Guilt tied my insides into knots, making it hard to look at the girl reaching up for my help. I couldn’t give it to her no matter how badly I wanted to. Balthazar and his damned rules!
“I can’t. I’m so sorry.” I took a few steps back until she lowered her hand. “But you can do this. You’re tough. Remember?”
Her gaze swung to the lights glistening on the pavement and she pushed herself to her knees. I took my chance. I let myself fade. Dissolve into the mist around me that was calling me home.
I watched Emma wave her arms at the slowing car. She was safe. Alive. I closed my eyes, laughing with relief. I’d done it. I’d saved her. Except…
I looked up at the broken tree where Maeve had balanced only minutes ago. There was no way I could walk away now. Not when I’d led Maeve to her.
Damn it. This was bad on so many levels. I watched Emma collapse against the man from the car as he wrapped a jacket around her shivering shoulders. Warmth spread through my chest. Yeah…bad wasn’t a strong enough word. Disaster was more like it. And I didn’t care. She was worth it.
“I’ll keep you safe. I swear it.” I repeated the promise I’d made to her father, then closed my eyes and let the wind catch me and toss me into the night.
Chapter 1
Finn
Sometimes Emma made me feel so alive, I almost forgot I was dead.
Almost.
I sat on the floor across from her bed listening to her slow, steady breaths. I should have been more alert. I was supposed to be on watch. But it was so hard to concentrate on anything but her when I knew she was remembering.
Emma rolled over, pressing her face into the pillow. “Finn…”
I shut my eyes, trying to hold on to it. I wasn’t stupid enough to think she’d remember this when she woke up, but damn it if hearing my name slip through her lips didn’t sweep through me like wildfire. Scorching the places where blood used to run. Melting the hollow space where my heart used to beat.
I took a deep, unneeded breath and let the back of my head thump against her overstuffed bookcase. This was never going to get easier. Two years of watching her through the invisible barrier of Balthazar’s rules was really starting to suck. Especially when every time I blinked, another piece of Allison was breaking through the surface.
In the pale light of her lamp, I could see the neat row of cookbooks, nestled together like a family, holding all of the secrets Emma created in the kitchen. They smelled like flour and sugar and home. The next orderly row was packed with the worn-out novels she loved, and a new photography book her mom bought her last year. The last shelf belonged to the books her father had written, held in place by gold-framed pictures of him smiling and alive. Emma had so many words inside her. I was surprised they didn’t fall out while she was sleeping. Thousands of words about mysteries and romance and life. Things I didn’t know anything about.
Things that Allison had known everything about.
She whimpered from under the covers and I looked up. What was she remembering this time? What piece of the Inbetween and her time with me was she fighting? There was so much I didn’t want her to remember. So much I needed her to remember. But that didn’t matter. I was here to protect her. That’s where it had to end.
I closed my eyes, trying to swallow my own crap lie. She mumbled something in her sleep and began to thrash under the sheets. I groaned and pushed myself up from my safe spot on the carpet, unable to sit there listening to her suffer anymore. I stopped a foot from the bed and knelt down.
“Shh…” I touched the edge of the mattress, forcing myself not to go any closer. “It’s going to be okay.” She was only a few inches away, but it felt like miles. Miles that left me wanting in so many ways that I ached. Hopefully my presence would be enough. There were times I swore she could feel me.
“What do you think you’re doing?” a gravelly voice chided.
I looked up from the edge of Emma’s bed just as Easton melted up from the polished hardwood floor beneath the window. Like an oil slick coming to life, he unfolded his long, shadowy legs until he was just an inkblot in front of the splash of lamplight on her wall. His violet eyes pinned me like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
Which I kind of was.
“Nothing,” I lied.
“Yeah, looked like nothing.” He strolled across the room accompanied by a wave of sulfur and smoke, the black serpent tattoo on his neck glinting.
“Jesus, Easton.” I scrunched up my nose and climbed to my feet. “Don’t they have a shower somewhere between here and the afterlife?”
“Screw you. You didn’t just have to tow somebody’s grandpa to Hell.” He brushed something chalky and gray off his long coat, and a shudder worked its way down my spine. God only knows what—or who—it had belonged to. “Besides, I wasn’t the one about to feel up a sleeping human.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Save it.” He waved his hand dismissively. “We have work to do. I don’t have time for your useless obsession with the human today.”
“Will you please stop calling her that?”
“What?” Easton glanced up from Emma’s vanity, where he’d been inspecting the various lotions, tubes, and bottles like he was on some alien planet. Then again, Easton had been dead for something like four hundred years and spent most of his life in Hell, so her stuff probably was sort of alien to him.
“’The human.’ You make her sound like a freak. It’s not like we’re a different species, for God’s sake. We were humans too, or don’t you remember that far back?”
“Were,” he said, scowling at me over his shoulder. “Past tense.”
Easton’s clumsy fingers knocked over the bobblehead zombie on the vanity top and we both froze. Emma shot up from beneath the covers, gasping.
“Mom?” She shoved the tangled blond hair out of her face, her eyes trained on her rumpled reflection in the vanity mirror. “Was that you?”
“Not Mom. Just one of Hell’s reapers, at your service.” Easton leaned against the bookcase and grinned. “You’re right, Finn. This is fun.”
“Are you freaking insane?” I hissed.
He rolled his eyes. “Oh calm down, drama queen. It’s not like she can hear us.”
“You scared her.”
“Are you kidding? She’s scared of her own reflection. And that has nothing to do with me.”
No. But the fact that Emma’s life had been a horror movie waiting to happen these last two years had everything to do with me. I’d led a soul that hated my guts and was hell-bent on revenge right to her doorstep.
I turned my attention back to Emma. After she collected herself, she twisted her hair up into a messy ponytail and dug in her nightstand drawer for her journal.
“Dear diary…” Easton nodded at the journal. “What do you think she’s going to write?”
I folded my arms across my chest. “Not my business.”
He walked over to her bed and plopped down beside her. The mattress didn’t creak or groan under his weight. The blankets didn’t shift. He peeked over her shoulder at the book. A long tendril of honey-colored hair came loose from Emma’s ponytail and fell across her eye. She tucked it behind her ear, but Easton blew on it so that it fell right back down. She swept it out of her face, looking frustrated, and Easton chuckled.
“Will you stop?” I said, feeling uncomfortable with how close he was to her. “This is so screwed up it’s not even funny.”
He raised a dark brow. “Oh? And what you’re doing isn’t?”
We could have gone back and forth like that for hours, but the call came. It always did. It started in my bones—a cold so cutting that it sliced through me like a machete. Easton’s jaw clenched, his muscles taut and ready. He slowly closed his hand around the handle of his scythe, which burned black and softly smoked at his side. I flexed my fingers as the icy ribbons of death worked their way through each one of my limbs.