If I Die

10

Sabine didn’t have a laptop, and mine was a one computer household, so going through the local school districts took a while. And a lot of them didn’t post pictures of their teachers. But finally, after an hour and a half of searching and two bags of microwave popcorn—I’d sworn off everything but junk for what remained of my life—we found him.

During the fall semester, our Mr. Beck had taught advanced math at Crestwood High. Only the Crestwood students had called him Mr. David Allan.

“That’s him!” Sabine said, and I nodded while Alec leaned over my shoulder for a better look. “Does it say why he left?”

“I doubt they’d put that on the website. But…” Crestwood’s student newspaper was online, so I did a quick search for his alias, looking for some mention of why he left—or was fired.

I found it in the November 3 issue. Mr. Allan had left his position as a first-year math teacher after one semester to pursue a graduate degree, and he hoped to be back in a couple of years, better able to serve the students of Crestwood.

Yeah, right.

I was about to close the tab when a familiar—and horrifying—place name caught my attention from the short mention just below Allan’s article.

Our thoughts and prayers are with senior honor student Farrah Combs, who was admitted to Lakeside Hospital last week. Get well soon, Farrah!

What the editor of the Crestwood Observer obviously didn’t know—if she had, the mention probably never would have run in their paper—was that Lakeside wasn’t a regular hospital. It was a mental health facility, attached to Arlington Memorial. The very same mental health facility—psych ward, to the uninformed—where I’d spent a week of my life, a year and a half earlier.

Lakeside was only fifteen miles away. Maybe Farrah Combs—assuming she was still there, and marginally coherent—could tell me something about Mr. Allan. And whether or not any of her fellow students had gotten pregnant or died while he was teaching there.

But I couldn’t tell Sabine my idea, because she’d insist on tagging along, and I was not taking a living nightmare into a mental health facility.

I glanced at the onscreen clock before closing my laptop and was relieved to realize it was almost six o’clock. “Okay…” I stood and slid my computer back into the bag. “I’m gonna find something to eat and you’re going to go home.”

“Why?” Sabine said, physically resisting as I tried to guide her toward the door. “We’re on a tight schedule here, Kaylee. I thought you wanted to nail this bastard.”

“I do. Figuratively. But I can’t think when I’m hungry, so why don’t you go home and go online and see if you can find any more of Beck’s former employers.”

“I don’t have internet at home.”

“Then go to the library. Sometimes people fall asleep there—I’m sure that’s an untapped market for you. We can exchange information in the morning.”

“What information are you gonna have?” she demanded, as I pulled the front door open and pushed her half-empty soda can into her hand.

I scrambled for another well-meaning lie until my gaze settled on an obviously amused Alec, and the answer slid into place. “Alec’s going to help me come up with a plan B for getting rid of Mr. Beck, in case murder starts to look a bit extreme.”

“That’s not gonna happen,” Sabine insisted, eyes narrowed at me now from the front porch.

“Well, just in case. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Then I closed the door in her face.

Alec laughed out loud. “What was that all about?”

“You have to take the direct approach with Sabine—she doesn’t understand subtlety.” I peeked through the blinds until her car drove away, then I turned to Alec. “Your turn. How’d you get here, anyway?”

He crossed both arms over his chest and suddenly embodied the immovable object. “I took the bus.”

“Good. I think there’s another one at six-fifteen. You need change?”

Alec frowned. “I’m gainfully employed, Kaylee. And I’m not leaving. I promised your dad I’d stay with you.”

“I don’t need a babysitter, Alec.”

“I know. But your dad’s afraid that whatever’s supposed to kill you could hit early and leave you lingering on the brink of death for the next few days. And he’s pretty determined not to let that happen.”

“Then he should be at home, not out chasing possibilities that don’t exist.”

“You can’t rationalize with grief and denial, Kaylee.”

“I’m trying to rationalize with you. I have something important to do, and I need you to go home.”

Alec dropped into my dad’s recliner, and I knew with one glance that he wasn’t going to be moved until he was damn well ready. “If this is about Nash…you’re as grown as you’re gonna get and it’s not my place to tell you what not to do with your boyfriend. You two can go back there and close the door and make the whole damn planet quake for all I care. I’ll even wear earplugs, if you think it’s gonna get loud, but—”

“No! This has nothing to do with Nash.” In fact, if I told him, he’d try to talk me out of it. I sighed and sat on the edge of the coffee table. “I swear, I’ll kill you if you tell my dad, but…I’m going to sneak into Lakeside and talk to Farrah Combs. And I need to be back before Nash comes over, so you have to go!”

“You’re gonna sneak into Lakeside? I thought you hated that place.”

“I do.” With a fierce and glorious passion. “But that’s my best chance of finding the bodies in Beck’s closet, and I am not going to die without knowing he’s no threat to Emma, or anyone else at school.”

“Fine. I’ll go with you.”

“You can’t. It’ll be hard enough to get myself in, and bringing you will only double our chances of getting caught.”

He shifted in the chair and it groaned beneath his weight. “How are you going to get in?”

I stared at my hands in my lap, avoiding his gaze. “I have an idea, but it only works for one person. Me.”

“Please tell me you’re not going to get yourself committed.”

He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, trying to catch my gaze. “I’m pretty sure your dad would actually kill me if I let that happen.”

“No! How am I supposed to help anyone if I’m tied to a stretcher?”

“They really tied you down?”

“We have that in common,” I said, and he burst into laughter, no doubt remembering what was probably the most embarrassing moment of either of our lives.

I couldn’t quite decide why I was reluctant to admit the next part, but when I realized he wasn’t going to go without more information, I knew I had no choice. “I’m going to see if Tod can get me into Lakeside without being seen.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Alec asked softly, watching me closely, and I couldn’t tell if he meant breaking into the hospital, or asking Tod for help.

“I’m not sure about anything anymore, Alec. Except that I’m going to die. But not before I take Beck down.” I stood and gestured toward the front door. “Now please go home so I can be reckless and brave for possibly the last time in my tragically short life.”

Alec rolled beautiful brown eyes. “No fair playing the deathcard.”

“No fair having it to play,” I shot back, holding the front door open.

“Fine.” He stood and shoved his hands into his pockets.

“But if your dad finds out, tell him you overpowered me and left me for dead.”

“Got it.” I pushed all six-foot-two, one hundred eighty-plus pounds of him over the threshold with both hands.

“Be careful, Kaylee,” he said, and I nodded solemnly as I closed the door in his face. He hadn’t even made it to the sidewalk when I pulled my phone from my pocket and autodialed.

“Kaylee?” Tod answered on the first ring. “What’s wrong?”

I hesitated on my way to the kitchen with Alec’s empty soda can. “How do you know something’s wrong?”

“You only call me when you want something Nash can’t do for you.”

My face flamed, and I was suddenly glad he couldn’t see me. That I knew of. “That is not true.”

“Oh, yeah?” he teased, and I could hear the challenge in his voice. “So…you don’t need anything?” Was it true? I had kind of come to count on him…

A smile snuck up on me, in spite of his valid point and the grave reason for my call. “As a matter of fact, I was going to offer you something.”

For one long moment, the only sound over the line was the soft whisper of his next inhalation, then his voice sounded a little scratchier than usual. “What did you have in mind?”

“A field trip. You interested in doing something dangerous, and possibly illegal?”

“Does it involve underage girls, broken curfews and assorted fruit toppings?”

I dropped the empty can into the recycling bin and leaned against the kitchen peninsula, grinning like an idiot. “Two of the three. And I could probably scrounge up some strawberry jam, if you’re desperate.”

“I’m never desperate,” Tod said, only his voice hadn’t come from my phone. I whirled around to see the reaper standing behind me, still holding his cell. “But for the record, I prefer apricot.”

“Yuck. Nobody likes apricot jam.”

Tod shrugged and pocketed his phone. “Sure, strawberry is the more obvious choice, but I submit that apricot has a more complex, unusual flavor, with just enough tang to keep things interesting…” He raised one brow, grinning more with his eyes than with his mouth, and I had the sudden inexplicable urge to look away, before I saw too much. Then Tod blinked, and whatever I’d almost seen was gone. “So…what illegal adventure will I be aiding and abetting today?”

I closed my phone and slid it into my front pocket. “Remember when you snuck me into Nash’s room to watch him and Sabine?” At the time, he’d said it was so that I could better understand their friendship, but in retrospect, I think it was so that I could see for myself how connected they were. Tod had made no secret of the fact that he thought his brother and I were a bad match. It was one of the few things he and Sabine had in common.

“Are we playing spy again? That’s my second favorite game.” Tod followed me down the hall and into my room, where I pretended I didn’t want to know what his first favorite game was while I dug in the bottom of my closet for a pair of laceless, slip-on canvas shoes. If I got caught, shoelaces would be a dead giveaway that I didn’t belong at Lakeside—strings of any kind were banned from the facility.

“More like detective. I need to get into a secure building.”

His brows rose in interest. “The police station? Did Sabine get arrested again?”

I stepped into the first shoe. “If she had, I’d be laughing from afar, not busting her out. We’re breaking into Lakeside.”

Tod dropped into my desk chair and it bobbed beneath his very corporeal weight. “Don’t most people try to break out of the psych ward?”

“I’m not most people.” I stepped into the other shoe and slid my ID and a twenty-dollar bill into my back pocket.

“That’s what I like best about you. So why are we breaking into the loony bin?”

“I need to talk to one of the patients. And I figured I should check on Scott while I’m there.”

“Scott’s at Lakeside?” Tod appeared in the living room ahead of me, and when I tried to grab my keys from the empty candy dish, I found them dangling from his index finger instead.

“Your mom said he was moved there for long-term care last month.”

Scott Carter was Nash’s best friend and fellow frost addict. But because he was human, the drug had affected him much faster and stronger than it affected Nash. Scott suffered a psychotic breakdown and irreparable brain damage from his addiction, and he now had a permanent, hardwired mental connection to Avari, the hellion of avarice, whose breath they’d both been huffing.

Nash had visited him several times in the hospital, always hoping for improvement that never came, but he couldn’t get in to see Scott at Lakeside, where visitors had to be approved individually by the attending physician.

“You wanna ride with me, or meet me in the parking lot?” I asked, plucking my key ring from his finger. Obviously, it’d be faster for him to just blink himself there, but he didn’t yet have the strength—or maybe the skill—to materialize that far away with a passenger, so I’d have to drive myself.

Tod crossed his arms over his uniform shirt, a blue polo with a stylized pizza embroidered on the left side of his chest. “I haven’t said I’ll do it yet.”

I frowned, one hand on the doorknob, trying to decide whether or not he was joking. “What if I said this is my dying wish? You know, one last request?”

“Your last request is to break into a psychiatric hospital?”

I shrugged. “I’m kind of operating under the assumption that I get one last request from everyone who gives a damn that I’m dying.” I shoved my hands into my pockets and stared straight at his eyes, demanding the truth from them in a sudden surge of reckless courage. “Do you fall into that category?”

“Don’t play that game, Kaylee. You already know the answer to that.” There was just the slightest twist of emotion in his blue eyes, and my pulse spiked when his voice went deep, like his response meant more than the sum of the individual words.

“Then will you help me?”

“You know the answer to that, too,” he said, and I smiled in relief, then almost laughed out loud over the absurdity of that. You’d have to be crazy to break into a psychiatric hospital.

I held the front door for him, then locked it behind us, and when I looked up, Tod was already sitting in my passenger seat waiting for me, with all four doors locked. “You know, you’d make a great thief,” I said, sliding into the driver’s seat next to him.

“I’m a man of many talents.”

“Thanks for doing this,” I said as I backed down the driveway.

“I was bored at work anyway.” He shrugged as I shifted into Drive and took off toward the highway.

After several miles of me watching the road and him watching me, I finally huffed in exasperation. “What?”

“What’d you want from Nash, Kaylee?”

“Huh?” I glanced at Tod and found his irises holding steady in spite of clear tension in the line of his jaw.

“Your last request from my little brother. What did you ask him to do for you?”

My grip tightened around the steering wheel, and I could feel my face flush. “That’s none of your business, Tod.”

In my peripheral vision, he nodded stiffly. “That’s what I thought.”

“What, no lecture about how I’m too young, or I’m not ready?” Or I shouldn’t be with Nash in the first place?

“I’ve already said what I have to say about you and my brother.” Tod stared out his window, and it irritated me that I couldn’t see his face. “If that’s really what you want, go for it. I just thought…”

“What? You thought what?” I demanded, further irritated by his tone—which I couldn’t quite interpret.

Finally he turned to face me again, and my focus shifted back and forth between him and the barely past-rush-hour traffic. “I just thought… I thought you’d have something better to do with these last few days than spend them in bed with your boyfriend.”

I couldn’t think beyond the sting of his words, each like a needle puncturing my heart. Or maybe my pride. But then my surprise—and yeah, a tiny hint of shame—morphed into anger, sharp and clear. “Did you die a virgin, Tod?” I demanded.

He rolled his eyes. “No.”

“Then where the hell do you get off telling me I should?”

He sighed and leaned his chair back a little as I passed a slow-moving station wagon. “That’s not what I’m saying. If you wanna sleep with Nash, then sleep with Nash. You wouldn’t be the first to make that mistake.”

Anger made my heart beat harder. “Why are you so sure it’d be a mistake?”

“Because I know you! You’ve waited this long because it’s important to you and you want it to mean something. And if it’s with Nash, I think you’ll regret it later, when you realize the two of you don’t belong together.”

His insight scared me, and for a second, I couldn’t think beyond the shock of hearing some of my own thoughts coming from his mouth, albeit colored with his usual anti-Nash perspective. Then the reality of what he’d said kicked in and fear-fueled anger flared in me like living flames.

“There isn’t going to be a later, Tod! These next three days? That’s my life. That’s all I get. I’m not going to live to regret anything.”

“So—just to be clear—you’re doing it for the novelty of the act? Not because you love him or because it means something—just so you can say you’ve done it?”

Yes.

“No!” I shook my head, trying to jostle my conflicting thoughts into some semblance of order. “You’re such a hypocrite! Did your first time mean something? Did a choir of angels set the mood with an a cappella fanfare celebrating your union?” I demanded, and Tod just stared at me, his expression caught somewhere between surprise and regret. “Why do you even care if I sleep with Nash?”

Why did I care that he cared?

He turned to stare out his window again. “I just assumed you’d have something a little more meaningful on your last to-do list.”

And that’s when I realized he had no idea why we were breaking into Lakeside. “Not that it’s any of your business, but this little field trip we’re on has a purpose. I’m hoping a psych patient named Farrah Combs can give me the information I need to get rid of the incubus posing as my math teacher so that he can’t seduce and either kill or impregnate my best friend after I’m dead. Is that noble enough for you?”

Tod blinked. Then he blinked again, clearly stunned. “Yeah, actually. That’s more like what I thought you’d be doing.”

“Well, don’t read too much into it. I’m not a saint, and I don’t want to be. I just want to be normal. I want to have fights with my dad, and secrets with my best friend, and sex with my boyfriend. But most of all, I want to not be dead in a few days. I’m not done living! And I can’t fit everything else I want to do into the next ninety-six hours, and no matter how many dying wishes I make, that’s not going to change. And I hate it!”

Tod laughed, and my teeth ground together as I swerved smoothly onto the exit ramp. “Why the hell is that funny?”

“It’s not. It’s just a relief to hear you sounding less than rational and perfectly accepting of your own death. For a while it looked like you were going to ‘go gentle into that good night,’ or whatever. And that’s not you, Kaylee.”

I glanced at him, brows raised in surprise. Tod rarely ever said what I expected to hear, but poetry was new, even for him. “You like it better when I ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light?’”

“I like it when you ‘rage, rage’ against anything. It makes you look fierce and…alive.” The blues in his eyes started to swirl. “And if you tell anyone I quoted Dylan Thomas, I’ll… Well, I won’t have to do anything, because no one will believe you.”

The light ahead turned red, and I slowed to a stop in the left turn lane, then laid one hand over my heart and gave him a cheesy, wide-eyed double-blink. “I will take your secret to my grave.”

“I wish you didn’t have to.”

“Yeah, me, too.” My chest ached just thinking about it.

The light changed and I turned left, then pulled into the parking lot on the right. Lakeside was attached to Arlington Memorial, the hospital where Tod worked as a reaper—unbeknownst to the living—and his mother worked as a third-shift triage nurse, but it was a separate building, with a separate entrance and better security.

I parked in the last row and killed the engine, then sat there staring at the building for a minute, trying to calm the flutter of panic the sight of it raised in my stomach, even though I had no memory of being taken in. I’d just woken up inside, all alone, strapped to a bed in a featureless white room.

“You sure about this?” Tod asked, watching me.

“Yeah. Thanks for helping, even if it’s just to fulfill my last request,” I teased, trying to lighten the mood.

“How is it fair that you get, like, five dying wishes and I didn’t even get one?”

“No dying wish?” I frowned. “That’s criminal.”

Tod shrugged. “One of the many downsides to an unexpected death.”

“Better late than never,” I said, pushing my car door open. “I officially owe you one dying wish.”

Tod’s pale brows arched halfway up his forehead, and he looked suddenly, achingly wistful. “She knows not what she says…”

Maybe not. But I was starting to get a pretty good idea….