If I Die

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.”