“Scott, who are you talking to?” I asked, creeped out to realize that whatever he was talking about was starting to make a weird kind of sense. Nothing I could quite understand, but definitely not lunacy.
“I don’t know!” he shouted, and I jumped, then glanced at the door, worried it would fly open and the room would be overrun with needle-bearing aides. “I’m not talking to you,” he insisted, a little quieter. “Because you’re not supposed to talk! Go away! Goawaygoawaygoawaygoaway!”
I opened my mouth, but before I could think of what to say, the door flew open and a large male aide—Charles, according to his name tag—burst into the room. I stood frozen, pulse racing so fast my vision was starting to blur. I’d been caught. I’d be arrested, and handcuffed, and driven to the police station in the back of the car.
“Okay, Scott, calm down…” Charles started, both hands outstretched, and I realized this was a familiar performance for them both. But when he saw me, the aide’s voice faltered, and I was pretty sure he was doubting his own sanity in the brief silence. Then, “Who are you? You’re not a resident.”
They never called us—er, them—patients. Always residents, like people resided at Lakeside by choice.
My hands opened and closed. I was starting to sweat, and my chest ached until I realized I wasn’t breathing. I opened my mouth and sucked in a deep breath, but that didn’t fix anything. Tod wasn’t back. I was still trapped.
“She’s not real,” Scott whispered, glancing from me to the aide, then back. “Make her go away.”
Charles scowled at me, part confusion, part anger. “You can’t be here. How did you even get in here?”
“I…” But that’s where my words ran out.
I could run, but I’d never get past Charles. He was big, and part of his job was restraining residents, when the need arose. And even if I got past him, I couldn’t get out of the locked ward.
Each breath came faster than the last, but I couldn’t stop them. Couldn’t even slow them. There was only one way out, and I desperately didn’t want to take it. If hellions and assorted monsters hung out across the world barrier from the high school, I didn’t want to know what was lurking in the Netherworld version of a mental health facility. Insane hellions? Was there any other kind?
I closed my eyes, trying to block out the entire room and both of the other occupants. Pulse racing, I tried to think about death. To remember those I’d witnessed so that my wail for them would help me cross into the Netherworld.
But the only death I could think about was my own, and I can’t wail for myself.
“Security!” Charles shouted, and I squeezed my eyes shut tighter, still trying.
A warm hand took a strong grip on mine, and I screamed and tried to jerk away. But he held tight. An instant later, the hum of the air conditioner faded into silence and my ears popped.
Then, suddenly the world felt warm and humid. Cicadas chirruped all around me, and that hand still held mine, its grip confident, but looser now.
“You okay?” Tod asked, and I opened my eyes to find him watching me, dark blond brows drawn low over blue eyes still brilliant in the setting sun. We were in the parking lot, by the trash bins, almost exactly where we’d stood half an hour earlier.
“That was… What was that?” I demanded, as my pulse finally began to slow.
“That was me taking some of the tarnish off this old armor.” He pretended to brush dust off the front of his shirt.
“You call that a rescue?”
Tod frowned. “You don’t?”
“That aide was about to haul me out of the room!” I pulled Lydia’s robe off in several angry movements, surprised to see that my hands were still shaking from the close call.
“It’s more fun when you’re almost caught.”
“That’s not almost. I was caught.” As evidenced by the remnants of panicked adrenaline still burning in my veins.
“Well, now you’re un-caught. And for the record, you’re the second chick I’ve snatched from the jaws of the mental health industry tonight.” His eyes shined in the dying light, and I couldn’t resist a small smile. Yes, I’d been caught and nearly suffered a fatal aneurysm from the shock—several days early, by my count—but it was over now, and I’d gotten what I needed.
“So, you what? Just blinked us both out of there? So that aide saw us disappear?”
Tod’s brows rose. “What kind of amateur do you think I am? He only saw you disappear. He never saw me at all.”
“That makes two of us. I was starting to worry about you.” I dropped Lydia’s robe on the sidewalk and headed for my car.
“Sorry.” Tod fell into step beside me. “It was a little more complicated than I expected.”
“But she’s okay?” I asked.
“She…? Oh, Lydia.” Tod brushed one stubborn blond curl from his forehead. “Yeah. I mean, she’s scared to be on her own, but anything’s better than that place.” He glanced over his shoulder at Lakeside. “And she has your number, right?”
“Yeah.” As I drove home, I played with the idea of inviting her to stay at my house. In a perfect world, that would have been…perfect. My dad needed someone to take care of, and he was about to lose me. Lydia needed to be taken care of, and she couldn’t go back to her own parents.
But if we lived in a perfect world, I wouldn’t be days from death and Lydia wouldn’t have been locked up in the first place. The reality was that she could never take my place, and my dad would probably be in no shape to take care of anyone for a while after his grand scheming failed and I died.
How could there possibly be so many things left to fix, and so little time in which to fix them?
“You wanna come in?” I asked, as I pulled my key from the engine.
Tod looked at me in the light shining through the windshield from the porch light. “Don’t you need to do some homework, or get a good night’s sleep, or something equally wholesome?”
I pushed open my car door. “I am no longer attending school for the purpose of education. At this point, I’m only showing up to keep an eye on Mr. Beck. And speaking of evil demon sires, I have a theory I need to verify. Interested in helping?”
The reaper shrugged. “I have nothing else planned till midnight.”
“Good.” I got out of the car and shoved my door closed as he stepped right through his. “That gives us five hours to…” Oh, crap. I glanced at my cell phone screen again, then groaned. It was just after seven.
I’d stood Nash up. Again.
I took several steps toward the house, then froze when my gaze landed on the front porch. Where Nash sat watching us.
“You know, pretty soon I’m going to start taking this personally.”
13
“Hey, I’m sorry. I lost track of time.”
Nash stood as I unlocked the door, but instead of following me inside, he stepped into the doorway, one hand on either side of the frame. Symbolically blocking Tod from entering, since he couldn’t physically keep the reaper from doing anything. “I need to talk to Kaylee.”
“So talk.” Tod disappeared from the front porch, then reappeared next to me in the living room, and when Nash turned around, his eyes were flashing in anger.
“This is private.”
Tod opened his mouth, then seemed to change his mind about whatever he was going to say and looked at me instead, brows raised in question.
I nodded. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Thanks for…everything.” But I owed Nash both an apology and an explanation.
Tod disappeared from my living room as fast as he’d appeared, and Nash closed the front door and leaned against it, watching me. “What happened?”
I collapsed onto the couch next to Styx, and ran one hand over her fur. “Sabine figured out that Beck’s an incubus, and Alec said that if he’s in heat, or whatever, Danica probably isn’t the first student he’s slept with, so we did some research and figured out—”