Before I Wake

by Rachel Vincent

  “I know. And I’m so sorry. So, how ’bout I start making it up to you with Chinese delivery? We got this coupon in the mail… .” He set his soda down and started digging through a pile of junk mail on the counter.

  “Thanks, but I’m not really hungry, and Tod and I need to do something. Something work-related,” I added when his brows arched in suspicion.

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “But maybe we could watch a movie tonight?” I said when his disappointment nearly broke my heart. “Just the two of us?”

  He nodded and forced a smile. “I’ll be waiting.”

  Tod caught my gaze from the hallway, where he’d waited, unseen by my father, and when he took my hand so we could blink out together, he leaned close to whisper in my ear. “I’d say he took that pretty well. You know your dad’s the coolest dad on the face of the planet, right?”

  “I know. One of these days, I may just tell him.”

  * * *

  “Do you remember the last time we were here?” Tod asked as we stood on the sidewalk in front of Lakeside, the mental-health unit attached to the hospital where Tod reaped souls and his mother worked the second shift as an R.N.

  “How could I forget?” I felt a little queasy just thinking about it. “Feels different this time, though.”

  “Because you can get in and out on your own?”

  “Yeah.” That eliminated my fear of being trapped. Caught. Locked up. “Maybe I’ll pretend I still have to hold your hand to be invisible.”

  “Role-playing. I like it.” His fingers curled around mine. “Have you heard from Lydia since we broke her out?”

  Lydia was a psychic syphon and former psychiatric patient who’d saved both my life and my sanity by taking some of my pain into herself when I was locked up in Lakeside. Tod and I had freed her less than a month ago.

  “No.” I’d tried two different women’s shelters—while I was incorporeal—before I’d realized she might not be allowed to stay without risking being put into foster care. “But I’ll keep looking for her.” She’d saved my life. I owed her nothing less.

  “You ready for this?” Tod asked.

  “Let’s go.” I closed my eyes and concentrated on Scott’s room, in the youth wing, on the third floor. Somewhere on the way, I lost Tod’s hand and started to panic, but he was there waiting for me when I opened my eyes in Scott’s room. “Guess I still need practice doing that in tandem, huh?”

  “We have plenty of time to get it right. We have time to get everything right.” He started to pull me close, but I froze with one glance over his shoulder. Scott lay on his back, on top of his made bed, fully dressed, including laceless sneakers. His hands were folded beneath his head and his eyes were closed. Watching him when he didn’t know we were there was a little creepy. I still wasn’t used to being incorporeal on purpose.

  I glanced around the room and frowned. Scott’s clothes were folded neatly on the open shelves bolted to the wall, but all of his other personal items—mostly photos of him, Nash, and Doug, who’d died of the frost addiction that drove Scott insane—were packed into an open box on the floor next to the desk bolted to the wall.

  “Maybe they’re getting ready to move him,” Tod said, squatting to look into the box.

  “Why? And where?” I didn’t look at his stuff. I didn’t want to see pieces of Scott’s shattered life and know that they all fit in a single box on the floor. I didn’t want to know how close Nash had come to sharing the same fate. I didn’t want to remember how I hadn’t been fast or perceptive enough to save either of them.

  “Is there a way to let him see us without scaring the crap out of him?” I whispered, though my volume had no effect on whether or not Scott could hear me.

  “There’s the slow fade-in,” Tod said, standing again, his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “But I’m a fan of the dramatic sudden appearance.” His grin was to lighten the mood, but I had trouble smiling at Lakeside. There was nothing funny about being locked up with only your personal demons for company.

  In Scott’s case, the demon was real.

  “Okay, here goes nothing.” I focused on Scott, trying to make sure he was the only one other than Tod who could hear and see me, in case someone else came in while we were there. That’s harder than it sounds, and I’d messed it up in practice more times than I cared to admit.

  When I was pretty sure I had it right, I cleared my throat.

  Scott’s eyes opened and his head rolled in our direction. His brows rose, but he didn’t look particularly surprised. Maybe because he was accustomed to seeing things that weren’t there. Maybe because he was used to seeing me in particular. Avari had been giving him hallucinations of me, a fact that creeped me out almost as badly as the hellion himself did.

  “Hi, Scott,” I said, and he sat up slowly, feet on the floor, leaning forward with his hands curled around the mattress on either side of his knees. His eyes were clear and focused. He didn’t look medicated.

  “I heard you were dead. Kinda assumed that meant I wouldn’t be seeing you again.”

  “Sorry.” I wasn’t sure whether or not I should admit that I had, in fact, died. Scott was officially crazy, so no one would believe him, anyway. But I decided not to mention it. Just in case. “Scott, I need a favor. Could you ask Avari a question for me?”

  “Why?” Scott looked straight into my eyes as he spoke, and his gaze was oddly steady.

  “Because we can’t speak to him directly without crossing over,” Tod said.

  “What if you could?” His focus narrowed on me, and my skin started to crawl.

  “Then we wouldn’t be here asking you for help,” I said. We’d come prepared for a strange conversation with Scott, but I found this apparent lack of strange even stranger than the strange I’d been expecting.

  “Why should I help you?” Scott demanded, and his voice had an odd edge to it now. He wasn’t confused by either our presence or our questions. “What did you ever do for me?”

  Tod glanced at me with both pale brows raised. “Is it just me, or does he seem a little saner than usual?”

  “Maybe he’s having a good day,” I whispered, desperately hoping that was true.

  “I’m insane, not deaf,” Scott said, and when he stood, I backed away. I was already dead, but because I was corporeal—I had to be, for him to see me—he could do physical damage to me, as both my father and Tod had already demonstrated on Thane.

  “Can Avari hear us?” I wasn’t sure if Scott served as a sort of amplifier, through which Avari could hear us directly, or if it was more of a messenger service, where Scott had to mentally ask Avari everything we asked him.

  “He can hear you, so be careful what you say. He can see you, so be careful what you do.” Scott stepped closer, and I backed up as Tod stepped between us. The psych patient peered at me over the reaper’s shoulder. “And if you’d come a little closer, he’d be able to taste you, too. Though he’d settle for just a little whiff.”

  “I don’t want to punch a mental patient, but I will,” Tod growled.

  “So the prince of death has become the white knight. I would not have laid wager on that.” In an instant, Scott changed, without changing at all. He stood straighter and suddenly seemed to take up more space in the small room than he should have. His gestures became formal, but didn’t seem overstated. He looked older. Scarier. He looked…familiar. “But you know you cannot wear both hats at once, dark prince. Not for long, anyway,” the Scott-thing said. “Someday you will have to choose.”

  Chills raced up my spine “That’s not Scott.”

  “I know,” Tod said as I stepped to the side for a better view around his arm. “Avari?”

  Scott’s mouth smiled, and it was creepy to see the hellion’s mannerisms bleeding through the skin of a former classmate. “Human emotion is a handicap to a reaper, Mr. Hudson. She melts your cold heart and softens your hard edges, and she’ll keep at it until there’s nothing left of you but what beats and bleeds and burns fo
r her. And then the formless lump of a man you’ll become won’t be capable of reaping souls. What will befall you then?”

  “He’s possessed,” Tod whispered, and I could only nod, trying not to hear what Avari was saying. Trying not to remember that he couldn’t lie.

  “If you stay with her, neither of you will see eternity.” Avari glanced at me through Scott’s eyes, and the hunger in them terrified me beyond what I’d thought I could feel in death. “Give her to me, and you will live forever.”

  “I’m already dead,” I said.

  “So am I,” Tod pointed out.

  “But you don’t have to be.” The hellion focused on Tod, ignoring me completely. “Give her to me, and I’ll give you a body. A real one, that breathes and beats on its own. One that can age, and change, and truly feel every proper pleasure and base desire. And when that one wears out, there will be another body, fresh and young. They will stretch into eternity for you, and with them, untold lifetimes in the human world, a part of it again, instead of watching from the fringes. All of that, in exchange for one, insignificant little soul. You will forget about her by the end of your first mortal lifetime. Your second, at the latest. Or I could help you forget her now, if you’d prefer.”

  Tod glanced at me, both brows raised. “Can a hellion go insane? Because I think this one’s lost his fucking mind.”

  “I’m dead, Avari,” I repeated. “Doesn’t that make this whole stupid obsession kind of pointless?”

  Scott clasped his hands at his back like an old man and tried to come closer, but Tod stayed between us, and the hellion didn’t seem to like having to look up at him. Or having to look around him to get to me. “Do you still have a soul, Ms. Cavanaugh?”

  “Yes…” I said, and I could already see where this was headed.

  “That soul is yet unsmudged, and unless I’m mistaken—” he made a show of sniffing the air in my direction, and my chill bumps doubled in size “—you died with other virtues intact. Do you have any idea how rare that is in today’s world?”

  “So I’ve heard,” I mumbled.

  “Now, if a hellion had access to the human plane, to a wealth of even purer souls and younger bodies, you might find your value eroded,” he continued. I didn’t give a damn about my value in the Netherworld, but I’d never been more relieved that Avari was stuck there. “Or perhaps not. There is something intriguing and rare about your persistent selflessness.” His frown was part fascination and part confusion, like he couldn’t quite figure out why I drew his interest.

  That made two of us.

  “Okay, I’ve had enough of this crap.” I stepped around Tod, and when he tried to pull me back, I gave him the warning look I’d perfected on Sabine. He backed off, but stayed close. “What the hell happened with Thane? Why didn’t you eat him when you had the chance?”

  “What makes you think I didn’t?” Avari’s words rolled off Scott’s tongue with an ease that made me sick to my undead stomach.

  “I saw him this morning, so unless you regurgitated him, it looks to me like he escaped your evil clutches. Or something like that.”

  “No one escapes—”

  “I did,” I said, before he could even finish his sentence. “Twice, if memory serves.”

  “Three times,” Tod corrected, ticking them off on his fingers. “There was the time in his office, with Addy, then the time at the carnival, then in the cafeteria. Three times.”

  “Oh, yeah. I forgot about the time with Addy.” I turned back to Scott, who looked distinctly unamused. “Three times.”

  “As loathe as I am to concede the fact, you were never truly captured, so you can’t possibly have escaped. And neither has Thane.”

  I crossed both arms over my chest, frowning. Hellions couldn’t outright lie. Possession of a human body didn’t change that, right? “Then what was he doing at the doughnut shop this morning?”

  “Reaping.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that is what reapers do.”

  I rolled my eyes and looked up at Tod. “Okay, this is a waste of time. Let’s go.”

  “Not without what we came for,” he said, and I’d never heard his voice deeper or angrier. “You have two choices here,” Tod said to the hellion. “You can answer some questions, or you can let your boy Scott take a lump to the head.” Which would evict Avari from the body he’d possessed and put a temporary end to his playtime on the human plane.

  “And how will you get the answers you seek then?” Avari demanded, and neither of us had an answer for that. “Nothing is free, Ms. Cavanaugh. Perhaps if you offered a trade…”

  “You’re not getting my soul, or any other part of me,” I said.

  “Information is tonight’s currency, is it not?” he said. “You answer two questions for me, and I will answer one for you.”

  “How is that fair?” Tod demanded, and I realized he’d edged closer to me, like he might have to lunge between me and mortal danger any second. I was beyond the mortal phase of my existence, but his instinct still made me smile.

  “Fair is irrelevant. I am a hellion of greed. I won’t offer this exchange again.”

  “Okay,” I said, and Tod groaned, but I ignored him. “You get two questions, but I go first.” And as soon as I had my answer, I’d blink out.

  Avari clucked Scott’s tongue and shook his head. “I haven’t succumbed to stupidity since we last spoke, Ms. Cavanaugh. But as a gesture of goodwill, I will allow you the second question.”

  That was as good as I was going to get. “Fine. Ask.”

  “What are you, little bean sidhe? How did you survive your own death?”

  “That’s two questions,” Tod pointed out.

  “They are one in spirit,” Avari insisted.

  “But they were two in…words. So I’ll answer one of them,” I said. “I am a reclamation agent. I take stolen souls from monsters like you and see that they get their final rest. Now my question.” But I had to think about that. If he could possibly answer me without divulging any actual information, he would. I’d have to phrase it carefully.

  “Why is Thane on the human plane, if he hasn’t wiggled free from your grip?”

  “He is doing my bidding, Ms. Cavanaugh. Thane the wayward reaper is now bound by new chains of servitude.”

  “So you told him to kill the doughnut-shop owner? Why?”

  Scott’s brows rose, but the expression was all hellion. “Does that mean you’d like to bargain for more information? If not, you still owe me another answer.”

  “You can settle up with her later.” Tod took my hand and reality started to twist and bend around me. The last thing I saw before we appeared in the middle of my bedroom floor was Scott’s face, warped in an angry snarl as the hellion peered out at me through his eyes.

  5

  “SO, DID THAT creep you out as much as it creeped me out?” I asked, flopping down on my bed on my stomach.

  Tod sank into my desk chair and rolled it forward until his knees touched the mattress. “Maybe more. Why would Thane work for Avari, if he’s free to leave the Netherworld?”

  Styx growled at him from the foot of my bed, then settled into my lap when I clucked my tongue at her and patted my leg. “I think the bigger question is what is he doing for Avari, other than the obvious?” Reaping unauthorized souls.

  “What is who doing for Avari?” my father asked, and I looked up in surprise to find him standing in my bedroom doorway. But I could tell from the way his gaze flitted over the room that he couldn’t see either of us. “The disembodied voice and the growling guard dog gave you both away, so you might as well show up for real.”

  “Sorry.” I concentrated on the physical plane��on truly being there—and my father’s gaze finally landed on me. “I didn’t realize I was only half-there.”

  “It takes some practice,” Tod said, and I knew that he’d become fully corporeal, too.

  “So, what’s going on with Avari?” My father leaned against the door frame, not
truly in my room, but clearly stating his intent to be involved in whatever we were up to. And since he’d overheard part of what I’d thought was a private conversation, we’d have to let him into the loop. Otherwise, he’d ask Madeline next time he saw her, and we’d be screwed.

  I glanced at Tod and found just a hint of frustration and fear swirling in the cerulean depths of his eyes. “Thane’s back, and Avari appears to be pulling his strings.”

  My father frowned. “Thane’s back? From the dead? Again?”

  Tod nodded. “He’s like the Rasputin of reapers. He’s evidently impossible to get rid of. But don’t worry,” he said, turning to lay one hand over mine on the edge of the bed. “I’m going to handle this.”

  My father’s forehead furrowed. “And by handle it, you mean…?”

  “I’m going to ask Levi for help.” Tod met my gaze. “Madeline told you to let the reapers police our own, right?” he asked, and I could only nod. “I’m hoping Levi can deal with Thane before anyone else sees him and reports his return. That way he can’t carry out whatever nefarious task Avari put him up to and neither Levi nor I will get in trouble for dealing with him through unsanctioned means like last time.”

  “How would Levi deal with him?” I asked, and my dad looked just as interested in the answer.

  “I assume he’d…end Thane. The only way to do that—that I know of—is to take his soul. I’ve seen Levi do it several times,” Tod said, and my chill bumps were back.

  “I’ve seen it, too,” I said, and the memory was enough to make my hands shake. “I saw him take yours, and he’ll do it again, if Madeline forces his hand.” I sat up on the end of the bed and met my father’s heavy gaze. “You can’t tell Madeline about Thane.”

  My father frowned. But then he nodded.

  “I started this, and I’ll finish it,” Tod said, still watching me. “There’s no reason for you to put yourself in any danger.”

  “I agree,” my father said.

  “Well, then, it’s a good thing I’m not submitting to a vote. I have every reason to get involved in this,” I insisted. “First, I am not going to spend eternity alone,” I said, glaring Tod into silence when he started to argue. “Second of all, Thane has a grudge against all three of us, one of whom he could still kill.” I aimed a pointed glance at my father, who looked like he wanted to argue, but couldn’t. “And anyway, you and Levi are going to need help finding Thane, and I happen to know someone who can sense the dead.”