If I Die. Rachel Vincent

stare at him for a moment, until I understood what he was doing. He was taking care of me, the only way he knew how. He couldn’t save my life—not this time—but he could solve my hunger.

      “No. Thanks, though.” I set Styx down, and she hopped onto my dad’s chair and stared out at the room, on alert from this new height.

      “No popcorn for the movie?”

      “I’m not really in the mood for a movie anymore.” A sappy tearjerker just wasn’t a good way to follow the news that you’re going to die. “I think we’re just going to hang out in my room.” I tugged Nash toward the hall and he came willingly, but looked like he couldn’t decide whether I’d just come to my senses or lost them completely.

      “Leave the door open,” my dad said, the second most common warning in his arsenal. Right behind, “Nash, go home.”

      I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it. I had six days to live, and he was worried about an unsupervised visit with my boyfriend?

      I dropped Nash’s hand and crossed my arms over my chest, trying to figure out how best to say what needed to be said. “Dad, this is no slight against your parenting skills, which are seriously formidable. No worries there. But I’ve only got six days to live. I’m never going to turn eighteen. I’m never even going to turn seventeen. The only part of my adult life I’m going to get to experience is the part I can claim in the next week. So I’d kinda like to spend these next six days—my last six days—as an emancipated minor.” Or at least an honorary adult.

      “Kaylee …” His voice was deep with warning, yet a little unsteady.

      “I’m not talking about moving out, Dad,” I insisted, hoping to avoid a parental meltdown—I really didn’t want his last memories of me to include a temper tantrum. “I’m just saying I don’t want to spend my last week on earth following a bunch of rules that don’t even really apply to me anymore. I mean, would you tell an eighty-year-old woman with terminal cancer to leave her door open?”

      “You’re not going to die, Kaylee.” My dad was scowling now, his arms crossed to mirror my own.

      I lifted both brows in challenge. “You know somethin’ I don’t?”

      “I know I’m going to find a way around this, and we’re going to laugh about it when you’re a very old woman. And yes, if you’re still living here when you’re eighty, I will damn well tell you to leave the door open.”

      My chest ached fiercely and I had to swallow to speak past the lump in my throat. “I tell you what—if I’m still alive on Friday morning, you can consider me happily un-emancipated.”

      My dad’s frown deepened and his irises churned slowly in a rare display of fear and frustration, but he didn’t object when I tugged Nash down the hall and into my room. Where I closed the door behind us. Then had to open it again to let Styx in.

      Nash sank into my desk chair looking up at me, and though his irises held steady—obviously a struggle—his eyes were … shiny. “Why’d you let your dad tell me? Why didn’t you tell me yourself?”

      I blinked, surprised by the amount of pain in his voice. “He beat me to it. I would have told you.” But I’d needed some time to process the information myself before I had to consider anyone else’s reaction.

      “This is messed up, Kaylee.” He pulled me closer and wrapped his arms around my waist, clutching the back of my shirt, his face pressed into my stomach. “Scott, and Doug, and now you … Why is everyone leaving me? What the hell am I going to do without you?”

      He was going to lean on his mom, and Tod. And Sabine. The three of them would do anything to protect Nash, and they’d be there for him when I couldn’t be. I was much more worried about my father….

      “Don’t think about that right now,” I said, talking to myself as much as to Nash. I stepped back so that he had to look up at me. “Think about all the privacy I just bought us. Too bad I waited until the week I’m gonna die to join the teenage resistance, huh?”

      “That’s not funny.” Nash frowned as I sat on the edge of the bed.

      “I wasn’t joking.”

      “Your dad thinks he can stop it.”

      “Yeah, well, Tod says he can’t.” I leaned back on the bed and let my legs dangle over the side while I studied my ceiling. How had I never noticed that crack, directly over my pillow? How often had I stared at that very spot and never noticed it?

      Nash swiveled toward me and the chair creaked. “And you believe him over your dad?”

      “Do I believe the reaper with insider’s knowledge on how death works over the desperate bean sidhe? Yeah. I do.”

      “Why are you acting like this?” he demanded, walking the rolling chair forward until his knees hit the mattress.

      I rolled onto my side to watch him. “My expiration date didn’t come with instructions. What am I supposed to be acting like?”

      Nash sighed and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “I just don’t understand how you can take this so lightly.”

      “What do you want me to do, slap on some black eye shadow and host my own wake? I’m gonna die, Nash. There’s nothing anyone can do to stop that. But I’ve got six days left, and I don’t want to spend them thinking about how it’s all gonna end.”

      I sat up on the bed and studied him, trying to see him like I had six months earlier, when we’d first started going out. Before he’d betrayed me to feed an addiction to Demon’s Breath that was my fault in the first place. I’d spent the past month and a half learning to trust him again—letting him convince me that was possible—but now I was out of time. As with everything really good in life, I’d have to either jump in headfirst, or not at all.

      “What?” Nash said when I just stared at him, thinking. Wondering if I could really go through with the idea taking root in my brain. Or maybe someplace a little lower. “You better not be thinking something stupid, like breaking up with me now will make next Thursday easier for me.”

      “Nash, if I thought there was any way to make my death easier for you, we wouldn’t be together in the first place. I just … I don’t want to dwell on all the things I’m not gonna get to do.” I took a deep breath and ignored my racing pulse. I couldn’t choose when or how my life ended, but I could choose how I spent what time I had left.

      I can do this.

      I took his hand and pulled him out of the chair. I didn’t have to pull very hard—it was more an issue of guiding him where I wanted him. Onto the bed. With me. “I wanna do some of them, before it’s too late.”

      I scooted backward and he crawled over my legs and up my torso as I lay back on the pillows, and my heart beat so hard I could hear it echo in my ears.

      “This is why you closed the door?” he whispered, dropping a series of tiny kisses at the back of my jaw.

      “It wasn’t premeditated….” I breathed, running my hands over the front of his shirt, feeling the planes beneath. Was his heart beating as hard as mine? Was that even possible?

      “Coulda fooled me.”

      “Shut up.” I slid one hand behind his neck and pulled him down until his mouth met mine. His lips were warm and soft, and the taste of him brought back nothing but good memories—the only advantage to having been possessed by a hellion is that you don’t actually remember what happened while you were away from your body. Which made it just a little easier for me to push aside the knowledge that he’d been less than trustworthy in the past and just decide to trust Nash now.

      I’d been unable to do that completely so far, but knowing I was going to die soon—knowing I was about to lose my chance—made me bold. Not quite fearless, like Sabine, but definitely brave. And more than a little eager.