Before I Wake

“Bastards have no self-respect,” Sabine muttered as the last of the crowd dissipated. “Even I don’t feed off the weak or the injured.”

I decided not to waste my breath telling her I was neither weak nor injured—physically, anyway. “Will you stay and eat with me?” I asked, glancing from Sabine to Nash, who closed his eyes and took a deep breath, then met my gaze again. “I brought burgers.”

Free food was usually enough to tempt Sabine, but Nash was another story.

“Is he here?” Nash asked, and I realized that was the first time I’d heard his voice since the day I died.

“He” was Tod, of course.

“Not yet, but you could stay till he gets here. Or you could just stay. You have every right to hate us both, but this doesn’t have to be…” Words failed me when the thought behind them trailed into nothing.

“Doesn’t have to be what, Kaylee?” Nash demanded softly. “Awkward and painful? Because if you know of some other way for me to view the fact that my brother stole my girlfriend, who then framed me for her murder, I’m willing to listen.”

But I didn’t. That was all true, and trying to defend either of us would only have made Nash angrier.

He started to turn away, and I stood, hyperaware of all the eyes watching us. “Please, stay,” I said, and he stopped. “Please, just… Maybe we could start again?” I said, so that only he and Sabine could hear. “I know we can’t erase everything that went wrong between us, but maybe we could kind of turn the page and start on a fresh one. Tabula rasa.”

Nash glanced at Sabine, who shrugged, then they both sat. And I realized I had no idea what to say. My plan ended with begging them both to sit with me, because I hadn’t really expected that to work.

“Um, Em and her boyfriend will be here any minute, which will probably put an end to genuine conversation, but… How are you?” I asked, pulling burgers from the grease-stained bag. His recovery from frost addiction had suffered a recent relapse and Harmony had said that kicking the habit a second time was even harder, because withdrawal was more severe.

“Do you even eat anymore?” Nash asked, ignoring my question entirely.

“I don’t have to, but, yeah, I can.” I handed him a burger and a carton of fries, and Sabine helped herself to the bag, impatient as always. “Nash, I’m so sorry.”

“You already said that,” Sabine said, folding the wrapper back from her burger. “You said it a lot, actually. Which supports my theory that apologies are basically pointless. They don’t fix anything, right? That’s why I rarely bother.”

“An apology isn’t a Band-Aid,” I insisted. “It’s an expression of regret.”

“Not that that matters.” Nash’s voice was deep and angry. He hadn’t touched his food. “Half these assholes still think I stabbed you, Kaylee. How is it that I stayed away from you, just like you told me to, yet I still wound up arrested and charged with killing you?”

“I didn’t have any choice.” That was the truth, and I needed him to believe that worse than I’d ever needed anything from him. “Beck said he’d rape and kill Em and Sophie if I didn’t cooperate. I couldn’t let that happen. He’d already hurt so many.” The memory chilled me, which made it hard to keep my heart beating, in a body that was already reluctant to cooperate. “But I fixed it. I told the police you weren’t even there.”

“You got the charges dropped, but you can’t take back what you did,” Nash insisted, and he was right. “I was convicted in the court of public opinion the minute they handcuffed me and threw me in the back of the police car. In front of my mother. How are you going to undo that?”

“I don’t know.” Tears burned at the back of my eyes and I fought to keep them from falling. I hadn’t even known I could still cry, but there they were, and suddenly I felt just as powerless in death as I’d been in life. “I’ll tell people. I’ll say whatever you want. I’ll…I’ll do an interview for the school paper, if that’ll help. Chelsea’s been bugging me to—”

“Forget about it.” Nash picked up his burger and tore half the wrapper from it, but he looked like the thought of eating made him sick. “Just don’t talk about it, and maybe this’ll all go away. Eventually.”

“Kaylee?”

I jumped, then turned toward the new voice to see the guy I’d collided with in the hall earlier, staring down at me like he was determined to have his say. “Look, I’ve had a rough day, and I can’t handle any more gawkers or gossipmongers, so if that’s what—”

“I’m Luca Tedesco. Madeline told me to introduce myself.” He smiled and stuck his hand out, and for a moment, I could only stare at it, as what he’d said sank in.

“Oh! I’m so sorry.” Instead of taking the hand he offered, I scooted over to make room for him on the bench. “You’re the necromancer?” I whispered, unable to hide my surprise. After what Madeline had said, I’d expected small, shy, and awkward, not tall, dark, and gorgeous.

Although, hadn’t I once been even more surprised when a certain rookie reaper turned out to be tall, blond, and beautiful?

“The new guy’s a necromancer?” Sabine said, and I enjoyed a rare glimpse of her surprise.

“Yeah.” Luca sat and glanced around the table, instantly at ease with a group of people he’d never met before. “So, I assume your friends are…?”

It took me a second to realize what he was asking, but Sabine caught on quickly. “I think ‘friend’ is kind of an iffy descriptor at the moment, but your necro-talk isn’t going to freak out a mara and a bean sidhe. I’m Sabine Campbell and this is Nash Hudson.” She placed one hand on her own chest, then gestured toward Nash.

“A mara and a bean sidhe. Wow.” Luca took a fry from the carton I offered him. “Madeline said I’d be in good company here, but I assumed she was just trying to con me into moving.”

“Who the hell is Madeline?” Sabine asked as Nash alternately stared at me, then Luca.

“She’s my boss in the reclamation department. Our boss, I guess,” I said with a glance at the new guy. “Luca and I are going to be working together.”

“So, how do you know Kaylee?” Luca asked, and I could tell from Sabine’s evil grin that I wasn’t going to like her answer.

“Oh, Nash used to not-quite-sleep with her, and I hung around to reinforce the ‘not quite’ part. But I’ve been relieved of duty on that front, since Kaylee dumped him for his brother in a nasty public spectacle. It was quite the scandal, even for those of us who saw it coming.”

Nash frowned, but didn’t argue. “Okay, what the hell is a necromancer?”

“He sees dead people,” Sabine said, favoring Luca with a rare smile. “Like that kid in the movie, right?”

Luca shrugged. “Sort of. Only without the ghosts. I mostly sense the recently dead and the restored. Like Kaylee. And like that reaper this morning.”

Nash stiffened. “Tod?”

Luca shrugged and glanced at me in question, and I winced over the verbal quicksand he had no idea he’d just stepped into. “I don’t know. Was the reaper named Tod?”

“Um, no. It was someone else.”

Nash relaxed a little, but Sabine frowned at me. As usual, she was too perceptive for her own good. And way too perceptive for my good. “Someone you know? Do you know another reaper?”

I looked up to find all three of them staring at me, waiting for the answer to a question I desperately didn’t want to answer in front of Luca, at least until I could be sure he wouldn’t tell Madeline.

“He was a rogue, right?” Luca said. “He killed that guy in the doughnut shop?”

“Yeah, he…wasn’t Tod,” I finished lamely, while Nash and Sabine stared at me. “I reclaimed the soul, though. Madeline has it.”

“Luca?” a familiar voice called from across the quad, and I looked up to see my cousin Sophie crossing the grass toward us, her gaze holding steady on the necromancer. That look was comfortable. Familiar. She didn’t even glance at the rest of us. “Did you get lost?”

Luca smiled like he knew her, and another layer of weird settled onto my life. “Nope. I braved the great divide to introduce myself to your cousin.” His arm slid around her waist when she stopped at the end of our table, and my mouth actually dropped open. “Turns out we’re going to be working together.”

“Wait, you two know each other?” My voice sounded kind of funny. Stunned. Sophie knew the necromancer.