Like me. He didn’t say it, but we both heard it.
“But the truth is...” Nash stopped and looked at me again, like he didn’t know how to finish his sentence. “I...I don’t really know what to do with this information, Kaylee. I don’t know how to process it. I’m not supposed to be here. I feel like the past two and a half years of my life have been a lie.”
“No, your life isn’t a lie, and it never has been. Your life is an opportunity. A gift. Just like mine is. We have that in common, Nash. We got a second chance.” Okay, technically I was on my third chance, but then, technically, I was dead.
I took a deep breath I didn’t really need, then prepared to say what I’d wanted to say to him for more than a month. I’d imagined this moment a million times, but now that it had come, I was suddenly unsure of the words. And of my right to say them. But someone had to.
“I don’t want to put any additional pressure on you or anything, but if you ask me, second chances come with a responsibility.” That’s what I believed about my own second chance, anyway. “The responsibility to earn the extra time you’ve been given. And to enjoy it. To live with and for everyone you love. To fight harder and longer than anyone else, because you owe it to your brother and I owe it to my mother to make sure that their deaths mean something.”
Nash blinked, and when the motion in his irises slowed, I knew he was thinking. He was truly considering what I was saying and its relevance to him. “That’s what you’re doing? That’s why you always jump in headfirst whenever anyone’s in trouble, whether they want your help or not? Whether they deserve it or not?”
I crossed my arms over my chest and let my rolling chair rotate a little. “I don’t do that.”
“That’s all you ever do. It’s who you are. And I think I’m starting to understand why.” The motion in his irises slowed even more, greens spreading into browns to make that hazel shade I knew so well. “You think you have to earn your place in the world.”
“I think we should all earn our place in the world. Especially people like me and you, who keep getting our friends and family hurt, whether we mean to or not.” I was afraid he would take that the wrong way, but he only nodded, like he might actually eventually agree. “We owe the world something. We owe the world everything.”
Nash stared at me like he hadn’t in a long time. Studying me, like he might be figuring me out. “You’re something else, Kaylee. I’m not sure exactly what that means, but I’m sure it’s true.”
“Yeah, you, too. You’re something special, Nash.” And he could be something great if he’d stop looking at life as a challenge to be conquered rather than an opportunity to be seized.
“So, now what?” He sat up straight and glanced at the room around us as if he no longer recognized it. As if what he’d learned had changed the way he saw everything, and a little spark of anticipation shot through me. I hadn’t seen him look like that—like he was ready for a challenge—in months.
“Now, you take a few minutes to process all this, then come out and have dinner. No one else knows about any of this, and I need you to keep it quiet until I’ve had a chance to tell Tod that I told you. But we’re going to get your mom back. We’re going to get them all back, and that’s going to be much easier if we’re all fighting on the same side. If we all trust one another. If we can all count on one another. Okay?”
Nash nodded, still kind of dazed, and I stood to give him some time to himself.
“When you’re ready, there’s food in the kitchen.”
When I got there, Em, Luca, and Sophie were nearly finished eating, but Tod and Sabine weren’t back yet. I scooped some noodles onto a plate for myself, but somehow I had even less appetite than usual. I’d just finished picking all the slivers of carrot from my meal and was about to check on Nash again when Tod suddenly appeared in the living room with Sabine in his arms.
She was unconscious, her head, arms, and legs hanging limp.
“Someone help me with her!” He kicked the coffee table out of the way and laid the mara on the couch. Chairs scratched the kitchen floor as we all stood at once. Nash made it into the living room at the same time I did—he must have flown down the hall. He shoved the coffee table over even farther and knelt on the floor next to the couch, brushing dark hair back from his girlfriend’s forehead.
“What the hell happened?” he demanded as Sophie and Emma sank onto the coffee table where they could see and Luca stood behind them, watching. Waiting to see how he could help.
“Look at her hand!” Em said, and I glanced at Sabine’s right arm—the one without a cast. Her wrist and hand were swollen to the point that the skin should have split, and a bright red web of veins traced the surface of her inflamed flesh, inching up her arm toward her chest. Toward her heart.
But what stood out to me most was a ring of bright red pinpricks encircling her wrist like a bracelet. Or like a tattoo.
“Oh, shit.” I knew those marks. I had an identical circle of them around my right ankle—permanent reminders of the day I’d been pricked by a crimson creeper vine. I’d nearly died.
“Avari got her ankles, too.” Tod carefully lifted Sabine’s leg, where a severed section of creeper vine dangled from the end of her jeans, its thorns still piercing the denim. A thick, viscous fluid dripped slowly from the cut end of the vine to soak into the carpet. “That cast is the only thing that saved her other arm.”
“Shit!” Nash carefully unwound the vine from her left ankle. “How did this happen?”
“He must have caught her.” Tod lifted the mara’s other leg so he could unwind the single loop of vine, and I stepped back to give them room. “I found her alone, unconscious, tied to the ground by all four limbs with creeper vines.”
“Live vines?” Sophie’s voice flowed thick with horror.
“Yeah. Dead ones wouldn’t have held. Fortunately, they were young. Thin, as you can see, and just now sprouting through cracks in the concrete.” Tod dropped the severed end of vine on the end table next to the couch, and a single drop of yellow venom leaked onto the wood while the inch-long thorns scratched the already-chipped varnish.
Nash’s vine followed a second later, then each brother rolled up a leg of her jeans and slid her sneakers and socks off so we could get a better look at the damage.
“Not as bad as her arm but not great,” Nash said through clenched teeth. His irises swirled with fear, and his voice shook with it. “If we don’t do something, this’ll kill her.”
Em lifted Sabine’s right arm and examined it, careful not to touch the puffy flesh. “What can we do?” Worry looked much the same on her as it had on Lydia. But Emma’s eyes were all her own, and they were so full of sadness I couldn’t help wondering whether she was syphoning it all from Nash or had actually started to care about Sabine, as I had.
That damn mara was an emotional ninja, sneaking up on your heart when you least expected it.
“Harmony treated me for this once,” I said. “She had this stuff—”
“She still has the stuff!” Nash stood so fast my head spun. “She has jars of it at home—she started making it in larger batches after you got pricked that time—she even carries some in her purse now, just in case.”
“Oh!” Sophie stood and raced into the kitchen. A second later, she was back with Harmony’s purse, shoving it at me. “She left it here when you guys crossed over.”
“Thanks.” I opened the bag and pawed through it, then began laying travel-size plastic bottles on the coffee table. There were three of them, and each was labeled in permanent marker with Harmony’s neat, all-caps print.