Before I Wake ss-6

by Rachel Vincent

  I opened my eyes to find Nash lying on his back on the ground, propped up on one elbow, one hand still gripped in mine.

  “Where are we?”

  “Almost there.” I closed my eyes again, and pictured the first-floor supply closet, across the hall from the teachers’ lounge. An instant later we were there, in the dark, Nash sprawled out on the floor with me sitting beside him.

  “What the hell, Kaylee?” He jerked his hand from my grip, and when he tried to sit up, something crashed to the ground with an ominous-sounding slosh.

  “Hang on.” I stood carefully and felt around on the wall next to the door. When I flipped the switch, dim light flooded the small space from a bare lightbulb overhead, highlighting Nash’s angry face with dramatic shadows. “Here’s your shirt. I think second period’s almost over.”

  “Damn it, Kaylee!” He jerked the shirt over his head, then shoved his arms through the sleeves. “I don’t even have any shoes!”

  “Don’t you keep cleats in your locker?” I asked as he stood, glaring down at me.

  “I can’t walk around all day in baseball cleats!”

  I shrugged. “Then go barefoot.”

  “Take me home, Kaylee. Now.”

  “No.” I crossed both arms over my chest. “You can’t just stay at home and pout when everyone you care about is at risk. All we have is one another, Nash. You, me, Sabine, Emma, and Tod. You owe it to us—all of us—to look out for us like we look out for you.”

  “Like you were looking out for me when you kissed my brother?” he demanded. “Or when you framed me for murder?”

  “More like when Tod and Sabine kept you from overdosing or hurting yourself when you fell off the wagon. Or when I made a deal with Levi and Madeline to clear your name. Or when Tod got rid of the dealer who supplied you with frost in the first place. Do you even know what he did?” I demanded, and Nash shook his head, brushing dust from the ground off his pants.

  “He dropped him in the Netherworld. That’s a death sentence for a human. Your brother killed to protect you from yourself. And that’s not even…” I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying what else Tod had done for him. That wasn’t my secret to tell. “The point is that you’re not alone, Nash, and you have to stop acting like you are. We’re in this together. All of us. And we need you as badly as you need us. So stop pushing us away, because we’re not going anywhere.”

  Nash blinked at me, surprise shining in his eyes. But that wasn’t all. In the low light, I thought I saw something else swirling in his irises. Something serious, and…relieved. “I’m so sorry for what I did to you, Kaylee. In the parking lot. I should have said it before. When I’m thinking straight, I can’t blame you for turning to him.” Tod, of course. Nash still wouldn’t say his name.

  “You know it had nothing to do with that.”

  “But it did,” he insisted. “If I’d been the answer to your problems instead of the source of them, you would never have even looked at him. So, I blame myself as much as I blame him.”

  “Don’t.” My eyes were watering for the second time in an hour. Three hours earlier, I’d felt so empty I didn’t even want to get out of bed, and now I was so full of pain and regret I could hardly make myself breathe. “Don’t blame either of you. I did this. I kissed him.” I glanced at my feet, then made myself meet his gaze again. “I love him, Nash. I’m sorry, but it’s true.”

  He exhaled slowly. “I know.”

  The bell for third period rang then, and we both glanced up, startled, even though we’d known it was coming. “I have to go back for my backpack.” Which I’d just realized I’d left in his living room. “I can grab some shoes for you, if you want.”

  “Thanks.”

  We parted ways in the hall, and I wondered if anyone had seen us coming out of the closet together, him with no shoes. Then I realized I didn’t care what anyone else saw, or thought, or said about us. Nash and I had been through more together than any of them could ever imagine, and if they couldn’t understand the wounds we’d inflicted, they couldn’t understand how long and bumpy the road to forgiveness really was.

  10

  I PICKED UP my backpack and Nash’s shoes, then practiced selective corporeality by letting only him see me slide them into his bag during his third-period class. Then I texted Sabine.

  Nash is here, and he’s fine. And he loves you.

  I’d just sat down at my normal table in the quad—invisible, even though there was no one there to see me—and was feeling pretty good about being nice to Sabine for no particular reason when Tod appeared on the grass in front of me. “Hey!” I slid my phone into my pocket, then stood to kiss him, and instead of letting me go, he lifted me onto the end of the picnic table I ate at every day. At least, every day before I’d died.

  Since no one could see us, I pulled him closer, and he settled into the space between my thighs, then leaned down for another kiss.

  “Mmm… What’s the occasion?” I murmured.

  “Wednesday.”

  “My new favorite day.”

  “No one’s scheduled to kick the proverbial bucket in the next hour, so I thought I’d come say hi before I head back for my double shift.”

  Frowning, I let my hand trail down his chest, wishing there wasn’t a layer of cotton between his skin and mine. “Why the double?”

  “Mareth didn’t pick up the list for the noon-to-midnight shift, and Levi can’t find her, so I have to fill in until she shows up.” Mareth was the reaper who shared the hospital reaping zone with Tod. She had nearly two decades’ seniority over him, but was still considered a rookie, by reaper standards.

  “Has she ever flaked before?”

  “No, and she’s always been cool about trading shifts with me when I need to.”

  Unease started twisting in my stomach. “It’s Thane,” I said, and Tod started to shake his head, but I spoke over him. “What if it wasn’t you specifically that he needed? What if he just needed a reaper, and he knew he could find one at the hospital? When he couldn’t get you, he could easily have gone after Mareth. That way he wouldn’t have to go back to Avari empty-handed.”

  “Why would Avari need a reaper? He already has Thane.”

  “Yes, but Thane wants out of…whatever he’s into. Isn’t that what Sabine said?” Or had Thane said that? “Either way, I’m gonna see if Luca can find Mareth. If she’s in the local area, on the human plane, he’ll know it.”

  “I still say that’s creepy. There’s no one out there mentally stalking humans.”

  “Isn’t that what Sabine does?” I said, and Tod laughed. “So, does this mean you’re actually working three shifts in a row?” Because there were only two twelve-hour shifts a day.

  “Yes, unless Mareth shows up. But I’ll have several long breaks. You’ll be seeing a lot of me.”

  “How much of you is a lot?” I asked, sliding my fingers beneath his shirt. The material rose with my hands, exposing smooth, hard abs.

  “You can see as much as you want, whenever you want.”

  “Unless you’re working, right?” I teased, but the heat in his eyes when he shook his head was unmistakable.

  “Whenever you want. Death itself would wait for you, Kaylee… .”

  * * *

  Lunch sucked without Tod, but on the bright side, Nash was acting almost normal again, and Sabine seemed to have forgiven him. Luca sat at Sophie’s table, and I couldn’t get him away from her long enough to ask him about Mareth, and I didn’t really want to get into it with my cousin, even if she did know the truth about the things that went bump in the night.

  Jayson seemed hyperaware that he didn’t really fit in, so he overcompensated by talking almost nonstop. I tried to participate in the conversation—I really did—but I had very little interest in the baseball team’s season standings, especially since Nash had quit the team, and I couldn’t care less about senior skip day, because I wasn’t a senior, and I wasn’t sure I ever would be.

  I’d stopped
making assumptions about my future more than a month earlier, when I realized that while there are few guarantees in life, there are even fewer in the afterlife.

  I was stirring green peas into my mashed potatoes, poking the lumpy concoction aimlessly, when Emma kicked me beneath the table. Or rather, she tried, but her foot when right through my leg and hit the bottom of the bench instead. And that’s when I realized I was fading out again.

  I blinked in surprise and pulled myself back into focus to find everyone at our table staring at me. Including Jayson. “You okay?” he said, frowning at me from across the table. “You look kinda pale.”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” One more second, and I would have looked transparent. “What were we talking about?”

  “Prom,” Emma said.

  “And how thoroughly absent some of us will be,” Sabine added.

  “You have to go,” Em insisted. “It’s your senior prom. Why don’t you want to go?”

  “I don’t do dresses.”

  “Nash.” Em leaned forward to see him around Sabine. “Tell her she has to go. Senior prom only happens once.”

  “Actually, I’m failing three classes right now, so there’s a good chance it’ll happen twice for me. And it’ll probably take me that whole year to talk her into wearing a dress.” He grinned, like that was a joke, but only Jayson laughed.

  “You’re failing three classes?” I couldn’t believe it. Nash was an honor student. He’d been ranked twelfth in the senior class at midterms.

  He glanced at the table, then met my gaze, his own swirling with some complicated blend of regret and melancholy. “It’s been a rough semester.”

  “He’s just behind on a few assignments, but his teachers are all working with him,” Sabine said, and I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around the fact that she was passing both junior and senior English in one year to graduate on time, but Nash was suddenly failing.

  “I can still turn in my history term paper for ninety percent credit, and if I ace that and my final, I’ll pull a B for the year,” Nash said. He’d lose his ranking, but he’d graduate. Assuming his other teachers were that generous.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, staring at the table.

  “Kay, it’s not your fault,” Nash insisted.

  “It’s kind of her fault,” Sabine said, and she was right. When he and I started going out, Nash had been an athlete and an honor student. He’d had several options for college, and scholarships had been a strong possibility. But I’d ruined all that for him. I’d turned him into an addict, then abandoned him, cheated on him, dumped him, and framed him for murder. No wonder he was failing. It was a miracle he hadn’t quit school entirely, instead of just the baseball team.

  “No, I made my own mess and I can still clean it up,” Nash said, and for the first time in a long time, I believed him.

  “If there’s anything I can do to help, please tell me,” I said. And I meant it.

  “Thanks,” Nash said, and he meant that, too.

  * * *

  I made it through English without disappearing in my chair, and Em and I were just starting a pairs translation exercise in French when Madeline materialized next to my chair and nearly scared me to death. Er, deeper into death. Or whatever.

  “Time to go to work,” she said, and to keep from looking crazy, I had to direct my response to Em instead of the empty air everyone else would see where Madeline was standing.

  “No, it’s time to translate conversational French.”

  “What?” Em frowned. But she didn’t look entirely surprised by my random declaration. She was getting used to me talking to people who weren’t obviously present.

  “Creepy undead employer at three o’clock,” I said, so that only Madeline and Em could hear me.

  Em stiffened and glanced to the side out of habit, but her gaze passed right over Madeline, who was only visible to me.

  “Now,” Madeline said, and I exhaled in frustration.

  “Sorry to bail on you, Em, but I have to go confiscate a stolen soul from some horrible Netherworld monster. If I’m not back when the bell rings, could you grab my books?”

  Emma’s eyes widened, but she nodded, so I grabbed the bathroom pass and mouthed the word emergency to Mrs. Brown on my way out of the classroom. Then I faded from the physical plane in the empty hall and followed Madeline to the quad, where Luca waited for us both at our lunch table.

  “She got to you, too, huh?” I said, sliding onto the bench seat across from him.

  “Actually, I called her.” Luca grinned. “I’m vomiting from a possible case of food poisoning. You?”

  “Sudden onset menstruation.”

  He nodded respectfully. “Classic.”

  “Yeah, but I should have gone for something more long-term. Yours will get you out of the whole afternoon. Ferris Bueller would be proud.”

  Madeline cleared her throat, bringing all banter to an end. “Luca, if you don’t mind?” She gestured toward me.

  “Sorry.” Luca met my gaze again from across the table, and this time he was appropriately somber. “There’s a corpse at the mall. Fresh. Maybe ten minutes dead.”

  “How do you know that?” I was morbidly fascinated by his abilities.

  Luca shrugged. “I can feel dead things from the moment they die until they start to rot or are preserved through artificial means.”

  “So, you can’t feel the bodies in a cemetery?”

  “Not usually. Those are either preserved or rotting, or both. But I can feel you, so long as you’re within a few miles of me, and when there are two of you, I know Tod’s with you.”

  “I’m gonna try to pretend that’s not creepy,” I said, and Luca nodded in sympathy, like he agreed with my assessment.

  “I’ve already checked with Levi, and no one was scheduled to die at the mall today,” Madeline said. “It’s the serial soul thief.”

  “How do you know? Couldn’t it be another rogue reaper? Or the same rogue reaper?” How long could I get away with not telling them about Thane? If I’d given a full disclosure earlier, would I have prevented this latest death? And if so, would this life have been spared at the expense of Tod’s?

  “It’s not a reaper,” Luca said. “There’s only one corpse at the mall, which means who or whatever the killer is, he’s alive. Or at least, he’s not dead.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We’re hoping you’ll be able to tell us that very soon.” Madeline pulled my amphora from her pocket and handed it to me. “But before you go, there’s something else you need to know.” She sighed and sank onto the bench next to me and the death of her formal manner scared me even worse than knowledge of what I was about to do. “I owe you the truth, Kaylee, and I’m going to give it to you, even though we really don’t have time to get into this right now.”

  “The truth? Have you been lying to me?” Maybe right before I go face untold evil isn’t the best time to spring that on me!

  “No, but I’ve omitted something important, and I apologize for that. I did what I thought was best for all involved, because I believed that if you doubted the strength of the reclamation department, you would doubt your own strength, and there’s no reason for you to ever doubt yourself, Kaylee. You were recruited for your strength just as much as for your bean sidhe abilities and we are especially grateful to have you right now because…you’re the only one left.”

  I blinked, trying to make sense of words that didn’t seem to go together, but she may as well have been speaking Swahili. “What? What does that mean, Madeline?”

  “I told you that the serial soul thief has already killed two of our other extractors. Well, two days ago, he killed the third and last. We were a small department in the first place, because under normal circumstances, there isn’t much work for extractors—thank goodness. Whatever’s been happening in this area in the past few months is almost unheard of. We’re not sure what’s going on, but it’s obvious that something dangerous and powerful has moved into th
e area.”

  Avari? His presence had drawn other hellions—and who knew what else—into the area. Did the soul thief have something to do with him? I would have to tell Madeline about Avari and Thane, but there wasn’t time to explain it all immediately. Not when she was still confessing her own secrets.

  “Levi and I have our hands full trying to keep the human media and authorities out of the way.”

  The police were suspicious, the media was aggressively speculative, and the parents were worried about the recent rash of mysterious deaths in our small Texas suburb. But Levi and Madeline, and whoever else they were working with, had hidden all the supernatural elements, and since all the recent tragedies had happened months apart, no one in our world had been able to draw any real connections between them.

  Still, the community was understandably anxious, and their unfocused fear only further fed Avari.

  “New extractors take a while to train, of course,” Madeline continued. “And you’re the last of them, Kaylee. You’re all I have left.”

  I blinked, then closed my eyes, trying in vain to draw my thoughts into focus. Madeline hadn’t been isolating me from the rest of the department because I hadn’t proven myself. She wasn’t isolating me at all, because there was no one to isolate me from.

  “I’m it?” No. It’s not possible.

  She nodded slowly. “You, and Luca, and me. We are the reclamation department. I’ve requested additional help from the two closest regions, but they’re swamped at the moment. Both of them are reporting an increase in stolen souls and losses similar to ours, and they have no one to spare. And what’s worse is that Levi tells me he’s now missing a reaper. Something very big is happening, and it seems to have started here. We’re the only ones prepared to stop whatever’s happening, and the truth is that we don’t even know what we’re facing. But whatever it is, you have to go face it right now, before the thief disappears again and we’ve lost another chance, and even more souls.”