“How was the reception?” I set a glass of sweet tea on the end table next to my father, then carefully lifted his leg from the coffee table and slid a pillow beneath it.
“Kaylee, you really don’t have to wait on me. I’m fine.” He scruffed the fur between Styx’s small, pointed ears, and she snuggled closer. The cutest part about their recent bonding was that my dad thought Styx was hungry for attention. I suspected the truth had more to do with her determination to protect him at all costs.
Styx was half-Netherhound. She was fiercely loyal and could snap a human long bone in a single bite.
“You were stabbed in the leg by a psychotic hellion wearing Sabine’s foster mother’s face.” In the kitchen again, I pulled his plate out of the microwave and grabbed a fork from the dish drainer. “What part of that is fine?”
“The part where I lived.” My dad sighed, and for a moment his eyes swirled with survivor’s guilt. “Some weren’t so lucky.”
“I heard that!” Em called from the bedroom, where she was obsessing over which of my hopelessly plain T-shirts to wear on her first day of school as Emily Cavanaugh.
“You’re a survivor, Em!” I called back. More of a survivor than I was, anyway. At least her heart still beat on its own. Even if it wasn’t her original heart.
I shooed Styx off the couch with one hand while I handed my dad’s plate to him with the other.
“How’s she doing?” My dad pulled back the plastic film covering his dinner as I set the remote control next to him.
“It’s going to take a while to adjust, but she’ll get there.” I shrugged. “She still has all of us.” Which was more than most new kids had on the first day. “So? The reception? How’s Ms. Marshall? And Em’s sisters?”
My father sighed. He no longer looked hungry. “They’re hurting, Kay. It kills me that we can’t tell them the truth.”
We’d thought about it. A lot. After all, we could certainly prove our crazy story. But telling them that Emma was still alive in someone else’s body would mean telling them about bean sidhes, and reapers, and death dates, and about the Netherworld, and that there were hellions over there just waiting to devour our souls and torture us for all of eternity.
Most humans didn’t handle that kind of disclosure well.
“It probably doesn’t help that they had to wait nearly two weeks to bury her.”
The police had refused to release Emma’s body until after a full autopsy. They hadn’t bought our claim that she’d broken her neck in a freak fall from the swing set at the lake, where my birthday party had been crashed by hellions.
We didn’t tell them about the hellions.
Of course, part of the reason our story was so hard for them to accept was that her boyfriend, Jayson, had died that same day. As had Sabine’s foster mother. That was too many deaths related to one high school clique to pass as coincidence.
But in the end, they’d had to release all the bodies for burial when they could find no signs of foul play. Because there was no foul play, on our part, anyway.
The hellions were not available for questioning.
“I’m just glad it’s over.” My dad picked up his fork and poked at a clump of rehydrated mashed potatoes.
“Yeah.” Except for the part about us getting rid of the three hellions occupying the Netherworld version of my high school. My dad wasn’t ready to hear about that just yet. At least not until his leg had healed.
“Hey,” Tod said, and I looked up to find him standing in the middle of the living room, holding a plain manila envelope.
“Is that…?” My dad gestured to the envelope, and Tod nodded.
“Em!” I called when he sat on the couch on my other side and handed me the package.
My bedroom door creaked open, and Emma trudged in from the hall as I dumped the contents of the envelope on the coffee table. She looked more nervous than curious when she saw what Tod had brought.
I picked up a small laminated card from the middle of the pile of papers and held it out to her. “Emily Cavanaugh, you are now officially licensed to drive.” Even though Lydia’s body was only fifteen years old. It hadn’t seemed fair to make Em wait another year and take driver’s ed all over again. She’d already lost so much—including her car.
“Where did you get them done?” Em sank into the armchair, staring at her new license.
I wondered what she was thinking. Was she hating her new face again? I couldn’t help wishing she’d known Lydia before becoming her. Lydia was so kind and selfless. She was so beautiful on the inside that her outside hadn’t mattered.
And it’s not like she’d had any obvious flaws. She was just…normal.
Obviously normal was hard to get used to, after a lifetime of gorgeous.
“I got yours the same place I got mine.” Tod had needed paperwork to get hired as a pizza delivery boy, just like Em needed it to start school. “But I’m sworn to secrecy on that front.”
“Like it matters.” Emma slid her new license into her back pocket, then leaned forward to study her new birth certificate. “This is bizarre. I’m not sure I’ve even seen my real one.” She frowned and picked up another small paper card. “New social security number. I guess I should memorize this…”
“Thanks for getting these, Tod,” my dad said, lifting a forkful of meat loaf toward his mouth.
“No problem.”
When my dad turned on the TV and Em sank farther into the chair to study her new social security number, Tod gave his head a subtle nod toward the hall.
“Hey, Dad, we’re gonna go…” I hesitated, trying to come up with a quick, reasonable excuse to be alone with Tod, but my father only rolled his eyes.
“Just leave the door open.”
I gave him a grateful smile and picked up my glass of water on the way into the hall.
In the middle of my bedroom floor, between the beds, I turned and put one hand over Tod’s chest to feel his heartbeat. It was there—faint but very real. The gesture, checking for his heartbeat, had become both habit and a silent communication between us. A reassurance.
A promise too big to be defined by mere words.
He opened his mouth, and I put one finger over my lips in the universal sign for “shhhh.”
Tod rolled his eyes. He didn’t need to be reminded to make sure the living couldn’t hear him—one of the handier perks of our undead state. In fact, he often had to be reminded to let others see and hear him. In the two-plus years since his death, most normal human functions had fallen out of habit, and he’d once told me he wasn’t sure his heart ever beat when I wasn’t there to feel it.
I’d promptly melted into a puddle of Kaylee-goo.
My fingers curled around a handful of his shirt when he kissed me, and I stood on my toes to give him more of me. To taste more of him. “Mmm…” I murmured when his lips trailed from my mouth over my chin, then down my neck. “I missed that.”
“It’s only been a few hours,” he whispered, though no one else could hear us. “Shouldn’t eternity make us more patient?”
“It’s having the opposite effect. Knowing we should have forever makes me want a little bit of forever right now…” I pulled him back up, and my lips met his again. His hands trailed slowly up my sides, and I let the feel of him chase away the anger and sadness I’d been fighting for most of the day. For most of the past two weeks, in fact. Tod felt good. Tod always felt good, even when the rest of my world was falling