Authors: Rachel Vincent
She gave me a sympathetic smile. “That makes all of us.” Her
smile faded and her eyes narrowed. “You guys didn’t do it, did you?”
“No. Turns out privacy’s kind of hard to come by when there’s a
hellion and his psychotic reaper minion out to steal your soul.”
Emma frowned, but before she could demand details, Mr.
Cumberland cleared his throat and started class.
Fifteen minutes into the lesson, I would have sworn the clock
on the wall was stuck. The hands hadn’t moved in ages. I swear, time was deader
than I was.
Sure, my previous math teacher was an evil, soul-stealing
pedophile, but he’d never once bored anyone to sleep, which was more than I
could say for Cumberland and his Bueller-esque monotone.
Halfway through the fifty-minute period, Emma kicked my desk,
and I sat upright, startled. “I can see through your arm!” she mouthed,
exaggerating each mimed word.
Crap!
I’d forgotten to concentrate
on being solid—I’d forgotten to concentrate on
anything
—and had nearly disappeared in the middle of class. I
narrowed my focus and solidified my form, but it took every bit of willpower I
had to make my physical form stick. Seriously, if Mr. Cumberland couldn’t summon
any enthusiasm for the lesson, how were we supposed to summon the will to be
there? Some of us literally…
Sabine was waiting in the hall after class. Alone.
“Hey, have you seen Nash today?” she asked, falling into step
beside us.
Em shook her head, and I glanced at Sabine in surprise. “You
didn’t pick him up this morning?”
“I decided to let him stew a little longer, but how am I
supposed to know when he’s had enough, if he’s not here where I can
see
him stew?”
“Trouble in paradise?” Em asked, and Sabine glowered at
her.
“He failed to save her from the clutches of evil,” I explained,
and Em’s brows rose.
Sabine stopped walking and grabbed my arm, pulling us all to a
halt in the middle of the hall. “He would have stepped up. Thane just caught him
by surprise.”
“I
hate
it when evil doesn’t send
fair warning in advance,” Em said, and the hall dimmed as Sabine’s eyes grew
darker.
“How’s this for warning?” the
mara
growled at Emma. “Get lost, or I’m having your pretty little human boyfriend for
lunch.”
“She doesn’t mean that,” I said as Em’s expression cycled
through anger and horror before settling somewhere in between.
“The hell I don’t. I haven’t had a decent meal in ages, since
someone
insisted I stop feeding at school.” She
glanced pointedly at me.
“Well, if you’d feed at night, like any normal Nightmare…” But
I realized the problem as soon as I’d said it, even if she wouldn’t admit it.
She couldn’t feed most nights because she was watching Nash. Almost twenty-four
hours a day, since his relapse the day before I died.
With a heavy sigh, I turned to Em. “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure
she doesn’t snack on Jayson. See you both at lunch.”
Em headed for class reluctantly, and I turned back to Sabine,
but she started talking before I could. “This is your fault, Kaylee. He needs me
and he loves me. I can see that in him when we’re alone, and he’d see it, too,
if you weren’t always there, giving him something else to look at. If you’d
stayed buried like any decent dead girl, none of this would have happened.”
I didn’t even know where to start. “I’m not going to apologize
for my own existence, Sabine. Besides if I weren’t here, Nash wouldn’t be,
either. He’d be sitting in jail awaiting trial for murder.”
“Because you framed him!” she whispered fiercely, dark eyes
flashing. “No matter how you look at it, this is all your fault. So take me to
him, now, so I can smack some sense into him. Assuming Thane didn’t go back for
him last night.”
Thane. Shit. I hadn’t thought of that. And Harmony wouldn’t
think to tell anyone he was missing, if she thought he was at school.
“I’ll go check on him, but I can’t take you with me.” Blinking
all the way to Nash’s house was pushing the limit of how far I could go on my
own without a layover, and I couldn’t get half that far with someone else in
tow. “But I’ll text you if there’s anything wrong. Okay?”
Sabine scowled and grabbed my arm again, and this time she
wouldn’t let me jerk free. “In case you haven’t noticed, Nash is in withdrawal
again, but this time the drug is
you.
Don’t you
think we ought to limit his exposure?”
Seriously? She was classifying me as a controlled substance
now?
“I’m just trying to help.” And I’d go even without her
approval. She didn’t own Nash, and he and I were still friends. We’d probably
always exist in that weird twilight between friendship and more. We’d been
through too much together to ever be any less to each other.
“Fine. But if anything happens to him because of you,
I’ll…”
“You need some time to work on that one?” I said, pulling my
arm free when I realized that for perhaps the first time in her life, she didn’t
know how to finish a threat. “Threatening to scare me to death has kind of lost
its punch, huh?”
“Just go get him. Please.”
The rare courtesy told me just how worried she was about him.
So I nodded, then ducked into the nearest bathroom and waited until it was
empty. Then I blinked into Nash’s living room, backpack and all. I set my bag on
the floor and started toward the hall, until I heard the clink of glass in the
kitchen.
I pushed the swinging door open slowly, expecting to see Nash,
but I found his mother instead, and for a moment, I didn’t know what to do.
Harmony and I hadn’t spoken one-on-one since I’d cheated on one of her sons with
the other, then framed one for my murder. Since I’d eavesdropped the day before,
I knew she thought Tod and I were good for each other, but I wasn’t sure if
she’d actually forgiven me for what I’d done to Nash. Or if she ever would. And
I had no idea how she’d feel about me popping into her house, unannounced.
But then she turned and noticed me in the doorway, and my
chance to sneak out expired.
“Kaylee!” She stood and motioned for me to come in, and the
minute the door swung shut behind me, she pulled me close in a tight hug. “I’ve
been hoping you’d come see me, but I didn’t want to push you, if you weren’t
ready.”
“So… You don’t hate me?” And in that moment, I realized that of
everything I’d lost when I died, other than my heartbeat, Harmony was what I’d
missed the most. She was the closest thing I had to a mother, but with
everything that had happened between me and her sons, I’d thought… Well, I
hadn’t expected open arms.
“Kaylee, I could never hate you.” She let go of me and pulled
out a second chair at the table, then pushed a plate of cookies toward me when I
sat.
Tears burned behind my eyes and I blinked, trying to keep them
at bay. “But I got Tod killed and Nash framed for murder.” I certainly didn’t
deserve her sympathy, much less her cookies.
“Honey, I know that was a hell of a crazy week, but you didn’t
do any of that on purpose. And let’s not forget what else you did. You also
saved Tod’s life and got Nash’s name cleared.”
“Doesn’t matter.” I sniffled, in spite of my best effort to
hold back tears. “Nash hates me.”
“No. Nash
wants
to hate you, but he
can’t. That’s the problem. He just needs time.”
“To learn to hate me?”
“No.” Harmony arched her brows at me, and I sobbed even as I
laughed. “To forgive. To move on.”
“Tod and I… We messed up.”
She nodded. “Yes, you did.”
“But we didn’t mean to hurt him.”
“I know. Deep down, I think Nash knows. But on the surface,
that’s harder to understand, and even harder to forgive.” She sighed and broke a
chunk from her cookie. “I wish I could say I didn’t see this coming, but I did.”
She’d warned me from the very start to be careful with
bean
sidhe
brothers. I’d thought I was.
I’d thought wrong.
“Tod told you how he felt?”
She gave me a sad smile. “No. I’m the mother. Neither of them
ever willingly tells me anything, but I know how to listen, even to the things
they don’t say.” She sighed again, and this one was heavier. “Still, when Nash
comes around, maybe you and Tod could hang out here sometimes. I wouldn’t mind
seeing the two of you every now and then.”
“Sure.” Tod checked on his mother regularly, but he rarely let
her see him. “For now, can I talk to Nash?”
“I wish you would. He says he’s sick, but he’s clean, and
sober, and has no sign of a fever.” She looked worried, but I couldn’t help
being relieved by the fact that he was still here, instead of suffering in the
Netherworld with Avari and Thane.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
When I knocked on Nash’s door, the answer was almost immediate.
“Go away, Kaylee.” He must have heard me talking to his mother. That’s what I
get for going completely corporeal, instead of letting only Harmony see and hear
me.
“Nope.” I pushed his door open and walked in, hoping he was
dressed. I got half my wish—jeans only.
“You don’t get to just walk in here anymore,” he said,
stretched out on his bed, hands folded behind his neck. “You gave that up when
you started making out with my brother.”
“But you get to come to my house in the middle of the night,
drunk, and try to kiss me?”
Nash frowned. “I said I was sorry about that.”
“No, actually, I don’t think you did.” Not for that specific
offense, anyway. I pulled out his desk chair and sat. “So, are you sorry?”
He sighed, then sat up and met my gaze boldly. “No. You kissed
him when you were with me. How was I supposed to know that road doesn’t run both
ways?”
“Nash…” I hardly knew where to begin. “If you don’t love
Sabine, you have to tell her. You’re all she wants. You’re all she thinks about.
You’re all she has.”
“I
do
love her. How could I not?”
he said, and I had no idea how to answer that one. “What did you think this was
going to be like, Kaylee? Did you think you could dump me, and I’d bounce back
to her and miraculously be happy? I’m not a Ping-Pong ball. You can’t just swat
me back and forth and expect me to be content wherever I land. If Tod dumped you
tomorrow, would you come back to me?”
I shook my head slowly, pushing myself back and forth a couple
of inches in his wheeled desk chair. What
had
I
thought things would be like between us after the breakup? The truth was that I
hadn’t given it much thought. I hadn’t expected to live past my own death.
“Look. I love Sabine—I probably always will—but that doesn’t
mean I don’t still love you, too. It’s not a switch I can just flip off. I wish
it was, because I’d flip it in a minute. I don’t think I even
like
you anymore, but I can’t get you out of my head,
and it hurts to see you, Kaylee.”
“I’m sorry. I’m
so
sorry. But you
still have to come to school, if for no other reason than that our strength is
in numbers.”
“I’m fine. Baskerville starts barking if anything inhuman or
undead gets within twenty feet of the house, in this plane or in the
Netherworld. How do you think I knew you were here?”
So he hadn’t heard me talking to his mom, after all.
“I’m not worried about you, Nash. But Sabine and Emma are both
at school with no Netherworld guard dogs looking after them. Or did you forget
that a rogue reaper tried to kill your girlfriend last night?”
“She’s not my—”
“Save it.” I rolled my eyes and walked the chair closer. “You
love her and you’re sleeping with her. Do you really think it’s worth arguing
over how you define your relationship?”
“I don’t think that’s any of your business.”
Okay, he had a point there. But that didn’t change anything.
“Get dressed. You’re going to school.”
“I don’t feel like it.” He lay back on the pillow again, and
suddenly I understood how my father had felt when I’d refused to get up that
morning.
“No one feels like going to school. Least of all me. But if I
have to go, so do you.”
Nash shrugged and put one hand behind his head again. “Who says
you have to go?”
“My dad. The state of Texas.” When that made no difference, my
temper flared. “You want to stop loving me? I think I can help you out with
that.” I snatched the T-shirt slung over his footboard, then sat on the bed and
grabbed his free hand. Then I closed my eyes and pictured the alley behind the
doughnut shop, where I’d seen Thane the day before. That was as close as I could
get to the halfway point between Nash’s house and the school—which was as far as
I could go with him in tow—and it was the place least likely to be
populated.
“What are you—?” Nash tried to jerk free from my grip, but I
held on tight, and a second later, I fell onto my butt on rough concrete. “What
the hell?”
I opened my eyes to find Nash lying on his back on the ground,
propped up on one elbow, one hand still gripped in mine.
“Where are we?”
“Almost there.” I closed my eyes again, and pictured the
first-floor supply closet, across the hall from the teachers’ lounge. An instant
later we were there, in the dark, Nash sprawled out on the floor with me sitting
beside him.
“What the hell, Kaylee?” He jerked his hand from my grip, and
when he tried to sit up, something crashed to the ground with an
ominous-sounding slosh.
“Hang on.” I stood carefully and felt around on the wall next
to the door. When I flipped the switch, dim light flooded the small space from a
bare lightbulb overhead, highlighting Nash’s angry face with dramatic shadows.
“Here’s your shirt. I think second period’s almost over.”
“
Damn it,
Kaylee!” He jerked the
shirt over his head, then shoved his arms through the sleeves. “I don’t even
have any shoes!”