowly, I let my hands trail down from his chest to the waist of his jeans.

I gave the top flap of denim one sharp tug, and the button slid through the hole.

“Whoa …!” Nash rolled onto his side, staring down at me in confusion. “What are you doing?”

“I think you’re pretty familiar with the concept….”

His gaze searched mine. “Is this a test? Should I ask what color your first bike was?”

I laughed. Six weeks earlier, I’d used that question as a sort of password, to make sure I wasn’t talking to a hellion who’d hijacked my friend Alec’s body. “I’m not possessed.” I looked up at him from the pillow, letting him see the truth on my face. “I’m just ready.”

“You weren’t ready last week.” Nash sat up, frowning down at me from the edge of my bed now. “And the only thing that’s changed is …”

“The only thing that’s changed is that now I’m dying. I’m out of time, Nash, and I want to do this. Now.” Before I got nervous, or scared, or started to feel really, really embarrassed by the fact that I was having to convince him.

“Your dad’s in the other room.”

“So let’s go to your house.”

He shook his head slowly. “My mom’s home.”

I shrugged. “Fine. Let’s go to the lake.”

“Kaylee …” Nash scrubbed his face with both hands, then looked at me with the most conflicted regret I’d ever seen. “You know I want to, but …”

I sat up, and I could feel my cheeks flaming. Was he turning me down? After all the times he’d hinted, and asked, and outright pushed? “But what?” I demanded, and I could hear the bite in my own voice.

“Not like this. You don’t really want this. You’re just trying to avoid thinking about next Thursday. Or maybe you’re trying to cross things off some kind of morbid checklist. Either way, this isn’t really what you want, and—”

“Don’t tell me what I want!” I snapped, but he only put his hand over mine and leaned closer, so that I had to see the depth of the regret swirling in his eyes.

“—and I swore to you once that I knew you well enough to know when you want to stop, even if you can’t tell me. Don’t make a liar out of me, Kaylee. Not again.”

He was right. Damn it.

“Okay, I get it. But things have changed.” I sucked in a deep breath and looked right into his eyes, begging him silently to understand. “Everything’s changed, Nash. I do want you. And you want me. You’ve wanted this for months, and now we’ve only got six days to make it happen before we both lose our chance.”

He closed his eyes, and I realized that was to prevent me from seeing whatever he couldn’t stop them from showing. When he finally opened his eyes, they shined with good humor, and only the lines in his forehead told me it was forced. “How did this turn into you begging me for sex?” He grinned, and I laughed out loud.

“You’re not gonna let me live it down, are you?”

Nash’s smile faltered. “No more life and death jokes, Kaylee. This is hard enough as it is.”

“They say humor is the best defense.”

“No, they say the best defense is a good offense. But you can’t take the offensive with death. Though he’s awfully easy to piss off sometimes …” Meaning Tod, of course. Though, honestly, Nash usually meant to piss him off.

“Whatever. Where do we stand on the subject of my dying wish?” I leaned back against the pillows again, hoping to tempt him.

“I’m your dying wish?” He lay down next to me, and I lifted my head so he could put his arm behind it.

“Well … not quite. My dying wish is not to die. But you’re a close second. So where do we stand?”

He ran one hand down my arm and my pulse spiked when his fingers splayed across my stomach. “We stand …”

My desk chair creaked, and I looked up to find Tod sitting in it backward, facing away from us—the most courteous entrance he’d ever given us as a couple. And while most of me was frustrated by the disruption, some tiny part of me was also a little relieved—and confused by the discrepancy in my own emotions.

“Hope I’m interrupting something.” The reaper swiveled to face us and Nash sat up, cheeks already flaming.

“Get. Out,” Nash growled.

Tod rolled his eyes. “I made Kaylee a promise. As usual, I’m just the messenger.”

“What’s up, Tod?” I laid one hand on Nash’s arm before he could say anything else.

“Mom’s in the kitchen with your dad, trying to talk him out of doing something stupid. It sounds like she could use your help.”




5


“There’s always an exception, Harmony,” my father said, and the raw pain in his voice stole my breath with an almost physical force. I was scared, and pissed off, and riding an unforeseen wave of sexual resolve in the face of certain death. But my father was in serious pain over a loss he refused to accept as inevitable.

The fact that I was that loss was almost too much for me to wrap my mind around.

I inched down the hall silently, aching to see my father’s face, but if they knew I was there, they’d stop talking, and I’d lose this glimpse into his true emotional state.

“Aiden.” Harmony’s whisper was so soft I almost didn’t recognize it. “I am so, so sorry. I wish I could say I know how you feel, but I didn’t have any warning with Tod.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” my dad answered, his voice hard now, like he could hold off the unavoidable with nothing but sheer will. “There’s a way out of this, and I’m going to find it.”

I peeked through the living room and into the kitchen just as Harmony scooted her chair closer to my father’s. They sat at the table with their backs to me, and I could only see them from the shoulders up, over the half wall separating the two rooms.

“Aiden, there’s nothing you can do.” She slid one arm around his waist and leaned her head on his shoulder, and I held my breath to make sure I could hear the rest. “Do you really want to miss your daughter’s last few days of life to chase answers that just aren’t there?”

“I don’t want to miss anything. And I don’t want her to miss anything, either—that’s the whole point. I’ve been such a fool, Harmony. I wasted thirteen years of her life letting my brother raise her because it hurt to look at her. Every time I saw her, I saw her mother. I only got Kaylee back six months ago, and now she’s being taken away. Six months isn’t long enough!”

“No one’s taking her away,” Harmony insisted gently. “Her time’s up. It happens to everyone.”

“What would you do?” my dad demanded, pulling away from her. “If you knew Nash was about to die, would you ever quit looking for a way to stop it? Would you give up on him?”

“I …”

“It doesn’t matter what she would do.” I stepped around the wall, and Tod appeared at my side. Nash’s footsteps squeaked on the hall tile behind me, even though I’d asked them both to stay in my room.

Harmony and my dad stood facing us, but they were both too good at hiding their feelings for me to read anything more than general angst. They were better at that than I would ever be, considering how little time I had left to perfect the art.

“Dad, don’t do this,” I begged, frozen where I stood. “You can’t change this, and if you try, you’ll only be putting yourself at risk. Do you really want me to spend my last six days worrying that we’re both going to die on Thursday?”

“I don’t want you to worry about anything.” He ran one hand through hair that showed no sign of graying, less than a month before his one hundred thirty-fourth birthday. “I want you to finish high school, and break curfew, and keep giving me excuses to toss the Hudson boys out of the house, not necessarily in that order. I want you to have a normal life. A long one.”

I bit my lip, trying to hold back tears as he crossed the room toward me. “Well, that’s not going to happen. And I’m not going to be able to enjoy what life I have left if I’m worried about you getting yourself killed trying to do the impossible.”

“Kaylee.” He reached for me, but I stepped back and crossed my arms over my chest.

“Promise me, Dad. Promise you’ll leave this alone.”

“You know I can’t—”

“Promise,” I insisted, and his stoic expression crumpled beneath a burden of pain and responsibility I couldn’t imagine.

“Fine. I promise,” he said at last, and I let him fold me into a hug.

And as he squeezed me, his heart beating against my ear, I knew only two things for sure: I was going to die, and my father was lying.

I stood on the front porch and knocked again—there was no doorbell—then stared down the rough gravel road at a series of run-down houses and old cars, their age and ruthless depreciation exposed by harsh March sunlight. My own neighborhood was dated—the houses were small with one-car garages and tiny yards. But compared to living in this part of town, I had nothing to complain about.

Finally, the door opened and Sabine raised one dark brow at me, her hand still on the knob. “You look like shit.”

“I wish I could say the same.” And I really meant it. I’d barely gotten any rest the night before—frankly, wasting what little time I had left sleeping felt almost criminal—and I was paying the price with pale skin, dark circles and a generally exhausted appearance. Sabine, on the other hand, only required four hours of sleep a night, yet she constantly walked the fine line between unconventionally hot and darkly captivating. A fact which fascinated and irritated me to no end.

“Any chance you’re here to admit defeat and hand over your boyfriend, like the good little bean sidhe we both know you are?”

My temper flared, but I held it in check, because of what I had to say next. “Actually, I need a favor.”

Sabine turned around and stalked into the darkened house, and I decided the open door was as much of an invitation as I was going to get.

“Is your foster mom home?” I followed her into a living room barely furnished with threadbare furniture smelling vaguely of old sweat.

“Rarely. She stays with her boyfriend most nights. Always comes back to collect the reimbursement check, though.”

“So you’re all alone?”

Sabine propped her hands on hips half-exposed by the low waist of her jeans and the short hem of a thin black tank top. “I’m a nightmare, Kaylee. Anyone who breaks in here would leave screaming. Or not at all.” She sat on the arm of an old brown-and-yellow striped couch. “Besides, I didn’t come here for parental supervision—I came for an address in the Eastlake school zone.” The mara had scared and manipulated her way into this foster home just to be near Nash. And evidently to drive me insane. “Now, if you would just step down and relinquish the prize ….”

“Nash isn’t—” but before I could finish insisting that my boyfriend wasn’t a prize to be won, a fierce, low rumbling rolled over the room, raising hair all over my body. I turned to find Sabine’s dog—Styx’s littermate—growling at me from the kitchen doorway, his tiny body tensed and ready to attack. Nothing that small and fluffy should have been able to make such a threatening sound, but thanks to their Nether-hound father, the entire litter sported teeth that could easily shred flesh and jaws that could snap most human long bones.

“What’s his name again?” I asked, careful not to make any threatening moves until Sabine had called the little monster off.

“Cujo.”

Of course it was Cujo. “Any clue why Cujo looks like he wants to chew my face off?”

“Probably because he wants to chew your face off.”

“Funny. Could you call him off?”

Her satisfied grin grated my nerves like nails on a chalkboard. “Only because I’m curious. Why the hell should I do you a favor, when you consistently deny me the one thing I want?” She snapped her fingers and Cujo followed her into a tiny galley-style kitchen, where she pulled a package of raw hamburger from the fridge and dropped it on the floor without even pulling back the plastic. Cujo dug in like he’d never seen meat before, though he looked pretty well fed to me.

I stood at one end of the kitchen, trying to decide if I should sit at the table or wait to be invited. Which probably wasn’t gonna happen. “Because …” I hesitated, trying to make up my mind while she dug a can of generic soda from the snot-green fridge. Then I sucked in a deep breath and spit it out. “Because I’m going to be dead in five days, and whether I like it or not, you’re the one Nash is going to turn to when he’s half out of his mind with grief. Which means I’m practically doing you a favor.” If my death would benefit anyone, it would be Sabine. “That means you owe me. And considering the timetable I’m on, I’m gonna need payment up front.”

Sabine popped the tab on her can and stared at me. “You’re dying? For real?”

“Not till Thursday.” At first, the thought had made me sick to my stomach every single time it crossed my conscious mind. But after contemplating my own untimely demise roughly four thousand times, the original terror and denial had given way to a hollow, distant acceptance. Thinking about my own death now had about the same effect on me as thinking about the eventual incineration of planet Earth, as it’s consumed by its own sun.

“You’re lying.” Sabine laughed like her life was a joke and I was the punch line. Then she drained half her can and brushed past me into the living room.

I followed her and perched on the edge of the ugliest, most ancient brown recliner I’d ever seen. “Why would I lie?”

She shrugged and set her can on the milk crate serving as an end table. “Habit? You’re not exactly a pillar of truth.”

I wanted to argue, but I couldn’t without proving her point. But to my credit, my lies were really more half truths, and they were always intended to help someone. Whereas Sabine’s compulsive truths were usually intended to hurt someone else or to entertain her.

“I’m not lying.” Another deep breath, and I nearly gagged on the acrid stench of stale cigarette smoke. Which I then spat out, along with an offer I really didn’t want to make. “Read me.”

Sabine sat up straight, her black eyes suddenly bright with interest. “Seriously?”

No. I shuddered, then swallowed my own bitter fear. “If that’s what it takes for you to believe me.”

She shrugged. “The offer itself was enough to make me believe you. But you can’t take it back now.” She crossed the small room in an instant, and my jaw clenched involuntarily when she dropped onto her knees in front of me. “You know I have to touch you, right? The stronger the contact, the better the reading.”

“Great.” I held out my hand and she wound her fingers around mine, like I’d once seen her do with Nash when neither of them knew I was watching. Their contact had looked intimate. Comfortable. I wondered if ours would look the same from the outside.

I started to close my eyes, but Sabine shook her head and leaned closer for a better look. Her hand was warm and dry, her grip firm. And as I watched, her pupils bled into the near-black of her irises, and the whole room seemed to dim around us.

A cold wave of fear swam over me, consuming me. It was uncomfortable, like being the center of attention in a room full of hellions.

Then that fear came into focus, and suddenly my own death was the only thing I could think about. Would it hurt? Would there be blood? Would anyone else have to see me die? Would I see them cry?

Would I die alone?

The lack of answers scared me almost worse than the questions themselves. But it was over in a second, and when Sabine let go of my hand, I realized she could have held on much longer.

“Holy shit, you’re gonna die.” She looked stunned. “You’re really going to die, and you’re terrified of death.”

“Is there a more rational reaction?”

The mara frowned, and her eyes darkened again. “Also, you’re planning to sleep with Nash before you go, and you’re scared you won’t be any good.”

Damn it. I could feel my cheeks burn. “Let’s just keep that bit between us, okay?”

Her dark brows rose. “Is that the favor?”

I scowled. “No.”

“No promises, then. And just FYI, you won’t be any good. Not the first time, anyway.” I started to stand, my cheeks flaming now. Why couldn’t she help me, just this once, without throwing my own fears into my face? But Sabine put one hand on my arm and pulled me back onto the chair before I could stomp off. “You won’t be any good, but he won’t care, Kaylee. Because he’s a guy, so any sex is good sex. And because he loves you,” she added, lips curled like the words were bitter on her tongue.

I blinked away unshed, angry tears, but couldn’t bring myself to thank her for softening the blow. Why was she antagonizing a dying woman anyway?

“You know I can’t let this happen, right? You can’t sleep with him, Kaylee. You have to break up with him.”

I rolled my eyes. “Okay, if I haven’t handed him over to you yet, why the hell would I do it now?”

She blinked at me, like the answer should have been obvious. “Because he loves you, and you’re dying. If you don’t dump him now—make a clean break—you’re always going to be the tragic lost love. How the hell am I supposed to compete with a ghost?”

“I don’t care how you compete!” But didn’t I, at least a little? As weird as it was to think about the two of them together, I wanted Nash to be happy after I died. I wanted him to be able to move on. But I couldn’t hurt him to make that happen.

“Fine. Then think about him. He won’t see it now, but you’d be doing him a favor. Helping him move on.”

“It’s not going to happen, Sabine.”

“Is this about sex? No one should die a virgin—I agree with you there. But you don’t need Nash for that. I could make a phone call. Of course, you’d have to break up with Nash for this to work …”

My head spun, and I didn’t know what to yell at her for first. So I decided to ignore the whole thing and focus on the favor I needed.

“Sabine. As much fun as these little forays into my personal life always are—” fun, like public incontinence “—I really need a favor.”

“Beyond me facilitating the timely loss of your virginity? ‘Cause I think that’s a pretty generous offer.”

“Yeah. You’re a walking charity. But I need you to find out what Mr. Beck is. And obviously I don’t have a lot of time.”

Sabine watched me while she took a long drink from her can, pointedly not offering me one. “Why?”

“Because I went to see Danica Sussman in the hospital, and she admitted that the baby wasn’t Max’s. And the nurse said the miscarriage nearly killed her, which is evidently pretty rare.”

“Well, aren’t you the little sleuth?” Sabine raised both brows, reluctantly impressed. “I’d start calling you Veronica Mars, if you weren’t quite so mousy.” She grinned when I ground my teeth together, determined to bite my tongue until she agreed to help me.

“So I was thinking maybe you were right. Maybe Mr. Beck is the father. I mean, if he’s not human, the baby wouldn’t have been fully human either, right? And that could explain why her miscarriage was so … awful. Right?”

“I guess.” Sabine set her can on another milk crate and crossed her arms over her chest. “But I hope you’re not basing this on what I said at lunch. That was just a theory. I have lots of time to think those up while people are cowering away from me in the halls and avoiding my eyes in class.” Because unless she was careful to keep it in check, creepy vibes emanated from Sabine like BO from an unwashed jock. “Wanna hear this theory I have about Tod? I think you’re gonna like it…

.”No.” I shook my head sharply and held her eye contact, determined to get through my request with the bare minimum of Sabine’s nosy, spiteful tangents. “I don’t want to hear any more of your theories. I just want you to follow up on this one, as a favor to a dying classmate. Please.”

Sabine watched me in open curiosity. “Why do you care? I mean, you’re going to be dead in a few days. Do you really want to spend your last few days tracking down whoever Danica Sussman cheated on her boyfriend with? Don’t you think it’s possible you’re grasping at a problem that doesn’t really exist to distract yourself from a reality you’re not ready to face?” Sabine stopped and grinned, obviously pleased with herself. “Damn, that was perceptive of me. And I didn’t even get that from reading your fear!”

I sighed. “I fully admit that’s what I’m doing. Don’t you think you’d want a distraction if you found out you were going to die before the end of the week?”

“Hell yeah. But I’d find it in Nash’s bed, not in Danica’s possibly skeleton-bearing closet.”

Sabine’s eyes widened. “You already tried, didn’t you?” When I didn’t answer, her smile grew. “Nash turned you down? Wow. That’s unexpected. And really satisfying …”

“He didn’t turn me down. We were interrupted,” I insisted, but as usual, she refused to rise above her own moment of triumph in the rivalry she’d decided we were in.

“And he didn’t want to pick up where you left off? Try not to read too much into that. It isn’t necessarily because you don’t know what you’re doing …”

My temper flared, and my jaw ached from being clenched. “Okay, look.” I leaned forward in the chair, capturing her gaze in spite of the discomfort of looking directly into the mara’s eyes. “I get that you want Nash. And as much as it kills me to admit this, you’re going to get a shot at him in a few days. I can make that easier for you. Or I can make it very, very hard.”

Sabine’s eyes narrowed and darkened, and suddenly the room felt colder. “Are you threatening me?”

I shrugged. “Yeah. Kinda.”

Her brows rose. “I should be pissed off, but this is actually kind of funny.”

“I’m serious. If you don’t leave me and Nash alone for five more days, I will make it clear that I can’t possibly rest in peace knowing the two of you are together, and you really will be competing with a ghost. How’s that for a threat?”

She nodded solemnly. “Not bad, for a first attempt. So what do I get if I do let you … have him?”

“A truce. I agree not to stand in the way of your relationship with Nash once I’m gone, and you agree not to stand in the way of our relationship until then.”

“But I want him now.”

I shrugged. “And I want to live. Looks like the universe mixed up our wish lists. So what do you say? Truce now, and my blessing for the two of you, once I’m gone?” I’d thought saying that would make me want to rip my own hair out, but it was actually a bit of a relief. Because the truth was that after I was gone, Nash would need her. Resisting addiction wouldn’t be easy for him, coupled with grief, and she could help keep him straight.

Sabine blinked, and I could practically see the gears turning behind her dark, dark eyes. She knew what I was offering—Nash would let himself be happy with her if he didn’t think I’d object. “Fine,” she said finally. “But I think I’m getting the better end of this deal.”

The scary part was that I believed her. “Whatever. For now, I really need you to find out about Mr. Beck.”

Sabine’s gaze narrowed on me in sudden suspicion. “Are you sure you don’t have a more personal interest in this? I know you’re trying to lose the big V before you meet the big D, and since Nash isn’t sounding incredibly interested, you may be looking into some other options. And I have to respect your taste. Beck would be one yummy hunk of flesh, even if he didn’t have a fear in the world. But why don’t you try looking a little closer to home—”

“Ew, Sabine, I don’t want to sleep with Mr. Beck!” I couldn’t stop the shudder of revulsion crawling up my spine at the thought that he might be connected to what happened to Danica. “And Nash is interested.”

“But you haven’t done it yet …?”

“That’s none of your business.” I started backing toward the front door.

Sabine shrugged, and I wanted to smack the smug look off her face. “He’ll tell me all about it once you’re gone, and I can wait a few more days for that.”

“Do you even have a heart in there?” I demanded, one hand on the front doorknob.

“Not anymore. I gave it to Nash before he even met you.” She couldn’t quite hide a flash of true pain, but for once, I was unaffected by someone else’s suffering. Like she’d said, I’d be gone in a few days, and she could wait that long to pick over my corpse and claim what I’d left behind.

“Just find out what Mr. Beck is—without letting him know you’re not human. Can you find some reason to touch him and read his fears a little more in depth?” Thanks to the braided bracelets we both wore—woven strands of dissimulatus, to keep hellions from identifying us from the Netherworld—he’d never know either of our species unless we gave ourselves away.

“If you think he’s really screwing students, finding a reason to touch him will be the easy part.” Sabine leaned back on the couch, making no move to show me out.

“Yeah. For you, I guess it will be.”

Her brows rose again, in challenge. “You calling me a slut?”

“No.” I sighed, trying to push aside thoughts I really didn’t want to think. “I think you’re fanatically loyal to Nash, at least in your heart.” And when I was gone, that loyalty would probably be mutual.

“Sabine?” I said, and her focus narrowed on me, her attention as serious now as my tone of voice. “I know you’ll be there for him when I’m gone.” In more ways than I wanted to contemplate. “But don’t even think about touching him until I’m cold and in the ground.”




6


Sunday morning, I woke up alone. My dad had left a note on the fridge, telling me he’d be back for dinner. No explanation. But I knew what he was doing. He was looking for a way to save my life. I also knew that if he found one, he’d take it, no matter what it cost him, or anyone else.

What it cost me was obvious. Why did my father always seem to demonstrate his love for me through his own absence?

I ate a pint of Phish Food for breakfast—why worry about either calories or poor nutrition when I wouldn’t be there to suffer from either one?—then got showered and dressed on autopilot. After half an hour of flipping through TV shows I had no interest in, I picked up my phone to call Emma—then remembered that she was working. But before I could slide my cell back into my pocket, it started playing Nash’s dedicated ring tone.

I smiled and flipped the phone open.

“Hey,” Nash said into my ear, his voice deep and gruff, like he’d just woken up. “You busy?”

“Got nothin’ scheduled till sometime Thursday. Why? What’cha got in mind?”

Bedsprings groaned, and Nash’s voice got louder. “Lady’s choice. Lunch? Movie? Hell, skydiving? You name it, and I’ll do it.”

I hesitated for one heart-thudding moment. “My dad’s out. I could use some company….”

Silence, but for a single exhalation over the line. “Seriously?” he asked. But we both knew what I was really saying. “You sure you’re ready?”

“Yeah.” No. But I’d run out of time to get ready. “Bring protection.” ‘Cause I sure didn’t have any.

“Give me half an hour.”

I closed my phone and slid it into my pocket, suddenly so nervous I couldn’t even breathe properly. Every breath seemed to come too early or too late, like I was alternately suffocating and hyperventilating.

Was that normal?

Feeling clueless and stupid, I squelched the urge to call Emma for advice—she wouldn’t have her phone behind the counter at work anyway—then stood and stared around my living room like I’d never seen it before. I felt like I should do something to … prepare. But damned if I knew what.

To distract myself from the endless list of things I suddenly realized I didn’t know about sex—not the science stuff, the real stuff; stuff I’d never really contemplated, but that now seemed vital—I made my bed. Then brushed my teeth. Then changed out of my boring cotton underwear for a pair of slightly less boring cotton underwear, silently cursing the embarrassment that had kept me from buying actual grown-up clothes when Emma had dragged me into Victoria’s Secret a couple of months earlier.

When none of that helped, I glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall. T-minus nine minutes, and counting. It would take five just to boot up my laptop. So I sat on the couch and pulled out my phone. Then did the unthinkable.

I called Sabine.

The mara answered on the third ring. “School doesn’t start for another twenty-one hours, Kaylee,” she groaned. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to Beck yet.”

“I know. I, um … I need some advice.” I closed my eyes and put one hand over them, silently cursing myself.

“From me?” She couldn’t have sounded more surprised if she’d woken up bald and toothless.

“I wouldn’t have called you if I had any other options, but Emma’s at work, and my mom’s dead, and Harmony’s … well, she’s Nash’s mom, so that’s out of the question. And that only leaves you.”

Bedsprings creaked again—was I the only one who got up before lunch?—and her hand scratched the receiver as she covered it. I couldn’t make out whatever she yelled at her foster mother, but it definitely wasn’t … polite.

Then a door slammed and most of the background noise died. And Sabine was back.

“I’m assuming this is about sex. If I’m wrong, correct me now, or this conversation is going to get really weird.”

“You’re not wrong. I have questions, and I need answers, fast. Nash will be here in—” I glanced at the clock again “—seven minutes.”

“Cutting it pretty close, aren’t you?” She sounded distinctly unhappy to hear that I was minutes away from sleeping with Nash, and I choked back the sudden fear that her answers would sabotage my first—and likely only—sexual experience.

“The opportunity came up kind of fast.”

“What aspect of our relationship made you think I’d give you advice on sleeping with Nash?”

“We have a truce!” I fell back on the couch in exasperation.

“I said I wouldn’t get in your way—I never said I’d help.”

“Please, Sabine. You’re going to have him for the rest of your life, but I may only get this one shot.” When that didn’t work, I sighed and tried from another angle. “You were right. I don’t know what I’m doing. Please help me.” Even I could hear the anxiety in my voice, so I wasn’t surprised when Sabine laughed.

“Okay,” she said, and suspicion lingered on the edge of my mind. Why would she agree so easily? “But first, breathe, Kaylee. He’s not even in the room yet, and you sound like you’re about to pass out.”

“That’s your fault.” I sucked in a deep breath and held it for a couple of seconds. “You told me I wouldn’t be any good.”

“Yeah, and I also told you it wouldn’t matter.”

But it would. I stretched out on the couch with my eyes still covered. “Look, I don’t have time to get good at this and I’d like to avoid humiliating myself. Just this once. Are you going to answer my questions, or do I need to go create the most embarrassing Google search history known to womankind?” Not that there was time for that anymore.

“Fine.” I could practically see her pouting, in my head. “What do you want to know?”

Another deep breath. “Don’t laugh, but … what am I supposed to do?”

Sabine didn’t laugh, and I almost died of shock. “Anything,” she said. “Nothing. Whatever feels right.”

“That’s a nonanswer.” And it only made me more nervous.

The mara sighed. “It’s the truth. If you don’t know what to do, don’t worry about it. Nash knows what he’s doing. Trust me.”

My stomach clenched around my ice-cream breakfast. “Could you please not remind me of the two of you together?”

“Who’s asking who for help here?”

I was regretting asking already. But there was no one else. “What about my hands? What do I do with them?”

That time Sabine laughed, but she sounded genuinely amused, not cruel. It was a nice—if suspicious—change. “Touch … whatever you want to touch.”

I groaned and squeezed my eyes shut tighter. “Anything more specific?”

“Use your imagination. But really, you can’t go wrong. He’s going to want you to touch him.” I started to ask another question, but she spoke again before I could. “Fortunately for you, the process is kind of foolproof, Kaylee. The basics, anyway. People have been doing it since the beginning of time—with no instructions. Just keep it simple.”

Right. Simple.

“Do you know how the French describe an orgasm?” Sabine asked, and the familiar edge of mischief in her voice was almost a relief.

“How the hell would I know that?” Sexual euphemisms weren’t covered by Mrs. Brown’s French II class syllabus.

“They call it la petite mort. The little death. I think there’s irony in there somewhere. At least for you.”

“Wow. Thanks for that,” I snapped. “I love being reminded that I’m about to die.”

She exhaled heavily. “You know how much this sucks for me, right? I have one thing with Nash that he doesn’t have with you. One thing. And you just called me for advice about how best to take that away from me. If we hadn’t just called a truce, I’d think you were finally learning how to play the game.”

“I’m not—” But before I could finish insisting that I hadn’t meant to rub it in her face, Nash knocked on the door, and I stood so fast my head spun. “He’s here. Gotta go.”

“Swell,” Sabine said, and her voice cracked a little on that one syllable. “But call Emma when you want to talk about it afterward. I’m not that kind of friend.” She hung up and I slid my phone into my pocket. Then I wiped sweat from my palms onto my jeans and opened the door.

Nash stood on the porch, smiling. Waiting.

His smile slipped a little when he saw my face, and a thread of doubt swirled through his eyes before he could squelch it. “Are you sure about this?”

“Yeah.” I grinned nervously. “Yes. Come in.” I grabbed his hand and pulled him into the house without stepping back, so that he was pressed against me when I swung the door shut. “I want this.” It’s now or never.

“Me, too. You have no idea how badly I want this.” Nash kissed me, and I forgot to be nervous. I forgot about everything except him, and the heat between us, and everything that had seemed forbidden before but was now suddenly available, and irresistible, and … right in front of me.

I backed slowly across the living room, still kissing Nash. Breathing him. Tasting him. I let him guide us through the doorway and down the hall, one hand around my waist while mine slid around his neck. I clung to him like the safety bar on a roller coaster, hurtling down the track fast enough to steal my breath and scatter my doubts. And that was the whole point, right? To put aside fear and let myself feel something, before I’d lost that chance.

When we crossed into my room—I knew by the change in light and the feel of carpet beneath my toes—I pulled his shirt over his head and dropped it on the floor.

My pulse roared in my ears. I’d seen him shirtless a million times, but never like this. Never with such a storm of need and blatant lust churning in his eyes, so hot that smoke should’ve been rising off his skin. Never with the understanding that we weren’t going to stop there.

I was already out of breath when Nash stepped back and his scalding gaze met mine. He lifted one brow in silent question, and when I nodded, he slid his hands beneath my shirt, warm against my sides. His hands skimmed up my skin slowly, dragging the material with them, leaving chills in their wake. I raised my arms and he pulled the shirt over my head.

I didn’t see where my shirt fell because he was kissing me again, and his arms wrapped around me. My bra pulled tight for a minute, and I gasped against his lips when the material suddenly fell to the floor between us. Then we were chest to chest, skin to skin. For the first time.

At least, that I remembered …

But I pushed that thought away. So what if he’d already been this far with me before, when I wasn’t in possession of my own body? That nonmemory didn’t matter anymore, right? Thanks to my truncated lifeline, nothing mattered anymore, except how I spent the next five days. And I wasn’t going to spend them being ruled by fear.

I pulled Nash down for another kiss, the only reliable cure for encroaching panic. His hands fell away from me, and a moment later we were on the bed, and his pants were gone, though I had no memory of that happening.

I lay back on the pillow and closed my eyes, and the world was reduced to his lips, and hands, and a flood of sensations that were nothing like I’d imagined, yet somehow even better. I got lost in the feel of him—everywhere all at once—and only found myself when he unbuttoned my jeans.

Startled, in spite of my own intentions, I sat up, and his hands fell away again. Nash studied my surely churning irises, watching me closely. “You want to stop?” He would take no chances this time, and that meant the world to me.

“No.” My voice was a shaky whisper. “Don’t stop.”

He smiled—a burst of heat before the flames rolled over me—and I lay back again, staring at that crack in my ceiling as he slowly slid my pants over my hips, leaving my underwear in place. For now.

This is going to happen. My choice. I wanted it.

But when Nash’s face appeared over mine, his weight settling onto me gently, I couldn’t breathe. He was naked. Completely.

“You okay?” he whispered, kissing the sensitive skin below my left ear.

“Yeah. Yes.” I nodded, just in case I wasn’t clear, running my hands over his chest.

He kissed me again, and his knee slid slowly between mine. I listened to my heart pound in my ears, wondering if he could hear it. Wondering if he could feel it.

His lips traveled south of my collarbone and I threw my head back, and—

Someone knocked on my bedroom door.

I sucked in a cold, shocked breath. Nash rolled off me and sat up, breathing too fast. Already reaching for his pants. I flipped the edge of my comforter up to cover myself, my face flaming. Thursday be damned, my dad was going to kill me now.

Right after he killed Nash.

“Just a second!” I yelled, then I held one finger to my lips, warning Nash to be quiet. Saying I was an adult for the next five days didn’t mean my father was going to play along with my decision. Or that Nash would live long enough to see me die.

“It’s me,” a voice called from the hallway, and Nash threw his pants at the floor instead of pulling them on.

“Tod, get the hell out of here before I kill you myself,” he growled. “And this time, you won’t be coming back.”

“I need to talk to Kaylee.” Tod’s syllables were bitten off, like he was speaking through clenched teeth. “Just be glad I’m not her dad. You guys aren’t exactly stealthy.”

“We’re not in the mood to talk.” Nash sat on the edge of my bed and slid one arm around my bare back while I clutched the covers to my chest, mortified beyond speech.

“It’s important,” Tod said through the door. “Get dressed. I’m coming in.”

“Damn it!” Nash swore, pawing through the tangle of material on the floor for his boxer briefs. I stood and scanned the room for my clothes, and Nash spat profanities at his brother while I fastened my bra and pulled my shirt over my head.

“Time’s up,” Tod said, and an instant later he appeared at the foot of my bed. He glanced at me long enough to realize I wasn’t wearing pants, then turned around while I pulled them on.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Nash snapped. He bent to pick up his pants again, then straightened, his gaze narrowed on Tod in anger and suspicion. “How did you know to knock?” Nash demanded, and my cheeks flamed like hot coals when I followed his logic. “You usually just blink into the room, right? How did you know not to this time?”

I zipped my pants and Tod turned to me, dismissing his half-naked brother. “Sorry, Kay. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important.”

“What’s wrong?” I couldn’t manage any more than that as I pushed hair back from my face, trying to pretend he hadn’t just seen me in my underwear.

“I got your reaper’s name.” He glanced at the ground for a moment before meeting my gaze again, and I felt my heart stop. “It’s him, Kaylee. The same one as before. They’re bringing in the reaper who killed your mom.”

“Does my dad know?” I stared at the kitchen floor, trying to wrap my brain around the facts. Minutes earlier, I’d been seconds away from losing my virginity and concerned with nothing else. Now I sat at the kitchen table, virginity frustratingly intact, embarrassed beyond belief, and suddenly scared of my approaching death for a whole new reason.

My mother’s reaper. Now my reaper. Again.

“No one knows, except you two.” Tod leaned against the refrigerator, watching me, probably wondering if he should have said anything at all. Knowing who would be coming for me didn’t exactly lessen the stress of my last days. But I was glad he’d told me.

“How could this even happen?” I demanded, as Nash paced back and forth between me and Tod. “This reaper—what’s his name?”

“Thane,” Tod said, watching me from across the room. “If he had a last name, it’s long gone now.”

“Thane.” Once I’d heard it, I had to say it. I had to try out the name of the man who’d taken my mother’s life out of spite when he was denied mine.

I shook my head to clear it and found both Hudson boys waiting for me to finish my thought. “Shouldn’t this bastard be on the run or something. I mean, he’s psychotic, right? He tried to kill me again while I was still in the hospital, before my mom was even buried!”

“Yeah, and if he’d actually been caught with an unauthorized soul, he’d have been fired on the spot,” Tod said. “But your dad stopped him before he could kill you again. The bright side, obviously, is that you’re still alive—at least so far. But the not-so-bright side is that Thane got away with attempted murder and potential soul trafficking because no one in the afterlife knew he’d tried it. Your dad didn’t even know he could report the incident, much less who to report it to. So, from what I can tell, Thane’s spent the past thirteen years in another district, where he continued reaping off the record, but was never caught.”

“So you’re saying the only way to keep him from killing me this time is if he’d succeeded in killing me last time?” My life had already been a nightmare. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that my death was becoming one, too.

“Yeah.” Tod shrugged miserably.

“But there’s no proof he did anything, after he went after Kaylee, is there?” Nash said. “If there was proof, they’d have repossessed his soul and sent him on to a true death, right? So how sure are we that he’s ever even reaped off the record?”

Tod exhaled slowly, then met his brother’s gaze. “Not sure enough to openly accuse him, but sure enough to have caught Levi’s attention. Turns out he was Thane’s supervisor when Kaylee died the first time. He didn’t like Thane, but he didn’t have proof of anything, so he had him transferred out of the district. Then, when Levi saw Thane listed for your reaping the other day, he did some digging. There are no official complaints, but there are a few discrepancies in Thane’s last district. No one’s associated them with him yet, but then, they don’t know what he tried to do to you. He’s never been caught in the act, or with an unauthorized soul.”

“So, how did he wind up in line to kill Kaylee again? Legally, this time?” Nash asked, sinking into the chair next to mine. “The bastard actually got promoted?”

“Not yet. This is something like a courtesy call, if I understand correctly,” Tod explained. “Thane is up for advancement—proof positive that the system is flawed—and since Kaylee was supposed to be his kill in the first place, some idiot higher up in the chain of command has decided that she should be his test case. A chance to finish what he started and secure a promotion.”

And that’s when I truly understood why Tod had considered his news important enough to interrupt me and Nash, even knowing what we were … up to. “So, if my death is the key to Thane’s promotion, there’s no way he’s going to let my dad do anything to mess that up.”

“That’s right.” Tod’s eyes were eerily, frighteningly still, and suddenly the “grim” descriptor seemed to fit him perfectly. “And if Thane gets this promotion, he’ll be working without a regular schedule, which will leave him plenty of time and opportunity to reap souls off the record, for profit or his own amusement. And what would amuse him more than reaping the soul of a man who’s gotten in his way not once, not twice, but three times before?”

That man, of course, would be my father.

“No.” No!

“Kaylee, it’s going to be all right.” Tod started across the room toward me, but stopped when Nash scooted closer to rub my back.

“No, it’s not. He’s going to kill me. That sucks, but I could almost deal with that, because I thought that after Thursday, all my problems would be over.” Nash would have Sabine to lean on, and I wouldn’t care what they did together, because I wouldn’t even exist anymore. My dad would be sad, but he’d still be alive, and eventually he’d deal.

But Tod’s bombshell had changed everything.

Tears filled my eyes, and I scrubbed my face with my hands to hide them. But I could still hear them in my voice. “If my dad makes trouble and Thane kills him, what will he do with his soul?”

Warm hands wrapped around my wrists and gently pulled my hands away from my face. I blinked, expecting to see Nash’s hazel eyes staring into mine—but I saw blue instead. Tod knelt in front of me, holding my arms, staring straight into my eyes. “That’s not going to happen.”

“Don’t promise her things you can’t deliver,” Nash snapped from the chair to my left, and I could hear anger in his voice, just as thick as the tears were in mine. “We all know how well that worked out for Addison.”

Tod’s jaw clenched, but his attention never left me. “I can’t stop whatever’s going to happen on Thursday, Kaylee. More than anything in the world, I wish I could.” I nodded, sniffling. “But Levi said if I can get proof that Thane’s been reaping off the record, he’ll take it to his boss, and at the very least, we can get him removed from your case and held for review. And that should protect your dad. No promises …” The reaper glanced pointedly at his brother, then met my tear-blurred gaze again. “But I’ll do what I can.”

“Thank you.” I wiped away more tears, trying to balance overwhelming fear and frustration with the bone of hope he’d just tossed me.

“How do you know all this already?” Nash’s gaze narrowed on his brother when the reaper finally stood and stepped back. “You popped in here like you had urgent news, but if it was so urgent in the first place, how did you and Levi have time to work this out?”

I glanced at Nash, surprised by his anger. “He’s just trying to help,” I insisted, sliding my hand into his.

“Don’t you think his timing is a little convenient?”

Tod actually laughed. “Little brother, the last thing I was trying to be was convenient.”

Something silent passed between them. Some kind of unspoken challenge that made my stomach pitch. “What am I missing?” They’d never been best friends, but I’d rarely seen them openly hostile.

Nash never even glanced at me. “You’ve delivered your news. Now go deliver some pizza.”

I glanced at him in surprise. “What’s wrong with you?”

But when Nash didn’t answer, Tod did, his eyes darker than usual, but still steady. “He wants to pick up where the two of you left off.”

I could feel myself flush, and Nash’s hand tightened around mine. But he was watching his brother again. “Do you have a problem with that, Tod?”

That sick feeling in my stomach grew stronger, and I looked up to find the reaper watching me, like he was waiting for some kind of signal. And when I didn’t give him one—when I couldn’t even fully understand the words they were saying, much less the ones they weren’t—he exhaled heavily, holding my gaze. “Not if that’s what she wants. At least this time she’s actually in there and able to speak for herself.” He tapped his head to illustrate his point, and I struggled to breathe through a complicated mix of embarrassment and squirming discomfort.

I didn’t like the reminder that he knew what had happened. What Nash had let happen when he was high. I didn’t want to think about it, and I didn’t want to know that anyone else ever thought about it.

Nash went stiff at my side, and I could practically feel his temper rolling off him in waves. “Get. Out.”

Tod watched me for another second, while I tried desperately to calm the storm of confusion battering my heart from all sides. Then he disappeared.

“I can’t believe he said that to you.” Nash pulled me up by the hand he still held, and I let him tug me toward the living room.

“He was talking to you,” I said softly, as I sank onto the couch next to him, and Nash went very, very still.

It was the thing we didn’t talk about. It had happened, more than once, and it had broken us up for a while, but he felt horrible about it, and the whole thing was behind us now. And I was fine as long as I didn’t think about it. About what was said and seen and done while I wasn’t in control of my own body.

Nash looked straight into my eyes with an intensity and sincerity that made me catch my breath. “It’s never going to happen again. Not even if you lived to be a thousand. You know that, right?”

“You’re here, aren’t you?” I said at last. Wasn’t that proof enough that I was trying to move past it?

But I couldn’t get Tod’s expression out of my head. There’d been just a flash of motion in his irises—a swirl of blue too quick to interpret.

I closed my eyes and tried to clear my head. Tried to get back to the place Nash and I had been an hour before, alone, in my room, where thoughts didn’t matter—it was all about feeling. But when I met Nash’s gaze, I knew the moment was over. He was still mad at Tod, and hurt by the reminder of things we’d put behind us. And maybe I was, too.

“He did this on purpose.” Nash let his head fall against the back of the couch. “He dredged up old problems to start new trouble.” And this time I couldn’t argue.

As it turns out, there’s no greater impediment to la petite mort—the little death—than a visit from the real thing.




7


I blinked in the dark, confusion covering me like a blanket over my head. Why was I awake? Then Styx growled, and I realized two things at once: I was in my room, and I wasn’t alone.

I sat up, heart pounding, pulse whooshing in my ears. Light from the hall painted a strip of color over one corner of my desk and the end of my bed, while the rest of the room stood shrouded in shadow. Styx lay near my footboard, curled up like she was still asleep, except for her raised head, shining black eyes, and sharp teeth, exposed as she growled in warning.

Avari. Harmony had said Styx would wake up if a hellion came anywhere near me, even from the other side of the world barrier, and though I’d managed to piss off two other hellions—Belphagore and Invidia—in the six months since I’d learned I was a bean sidhe, Avari would always be my default guess. My go-to bad guy, a title awarded on the basis of persistence alone.

It creeped me out to know that Avari was wandering around the Netherworld version of my house—a field of razor wheat—with nothing separating us except for the world barrier. Was he trying to possess me again? He couldn’t take over my body while I was conscious, which is why Styx’s job—half guard dog, half security alarm—was so important. And that was also why I was under orders to wake my dad up if Styx so much as growled in her sleep.

I crawled out from under the covers and stretched to reach her fur, stroking her in reward for a job well done on my way out of bed.

“Well, look who’s all grown up.”

I jumped at the sound of an unfamiliar voice, then sat up slowly, skin crawling as I reached for my bedside lamp. It wasn’t Avari. It couldn’t be—unless he’d possessed someone else and broken into my house.

Shit, shit, shit! I flipped the lamp switch and every dark silhouette in my room was thrown into full color, the sudden light blinding me for one long moment. I blinked rapidly, fighting off panic as I waited for my vision to adjust, but when it did, it brought no answers—only more questions.

A man sat in my desk chair, watching me silently, arms crossed over the front of a white button-up shirt. His dark eyes glittered with some perverse version of anticipation or amusement, as if he knew me and was waiting for a familiar reaction. But I’d never even seen him before—I would have remembered that face. Smooth and young, with a strong chin and wide forehead. If I’d seen him at a party, I would have watched him—or watched Emma fawn over him. But in my room, in the middle of the night …?

“Get out.” I slid off the mattress on the opposite side, and squatted to pull an aluminum baseball bat—one of Nash’s spares—from beneath the bed. I was no stranger to late-night unwanted company.

“Do you even know who I am?”

“Don’t know, don’t care.” Unscheduled visitors rarely brought good news—just ask Jacob Marley. “Get out now, or I’ll yell for my dad.”

The stranger settled farther into my chair, getting comfortable. “How is your dad?” he asked, still watching me eagerly, like he’d rather read my thoughts than hear me speak. “I haven’t seen him in, what? Thirteen years?”

No, no, no … I shook my head, but I couldn’t deny the swift understanding and terror colliding within me. “Thane?” I whispered, suddenly cold all over.

He was early.

“No. You can’t be here yet.” I glanced into the hall and started to yell for my dad—until I remembered what Tod had said. If my dad got in Thane’s way, Thane would kill him. That would give us proof enough to get Thane fired, but my dad would still be dead.

Instead of shouting, I backed slowly away from the bed, tightening my grip on the bat, for all the good it would do. I could handle this myself. “I still have four days, and you’re not gonna—”

“Relax.” Thane smiled, and no matter how pretty he was, I couldn’t shake the certainty that kittens everywhere were suddenly screeching in pain from the mockery of joy that had just settled onto his face. “I just thought we should formally meet, since I’m going to be the last thing you ever see.”

I took a deep breath, trying desperately to focus on the fact that he hadn’t come to kill me—yet—instead of on the fact that he’d come at all. “Do you always show up early to taunt your victims?”

“You’re not a victim, you’re an assignment,” Thane said, watching as I made myself climb back onto the bed and lay the bat at my side on the comforter, as if I wasn’t terrified and in shock. “Do you always act like having a reaper in your bedroom is a matter of course?”

Show no fear.

I shrugged and tucked my legs beneath me, glad I’d slept in pajama bottoms. “I know interesting people.”

“Of course. Because you’re a bean sidhe, right?” the reaper said, as if he’d just remembered. “And that makes me one very lucky worker bee. The average reaper will go his entire afterlife without ever encountering a nonhuman soul, and here I’ve got the opportunity to reap yours for a second time. It doesn’t get much better than this …” Thane rolled the chair close enough that his knees touched my mattress, still eyeing me boldly, studying me. “Except for reaping your mother.”

My hand flew before my brain caught up with it. A second later, my palm throbbed, and an angry red patch marred his smooth, stubbleless cheek.

Thane threw his head back and laughed, and I glanced at the door, hoping my father would sleep through the whole thing. Hoping Thane was audible—and inexplicably corporeal—only to me.

“Well, aren’t you fun!” he said, raising one hand to his cheek. “Who would have guessed that the toddler who once died without a whimper would grow into such a hellcat!” He leaned closer, and I held my breath. “It’s almost a shame I have to extinguish such a bright flame, but it’s true what they say about life being unfair. Death, however, is the great equalizer. Death comes to everyone, eventually, and you have the honor of meeting him twice.” Thane leaned back in my chair and recrossed his arms. “Lucky, lucky girl …”

“Get out.” I picked up the bat again, thrilled to find fury overwhelming my fear. “Get the hell out of my room and don’t come back.”

“Or what? You’ll sic your father on me?” He raised both brows in silent challenge, and I wanted to hit him again. With the bat this time. “He’s a sad, desperate man, with the potential to become a real thorn in my side. But you have to respect his determination to save his daughter. Too bad it’s not going to work.”

I didn’t really want to know, and I certainly didn’t want to prolong Thane’s visit or admit my own ignorance. But I had to ask. “What’s he doing?”

“He’s been hanging around the local reaper office for two days, begging anyone who’ll listen to let him trade his expiration date for yours. It’s not going to matter, though. Your file has a big red ‘special circumstances’ sticker on the front, and the notation inside states clearly that you’ve already had one date exchange and are thus ineligible for another.”

Uh-oh.

“I don’t suppose you know how he found the local headquarters, do you?” Thane asked, and I shook my head, though it had to be Tod. Who else could have told him? Who else would even know?

Thane looked like he didn’t believe me, but didn’t really care one way or another. “As amusing as the whole thing would be, if it weren’t so pathetic, if he doesn’t back off soon, he might find his expiration date exchanged for someone he’s never even met.”

“Is that why you’re here?” I asked, fury burning bright behind my eyes, a headache in full bloom. “To threaten my dad?”

The reaper laughed again, softer this time, and I already hated the sound. “That’s just a bonus. I’m here to get to know you. By my count, we have several days to spend together before our business is concluded, and I say we make the most of it. How do you feel about Mexican takeout?”

Was he serious? “Why are you doing this?”

He shrugged. “I’ve never reaped a soul from someone who knew what was coming, so I look forward to observing your last days, studying how you cope as you count down the hours. Like a fish in a glass bowl …”

“You’re psychotic.”

Another shrug. “Nah. Just bored. But don’t mistake my interest for sympathy. Nothing will stop me from ending your life when the time comes.”

“When is that?” I asked, trying hard not to reveal how desperate I was for that nugget of information. “When am I supposed to die?”

For a moment, he only watched me, and I got the feeling he was trying to decide whether I’d suffer more from knowing or from not knowing. “I think this will be more fun as a surprise,” he said finally, and I groaned on the inside. “See you soon, Kaylee.”

Then he was gone, and I was alone with my own fear and anger. And with Styx, who glanced around the room, sniffed the air once, then curled up and went back to sleep, secure in the knowledge that the big bad reaper was gone.

But I couldn’t sleep—not after what had just happened. Not knowing it could happen again, at any time. Not knowing my father had spent the entire weekend painting a target on his own back, for me.

I lifted my cell from the charger on my nightstand and autodialed Tod. He answered on the first ring. “Kaylee?”

“Did you tell my dad how to find the local reaper office?” I demanded, without a greeting.

Tod sighed. “You in your room?”

“Yeah.”

Another pause. Then, “Are you dressed?”

For just a split second, I considered saying no, and I wondered if he’d take that as deterrent or motivation. Then I came to my senses. “Pjs.”

He appeared at the foot of my bed an instant later, already sliding his phone into his pocket as he pushed Styx over and sank onto the mattress. She growled at him until I patted a spot next to my right hip, and she curled up there, content to watch him in threatening silence.

“I’m sorry,” Tod said, one bent leg on my comforter. “I was trying to help.”

“How is telling my dad where to go beg for my life possibly helping? You know they’re not going to make the trade.”

“That’s why I sent him there. Because they won’t do what he wants, but they won’t hurt him, and Thane’s not going to make a move on him while he’s in a building full of other reapers.” He shrugged, and it got a little harder for me to stay mad at him. “Besides, that way I know where he is, and I can check up on him without having to hunt him down.”

“Oh.” When he put it like that, it sounded kind of … smart. “Well, then … thanks for keeping my dad out of trouble.”

Suddenly nervous, for no reason I could pin down, I fidgeted with the handle of Nash’s bat, and Tod noticed.

“You know, most girls sleep with a teddy bear or an extra pillow. But I gotta say, that’s kinda hot …”

My cheeks blazed on the lower edge of my vision. “Nash gave it to me. But I wasn’t sleeping with it. I …” I shook my head and started over. “Thane was here, Tod. That’s how I knew Dad was at your office.”

“Thane was here? In your room?” He sat up straight, eyes churning with cobalt streaks of anger like I’d never seen from him before. “Please tell me you bashed his skull in.”

“No, but I did slap him. He’s planning to watch me to see if I crack up, knowing I’m going to die in a few days. Can he do that?”

His dimple disappeared beneath a dark scowl. “Yeah, but he’s not supposed to tell you he’s doing it. You’re never supposed to see your own reaper.”

“Would that be enough to get him fired, if I told Levi?”

Tod shrugged. “If he were a rookie and you were a clueless human, yeah. But since he’s not, and you’re not, it’d probably just derail his promotion and get him knocked a peg or two down the ladder. Which would piss him off.”

“I don’t suppose you’re any closer to proving he’s done anything else?”

“Not yet. I’ll get him, though, Kaylee,” Tod said, and that look was back. His irises were too still, like there was something he didn’t want me to see. And when I realized how badly I wanted to see it, I glanced down and noticed I was playing with the bat again.

My weak laugh sounded nervous, even to my own ears. “I guess I should tell Nash he was right about the bat. It did come in handy.”

Tod leaned forward to catch my gaze, and a blue twist of fear churned in his. “Kaylee, you can’t tell him about Thane. Anyone Thane sees as a threat is in danger. The irony there is that if he killed Nash, or your dad, or whoever, we’d be able to catch him with an unauthorized soul. But it’d be too late for whoever he took.”




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