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 shoved. “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.”
&n
bsp; 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 behind 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.
FB2 document info
Document ID: f319bea5-7baf-4746-9e64-5a075785bce6
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 30.3.2013
Created using: calibre 0.8.53, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6 software
Document authors :
Bakoro
About
This file was generated by Lord KiRon's FB2EPUB converter version 1.1.5.0.
(This book might contain copyrighted material, author of the converter bears no responsibility for it's usage)
Этот файл создан при помощи конвертера FB2EPUB версии 1.1.5.0 написанного Lord KiRon.
(Эта книга может содержать материал который защищен авторским правом, автор конвертера не несет ответственности за его использование)
http://www.fb2epub.net
https://code.google.com/p/fb2epub/
With All My Soul ss-7 Page 34