When I died, her dad had finally been forced to tell her the truth about our family. I wondered how she was handling it, but I couldn’t tell that from watching her back as she fled. I wanted to escape with her, but I couldn’t get through the crowd. I couldn’t even get my locker open, because there wasn’t room.
There wasn’t room to move, and there wasn’t room to breathe. The world started to close in on me, and the only way I knew to escape was to disappear, and I couldn’t do that. No matter what, I couldn’t disappear in front of fifty fellow students.
The questions kept coming, but the answers got stuck behind the lump in my throat. They weren’t the real answers, anyway, because I couldn’t tell them what had really happened, because the truth wouldn’t set me free. The truth would get me locked up.
Distantly, I heard a couple of teachers yelling for order, but it was Emma who finally made it stop. “Back off, vultures!” she shouted, and I exhaled in relief as she pushed her way to the center of the crowd. “She just got out of the hospital. Why don’t you go gossip behind her back, like decent people?”
I could have kissed her.
Once Emma had achieved near-silence in the hall, the teachers were able to start herding everyone toward their classes again, and through the crowd, I saw Nash and Sabine heading away from us. Without a word.
I don’t know what I expected. For all I knew, he might never forgive me, and I couldn’t really blame him.
“Are you okay?” Coach Tucker, the girls’ softball coach, asked as I finally pulled my locker open.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” What else could I say?
“Here.” She pulled out a notepad and started scribbling on it, then ripped the top sheet off and handed it to me. It was a late pass, with my name on it. “Take a few minutes and get yourself together,” she said, already scribbling on a second pass for Emma.
“Thanks.” But all I could think about was that she’d remembered my name for the first time in nearly three years.
“I’m so sorry about what happened to you, Kaylee,” Coach Tucker said as she handed Em her pass. “I feel like one of us should have known something was wrong with him. We saw him every day. We talked to him. Ate with him. I’m so sorry we failed you.”
I didn’t know what to say. The faculty had sent flowers to my house the day after I’d been restored from the dead, but I’d assumed the bouquet was an autoresponse from the secretary. Now I wondered if Coach Tucker had arranged the whole thing.
“Nobody failed me. I’m fine. Really,” I said, but she didn’t look convinced.
“Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help you get readjusted,” she said, and I nodded, then started removing books from my backpack and sliding them into my locker. I wasn’t trying to be rude. I just didn’t know what else to say.
Finally Coach Tucker left to scold a couple kissing in the hall, and I exhaled slowly.
“You okay?” Emma asked, leaning against the locker next to mine.
“Been better. People suck.”
Em smiled. “Yeah. People do suck.” Her smile died as I stared into my now-empty backpack, trying to remember what I’d been doing. What book I needed.
“So, Thane’s back?” Em said softly as I dropped my chemistry text into my bag again. “How is that even possible?”
“I don’t know.”
“What does this mean?”
“I don’t know.”
She frowned. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know, Em. I don’t know anything about it, except that he killed the owner of the doughnut shop around the corner from the school, and you’re the only person I’ve told.” But I couldn’t tell her what he’d said about Avari coming after my friends and family. That would scare her to death.
“You haven’t told Tod?”
“Haven’t had a chance.” I closed my locker and threw my backpack over one shoulder. “I can’t tell Madeline, because she’ll tell Levi, and that will force him into making trouble for Tod. Like,
The bell rang, and several underclassmen ran past, on their way to class.
“—we’re both late for second period,” I finished. And Em hadn’t been to her locker yet.
“Okay, I know. But one more thing.” She laid a hand on my arm and the rare show of nerves in her expression made me stop. “Since you’ve been gone, Nash and Sabine have been avoiding me, so I’ve been eating lunch with Jayson.”
“Jayson Olivera?”
“Yeah. We’ve been kind of…going out. For a couple of weeks.”
I blinked in surprise. To my knowledge, she hadn’t actually dated anyone since Doug died right before Christmas.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I wasn’t sure it would turn into anything—I’m still not sure—and you had enough on your mind without having to worry about censoring yourself in front of my human boyfriend.”
My chest ached at the look in her eyes and at the silence, where all the things she wasn’t saying should have gone. “I didn’t realize you knew Jayson,” I said.
Em shrugged. “I didn’t, really.” She clutched her books to her chest and leaned against my closed locker. “It was really weird here when you were gone. Nash and Sabine were all closed off and unapproachable. Not that I can blame them, with everyone talking about his arrest. And everyone else just wanted to know what really happened that night at your house. Nash wasn’t talking, so they came after me. Jayson was the only one who still acted… normal.”
And she’d needed normal. I’d tried so hard not to drag Emma into danger, but the Netherworld was like quicksand—the harder I tried to pull her out of it, the harder it sucked her in.
She would have been better off if she’d never met me.
“I’m so sorry, Emma.”
“It’s okay,” Em said. “Really. But I like him, and he was totally there for me when I was…lonely. I just… Is it going to be weird if Jayson sits with us? I’m assuming Tod will be there, and you never know when Nash and Sabine will decide they want to talk. He can’t be mad at you forever.”
“Yes, he can. So, are Nash and Sabine…together?” Em hadn’t said much about that during my month off, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about the possibility. The probability. It was officially none of my business who Nash went out with, and I wanted him to be happy, but…just asking the question felt weird.
So much had changed so fast—my head was still spinning.
Em frowned in thought. “I can’t tell. You never see one without the other anymore, but they’re not all over each other in public or anything. Maybe that was never their style.”
But if there’d been a ban on public displays, that was Nash’s doing. Sabine would claim him any way she could. Any way he’d let her.
I shrugged and tried to shake the thought off. “I wouldn’t worry about Nash and Sabine showing up to make your human boyfriend uncomfortable, and when Tod gets there…we’ll make it work.” So what if Em’s boyfriend wouldn’t be able to see or hear mine. “Any boyfriend of yours… You know the rest.” I scrounged up a parting smile, then headed for second-period chemistry, where the stares continued for another miserable fifty minutes.
Third period was my free period, so I shoved my backpack into my locker, then headed for the nearest restroom, which was quickly turning into my own personal transit system. But as I passed the front office, the glass door opened and the school’s attendance secretary stuck her head out. “Kaylee Cavanaugh?” she said, both her eyebrows and her voice high in question.
I hesitated, almost certain she wouldn’t have been able to pick me out of a crowd a month earlier.
“I was just on my way to find you. You’re late for your appointment with your guidance counselor.”
