Tod laughed. “I’ve been asking her that for the past three hours. She’s real. Solid and thoroughly functional.”
“Well then.” Sabine let go of me and grinned. “I guess we know how they spent the past three hours, instead of alerting anyone else to the miraculous resurrection.” She shrugged. “Not that I blame you. If it were me and Nash, we’d still be sequestered.”
Obviously some things hadn’t changed....
“I—I don’t...” Em stuttered, and as soon as Sabine stepped back, Emma was there. She’d grown, too, but that put her at exactly my height, and I hugged her so tight I could almost hear her ribs groan. “How...?”
“She didn’t die. Levi lied.” Tod still sounded less than pleased by that, and I couldn’t blame him.
“I asked him to,” I clarified, without letting go of Emma. I couldn’t let her go. I wasn’t ready. And based on the strength of her hug, neither was Em. “I knew that if you guys knew what I was planning, you’d come after me.”
“Come after you where?” Sabine frowned, and I could tell by the suspicion dripping from that one question that she’d figured at least part of it out.
“The Netherworld.” Tod told them the part I couldn’t make myself say out loud. “She turned herself in. Which sounds really asinine until you hear about the out clause she built into her deal with Avari. That part’s really brilliant.”
“You turned yourself in? To Avari?” Emma shuddered even as she said his name, and I could see all the questions she obviously wanted to ask hiding just below her surprise and confusion. “You were there the whole time? So you’ve been...? He’s been...?” Horror washed over her face in slow motion as comprehension surfaced. As she realized where and how I’d spent the past four years. And why I’d spent them.
“Damn, Kay,” Sabine whispered.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Tears formed in Emma’s eyes. “How can you be okay?”
“I made a deal with Ira. I gave him everything I couldn’t handle....” Mostly massive amounts of pain and rage. “And that left me with my...um...sanity.” I shrugged like it was no big deal, but no one bought that.
“Ira. Damn.” Sabine tossed long, dark hair over her shoulder. “I haven’t heard that name in years. And you actually talked a hellion of wrath into sucking the crazy right out of you?”
“It was mutually beneficial. And Ira’ll be munching on Avari’s fury for centuries. That’s really why he agreed to the whole thing.” I blinked and shook my head, mentally changing the subject. “Enough about the Netherworld. We’re done with that now.” I’d put myself through hell for four years to make damn sure of that. “I want to talk about you guys! You’re all...grown!”
Emma laughed. “Yeah. I guess so. You missed prom. Then...everything else.”
“You’re in college?” Tod had told me that, but I wanted to hear it from her.
“Yeah. I’m a junior at A&M. But they’re about to graduate. Both of them!” She gestured to Sabine and Nash, and when my gaze fell on Nash again, it stuck there. He hadn’t moved. He hadn’t said a word. He was still staring at me in shock, and his sunglasses lay on his left foot, where he’d dropped them.
“Nash?”
He blinked, and his eyes swirled with confused, surprised twists of brown and green. I took a step toward him, and he studied me. Like he didn’t dare believe the signals his eyes were sending him.
So I closed the distance between us on my own, then went up on my toes to hug him.
He felt...different. Bigger. More solid.
Healthy.
Slowly, his arms closed around me. His hug tightened steadily until I couldn’t have breathed if I’d needed to. He shook in my arms, and his tears soaked into the shoulder of my shirt.
“It’s okay,” I said with what little breath remained in my lungs. “It’s okay, Nash.”
When he finally let me go and wiped tears from his face, I wanted to hug him all over again.
“You know, there are easier ways to make an ex get over you, Kay. You didn’t have to fake your own death. Again.”
I laughed through my own tears, and I hugged him again. Then I escaped into the kitchen to pull myself together while I poured soda into the cups, hoping they wouldn’t see how surreal this was for me. Four hours earlier, I hadn’t known my own name. I’d forgotten this world existed. I’d been lost in a hell from which there should have been no mistake.
And now...
I turned and found them all watching me, so I took a long drink from my cup to buy time. To think of what to say.
Tod’s hand slid into mine, and he smiled. Without saying a word, he told me that everything was okay. That everything would come back to me, in time. That the world may have moved on without me, but he hadn’t.
And that’s when I realized what I wanted to talk about. The world had moved on without me, but ignoring that fact wouldn’t help me adjust to it. I had to hit it head-on.
“You all look so different!” I couldn’t get over it. “So, college and life? How are things?”
“Things are good,” Emma said. “I have a boyfriend.”
“The necromancer? I heard!”
Her smile was like sunlight emerging from the clouds as she grabbed a cup for herself from the drinks lined up on the counter. “His name’s Chad. He knows who I really am and how I...got here.” In Lydia’s body, obviously. “He knows the truth, and it didn’t scare him away.”
“It’s kinda hard to scare a necromancer.” Tod set cups in front of Nash and Sabine when they settled onto bar stools across the counter from us. “They’re like reapers, but with less purpose.”
“He has purpose!” Em gave Tod a good-natured shove. “He’s an ed major. He wants to teach.”
“Not at Eastlake, I hope.” I smiled, trying not to feel lost in a conversation about someone I’d never met. “I hear that place is dangerous.”
“Not since you...died.” Nash frowned at the counter for a moment. “When you left, all that other stuff...it just...stopped.”
“Not because you were the cause of it,” Tod clarified, squeezing my hand. “You weren’t. The hellions left Eastlake because you paid to make them go away.” His grin returned. “You didn’t just clean up the school, you made a down payment on a miracle—a mara with an education!” He made a grand gesture toward Sabine, and she laughed.
“Yeah.” The mara tossed dark hair over her shoulder. “It turns out that without hellions stalking you constantly, school’s not that big of an obstacle. Still boring as hell, though.”
“She has a three-point-four GPA.” Nash wrapped one arm around her, and I could see the pride in his eyes. “And she’d have a four-point-oh if I could talk her into actually attending most of her classes.”
Sabine shrugged. “Waste of time when you already know the material. We’re nearly done now, though. Two more finals, then we graduate in two weeks.”
My chest ached again, and before I could process how thoroughly they’d all moved on without me, and why that bothered me, despite how happy I was for them all, the front door creaked open again and I turned to find Sophie standing in the doorway, frozen in place. Staring at me like she’d seen a ghost.
Luca nudged her inside, then closed the door at their backs. “Told ya so,” he leaned closer to say into her ear. I laughed. Of course he’d known. He’d probably felt me the moment I crossed back into the human world.
“Creepy-ass necromancers,” I said with a grin, and he stepped around my cousin to give me a hug.
“So glad you’re back,” he said. “Work sucks without our best reclamationist.”
“You’re still working for Madeline?”
He nodded, and his grin widened. “As are you. Aunt Madeline says she wants you back on the job by the end of the week. Also, she says, ‘Welcome back.’”
Warmth flooded me, and I was surprised to realize how good that made me feel. There was still a place for me, even if that place wasn’t at college with Nash, Sabine, and Emma.
Besides, A&M wasn’t that far away. Especially with my two-second commute.
“Kaylee?” Sophie’s voice sounded strange. Fragile. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, considering all the weird shit I’ve seen in the past four years. But I have to admit...I didn’t believe Luca when he said you were back.”
She hugged me, and I was a little relieved to realize she hadn’t changed as much as the others. Of course, she was the youngest, though still older than me, now. “And hey, don’t worry about your hair. We can fix that. Three hours at my salon, and no one will ever know your poor head spent four years in that dry Netherworld air.”
I laughed out loud.
The next hour was surreal. They asked a dozen questions I didn’t want to answer about my time in the Netherworld, and I missed Alec more than ever. He would have understood my silence.
When it became obvious that I’d rather listen than talk, everyone seemed eager to oblige. I heard about classes, and parties, and schoolwork, and new cars, and new jobs, and new friends. I laughed at stories I didn’t completely understand and sympathized with disappointments I couldn’t really imagine. It seemed impossible that so much could have changed in the human world, when I could still remember my last day there like it was yesterday.
But I’d missed a lot of yesterdays.
We were digging into huge slices of birthday cake—Tod insisted, since I’d missed four birthdays—when another car pulled into the driveway.
My fork froze inches from my mouth. I dropped it onto my plate and was halfway to the door when it opened on its own. Harmony took one look at me, and her jaw dropped open so fast I was afraid it was going to fall off her face.
“Oh, my...”
I folded her into a long-overdue hug and only then noticed the firm bump between us. The one growing in her belly. I stepped back and glanced at her round stomach in surprise. “Are you...?” The rest of the words got stuck in my throat, and she nodded, beaming at me.
“It’s a girl.”
“We were going to call her Kaylee,” my uncle said, and I looked up to find him in the doorway, watching me through damp, shiny eyes.
Uncle Brendon gave me my millionth hug in the past hour, and only once I’d let him go did I notice that the gold band on his finger matched the one on Harmony’s. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?” I demanded, turning on the rest of my friends and family with a grin that probably spoiled my angry act.
Sophie laughed. “Dad would have killed me if he missed the look on your face. So...I’m going to be a big sister. Weird, huh?”
“Beyond weird.” I turned back to Harmony. “Wow! So, when are you due?”
“Three months. We’re excited! And your old room at Brendon’s will be the nursery.”
“Speaking of babies...” Em stepped forward with her phone and showed me a picture of a laughing toddler with her sister’s eyes and my old math teacher’s wavy brown hair.
I took the phone from her and stared at the picture. “Oh, Em, he’s adorable!” Her nephew was so cute, in fact, that though I would have sworn it was impossible, I wasn’t creeped out by his resemblance to the man who’d murdered me.
“Yeah. And he never would have survived without you. Without the soul you gave him.”
I’d left instructions in my goodbye letter, begging Harmony to help them install the soul in the baby when he was born. “What’s his name?”
“I suggested Damien,” Tod said while Em showed me how to scroll through the latest pictures on her phone—a leap in technology I’d missed during my sabbatical in hell. “But no one listened.”
“Caleb. He’s very sweet but quite a handful.”
“Have you searched his head for a birthmark in the form of three sixes?”
Emma shoved Tod again, and I got the impression that was a joke he’d told in infinite variations. I didn’t get it.
“Most little boys are...challenging,” Harmony said. “Including the two of you.” She smiled at both her sons.
“Okay, I’m here. What’s the big...?”
I froze at the sound of my father’s voice, and when it faded in surprise, I turned to find him staring at me.
“Kaylee?” His voice cracked, and disbelief dripped from the fracture. I smiled at him while my heart thundered in my chest. “Is that you? Are you real?”
Tod laughed again. “We’ve been asking her that all day.”
My dad practically floated across the room toward me, and only once his arms were wrapped around me did I realize he was wearing a flannel plaid shirt I’d been trying to get him to throw away for months before he’d disappeared into the Netherworld.
“I’m real.” I inhaled his scent, and fresh tears formed in my eyes. “I am so sorry for everything I put you through.” I clung to him, crying onto his shirt, burying my face in his shoulder.
My dad held me at arm’s length, staring at me through his own tears. “Kaylee, what on earth could you possibly have to be sorry for?”
“I lied to you,” I said, between sobbing hiccups. “And I skipped school, and communed with evil forces, and drugged my boyfriend, and went to the Netherworld without permission, and I’m about four years late for my curfew. I totally understand if you want to ground me. With four years’ worth of interest.”
My father laughed so hard his whole body shook, and tears dripped from his chin. “Is that what it’ll take to keep you here?”
I shook my head. When he pulled me into another overdue hug, I laid my head down on his shoulder. “You couldn’t get rid of me this time if you tried.”
For at least a solid minute, we cried in each other’s arms, unleashing four years’ worth of grief and pain and guilt.
When he finally let me go, I turned in a slow circle, looking around at everyone I loved. Everyone I’d abandoned in an attempt to protect them. The room blurred beneath my tears. “I can’t believe I’m here. I can’t believe you’re all here.”
“Um...” Sophie crossed her arms over a designer blouse and arched both manicured brows at me. “Out of all the weird species, out-of-body experiences, resurrections, and octogenarian pregnancies represented by the occupants of this room right now, your presence is the thing most difficult to believe.”
“Sophie...” Uncle Brendon said, but my cousin shook her head.
“I have something to say, and I’m going to be heard.” She turned to me again, and I braced myself for a well-meaning but offensive critique of my hair, or my face, or the tee I’d borrowed from Tod, which hung nearly to the cuff of my shorts. But instead, she smiled and glanced around the room. “I think I speak for everyone here when I say...welcome home, Kaylee.”
* * *
“Are you sure about this?” I called through the closed bathroom door, lifting acres of gold tulle. When I turned in front of the small mirror, light caught the sequins on my bodice and reflected a thousand points of light on the walls of Tod’s tiny bathroom.
“I’m sure. Come on out.”
“I feel stupid,” I moaned, pulling the door open, but my complaint died on my tongue with one look at him. “But you look...” I stared at him for a second. Then I had to touch him.
I ran my fingers over his gold tie, feeling the raised thread pattern, then down the right side of the matching vest, half-hidden by his black tux jacket. “You look gorgeous.”
“Okay.” He nodded hesitantly. “That’s a little feminine, as far as compliments go, but I can’t argue with the general sentiment. I look great. And so do you. Turns out gold is a good color for us both.” He made a spinning motion with one finger, and I turned slowly to show off my dress. To show off me in my dress. The prom dress I’d never worn.
I felt simultaneously beautiful and foolish, twirling in what little floor space there was between the unmade twin bed and the pile of unfolded laundry. “Tell me again why we’re wearing four-year-old prom clothes, alone in your bedroom?”
“We’re making up for lost time.” His arms slid around my waist, and mine met beh
ind his neck. “We’re going to do everything you missed while you were gone. We’ll make up for every single lost moment. All of them.”
I looked into his eyes and got lost in them. “That could take a long time.”
He started swaying, and I swayed with him, and it didn’t matter that we didn’t have music, or friends, or punch, or a gym decorated with lights and crepe paper. We had the only two things we needed for our private prom—each other. And pretty clothes.
“I don’t care if it takes forever, Kaylee,” he said, and warmth trailed down my spine to settle in a dozen pleasant places. “The universe owes us forever. And our eternity starts now.”
* * * * *
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Natashya Wilson and the rest of Harlequin Teen for launching the Teen line with Soul Screamers and for supporting Kaylee the whole way.
Thanks to my agent, Merrilee Heifetz, for making things happen.
Thanks to my critique partner, Rinda Elliott, for untold hours plotting, and whining, and planning over the phone. I hope we get to do all that in person very soon.
Thanks to No. 1, who sees the crazy, frazzled writer my official author photos hide well. Thanks for knowing when to offer coffee, when to make fajitas, and when to back quietly away from the office door. You’ve made this possible.
Thanks most of all to my editor, Mary-Theresa Hussey, for guidance, support, enthusiasm, and—most importantly—for smiley faces in the margins.
FEARLESS
For Rinda, my longtime critique partner, whose brilliant suggestion greatly influenced the new ending of this story, which was originally published years ago, without the last segment. Thank you!
This story takes place almost a year before MY SOUL TO LOSE, two full years before Kaylee and Sabine will meet....
“Sabine, look at me.”
Not likely. But staring out the car window wasn’t much better. All I could see was the building, long, low, and squat with tall, skinny windows arranged in pairs. Better than correctional custody, but not by much.
The brick-backed sign to the right of the sidewalk read Holser House, but that was a lie. “This isn’t a house.”
Soul Screamers Volume Two Page 34