Sabine. “She’s in the office waiting for her dad, because school policy says that if she’s not fit for class, she’s not fit to drive, and they won’t let me take her home because I’m not a relative.”
Emma blinked at him in surprise, then glanced at the rest of us in turn. “Who’s this?”
I gestured to her with one hand and him with the other. “Emma Marshall, Luca Tedesco. Em is my best friend. Luca is a necromancer, and my coreclamationist. Or whatever. He’s also Sophie’s new boyfriend.”
“Necro-what?” Emma asked.
Sabine reached across the table to claim a half-eaten crust from Emma’s napkin. “He’s a metal detector for dead stuff.”
Em glanced at Luca, her eyes wide in either interest or fear. “Like ghosts?”
“No, like the undead.” He gestured at me and Tod. “And the recently dead. But once someone’s been dead for more than a few days or is buried more than a few feet deep, my accuracy suffers.”
“That is both creepy and fascinating,” Sabine said. Then she gestured to him with the half-eaten crust. “I like him. Not sure why he’s wasting his time with the pole dancer, though.”
Tod laughed out loud and I groaned. “Sophie takes ballet and jazz. She’s not a pole dancer.”
“There’s more money in pole dancing,” Sabine insisted.
“Actually, Sophie takes ballet and lyrical dance. She quit jazz last year,” Luca said, and every single one of us glanced at him in surprise. “What?” He shrugged. “She listens to me talk about dead people and soccer.”
I shook my head, trying to draw my thoughts back into focus. “Okay, what are the possibilities? About Avari and Scott, not Sophie?”
“Scott’s dead, and Avari’s possessed his corpse,” Nash said, each word short and clipped, as if they actually hurt to pronounce. As far as I could tell, he had yet to actually make eye contact with his brother.
“That possibility should be easy enough to verify or eliminate,” Sabine said.
“How?” Em asked.
“Go look in the casket. If the body’s there, then Avari obviously doesn’t have it,” the
I glanced at Tod, and he shrugged. “Okay,” I said. “One of us should be able to handle that. Other possibilities?”
“He’s not really dead?” Em said. “He faked his own death, like on a soap opera.”
Sabine’s brows rose. “Or he’s undead. Something like the two of you.” She waved the pizza crust at me and Tod.
I turned to Luca. “If you saw him, you could tell us whether or not he’s alive, right?”
Luca nodded. “And if he’s close enough, I could sense and track him. But I should probably admit I’ve never intentionally faced a walking corpse.”
Sabine burst into laughter, drawing stares from the surrounding tables.
“You’re sitting next to two of them,” Nash said, too low for anyone outside our circle to hear.
Luca glanced at me and Tod, whom he’d met while I was with Sophie, then turned back to Nash with a shrug. “Yeah, but they’re the good guys, right? I’ve never picked a fight with anything out to steal my soul.”
Nash looked at Tod then, for the first time since he’d sat down, and I knew the fragile peace had met its end, at least for the moment. “
“Something can’t be stolen if it doesn’t truly belong to you in the first place,” Tod insisted, but Nash stood and walked away from us all without a word, just as Jayson stepped into the quad.
“How come he’s always leaving?” Jayson asked, sliding onto the bench seat next to Emma. “I’m starting to take it personally.”
“Don’t,” Sabine said. “He doesn’t like you enough to care whether or not you’re here.”
After school, I blinked into my room—being dead was saving me a fortune in gas—and dropped my backpack on my bed. I scruffed Styx’s fur and let her pretend to attack my fingers—if she’d wanted to, she could have bitten them clean off—then headed into the kitchen for a soda.
I wasn’t thirsty. But if I hadn’t been dead, I would have finished at least one can of Coke before I even considered starting my homework, and lately it felt like observing the old routines was the only way to stay sane.
I was three steps into the living room when I heard Harmony’s voice, and when I looked up, I saw her sitting at the kitchen table with my father, cradling a cup of hot tea in one hand. I started to say hi, but then she finished her sentence and I realized they could neither see nor hear me.
“I’m sorry, Aiden. You have my word that he’s clean. Sobriety is harder to enforce. But I’m trying, and I think he is, too. He’s just having a really hard time right now.”
“I know. But that’s not the biggest problem involving your sons and my daughter.”
Harmony frowned into her mug and closed her eyes for a second, like she was steeling herself for more bad news. “What now?”
“Tod and Kaylee are getting…physical,” my dad said, and I could feel my invisible cheeks flame. He’d left work early and called Harmony over just because I’d said the S-word? Seriously?
Harmony burst into laughter, and my father’s expression of confusion must have mirrored my own. “They’ve always been ‘physical,’ Aiden. That’s how this whole thing started, remember? With a kiss?”
My father’s frown deepened into a formidable scowl. “No. I mean they’re getting
Harmony nodded and studied his expression, sipping from her mug, and it looked like she was trying to decide on the right response before she opened her mouth. I’d always admired that about her. “Okay,” she said finally. Then she set her mug down. “And you really think that two teenagers contemplating sex is worse than Nash showing up drunk on your doorstep?”
My father blinked. Then he blinked again. “First of all, Tod’s not a teenager—”
“And Kaylee’s not a child,” Harmony pointed out, and I wanted to hug her. Except that would have been the most awkward spyfail in history.
“Doesn’t this bother you at all? They’ve only been together for a month. Doesn’t that seem a little… fast?”
Harmony wrapped her hands around her mug on the table, but didn’t pick it up. “How long were you and Darby together before you…?”
My father’s irritation paled beneath the new flush creeping into his cheeks. I’d rarely seen him embarrassed, and I’d never seen him blush before. Ever. “That’s not the point.”
“Mmm-hmm.” Harmony smiled. “That’s what I thought. Yes, Kay and Tod have only been together for a month. And maybe I do think that’s too fast, even if that thought could reasonably be considered hypocritical, coming from either of us. But that’s not our decision to make.”
“The hell it isn’t. She’s a child.”
“No, she’s days away from her seventeenth birthday.” Which was the age of consent, in Texas. “And she’s dead. As is he. I don’t think adolescent norms apply here, Aiden. Not anymore.”
“We’ll have to agree to disagree on that.”
“No.” Harmony let go of her mug to take my dad’s hand, and he looked at her in surprise. She looked…scared. “Aiden, don’t chase him away. Please. I know you only want to protect her, and I want the same thing for Tod, but they’re good for each other. I promise you that. And if you chase him off because you’re afraid of letting your little girl grow up, then what do either of them have left? Eternity alone?”
“Harmony—” he said, but she talked over him and refused to let go of his hand.
“I wish you could have seen him last year. He was a different person. No longer the boy I lost, but not yet the man Kaylee found. He was…indifferent. He was slipping away. Your daughter changed that. He needs her. And she needs him. I don’t think you could keep them apart forever, but even a few years alone in the afterlife could be enough to change them both. If you ruin this for them, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. But they’ll regret it for eternity.”
My father closed his eyes.
“Eternity is a long time to be alone, Aiden.”
