If I Die

eyelids.

Then Beck laughed, and my eyes flew open again. I stared in shock as he pulled the butcher knife from his stomach and tossed it into the sink, where it clattered into the popcorn bowl. Through the hole in his shirt, I could see the two-inch gash seal itself, like it was never even there. And if not for all the blood, I would have thought I’d imagined the whole thing.

“Stainless steel isn’t much of a problem for me, either.” In the next second, he was there, pinning me to the fridge, one hand around my wrist, the other pressing the dual dagger tips into my chest, just below my rib cage. “I think we’re done with this now…” He slid one finger beneath the braided dissimulatus bracelet, tugging my arm toward the top dagger blade.

Every breath I took, every panicked beat of my adrenaline-flooded heart demanded action. Resistance. Struggle, at least. But I’d never fought anyone in my life. The closest I’d ever come was slapping Sabine, and if I was in over my head against Nash’s nightmare of an ex-girlfriend, I didn’t stand a chance against an incubus who healed his own wounds. Especially not with his knife poised to slide beneath my ribs, taking my life and my soul in one vicious stroke.

Beck lowered my arm against the dagger so that the top blade slid between my skin and the bracelet. The knife sliced through the braided fiber like it wasn’t even there.

The bracelet fell from my arm, and Beck caught it with out removing the dagger from my chest. He turned it over in his hand, studying it, eyes alight with interest. “Wonderful craftsmanship,” he said. “Where did you get this?”

I said nothing, furious tears standing in my eyes, mercifully blurring a face most of my classmates had swooned over.

He wadded up the ruined fiber and tossed it across the kitchen, where it hit the far wall and fell to the floor, too far away to continue “jamming” my psychic signature and hiding my species. Then he stared down at me from inches away, studying me critically through narrowed eyes.

“Not a harpy…” he said, with a glance at my ears. “But then, dissimulatus wouldn’t have hidden the pointy ears, would it?”

I didn’t answer, and he didn’t seem to care.

“Not a mara…” he said, studying my eyes, no doubt noting my complete inability to read and inspire fear with them. “Not alluring enough to be a siren, though that was my guess for Emma, and you’re definitely not a succubus… Which only leaves a couple of possibilities, considering your human appearance and your psychic signature. So, maybe…bean sidhe?”

My eyes must have given it away, because he nodded decisively, eyes flashing in triumph. “Does it matter?”

“Only to verify that you are not, in fact, human. Though I must admit, I am curious—I’ve never met a bean sidhe before.” Beck stared down at me almost longingly. “It’s a shame that getting to know you properly would smudge that shiny purity. Bean sidhes are so rare, and you’re not bad-looking…”

Evil and flattering. “Wow, who wouldn’t want to be murdered by such a charmer?” I said, my mind racing along with my heart as he began to lightly trace the bottom of my rib cage with the lower blade.

Beck laughed, and his knife hand jiggled. I gasped as the point of the blade poked me through my shirt, almost firm enough to break my skin. “I like your spirit. But letting you go would be an unconscionable waste of resources.”

“So you’re just going to stab me in the kitchen?” I demanded, mining my terror for remaining fiery threads of anger to keep panic at bay. “Shouldn’t you at least try to make it look like an accident? I mean, this whole stabbing thing sounds messy, and you’ll never get all that blood out of the tile grout.”

“I’ll be done with your body before it even cools, and mine is the only blood I plan to dispose of.” But he glanced around the kitchen, as if he were truly seeing it for the first time. “However, now that you mention it, the kitchen does seem a bit…cold. Why don’t we take this to your room? You’d like to die in your own bed, right?” he said, and chill bumps burst to life on every inch of my body. “Then your dad can find you, and it’ll look like a crime of passion. Maybe they’ll even blame Nash. Didn’t the two of you have a big, public fight the other day?”

Oh, nooo. Beck was right. The whole world had seen me kiss someone else, then seen Nash stomp out. Em and Sabine would know he hadn’t killed me, and our families would believe him, obviously. But if he couldn’t stay off frost, the police would know he was messed up on something, and even if they couldn’t pin down the actual substance, he’d look unstable, at the least.

“No.” I felt my eyes go wide, but Beck only grinned in return, clearly enjoying my misery. “Please, no, Mr. Beck. Nash didn’t do anything to you. You can’t let people blame this on him.”

“Oh, I think that wraps things up nicely, and it’ll throw the school into fear and chaos, which should keep the local hellion population happy.” He grabbed my arm in his free hand and before I could blink, he’d spun me around, the twin knife points now poking into my back, on either side of my spine. “It never hurts to pay tribute to the local hellions, if you ever plan to revisit their haunts.”

“You’re paying tribute to Avari?” Terror tightened my throat, and I could barely force the words out, but I had to keep talking. Keep trying to distract him long enough to…do something drastic.

“You know him?” Beck pushed me forward, and I didn’t dare resist, with death so close at my back. Where the hell was my dad? Or Tod?

I held my arms stiff at my side, wondering if I could grab a makeshift weapon before he could shove the knife through my spine… “I know he’s going to be pissed if I die and he doesn’t get my soul.”

On the dusty mirror over the couch, Beck’s brows rose, and he glanced at me in sudden interest. “Well, then, it’s a good thing I’m planning to leave him a tribute, huh?”

Crap. Had I just given him another reason to blame Nash?

“No!”

“Shh. I don’t think you want to wake Emma and your cousin.” Beck pushed me across the living room and into the hall, where I took one last look at my best friend, still passed out on the couch, before he shoved me toward my room.

“Sit.” Beck nodded at my desk chair as he marched me through my own door—it hadn’t been hard to find in a two-bedroom house.

Huh? But I sat, the knife now pressed into my side, only more confused when he leaned over me to open my laptop. I hadn’t shut it down when I closed it, so it flared to life instantly, my email inbox greeting me with unnerving normalcy while I sat with a mystical two-bladed knife pressing into my ribs.

“You’re going to send Nash an email, begging him not to come over. Tell him to calm down, and you’ll talk to him tomorrow, at school, but you’re not going to let him in while he’s this angry.”

My teeth clenched together so hard my jaws ached in protest, and I had to force my mouth open to speak. “No.”

“Do it. It has to be in your own words, with only your prints on the keyboard.”

I craned my neck to look up at him, wishing he could see the fury surely raging in my irises. “You want to kill me? Fine. Kill me. But I’m not going to help you frame Nash.”

Beck leaned so close I felt his breath on my ear. The tip of one blade bit into my skin. I gasped at the sharp pain and couldn’t help wondering how much worse the real thing would hurt. “You’re going to do it, or when I’m done with you, I’ll take Emma and your cousin back to Emma’s house and we’ll have a little fun while your soulless corpse cools.”

A bitter, black pain settled into my stomach, and threatened to swallow me whole. “Don’t touch them,” I whispered furiously, with all the volume I could manage.

“You have my word that I won’t, if you do exactly what I tell you to.”

Hellions can’t lie; did the same thing go for incubi? I didn’t know, but I had no doubt that if I didn’t write the email, he’d do to Em and Sophie what he’d done to Danica. Or maybe what he’d done to her mother.

He was making me choose. Nash or Emma and Sophie.

If I wrote the letter and the police found it—no doubt Beck would leave it open on my laptop—Nash would probably spend the rest of his life on the run. As would Harmony, because she and Tod wouldn’t let him go down for