Soul Screamers Volume Four: With All My Soul\Fearless\Niederwald\Last Request: 4 (62 page)

But if he didn’t know... If he had hope, however false, then we could keep him. At least for a little while longer.

After years of wishing off and on that he would move on and accept true death, suddenly I wasn’t ready to let him go.

“Stay, Tod. We need you. All of us. Losing Kaylee was hard enough. Don’t do that to us again. Don’t do that to Em. Don’t do it to Mom. Don’t do it to
me,
Tod. Haven’t we all lost enough already?”

He hesitated, and I knew I’d struck the right angle. He would do for us what he wouldn’t do for himself. He and Kaylee had that in common.

“It’ll get better.” I placed the pendant back in his palm. “I’ll help. We’ll all help. And it will get better, I promise.”

Finally Tod nodded. He slid the pendant into his pocket and looked into my eyes, searching for the truth, but I kept it hidden deep, deep inside. Because I had no other choice. “Thank you.” He pulled me into another hug, and his whole body hitched with sobs as he whispered into my ear. “I knew I was doing the right thing that night. I knew you had to live. I’ve never regretted it. Not even for a single second.”

I didn’t realize I was crying with him until he let me go, and the air displaced in his wake was cold on the tear tracks trailing down my cheek.

As we walked into reaper headquarters together, a united front once again, I wondered how long it would be before the lie I’d told for all the right reasons would begin to rot my own soul.

Tod

Late that night, I dropped in on Nash at home.
His
home. The house he and our mother still technically shared was never mine. I’d never lived there.

I wanted to thank him. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to eat nachos and shoot video-game zombies and pretend that I wasn’t dead, and that he wasn’t grown, and that we’d never loved and lost a girl named Kaylee.

Not that I wanted to forget about her. I wanted to forget
losing
her, just for one night.

But when I got there, Nash had his head buried in a college textbook as thick as my forearm, his forehead wrinkled in concentration, his future as bright with possibility as the bulb shining down on the words as he read them. I watched him for a while, marveling at his attention span and at his dedication to an education so irrelevant to my existence that we seemed to be living on parallel planes.

I stayed until Sabine showed up and he abandoned his book for her arms. Seeing them together made me ache deep inside with a hunger that could not be satiated. A need that could not be fulfilled. When they cast off books, and words, and clothes, I gave them the only gift I had left to give: my absence.

I popped in on my mom and Brendon, and found them arguing good-naturedly over the menu for their wedding. Sophie and Luca were curled up in front of a movie with Emma and Chad, and the only thing worse than watching the four of them, with their popcorn, and drinks, and inside jokes I didn’t understand was seeing Aiden asleep in his armchair, all alone.

That, I understood.

When I had no one left to check on and nowhere else to be, I wound up at the cemetery. Those who actually know about reapers probably think we hang out at the cemetery all the time, but that’s not true. The entire basis of my afterlife is death, so before Kaylee died, hanging out in graveyards felt...redundant.

After her memorial, I came every day, at first. Kaylee wasn’t buried there—Levi’d said she’d asked to be cremated, and Aiden kept her ashes at home—but she had a tombstone next to her mother’s, and that felt like the best place to be close to her. To talk to her, even though I knew better than most that she couldn’t hear me. She would never hear anything, ever again.

As the months passed, I came less often, not because I came to terms with her death—I didn’t—or because the pain began to fade—it didn’t—but because it became too tempting to spend every day sitting in front of her headstone, pretending she could hear whatever I wanted to tell her.

It took effort to stop going to the cemetery. To stop visiting her memory and talking to a hunk of stone carved with her name.

Before the night of the harpies, I hadn’t been in weeks. The grass had grown since my last visit, and many of the vases were filled with flowers. I sat on the ground in front of her headstone and stared at the epitaph.

We are better for having known her.

Truer words were never carved.

“I saw Nash today.” I spoke softly, even though no one could see or hear me. “He’s doing well. They all are. I wish you could see them. They’re all grown up, and they think about things like tuition and car insurance. They’re boring now, Kay. You’re not missing much.”

Kaylee’s epitaph blurred in front of me, and when I blinked, tears rolled down my cheeks and left wet spots on my jeans.

“I saw your dad today, too.” I plucked a blade of grass and shredded it absently as I spoke. “He’s...about the same. Lonely. He misses you, and he’s still in pain, but that’s about to end. That’s what I wanted to tell you, and
damn
I wish you could really hear me, because this is important.”

I sniffed back more tears and swallowed the lump in my throat, then I sat up straight, trying to give the news the delivery it deserved.

“We found your mom, Kay. We found her, and we turned Thane in, and Levi’s already reclaimed his soul. He’s dead. He’s gone, Kaylee, and your mother is... Well, she’s fine. That’s what I wish I could tell you. She wasn’t tortured, and she’s not in any pain, and her soul is in good hands. Levi’s giving her peace right this very moment, and that means your dad will find peace, too. He’s going to be okay, Kaylee. He’s going to be able to move on. To let her go and find something to live for.

“I wish...”
I wish I could say the same for me
. But I couldn’t lay that burden on her. Even if she couldn’t really hear me. “I wish I could see you one more time. I miss your eyes. There are no blues left in the world as blue as your eyes. There’s nothing as beautiful as your smile. I wish I could touch you. Just one more time. I would give up the rest of my afterlife for the chance to hold you
one more time
.”

But that trade wasn’t on the table. Nash was right. Giving up my own life wouldn’t bring her back. And that wasn’t what she would have wanted.

Giving up my afterlife after she died to protect me and everyone else she loved would be like slapping Kaylee in the face. It would be defiling her memory. Rejecting her sacrifice.

“I’m going to live, Kaylee. As much as any reaper ever lived, anyway.” I wiped my face with both hands and pushed an errant curl from my forehead. “I owe you that, so I want you to know that I’m going to make it work. They’ll have to rip my soul from my body to get rid of me.”

Standing, I brushed grass from my jeans and laid one hand on top of her headstone. “I love you. I will love you until the sun devours the earth and takes us all to a fiery grave, and when that happens, the last word on my lips will be your name.

“Until then...I will carry on.”

* * * * *

ISBN-13: 9781460326596

SOUL SCREAMERS VOLUME FOUR

Copyright © 2014 by Harlequin Books S.A.

The publisher acknowledges the copyright holder
of the individual works as follows:

WITH ALL MY SOUL
Copyright © 2013 by Rachel Vincent

FEARLESS
Copyright © 2010 by Rachel Vincent
First published in KISS ME DEADLY by Running Press Teens
Refreshed version of FEARLESS, revised by the author

NIEDERWALD
Copyright © 2011 by Rachel Vincent
First published in ENTHRALLED by HarperCollins
Refreshed version of NIEDERWALD, revised by the author

LAST REQUEST
Copyright © 2014 by Rachel Vincent

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