Before I Wake

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3

“HEY, WHAT ARE you doing here?” Tod said, taking my hand as I sank into the waiting-room chair next to him. “Rough day at school?”

“Mandatory counseling. And I got mobbed in the hall between first and second period.”

He rolled his eyes in mock exasperation. “You’d think they’ve never seen a murder victim returned from the dead to reclaim the souls of the fallen and grant them eternal rest.”

“Well, when you say it like that…”

“Just give them some time, Kaylee. Eventually you’ll be old news again, and life will go back to normal.” Tod shrugged. “Except you won’t actually be living it.”

“Not helping.” There was a time when I’d thought it would be nice to be noticed. To stand out, like Emma or Sophie. Now I stood out, but for all the wrong reasons. Anonymity was a luxury I’d never expected to miss.

I ran my thumb over the back of Tod’s hand. Just touching him made me feel more…real. More there. More alive. I pulled him closer for a kiss and my heart beat faster when his lips touched mine. My pulse raced, and I suddenly remembered what it had felt like the first time we’d kissed, not in my head, like a mere memory, but in my entire body. Like I was reliving it. Like I could go back to that moment, the most alive I’d ever felt before or since, and live in it for eternity.

For a second, I almost forgot I was dead. And that he was dead. And that we were surrounded by sick people in the waiting room of the local hospital.

Then someone coughed and a baby started crying. Reality roared back into focus, and it was such a disappointment that my chest ached from the loss of something I hadn’t really had in the first place.

Why did I feel so disconnected from everything around me? How could I look the same, but feel so different? Empty, like a shell. A Kaylee-shell, still me on the outside, but hollow on the inside. I’d thought that going back to school—seeing friends and classmates, and even teachers—would help me fill the void. I’d thought that if I could stuff the shell of my former self with the pieces of my former life, everything could go back to the way it was.

I’d thought my death could be just a blip on the radar of my life, over and done with in short order. I should have known better, just from being with Tod. His death wasn’t a blip. It was the defining moment of his existence. His death—how, why, and when he’d died—had shaped him. Defined him.

What did my death say about me? That I was a victim? That I wasn’t strong enough to protect Nash like I’d protected Emma and Sophie?

“Hey.” Tod squeezed my hand to draw me out of my thoughts. “I think death looks good on you.” He took my other hand and his fingers wound around mine, my arm stretched over the chair rail between us. “I look forward to the day when I won’t have to share you with roving bands of high-school gossip mobs.”

“That day could be today,” I admitted. “I don’t want to go back.” But I didn’t have any choice. I’d begged and bargained for the chance to pretend I was still alive, and now that I’d gotten that chance, I had to uphold my end of the deal. I had to keep up with appearances.

“It’ll get better,” Tod said, and his next blink was too long. “So, did you see Nash?”

“Only in passing. I doubt he’ll be offering an olive branch anytime soon.”

“You could make the first move,” Tod suggested, running his thumb over the back of mine.

“Yeah, if I could get him to speak to me. How is he?” During both rounds of recovery from addiction to frost —Demon’s Breath, to those in the know—Tod had checked in on his brother regularly, though Nash never saw him.

“I can’t get very close to him anymore. That damn dog barks every time I show up, and Nash starts yelling for me to get out.”

Nash’s dog, Baskerville, was Styx’s littermate.

“Nash isn’t going to forgive me,” Tod said. “Not yet, anyway. But he might forgive you. He still loves you, Kaylee.”

Something in his voice made my heart hurt, and I hated that I liked that. Feeling anything was so rare lately that even pain had become interesting.

“You’re not worried about me and Nash, are you?” I asked, ducking to catch his gaze. “Because—”

“No.” He put one finger over my mouth, then replaced it with his lips, and that kiss went deeper and longer than would have been appropriate in a hospital, if anyone could have seen us. And when he finally pulled away, his gaze met mine, and everything that kiss had said was still echoing in his eyes, in fierce cobalt swirls of emotion so bold and confident it couldn’t possibly be shaken. “I’m not worried about you and Nash. I’m worried about just Nash.”

“Me, too.”

“Did something happen?”

“Something happened, but not because of Nash. I had my first reclamation this morning,” I said, wishing we weren’t separated by the arm of the chair between us. “Rogue reaper. Sort of a trial run, before they send me on the job they brought me back for.”

“So, did you kick ass?”

I grinned, indulging in a moment of pride over the fact that I’d actually gotten the job done. First time. “There was both the kicking of ass and the taking of names. One name, actually.”

Tod’s pale brows rose. “I take it this is a name I might know?”

My moment of pride ended in a cold wash of fear and confusion. “Thane.”

His brow furrowed. “Thane, the lovable, brand-new reaper I’ve never met, who means none of us any harm? Please say you mean that Thane… .”

“Nope, the other one. Thane, the reaper who killed my mother, then came back for me thirteen years later. He’s back, Tod. He killed a doughnut-shop owner this morning, then just kind of hung around waiting to be caught, like he knew someone would come for him. He was surprised to see me, though, and he looked terrified when I took the soul from him.”

“Did you tell Madeline?” Tod asked, his irises noticeably still.

“No, I didn’t want to get you in trouble.”

His frown deepened. “Kaylee, either Avari let Thane go, or Thane escaped. Either way, something’s wrong. You have to tell her.”

“No!” That came out louder than I’d intended, and if I’d been audible, everyone in the E.R. waiting room would have been staring at us. “I’m not spending eternity here without you. No way.”

His fingers tightened around mine. “That’s not what I want, either, but we can’t just let Thane keep killing.”

“I know, but there has to be a way I can get rid of him without losing you. I think we should start at Lakeside.” The psychiatric unit attached to the hospital we sat in at that very moment.

“With Scott?” Tod’s irises were swirling now, reflecting his emotions as he started to understand my plan.

“Yeah.”

Scott Carter, one of Nash’s best friends and Sophie’s—ex?—boyfriend, had gone insane when addiction to Demon’s Breath left him with a hardwired mental connection to Avari, the hellion whose breath he’d huffed. The very same hellion Tod had given Thane to. If anyone knew how and why Thane was back on the human plane, Avari would.

Getting him to tell us would be the hard part.

“Okay,” Tod said finally. “We’ll go see Scott tonight, but for now, I need to get back to work. These sick people aren’t going to kill themselves, you know.”

I fought a smile, more relieved than truly amused. “Your sense of humor is so morbid.”

“Says the dead girl. See you at lunch?”

“Yeah. It’ll probably be you, me, Em, and her human boyfriend, though, so it might be kind of awkward.” He