If I Die (19 page)

“Okay, take a breath, Kaylee,” she said at last, when my sobs finally began to fade. I let go of her to wipe my face with a dried-stiff paper napkin from her dashboard. “First of all, you should have told me. But in light of the circumstances, I’m gonna let that one slide. And second…what the hell are you even
doing
here? Why aren’t you skydiving, or mountain climbing, or on a plane to some fabulous city you’ve never seen before. Your dad would totally make that happen, if you asked him. Why would you want to spend your last two days on earth at school?”

I blinked and wiped my face on my sleeve. “Em, I have to get rid of Beck.”

“No you don’t! Let Nash and Sabine handle it. Tod and Alec can help. Or hell, tell your dad and let him do it!”

“I’m telling my dad tonight—I would have already, but he’s been so stressed out trying to find a way to exchange my date, which isn’t going to happen. But I seriously doubt Tod and Nash are going to be working together on anything in the near future. And even if they were, none of them know what to do any better than I do. I need to know this is handled before I die, Emma. Especially after what I just saw in there.” I nodded toward the school building. “Do you honestly think you could have told him no?”

“Yeah.” She shrugged. “The problem is that I didn’t want to. I
still
don’t want to.”

“And that’s why I have to do this. I want to know that you’re going to be safe before…you know.”

Emma looked at me for a second, then sighed. “You have to let it go. Let someone else handle it this time. You can’t save everyone, Kay. You can’t control everything.”

“You sound like Nash,” I said, and as his name faded from my tongue, another wave of guilt crashed over me. Em must have seen it on my face.

“How did he take it? About Tod, I mean.”

“Not well, but that’s my fault. He hates me, and I can’t blame him, and now I’m the reason he hates his own brother. And Nash thinks Tod’s using me to hurt him because he’s jealous that Nash is still alive.”

Emma shook her head. “I don’t blame him for being upset, but that’s not it. Tod’s been pining over you for months. Frankly, I’m impressed that you held out for so long.”

“You knew there was…pining?”

Emma actually smiled, and that felt good, after all the tears.
“We all knew, Kaylee. Hell, I bet even your dad knew. I didn’t think Tod would ever say anything, though, because of Nash.”

“He didn’t. I mean, he told me Nash and I were wrong for each other, and he’s been hanging around a lot since Nash went into recovery, but he’s always been a flirt, so I didn’t really think anything about it until a couple of days ago. Then I saw him feed my reaper to Avari, and it just kind of…clicked. He did that for
me
.”

“He did what? What exactly does that mean, feeding someone to Avari?”

“The reaper who was supposed to end my life on Thursday—his name was Thane, and he was kind of stalking me. So Tod found him, beat him up, hauled him into the Netherworld, and gave him to Avari. He just…fed my reaper to a hellion. He could have gotten in serious trouble, Em. He still could. But he did it anyway.”

I glanced at Emma to find her watching me, her gaze half out of focus, but intense, like she was hanging on every word. “I can’t get a guy to sit through an entire movie before he starts groping me, and Tod
killed
someone for you. And you’re not even a couple. Are you?”

I exhaled deeply in frustration, trying to make sense out of the tangled knot my thoughts had become. “I don’t know, Em. What would be the point? I’m not even going to be here in two days, but Nash will, and they’ll still be brothers, and he hates Tod now as it is. How much worse is that going to be if this turns out to be more than just a couple of kisses?” The echoes of which I could still
feel
. Was it possible to be haunted by a kiss?

“I don’t know,” Em said. “I’m sure Nash is upset, and pissed off, and I don’t blame him. But these aren’t exactly normal circumstances. Maybe if you told him what you just told me, he’d understand. Eventually.”

But I had my doubts.

I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead. We’d hurt Nash from both sides—as his brother and his girlfriend. It wouldn’t be fair of us to make that worse, just for two days of something that could never go any further. Would Tod even want to? Did he want to be with me badly enough to hurt his brother? Did I want him to?
Should
I want him, too?

“Okay you’re obviously overthinking this,” Emma said. “So just answer this one question. If Nash didn’t care—if it truly wouldn’t bother him to see you with his brother—what would you do?”

“But he
does
care…”

“That’s not the point. Just for the next minute—for the sake of argument—pretend there is no Nash,” she said, and I nodded slowly, trying to imagine something so impossible. “Now, since there’s nobody to get hurt, no matter what you decide, what do you want to do?”

I closed my eyes, and in my head, I saw a set of bright blue ones staring back at me. “I want to kiss Tod again.”

I followed Emma back to her house, and we spent the next two hours overanalyzing my ill-fated love life and ignoring her older sister’s unsolicited advice about that ill-fated love life—which she understood very little of. We didn’t talk about my impending death. In fact, we avoided the subject at all costs, by mutual, unspoken agreement.

Emma seemed to understand what I would have had to explain to anyone else—that I wanted just a couple of hours of normal with my best friend, before I returned to the maelstrom of bizarre the rest of my life had become. What little life I had left, anyway.

But when it was time for me to go, I accidently left my keys in her room, and when I went back for them, Emma was crying, facedown on her bed. Hard enough that she heard neither my footsteps, nor the rattle of my keys as I slid them into my pocket. My heart broke for us both as I snuck out again, so she wouldn’t know I’d seen.

Five minutes later, I opened my front door to find a huge bowl of popcorn on the coffee table, and I could tell from the scent and the way some of the kernels were shriveled that they were drizzled with real butter.

“Hey.” My dad stepped into the living room from the kitchen with two tall, clear glasses, topped in thick cream-colored foam.

“Is that what I think it is?” I pushed the door shut and dropped my keys into the empty candy dish, then took the glass he handed me. “Coke floats?” He used to make them when I was little—that was one of the few memories I had from before my mother died.

“None other. And I’ve got sour worms and Milk Duds for dessert.”

“So this is dinner?” I dropped onto the couch and grabbed a handful of greasy popcorn.

“Unless you want pizza.” My dad plopped onto the couch next to me and stuck a bendy straw into my float. “I happen to know the local delivery boy can be here in thirty seconds or less.”

I laughed, because that’s what he wanted to hear, but the mention of Tod made my heart ache, with a confusing combination of excitement and guilt. “No, this is fine. This is great.”

“Good.” He set his glass on the end table and picked up the remote control. “It looks like the movies recorded, but I’ll be damned if I know how to make them play.”

I swallowed my first mouthful of Coke and melted ice cream, then took the remote from him and pulled up the guide menu. “You know, you’re going to have to learn to do this for yourself, at some point. I’m not going to be around to program the DVR forever…”

I meant it as a joke, but my dad looked like I’d just stabbed him in the heart. Repeatedly.

“Sorry. Just kidding.” I shoved another handful of popcorn in my mouth to keep from making it worse.

“It’s okay,” my dad said, though it was clearly anything but.
“However, I reserve the right to wallow in denial for as long as I see fit. And on that note, how was school today?”

Another sip from my glass, and I was ready to play along. “Well…I embarrassed Sophie at lunch, failed to turn in five homework assignments, lied to my French teacher, saw Tod feed my personal reaper to Avari in the Netherworld, broke up with my boyfriend, then propositioned my math teacher.” I shrugged and tried on a nervous grin. “Nothing worth writing home about.”

My father leaned back on the couch, holding his float in both hands. “I swear, Kaylee, sometimes it’s hard to tell when you’re joking.”

“Is this part of that whole wallowing in denial thing?” I reached for another handful of popcorn. “’Cause I was serious. All that really happened.”

His brows rose and his gaze narrowed on me. “The father of a non-emancipated minor might be a little overwhelmed right now.”

“A non-emancipated minor would never have told her father most of that.”

My dad sighed. “I don’t even know where to begin.” I started to make a suggestion, but he cut me off. “Oh, wait. Yes I do. Why the hell would you proposition your math teacher? And what exactly do you mean by ‘propositioned’?”

“I don’t think you want details on my definition of that word, Dad. But it wasn’t for real. Our math teacher is an incubus, and Em and I were trying to get him where we want him, so we can take him out. By…putting ourselves in the line of fire, tomorrow, at Emma’s house.” Before he could form a response—and his struggle with that was obvious—I pushed the play button on the remote. “How ’bout some
Alien?
”

“How ’bout some
answers?
” He grabbed the remote and pushed several buttons, and when he couldn’t get the movie
to stop, he finally stood and stomped across the room, then slammed his whole hand down on the power button.

Dramatic, but effective.

“Okay, I’ll give you the short version,” I conceded. “But then I demand some serious
Alien
carnage.” My dad made a “go ahead” gesture, then reclaimed his seat next to me. “Mr. Beck is Mr. Wesner’s replacement, and last week we discovered he’s not human. He’s an incubus. And he’s in heat—or whatever. I would have told you, but that was the same day you and Tod told me I was going to die, and then everything started to pile up, and you were always gone trying to save my life. And as it turns out, there’s just never a good time to tell your dad you’re doing battle with an evil lust demon posing as your math teacher. Right?”

His pause was too long to precede anything good. “Is this what your little powwow this morning was about?”

“Yeah. We were pooling information and trying to come up with a viable game plan. If you want to help, we
really
need to know how to get rid of a possibly ancient incubus.”

“By letting your father
kill
him for even
thinking
about touching his little girl.”

The ache in my chest was warm and kind of wonderful, in the weirdest way. “Yeah, that’d be really awesome, if you could do that. ’Cause we actually don’t know how to kill him, and I need to make sure he’s gone before I die, ’cause he’s going after Emma next.”

“Next?”

“He’s already impregnated three girls that we know of. He’s also killed one woman and left another in a coma. But I’d bet there are others we don’t know about yet.” And with that thought, my appetite dried up like sweat on a Texas sidewalk.

“Damn it.” My father scrubbed his face with both hands,
and I felt awful for adding to the stress he was already under. “Harmony warned me it could get crazy around here, with Avari living in the high school. But I never saw this incubus thing coming.”

“Yeah, me, neither. It’s not one of the things you typically worry about, in suburban Texas.”

“Okay, if memory serves, your uncle Brendon ran up against an incubus once. I’ll call him later and see what he can tell me. But just to make me feel marginally involved in your life, what happened with you and Nash? Not that I disapprove of the outcome, but this seems like an odd time to dump your boyfriend.”

Oh, here we go
… “Nash saw me kissing Tod.”

My father’s stare was almost vacant, and just when I was starting to wonder if he was still in there, he blinked. “I should have mixed something stronger than Coke floats.”

We only made it through the first
Alien
movie before my dad’s patience shattered beneath the cluster bomb I’d dropped on him and he excused himself to go call his brother. I couldn’t blame him. Even our rare, about-to-expire father-daughter bonding time was outweighed by the threat of an incubus preying on the local coed populace.

Dad made the call from his room, so I sat on my bed with my door open, trying to hear what he obviously wanted to chew over privately before passing on to me. But he was hard to hear through his closed door.

“No, we’re short on specifics, and even shorter on time,” my dad said. He’d told my uncle Brendon about my expiration date, and they’d planned a family dinner for the next night, Wednesday, possibly my last night in the land of the living, and the night I’d planned to lure my evil incubus teacher to his death. I couldn’t imagine how awkward that meal would
be, though, considering my cousin Sophie’s complete ignorance of all nonhuman matters.

“She doesn’t know his real name or how old he is…” My father’s words faded, and I assumed my uncle was speaking on the other end of the line. “Math. You should ask Sophie if she has him.”

But she didn’t. I’d verified that the day we found out what Beck was.

“I know, but let’s not borrow trouble till we’re ready to pay some back.” My dad’s mattress creaked and I could picture him sitting on the edge of the bed, hunched over and stressed. But I didn’t hear anything after that because my phone buzzed in my pocket. I dug it out to find a text from Tod.

Can I come over?

Suddenly my chest burned like my lungs were on fire. Like when I was a little girl on the playground swing set, and that plummeting feeling made me feel scared, and excited, and so
alive
.

Yeah. In my room.

An instant later, Tod stood in the middle of my bedroom floor, and I realized that the courtesy text before just popping in was only one of the things that had changed.

“Hey,” he said, hands shoved into his jeans pockets, watching me carefully, like he didn’t quite know how to act around me now and would be taking his cues from me. Which sucked, ’cause that was my plan, too.

“Hey.” I sat up on the bed and folded my legs beneath me, itching to touch him, or somehow acknowledge what had happened between us. Yet I felt guilty for that impulse—for wanting something that would hurt Nash.

“I need to tell you something.” He glanced at the floor, looking more conflicted than I’d ever seen him, and that
burning in my chest became a steady smolder of resignation and disappointment I had no right to feel.

I knew where this was going. Nash was his brother—his flesh and blood. And Nash would be here for the next three hundred years or so, long after any memory of me faded from both of their minds. Of
course
he would choose his brother over me. How could he not? And part of me knew that was the right thing to do. How could I not want peace between them, especially considering that aside from Harmony and potentially Sabine, they
had
no one else. Tod and Nash would probably never be best friends, but they would always be brothers, and who was I to get in the way of that?

Tod exhaled slowly, and I could only watch him, waiting for the inevitable heartbreak. Could a person actually die of a broken heart? Was that how I would go?

“I’m not supposed to want you, Kaylee. Not like this,” he said, the blues in his eyes churning with disparate emotions, and my stubborn heart beat harder. “I made a decision two years ago and gave up the right to want
anything
.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I wasn’t going to interrupt him, because no one had ever spoken to me like this. As if whatever he was trying to tell me was so raw and painful it had to come straight from his soul.

“I’m not supposed to have a life, or a future beyond helping preserve the balance between life and death. My humanity is supposed to fade. They want us that way. Empty, so it’s easier to take life, day after day. Sometimes it becomes too easy, and reapers get bored. Desperate for something—anything—to break up the monotony.”

He was talking about Thane; I understood that much. I was Thane’s entertainment—his break from monotony.

“That’s not supposed to happen, but neither is this.”

“This” was me.
I
wasn’t supposed to happen to Tod. My
next breath burned in my throat, and he shifted onto one foot staring down at me like he wanted to sit, but couldn’t let himself get comfortable until he’d said what he had to say.

“They were starting to get what they wanted from me. I stayed close to my mom and Nash, and that worked for a while, but it wasn’t enough. Only two years dead, and it was getting harder for me to feel…anything. I was starting to slip into the darkness. The numbness. And the worst part is that it wasn’t even scary. I was losing myself, and I didn’t even care.

“Then I met you, and at first I didn’t understand what had happened. What had changed. All I knew was that I wanted to be near you. Then you helped me with Addison, even though it nearly got you killed—
I
nearly got you killed—and I started to understand how special you are. But by then, you were getting serious with Nash. With my
brother
—one of few people in the whole world I still gave a damn about. So I tried to stay away. I tried so
hard
.” His voice cracked on the last word, and my heart cracked with it. Tears stood in my eyes, but I was afraid to let them fall. I was afraid to even breathe for fear of missing a single word.

“But you kept pulling me back. You’re the brightest thing I’ve ever seen, Kaylee. You’re this beautiful ball of fire spitting sparks out at the world, burning fiercely, holding back the dark by sheer will. And I always knew that if I reached out—if I tried to touch you—I’d get burned. Because you’re not mine. I’m not supposed to feel the fire. I’m not supposed to want it. But I
do
. I want you, Kaylee, like I’ve never wanted anything. Ever. I want the fire. I want the heat, and the light, and I want the burn. But…”

He left that word hanging. The most hated word in the English language. And I knew what was supposed to follow it.

“But Nash…” I finished for him, and my tears fell in scorching trails down my cheeks.

Tod nodded miserably. “He’s my brother. He can hate me his entire life, but that won’t change the fact that he’s my little brother, and I’m supposed to protect him, not hurt him.”

“And we hurt him.” I couldn’t get Nash’s face out of my mind, how betrayed he’d looked standing in the hall. When he saw us.

“Yeah. We did.”

“Why…?” I started, then had to suck in a deep breath to continue. To control the heartbroken, angry tears that wanted to flow again. I stood and turned away from him while I wiped my face, and my frustration built. “Why did you say Nash and I aren’t right for each other, if you didn’t want to hurt him?” I demanded, turning on him again. “Why the hell would you show me that if it wasn’t going to lead to anything?”

“Because it’s true. Even if you were both scheduled to live forever, eventually he would have messed up again and hurt you. Or you would have broken his heart. But I won’t deny that I had selfish reasons for saying it, even though it was the truth.”