Before I Wake

your recovery?”

“Don’t even look at her,” Sabine whispered as Nash said, “Just keep walking.”

“How do they even know he’s out?” I said when the front doors had closed behind us, careful that only Nash and Sabine could hear me. “What, did Avari hold a press conference?”

“I don’t know, but if I see him again, I’m going to expel the hellion by any means necessary,” Nash said. So far, the only means we knew of was to knock the host unconscious. “Maybe Scott can stay with me for a few days, so Baskerville can watch out for us both.”

Sabine didn’t look happy about sharing Nash with another houseguest, but he didn’t even notice. “I’ll see you both at lunch. I’m gonna go see if the nurse will give me some Tylenol.”

“I don’t think she treats hangovers,” I called after him, and when I turned to glance at Sabine, she was already walking off in the other direction.

* * *

At lunch, I went through the line and got a tray, because that’s what you do at lunch, and looking and acting normal had become a part of my job. I’d just sat down at my usual table and cracked the cap on my bottle of water when Luca came jogging up to my table. Instead of sitting, he leaned over with both hands flat on the table.

“Hey, I know we just met, but I need to ask you for a favor—” I said, but he interrupted me before I could ask him to find Thane again.

“I just saw Sophie crying, and I tried to find out what’s wrong, but she ran into the girls’ bathroom in the front hall. Can you go check on her?”

I have to admit, I hesitated. Sophie had turned on me more times than I could count, and even after she’d learned the family secret, she’d abandoned me to the wolves on my first day back at school. And the last time I’d followed my cousin into the bathroom, I’d found her shearing a beauty queen with a pair of pinking shears.

“Please,” Luca said, and I was surprised to realize he actually liked her. For real. Even more, he was worried about her.

“Fine. But if a beautiful blond reaper shows up while I’m gone, don’t freak out. That’s my boyfriend, Tod.”

Luca nodded, clearly confused, and I headed through the cafeteria and into the front hall, then pushed open the door to the girls’ restroom. The room looked empty, but someone was sniffling in the last stall.

“Sophie?”

The sniffling stopped. “Go away, Kaylee.” My cousin’s voice had that just-cried nasal quality, but lacked its usual hostile bite.

“What’s wrong?” I pushed open the last stall to find her perched on the edge of the toilet seat, her phone cradled in both hands.

“Like you care.”

“Why would I be here if I didn’t care?”

“I don’t know why you do half the things you do, Kaylee.”

I crossed both arms over my chest, rapidly losing patience. “Okay, this is your last chance to soak up some free sympathy and attention before I go tell Luca you’re throwing a fit over a broken nail.”

She blinked when I said Luca’s name, then her eyes filled with tears again. “Not that it’ll mean anything to you, but I just found out that Scott died yesterday, okay? How’s that for a broken nail? My ex, whom you got arrested, died in the mental hospital yesterday morning.”

My hands started to shake, and I had to concentrate to keep my heart from stopping. “That’s not possible,” I whispered as Scott’s face flashed behind my eyes, twisted into a sneer that was all Avari.

“Why? You think you’re the only one allowed to die around here? Not everything is about you, Kaylee Cavanaugh.”

“Are you sure he died at the hospital?”

Sophie set her phone in her lap to blot tears from her eyes with a thin square of toilet paper. “Yes, I’m sure. Where else would he be?”

“And you’re sure it was yesterday? Not this morning?” Tod and I had seen Scott since then. So had Nash.

“What is wrong with you?” my cousin demanded, frowning up at me through glittery mascara that had started to streak beneath her eyes. “You’re acting even weirder than usual.”

I snatched the phone from her lap and ignored her protest while I scanned the article she’d been reading. My horror grew with every word, and when I saw the picture attached to the article, I stopped breathing altogether. It was a shot of me, sitting in my chemistry class, clearly taken through the school window the day before.

The headline read Teen Returns to School the Day Her First Attacker Is Found Dead. The article went on to explain how, months before my math teacher tried to kill me, eighteen-year-old Scott William Carter was arrested and declared unfit to stand trial for attempting to commit the exact same crime. Scott, according to the article, was discovered dead in his bed at Lakeside Mental Health Center on Monday morning, during breakfast.

The article ended with the reporter wondering what it was about me that made people want to kill me. Then he called me a serial survivor.

The irony burned deep, deep inside.

7

“BUT HOW COULD he have died before you saw him?” Em whispered from across the table. She was trying to get caught up before Jayson arrived and we’d have to either table the discussion or move it elsewhere.

“I don’t know,” I said, screwing the top back onto my bottle of water.

“The list of things we can’t make sense of is extra-long and twisty today,” Tod said. He’d shown up with two boxes of pizza while I was still in the bathroom, but if any of the teachers realized he wasn’t a student, he’d have to leave. Or at least pretend to leave.

“Are you sure you saw him last night?” Em asked, and Nash shook his head, staring at the slice of pizza lying untouched on a napkin in front of him. Tod had brought his favorite—pepperoni and mushrooms—but whatever appetite he’d had and whatever tolerance he’d been willing to extend to his brother had expired the moment he found out Scott was dead.

“I’m not sure,” Nash said. “I don’t remember it very clearly.”

“Okay, but we know what we saw,” Tod pointed out. “Kaylee and I saw and spoke to him in the hospital, more than twelve hours after the newspaper says he died.”

“Ohh,” I breathed as a piece of the puzzle fell into place. “He wasn’t packing to be released. Someone else had started boxing up his things. Because he died.”

“Can a hellion possess a dead body?” Sabine asked around a mouthful of pizza

Tod shrugged. “Before today, I would have said no.”

Emma frowned and glanced around the quad, on the lookout for Jayson. “Okay, but even if that’s possible, are you seriously suggesting that Avari possessed a body in the hospital morgue, dressed it in its own clothes, walked it across the street to the mental-health center, broke into the adolescent ward, then waltzed into Scott’s room, and no one noticed?”

Sabine scowled, but before she could defend her theory, Nash pushed the pizza box toward the middle of the table and exhaled. “Can we please stop referring to Scott as a dead body?”

No one bothered to point out that the description was accurate. This was just the latest in a series of losses that had begun shaping Nash’s life long before I met him.

“Sorry,” Em mumbled, and for about a minute, no one spoke.

Then the silence got the better of Sabine and she turned to Tod. “Okay, then, was he scheduled to die yesterday? Can you ask your boss?”

“Don’t have to,” Tod said as Luca made his way across the quad toward us. “Lakeside is in my zone, because it’s attached to the hospital, and Scott died during my shift. If his death was scheduled, I would have been the one reaping his soul. At the very least, I would have known about it.”

“Okay, Sophie’s calmer now, but they’re still sending her home,” Luca said, sliding onto the bench next to