If I Die

Thursday had come.

Today I would die.

With Tod gone, I curled up under the blanket, only half watching the movie while Emma slept beside me on two of the couch cushions, Styx snoring softly in the crook of her arm. In spite of my determination not to waste any of my last day, I was starting to nod off when Em’s phone buzzed on the coffee table. She had a text.

I picked it up, debating waking her, and read the message on the screen, from her sister, Traci.

Got dumped. Need sugar. Where r u?

Crap. Traci was home alone. She’d probably be fine—surely Beck had come and gone hours ago—but I wasn’t willing to take a chance with Em’s sister.

Come to Kaylee’s, I typed. We have junk food.

Traci’s next text asked for the address, so I gave it to her. When she said she’d be right over, I unlocked the front door, then threw away the candy wrappers and half-eaten popcorn from our own binge, secretly kind of glad for the excuse to wake up Emma when her sister arrived.

Usually when Traci got dumped, she and her best friend would binge drink, bad-mouthing the new ex with drunken abandon, so the thought that she wanted comfort this time from her little sister and her sister’s best friend was…unexpected. And the coincidental timing was…too much to believe. And Traci already knew where I lived…

I stopped halfway to the kitchen with three empty, sticky glasses. That text wasn’t from Traci…

Shit! I set the glasses on the nearest end table and ran to the front door, where I twisted the dead bolt and threaded the chain lock through its channel. Then I raced across the living room and through the kitchen to double- check the locks on the back door, but even with the house relatively secure, I couldn’t make my pulse slow into the normal range.

I rounded the kitchen table, glancing around in search of my phone, then stopped cold with one glance into the living room.

“Kaylee Cavanaugh.” Mr. Beck stood in the middle of the room in snug jeans and a T-shirt, staring at me. No, glaring at me.

Fear raced along my spine and into every nerve ending in my body. I wiped sweat from my palms onto my jeans, and fought for enough calm to think clearly. “How’d you get in here?”

“Doors and locks aren’t much of a problem for me.” He’d come in through the Netherworld, which explained how he’d gotten in to see Farrah so many times….

Escape options flittered through my head, as worthless as a swarm of moths, mostly because Em and Sophie were still sleeping, and Beck stood between us. I couldn’t leave without them. “I don’t suppose you’d go away, if I ask nicely?”

“Not without what I came for,” he said, his voice low, and angry, and very un-teacherlike. “My plan was to call your bluff this evening, but Emma’s house was deserted. Any idea how that happened?”

“We know what you are,” I said, unwilling to answer his questions and unable to quiet the cold foreboding swelling inside me.

“Yeah, I picked up on that during your little role-playing exercise yesterday, and at first I couldn’t figure out how you knew. Then I noticed your bracelet.” He glanced at my wrist, and I realized I was twisting the braided fiber nervously. “And I noticed that Emma wore one, too. Dissimulatus, right? Which means you’re trying to hide something. Your species, maybe?”

“Emma’s human.” That was the exception in my no-revelation policy. I wanted no mistake about the fact that she would not be the best walking incubator.

“Yes, I figured that out when I met her sister. And your other friend…?” He glanced at Sophie over his shoulder.

“She’s not a friend. She’s my cousin. And she’s human, too.”

“But you’re not human, are you?”

“Where’s Traci?” I demanded, glancing at the clock on the microwave. 12:10. My dad or Tod could show up anytime. I just had to stall….

“She’s safe in her own bed.” Beck stepped into the kitchen doorway, and I stepped back, and too late I realized I’d just blocked myself into the U-shaped kitchen. “And—not to flatter myself—it looks like she’s going to sleep straight through till morning. At least. But on the bright side, she’s forgotten all about that loser boyfriend.”

Shitshitshit! “You…fed from her?” I could hear my own heartbeat echo in my ears, a cadence of fear and fury that had no outlet.

Beck leaned against the kitchen door frame, arms crossed over the lines of a perfectly sculpted chest barely hidden beneath his snug T-shirt. “I prefer to think of it as a mutual exchange of services. She was well compensated. Ask her, if you don’t believe me.”

His meaning sank in, and revulsion crawled over me like an army of flies buzzing beneath my skin. “She’s alive?”

“She is. And whether or not she stays alive depends on you.”

I blinked, running down the clock with my silence. Waiting for help, because I was in over my head. I couldn’t fight an incubus. I didn’t even know how. But I couldn’t let Traci die, if there was any way I could stop it. And even if I was willing to leave Emma and Sophie—and I wasn’t—I couldn’t escape into the Netherworld because he’d only follow me. Or take my best friend or my cousin.

My gaze slid toward Emma, then Sophie, both somehow still asleep, and he glanced at them over his shoulder. “Don’t worry. They’re going to sleep for a while.”

“You’re feeding from them in their sleep?” How was that even possible?

“Just enough to keep them out of the way. Our desires don’t sleep, even when we do, which makes sleepers the psychic version of fast food.”

“I’ll kill you if you hurt either of them.”

Beck laughed out loud. “Do you know where I spent my evening, Kaylee? After I left Miss Marshall to her rest?” I shook my head, but he didn’t seem to notice. “I went to check on a former student, who’s been faithfully nurturing a precious little bundle of mine, in spite of her own failing health.”

Uh-oh. “Farrah?”

He smiled, like I’d just performed a particularly impressive magic trick. “That’s why you’re such a good student, Kaylee—you do your homework.”

I shrugged and took another glance at the clock. 12:12. Had time actually stopped? “How is Farrah?”

The glint of dark humor faded in Beck’s eyes as they narrowed. “Farrah is dead. I took her to the Netherworld to give birth in peace, and she delivered my son with her last breath. He died in my arms, less than fifteen minutes later. Months of hard work and hope, gone.” He stepped closer, and again I stepped back, until my spine hit the edge of the kitchen counter. There was nowhere left to go.

“Farrah was seven months pregnant,” he said. “The infant would have been viable—if I’d had a soul to give him.” Another step toward me, and panic echoed in every whoosh of my racing pulse. “But when I took my newborn son to collect the soul kept warm for him in the body of a certain young syphon, she was gone. And my son died, staring up at me with blind eyes, empty for want of a soul.” Fury blazed in his own eyes, like he was the bonfire and I was the fuel. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, Ms. Cavanaugh?”

“Lydia wasn’t crazy,” I whispered, then cleared my voice, determined to project both volume and confidence I didn’t feel. “She shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”

“Yes, but she was there, and her soul was mine for the taking. You’ve cost me a soul, Ms. Cavanaugh, and you’re going to make up for that loss tonight.”

I burst into laughter, grimly, and maybe inappropriately amused by the irony. “You’re out of luck, Mr. Beck.” And the truth of that statement—the unexpected upside to my imminent death—rolled through me on a sudden surge of reckless courage. I braced my hands on the counter behind me and hopped onto it, my legs dangling in front of the cabinet doors, suddenly a bit more confident because of what I knew and he did not. “You can’t get life out of me, Mr. Beck. I’m going to die today, so I’m no use to you. So why don’t you just go away?”