B00AO57VOY EBOK (7 page)

“Oh shit!” I whispered,
looking up at Nathan. 

“We’re screwed,” he
whispered back.

“I am
not
going to
jail,” I hissed back, turning around in circles as I looked for a place to
hide.  I gulped loudly when I saw which room we’d run into. 

“What a surprise,” I
muttered, staring at the showroom full of coffins.  Looking up at Nathan, I
tried for a smile.  “Baby, you know that promise I made you?”

“Yeah,” he said, drawing the
word out like he was dreading what I was about to say. 

“It looks like I’m gonna have
to break it after all.”

“Nathan, I said I was—”

“Sorry,” he finished for me
in a growl.  “I heard you.  All twenty times.”

“But, you’re still—”

“I’m not mad,” he bit out,
interrupting me again. 

“Then why are you talking to
me like—?”  He hadn’t let me finish an entire sentence since we’d escaped the
funeral home, but, for some stupid reason, I couldn’t seem to stop trying.  As
expected, he cut me off
again
.

“Because I just spent two
hours in a coffin, that’s why!” he roared.  Guess he was mad after all.

 “So did I!” I yelled back,
snapping under the pressure at long last.  “Do you really think that experience
was any better for me than it was for you?!  Think again, buddy!  I’ll have
nightmares about that coffin until I end up in one for real!”

He
so
needed to get
over himself!  Okay, so it hadn’t been ideal, I’d be the first to admit it, but
at least we weren’t in jail.  Nathan was obviously having a hard time seeing it
that way, though.  He was acting like I’d planned the whole fiasco.  Yeah,
because I had just
known
The Donut and his bungling band of idiots were
going to hang out for two hours. 

“Just tell me I didn’t go
through that for nothing,” Nathan grumbled finally, giving me a look that said
I’d damn well
better
tell him that.  “Did you find out where he is?”

“Yes.  No.  Kind of.  God, I
don’t know,” I told him softly, blinking back tears again as I looked away. 

I suddenly wished we’d never
gone to the funeral home at all—and not because I’d just spent more time than I
ever wanted to in a coffin.  Seriously, after that, I intended to let everyone
I knew know that I wanted to be cremated.  I
never
wanted to be put in
another box.  Like,
ever
. 

Even my coffin experience
didn’t compare with the horrible scene I’d had to witness when I’d spent
Casey’s last few minutes on earth with her though.  I had been planning to
summon Casey’s
ghost
.  I’d thought I could just call her up and get her
to tell me where Jack was so I could end the whole thing.  I hadn’t figured
actually
seeing
what had happened to her into my brilliant scheme. 

I had about as much of a
chance of erasing the last few minutes of that girl’s life from my memory as I
had of forgetting what it had been like to be shut in that coffin.  It was
something I would never be able to forget.

Nathan was quiet for the
rest of the ride home, his expression tense and unhappy.  As we pulled into the
driveway, he took a deep breath and I saw him shudder.  When the garage door
closed behind us, he cut the engine and finally turned to look at me again. 
When he saw the tears standing in my eyes, his expression finally softened. 

 “Baby, are you okay?”  When
I tried to look away, he grasped my chin and gently turned my head so I was
facing him. 

“I just want to go to bed,”
I told him, pulling my chin free.  “I need…”

I shook my head and reached
for the door without finishing that sentence.  I didn’t know what I needed.  I
needed somewhere quiet to be alone.  I needed to cry and scream and rage at the
twisted Fate that kept messing with me.  I needed someone to tell me it was all
right so I could tell them they were wrong. 

What I
didn’t
need
was what was waiting for me. 

Grams was standing framed in
the doorway to the kitchen looking like someone had just pissed in her anti-wrinkle
potion.

For a long, tense, silent
moment we just looked at each other.  Her graying red curls were coming loose
from the twist she usually wore them in.  The shoulders of her long wool
overcoat were dusted with snow and her leaf-green eyes were practically
shooting sparks.  She looked tired and almost weak. 

She also looked like she was
ready to decapitate someone.  Considering she was staring at me instead of
Nathan, I had a pretty good idea who was about to get the axe.

“Uh…hi, Grams,” I finally
squeaked, going for a smile—that immediately slipped off my face when her glare
got a little darker.  By the time Nathan got out of the car and joined me, I
was ready to bolt.

“Shea,” Nathan said by way
of a greeting, arching an eyebrow when she turned her glare on him instead of
me.  “I thought you said they’d cancelled your flight again.”

“They did,” Grams bit out
through clenched teeth.  “I decided not to wait.”

“Then how’d you get here?” I
asked before I thought about it.  I instantly wished I’d just kept my mouth
shut.  The look on Grams’ face guaranteed a nuclear detonation in ten…nine…eight…

“Get inside,” she growled. 
“Both of you.”

She turned to lead the way
and I saw her stagger.  She reached out for something to catch her fall, but
there wasn’t anything close enough for her to grab on to.  I ran toward her,
but Nathan was faster.  Sweeping her into his arms, he hurried over to a chair
at the kitchen table and gently placed her in it.  When he stepped back, I saw
what I hadn’t seen in the garage.  Her skin was almost gray, and her lips had a
bluish tinge to them.  There was also something kind of…hazy about her.  It was
almost like she was just
mostly
there.

“You teleported?” Nathan
roared as I dropped to my knees next to Grams’ chair.  I felt a burst of panic
when I took her hand and felt how icy her skin was.  “You teleported from
Washington
,
Shea?  Are you
mad
?”

My head snapped around at
that and I gave him a confused look.  I’d accidentally teleported from
Washington once myself.  I’d ended up doing a face-plant right in my front
yard, in fact.  But I sure as
hell
hadn’t looked like Grams when it was
over.

“Oh, yes,” she hissed,
pinning him with an almost deadly look.  “I’m quite furious with both of you,
actually.  And for your information, I am perfectly capable of making that kind
of journey.  Even Ember has done it.  Surely you remember
that
dramatic
exit?”

“She’s eighteen, Shea!”
Nathan yelled, throwing up his arms in frustration.  “
Eighteen
, damn it,
not
pushing
eighty
!”

“Numbers,” Grams snorted, waving
off Nathan’s concern like he was just being silly.  “Teleportation is about
power,
Nate, not age.”

With an aggravated growl,
Nathan gave up and scrubbed his hands over his face like he was trying to pull
it off.  I gave him a soft smile when he let his hands fall and he muttered,
“You two are going to be the death of me for sure.”

“Now
that
you have
right,” Grams said, her voice as cold as her skin.  “In fact, you have one
minute to explain why I wasn’t notified immediately about the killer they’re calling
Blood Red before I zap you into oblivion.  And when you’re finished with that,
you can explain to me why you and my granddaughter are creeping in at dawn when
this monster is killing girls who
look like Ember
!”

By the time she finished
speaking, her voice had risen to a howl of fury that seemed to reverberate
around the room long after she finished shrieking.  For a second, there was
nothing but silence and that unnatural echo of Grams’ voice.  Giving her an
unpleasant look, Nathan turned and grabbed the tea kettle without so much as a
word.  Filling it with water, he slammed it onto the stove.  With every move he
made, Grams looked a little more pissed off.

“I want answers, Nate!” she
finally snapped, shaking off my hand when I laid it on her shoulder in an
effort to calm her down a little before she had a stroke or something. 

“And I’ll be happy to give
them to you, Shea—as soon as the rest of you
arrives
.”

I turned around to stare at
Grams again, my mouth falling open.  So
that
was why she looked funny. 
She
wasn’t
all there!  That
so
didn’t make teleportation look
safe to me.

The look on Nathan’s face
combined with the strained tone of his voice said very clearly that Grams
wasn’t going to like what he had to say if she forced him to speak again right
then.  Given the night we’d had, I really couldn’t blame him.  Grams must have
seen the signs too, because she scowled at him and then turned another dark
look in my direction.

“Ember, what
are
you
wearing?” she grumbled, fingering the edge of my hood. 

I jerked away from her and
shot to my feet like someone had just jabbed me with a cattle prod, forcing
myself not to reach toward my neck.  Grams had yet to see Nathan’s vampy stamp
of ownership and I
really
didn’t think right then was the time.  If she
was pissed because we were ‘creeping in at dawn’, she’d be beyond furious then.

She’d be homicidal.

I caught Nathan’s eye as I
passed him on my way to get a mug for Grams and saw he looked as nervous as I
did.  Nervous and sad.  As much as I hated that mark, I knew Nathan hated the
fact that he’d given it to me more. 

When I closed the cabinet
and turned back around with Grams’ mug in my hand, she was watching us like a
hawk.  She looked from me to Nathan and back again, her eyes sweeping us from
head to toe.  After thoroughly studying us for a few minutes, she leaned back
in her chair and sighed in what could only be exasperation.

“The bank?” she asked,
taking me by surprise. 

“Excuse me?” I said,
exchanging a confused look with Nathan. 

“Did you rob the
bank
?”
Grams asked, clarifying her original question.  “You’re both dressed from head
to toe in black.  You’re wearing a hood to cover your hair.  I want to know if
the authorities are looking for the two of you.”

“No, we didn’t rob the
bank,” I said, rolling my eyes because that’s what she expected me to do. 

“Ember, I think we should—”
Nathan began, but I cut him off in a hurry.

“Get Grams a blanket!” I
nearly shouted, already headed for the door.  “Good idea, baby.  I’ll be right
back.”

“Ember, get back here,”
Grams commanded, sounding more like herself, just as I reached the promise of
escape.

Grimacing, I stopped where I
was.  I stood there for a second, debating whether or not to run.  I was
younger, faster.  Grams could teleport herself across the country.  Given those
odds, I decided I’d lost before the race began. 

Plastering the fakest smile
in history on my lips, I turned back around to face her.  To my surprise, she
didn’t even look angry anymore.  She didn’t look…anything, actually.  Her face
was so blank that, for just a second, I wanted to go check to make sure she was
still in her body. 

“Where were you tonight,
Ember?” she asked calmly, even pausing to smile at Nathan when he set a
steaming mug of tea in front of her.

“Oh, you don’t want to hear
that story,” I told her with a nervous laugh, waving my hand like we hadn’t
been up to anything that included breaking and entering—or coffins.

“Oh, but I think I do,”
Grams argued with a tight-lipped smile.

A little help here!
I
thought, giving Nathan a frantic look as he took a seat next to Grams, a tall
black travel mug in his hand.  Yeah, that wasn’t tea.

“We broke into the funeral
home, I lost Em for a full five minutes while she was communing with the dead
even though she was standing right in front of me, then we took a two hour
siesta in a couple of coffins,” he said with a shrug.  I glared at him, and he
winked at me as he lifted his mug and took a long drink of the blood it
contained.

“What?!” Grams shrieked, the
color returning to her cheeks all at once.  It appeared the rest of her had
arrived just in time—for her to kill me, that is.

“You asked,” Nathan said
with a shrug, leaning back in his chair and admiring the amazing shade of puce
Grams was turning.

“You broke into a…  Ember
was…”  I watched Grams flounder, coming up with about fifty ways to get even
with Nathan as she did.  “Coffins!  My baby was in a coffin!”

“I am going to
kill
you!” I hissed at Nathan, thinking I should have run when I had the chance.  He
blew me a kiss in response.

Oh, he was
so
going
to get it!

“Explain yourself!” Grams
howled, turning a burning glare in my direction.  “Now, Ember Leigh Blaylock!”