I blinked at the road and exhaled slowly. “Nothing you want to know much about.”
“I saw how Nash pulled you away.” Leather creaked as she shifted in her seat. “He didn’t even want you to get a whiff of it, so whatever it is, it must be pretty damn scary.”
“It is.” Yet he hadn’t hesitated to kiss me and breathe all over me while he was taking it. How much could I possibly mean to him if he’d risk exposing me?
“I should have done something.” Emma groaned. “I knew he was taking too much, and I just let him!” She stomped the floorboard hard enough to rock the whole car, and my heart broke for her.
“Em, you couldn’t have stopped him.” I was sure of that, yet I was equally sure that Nash and I could have. I’d failed Scott and Doug, but it wasn’t too late to help Nash. No matter what he’d done, I couldn’t live with myself if I let him turn out like his friends.
“I should be there.” Emma sat straighter, oblivious to the turn my thoughts had taken. “Can you take me to the hospital? He might not be gone yet, and I should be there. I know that sounds stupid—it’s not like we were in love or anything—but I feel awful for just leaving him.”
I shook my head slowly and made the turn onto her street. “It doesn’t sound stupid. But Em, they’re not going to let you in. You’re not family.” And Doug’s family—just the father and stepmother, as far as I knew—were still in New York on a working vacation. Did that mean Doug would die alone? Surely Nash could Influence his way into the room…. “Besides, Emma, the last place you need to be is in a hospital swarming with cops.”
Emma sighed and sank into her seat as I pulled to a stop on the street in front of her mailbox. Her house was dark.
“Where is everybody?” The hum of the engine faded as I pulled the keys from the ignition.
“Traci’s working, and Cara’s at her sorority’s Christmas party,” Emma said as I pushed my car door opened. I hadn’t really expected either of her sisters to be home on a Friday night, but I was worried about her mom catching Emma before we’d washed her shirt and brushed her teeth. “And Mom has a date, if you can believe that.” She shoved her own door open and stepped onto the grass, surprisingly steady.
Evidently death is sobering. No real shock there.
I grabbed my overnight bag—now minus one T-shirt—then swung the door shut and locked the car. Emma was already halfway up the cute stone path, digging in her pocket for her keys before she remembered that I’d taken them. I gave them to her, but her hand shook too badly to slide the key into the lock, so I took it back and opened the door myself.
“I feel so helpless!” Emma dropped onto the overstuffed couch as I bolted the door behind us. “Worthless. So frustrated and…impotent!” She sat up straight then and punched the arm of her couch so hard I wasn’t surprised when her knuckles came away skinned and oozing blood from the rough weave.
I handed her a tissue from a box on the end table. “That’s not a phrase you hear very often from girls.” I forced a smile, but my joke landed like a brick dropped from a skyscraper.
I knew exactly how she felt.
“I’m serious.” She dabbed at her fist, then dropped the tissue on the coffee table. “What’s the point of knowing someone’s going to die if you can’t do anything about it? How can you stand this?” she demanded. “All this death? How can you stand knowing about it before anyone else does?”
I took my shoes off and lined them up with the others in the front closet, then sank onto the couch beside her, leaning my head on her shoulder. “Have you ever known anyone who died?” Her parents had divorced when Em was only four, but I was pretty sure her dad was still alive. Somewhere.
“Just Roger.”
“Who’s Roger?”
“The hamster we had when I was seven. Does he count?”
“I don’t think so.” I almost smiled, but held it back when I realized she might be offended. For all I knew, she and Roger had been very close.
“Then, no.” She folded one leg beneath the other and twisted to face me. “And I’ve certainly never had to look at someone, knowing he’d be dead soon. How can you stand this?” she asked again. And in that moment, I came very close to telling her the truth: that I couldn’t. Not without Nash.
“It’s not easy.” I stood and pulled Emma up by both hands.
“In fact, it sucks. Do you have ice cream?”
“Yeah.” She wiped fresh tears from her face and gestured vaguely toward the kitchen. “Traci’s boyfriend dumped her yesterday. Fourth one this year.” Which made no sense to me. The Marshall girls were gorgeous beyond all reason. “There’s a pint of Phish Food in the freezer.”
“Great. Pick out a movie while I get the ice cream.”
Emma nodded hesitantly, then crossed the living room toward the rack of DVDs to the left of a slim, simple entertainment center. “Bring two spoons!” she shouted over her shoulder as she knelt to scan the titles.
For the first half hour of the movie—a lighthearted, predictable romantic comedy—Emma shoveled ice cream into her mouth and glanced regularly at my cell lying on her nightstand, obviously willing it to ring with an update from Nash.
But my phone never rang.
By the time the credits rolled, Emma had fallen asleep, her spoon still dangling from one hand, several drops of chocolate ice cream dotting the front of the shirt she’d borrowed from me. When I got up to turn off the movie, her spoon thumped to the floor, so I rolled carefully off the bed and took both spoons and the empty ice cream container into the kitchen, yawning so hard my jaw ached.
The clock on the microwave read a quarter to one, and I wondered idly how late Ms. Marshall would be out. I had no frame of reference for adult dating.
I grabbed a Coke from the fridge, then padded back to Emma’s room, intending to call Nash. But when I reached for my phone from the nightstand on Emma’s side of the bed, her eyes popped wide-open, as if some unseen clasp holding them closed had just been released.
Startled, I squealed and jumped back. “Em, you okay?” But even when she finally blinked, her face still pressed into the pillow, her eyes didn’t lose that sleep haze, nor did they focus on me. Or on anything else. “Em?”
She snapped upright in a single, eerily stiff motion and blinked at me, then glanced around her room like she’d never seen it before—easily one of the weirdest things I’d seen in my entire life.
In either world.
“Emma?” I backed slowly away from the bed, my phone clenched in my left hand, as a strange, heavy, fluttery feeling settled into my stomach. Like I’d swallowed a swarm of iron butterflies.
“Not exactly…” A low, scratchy, unfamiliar voice said as my best friend’s mouth moved.
My heart rate exploded and my pulse roared in my ears. “Who, then, exactly?”
“I am Alec. As presented through Emma Dawn Marshall.”
As presented…?
Whoa…
“Who are you, and what the hell are you doing in my best friend?” I backed farther from the bed, my empty hand stretched behind me to warn me before I bumped into anything. Part of me—most of me, in fact—wanted to make a break for the door. But I couldn’t leave Emma alone with…whatever was talking through her. Possessing her. Because that’s obviously what this was.
“I apologize for contacting you through an intermediary, but my options are pretty limited at the moment,” Emma said with Alec’s voice, and the effect was disjointed, like a bad voice-over in a foreign film. Except the actor and the voice were both speaking the same language. “I promise your friend won’t remember any of this. She might wake up sleepy and disoriented, but none the worse for wear.” He extended his borrowed arms, like he was testing the fit of a new shirt.
My stomach roiled at the casual gesture and the gruesome image that accompanied it, and my mind raced, trying to make sense of what I was seeing and hearing. Without much luck. Emma was speaking to me in someone else’s voice. She was being used as a human microphone—this “Alec’s” intermediary.