Soul Screamers Volume Four: With All My Soul\Fearless\Niederwald\Last Request: 4 (2 page)

And for Alec.

My hand twitched at the thought of him, as if I still held the dagger. I could almost smell the blood. I could still see him in my mind, one of my few real friends, his eyes filled with pain and confusion, staring up at me in fear. Until they’d stared at nothing.

I swallowed my anger at Avari and what he’d taken from us, determined to avoid ruining Emma’s perfect funeral with the bellow of rage itching to burst free from me.

Today was a new start for Em, and a new start for us all. We could no longer afford to be victims in Avari’s quest to walk the human world. Beginning today, we were soldiers. Warriors, battle-weary and not yet focused, but warriors nonetheless.

Warriors, at least for the moment, in black formal funeral attire. All except for Tod, who could wear whatever he wanted because no one other than the five of us could see him.

I started to take his hand, hoping no one would notice such a small motion, but then Emma made a soft, strangling sound and I looked up to see her staring ahead, frozen like a deer in mortal danger.

Her mother was heading straight for us.

“Kaylee, thank you so much for coming.” Ms. Marshall sniffled and reached for my hand, and her tears triggered more of my own. “Thank you all.” She glanced at everyone but Tod, whom she couldn’t see, and when her gaze lingered for a second on her own daughter, hidden behind a stranger’s face, Emma burst into fresh sobs.

“We wouldn’t have missed it, Ms. Marshall,” Nash said, while I wrapped one arm around Emma.

Sabine stared at us both. The funeral hadn’t upset her at all, that I could see, and she obviously didn’t understand why it had bothered us, beyond the lie we were telling the world, since Emma was still alive and mostly well.

“Thank you.” Ms. Marshall sniffled again, and she didn’t seem to notice that her own heels were sinking into the soft earth. “I know Emma would be happy if she could see you all here now.”

Em sobbed harder.

“I’m sorry, I don’t believe we’ve met.” Ms. Marshall dabbed her eyes with a damp tissue and held one hand out to her own daughter.

Emma cleared her throat and shook her mother’s hand. Her mouth opened, but nothing came out.

“This is my cousin. Emily,” I said. “She’s just lost her parents, so she’ll be staying with me and my dad.” That was the best story we could come up with. It was heavy on coincidence, but just as heavy on necessity—Em had to live somewhere, now that she’d lost everything she’d ever had. Except for us.

Ms. Marshall’s expression crumbled beneath a new layer of sympathetic grief, and her voice shook. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Emily.”

But if Em heard her, I couldn’t tell.

“She loved you so much!” Emma threw her arms around her mother and buried her tear-streaked face in her mom’s hair. “She wouldn’t want you to forget about her, but she doesn’t want you to worry, either. Or to...” Em nearly choked on her own tears, and we all stood there looking as helpless as Ms. Marshall looked confused and...devastated. She was crying again, and so was I. “Or to...you know...stop living. She wants you to live,” Em said into her mother’s ear. “And to hug Traci and Cara a lot. And to make yourself happy. She’s sorry she called your boyfriend an idiot. It shouldn’t matter that he’s kind of stupid, if he makes you happy, so Emma would want you to go for it.”

She finally released her mother and stepped back, wiping tears with her bare hands. “So you should go for it.”

Ms. Marshall’s tissue was soaked and when she blinked, more tears fell. “I didn’t realize you knew Emma. Do you go to Eastlake?”

“She will,” I said, when I realized Em’s flood of words had dried up, leaving her speechless and evidently mortified by her outburst. “But she knew Emma from...before. We were all three really close.” I couldn’t tell whether or not Ms. Marshall believed me—or whether she was even capable of thinking my hasty explanation through at the moment—but she nodded and wiped at her cheeks again.

“Kaylee, when you feel up to it, I hope you’ll come over and take something from Emma’s room. To remember her by. I’m sure she’d want you to have whatever you’d like.”

“We will,” Em said before I could speak.

Ms. Marshall frowned, then nodded again and started backing away from us in heels crusted with mud from the recent rain. “Thank you all for coming.” Then her two remaining daughters each put an arm around her and led her to the long black car waiting with its engine running.

“I think I scared her,” Emma whispered, clutching my hand.

“Yup.” Sabine’s nearly black eyes were dilated and her mouth hung open just a little. As a
mara
—a living Nightmare—Sabine fed on fear, but she’d been going hungry a lot lately, since grief and anger had finally overwhelmed the nearly constant state of fear we’d all been living in for the past few months.

“I’m pretty sure it’s rude to feed from the dead girl’s family at a funeral,” Nash said, one arm around her waist, his fingers curled around her narrow hip. He used to hold me like that. I used to like it. But Nash and I were over. We’d been over before we even knew we were over, and I still wasn’t sure he’d completely accepted that yet. But it made me feel better to see him touch her in public.

He’d been touching her in private since the very day we broke up.

Sabine lifted both brows at him. “You expect me to believe that if someone threw a pie in your face at a funeral you wouldn’t lick your lips?”

“If someone threw a pie in my face at a funeral, I’d...” Nash frowned. “Well, that’d be really weird.”

“Weirder than seeing yourself buried?” Tod’s hand slid into my grip, his fingers curling around mine, now that there was no one near enough to see me holding hands with empty air. No one except Sophie, my real cousin, and her boyfriend, Luca, who watched us from the other side of the open grave. They knew all about Tod. In fact, my undead reaper boyfriend hardly even registered as “strange” to Sophie anymore, considering that her own boyfriend was a necromancer. And that Luca and Sabine were the only ones among us who’d never died.

Nash’s death was classified information, available on a need-to-know basis, and so far, his mom and brother didn’t think anyone needed to know. Including Nash.

Emma and I had both died twice, and for me, that second one actually stuck. Now I was a “resurrected American,” better known, in colloquial terms, as life-challenged. Or undead. Or the living dead. But I’m not a zombie. I’m just a little less alive than your average high school junior.

“No,” Nash said, in that short-tempered voice he seemed to save just for his brother. “Having a pie thrown in my face at a funeral would not be weirder than seeing myself buried.”

“Then Em wins this round.” He glanced around at the last of the mourners, including my father, who leaned on his crutch, chatting softly with Harmony, Tod and Nash’s mom, and his own brother—my uncle Brendon. “Let’s get out of here. I’ve had enough death for one day.”

That really means something, coming from a reaper.

* * *

“You okay?” I tossed Emma a T-shirt from my dresser, and she pulled it over her head. We were nearly the same size, now that she was Lydia. Which meant that the clothes we’d snuck out of her mom’s house no longer fit her.

“Yeah.” She kicked one of Styx’s rubber dog bones out of the way and stepped into a pair of my jeans. “I don’t know what happened at the cemetery. I mean, it’s not like I’m really dead, but as soon as my mom started talking to you, I just lost it.”

That was true. She’d been staring at her mother and sisters for two straight days, at the viewing the day before, the funeral today, then the actual burial, and she hadn’t lost it once. Not until her mother was within arm’s reach.

“Don’t worry about it. You’ve been through hell this year, Em. I’d be worried about you if you weren’t upset.” Though actually, I
was
worried about her. Very worried.

Emma sat on the edge of her bed to pull on a pair of sneakers, and if I’d reached out from the end of
my
bed, I could have touched her. We’d given up nearly all the floor space in my room for the extra twin bed, and I’d had to get rid of my beanbag chair, which was a real shame, considering we didn’t actually need a second bed. Emma could have had mine—I hadn’t slept in it once in the nearly two weeks since my birthday/her death-day, in part because I no longer needed sleep, though I’d discovered that I
did
need rest.

But telling my father that I was spending most of my nights at Tod’s place, whether or not my reaper boyfriend was actually at home, would have been...

Well, that wouldn’t have been a pleasant conversation. Even if my dad had his suspicions about how physical our relationship had become, I was in no hurry to confirm them. I may have been practically grown—and technically dead—but I would always be his little girl. He’d made that more than clear.

And I loved him for it.

More comfortable in our regular clothes, Em and I met everyone else in the front of the house, where Sabine had helped herself to a soda without getting one for anyone else. “All I’m saying is that Emily and Emma are practically the same name. No offense, Em,” she added when we walked past my father’s chair, where the
mara
was perched on the arm, hopelessly wrinkling the black slacks she only wore to funerals. And, truthfully, she only wore those because Nash had insisted black jeans weren’t good enough.

“None taken.” Em headed into the kitchen and took a seat at the bar, where she rested her forehead on her folded arms.

“At least she wasn’t named after a can of soup,” Tod said, and Sabine shot him a scowl. Her last name—Campbell—had come from a hungry worker at the church where she’d been abandoned as a toddler.

“Emma and Emily are pretty similar.” Nash sank into my dad’s armchair and wrapped one arm around the
mara
’s waist. “Wouldn’t you rather pick something different? I mean, you could be anyone you want. It could be fun. None of the rest of us got to pick our names.”

Em didn’t even look up.

“We called her Cynthia for three days.” Tod shoved a pillow over so I could sit with him on the couch. “She couldn’t remember to answer. Calling her Emily is just easier.”

“Who cares what you call her? Emma is still Emma, and that’s all that matters, right? That she survived.” Sophie shrugged in her spaghetti-strap dress, leaning against the wall by the door like she wanted to stay but needed to be near an exit, just in case.

I could tell she was trying to say the right thing. To be useful and insightful. She’d been doing that a lot since she and Luca got together, which seemed to show her that she had more in common with me and my “freak” friends than she would ever again have in common with her fellow dancers and teen socialites. But when filtered through the lens of narcissism through which my cousin viewed the world “useful and insightful” usually came out sounding more like “pointless and trite.”

Sophie had come a long way, but the journey was far from over.

“Yeah, I survived.” Em sat up and glared at her over the half wall separating the kitchen from the living room. “Unless you count the part where my neck was snapped by a hellion who wanted to wear me like a perpetual Halloween costume. And the fact that my permanent address is now plot number 436 at the Grandview Cemetery. You think Zappos delivers to burial plots? If so, you must be right! Nothing’s changed! So what if I’m now a brunette, and a B-cup, and an
Emily?
At least I
survived,
right?”

“I was just trying to help.” Sophie blinked back tears that probably had more to do with her own frustration than with sympathy for Em. “I almost died, too, you know. We all did.”

“
Almost
only counts in beauty pageants.” Emma slid off her bar stool and pulled a can of soda from the fridge, then took down a tall glass and the bottle of whiskey my dad had confiscated from Nash a couple of weeks earlier. No one said anything when she poured generous helpings of both into the glass.

“We’re going to get him,” I said through clenched teeth, struggling to hide my anger on her behalf while she drained a quarter of the glass. “We’re going to get them
all.
”

She didn’t deserve this. It was
my
fault Emma had lost everything she’d ever had, except for a best friend who’d failed to protect her. It was my fault, and it was Avari’s, and he was going to pay for what happened to Em and to everyone else he’d hurt.

“Sure we are.” Emma rolled her eyes and took another drink. “We’re going to sock it to the immortal hellions capable of squashing us like ants on the sidewalk. So what if they can’t be killed, or caught, or even hurt, as far as we know. Maybe we can kill them with
kindness.
Or maybe they’ll see us wearing our big-boy pants, all ready to take them down, and they’ll die laughing. That’s the only way we’re going to get them. I know nothing about the Netherworld, but I know that.”

“I have a plan, Em. A good one.”

“I know you do. I’m sorry.” She shoved limp brown hair back from her face and sat, still holding her glass. “I just... I attended my own funeral today. There’s just no way to improve a day that started with throwing clods of dirt on your own coffin.”

“I know.” My hand tightened around Tod’s. I hadn’t seen myself buried, but I had been...well...murdered. Sacrificed, in fact. As a virgin.

Cliché? Sure. Painful? Hell, yes.

Reversible?

Nope.

“Well, at least you’re compatible roommates,” Sabine said as Luca headed into the kitchen. “Kaylee’s dead, but pretending to live in her own body, and Emma’s alive in someone else’s body, but faking death. Your living situation was meant to be. Unlike mine.” The
mara
threw an angry glance at my cousin.

Since her foster mother’s death, Sabine had been staying with Sophie and my uncle Brendon, who’d officially applied to be her new foster parent, to keep her within the fold. Because in spite of obvious attitude...
issues,
she’d proved useful.

Also because if we tried to get rid of her, she’d only claw her way back into Nash’s life, stepping on everyone in her way. She’d certainly done it before.