If I Die

for as long as I see fit. And on that note, how was school today?”

Another sip from my glass, and I was ready to play along. “Well…I embarrassed Sophie at lunch, failed to turn in five homework assignments, lied to my French teacher, saw Tod feed my personal reaper to Avari in the Netherworld, broke up with my boyfriend, then propositioned my math teacher.” I shrugged and tried on a nervous grin. “Nothing worth writing home about.”

My father leaned back on the couch, holding his float in both hands. “I swear, Kaylee, sometimes it’s hard to tell when you’re joking.”

“Is this part of that whole wallowing in denial thing?” I reached for another handful of popcorn. “’Cause I was serious. All that really happened.”

His brows rose and his gaze narrowed on me. “The father of a non-emancipated minor might be a little overwhelmed right now.”

“A non-emancipated minor would never have told her father most of that.”

My dad sighed. “I don’t even know where to begin.” I started to make a suggestion, but he cut me off. “Oh, wait. Yes I do. Why the hell would you proposition your math teacher? And what exactly do you mean by ‘propositioned’?”

“I don’t think you want details on my definition of that word, Dad. But it wasn’t for real. Our math teacher is an incubus, and Em and I were trying to get him where we want him, so we can take him out. By…putting ourselves in the line of fire, tomorrow, at Emma’s house.” Before he could form a response—and his struggle with that was obvious—I pushed the play button on the remote. “How ’bout some Alien?”

“How ’bout some answers?” He grabbed the remote and pushed several buttons, and when he couldn’t get the movie to stop, he finally stood and stomped across the room, then slammed his whole hand down on the power button.

Dramatic, but effective.

“Okay, I’ll give you the short version,” I conceded. “But then I demand some serious Alien carnage.” My dad made a “go ahead” gesture, then reclaimed his seat next to me. “Mr. Beck is Mr. Wesner’s replacement, and last week we discovered he’s not human. He’s an incubus. And he’s in heat—or whatever. I would have told you, but that was the same day you and Tod told me I was going to die, and then everything started to pile up, and you were always gone trying to save my life. And as it turns out, there’s just never a good time to tell your dad you’re doing battle with an evil lust demon posing as your math teacher. Right?”

His pause was too long to precede anything good. “Is this what your little powwow this morning was about?”

“Yeah. We were pooling information and trying to come up with a viable game plan. If you want to help, we really need to know how to get rid of a possibly ancient incubus.”

“By letting your father kill him for even thinking about touching his little girl.”

The ache in my chest was warm and kind of wonderful, in the weirdest way. “Yeah, that’d be really awesome, if you could do that. ’Cause we actually don’t know how to kill him, and I need to make sure he’s gone before I die, ’cause he’s going after Emma next.”

“Next?”

“He’s already impregnated three girls that we know of. He’s also killed one woman and left another in a coma. But I’d bet there are others we don’t know about yet.” And with that thought, my appetite dried up like sweat on a Texas sidewalk.

“Damn it.” My father scrubbed his face with both hands, and I felt awful for adding to the stress he was already under. “Harmony warned me it could get crazy around here, with Avari living in the high school. But I never saw this incubus thing coming.”

“Yeah, me, neither. It’s not one of the things you typically worry about, in suburban Texas.”

“Okay, if memory serves, your uncle Brendon ran up against an incubus once. I’ll call him later and see what he can tell me. But just to make me feel marginally involved in your life, what happened with you and Nash? Not that I disapprove of the outcome, but this seems like an odd time to dump your boyfriend.”

Oh, here we go… “Nash saw me kissing Tod.”

My father’s stare was almost vacant, and just when I was starting to wonder if he was still in there, he blinked. “I should have mixed something stronger than Coke floats.”

We only made it through the first Alien movie before my dad’s patience shattered beneath the cluster bomb I’d dropped on him and he excused himself to go call his brother. I couldn’t blame him. Even our rare, about-to-expire father-daughter bonding time was outweighed by the threat of an incubus preying on the local coed populace.

Dad made the call from his room, so I sat on my bed with my door open, trying to hear what he obviously wanted to chew over privately before passing on to me. But he was hard to hear through his closed door.

“No, we’re short on specifics, and even shorter on time,” my dad said. He’d told my uncle Brendon about my expiration date, and they’d planned a family dinner for the next night, Wednesday, possibly my last night in the land of the living, and the night I’d planned to lure my evil incubus teacher to his death. I couldn’t imagine how awkward that meal would be, though, considering my cousin Sophie’s complete ignorance of all nonhuman matters.

“She doesn’t know his real name or how old he is…” My father’s words faded, and I assumed my uncle was speaking on the other end of the line. “Math. You should ask Sophie if she has him.”

But she didn’t. I’d verified that the day we found out what Beck was.

“I know, but let’s not borrow trouble till we’re ready to pay some back.” My dad’s mattress creaked and I could picture him sitting on the edge of the bed, hunched over and stressed. But I didn’t hear anything after that because my phone buzzed in my pocket. I dug it out to find a text from Tod.

Can I come over?

Suddenly my chest burned like my lungs were on fire. Like when I was a little girl on the playground swing set, and that plummeting feeling made me feel scared, and excited, and so alive.

Yeah. In my room.

An instant later, Tod stood in the middle of my bedroom floor, and I realized that the courtesy text before just popping in was only one of the things that had changed.

“Hey,” he said, hands shoved into his jeans pockets, watching me carefully, like he didn’t quite know how to act around me now and would be taking his cues from me. Which sucked, ’cause that was my plan, too.

“Hey.” I sat up on the bed and folded my legs beneath me, itching to touch him, or somehow acknowledge what had happened between us. Yet I felt guilty for that impulse—for wanting something that would hurt Nash.

“I need to tell you something.” He glanced at the floor, looking more conflicted than I’d ever seen him, and that burning in my chest became a steady smolder of resignation and disappointment I had no right to feel.

I knew where this was going. Nash was his brother—his flesh and blood. And Nash would be here for the next three hundred years or so, long after any memory of me faded from both of their minds. Of course he would choose his brother over me. How could he not? And part of me knew that was the right thing to do. How could I not want peace between them, especially considering that aside from Harmony and potentially Sabine, they had no one else. Tod and Nash would probably never be best friends, but they would always be brothers, and who was I to get in the way of that?

Tod exhaled slowly, and I could only watch him, waiting for the inevitable heartbreak. Could a person actually die of a broken heart? Was that how I would go?

“I’m not supposed to want you, Kaylee. Not like this,” he said, the blues in his eyes churning with disparate emotions, and my stubborn heart beat harder. “I made a decision two years ago and gave up the right to want anything.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I wasn’t going to interrupt him, because no one had ever spoken to me like this. As if whatever he was trying to tell me was so raw and painful it had to come straight from his soul.

“I’m not supposed to have a life, or a future beyond helping preserve the balance between life and death. My humanity is supposed to fade. They want us that way. Empty, so it’s easier to take life, day after day. Sometimes it becomes too easy, and reapers get bored. Desperate for something—anything—to break up the monotony.”

He was talking about Thane; I understood that much. I was Thane’s entertainment—his break from