“She doesn’t know his real name or how old he is…” My father’s words faded, and I assumed my uncle was speaking on the other end of the line. “Math. You should ask Sophie if she has him.”
But she didn’t. I’d verified that the day we found out what Beck was.
“I know, but let’s not borrow trouble till we’re ready to pay some back.” My dad’s mattress creaked and I could picture him sitting on the edge of the bed, hunched over and stressed. But I didn’t hear anything after that because my phone buzzed in my pocket. I dug it out to find a text from Tod.
Can I come over?
Suddenly my chest burned like my lungs were on fire. Like when I was a little girl on the playground swing set, and that plummeting feeling made me feel scared, and excited, and so alive.
Yeah. In my room.
An instant later, Tod stood in the middle of my bedroom floor, and I realized that the courtesy text before just popping in was only one of the things that had changed.
“Hey,” he said, hands shoved into his jeans pockets, watching me carefully, like he didn’t quite know how to act around me now and would be taking his cues from me. Which sucked, ’cause that was my plan, too.
“Hey.” I sat up on the bed and folded my legs beneath me, itching to touch him, or somehow acknowledge what had happened between us. Yet I felt guilty for that impulse—for wanting something that would hurt Nash.
“I need to tell you something.” He glanced at the floor, looking more conflicted than I’d ever seen him, and that burning in my chest became a steady smolder of resignation and disappointment I had no right to feel.
I knew where this was going. Nash was his brother—his flesh and blood. And Nash would be here for the next three hundred years or so, long after any memory of me faded from both of their minds. Of course he would choose his brother over me. How could he not? And part of me knew that was the right thing to do. How could I not want peace between them, especially considering that aside from Harmony and potentially Sabine, they had no one else. Tod and Nash would probably never be best friends, but they would always be brothers, and who was I to get in the way of that?
Tod exhaled slowly, and I could only watch him, waiting for the inevitable heartbreak. Could a person actually die of a broken heart? Was that how I would go?
“I’m not supposed to want you, Kaylee. Not like this,” he said, the blues in his eyes churning with disparate emotions, and my stubborn heart beat harder. “I made a decision two years ago and gave up the right to want anything.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I wasn’t going to interrupt him, because no one had ever spoken to me like this. As if whatever he was trying to tell me was so raw and painful it had to come straight from his soul.
“I’m not supposed to have a life, or a future beyond helping preserve the balance between life and death. My humanity is supposed to fade. They want us that way. Empty, so it’s easier to take life, day after day. Sometimes it becomes too easy, and reapers get bored. Desperate for something—anything—to break up the monotony.”
He was talking about Thane; I understood that much. I was Thane’s entertainment—his break from monotony.
“That’s not supposed to happen, but neither is this.”
“This” was me. I wasn’t supposed to happen to Tod. My next breath burned in my throat, and he shifted onto one foot staring down at me like he wanted to sit, but couldn’t let himself get comfortable until he’d said what he had to say.
“They were starting to get what they wanted from me. I stayed close to my mom and Nash, and that worked for a while, but it wasn’t enough. Only two years dead, and it was getting harder for me to feel…anything. I was starting to slip into the darkness. The numbness. And the worst part is that it wasn’t even scary. I was losing myself, and I didn’t even care.
“Then I met you, and at first I didn’t understand what had happened. What had changed. All I knew was that I wanted to be near you. Then you helped me with Addison, even though it nearly got you killed—I nearly got you killed—and I started to understand how special you are. But by then, you were getting serious with Nash. With my brother—one of few people in the whole world I still gave a damn about. So I tried to stay away. I tried so hard.” His voice cracked on the last word, and my heart cracked with it. Tears stood in my eyes, but I was afraid to let them fall. I was afraid to even breathe for fear of missing a single word.
“But you kept pulling me back. You’re the brightest thing I’ve ever seen, Kaylee. You’re this beautiful ball of fire spitting sparks out at the world, burning fiercely, holding back the dark by sheer will. And I always knew that if I reached out—if I tried to touch you—I’d get burned. Because you’re not mine. I’m not supposed to feel the fire. I’m not supposed to want it. But I do. I want you, Kaylee, like I’ve never wanted anything. Ever. I want the fire. I want the heat, and the light, and I want the burn. But…”
He left that word hanging. The most hated word in the English language. And I knew what was supposed to follow it.
“But Nash…” I finished for him, and my tears fell in scorching trails down my cheeks.
Tod nodded miserably. “He’s my brother. He can hate me his entire life, but that won’t change the fact that he’s my little brother, and I’m supposed to protect him, not hurt him.”
“And we hurt him.” I couldn’t get Nash’s face out of my mind, how betrayed he’d looked standing in the hall. When he saw us.
“Yeah. We did.”
“Why…?” I started, then had to suck in a deep breath to continue. To control the heartbroken, angry tears that wanted to flow again. I stood and turned away from him while I wiped my face, and my frustration built. “Why did you say Nash and I aren’t right for each other, if you didn’t want to hurt him?” I demanded, turning on him again. “Why the hell would you show me that if it wasn’t going to lead to anything?”
“Because it’s true. Even if you were both scheduled to live forever, eventually he would have messed up again and hurt you. Or you would have broken his heart. But I won’t deny that I had selfish reasons for saying it, even though it was the truth.”
“So you wanted us to break up.”
“Hell yes, I wanted you to break up,” he said, and for one horrible, wonderful moment, relief almost overwhelmed my guilt. “But I didn’t want to be the catalyst. I wanted you to realize he was wrong for you, then realize that I might not be. I’m so sorry it all came out of order, and if I could undo what he saw and go back and do this the right way, I would. He’s my brother.”
I sniffled back more tears and sank onto my comforter again. “So, you’re here to let me down easy?” This was the part that would kill me, two days early. I could feel it.
“No,” he said, and I looked up, sure I’d heard him wrong, or I was missing something. “I’m here because I couldn’t stay away from you. I’ll spend the next three hundred years trying to make this up to Nash, if that’s what it takes. But I’m going to spend the next two days with you. If you want my company.”
My next breath was so shallow I hardly had the air to speak. “I want that so, so much.”
Tod sank into my desk chair and a slow, relieved smile formed on his face. “I was sure that after all that, you’d decide this was too much trouble.”
“This?”
“Us,” he clarified, rolling the chair closer to the bed, one foot at a time.
I scooted toward the edge of the mattress to meet him, my pulse rushing so fast just breathing felt surreal. “There’s an us?”
“As far as I’m concerned…” He leaned forward, his mouth inches from mine, and my pulse spiked. “There’s nothing but us.” His lips met mine, and he kissed me slowly, deeply, like we had all the time in the world. And in that moment, that’s exactly what it felt like.
When I finally pulled back to catch my breath, my head was spinning. Or maybe the whole damn room was spinning. “I think that was even better than the first time,” I whisp
ered.
“There’s no one gawking at us now.”
But that reminded me of the public spectacle our first kiss had become, and why we’d been there in the first place. And of the questions I still had to ask, as badly as I hated to ruin the moment. “So…Thane’s gone?” I asked, and Tod nodded. “What does that mean, exactly?”
“It means that Levi will be scrambling to replace him.”
“Does he know what happened?”
Tod leaned back in my desk chair. “He knows that Thane had an unfortunate run-in with everyone’s least favorite hellion and that he won’t be rejoining the workforce. But he might not be entirely clear on how Thane and Avari happened to meet.”
“Are you going to get in trouble for this?”
He shrugged, like it didn’t matter. “I’m dead. What more could they do to me?”
But I wasn’t buying his nonchalance. They could demote him back to reaping on the local nursing home circuit. They could transfer him to another district, away from his family. They could recycle his soul and end his afterlife.
The thought that Tod could die—for real this time—because of me made me want to vomit my junk food dinner all over my comforter. “The truth. How bad could this get?”
Tod exhaled slowly, then met my gaze with a heavy one of his own. “Levi wanted to make an example out of Thane and he’s pretty pissed that I messed that up. But he likes me—as much as a reaper his age can really like anyone—and he’s the one who left the information around for me to find in the first place. I think he’ll leave it alone as long as he can claim plausible deniability. But if anyone over his head finds out I acted against another reaper—one who outranks me—without permission or evidence…well, let’s just say there’ll be a sudden opening at the pizza place.”
My nausea swelled into bone chilling horror. Tod could still die—again—for what he’d done for me. But he hadn’t hesitated to do it.
“So he hasn’t replaced Thane yet?” I said, trying not to think about how badly this could end for Tod. There was nothing I could do to change that. I couldn’t make him take back what he’d done, and even mentioning it would sound ungrateful.
“Not that I know of.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Knowing that Levi was looking for someone to kill me—though inevitable—was creepy and beyond bizarre.
Though it hadn’t even happened yet, my death was already hurting people, in spite of my best efforts to make it easy on everyone. I should have told Emma earlier. I’d thought that by not telling her, I’d be sparing her several days of advance grief, but it turns out, I was denying her the chance to come to terms with my death.
And Nash…
“I should have taken your advice,” I blurted out, with no conscious warning from my brain that I was even going to speak.
Tod took one look at the pain that must have been swirling in my eyes and he put on a teasing grin as easily as most guys would put on a baseball cap. “About the pizza? I told you, goat cheese is no joke.”
“No.” He was going to make me say it. “About Nash. I should have let Sabine have him six weeks ago. You were right—if I’d let him go then, he would have moved on by now, and whatever’s going to happen on Thursday wouldn’t be so hard for him.” And, of course, he wouldn’t have been blindsided by me kissing his undead brother in the middle of the math hall.
Tod exhaled heavily, and when he looked up, the soft swirl of blue in his eyes caught me off guard. And suddenly my heart felt bruised in advance of whatever he was going to say. “I lied, Kaylee.”
Okay, not the best opening… But not the worst either, considering his last big announcement was that I was going to die. “About what?”
“About Nash,” Tod said, and though he looked uncomfortable with the very concept of making a confession, he didn’t look particularly sorry about the offense itself. “I don’t think he would have gotten over you this quickly.”
“Then why did you say it?” Why would he lie to me—even if I was the pot to his black kettle?
“Because you don’t belong with him! I tried to tell you that, but you wouldn’t listen, and I thought if you understood that he’d be better off without you, you’d break up with him for his own good. So I…exaggerated how easy it’d be for him to get over you, with Sabine there to step in. But I underestimated how incredibly stubborn you are.”
“I prefer to think of it as dedication…” I mumbled.
“Whatever you want to call it. The harder Sabine pulled on him, the harder you pulled back, just so she couldn’t have him.”
“That’s not why!”
“Not consciously, no,” Tod agreed, taking my hand in his. “Which is why you couldn’t see what I was trying to show you. But then you saw, and you kissed me, and that changed everything for me, and now I only know two things for sure.”
“What things?” I couldn’t get enough air, no matter how fast my lungs pulled it in, and I couldn’t think beyond waiting for whatever he would say next.
“I know that you and I belong together. And I know that it’s too late for that to matter.”
My heart cracked open, and pain leaked out. “That’s the problem, Tod. It’s too late for anything to matter. That’s why I kissed you,” I admitted, challenging myself to hold his gaze during my own confession.
“You kissed me because it wouldn’t matter?” A flicker of hurt swirled in his eyes. “You really think it doesn’t matter?”
“That’s not what I meant.” That kiss had meant a lot to several different people. To Nash. To Tod. Hell, even to Sabine. And I wasn’t going to deny what it changed for me. “I meant…I’m going to die in less than two days, and you should know better than anyone what that means. It’s scary, and surreal, but in a way, it’s also like the ultimate freedom. Does that make any sense?”
“Yeah.” Tod brushed a pale curl from his forehead. “You can do whatever you want, because you’re not going to be here to suffer the consequences. Right?”
“Right.”
His brows rose over a new shine in his eyes. “So what you’re really saying is that kissing me is one of those things a girl shouldn’t die without experiencing, right?”
“Wow, you have a healthy ego.”
He shrugged. “Helps make up for the pallor of death. But you’re avoiding the question.”
“I didn’t think you were serious.”
“Dead serious.” The reaper grinned over his own joke, and I groaned. “Humor me, Kaylee. Dead guys don’t get much action—I’m gonna have to make this memory last a loooong time,” he said, and it felt like someone had sucked all the air out of the room and left me gasping. He was going to make the memory last? The memory of me kissing him?
“Make it last, like, forever?” I whispered, and immediately wished I’d kept that question to myself.
“Yeah. Like mental movie footage.” His mouth was grinning, but his eyes were serious. “Now I’m compiling the bonus features, including an interview with the kissee herself. So tell me, Ms. Cavanaugh, how long have you been dying to kiss me?”
I groaned. “More death humor?”
Another shrug. “It’s kind of my shtick. Answer the question.”
“I don’t know.” I sat up and played along, surprised to realize that for the first time in days, I wasn’t tense and on alert, waiting for the proverbial scythe to swing—ironic, considering I was sitting next to a Grim Reaper. “It’s not like I planned it, but I will admit that the prospect hasn’t been especially distasteful lately.”
“Not especially distasteful?” He pretended to think it over. “That ought to keep my ego in check.”
I laughed. “Is that even possible?”
“Probably not. But I wouldn’t put anything past you, Kaylee,” Tod said, looking straight into my eyes. I looked back until the connection between us started to feel raw, and taut, and vital, in no way I could explain. I’d never felt so exposed and vulnerable, yet confident of my own safety. I felt like he
could see past my eyes into parts of me no one had ever seen before. And he deserved the truth.
“Fine.” I crossed my legs yoga style and picked at a bit of fuzz on my comforter. “I admit it. I didn’t want to die without knowing what it was like to kiss you.” I might have been thinking about that on occasion recently, since we’d been spending so much time together….
I don’t know how I thought he’d react to that tender bit of truth, but his wary frown definitely wasn’t what I’d expected.
Tod leaned back in my desk chair, putting a frustrating distance between us. “Like you didn’t want to die without knowing what it was like to sleep with my brother?”
And that’s when I understood my mistake—and damn, I’d made a lot of them.
“I didn’t sleep with him, Tod. Thanks to you, ironically enough.” Because he’d interrupted us with the news that Thane had been assigned as my reaper.
“That’s not irony, Kaylee,” he said, and his gaze never wavered. “It was careful timing.”
I blinked, gaping at him in disbelief. “You knew…?”
“That you were about to have sex with Nash? Yeah.” He shrugged, like that was no big deal, but my irritation had just flared into a brutal emotional heartburn.
“You were here? Watching?” I shouldn’t have been surprised. There was nothing to stop a reaper from being wherever he wanted, unseen by all. But knowing my privacy had been violated during one of the most intimate moments of my life sickened me like little I’d ever felt.
“Hell no, I wasn’t here. I can’t even stand to see Nash kiss you, much less…anything more. But here’s what you really want to know—I don’t spy on you, Kaylee. Not anymore.” Tod was careful to let me see the cobalt twist of sincerity in his eyes.
“But you used to?” I refused to be placated by the past tense nature of the offense.
“Yeah, but it was nothing personal.” He shrugged and crossed his arms over his chest. “I have a lot of hours to kill and nowhere to be when I’m not working. So I watch people. Most reapers do it out of boredom, but I’ve been hanging out at my mom’s house ever since I died, because I don’t know where else to go. It’s not my home, because I never lived there, but it’s always been like home, because my family’s there.”