Soul Screamers Volume Four: With All My Soul\Fearless\Niederwald\Last Request: 4 (43 page)

I also loved her for the fact that, like Tod, she hadn’t changed at all in the four years I’d been gone. That couldn’t be said for anyone else, based on the pictures I’d found in Emma’s room—my former room. The twin beds had been replaced with a full, and my things were packed into boxes stacked at the back of her closet.

They hadn’t gotten rid of me. They’d just packed me up. Seeing those boxes reminded me of the day I’d helped Emma pack up her former life and move into her new one. We’d changed places, sort of. That felt weird.

“I told them I had an announcement,” Tod said. “They probably expect me to announce my retirement.” Which, for a reaper, meant requesting or accepting his final death. “It’s kind of...been coming.”

I frowned and dropped the ice scoop into the sink, and he shrugged. “It was hard without you, Kaylee. I couldn’t let you go, but I didn’t know how to be here without you. If I’d never met you, I probably would have been fine.” He shrugged, and that same stubborn curl fell over his forehead. “I mean, creatures who only exist in the dark don’t know they’re missing the sun, right? But once you’ve
seen
the sun. Once you’ve seen it light up the world...once you’ve felt its heat all around you...inside you...” He clutched his own chest, and my heart cracked open. “It’s hard to live in the dark after the sun dies.”

“I’m so sorry.” I set the last cup on the counter and threw my arms around him again. “I’m so glad you didn’t do something...permanent.”

“I almost did. I started slipping away again. If not for my mom and Emma, I might have lost most of my humanity by now.”

“Em? You and Emma?” I pulled back to look at him, my chest aching, and I had to remind myself that four years was a long time, and they were only human—mostly. And that I’d
left
them, and they’d thought I was
dead,
and they had had every right to move on. To at least
try....

Tod’s eyes widened, then he laughed and pulled me closer. “Not like that. Emma has a boyfriend. A necromancer friend of Luca’s. They’ve been together almost three years now.”

“The guy in the picture on her dresser?” They looked happy in the photo. They looked...normal. Emma deserved some normal.

“Yeah. He’s a good guy, and he loves her, and he knows how to handle the occasional syphon meltdown. But even if none of that were true...” Tod put a hand on each of my arms and looked right into my eyes. “You have my heart and soul, Kaylee Cavanaugh, and that never changed, even when I thought you were gone. Em and I are just friends. There was never anyone else. Which means that all of this—” he stepped back and spread his arms with a grin I’d missed like I would miss my own heartbeat if I never felt it again “—went to waste for four very long years.”

“Well, that’s all over now. An ego like that deserves to be stroked.” I ran my hands over his chest and stood on my toes to whisper in his ear, “Or at least humored.”

“Humored, huh?” He laughed. “I’ll take what I can get. For now....”

I pulled his head down for a kiss and didn’t let him go until an engine rumbled to a stop out front, and my heart stopped with it. “They’re here.” One of them, at least. I’d only heard one car.

I raced to the front window and peeked through the gap in the drapes to see an unfamiliar vehicle in the driveway. The driver’s door opened, and I hardly recognized the man who stepped out. He had Nash’s artfully mussed hair, but I couldn’t see his eyes behind a pair of dark sunglasses. And he was...bigger.

My heart ached. Each beat seemed to bruise me from the inside out.

Nash had grown up, like Tod and I never would. Mental math told me he was twenty-two now, and though I could see it, I couldn’t truly believe it.

The passenger’s-side door opened and a headful of long, straight, dark hair appeared over the roof of the car. A second later, Sabine rounded the front bumper and slid her hand into Nash’s, and I’m sure my eyes nearly bugged out of my head.

She’d grown up, too, and she was
gorgeous,
in a mature, collected way the teenage
mara
I’d come to thoroughly tolerate had never been. And she looked...happy. Even with all the eyeliner she still wore and a familiar pair of guys’ khakis hanging low on the swell of her hips.

“This is
bizarre,
” I whispered, and Tod’s hand settled at my lower back.

“I guess it must be, seeing it all of a sudden like that.” He shrugged. “They grew up.”

“And they’re...okay? They’re good?”

“Yeah. Better than I would have expected.” His arm slid around my side and pulled me close again, just as the rear door of the car opened, and my breath caught in my throat.

Emma.

Lydia’s body had grown up, too, and Em now wore it like it was her own. She’d cut her thin hair, and it looked healthier than I’d ever seen it, bouncing on her shoulders in light brown waves. Her arms were tanned, and she’d finally figured out how to dress a body with no curves to speak of—a dilemma I remembered well.

I was still watching her walk up the sidewalk when Nash knocked on the door, then opened it and came in without waiting for the key Em had dug from her purse. “Hey, Peter Pan? You in here?”

Sabine followed him inside, and I could tell by the way their gazes passed over us, then settled on the cups of ice lined up on the kitchen counter that they couldn’t see either of us yet. I hadn’t gone spectral on purpose. Evidently—subconsciously, at least—I wasn’t ready to be seen.

“Kay?” Tod said, and they didn’t hear that, either. “You ready?”

I nodded, and I only realized that was the truth at the very last second.

Tod cleared his throat. Nash and Sabine turned our way just as Em stepped into the house.

For a moment, shocked silence reigned.

Nash took off his sunglasses, and his hazel eyes were as wide and still as I’d ever seen them. Emma dropped her purse, and Styx skittered away from the falling debris. Sabine’s mouth widened in a stunning smile. She was the first to believe her eyes, and, somehow, that didn’t surprise me.

“Kay?” She crossed the room in an instant and threw strong arms around me, while I tried to ignore the fact that she’d grown at least two inches taller since I’d last seen her. She towered over me now, and was only a couple of inches shorter than Nash. “Are you real?”

Tod laughed. “I’ve been asking her that for the past three hours. She’s real. Solid and thoroughly functional.”

“Well then.” Sabine let go of me and grinned. “I guess we know how they spent the past three hours, instead of alerting anyone else to the miraculous resurrection.” She shrugged. “Not that I blame you. If it were me and Nash, we’d still be sequestered.”

Obviously
some
things hadn’t changed....

“I—I don’t...” Em stuttered, and as soon as Sabine stepped back, Emma was there. She’d grown, too, but that put her at exactly my height, and I hugged her so tight I could almost hear her ribs groan. “How...?”

“She didn’t die. Levi lied.” Tod still sounded less than pleased by that, and I couldn’t blame him.

“I asked him to,” I clarified, without letting go of Emma. I couldn’t let her go. I wasn’t ready. And based on the strength of her hug, neither was Em. “I knew that if you guys knew what I was planning, you’d come after me.”

“Come after you
where?
” Sabine frowned, and I could tell by the suspicion dripping from that one question that she’d figured at least part of it out.

“The Netherworld.” Tod told them the part I couldn’t make myself say out loud. “She turned herself in. Which sounds really
asinine
until you hear about the out clause she built into her deal with Avari. That part’s really brilliant.”

“You turned yourself in? To
Avari?
” Emma shuddered even as she said his name, and I could see all the questions she obviously wanted to ask hiding just below her surprise and confusion. “You were there the whole time? So you’ve been...? He’s been...?” Horror washed over her face in slow motion as comprehension surfaced. As she realized where and how I’d spent the past four years. And
why
I’d spent them.

“
Damn,
Kay,” Sabine whispered.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Tears formed in Emma’s eyes.
“
How
can you be okay?”

“I made a deal with Ira. I gave him everything I couldn’t handle....” Mostly massive amounts of pain and rage. “And that left me with my...um...sanity.” I shrugged like it was no big deal, but no one bought that.

“Ira. Damn.” Sabine tossed long, dark hair over her shoulder. “I haven’t heard that name in years. And you actually talked a hellion of wrath into sucking the crazy right out of you?”

“It was mutually beneficial. And Ira’ll be munching on Avari’s fury for centuries. That’s really why he agreed to the whole thing.” I blinked and shook my head, mentally changing the subject. “Enough about the Netherworld. We’re done with that now.” I’d put myself through hell for four years to make damn sure of that. “I want to talk about you guys! You’re all...grown!”

Emma laughed. “Yeah. I guess so. You missed prom. Then...everything else.”

“You’re in college?” Tod had told me that, but I wanted to hear it from her.

“Yeah. I’m a junior at A&M. But they’re about to graduate. Both of them!” She gestured to Sabine and Nash, and when my gaze fell on Nash again, it stuck there. He hadn’t moved. He hadn’t said a word. He was still staring at me in shock, and his sunglasses lay on his left foot, where he’d dropped them.

“Nash?”

He blinked, and his eyes swirled with confused, surprised twists of brown and green. I took a step toward him, and he studied me. Like he didn’t dare believe the signals his eyes were sending him.

So I closed the distance between us on my own, then went up on my toes to hug him.

He felt...different. Bigger. More solid.

Healthy.

Slowly, his arms closed around me. His hug tightened steadily until I couldn’t have breathed if I’d needed to. He shook in my arms, and his tears soaked into the shoulder of my shirt.

“It’s okay,” I said with what little breath remained in my lungs. “It’s okay, Nash.”

When he finally let me go and wiped tears from his face, I wanted to hug him all over again.

“You know, there are easier ways to make an ex get over you, Kay. You didn’t have to fake your own death. Again.”

I laughed through my own tears, and I hugged him again. Then I escaped into the kitchen to pull myself together while I poured soda into the cups, hoping they wouldn’t see how surreal this was for me. Four hours earlier, I hadn’t known my own name. I’d forgotten this world existed. I’d been lost in a hell from which there should have been no mistake.

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 shove. “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.