“You want me to take you back now?” I asked, while on the inside I chanted, please say no, please say no, pleasesayno over and over.
“No,” she said, pressing herself against me. “I want you to let your brother wait a few minutes.” She tugged on the button at the waist of my jeans.
I put one hand over hers to stop her, cursing myself silently. “I can’t. When left to his own devices, Nash finds trouble.” And sometimes tries to break it out of jail. “You sure you can’t miss curfew? I’ll make it worth your while….”
“I’m sure you would.” Her smile practically sizzled, and the flashes of memory that surfaced scalded me from the inside out. “But if I’m late, my mom will jump to all the right conclusions, and then my dad will kill you. Seriously. And what am I gonna do with a dead boyfriend?”
“Nothing that doesn’t defy the norms of polite society…” I mumbled, disappointed when she stepped back and turned toward the door.
If Nash isn’t dead of alcohol poisoning by the time I get there, I’ll kill him myself…
Five minutes later, we pulled up in front of Genna’s house, and as she’d predicted, the living room windows were still blazing with light. “Sure you don’t want to reconsider?” I spread my arms and grinned. “All of this could be yours….”
“I’m reconsidering as we speak.” She leaned toward me, and I met her halfway. “But we’ve already been spotted,” she said, lips moving softly against my jaw on the way to my mouth. I glanced up to see that she was right; a tall, shadowed form stood in the front window, staring right at my car. “I gotta go.” Genna pushed the door open and stepped out, small pink purse in hand. “Say hi to Nash for me.” Then the car door closed, and she was halfway up the walk before I’d even shifted into drive.
Her front door opened and her dad stepped out to put one arm around her shoulders, and as they stepped inside, she turned back to smile at me once.
And that was the last time I ever saw Genna Hansen.
“What took you so long?” Nash asked, as he slid into the passenger seat and pulled the door closed.
“I stopped to donate all your underwear to the homeless. You’re gonna wanna take care of those tighty whities—they’re all you’ve got left.”
He leaned against the door, either too tired or too drunk to sit up. “And to think, most people don’t understand your sense of humor.”
“Fools, all of them.” I flicked on my turn signal and merged with the highway traffic, typically heavy for a Friday night. “What are you doing out here, anyway?”
“Drinking alone, while my best friend and my brother feel up their respective girlfriends, with no thought for the less fortunate.” His eyelids looked heavy, and I wondered how much he’d had. “Unfortunately, the juvenile justice system doesn’t consider Sabine’s separation from me cause for concern.”
“Bastards.” I swerved around an SUV, then back into the right lane. “Clearly the system is flawed.”
Nash shrugged and slouched lower. “At least you got laid.”
I glared at him before turning back to the traffic. “No, I got a brother who redefines the concept of ‘coitus interruptus.’”
“Sorry.” Nash frowned, his unfocused stare aimed out the windshield as I eased the car off the highway and onto the first street in a tangle of suburban neighborhoods. “But hey, since you’re not busy anymore and we’re out anyway…we could head over to Holser House.” I started to shake my head, but he kept talking. “Please, Tod. That place is going to kill her.”
Irritated, I clenched the wheel and stared at the road. “You’re drunk, Nash.”
“Then you can do the talking!” he snapped, sitting straighter now. “I’ll stay in the car.”
“You should have stayed in the house!”
“You didn’t!”
My hands clenched around the wheel. “I came back with Genna instead of going out, so I could keep an eye on you!”
“Great job.”
I shook my head, fighting the urge to punch the steering wheel. “No way. You snuck out and got drunk. You’re not blaming this on me.”
“But Mom will,” he said, and it only took me a second to realize he was right. “She doesn’t have to know.” He twisted in his seat to face me, rather than the windshield. “Let’s go get Sabine. I’ll be sober by the time we get home, and we’ll tell Mom she ran away on her own. Sabine will back us up, and Mom never has to know either of us left the house.”
“No.” Hell no. Mom would see through that in a second, and I’d get into worse trouble than Nash for letting him go through with such an idiotic, illegal stunt.
“Come on, Tod, I never ask you for anything!”
“Bullshit!” I glanced at him, furious to realize he actually believed his own load of crap!
“You ask me for gas money, and condoms, and alibis, and favors, and advice you never follow. And now you’re asking me to drive your underage, drunk ass to break your jailbird, jailbait girlfriend out of corrective custody. And I’m the one who’ll get in trouble when that brilliant piece of on-the-fly planning goes south.”
“If something goes wrong, I’ll take the blame,” Nash insisted.
“No you won’t, because no one will point the blame at you. Sabine will lie to protect you on her end, and Mom will let you slide because she thinks you’re some ‘sensitive soul.’ It’s always, ‘Poor Nash, he wears his heart on his sleeve, then wonders why it’s always bruised.’ Or, ‘He’s only so reckless because he lives in the moment and he feels things so deeply.'”
“She doesn’t say that.”
“The hell she doesn’t. But your problem isn’t the heart on your sleeve, it’s the head on your shoulders. You don’t think about things, you just do them, and it never even occurs to you that you could be screwing someone else over.”
“You mean you?”
“Yeah, me! I can’t turn around without tripping over whatever trouble you’re in. I spend half my life cleaning up your messes, and all you do is take up space and get in my way!”
I couldn't see Nash. The suburban street was unlit, and I was staring at the road. But I could tell I’d gone too far because he went completely still and quiet. For nearly a minute. Then he grabbed the door handle, like he’d pull it open with the car still moving. “Let me out.”
“What?”
“I’d hate to take up any more space in your life,” he spat. “Stop the car.”
I rolled my eyes, but slowed down, in case he tried to jump. “Are moronic overreactions a side effect of dating a delinquent, or is this the alcohol talking?”
“You don’t know anything about me,” Nash snapped, tightening an already white-knuckled grip on the door handle. “And you don’t know a damn thing about Sabine. Stop the car, or I’m gonna jump and roll.”
“No, you’re gonna go home and sleep it off in your own bed,” I insisted, as we rolled past the last house on the block, the rest of which was taken up by a large community park.
“Stop the damn car!” I felt his Influence almost before he spoke, and his words washed over me in a rush of anger, chased by a backwash of resentment. The urge to pull onto the side of the road was overwhelming.
I slammed on the brake and we screeched to a halt at the corner in front of the park, not because he wanted me to stop, but because I was too pissed to drive. “Don’t even try to Influence me, you little—”
Nash’s eyes widened, staring straight ahead. I glanced up just in time to see a car gliding toward us on the wrong side of the road, sleek and black against the night, no headlights to announce its approach.
Adrenaline surging through me, I shifted into reverse and cut the wheel to the right, but it was way too late. The car slammed into us head-on. There was a loud pop of impact and the squeal-crunch of bending metal.
The world spun around me.
Nash flew forward and his head smacked the windshield. My seat belt punched the air from my lungs as the entire dashboard lurched toward me. The stee
ring wheel stopped two inches from my chest.
Then everything went still.
The only sound was the soft hiss of something ruptured. Every breath hurt, and my neck was so stiff I could hardly turn my head. I exhaled slowly and closed my eyes, stealing a moment in the near-silence to appreciate my pounding heart, and the fact that it continued to beat.
Then I twisted in the dark to face my brother.
“Nash?” He was slumped in his seat half facing me. His eyes were closed, his head steadily dripping blood from an injury I couldn’t see in the dark. My relief bled into dread as I pushed my door open and the interior lights came on. “Nash?” I said again, but he didn’t answer. He was barely breathing, and I was afraid to make things worse by shaking him awake. “Shit!”
I unbuckled my seat belt and had to slide out the door sideways, because of the crunched dashboard and the steering wheel that had nearly crushed my rib cage. The street was lit only by the red glow of my taillights—the wreck had obliterated the headlights—and I spared a moment to glance at the bastard crumpled over the deployed airbag in the other car. Where the hell were our airbags?
My car didn’t have them. It was too old.
I raced around the rear of the car and pulled Nash’s door open with one hand, while the other dug in my pocket for my phone. I flipped it open and knelt by my brother.
He wasn’t breathing.
Shit!
Heart racing in panic, I felt for his pulse with my free hand, but couldn’t find it in his neck. I tried his wrist—my mom had taught me years ago—but couldn’t find it there either. His heart wasn’t beating.
“No!” I shouted, out loud this time. I dropped his arm and pressed the 9 on my phone, my hands shaking, my pulse a roar in my ears. “No, no, no…” I chanted, shock and guilt warring inside me as I pressed the 1. “Not like this. Not after I…”
Not after what I’d said to him. These couldn’t be his last moments—drunk on the side of the road, alone except for the asshole brother who’d put him there in the first place.
If Mom were here…
If my mother was there, we could fix him. A male and female bean sidhe, together we could reinstate his soul and save his life. Nash would live, and I wouldn’t be a killer.
There’d be a price—someone had to die—but it’d be worth it. Let the reaper take someone else—some old man sleeping down the street. Someone who’d already lived a full life. Someone whose brother hadn’t just told him he was taking up space and getting in the way.
But my mother wasn’t there, and she’d never make it in time, even if I called her. Neither would the ambulance. There was no one close enough to help Nash except me and…
The reaper.
Because no one dies without a reaper there to take his soul.
I blinked as the thought played out in my head, and with it came a chilling spark of possibility.
I flipped my phone closed and shoved it into my pocket. My head throbbed and my chest ached, and my stomach pitched at the very thought of what I was about to do—of who I was about to appeal to—but nothing compared to the nameless, formless agony rising through me with the knowledge that I’d gotten my own brother killed.
Standing, I squinted into the dark, looking for someone I probably wouldn’t—and shouldn’t—be able to see. I swallowed, my hands shaking from either fear or shock. “I know you’re here, reaper,” I whispered, suddenly glad no one had emerged from the nearest houses, now more than a block away. “I know you’re here somewhere, but there’s been some kind of mistake. It’s not his time. He’s too young.”
“There’s no such thing as too young to die,” a soft, oddly high-pitched voice said behind me, and I whirled around to find a small boy watching me, freckled face crowned in hair cast red by my taillights. “Trust me.”
Momentary confusion gave way to both horror and hope. “You’re the reaper?” I stared down at him, heart pounding, and he nodded slowly.
“One of them, anyway.”
Because the concept of reapers isn’t creepy enough without adding dead kids to the mix. My pulse raced with a dizzying combination of fear and anger. No good could come of arguing with a grim reaper. But I had nothing left to lose.
“Sorry about your premature death.” I paused to clear my throat, then continued, trying to project confidence I didn’t feel. “Missing out on puberty must suck. But this can’t be right.” I gestured toward Nash without taking my focus from the reaper. “Can’t you double check your list or something?”
The dead child shook his head slowly, and his dark gaze never strayed from my eyes. “I died right on time. As did he.” He nodded toward my brother, still slouched in the passenger’s seat. “See for yourself.” He pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket and held it out to me. My hands trembled so badly I almost tore the paper when I opened it.
It was a printout of an official looking form, with a seal I didn’t recognize. I read by the crimson glow of my own taillights. Nash Eric Hudson. 23:48 Corner of 3rd and Elm.
“No. Not like this.” Determination burned within me, feeding flames of anger. I tore the paper in half, then ripped it again and dropped the scraps on the ground. “It can’t go down like this.”
“You know that doesn’t change anything, right?” The dead kid put his hands in his pockets and watched the scraps of paper blow away, then looked up at me, frowning. “You’re a bean sidhe, right? So you know how this works?”
“Yeah.” My mom had always been straight with us about death. Even when my dad died, when we were just kids. “But I also know you can change it, right? There are ways to change this…?”
The reaper raised one brow and suddenly looked much older. The difference was in his eyes—in the sudden interest I saw there.
“Please. It can’t happen like this,” I insisted, talking to us both now. “I wasn’t paying attention, at home or on the road. This is my fault. You have to help me fix it.”
“He would have died anyway,” the reaper said, shrugging again. “If you’d kept him home, he would have choked on his dinner. If you’d left him at the party, he would have made his friend drive, and they’d have wound up exactly like this.”
“How did you know…?” I demanded, confusion trailing into the night with my aborted question.
“I watched. But my point is that you aren’t the cause of Nash’s death. You’re merely the instrument.” He glanced at the driver of the other car, unconscious, but obviously breathing. “One of the instruments, anyway.”
“I can’t be the instrument of my brother’s death!” I snapped. “That’s beyond screwed up.”
The reaper eyed me closely, like he could see beyond my words and into the thoughts I didn’t voice. “Which is it you object to? His death, or your part in it?”
I hesitated, for just an instant, but he saw my indecision. He heard that moment of silence. “Both!” I shouted, running my hands through my hair, resisting the urge to simply close my eyes until the entire nightmare blew over. Because it wouldn’t. “It can’t happen like this. Can’t you…give him more time? Please? I’ll do whatever you want. Just give him a few more years.”
The kid shook his head, and I realized that his hair really was red—it wasn’t just reflecting the taillights. “There are no extensions.” He squatted to catch my gaze when I sank onto my knees, as my anger began to fade into a welcome numbness. “There are only exchanges. One life—” he gestured toward Nash, palm up “— for another…” He held his other empty hand toward me, miming the act of balancing a set of scales. “How badly do you want him to live?”
The question seemed to echo all around me, and it took me a moment to realize I was hearing it in my own head.
I looked up slowly to find him watching me, his intense eyes an indeterminate color in the dark. “You mean I can…?”
“I have to leave here with a soul, but it could as easily be yours as his. It’s your choice.”
I glanced up at Nash, unmoving, h
is arm hanging limp against the side of the bucket seat. The reaper was right; Nash would have died no matter what I did or said to him. But I couldn’t deal, knowing that I’d ignored him in favor of a girl, told him he had no place in my life, then driven him into the path of the car that killed him.
I couldn’t live my life, knowing the part I played in ending his.
My next breath was long and deep—I’d decided it would be one of my last.
“Yes. I’ll do it. But I have one condition.”
The child’s brows rose again, this time in dark amusement. “Death makes no promises.”
“He can’t know.” I stood, staring down at my brother. What good would it do to give him life, if he’d spend it feeling guilty for my death? I turned to the reaper. “I’ll do it, if you swear he’ll never know it was supposed to be him.”
The child smiled slowly, and his satisfied expression raised chill bumps on my arms in spite of the warm June night. “That, I can do.”
And suddenly the enormity of what I’d just agreed to hit me with the unyielding weight of eternity. Isn’t your life supposed to flash before your eyes when you die? Then how come all I saw was regret?
The reaper glanced at Nash, then back at me, and the hint of a grin told me the little bastard enjoyed this part of his job. “Any last words?”
Pushing everything else aside to clear my head, I knelt next to Nash, wishing with all of my last few seconds of life that he could actually hear me. “Can’t clean up after you anymore, baby brother, so don’t punk out. Make it count.”
I stood and started to turn toward the reaper. But then something hard slammed into my chest, and my legs folded beneath me. I blinked, and the car went fuzzy. Nash’s face slid out of focus. He took a breath. Then he coughed, his eyes still closed.
The child knelt over me, red curls backlit by the moon, finally emerging from thick cloud cover. The last thing I saw was the creepy little bastard’s smile….
Bright light shined, red and veiny through my closed eyelids. I blinked, and suddenly the world was white instead. But not Heaven-white, with clouds, and robes, and chicks with wings. Hospital-white. White walls. White ceiling. White sheets and pillows, on the bed beneath me.