LITMIR.BIZ

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then again, he was probably pretty busy dealing with my aunt.

      Uncle Brendon leaned back in his chair and lifted a sweating can of Coke from the end table. “She said Emma fainted, and while everyone was fussing over her, one of the cheerleaders fell over dead. The whole school’s in complete shock. It’s already been on the news.”

      I swaltowed thickly and glanced at Nash. And naturally, Uncle Brendon caught the look.

      “Emma died, didn’t she?” His expression was pained, as if he wasn’t sure he really wanted to hear the truth. “She died, and you two brought her back.”

      At his words, horror and a stunned incredulity washed over me in a devastating wave—the culmination of every terrifying thing I’d seen and done over the past few days, and I could only nod, holding back tears through sheer will.

      Anger rolled across my uncle’s face like fog before a storm, and he stood, his hand fisted around the can. If it had been full, he’d have been wearing most of his soda. “I told you to stay out of it. I said your father and I would look into it. You could have died, and as it stands now, you got someone else killed.”

      I shot to my feet, anger eclipsing my weaker emotions. “That’s not fair. None of this was our fault!”

      “There’s nothing fair about this,” Uncle Brendon roared, and I knew from his volume alone that Sophie wasn’t at home. “If you don’t believe me, go ask that poor cheerleader’s parents.”

      Nash stood at my side, his stance steady and strong, his gaze unyielding. “Mr. Cavanaugh, we had nothing to do with Julie’s death. In fact, we tried to save her too, but—”

      We all seemed to realize simultaneously that he’d said the wrong thing. I squeezed Nash’s hand to silence him, but it was too late.

      “You tried to do it again?” Uncle Brendon’s fury was surpassed only by his fear.

      “We had to!” I was shouting now, and the entire living room swam with the tears filling my eyes. “I couldn’t let the reaper steal another soul without at least trying to stop it.”

      A glimpse of sympathy flashed through his anger, but then it was gone, stamped out by fear born of caution. “You have to. You can’t go sticking your nose into reaper business every time someone you know dies, unless you want to die with them!” He turned to Nash then, anger still spinning in his eyes. “If you’re going to tell her what she can do, you have a responsibility to also tell her what she can’t do.”

      “He did,” I said before Nash could answer. “But Emma wasn’t supposed to die.”

      My uncle’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “How do you know that?”

      Nash spoke before I could, probably to keep me from digging my hole any deeper. “Tod got a look at the list. The reaper is a rogue, and none of those girls were supposed to die.”

      “See?” I demanded, when Nash went silent without revealing the rest of Tod’s information. “We had to save her. She wasn’t meant to die yet.” Plus, she’s my best friend. “Tell me you wouldn’t have done the same thing.”

      “He wouldn’t have.” The new voice came from the entry, carried on a soft September breeze, and we all whirled toward it in unison. My dad stood in the doorway, a suitcase in each hand. “But I would.”

      I should have said something. I should have had some kind of greeting for the father I hadn’t seen in a year and a half. But my mouth wouldn’t open, and the longer I stood there in silence, the better I came to understand the problem. It wasn’t that I had nothing to say to him. It was that I had too much to say.

      Why did you lie? Where have you been? What makes you think coming back now will make any difference? But I couldn’t decide what to say first.

      Nash didn’t have that problem. “I’m guessing this is your dad?” he whispered, leaning closer so that our shoulders touched.

      My father nodded, thick brown waves bobbing with the movement. His hair was longer than I remembered it, and nearly brushed his shoulders. I couldn’t help wondering how different I looked to him.

      “You must be Harmony’s boy,” my father said, his deep voice rumbling. “Brendon said you’d probably be here.”

      “Yes, sir,” Nash said. Then, to me, he said, “He doesn’t sound like he’s from Ireland.”

      My father dropped his bags in the entryway. “I’m not. I just live there.” He reached back to pull the front door closed, then scuffed his boots on the mat before stepping into the living room. My dad took a long look at me, from head to toe, and his jaw hardened when his eyes lingered on my right hand, still clasped in Nash’s. Then his gaze landed on my face, and a series of emotions passed over his.

      Grief, first of all. I’d expected that one. The older I got, the more I looked like my mother. She was only twenty-three when she died—at least that’s what they’d told me—and sometimes even I was freaked out by the resemblance in old pictures. He also looked sad and a little worried, as if he dreaded our upcoming conversation.

      But the last expression—the part that kept me from storming out of the house and taking off in the car he’d paid for—was pride. My father’s eyes gleamed with it, even as old pain etched lines into his otherwise youthful face.

      “Hey, kiddo.” He took a deep breath, and his entire chest fell as he exhaled. “Think I could get a hug?”

      I’d had no intention of hugging my father. I was still so mad at him I could hardly think about anything else, even with everything else going on. Yet I disentangled my hand from Nash’s and stepped forward on autopilot. My father crossed the rest of the floor toward me. He wrapped his huge arms around me and my head found his chest, just like it had when I was little.

      He might have looked difterent, but he smelled exactly the same. Like coffee, and the wool in his coat, and whatever cologne he’d been wearing as long as I could remember. Hugging my father brought back the ghosts of memories so old I couldn’t quite bring them into focus.

      “I missed you,” he said into my hair, as if I were still a child.

      I stepped back and crossed my arms over my chest. Hugs wouldn’t fix everything. “You could have visited.”

      “I should have.” It wasn’t quite an apology, but at least we agreed on something.

      “Well, you’re here now.” Uncle Brendon turned toward the kitchen. “Sit, Aiden. What can I get you to drink?”

      “Coffee, thanks.” My dad shrugged out of his black wool coat and draped it over the back of an armchair. “So.” He sank into the chair, and I sat opposite him, beside Nash on the couch. “I hear you’ve discovered your heritage. And tried it out, evidently. You restored a friend?”

      I met his eyes boldly, daring him to criticize my decision when he’d already admitted he’d have done the same. “Emma wasn’t supposed to die. None of them were.”

      “None of them? “ My father frowned toward the kitchen; obviously Uncle Brendon hadn’t yet given him the details of my discovery. “Who else are we talking about?”

      “There were three others. One a day, three days in a row.” Nash’s thumb stroked the back of mine until my father scowled at him, and he dropped my hand and leaned back on the couch. “Then the reaper took someone else today when we saved Emma.”

      Irritated—yet amused—I reclaimed his hand and let them both rest on my lap. Absentee fathers had no right to disapprove of boytriends. “All four of them—five if you count Emma—just fell over dead with no warning. It wasn’t their time to go.”

      “How do you know?”

      I leaned into Nash, smiling innocently as my father’s jaw tightened. “Nash’s friend Tod is a reaper.”

      My

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