No Time to Cry (Nine While Nine Legacy Book 1) (2 page)

“Look, darlin’, I do this every
day…well, nearly every day. I’m sorry if I’m not as delicate as you need—“

“You’re an ass.” I breathed out, choking
back the onset of tears. I took one last look at
myself
, at my friends
gathered here, for me, to be with me, all so happy…and unaware. I heard a moan
of absolute desolation escape from me then I ran for, and stormed through, the
open roof door. I tore down the single flight of stairs to my apartment and
reached for the door knob, prepared to race through and barricade him out. My
hand passed right through it.

The air in my lungs rushed out in
dismay. “Shit!” I cried. I gave it another go, and another; again and again my
hand passed right through the metal, as if my fingers were made of fog, not
flesh. I sighed heavily, desperately. I pondered briefly, if I were to lean my
head against the door, as I so utterly felt the overwhelming need to do, would
I pass right through it? Before I could test it out, I heard carpet-muffled
footsteps stop behind me. I knew it was Liam without needing to turn.

“We’ve got a lot to talk about and we
can’t do it here. We need to go to my place.”

 I glared at him in response. I was
on fire with rage and resentment, but my mind felt suddenly focused and sharp,
something humming deep within the recesses. I grabbed at the door knob and felt
my hand grip it solidly. I grinned and turned it, swiftly pushing the door
open.

“What?” Liam was sounding awfully
perplexed. I felt very satisfied with that achievement. “No. No. You can’t do
that.”

“I just did.” I said to him smugly,
darting through the door and slamming it in his face, locking it quickly behind
me. He was not welcome here.

~
Chapter Two ~

I
strode through my apartment, looking at everything as I passed from the small
foyer into the living room, up the hall to my kitchen, then back out to the living
room. My mind racing to process and get a grip on the info I’d been given, just
trying to wrap my mind around it, and trying to breathe normally. I saw the
contents of each room, saw my favorite things; my art, my photos, my writing,
my clothes, my books, every little meaningful thing jumping forefront to my
sight as a soon to be lost object.

“I’m dead,” I said it out loud. I felt I
needed to say it aloud. To feel it in my mouth, passing my lips, to maybe get a
better comprehension, to come to terms with it. It felt true. “I can’t stay
here.” I looked at my surroundings.

I loved this apartment. I remembered
back to when Gigi had first phoned me about its availability. I had jumped
right on it. Prime location near downtown. Excellent price. Spacious. Third
floor with a view of the ocean—well, a slight view. A huge living room, with a
loft bedroom overlooking it. A small room enclosed by French doors at one end
of the living room, perfect for my writing room. Cathedral ceilings. Hardwood
floors. Two sets of French doors in the living room, which allowed in amazing,
refreshing ocean breezes, afternoon sunlight, and beautiful sunsets.

“Lissa!” I heard him yell through the
door.

This was home, my home. And now I was
being forced to leave. I spun around, taking it all in. My heart bursting with
the need to cry and scream and fight and argue. But there was no time. Instead
I just growled and cursed to the room. I heard the soft, insistent knocking on
my door and chose to ignore it.

“Usher,” I sneered flippantly. “Screw
you!” I screamed towards the foyer and the front door. “And my name IS NOT
LISSA!!”

I heard my door open and close, heard
footsteps on the wood floor, coming toward me.

“You can’t stay here. You
need
to
come with me. I am very sorry, sweetheart, but you
have
died—”

“Shut up. Get out. I’m not going
anywhere with you!” I seethed at him, interrupting him as I shoved him back
towards the door. How had he gotten in anyway?

“There are things I have to explain to
you and we can’t do that here.”

I looked all around me, trying to take
it all in, my place, my things. I’d worked so hard for it all. I was suddenly
exhausted, depleted of my fury, spent. I stumbled back, leaned against the
foyer wall, the framed print behind me shifting sideways beneath my back.

“I’m not done, I wasn’t done,” I said to
him simply. No loathing or wrath left in my voice, only sorrow, as I began to
slide down the wall.

“Rarely is anyone.” He stepped closer,
slid his arms around me, pulling me up and away from the wall, and to him. I
collapsed against him, something inside me waning at the same moment. I could
actually feel something different about him. He wasn’t normal. He
felt
like he had something
extra
about him. Perhaps this was what
preternatural felt like, I was always describing it in books, reading it in
books, was this it…in the flesh…in my foyer?

“I can’t just give up, give it all up,
walk away. I just got really happy again. Life just got fun again,” I spoke
softly, forlornly.

“Come on, let’s go. Everything will be ok
again.” He replied, spoken gently, with a reassuring quality.

And that voice, soothing…and that
accent…I felt myself
wanting
to go with him.

This was truly insane. I was in the arms
of Death. Death was holding me. And he was really cute. And he felt really
good. Both ridiculously absurd observations.

 But he was. And I felt no
inclination to move out of his arms. It felt good there, protected, safe, and
warm. And I was so cold and so scared. And so very angry. Wait! Yes! There was
still that. I was angry. Infuriated. I raised my head from his shoulder and
looked at him, at his face—the look on his face, was that remorse?—before
thrusting him away again.

“No,” I spat out.

“Please be reasonable, there are things
I need to tell you,” he entreated.

Reasonable? Really? Was he serious? Did
he genuinely expect that?  “I don’t want to hear anything else.” I strode
away from him, to the living room.

“You’re to be a Coimhdeacht,” he blurted
out.

I froze where I was.

 “So you
are
dead, but
you’re still alive too.” Trying to give me hope and repair this situation?
“Merely a new you now.”

“A
Kuhv
…what?”

“Hold on.” He grabbed up a pen and a
scrap of paper from my nearby desk and scrawled out a word. Coimhdeacht. It
looked nothing like it sounded. “It’s said
kuhv-juhkt
.”
He said it slowly and I repeated it.

“Coimhdeacht.” I breathed out, barely
more than a whisper. It was a strange word, felt odd in my mouth…but at the
same time felt familiar, comfortable. It teased at something in my mind. But
what exactly? I couldn’t quite pin it down.

“Yes. Perfect. Now, can we please get
going? We can’t be here much longer.” He looked apprehensive, as if expecting
someone to burst through the front door any moment.

“A Coimhdeacht,” I murmured. His words
seeping into my brain. “I’m still alive?”

“Yes. Sort of. I mean, yes, definitely,”
he paused, seemed to be pondering something that baffled him. “You shouldn’t be
yet. You should still be all flimsy and murky.” He waggled his fingers in the
air in front of him, then tapped them on his forehead, obviously mulling this
over. “If you can already hang onto things, touch things, then that means that
you can be seen. Seen by live people, mortals, not only me.” He looked around
my place, taking it all in, his eyebrows rising in admiration, his head nodding
in approval, seemingly considering my possessions. He picked up my mail from
the side table, ruffled through the bills and catalogs.

A vague idea planted itself unexpectedly
in my mind. “I should stay here; be a Coimhdeacht from here.” I glanced around,
hopefully. Why go anywhere? I had a great place. I shrugged at him. “Makes
sense to me.”

Liam shook his head. He looked paler
than just a moment before. He looked at me and then back down at the papers in
his hand. “You’re going to Seattle. Your job is in Seattle. I was sent here to
retrieve you,” he stammered.

My response was to frown, to scowl. I
didn’t want to be ‘retrieved’. I didn’t want to go to Seattle. Dealing with being
suddenly dead was enough of a change without throwing in a relocation plan to
boot. 

“And since things seem to have been
moved to the fast track, we need to get a move on. You’re visible now. This is
going to be the second place they come after it’s discovered that the sleeping
girl up on that couch is no longer breathing. We have to go…now. You’ve got to
come with me…Isabelle. Do you want to try explaining any of this to cops? Why
are you here in the dead girl’s apartment? How do you know her? Why are you
here and she is up there dead? What’s your name?”

He stopped there. Glancing briefly again
at the assortment of mail, obviously to let it all sink in, or perhaps for
dramatic effect.

He had a point. I couldn’t deny that. I
was dead. What would I say? What could I say to anyone once I was discovered up
there?

I looked around me again, at all my
much-loved possessions, my charming home. I loved living here. I loved my
friends and the life I’d made for myself.

How could I be expected to leave it all
behind? And to be so rushed through the entire mental processing of it all just
sucked royally too.

I felt so sick.

A look of concern settled on his face
and he checked his watch, looked at me again, the concerned look deepening to
dismay. “No. Wait. That’s not right.” He sounded really alarmed, staggered
actually. His voice nearly quavered. He seemed to pale even further.

 I turned and looked at myself in
the gilt framed, full length mirror that was attached to my foyer wall, nearly
afraid to after taking in his reaction. 

“You look the same. Almost exactly the
same.” I saw his reflection before my eyes settled on my own. He was frozen in
his shock. “You’ve gone solid
and
you look the same. That’s not how it
happens.”         

 My eyes came to rest on my image.
I looked like me. Ah, relief. I was still me.

Well—as I looked at myself more closely,
without the haze of looming dread clouding my vision—I was actually more like
the perfected version of me.

 I stepped closer to the mirror to inspect
myself. My skin looked velvety soft. I reached up and touched my face, it was
exactly that. I’d always had nice skin, but this was baby soft perfection,
smooth, even toned, flawless, luminous.

“Wow,” I breathed out. My eyes were the
most amazing hues; trapped in them were the waters of New Providence, in the
Bahamas. Clear, cool, pale violet. Blending gently into rich Cyan. Fusing into
Sapphire and then Persian Blue. Hypnotic.

My hair? It gleamed. It glowed. It had
gone from a pretty shade of dark-honey blonde to a combination of shades. Now a
gorgeous blend of warm honey and shimmering amber, with threads of radiant
sunset oranges and reds, adorned my head.

And my body felt stronger. I worked out
a couple of times a week, but this felt different. Somehow less vulnerable.
“Ok, this part I’m liking.” I smiled. And it made me stumble back a bit from
the mirror. It was the dream me; the ‘me’
that was featured in my
dreams.

“No. That’s wrong,” Mr. Encouragement
chimed in.
Rain on my parade why don’t you.
“You can’t look the same.”
He reached out tentatively and touched my cheek. A look traversed his face for
just an instant that I couldn’t quite name. But it made me feel pleased. “You
can’t look like you at all. And when precisely did this happen? You did not
look like…
this,”
he flailed his hands around in front of me, “when
we…well, moments ago!”

“I don’t look like me. Look at me!”

“I am. And it’s all wrong.” We both
examined my image. I had a certain radiance and luminosity now, coming from my
eyes, from my hair, from my skin. I was thrilled with this amendment, Liam not
so much. In fact, he looked a little ill. “Well, somebody must like you.” He
shrugged, dismayed and now at a loss. He seemed much shaken by this turn of
events.

“Yeah. That’s why I’m dead…
ish
.”

“Feck, feck—bloody hell—how did this get
fecked up? I better not get the shaft for this.” He dragged his eyes from my
reflection to look directly at me. “Shit. No. That’s not how it works. He held
my face in his hands, examining it closely.

 I tried pulling away, talk about
discomfiting moments.

“You really look like this. This is what
you are. This doesn’t happen. Something’s gone wrong. This isn’t supposed to
happen. You should look absolutely nothing like yourself…like you did up
there.” He was stammering now.

“Well, Mr. Happy…how does this work
anyway. What exactly is wrong…has gone wrong?”

 “I can’t go into that now. Right
now we need to get the hell out of here.

And then in a flash I was alert, ready
to act, catalyzed by an inkling of a conspiracy that surged mind-bogglingly
into my head. I whirled swiftly towards the stairs, ran up them to my bed room,
the rough scheme forming in my brain taking shape more completely with every
step.

Liam, startled by my abrupt exodus, took
a moment to register the change and then raced after me, most likely thinking I
was bolting to escape him, rather than to my true destination.

I flung the closet door open and dashed
inside the semi large walk-in. I reached up to the top shelf—not hard to do at
five-feet-nine-inches and yanked down my two largest suitcases, spun and
retrieved two garment bags from the rack. I threw them all onto my super comfy
king size bed—oh…how I would miss that bed. I hadn’t even had it very long. I
hadn’t had a boyfriend since buying it…so I’d never even…well, never mind. A
sense of urgency pushed me on. 

“What are you doing?” Liam asked
gruffly.

“What does it look like?” If he was
going to be so surly, I would respond with ambiguity. I hurried to my dresser,
quickly rifled through the contents in its drawers, pulling out all of my
favorite clothes and tossing them hastily into the open bags.

“Isabelle.” He grabbed my arm. “I’m
serious. What are you doing?”

I paused at the change in his tone of voice.
Oh. He really meant it. He was completely somber. I bit my bottom lip. Should I
anger a Coimhdeacht? What would happen if I pissed him off? My life was already
gone after all, what else could he take from me?

“Fine. You win. I’m going with you.” I tugged
my arm from his grip, put my hands on my hips, wary but aggravated. “I’m
packing. I’ll go to Seattle with you, but I’m taking a few things with me.”