Before I Wake

then gulped from his mug to clear his throat. “Ever hear of knocking?”

Madeline raised one perfectly arched brow at him. “Mr. Cavanaugh, I’m doing you a courtesy by letting you see and hear me at all. If that isn’t good enough for you, I can appear to Kaylee alone.”

Madeline was my boss in the reclamation department—she was the one who’d okayed the cover-up that hid my death and kept Nash from going down for my murder. She was also the only department member I’d met so far. My dad didn’t like her. She hadn’t bothered to form an opinion of him one way or another.

“It’s fine. Would you like some coffee?” He held up the untouched mug he’d fixed for me.

“This is not a social visit, Mr. Cavanaugh.” Madeline turned to me, arms crossed over her white blouse. “Kaylee, there’s some question about whether or not you’re ready to begin work on your own as an extractor. Four weeks is a rather short training period, we admit, but the soul thief you were restored to deal with has killed again, and we can’t let this continue if there’s any chance you’re ready to take him or her on now.”

A dull knot of fear blossomed deep in my stomach and I fed it with doubts about my own abilities because I knew I should be scared. I would be, if not for the pervasive numbness that settled deeper into me with each day of my afterlife.

“Wait a minute—who is this thief, and why does Kaylee have to be the one to stop him? No one ever bothered to explain that to me. After all, I’m just her father.”

Madeline focused her steely stare at him. “We don’t know who or what the thief is, Mr. Cavanaugh. That’s part of what we need Kaylee to find out. But we’ve already lost two agents chasing him, and frankly, because she is a bean sidhe, Kaylee is our best bet at the moment.”

I was far from sure I could actually do what she wanted, but I couldn’t find any flaw in her logic. As a female bean sidhe, in life, I’d been a death portent. When someone near me was close to death, I got the overwhelming need to wail for the departing soul. But what that wail really did was suspend the soul. Capture it. With the help of a male bean sidhe—Tod, Nash, my uncle, and my dad all qualified—I could reinstate that soul and save the life of its owner. But at great cost. To preserve the balance between life and death, when one life was saved, another would be taken.

Madeline had brought me back from the dead and recruited me in hopes that my bean sidhe abilities would help me succeed where the other extractors had failed. I desperately hoped she was right, because the alternative was the end to my afterlife. A final rest, as she called it.

“And you want me to do this today? Face this thief?” That fear inside me swelled until I felt cold on the inside, like ice was forming in my stomach.

“No. We don’t know the thief’s current whereabouts. But we need to know you’re ready whenever we find him, so today is a trial run, to see how you perform on your own.”

“But the target is real?” my father asked, and I was starting to wonder if I even needed to be here for this discussion of my afterlife.

“Very real.” Madeline met my gaze. “Our necromancer has pinpointed a reaper Levi can’t identify, which means this reaper isn’t from his district.” Tod’s boss was familiar enough with his own employees to recognize their restored souls from a distance. “We suspect he’s a rogue and we think he’ll strike very soon. When that happens, I’ll come for you, and you will go extract the stolen soul from him. Do you understand?”

“No.” In fact, I wanted to curl up in my bed and hide under the covers. “If you know he’s there, why not go get him now?”

“Because he hasn’t stolen any souls yet.”

“So you’re just going to let someone die?”

Madeline scowled. “If we were to apprehend him now, we’d never know for sure the reaper is a rogue and we’d lose this opportunity to see you in action, on your own. Whatever life this reaper takes doesn’t outweigh our opportunity to stop the thief you were restored to deal with. To put it in terms you’ll understand, that’s like swatting a fly, but letting the hornet live.”

“Those aren’t terms I understand! What if yours was the life he was going to take?” I shoved my plate away and stood. I’d found something else that could beat back the numbness—anger. “Who are you to decide what one life is worth?”

“I am your boss.” Madeline didn’t even raise her voice, and it irritated me to realize she wasn’t as upset about this as I was. She wasn’t upset at all. “This serial soul thief is much more dangerous than a single rogue reaper, which makes the reaper an ideal trial run for you. Especially considering that we can track the reaper, thanks to our new necromancer.”

A necromancer, I’d recently learned, was someone who could see and communicate with the dead. Only see isn’t a precise term. It’s more of a sense than true sight. Though in my case, the literal interpretation also applied—a necromancer could see and hear me, even when I made myself invisible and inaudible to everyone else.

“When am I going to meet this necromancer?”

“Today,” Madeline said. “He started class at your school last week, and since it seems likely that the two of you will run into each other, we’d like you to keep an eye on him.”

“Your necromancer is a teenager?”

“I believe he’s in his junior year.”

“Is he alive?” my father asked. He thought the dead-to-living ratio of my friends and coworkers was high enough already.

“Both alive and human, Mr. Cavanaugh. He’s also a very polite young man.”

“They’re gonna eat him alive,” I mumbled, and my father chuckled. “Fine, I’ll keep an eye out for your necromancer, but I can’t promise that associating with me will do him any favors, socially.”

“Thank you, Kaylee,” Madeline said, and I glanced up in surprise over the courtesy. Not that Madeline was ever truly rude, she just wasn’t very…personable. “I’ll find you when and if this reaper turns out to be a rogue.”

With that Madeline disappeared, and my father sighed. “So much for a normal first day back.”

I dipped a strip of bacon in a pool of syrup. “Dad, I can count the number of normal school days I’ve had this year on one hand.”

“I know. I’m sorry about that.” He sipped from his mug, and I shrugged, but before I could reply, Madeline appeared in the kitchen again, and this time I nearly choked. “Change your mind about the coffee?” my dad asked, but she only shook her head.

“The reaper made a kill. It’s time to earn your keep, Kaylee.”

I swallowed the bite I’d nearly choked on then stood, nerves buzzing in my stomach like I’d devoured a swarm of flies, even though I knew what to do. I’d been practicing for a month. But… “I have to be in first period in twenty minutes.”

“Then work fast.” Madeline reached into the pocket of her suit jacket and pulled out what looked like a handful of metal, which she held out for me to take. I lifted what turned out to be a heart-shaped locket on a gold chain. It was pretty, in a sweet, dated kind of way.

“It’s heavy.” I frowned, trying to slide my fingernail into the edge seam. “And it doesn’t open.”

“That’s because it’s not a locket. It’s an amphora. This will hold the soul after you capture it. This was designed especially for you, to look like something a young woman would wear.”

“A young woman from what era?” I mumbled, slipping the chain over my head.

Madeline frowned. “Bring this back to me when you have the soul. Do not try to apprehend the rogue. It’s up to the reapers to police their own—we’re only concerned with the stolen soul he carries. Do you understand?”

“Yeah.” I wasn’t looking to pick a fight on my first day, anyway. “Where is this reaper?”

“He killed someone at the Daylight Donuts shop three minutes ago. If you hurry, he might still be close. If you have trouble finding or identifying him, sing for the soul.”

“Okay, but—”

“Go, Kaylee.”

I glanced from Madeline to my father, who nodded reluctantly. So I closed my eyes and thought of the doughnut shop—fortunately, I’d been there a million times. When I opened my eyes, I stood in the middle of the small dining area. The shop was open, but empty, and a quick glance around revealed the body of the owner on the floor of the kitchen, still in his long white apron. But there was no reaper.

Panicked, I stepped through the locked back door of the shop and into an alley, my feet silent on the concrete