If I Die

“Nuh-uh.” Sabine shook her head vehemently. “I’m a parasite, too. If I can control myself during a meal at seventeen years old, then he can damn well do it at…however old he is.”

Alec nodded, conceding the point, but his gaze held Sabine’s firmly. “And you have no evidence that he hasn’t. All you have is a teenager’s miscarriage. I’m not saying that’s not horrible, because it is. But he didn’t mean for that to happen. Your incubus wants that baby even worse than its mother probably did, yet you’re willing to kill a man because his lover had a miscarriage?”

Sabine leaned forward in her chair, and the lights in the room seemed to dim as her eyes grew darker. “You’re twisting it all around to make it sound innocent, but it’s not,” she insisted. “This is a very old man taking advantage of teenage girls, using some kind of supernatural charisma as a weapon. That’s messed up, no matter how you look at it.”

I frowned at Alec, turning on the couch to face him more directly. “You can’t seriously think what he’s doing is justified?”

“No. And I never said I did. I’m just saying that the punishment ought to fit the crime. You’re talking about killing this man, and you have no evidence he’s actually taken a life.”

Crap. “He’s right,” I said, and Sabine turned on me in surprise. I shrugged. “I’m not saying we should drop the issue. I’m not even saying you can’t kill him.” If he lay one hand on Emma, I’d be right there behind Sabine when she threw the first punch—or whatever. “But before we condemn a man to death, we need to know that he’s actually taken a life. Otherwise…we’re going to have to find some other way to get rid of him.” Some way that wouldn’t just push him into the next school unlucky enough to have a midsemester job opening.

“Okay, so we find his victims,” Sabine conceded, obviously confident that there actually were victims. “How do we do that? Look for other pregnant girls?”

“Well, unless he’s a moron—and he’s isn’t, or someone would have caught up to him by now—he’s not going to feed from anyone carrying his child, ’cause that would drain the baby, too. Right?” I asked, and Alec nodded. “So, basically, we’re looking for dead un-pregnant women.”

“Can’t think of any of those, recently,” Sabine said.

“Me, neither. So we stick with what we know, which is that Danica probably isn’t the first girl he’s knocked up during this fertility cycle. Maybe if we find the others, and search the obituaries in their towns, we’ll be able to put together a pattern.”

Sabine nodded, brows raised. “Not bad, bean sidhe!”

“Not bad at all,” Alec agreed. “And maybe I can narrow your search a bit… Incubi—and succubi, too, if memory serves—tend to return to the same breeding ground cycle after cycle. If he’s breeding here now, then this is his territory, and you’re probably going to find most of his other conquests in this general area.”

“Same breeding ground, cycle after cycle…” I said, thinking aloud. “And if he’s teaching now to get to teenage girls, maybe he taught somewhere else before Eastlake.”

“So, what are you gonna do?” Alec asked. “Go question every principal in the metroplex about former teachers?”

“Poor Alec, you’ve missed so much in the last quarter of a century.” Grinning from ear to ear, I set Styx down and bent to pull my laptop from my bag on the floor. “Most schools don’t put students’ yearbook photos online, but lots of them have pictures of the faculty…” I set the laptop on the coffee table and turned it on, then sipped from my can while the system booted up.

With any luck, the face that had probably brought girls flocking to him for centuries would now lead us to his previous victims, along with the evidence we’d need to get rid of Beck for good.

10

Sabine didn’t have a laptop, and mine was a one computer household, so going through the local school districts took a while. And a lot of them didn’t post pictures of their teachers. But finally, after an hour and a half of searching and two bags of microwave popcorn—I’d sworn off everything but junk for what remained of my life—we found him.

During the fall semester, our Mr. Beck had taught advanced math at Crestwood High. Only the Crestwood students had called him Mr. David Allan.

“That’s him!” Sabine said, and I nodded while Alec leaned over my shoulder for a better look. “Does it say why he left?”

“I doubt they’d put that on the website. But…” Crestwood’s student newspaper was online, so I did a quick search for his alias, looking for some mention of why he left—or was fired.

I found it in the November 3 issue. Mr. Allan had left his position as a first-year math teacher after one semester to pursue a graduate degree, and he hoped to be back in a couple of years, better able to serve the students of Crestwood.

Yeah, right.

I was about to close the tab when a familiar—and horrifying—place name caught my attention from the short mention just below Allan’s article.

Our thoughts and prayers are with senior honor student Farrah Combs, who was admitted to Lakeside Hospital last week. Get well soon, Farrah!

What the editor of the Crestwood Observer obviously didn’t know—if she had, the mention probably never would have run in their paper—was that Lakeside wasn’t a regular hospital. It was a mental health facility, attached to Arlington Memorial. The very same mental health facility—psych ward, to the uninformed—where I’d spent a week of my life, a year and a half earlier.

Lakeside was only fifteen miles away. Maybe Farrah Combs—assuming she was still there, and marginally coherent—could tell me something about Mr. Allan. And whether or not any of her fellow students had gotten pregnant or died while he was teaching there.

But I couldn’t tell Sabine my idea, because she’d insist on tagging along, and I was not taking a living nightmare into a mental health facility.

I glanced at the onscreen clock before closing my laptop and was relieved to realize it was almost six o’clock. “Okay…” I stood and slid my computer back into the bag. “I’m gonna find something to eat and you’re going to go home.”

“Why?” Sabine said, physically resisting as I tried to guide her toward the door. “We’re on a tight schedule here, Kaylee. I thought you wanted to nail this bastard.”

“I do. Figuratively. But I can’t think when I’m hungry, so why don’t you go home and go online and see if you can find any more of Beck’s former employers.”

“I don’t have internet at home.”

“Then go to the library. Sometimes people fall asleep there—I’m sure that’s an untapped market for you. We can exchange information in the morning.”

“What information are you gonna have?” she demanded, as I pulled the front door open and pushed her half- empty soda can into her hand.

I scrambled for another well-meaning lie until my gaze settled on an obviously amused Alec, and the answer slid into place. “Alec’s going to help me come up with a plan B for getting rid of Mr. Beck, in case murder starts to look a bit extreme.”

“That’s not gonna happen,” Sabine insisted, eyes narrowed at me now from the front porch.

“Well, just in case. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Then I closed the door in her face.

Alec laughed out loud. “What was that all about?”

“You have to take the direct approach with Sabine—she doesn’t understand subtlety.” I peeked through the blinds until her car drove away, then I turned to Alec. “Your turn. How’d you get here, anyway?”

He crossed both arms over his chest and suddenly embodied the immovable object. “I took the bus.”

“Good. I think there’s another one at six-fifteen. You need change?”

Alec frowned. “I’m gainfully employed, Kaylee. And I’m not leaving. I promised your dad I’d stay with you.”