Before I Wake

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 for 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.