“Was Marco Gutierrez one of them?”
“Yeah.”
“Good enough.” I pulled a notepad from my bag and pushed it across the table toward him. Em added a pen. “Write down all you can remember. Please.”
“Is this about what happened with Marco yesterday?” Sabine sipped from her cup while Nash scribbled on the notepad.
“Yeah. He was just possessed, so it was pretty easy to get rid of Avari, but I’d like to avoid a repetition. Or at least see it coming ahead of time.”
“So, where do we stand with Sophie and the liquid envy?” Em cradled her cup in both hands.
Sabine’s smile looked almost euphoric. Which kinda scared me. “I gave her the first dose this morning, in her coffee. Had to dump in extra sugar to cover the taste.”
“Half a drop?” Em said. “Because Kaylee went bat-shit crazy on a full drop.”
“I did not—”
“Yeah. Half a drop, as instructed.” Sabine spoke over me. “But I’m telling you, this whole thing would be much more entertaining—and would go a lot faster—if you’d let me really dose her.”
“No. I know you enjoy your work, but the object isn’t to drive her nuts.”
Sabine huffed. “Speak for yourself.” Then she shrugged. “At least I’m getting a decent bedtime snack out of this.” Because she was feeding from Sophie’s relevant fears as part of the process.
Em chuckled, staring into her cup. “I can’t believe you put real sugar in her coffee. She’d kill you if she knew it wasn’t calorie-free sweetener.”
“Here.” Nash slid the notepad back to me. “That’s all I can remember.”
I glanced at the list. “That’s only three names.”
He shrugged and sipped his coffee. “If I had more, I’d give them to you.”
“Thanks.” I turned to Em. “What about you? Did you see Doug hang out with anyone in particular?”
“Yeah.” She shrugged. “Half the school. But I never even saw him with a balloon.” Which is what they’d used to store frost in. Which was kind of…my idea. Though I’d never intended to contribute to the ease of drug trafficking when I’d thought of it.
“Hey, Kaylee, can I talk to you for a minute?” I twisted in my chair to see Chelsea Simms holding a green paper folder.
“Sure.” I shoved the notepad into my bag, picked up my coffee, and stood. “I’ll see you guys at lunch.” Sabine, Nash, and Emma nodded, and I followed Chelsea into the hall.
She opened the folder as we walked in the general direction of our first-period math class, then pulled out a sheet of paper and handed it to me. “I just wanted to show you this.” It was a screen print from some kind of layout program. “It’s for her memorial page in the yearbook.”
In the center was a candid shot of Emma at a football game, from the fall semester. Her cheeks were red from the cold and she wore a green scarf; her thick, golden hair was flying over her shoulder in the wind. She looked happy.
She looked alive.
In that moment, I understood what Emma had lost, beyond her family, her clothes, her car, and the future she’d always assumed she’d have. She’d lost herself.
I’d met Emma in the third grade, and in all the time I’d known her, I couldn’t remember her ever lacking confidence or self-esteem before I’d exposed her to truths about the world no human should have to deal with. She’d always known who she was and where she fit into the world. She’d known what she wanted to do with her life—even if that changed on a monthly basis—and exactly what she was capable of.
She had none of that now, and even if I spent my entire afterlife trying to make that up to her, I could never give her back what she’d lost. Ever. The best I could do was help her adjust to the life she had now. Show her that she still had her friends, and that this new life could still be a good one.
But I couldn’t do that with Avari always two steps behind us. I couldn’t honestly tell her that life was still worth living if we were always looking over our shoulders to evade death and eternal torture. I had to get rid of Avari and the rest of the hellions not just to avenge Em’s death, and those who’d gone before her, but to make sure that the life she had left was more than just the constant struggle to hold on to it.
“Do you think she’d like it?” Chelsea asked, and I realized we’d stopped walking several doors away from our classroom. And that my hand was clenched around the printout, my knuckles white from the strain.
“Yeah. It’s beautiful. I think she’ll love it.”
Chelsea gave me a confused look, and it took me a second to realize I’d referred to Em in present tense. Again.
“I mean, if she were still here. Which she’s not, obviously. Because she died. But if she hadn’t, I have no doubt that Emma would love this yearbook memorial page.”
6
“I hate it.” Em set the memorial page printout on the picnic table and pinned it with her soda can.
“Hate what?” Nash put his tray down, Sabine set hers next to it, and they sank onto the bench across from me and Em.
“My yearbook memorial page.”
“That’s what Chelsea wanted to show me this morning.” I leaned across the table and took an apple wedge from Nash’s tray. I wasn’t hungry, but if I never ate anything at lunch, people would start to notice, and he rarely bothered with the fruit anyway.
Sabine unscrewed the top on a bottle of flavored water from the vending machine. “What’s wrong with it?”
Emma rotated the page beneath her can so they could see it. “The layout is simplistic and too symmetrical, the quote they picked says nothing about me, and I’d complain that the picture’s too small, except that it’s a horrible shot of me anyway.”
“What are you talking about? You look great!” I frowned, studying her. “Are you channeling someone’s anger again?”
“Not that I know of. Anyway, I’m not mad. I just hate that picture.”
“Oh, that may be my doing,” Sabine said around a bite of cheese-slathered corn chip. “Em’s afraid she’ll never look that good, so I thought this might be a good time to amp up her insecurity and vanity by feeding that fear. Tastes pretty good, too.” She washed her bite down with a gulp of water. “Want me to stop?”
“No. It’s fine.” Em sat with a pout and turned the printout over, so she couldn’t see her own face. Her own former face. And suddenly I felt bad for showing it to her. I’d thought it would make her feel better to know how much people cared. How much they missed her. Instead, I’d reminded her of what she’d lost. Again.
“Your dad snuck out of my house at two this morning,” Nash said. I glanced up in confusion to find my cousin and her necromancer boyfriend only a few feet away, carrying their lunch. Sophie looked sick.
“Whoa, really?” Luca glanced from Nash to Sophie, who scowled and dropped her tray on the table so hard that her orange bounced into a plastic cup of cottage cheese. “This is the man who threatened to make sure I could never sire children if he ever caught me at your house past nine o’clock?”
“The very same.” Sophie sat and started scraping cheese off her orange with a plastic spork. “And that wasn’t an idle threat. Turns out I also have three older half brothers—like, way older—who would cut off anything you let dangle if they knew half of—”
Luca put a hand over her