Before I Wake

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 the 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.”

My hands were shaking again, and my heart was pounding like it hadn’t since the night I died. “You’re not coming with me?”

Madeline shook her head. “Since you’re new, under normal circumstances, I’d go to observe and help out where I can. However, I have a meeting with the head of my old district in five minutes, wherein I plan to beg for some emergency manpower.”

I nodded slowly, and a cold numbness blossomed in my stomach, then began to spread. On my own. I was going to be on my own. If I died, there’d be no witness to tell my friends and family what happened to me.

“Kaylee, listen to me,” Madeline said, and I forced my eyes to bring her back into focus. “If this goes badly, run. We need the thief, but we need you worse. Do you understand?”

“Yeah.” Tod had said the same thing the night before. I turned to Luca and could hardly hear the words coming from my own mouth. “Where am I going?”

“Second floor of the mall. East end.” He shrugged, and I was relieved to realize he looked as stunned by all of this as I was. “That’s where the body is, anyway, though someone may have found it by now.”

I nodded. Then I concentrated on the mall and blinked out of the quad before I could lose my nerve.

Three miles was too far for me to go in one shot, at least without more practice, so I had to stop twice on the way, but I still arrived at the east end of the mall just seconds after I’d left school.

The mall was pretty quiet in the middle of a weekday, when most people were still at work and school, but the indoor playground was crowded with toddlers and their mothers, the gossip and giggles floating up to me from the floor below. Two elderly ladies race-walked past without seeing me, their arms pumping, sneakers squeaking on the floor. Other than that, I saw only a handful of shoppers carrying bags, most of them women in their thirties, and the occasional man in a suit, who’d stopped at the mall for lunch.

None of them looked like a murderer, which forced me to admit that I had no idea what a murderer looked like. The police had thought Nash looked like a killer, but he was innocent. Tod killed people for a living—only those whose time was up—and no one would ever know, just from looking at him. If they could’ve seen him. Mr. Beck could have been a movie star, but he was guilty as hell. And if we were being really nitpicky about the definition, I was a killer, too.

So the only thing I could be certain of as I scanned the faces around me, glad I was incorporeal so no one could see me clutching the heart-shaped amphora hanging from a chain around my neck, was that no one had found