Rachel Vincent - With All My Soul

“Thanks.” I turned to Em. “What about you? Did you see Doug hang out with anyone in particular?”

“Yeah.” She shrugged. “Half the school. But I never even saw him with a balloon.” Which is what they’d used to store frost in. Which was kind of...my idea. Though I’d never intended to contribute to the ease of drug trafficking when I’d thought of it.

“Hey, Kaylee, can I talk to you for a minute?” I twisted in my chair to see Chelsea Simms holding a green paper folder.

“Sure.” I shoved the notepad into my bag, picked up my coffee, and stood. “I’ll see you guys at lunch.” Sabine, Nash, and Emma nodded, and I followed Chelsea into the hall.

She opened the folder as we walked in the general direction of our first-period math class, then pulled out a sheet of paper and handed it to me. “I just wanted to show you this.” It was a screen print from some kind of layout program. “It’s for her memorial page in the yearbook.”

In the center was a candid shot of Emma at a football game, from the fall semester. Her cheeks were red from the cold and she wore a green scarf; her thick, golden hair was flying over her shoulder in the wind. She looked happy.

She looked alive.

In that moment, I understood what Emma had lost, beyond her family, her clothes, her car, and the future she’d always assumed she’d have. She’d lost herself.

I’d met Emma in the third grade, and in all the time I’d known her, I couldn’t remember her ever lacking confidence or self-esteem before I’d exposed her to truths about the world no human should have to deal with. She’d always known who she was and where she fit into the world. She’d known what she wanted to do with her life—even if that changed on a monthly basis—and exactly what she was capable of.

She had none of that now, and even if I spent my entire afterlife trying to make that up to her, I could never give her back what she’d lost. Ever. The best I could do was help her adjust to the life she had now. Show her that she still had her friends, and that this new life could still be a good one.

But I couldn’t do that with Avari always two steps behind us. I couldn’t honestly tell her that life was still worth living if we were always looking over our shoulders to evade death and eternal torture. I had to get rid of Avari and the rest of the hellions not just to avenge Em’s death, and those who’d gone before her, but to make sure that the life she had left was more than just the constant struggle to hold on to it.

“Do you think she’d like it?” Chelsea asked, and I realized we’d stopped walking several doors away from our classroom. And that my hand was clenched around the printout, my knuckles white from the strain.

“Yeah. It’s beautiful. I think she’ll love it.”

Chelsea gave me a confused look, and it took me a second to realize I’d referred to Em in present tense. Again.

“I mean, if she were still here. Which she’s not, obviously. Because she died. But if she hadn’t, I have no doubt that Emma would love this yearbook memorial page.”

“I hate it.” Em set the memorial page printout on the picnic table and pinned it with her soda can.

“Hate what?” Nash put his tray down, Sabine set hers next to it, and they sank onto the bench across from me and Em.

“My yearbook memorial page.”

“That’s what Chelsea wanted to show me this morning.” I leaned across the table and took an apple wedge from Nash’s tray. I wasn’t hungry, but if I never ate anything at lunch, people would start to notice, and he rarely bothered with the fruit anyway.

Sabine unscrewed the top on a bottle of flavored water from the vending machine. “What’s wrong with it?”

Emma rotated the page beneath her can so they could see it. “The layout is simplistic and too symmetrical, the quote they picked says nothing about me, and I’d complain that the picture’s too small, except that it’s a horrible shot of me anyway.”

“What are you talking about? You look great!” I frowned, studying her. “Are you channeling someone’s anger again?”

“Not that I know of. Anyway, I’m not mad. I just hate that picture.”

“Oh, that may be my doing,” Sabine said around a bite of cheese-slathered corn chip. “Em’s afraid she’ll never look that good, so I thought this might be a good time to amp up her insecurity and vanity by feeding that fear. Tastes pretty good, too.” She washed her bite down with a gulp of water. “Want me to stop?”

“No. It’s fine.” Em sat with a pout and turned the printout over, so she couldn’t see her own face. Her own former face. And suddenly I felt bad for showing it to her. I’d thought it would make her feel better to know how much people cared. How much they missed her. Instead, I’d reminded her of what she’d lost. Again.

“Your dad snuck out of my house at two this morning,” Nash said. I glanced up in confusion to find my cousin and her necromancer boyfriend only a few feet away, carrying their lunch. Sophie looked sick.

“Whoa, really?” Luca glanced from Nash to Sophie, who scowled and dropped her tray on the table so hard that her orange bounced into a plastic cup of cottage cheese. “This is the man who threatened to make sure I could never sire children if he ever caught me at your house past nine o’clock?”

“The very same.” Sophie sat and started scraping cheese off her orange with a plastic spork. “And that wasn’t an idle threat. Turns out I also have three older half brothers—like, way older—who would cut off anything you let dangle if they knew half of—”

Luca put a hand over her mouth, and I swear he looked suddenly pale. “Well, then let’s not tell them.” He frowned and dropped his hand. “Wait, what do you mean, it turns out you have older brothers?”

She shrugged. “My dad couldn’t tell me about them until I knew he was a bean sidhe, because they’re in their sixties but they look, like, twenty-five. Like they could be my uncles. But they all have grandkids.”

“Wait a minute.” Sabine scowled at Nash, and the sun seemed to fade a little. “I can’t stay the night at your place, but Sophie’s dad can? How is that fair?”

“How’s what fair?”

Tod appeared out of nowhere and sat next to me on the bench. He slid one arm around my waist, and it took all the self-control I had not to lean over and kiss him. Which I couldn’t do without looking crazy to the hundred or so other students in the quad who couldn’t see him.

Em leaned forward to fill him in. “Your mom’s sleeping with Sophie’s dad, and Sabine thinks—”

“Whoa...” Tod clamped both hands over his ears. “I don’t ever need to hear that sentence again. No need to finish it, either.”

“At least we agree on something,” Nash mumbled, ripping the crust from a slice of cafeteria pizza.

Sabine planted both palms flat on the table. “My point is that it isn’t fair that he can come and go as he pleases—no pun intended—”

Everyone at our table groaned in unison, and Nash looked more than a little nauseated.

“—but—and I am not kidding— I now have a nine o’clock curfew. Seriously. Nine o’clock! I am a creature of the night! You can’t impose a curfew on a living Nightmare! What am I supposed to do for the ten hours after lockdown? Maras only need four hours of sleep. Who the hell is he to tell me when I can and can’t leave the house?”

“Your legal guardian.” Sophie sank her thumbnail through the skin of her orange and began to peel it. “Officially, as of eleven this morning. He called to tell me when he finished Influencing the juvenile court judge over brunch. I was supposed to tell you, but you know.” She shrugged. “I didn’t.”