Rachel Vincent - With All My Soul

“I know.” But I didn’t care. “How many, Tod? When you touch me, how many other girls are you remembering?”

“None. Look at me.”

I looked at him, but I could hardly see him through tears. When had that happened?

“When I touch you, I’m not thinking about anyone but you. When I look at you, I can’t remember what any of the others looked like. When I hear your voice, I can’t even remember their names.”

“Really?” My tears fell, and he wiped them away with his bare hands.

“Really. Compared to you, they’re all nameless. Like...Thing One and Thing Two. And Thing Three. And...okay, that’s not helping.” His gaze searched mine, and his forehead furrowed. “This sucks. How can I help?”

“I don’t...” But I did know. “I think I need you to kiss me.”

His features relaxed, and his grin came back slowly, like he expected me to change my mind. When I didn’t, he pulled me into his lap, and I tucked my legs around him. “My pleasure.”

He kissed me, and my hands slid behind his neck. I wanted to devour him. I really did. And the beauty of being dead and in love is that you don’t have to come up for air.

I don’t know how long we sat there kissing, tangled up in each other and nearly desperate for more, but I know we didn’t stop until Emma came in to get ready for bed. And I only know when that happened because she pretended to gag in the doorway.

“I can’t even see you, but I know what you’re doing.”

“No, you don’t,” Tod said to her, his lips still pressed against mine. “We’re still dressed.”

I laughed and concentrated on being visible on the human plane.

Em sank onto the edge of her bed, and I climbed off Tod’s lap. “Better?” he said, and I nodded, my face flaming.

“Sorry. That was intense.”

“That?” Em waved one hand at the two of us, grinning. “Or the test dose?”

“Both,” Tod and I said in unison. He was only partly kidding when he continued, “Tell Sabine to give Sophie a half dose.”

“So? Do we have any classes together? Let me see....” I pulled Emma’s new schedule from her hands as the office door swung shut behind us. “Crap.” I scanned the schedule again, hoping I’d misread. “There are only a couple hundred juniors in this school. How can we only have one class together?”

French. With Mrs. Brown. The only class “Emily Cavanaugh” and I shared was Em’s least favorite.

She leaned in to whisper, staring out at a sea of faces she’d known most of her life, none of whom recognized her. “If we were going to make up my age anyway, why the hell didn’t we go with eighteen instead of seventeen? Or twenty-one. That would have been nice.”

“You have to finish high school, Em.”

“Why? What’s the point?”

I’m sure there were several dozen good answers to her question, but I couldn’t think of any of them in that moment; I didn’t want to be there, either. So I gave her a little taste of the motivation I was clinging to. “Justice. This is where Avari and the other hellions hang out, remember? Invidia could be exactly where we’re standing right now, on the other side of the world barrier. She could be sniffing us out as we speak. How are you going to draw her into a trap if you’re not here?”

“Valid point. But frustratingly ironic. They hang out here to be close to us. To feed from our emotions. And now that I don’t have to be here if I don’t want to, I’m stuck here anyway, to stay close to them.”

“Welcome to my afterlife. Where’s your first class?”

Emma studied her new schedule as we ambled aimlessly down the hall, and I tried to ignore the stares focused on us—no, focused on me. I didn’t figure out what the whispers were all about until some idiot underestimated his volume.

“I can’t believe she came to school today. Her best friend’s been in the ground less than twenty-four hours, and she doesn’t even look upset.”

Oh. They’d expected me to still be mourning Emma, which had never occurred to me because Emma was standing right next to me. It had been much easier to pretend to grieve during the week and a half before she’d come back to school, when we were still waiting for the police to release her body so we could bury her. Without her next to me, I’d had no trouble remembering that she was supposed to be dead.

“Two-oh-four.” Em looked up from her schedule and frowned. “I’m headed upstairs. See you at lunch?”

“Yeah.” At least that much hadn’t changed.

First period math was weird without Emma. The stares continued all the way through class, and I actually had to do math during the last five minutes of class, when we were supposed to be starting our homework, since I had no one to whisper with.

But there were plenty of people whispering about me.

I was the center of attention when I’d secretly died, yet somehow I was still the center of attention now that Em had secretly lived. I couldn’t win for losing.

“Hey, Kaylee.” Chelsea Simms sat next to me—uninvited—at my empty lunch table in the quad, and I silently cursed myself for showing up early.

“Hey.” I had no third period class, so I usually spent the hour there, knowing that if Tod had a break at work, that’s where he’d look for me.

Chelsea pulled a notebook from her bag. “Do you mind if I ask you a few things about Emma? I’m working on a memorial article for the school paper.”

Oh, yeah. Journalism was also third period. Just my luck.

“Sure.”

She frowned, studying my expression. “If this is a bad time, I can...?”

“No, go ahead. I don’t mind talking about Em. Feels like I’m keeping her memory alive.” How’s that for quotable?

“Great. Em was a junior, right?” Chelsea said, and I nodded. “And she had two sisters?” Another nod, and I noticed that though her notebook was open, she wasn’t taking notes. Whatever she really wanted to ask obviously required courage she hadn’t yet worked up.

“And...was she a good student?”

I turned to face her directly, looking right into her eyes. “Chelsea, just ask whatever you really want to know. Otherwise, this sounds like it’ll take all day.”

She blinked, surprised, then nodded. “Okay.” She sat straighter and actually picked up her pen, ready to write. “Do you really think it’s a coincidence that Emma Marshall and her boyfriend died on the same day? Just one day after Brant Williams died in his car, here on campus?”

I swallowed, trying to hide my own surprise. Obviously our classmates were just as suspicious as the police had been, but I hadn’t expected anyone to actually ask that question. And I certainly hadn’t expected anyone to expect me to have an answer.

“Do I think it’s a coincidence?” I bought time to think by repeating the question. “I don’t know what it is. I don’t see how it could be more than that. They died at different times, in different places, in different ways.” Sort of. Neither Brant nor Jayson had any obvious cause of death, so the coroner had labeled them both with the generic “heart failure.” Which wasn’t exactly common in teenagers.

“Were you there when Emma died?” Chelsea asked, her gaze glued to me. Watching closely for my reaction.

“Yeah. A bunch of us were. We took the day off for my birthday.” The tears in my eyes were real—I was lying, but the truth was no less traumatic. “We were just goofing off on the swings. At the lake. But Em went too high.” I sniffled. “She was showing off. Then she let go and just... She just fell out of the swing. She landed on her back, but she must have hit her head first, and...”