“You mean eventually, right?” She blinked, and I could tell it hadn’t sunk in. “Please tell me you’re making some kind of big-picture philosophical statement about the inevitability of death and the transient nature of human existence.”
“Not eventually, Em. Sometime on Thursday. I don’t know exactly when, and I don’t know how, and I don’t know where. I don’t even know who’s coming to reap my soul, because Tod just took the reaper who had that job and fed him to Avari. All I know is that it’s hard to motivate myself to go work for a paycheck I’m never gonna cash or do homework that’s never gonna get graded. But I am hell-bent on taking Mr. Beck down before I die.”
Emma leaned back in the driver’s seat, hands limp in her lap, keys dangling from one bent finger. “Okay, I’m going to need a minute. That’s a lot to process.”
“I know.”
She took a couple of deep breaths, then rolled her head on the headrest to face me. “I was only in Beck’s classroom for, like, an hour, right?” she asked, and I nodded, though it had felt like much less to me, in the Netherworld. “And in that time, you dumped your boyfriend, kissed his dead brother and found out you’re going to die?”
I stared at my hands, nervously fiddling with my keys in my lap. “Actually, I already knew that last part.”
“You already knew?” Em’s voice sounded strained, like when her feelings were hurt and she didn’t want me to know. I looked up to find her frowning at me. “How long?”
“Since Friday night,” I admitted, a thick undercurrent of guilt flowing in to supplant my good intentions in not telling her earlier.
“Five days? You knew five days ago, and you didn’t tell me?”
“I’m sorry, Emma. I didn’t want you to have to dwell on it, like I have.”
“Did it ever occur to you that I might want to dwell on it? Or at least know that it was coming?” Her eyes filled with tears, and her lower lip began to quiver. “How serious is this, Kay?” She blinked and wiped tears from her face with one hand, making an obvious effort to compose herself and her thoughts. “I mean, I know it’s death, but you’ve already died once, and I’ve died, and, hell, even Sophie’s died, so that’s less of a permanent state than I used to think it was.”
“This time it’s permanent.” And just saying the words triggered a new wave of fear inside me, beating at my spirit like waves against the cliffs, constantly eroding until there would soon be nothing left of me.
Emma shook her head, denying the inevitable. “But Tod? He can use his reaper connections to get you another extension—or whatever. Right?”
“No, Em.” I gripped the door handle so hard my fingers ached. “He can’t get me another exchange. No one gets more than one exchange. No exceptions.” And even if there were exceptions, Tod wasn’t in any position to secure one. He was still a rookie reaper, only two years dead, and still on the bottom rung of his afterlife.
“Wait, Tod can’t fix this?” Her bottom lip shook, and I knew that the reality was starting to sink in. “You’re seriously telling me you’re going to die in two days? For real? Like, gone forever?”
It wasn’t any easier to hear coming from her mouth, but I nodded, fighting to keep the facts closed off in some dark corner of my head with the other mental cobwebs I didn’t want to deal with. And suddenly I realized that my mind was becoming a very messy place.
“Does everyone else know? Nash and Tod?” she asked, and I nodded miserably. “Sabine?” Em demanded, and when I nodded again, a new layer of hurt swept over her features, like the curtain on a stage.
“I had to tell her to get her to help me with Mr. Beck,” I tried to explain, but I knew nothing I could say would help.
“So, I’m the only one you left out?”
“I wasn’t leaving you out. I was trying to spare you from anticipating it. And I didn’t tell Nash—my dad did. And Tod’s the one who told him. So, really, the only person I’ve told is Sabine.”
“What part of that is supposed to make me feel better?”
“None of it. None of it can make either of us feel better, which is why I didn’t want you to know. Hell, I wish I didn’t know. Em, I’m getting scared.” And suddenly there were tears. From nowhere. I’d known Emma longer than anyone else in my life, other than my uncle. I’d known her longer than I’d known my own father, and somewhere in the process of telling my best and oldest friend that I was going to die, I came to understand the truth of it for myself.
“Oh, Kaylee…” She dropped her keys in the center console and pulled me into a hug that shoved her water bottle into my ribs and my knee into the gear shift, but I wouldn’t have let go for anything in the world.
“I’ve been trying not to think about it, and that’s mostly been working, because nothing ever seems normal around here anymore,” I sobbed, half-choking on my words as they ran together and my tears soaked into the shoulder of her shirt. “But every time I close my eyes, or take a deep breath—every time things get quiet for just a second—there it is again. Waiting for me. It’s like my heart is a watch, and I know it’s going to stop ticking on Thursday, and every single beat shoves me a second closer to death, and I try to dig in, or grab on to something, but it keeps pushing me, and I keep sliding, and there isn’t much more space before I’ll just…fall off the edge.” By the end, I was sobbing, and squeezing her so tight she probably couldn’t breathe, but she kept holding on.
“Okay, take a breath, Kaylee,” she said at last, when my sobs finally began to fade. I let go of her to wipe my face with a dried-stiff paper napkin from her dashboard. “First of all, you should have told me. But in light of the circumstances, I’m gonna let that one slide. And second…what the hell are you even doing here? Why aren’t you skydiving, or mountain climbing, or on a plane to some fabulous city you’ve never seen before. Your dad would totally make that happen, if you asked him. Why would you want to spend your last two days on earth at school?”
I blinked and wiped my face on my sleeve. “Em, I have to get rid of Beck.”
“No you don’t! Let Nash and Sabine handle it. Tod and Alec can help. Or hell, tell your dad and let him do it!”
“I’m telling my dad tonight—I would have already, but he’s been so stressed out trying to find a way to exchange my date, which isn’t going to happen. But I seriously doubt Tod and Nash are going to be working together on anything in the near future. And even if they were, none of them know what to do any better than I do. I need to know this is handled before I die, Emma. Especially after what I just saw in there.” I nodded toward the school building. “Do you honestly think you could have told him no?”
“Yeah.” She shrugged. “The problem is that I didn’t want to. I still don’t want to.”
“And that’s why I have to do this. I want to know that you’re going to be safe before…you know.”
Emma looked at me for a second, then sighed. “You have to let it go. Let someone else handle it this time. You can’t save everyone, Kay. You can’t control everything.”
“You sound like Nash,” I said, and as his name faded from my tongue, another wave of guilt crashed over me. Em must have seen it on my face.
“How did he take it? About Tod, I mean.”
“Not well, but that’s my fault. He hates me, and I can’t blame him, and now I’m the reason he hates his own brother. And Nash thinks Tod’s using me to hurt him because he’s jealous that Nash is still alive.”
Emma shook her head. “I don’t blame him for being upset, but that’s not it. Tod’s been pining over you for months. Frankly, I’m impressed that you held out for so long.”
“You knew there was…pining?”
Emma actually smiled, and that felt good, after all the tears. “We all knew, Kaylee. Hell, I bet even your dad knew. I didn’t think Tod would ever say anything, though, because of Nash.”
“He didn’t. I mean, he told me Nash and I were wrong for each other, and he’s been hanging around a lot since Nash went into recovery, but he’s always been a flirt, so I didn’t really think anything about it until a couple of days ago. Then I saw him feed my reaper to Avari, and it just kind of…clicked. He did that for me.”