I swallowed the sudden need to vomit and nodded. He was right. But I didn’t like it.
The growl of an engine outside broke through the excruciating silence Alec’s last words had woven. Ms. Marshall was home.
But Emma was not.
I spun in the chair, as if I could see through all the walls between me and the driveway. My heart raced, and I turned back to Alec. “You have to go. Now.”
He shook her head and stood, foreign panic playing behind Emma’s eyes. “We have to make plans. We’re only going to get one chance, and we can’t afford to mess it up.”
“I know. But not now.” I glanced toward the hall again as a key turned in the front door. “I need some time to get rid of her mother.” And talk to Tod.
As badly as I wanted to save Nash, I was not just going to jump into the Netherworld with someone I’d never met—someone whose humanity I couldn’t even confirm—without proof that Nash was actually missing.
And I definitely wasn’t going to do it without backup. Tod could get himself out, and he could take someone with him, if necessary. And if this whole thing turned out to be a trap—an attempt by Avari to regain the soul that got away—I wanted someone I mostly trusted in my corner.
“How long?” Alec asked as the front door swung open across the house.
“Shhhh…” I hissed, my pulse racing. Then, “Two hours. Can you do that, with the time difference?”
Emma nodded. “I think so.”
As loath as I was to subject Emma to another possession, I saw no other choice. “Fine. Now go!”
Alec frowned. Then Emma’s eyes closed, and she fell over backward on the bed.
“Em, are you home?” Ms. Marshall called, her heels clacking down the hall toward us.
“Mmm?” Emma’s eyes fluttered and she rolled over, one hand rising automatically to run through her hair.
“We’re back here!” I crossed the room and sank onto the bed next to Emma. “We fell asleep watching a movie.”
Ms. Marshall appeared in the doorway, leaning against the frame with one high-heeled foot crossed over the other, the empty ice cream carton in one hand. She lifted the carton and glanced at the DVD case on Emma’s dresser. “Wild night?”
You have no idea….
19
“TOD!” I WHISPERED as I slammed the car door shut, glancing frantically around the dark concrete maze at mostly empty parking spaces. The chances of the reaper being in the parking garage were slim to none, but honestly, Tod was hardly ever where I expected to find him.
When he didn’t answer, I clicked the automatic lock on my rented key bauble and headed for the entrance, wishing I’d thought to change clothes before I left Emma’s. But since I hadn’t, my walk across the dank parking garage was accented by the clunking of my wedge heels against the concrete and the flash of my shiny blouse in the dim industrial lights overhead.
When the glass door closed behind me with a soft air-sucking sound, I glanced around the empty, sterile hallway, desperate for a glimpse of the reaper Nash and I usually couldn’t get rid of. “Tod! Get your invisible butt down here!” Or up here, or over here, or whichever way he’d have to travel to get to me.
Regrettably, superhearing was not among a reaper’s many awesome abilities, so I’d have to be within normal hearing range to catch his attention. And since I couldn’t see him—he considered corporeality at work to be unprofessional, though evidently shouting at the patients to hurry up and die! didn’t offend his delicate moral fiber—putting myself within that hearing range could prove quite a challenge.
When he didn’t show up in the back hallway, I race-walked down the corridor and around the corner, then through the swinging double doors into the emergency room, where Tod spent most of his working hours. If I didn’t find him there, I was screwed, because there was no way a teenage girl would go unnoticed wandering around the intensive care unit by herself in the middle of the night.
Unfortunately, even at two in the morning, the emergency room was half-full and most of the patients looked awake enough to notice me calling out to someone who wasn’t there.
“Tod!” I whispered, stepping into the vending machine alcove. Stubbornly resisting a bag of Doritos taunting me from behind the glass, I checked both restrooms opposite the water fountain with no luck.
Back in the waiting area, I jogged past the triage nurse’s station and had one palm on the door leading into the bowels of the E.R. when a familiar voice spoke up from behind me. “Is Emma with you?”
Startled, my heart thumping, I whirled around to find Tod standing with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of a faded, baggy pair of jeans. His sleeves were short and his jacket missing, as usual. Evidently the mostly dead don’t feel the cold like the rest of us do. Or maybe that was part of his big bad reaper routine.
“No. Why?” I asked, and the triage nurse glanced at me in surprise, clearly unable to see or hear the reaper. I was going to have to start wearing a Bluetooth headset, or talking to Tod was going to get me locked up again.
“Her boyfriend came in by ambulance a few hours ago, and it’s getting pretty tense back there,” he said, unbothered by the nurse’s presence as I smiled at her and subtly led him away from the double doors, hoping none of the staff recognized me from my visit the night before.
In the waiting area again, I raised my brows to tell him to go on, and Tod shrugged. “His dad’s some big-shot lawyer. The governor’s personal attorney, or some crap like that. He showed up about fifteen minutes ago, straight from the airport, and has been raising hell ever since. He’s threatening to sue the hospital for negligence, and the attending physician for malpractice, and the damned janitor who mopped the floor he slipped on, even though there was one of those orange ‘slippery’ signs right next to him when he went down.”
“So Doug’s still…alive?” I whispered as he followed me into the rear corridor.
“Nah. He was brain-dead but breathing when he got here, and I put him out of his misery about an hour later. The weird thing is that he isn’t on the list. Levi sent a runner with this about twenty minutes after Richie Rich came in.” Tod pulled an uneven square of yellow paper from his right pocket and handed it to me.
My hands shook as I unfolded it. It was the bottom half torn from a sheet of legal paper. Neat, loopy handwriting slanted across the lines: Douglas Aaron Fuller 23:47:33.
“What is this?” I couldn’t refold the paper fast enough. I shoved it at Tod, and he slid it back into his pocket.
“It’s an addendum. An unscheduled reaping. The job should have gone to whoever works the sector where Em’s boyfriend dropped, but our office didn’t get word in time. So they sent it to me here.”
Exhaustion and shock had taken their toll, and my eyes didn’t want to focus. The hallway blurred until I blinked to clear my vision. “So this didn’t have to happen…”
Tod shrugged. “It probably shouldn’t have happened. This is only the second addendum I’ve seen in two years, and it just happens to be Emma’s new boy toy. And she didn’t come in with him. What’s going on, Kaylee?”
And suddenly Doug’s death hit me—not as a bean sidhe, but as a person—grief suffocating me beneath the weight of my own guilt. I tripped over one wedge heel and caught myself against the wall, barely flinching at the pain in my bandaged arm because it was nothing compared to the ache in my heart.
“You okay?” Tod asked, and he sounded like he actually cared.