If I Die (28 page)

Beck leaned so close I felt his breath on my ear. The tip of one blade bit into my skin. I gasped at the sharp pain and couldn’t help wondering how much worse the real thing would hurt. “You’re going to do it, or when I’m done with you, I’ll take Emma and your cousin back to Emma’s house and we’ll have a little fun while your soulless corpse cools.”

A bitter, black pain settled into my stomach, and threatened to swallow me whole. “Don’t touch them,” I whispered furiously, with all the volume I could manage.

“You have my word that I won’t, if you do exactly what I tell you to.”

Hellions can’t lie; did the same thing go for incubi? I didn’t know, but I had no doubt that if I didn’t write the email, he’d do to Em and Sophie what he’d done to Danica. Or maybe what he’d done to her mother.

He was making me choose. Nash or Emma and Sophie.

If I wrote the letter and the police found it—no doubt Beck would leave it open on my laptop—Nash would probably spend the rest of his life on the run. As would Harmony, because she and Tod wouldn’t let him go down for my murder.

But if I didn’t write the letter, Emma and Sophie would die, either from the energy Beck would drain from them, or to give his demon children life.

I couldn’t let them die. Not again. Not because of me. So I started typing.

Tears blurred out the screen. I blinked, and they trailed down my cheeks in hot rivers of my own terror, and anger, and remorse. But I did what I had to do. I begged Nash not to come over. I promised I’d talk to him at school, but not until he calmed down. And at the end of the letter, I told him he scared me when he was like “this,” as Beck ordered. Tears dripped on the keyboard when I typed my name at the bottom of the screen. More dripped from my chin while my pointer hovered over the send button.

“Do it,” Beck whispered into my ear, and I could hear his breathing escalate, like he was turned on by what he was making me do. By the pain and chaos he was creating. “Do it, or I swear they wil die screaming in both pleasure and pain. Tonight.”

My entire body shook with sobs. But I clicked Send. And ruined everything, for everyone I’d ever loved.

“Good girl…” Beck crooned, pulling up on my arm until I had to stand.

My legs almost refused to hold me. Shock settled over me, blurring things.

Numbing me. I couldn’t think through the fog swirling in my head, like my brain had given up and crossed over into hell without the rest of me.

“Sit down,” he murmured, and I only realized I’d sat on the bed when I felt the mattress sink beneath me.

I may as well have killed him. I’d ended Nash’s life just the same, with the press of a few buttons and a single click of the mouse.

“Here, let’s take your shirt off—just a little scene setting. Smal -town cops usually need it spoon-fed to them, and we don’t want to leave any doubts.”

Would Tod forgive me? He’d never know why I did it, but he’d know it wasn’t true. Would he hate me for eternity for what I’d done to his brother? To his mother?

I barely felt Beck unbutton my shirt, but vaguely I was aware that he did it one-handed, because those twin points of pain—promise of an end to this new misery—never left my side.

“Lie down now…” There was gentle pressure on my bare shoulder, and the bed rose up to meet me. I was drowning in guilt, so cold and bitter I could no longer feel the fear I’d been living with for the past five days. Fear didn’t matter anymore—I was going to die whether I was afraid of death or not.

The only things that mattered were the people I loved, and I’d just betrayed every last one of them. My life was a series of smal lies, but my death was the biggest one of all.

Beck leaned over me, his head backlit by the light on my ceiling. His cheek brushed mine, an intimate invasion I hated, even on the verge of death.

“This’ll only hurt for a minute,” he promised. “And since you’re not going to make a last confession, maybe I should.” He sat up then, and I forced my gaze to focus on the cruelty and joy shining in his eyes. “I’m still going to take Emma and your cousin. They’ll die screaming my name.”

I blinked, and my room roared back into focus, so sharp and crisp my eyes burned. Rage blazed through me, igniting my every nerve ending, sparking in every synapse. And suddenly I realized I had nothing left to lose.

“The hell they will.” I smacked his knife hand away from my chest, and one blade sliced across my left palm. Blood flowed, and the pain was sharp, but I’d caught him by surprise. I sat up, my right fist already flying, and through sheer luck, the blow actually glanced across his chin.

Stunned, Beck reached for me. I dropped beneath his grasping hand and rol ed off the other side of the mattress, reaching for Nash’s bat. But it had rolled too far under the bed, and Beck was there in an instant, my incompetent fighting skills no match for his supernatural speed. He threw me against the wall, one hand around my neck. Gagging, I tried to shove my knee into his groin, but he blocked the blow with the fist still clenching the knife.

“No…” I croaked, desperate for a breath—just enough to wail my way into the Netherworld. Beck would follow me, but at least then I’d be running, and I could lure him away from Emma and Sophie. At least then, I’d have a chance. But Beck only tightened his grip.

“You stupid little bitch,” he spat, swinging me away from the wall by my throat. “You couldn’t just play nice, could you? I was going to make it fast—

both blades straight through your heart. But now I think I’ll let you suffer.”

My vision darkened. My throat burned. My terror knew no limits.

Beck pushed me backward, his fingers flexing around my neck until my ears rang. The backs of my legs hit the mattress, and he kept pushing until I had to sit, clawing at his fingers with both hands.

He shoved again, and I fell onto my back with him straddling me. But finally his grip on my throat loosened, just enough for me to suck in a shallow, unsatisfying breath—not enough to scream, just enough to live. The fresh air burned all the way down, and Beck clucked his tongue. “Can’t let you suffocate,” he said, raising the double-bladed knife for me to see, twisting it so that the light overhead glinted off every shiny surface. “You have to die by hellion-forged steel, or you’re no good to me.” The knife disappeared from sight, and an instant later I felt both tips press into my skin, in the center of my stomach. “Any last words?”

He relaxed his grip on my throat a little more, just enough that I could croak out a couple of words. And a couple was all I had for him.

“Fuck—” I gasped, ignoring the pain “—you.”

“Wel said.” His right arm flexed. My pulse roared in my ears. And the blades sank slowly, steadily into my stomach, bringing with them a fiery pain like nothing I’d never felt.

I gasped, and his hand fell away from my throat. My world shrank to encompass nothing but the agony spreading out from my center, spilling from my flesh in warm rivers of blood.

Beck crawled onto the bed next to me, on his knees, watching in fascination as I blinked up at him. My hands shook as they reached for my stomach, hovering over both the devastating damage and the hated instrument.

“Does it hurt?” he asked, eyes shining with eagerness.

I pulled in an agonizing breath and licked my lips with a tongue that was suddenly dry. “You tell me.” Then I grabbed the hilt and pul ed, screaming as the blades slid free of my flesh. And with the last of my strength, I shoved the dual dagger up beneath his rib cage, straight into his heart.

Chapter Twenty - Two

Beck’s eyes went wide. He gasped, and that sudden intake seemed to last forever. Blood poured from his chest, sluicing over the hilt of the knife to soak my comforter.

“Hellion-forged steel, huh?” I whispered, with all the volume I could manage. Guess I found something that will kill an incubus. The question was, would it capture his soul?

Beck blinked one more time, his eyes already losing focus. I forced myself up on one elbow, my other hand clutching at my own wounds, blood pouring through my fingers. He fell backward on the bed, his head hanging off the edge. And while I watched, paralyzed by the burning pain spreading out from the core of my body, a dark aura developed around him, darkening by the second.

He was dying. I’d killed him. But Beck’s death wouldn’t prevent my own.

I lay back on the bed, terrified by the feel of my own blood pouring through my fingers, racked by pain I could never have imagined. There was so much blood between us, I could practically taste it in the air, and the thick, coppery scent made me gag with each breath.

Desperate now, I dug in my pocket with my free hand, horrified by the darkness growing on the edges of my vision. That wasn’t Beck’s death aura—

that was me losing consciousness. I was dying. Was my reaper already here?

Tod had said I wouldn’t see him….

I flipped the phone open and held it up long enough to press and hold the number four. Then my hand fell back on the mattress, useless.

While the phone rang, I turned my head, my left cheek pressed into the mattress. Beck lay inches away, and as I watched, the phone still ringing faintly from my open palm, I saw his soul struggle up from his body, like it wanted to rise. And almost as fast as it appeared, it began to trail toward his chest, like smoke pulled up a chimney by an unseen draft.

His soul was cloudy and streaked with dark ribbons of smut, and as Tod answered his phone with a greeting I didn’t have the strength to answer, Beck’s soul seemed to soak into the hilt of the dagger until a second later there wasn’t a trace of it left.

“Hello?” Tod said again. “Kaylee? Are you all right?”

I opened my mouth but what came out wasn’t a real word. I could only manage a hint of sound riding a pain-laden sigh. Then my eyes closed, and I was alone with the sound of my own irregular breathing.

“Kaylee?” Tod sounded closer now, and when his hand brushed hair back from my face, I would have jumped, if I’d had the strength. “No…! Kaylee, wake up. Please wake up.”

Tod was crying. I’d never heard him cry before.

I forced one eye open, and there he was on his knees by the bed, still clutching his own phone. “So sorry,” I mouthed, but the words carried no sound. I was so sorry for what I’d done to Nash, but I couldn’t tell him. And that meant he couldn’t tell Nash.

“You’re gonna be okay.” Tod dropped his phone and slid one arm beneath my shoulders, the other beneath my knees. “Can you put pressure on the wound?”

But I couldn’t even shake my head in answer. I couldn’t move.

“I’m taking you to the hospital, but I can’t go that far in one shot carrying you, so we’ll have to stop a couple of times on the way. Okay?”

I couldn’t answer, but that didn’t matter. I closed my eyes, then opened them almost immediately when something cold and wet fell on my face. It was raining softly, and I was outside, in a parking lot I didn’t recognize. The lot faded, and the next instant Tod stood in a park, still clutching me to his chest, stil crying.

My eyes fell shut again, and a second later, a familiar, antiseptic scent burned my nose, while bright lights rendered the world red and veiny through my closed eyelids.

I blinked, and the hospital came into view. A hallway, full of beeps, and voices, and the steady metallic clink of carts wheeled on linoleum. Tod laid me on a stretcher and pressed something to my stomach. It didn’t hurt anymore, and that should have scared me, but nothing scared me more than seeing him cry.

Reapers don’t cry. They don’t. But I’d made Tod cry. And he didn’t even know what I’d done yet.

“They’re going to fix you, Kaylee,” he said, leaning down to whisper in my ear. “I promise.”

I shook my head, but Tod stepped back anyway, pulling his hand out of mine. He glanced down the hal , toward the source of most of the noise. “Hey, somebody help! This girl’s bleeding!”

“My dad…” I mouthed, when I couldn’t force any more sound, and Tod nodded. Then he disappeared.

A second later, footsteps pounded toward me, and the first nurse appeared from around the corner, clad in Looney Tunes–print scrubs. “Holy—”

She yelled something else I couldn’t focus on, and more people came running.

They wheeled me past a long desk and into a room full of equipment, and someone started cutting my remaining clothes off.

Minutes later—or seconds; I’d lost all sense of time—Tod reappeared with my father in tow.

“Kaylee!” my dad shouted, and a man in scrubs held him back. “That’s my daughter!”

“Sir, how did you get in here?”

My dad threw one punch, and the nurse hit the floor. In the next instant, he was at my side, and someone was yelling that he could stay, if he stayed out of the way.

“Kaylee…” Tears trailed down his face as he brushed hair back from my head. Someone pushed him aside and an oxygen mask was lowered over my face, then he was back and Tod was with him.

They watched me, tears standing in their eyes, and every time I blinked, it became a struggle to open my eyes again. I didn’t hear the questions, the slosh of liquids, or the crackle of sealed packages being opened. I didn’t feel the needles, or the sterile solution, or the pulse monitor clipped over my finger. I only saw Tod and my dad. The men who loved me. I wished I could tel them how sorry I was that I’d ruined everything.

Then I blinked, and the world dimmed. And suddenly a little redheaded boy was there, completely out of place in an E.R. operating room. He pulled Tod away from the bed and said something I couldn’t hear.

Levi.

It was time. Levi had come to reap my soul.

But instead, he handed Tod a slip of paper, watching solemnly as he read it, and Tod gaped at him. Then shook his head. Levi repeated whatever he’d said, then gestured to me with one open hand. Tod crossed his arms over his chest and held his ground. And finally I understood.

Levi wasn’t my reaper. Tod was. By bringing me to the hospital, Tod had put me on his own reaping list. And he was refusing to kill me.

I glanced up at my dad, but he was still crying, still stroking my hair, and he saw nothing else.

The boy frowned up at Tod, like he was waiting for something. For the reaper he’d recruited and trained to concede logic and give in. But Tod only shook his head, one last time.

Levi’s frown deepened, and he reached up toward Tod’s chest with one small hand. Tod’s blue eyes widened, and his mouth fell open. His soul streamed out of his body and curled around Levi’s tiny fist like a handful of incorporeal cotton. Tod glanced at me and blinked once. Then he disappeared.

He was just…gone.

No…! I screamed, but no sound came out. The pain in my heart swallowed the pain in my stomach like the ocean devours a single drop of rain.

Thoughtless, wordless agony washed over me, a loss like I’d never felt before. I was hollow, empty of everything but pain, and the ghost memory of blue eyes watching me, seeing me like no one else ever had. Those eyes would never look at me again. They would never blink, or swirl, or shine. They were gone.

Tod was gone.

My entire world was pain.

I couldn’t see through my tears, and when they finally fel , Levi stood next to my father, heedless of the nurses and doctors who stepped through him to get to me. “I’m so sorry, Kaylee,” he said. “He didn’t give me any choice.”

Then he placed one hand over my eyes, and the world went black.

I don’t know what happened while the world was gone, but when it came back, the light was too bright to bear, even with my eyes closed. I blinked, and that brightness intensified beyond my threshold for pain, like a bolt of lightning through my brain. I blinked again, and my eyes began to adjust.

And my brain finally caught up.

“What the hell…?” I whispered, surprised by how rough my voice sounded, until I remembered what happened.

“This isn’t hell, Kaylee. Far from it.”

I jerked in surprise, then sat up so fast my head swam. A woman stood in front of me, wearing a brown suit jacket and skirt. Her hair was short, and her nose was long. Before I had a chance to ask her anything, I realized I was naked from the waist up. And sitting on a cold, metal table.

Mortified, I grabbed the plain white sheet that had fallen when I sat up and clutched it to my chest. Then I stared at the wall of stainless-steel drawers to my left. And the three other metal gurneys on my right.

I was in the morgue.

“Did I die?” I asked, my voice virtually toneless with shock.

“Yes,” a familiar voice said from behind me, and I turned to watch Levi circle my table. “But Madeline has asked for an audience with you. Please give her your full attention.”

Before I could process that, Madeline cleared her throat, and I glanced at her automatical y. “Kaylee, we’d like to offer you the opportunity to—”

“No.” I clutched the sheet tighter and stared her right in the eyes. “I don’t want to be a reaper.” Not after what had happened to Tod. How could they ever think I’d work for them after they kil ed him?

Her left brow arched dramatically. “That’s not what we want, either. I work for the reclamation department, and we could use your services.”

“Doing what?” I frowned, glancing from Madeline to Levi, then back to her.

“Reclaiming souls from those they don’t belong to.”

“Stolen souls? From hellions?” Shouldn’t my heart be pounding? The very thought terrified me. But my heart refused to beat. Because I was dead.

“No, you would be working here, in the human world. As a female bean sidhe, you’re uniquely suited to what we do. And frankly, we’re drastically understaffed.”

“Can you…make me alive again?”

“No, not like you were.” Madeline glanced at her hands, clasped in front of her. “Unfortunately, no one can do that. But we can do almost as well.”

“You’d exist in form similar to that of a reaper,” Levi supplied. “But with a different skil set.”

Like a reaper. Like Tod, who’d had a physical form whenever he’d wanted it. Who’d been able to stay with his family. Until I’d gotten him killed, and Nash framed for my murder.

“No,” I repeated, eyeing Madeline steadily. “I’ve seen how you reward people cursed with an afterlife. No way.”

“I don’t think you understand the opportunity you’re passing up, Kaylee.” Madeline crossed her arms over her suit jacket. “Not just for you, but for everyone you care about. As things stand now, your best friend is devastated and your father is inconsolable. And your boyfriend…”

“Ex…” Levi supplied, laying one arm on the gurney, over the sheet that covered me.

Madeline began again. “Your ex-boyfriend is sitting in a jail cell, sick with withdrawal from a very powerful substance and about to be charged with your murder.”

“But that’s not possible.” My hands clenched around the cold sheet in frustration and anger. “I killed Mr. Beck. They must have found his body. They have to know he killed me.” Yet I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around the sentence I’d just spoken.

Levi watched me in what may have been sympathy. Or possibly impatience. “Kaylee, you and the incubus were stabbed with the same instrument, seconds apart, on your bed. At the moment, the police believe that Nash found you there together, and that he killed you both in a jealous rage.”

I shook my head, clinging to denial. “Fingerprints. His fingerprints aren’t there.”

Levi shrugged. “They’ll say he wiped them off. He’s a smart boy. Smart enough to wrap your dying hands around the hilt of the knife.”

“No!” My dad would know better, as would Harmony, Emma and Sabine. But no one had actually seen Beck stab me—Em and Sophie had already been asleep when he’d arrived—and thanks to her criminal record, Sabine would make the world’s worst alibi for Nash.

Nash could actually go down for this. And without Tod to break him out, he would spend the rest of his life in jail. Because I’d helped Beck frame him.

I couldn’t let that happen.

“You’re saying that if I do this thing for you, this job, you’ll help Nash?”

Madeline frowned, and I knew I wasn’t going to like whatever came next. “It’s more than just this one job, Kaylee. It’s a commitment to work for the reclamation department. In exchange, you’ll be granted an afterlife with certain physical privileges—and a few unavoidable limitations—for as long as you remain in our employ.”

“Limitations?”

She lifted one brow in what may have been amusement. “Most people are more interested in the advantages.”

“Fine,” I snapped. “What are those?”

“Immortality, of course. Agelessness.”

“Those sound like limitations to me. Who wants to be sixteen forever?”

And alone, at that. I didn’t want to watch my friends and family age and die. I didn’t want the world to move on without me. I didn’t want to face eternity on my own.

And she must have seen that on my face.

“And, of course, the biggest advantage is the chance to help Mr.

Hudson.”

She meant Nash. But I couldn’t help thinking about Tod, too. He’d died—again—for me.

“Would you really let Nash go down for my murder, knowing he’s innocent?” I demanded.

“Would you?” Madeline’s gaze held steady. Based on her eyes, I knew she had a soul, but based on her cold, hard demeanor, I’d guess she hadn’t recently found use for her heart. “We can’t intervene on behalf of every innocent man sent to prison, Kaylee. The reclamation department is only willing to expend its resources on Nash’s behalf if we’ll be getting something in return—your services. It’s your choice.”

“What could you do for him?”

“As a signing bonus, if you agree to work for us, the reclamation department will arrange for Mr. Hudson’s escape from police custody.”