“Well, don’t read too much into it. I’m not a saint, and I don’t want to be. I just want to be normal. I want to have fights with my dad, and secrets with my best friend, and sex with my boyfriend. But most of all, I want to not be dead in a few days. I’m not done living! And I can’t fit everything else I want to do into the next ninety-six hours, and no matter how many dying wishes I make, that’s not going to change. And I hate it!”
Tod laughed, and my teeth ground together as I swerved smoothly onto the exit ramp. “Why the hell is that funny?”
“It’s not. It’s just a relief to hear you sounding less than rational and perfectly accepting of your own death. For a while it looked like you were going to ‘go gentle into that good night,’ or whatever. And that’s not you, Kaylee.”
I glanced at him, brows raised in surprise. Tod rarely ever said what I expected to hear, but poetry was new, even for him. “You like it better when I ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light?’”
“I like it when you ‘rage, rage’ against anything. It makes you look fierce and…alive.” The blues in his eyes started to swirl. “And if you tell anyone I quoted Dylan Thomas, I’ll… Well, I won’t have to do anything, because no one will believe you.”
The light ahead turned red, and I slowed to a stop in the left turn lane, then laid one hand over my heart and gave him a cheesy, wide-eyed double-blink. “I will take your secret to my grave.”
“I wish you didn’t have to.”
“Yeah, me, too.” My chest ached just thinking about it.
The light changed and I turned left, then pulled into the parking lot on the right. Lakeside was attached to Arlington Memorial, the hospital where Tod worked as a reaper—unbeknownst to the living—and his mother worked as a third-shift triage nurse, but it was a separate building, with a separate entrance and better security.
I parked in the last row and killed the engine, then sat there staring at the building for a minute, trying to calm the flutter of panic the sight of it raised in my stomach, even though I had no memory of being taken in. I’d just woken up inside, all alone, strapped to a bed in a featureless white room.
“You sure about this?” Tod asked, watching me.
“Yeah. Thanks for helping, even if it’s just to fulfill my last request,” I teased, trying to lighten the mood.
“How is it fair that you get, like, five dying wishes and I didn’t even get one?”
“No dying wish?” I frowned. “That’s criminal.”
Tod shrugged. “One of the many downsides to an unexpected death.”
“Better late than never,” I said, pushing my car door open. “I officially owe you one dying wish.”
Tod’s pale brows arched halfway up his forehead, and he looked suddenly, achingly wistful. “She knows not what she says…”
Maybe not. But I was starting to get a pretty good idea….
11
“So what’s the plan?” Tod asked, as we stared at the building, sitting side by side on the hood of my car.
I shrugged. “Nothing complicated. You get me in, we find Farrah, I ask her questions.”
“Sounds simple enough.”
“If you don’t count the million and one things that could go wrong. How long can you keep me invisible?”
“As long as we’re in physical contact.”
My throat felt suddenly dry. “Holding hands?” That’s how we’d done it last time.
“Unless you had something else in mind.”
“I…” Words deserted me until he grinned, and I realized he was kidding. “No wonder you and Nash can’t get along.”
“We get along.” He brushed that one stubborn curl back from his forehead. “We just don’t agree on anything.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It would if you had a brother.”
I could only shake off confusion and change the subject. “Last time we did this, you couldn’t keep me invisible and inaudible at the same time. Has that changed? Do you think you could make sure only Farrah can see and hear us?”
Another shrug. “Only one way to find out…” He stood and I slid off the hood, my palms suddenly damp from nerves, in spite of my determination to do what needed to be done. To protect Emma by getting rid of Mr. Beck and to face this, my worst fear, before I faced death. The thought of which was rapidly becoming my second worst fear.
Tod was already walking toward the building—no doubt moving corporeally for my exclusive benefit—but when he realized I wasn’t with him, he turned. “It won’t be like last time,” he said, with one look at my face.
“You don’t know what last time was like.” My hands started to shake at the memory of waking up strapped to a tall bed in an empty room.
“I know you couldn’t leave, and you didn’t know what was happening to you. And I know you’re more scared of going back in there than of crossing into the Netherworld.”
I stared at him, confused by the ache in my chest, like my heart suddenly needed more space.
“This time, you can leave whenever you want,” Tod said. “You just say the word, and I’ll make the rest of the world go away. I’ll take you someplace safe, where no one else can reach us.”
I couldn’t see anything but his eyes, staring into mine. I couldn’t take a breath deep enough to satisfy the need for one. I kept waiting for him to laugh, or grin, or do something to break the moment stretching between us. And when he didn’t—when he let that moment swell into something raw, and fragile, and too real for me to think about, I crossed my arms over my chest and scrounged up a challenging grin to lighten the moment. “You think I need to be rescued?”
“I think it doesn’t hurt to let someone else do the rescuing every now and then, when your own armor starts to get banged up.”
Maybe he was right. “And you think you’re up to the challenge?”
Some nameless emotion swirled in the blues of his eyes for just an instant. “I’m up to any challenge you could throw down. And several you’ve probably never thought of.”
I laughed out loud. “I’m starting to see the family resemblance.”
Tod frowned. “That’s not funny.”
“I know.” That time I took the lead and we stopped twenty feet from the back door, where the serene, manicured greenery gave way to cold concrete and two industrial trash bins.
“You ready?” Tod held his hand out and I took it, twining my fingers around his. His palm was warm and dry, and I tried to ignore the wave of confusion and possibility that crashed over me. There was no time—and no real purpose—for either one.
“Close your eyes,” he whispered, and I was happy to comply, because I couldn’t deal with what I might still see in his. Not now, anyway. “Here we go…”
My stomach pitched with the sudden sensation that I was falling. I fought the urge to grab on to something and clung to Tod’s hand instead, surprised that it still felt warm and solid while my own body felt oddly insubstantial.
Then the world seemed to settle around me and I felt the floor beneath my feet. The air was cold and had that distinctive hospital smell, somehow both sterile and stale at the same time. Tod squeezed my hand and I opened my eyes.
And the fears of my present slammed into the terror of my past.
Nothing had changed. Lakeside still looked and felt exactly the same.
We stood in the open common area of the youth ward, where patients gathered to eat, watch TV, play games, and have group therapy. The nurse’s station was only feet away, and the girls’ wing stretched out on my right. At the end of the hall was the room I’d occupied, and I was overwhelmed with the perverse need to go see who lived there now, and whether her delusions could hold a candle to my own.
You’re not crazy, Kaylee.
I had to remind myself, because just being back in that place blurred the line between delusion and reality for me. The last time I was there, I hadn’t known I was a bean sidhe. I’d only known that I was seeing things no one else could see—dark, horrifying auras surrounding certain people, and odd smoke, and things skittering through it. I’d fought, and failed, against an overwhelming need to scream, and it was those fits—what I thought were panic attacks—that landed me in Lakeside in the first place.