“Kaylee?” My dad’s footsteps thumped behind me as I stepped into my room, questions whirling around in my head so fast I got dizzy, just standing still. “Did you hear Tod?”
“Of course I heard him.” Though, admittedly, that was never a guarantee. Reapers could choose who they wanted to be seen and heard by, on an individual basis, and Tod had an irritating habit of appearing to just one person in the room at a time—usually me.
“I think she’s in shock,” the reaper said as I scanned the floor, the rumpled covers, and the laundry piled in my desk chair, looking for a breathing lump of fur.
“Styx?” I called, but nothing moved. Tod materialized at the foot of the bed, studying me closely for my reaction, and I jumped, startled by his sudden appearance. “I’m not in shock. Not yet, anyway.” At a glance, he looked nothing like his brother, beyond their similar athletic builds. Tod had his mother’s blue eyes and blond curls, while Nash obviously took after his father, who’d died long before I met either of the Hudson boys.
“For the moment, I am firmly entrenched in denial, which—honestly—feels like the healthiest stage of acceptance. And I’d really appreciate it if you’d let me wallow there for a while.” I brushed past my father into the hall, headed toward the kitchen. “Styx!”
“I let her into the backyard,” my dad said at last, following me into the kitchen. “She doesn’t like Tod.”
“That’s because Tod never brings anything but death and bad advice,” I snapped, beyond caring that I was being unfair—it wasn’t the reaper’s fault that my number was up.
“That’s not true.” Tod tried to grin, and I had to respect his effort to lighten the mood. “Sometimes I bring pizza.”
Because the reaper gig—he extinguished life and reaped souls at the local hospital from midnight to noon—didn’t pay in human currency, Tod had begun delivering pizza for spending money during his free time. At my suggestion.
At first, I’d been amused by the fact that you could get both death and a large pepperoni delivered by the same person. But after Danica Sussman’s first period miscarriage and the news of my own impending demise, nothing seemed very funny at the moment.
“Styx is probably starving,” I mumbled, pulling open the fridge. My father’s warm hand landed firmly over mine on the handle and he pushed the door closed.
“Kaylee, please sit down. We need to talk about this.”
“I know.” But I was terrified that if I stopped moving for more than a second, that cloud of denial would clear and leave me staring at the ugly truth. And I’d already faced more than my share of ugly truths in the almost-seventeen years of my life.
Finally I nodded reluctantly. For all I knew, I didn’t have the luxury of avoiding the truth for very long.
I opened the fridge again and pulled out a can of Coke, then followed my dad into the living room, where Tod was already seated in my father’s recliner. For once, Dad didn’t yell at him to move. Instead, he sat on the couch with me, and I could see that he wanted to hug me, but I couldn’t let him, because that gesture of grief would make it real, and no matter how little time I had left, I wasn’t ready for that. Not yet.
So I would focus on the facts, rather than the truth. Because no matter what it sounds like, there’s actually a very big difference between the two.
“Are you sure?” I asked, holding the cold can with both hands, relishing the discomfort because it meant that I was still alive.
Tod nodded miserably. “Normally I don’t see the names more than a day or two in advance, but because you’re already on borrowed time, your name came on the special list.”
Special …
I was on borrowed time because I’d already died once. I was only three at the time, and thirteen years later, I only knew what I’d been told long after the fact: I was scheduled to die that night, on the side of an icy road in an accident. However, my parents couldn’t stand the thought of losing their only child, so my father tried to exchange his death date for mine. But the reaper was a vicious bastard, and he took my mother’s life instead.
I’d been living my mother’s life—literally—since I was three years old. And now her lifeline was coming to its end. Which meant that I would die. Again.
“Aren’t you just a rookie?” My father frowned skeptically.
“How do you even have access to this special list?” Normally, my dad wouldn’t hesitate to question the reaper, based solely on the fact that they didn’t get along. But his disbelief this time had a deeper root. One I understood.
If Tod was wrong, or even lying for some reason, then maybe I wasn’t going to die. Maybe my borrowed lifeline wasn’t really sliding through my fingers faster than I could cling to it.
“That’s the weird thing,” Tod said, unbothered by my dad’s skepticism. “Normally, I wouldn’t have access to it. If I’d known it was coming up, I could have looked up the specifics on the sly.” Tod had his boss’s passwords because he’d set them up in the first place—he was one of only two reapers in the district young enough to have grown up with computers. “But this time I didn’t have to. When I went in this afternoon to pick up my own list, Levi sent me into his office for something. And the special list was sitting right there on his desk, in plain sight.”
“And naturally, you read it,” my father added.
“I’m a reaper, not a saint. Anyway, I think he wanted me to see it. Why else would he have left it out, then sent me in alone with it lying right there?”
“Why would he want you to see it?” I asked, curious in spite of the huge dark cloud hanging over my truncated future.
Tod shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he likes me. Maybe he likes you.” I’d only met Levi, Tod’s boss, once, but he had seemed impressed with my ingenuity. Impressed enough to give me a heads-up about my own death? Maybe, but …
“Why?” I asked, focused on Tod’s eyes in search of an answer. If I’d been looking at Nash, I’d have known what he was feeling just by watching the colors twist in his irises. But, like my dad, Tod was too good at hiding what he was feeling.
He rarely ever let his emotions show through the windows to his soul.
“Why would he like you?” Tod’s eyes held steady. “Well, you do have this sort of magnetic effect on the darker elements of life. And the afterlife.” As evidenced by Avari the hellion’s obsession with claiming my soul. “And Levi’s definitely on the murky side of things.”
I had no idea how old Levi was—though my best guess was in the mid-triple digits—but he looked like an eight-year-old, freckled, redheaded little boy. That, combined with the fact that all reapers were technically dead, made him hands down the creepiest reaper I’d ever met. And, unfortunately, in the last six months, I’d had occasion to meet several.
But that wasn’t what I’d meant.
“No, why would he want me to know? Why would you want me to know? Nash said we’re not supposed to tell people when they’re going to die, because that just makes their last moments miserable. And I gotta say, he was right.” I didn’t know my exact time of death yet, but just knowing it was coming was enough to make my stomach revolt against the entire concept of food.
“In general, that’s true …” my father began, but Tod cut him off, sporting a characteristic dark grin.
“But you seem to be the exception to so many rules, why should this one be any different?”
“Does that mean you want me to suffer through anticipation?” I asked, hoping I’d misinterpreted that part.
“No.”