She snorts. "Yeah, maybe. Gods, the dating pool is just so fuckingdismal.Why do so many men have to suck so bad? If they sucked less, maybe I wouldn't have died single. I hope the dating pool's better in the Beyond."
That tiny reminder almost kills my smile as we listen to the music without talking all the way back to our small town.
It's been eight months since everything happened. The Battle of the Citadel. The end of the Upheaval. My rescue.
Which means it's been just over eight months and three weeks since Jessica died while I was forced to watch helplessly, experiencing every bit of her final pain until it cut off. I don't know why Syntyche, the goddess of reaping, has left her spirit alone, but I'd be lost without my best friend. Whether she helps me keep my sanity or is slowly clawing it away from me, I'll never know, but she's who I count on most in the world.
But whenever she mentions passing into the Beyond…
I know she needs to pass on eventually. It's this unspoken thing between us—we both know she's sticking around to keep an eye on me, since no one else really knows my whole story.
Jessica does, though.
In life, Jess was my confidante ineverythingafter we met as awkward middle schoolers. She's the one who helped me adjust to living among humans and pretending to be one. We were there for each other through everything—middle school, lazy summers, all of high school, bad hair days, concerts, trips abroad, graduation, starting jobs, every ugly breakup….
We survived the beginning of the Upheaval together. Jess stuck by my side as I tracked down my parents on the thin hope that they would accept some kind of payment and take Jessica and her suffering younger sister into their safe haven after shadow fiends killed the rest of Jess's family.
Then my parents turned us away, and we were captured by monsters and taken to the citadel.
She didn't survive.
I did.
I know she doesn't blame me for that, but…
As we pull onto the obscure forest road that leads to my house, Jessica sees my face and throws her head back with a groan.
"You're doing it again. Bitch, stop feeling guilty for choicesI madeor I'll—oh my gods, Mr. Douchenozzle is here."
2
HEIDI
I brakea little too hard in my circular driveway.
Jessica is right. My ex, Mr. Ryan Douchenozzle himself, is parked in front of my house. The second he sees my light blue sedan, he stumbles out of his big white truck toward me.
"Elise!" he calls, hiccuping.
"Gods help me," I pray, double-checking to make sure all my doors are locked.
I can tell from his voice and the stumbling that he's hammered. The last time I saw Ryan like this was right before the Upheaval, shortly after I broke up with him for cheating on me. He'd shown up drunk as a skunk, peed all over my front porch, screamed at me through my home security camera, and then broke down in tears begging me to at least let him inside so we could talk.
I'd ignored him completely, waiting for him just to leave.
Jess had returned from her work shift, saw him half-passed-out on the porch steps, and dumped a planter full of sunflowers on his head before chewing him out in Spanish. She's always had an impressive temper and scared him off badly enough that he stayed away after that.
Well,at least until sometime during the Upheaval, when he broke back into my house while I was gone.
Jessica boos Ryan. "Not this cheater again! How many times do we have to tell him to get lost?"
Before I can hit the gas and leave as quickly as I came, Ryan flops across the hood of my car. Gripping the side view mirror, he knocks hard on my window.
"Hey! What the hell, Elise? Are you seriously going to keep ignoring me?" he demands.
"Yes!" Jessica shouts back at him for only me to hear. "Because you're a fucking asshole!"
Ryan's irritated, inebriated, spurned emotions creep into my car from outside, pressing on my chest. I really,reallymiss that charm Everett gifted me years ago. The one he told me the Garnet Wizard made. It was destroyed by the liches in the Nether, and thanks to whatever they did to me there to magnify my already extreme levels of empathy, no other charms I've tried wearing have worked for long.
