itself—that was nice, don’t you think?”
It was, as it damn well should have been. Em had left funeral details—in her own handwriting—in an envelope on her vanity table the day we’d picked up her shoes and a few other essentials. Once Ms. Marshall was thinking clearly, she’d probably wonder why her seventeen-year-old daughter had given so much thought to how she wanted to be buried, but grief had eclipsed her skepticism at least long enough to arrange the funeral of her daughter’s—albeit morbid—dreams.
“It was beautiful, Em,” Tod whispered, and I glanced up to find him standing next to me, where there’d been only damp grass a second before. It took more self-control than I’d known I had to keep from throwing my arms around him and trying to melt into him, which had recently replaced hoping for world peace as my new favorite impossible task.
I couldn’t throw myself at him because most people couldn’t see him. Reapers are sneaky that way.
Beyond that, I couldn’t indulge in an embrace from my boyfriend—that word felt so inadequate—because today wasn’t about comforting me. It was about burying Emma. Being there for her.
And planning vengeance. Justice for Em and for everyone else Avari and his fellow hellions had possessed, tortured, or taken from us. Today was about plotting retribution for Emma’s boyfriend. And for Lydia, and for Sabine’s foster mother, and for Brant, Nash’s baseball teammate.
And for Alec.
My hand twitched at the thought of him, as if I still held the dagger. I could almost smell the blood. I could still see him in my mind, one of my few real friends, his eyes filled with pain and confusion, staring up at me in fear. Until they’d stared at nothing.
I swallowed my anger at Avari and what he’d taken from us, determined to avoid ruining Emma’s perfect funeral with the bellow of rage itching to burst free from me.
Today was a new start for Em, and a new start for us all. We could no longer afford to be victims in Avari’s quest to walk the human world. Beginning today, we were soldiers. Warriors, battle-weary and not yet focused, but warriors nonetheless.
Warriors, at least for the moment, in black formal funeral attire. All except for Tod, who could wear whatever he wanted because no one other than the five of us could see him.
I started to take his hand, hoping no one would notice such a small motion, but then Emma made a soft, strangling sound and I looked up to see her staring ahead, frozen like a deer in mortal danger.
Her mother was heading straight for us.
“Kaylee, thank you so much for coming.” Ms. Marshall sniffled and reached for my hand, and her tears triggered more of my own. “Thank you all.” She glanced at everyone but Tod, whom she couldn’t see, and when her gaze lingered for a second on her own daughter, hidden behind a stranger’s face, Emma burst into fresh sobs.
“We wouldn’t have missed it, Ms. Marshall,” Nash said, while I wrapped one arm around Emma.
Sabine stared at us both. The funeral hadn’t upset her at all, that I could see, and she obviously didn’t understand why it had bothered us, beyond the lie we were telling the world, since Emma was still alive and mostly well.
“Thank you.” Ms. Marshall sniffled again, and she didn’t seem to notice that her own heels were sinking into the soft earth. “I know Emma would be happy if she could see you all here now.”
Em sobbed harder.
“I’m sorry, I don’t believe we’ve met.” Ms. Marshall dabbed her eyes with a damp tissue and held one hand out to her own daughter.
Emma cleared her throat and shook her mother’s hand. Her mouth opened, but nothing came out.
“This is my cousin. Emily,” I said. “She’s just lost her parents, so she’ll be staying with me and my dad.” That was the best story we could come up with. It was heavy on coincidence, but just as heavy on necessity—Em had to live somewhere, now that she’d lost everything she’d ever had. Except for us.
Ms. Marshall’s expression crumbled beneath a new layer of sympathetic grief, and her voice shook. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Emily.”
But if Em heard her, I couldn’t tell.
“She loved you so much!” Emma threw her arms around her mother and buried her tear-streaked face in her mom’s hair. “She wouldn’t want you to forget about her, but she doesn’t want you to worry either. Or to…” Em nearly choked on her own tears, and we all stood there looking as helpless as Ms. Marshall looked confused and…devastated. She was crying again, and so was I. “Or to…you know…stop living. She wants you to live,” Em said into her mother’s ear. “And to hug Traci and Cara a lot. And to make yourself happy. She’s sorry she called your boyfriend an idiot. It shouldn’t matter that he’s kind of stupid, if he makes you happy, so Emma would want you to go for it.”
She finally released her mother and stepped back, wiping tears with her bare hands. “So you should go for it.”
Ms. Marshall’s tissue was soaked and when she blinked, more tears fell. “I didn’t realize you knew Emma. Do you go to Eastlake?”
“She will,” I said, when I realized Em’s flood of words had dried up, leaving her speechless and evidently mortified by her outburst. “But she knew Emma from…before. We were all three really close.” I couldn’t tell whether or not Ms. Marshall believed me—or whether she was even capable of thinking my hasty explanation through at the moment—but she nodded and wiped at her cheeks again.
“Kaylee, when you feel up to it, I hope you’ll come over and take something from Emma’s room. To remember her by. I’m sure she’d want you to have whatever you’d like.”
“We will,” Em said before I could speak.
Ms. Marshall frowned, then nodded again and started backing away from us in heels crusted with mud from the recent rain. “Thank you all for coming.” Then her two remaining daughters each put an arm around her and led her to the long black car waiting with its engine running.
“I think I scared her,” Emma whispered, clutching my hand.
“Yup.” Sabine’s nearly black eyes were dilated and her mouth hung open just a little. As a mara—a living Nightmare—Sabine fed on fear, but she’d been going hungry a lot lately, since grief and anger had finally overwhelmed the nearly constant state of fear we’d all been living in for the past few months.
“I’m pretty sure it’s rude to feed from the dead girl’s family at a funeral,” Nash said, one arm around her waist, his fingers curled around her narrow hip. He used to hold me like that. I used to like it. But Nash and I were over. We’d been over before we even knew we were over, and I still wasn’t sure he’d completely accepted that yet. But it made me feel better to see him touch her in public.
He’d been touching her in private since the very day we broke up.
Sabine lifted both brows at him. “You expect me to believe that if someone threw a pie in your face at a funeral you wouldn’t lick your lips?”
“If someone threw a pie in my face at a funeral, I’d…” Nash frowned. “Well, that’d be really weird.”
“Weirder
