Before I Wake

by Rachel Vincent

  “I’m sure it must be very difficult being back here for you,” Ms. Hirsch said, and I realized she’d heard about the incident in the hall. “I suspect you’re dealing with a lot of unwanted attention today.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you feel you’re coping with that?”

  I was trying to cope by fleeing school grounds during my free period—until I’d been dragged into the counselor’s office. “All I can really do is ignore them, right?”

  She nodded slowly. “People, especially teenagers, are curious by nature, they don’t always think about how their curiosity affects others. Peers may ask you directly or indirectly about what happened to you. But you have every right to tell them you don’t want to talk about it with them. You should never feel guilty about that.”

  I didn’t feel guilty. I didn’t feel…much of anything, except for the need—a truly escalating drive—to get as far away from school and my “peers” as possible.

  I should have been a wreck. People were obviously waiting for me to fall apart at the seams and spill my emotional guts all over the floor, and some small part of me wished I could. I wished things were still simple enough that a good cry could purge all the bad stuff and give me a fresh start. But I’d never felt less like crying, and I was all out of fresh starts. My mother had given me the only one I was allowed when I was three.

  “I’m fine. Really,” I said, and her frown deepened.

  “Kaylee, it’s perfectly normal to be upset for a very long time after something like what you’ve been through. It could be months before you start to feel anything like normal and that is perfectly okay.”

  Normal? Seriously?

  “So, what, there’s a timeline for how long it should take me to get over being stabbed by my math teacher? Someone really wrote that? How convenient! Does it happen to mention how long I should be upset about the fact that I had to kill him? Because honestly, with no guidelines in place, I might be tempted to linger in mourning for, like, a solid week. Is that too long?”

  Ms. Hirsch blinked. Then she pulled open a drawer and took a pamphlet from inside and slid it across the desk to me. “This is the contact information for a group of survivors of violent crimes. I think it would be worth your time to…”

  “No, thank you.” I pushed the pamphlet back toward her. She was only trying to help. I knew that. But I also knew that through no fault of her own, she was in way over her head. And honestly, she’d probably been there all year, considering how many students and teachers Eastlake had lost under unexplained circumstances since the school year started. “I really have to go,” I said, picking up my backpack.

  Ms. Hirsch exhaled slowly, then met my gaze again. “Kaylee, this office is a safe space.” She spread her arms to take in all four walls, then folded them on top of her desk, rumpling the pamphlet. “You can say anything you need to say in here, and what you tell me is completely confidential. I’m sure you have family and friends you can talk to, but sometimes it helps to talk to someone completely uninvolved. I want you to know that I can be that person for you. If things get too overwhelming at any point during the school day, I want you to come down here. We can talk. Or you can just sit in here and take a break.” She placed her hands palms down on the desktop and her gaze intensified. “Safe space. Please remember that.”

  “Thanks. That’s good to know.” I threw my backpack over my shoulder and practically ran out the door and through both sets of offices. In the bathroom, I had to take refuge in a stall, waiting for the small mid-third-period crowd to go back to class so I could blink out of the school without anyone seeing me disappear. While I waited, two sophomores whose names I couldn’t remember chatted in front of the mirrors, like they had nowhere better to be. As soon as they started talking, I realized they hadn’t seen me come in. If there was ever a time to use my new instantaneous method of transportation, this was it. But their conversation froze me in place.

  I shouldn’t have listened. But I couldn’t help it.

  “The cops think he tried to…you know. And she fought back.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “My mom works in dispatch.”

  “Well, I don’t believe it. Mr. Beck could have had anyone he wanted, so why go after Kaylee Cavanaugh? And even if he did, it’s not like she would have said no. She’s a closet slut. She was with Scott Carter the day he was arrested, remember? Cheating on her boyfriend with his best friend—her own sister’s boyfriend.”

  “I think Sophie’s her cousin.”

  “Whatever. She cheats on Nash with Scott, and he ends up in the psych ward. Then she kisses some guy in the middle of the school, and the next day they find Mr. Beck dead on her bed, and Nash gets arrested. She’s like King Midas, only everything she touches turns to shit instead of gold.”

  Anger flared inside me and I threw the stall door open—then realized that’s as far as my plan went. “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” I snapped, glaring at both of them in the mirror. “Is there some broken filter or busted pressure gauge in there that lets every half-formed thought leak out of your mouths?” I demanded, tossing a careless gesture at their heads. “Because if these are the gems you actually intended to share with the world, you should know they don’t paint a very flattering picture of your intellect.”

  I stomped out of the bathroom with them staring after me and ran smack into a tall, dark-haired guy I’d never seen before.

  “Whoa, are you okay?” he asked, one hand on my arm to steady me. I nodded, and he frowned down at me, like he suddenly recognized me. “Hey, are you Kaylee Cavanaugh?”

  I exhaled, trying to purge my anger, but with it came words I hadn’t intended to say. “Yeah. I am. And, yes, I’m glad to be alive. No, I’m not a slut. And, no, you can’t see my scar. Does that about cover it?”

  He stared at me in surprise and I took off down the hall at a run because I could feel myself fading from physical existence and I couldn’t let him—or anyone else—see that happen. My footsteps faded as I rounded the corner, and a girl at the other end of the hall looked up like she’d heard something, but her gaze floated over me like I wasn’t even there. And from her perspective, I wasn’t.

  Dead people have to want to be seen in order to exist on the physical plane, and I’d never wanted to exist less.

  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 firs
t 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 could show himself to just me and Em, but it would be easier for Em to pretend not to see him if she actually couldn’t see him.

  Tod scowled. “Fine. But if I have to stay invisible the whole time, I can’t promise to be on my best behavior. There’s no telling what I might do… I mean, if no one else can see me, anyway, why bother with clothes at all?”

  I laughed, trying to disguise the sudden curious heat settling into my face. “Well, that ought to spice up the lunch period.”

  “That’s a game two can play, you know,” he said, his gaze wandering south of my collarbones.

  “Except that I won’t be invisible,” I pointed out as he leaned over the chair arm between us to drop a kiss on my neck, and my heart thumped a little harder, a sensation I’d taken entirely for granted when I was still alive.

  Tod groaned against my skin. “Remind me again why we’re going to lunch, when neither of us needs food?”

  “I’m having trouble remembering at the moment,” I whispered when he sat up and the heat in his eyes burned straight through my own. “Something about pretending to be alive…”

  “How’s that working out?”

  “It feels less like pretending at the moment.” With my heart beating on its own. My skin tingling from just the possibility that he might touch me again. But that would stop when I went back to school. I’d have to concentrate on the appearance of life—a pulse, regular breaths, physical presence—and everything would suddenly be immeasurably harder.

  Everything that came naturally to everyone else would be a constant effort for me. So much to remember. So much to hide. So much to lose.

  Suddenly keeping up with appearances didn’t seem worth the work.

  “You won’t have to pretend forever,” Tod said. “One more year of high school, and then you can do whatever you want. Universities don’t hold students captive, so you could pop on and off campus at will, if you want to go to college. Or we could just…hang out.”

  “Forever?” The very concept of forever—of time without end—was too daunting to truly contemplate. Doing
nothing for a millennia of spare time—even nothing with Tod—didn’t seem possible. Surely I’d lose my mind.

  “What about you? What do you want?” In all the conversations we’d had in the past month—spilling secrets, doubts, wants, and hopes—it had never occurred to me to ask that.

  “I have what I want.” His hand squeezed mine again, but it felt like he was squeezing my heart. “There’s plenty of time to figure the rest out. Hopefully it’ll go something like this… .”

  He leaned in for another kiss, and it took every single bit of willpower I had to pull away from him, when what I really wanted to do was climb into his lap, and bury my hands in his hair, and make a private spectacle of us both. I’d never had an urge so strong, and the reasons to resist were suddenly frighteningly vague.

  Oh, yeah. Work. And school.

  “I thought you had souls to reap…” I whispered, staring into the desire swirling in his eyes, wondering if he could see mine reflected back at him.

  “They’ll wait.”

  “I’m trying to do the mature thing here.” I groaned when he pulled me close again.

  “I’m not.”

  “Why do I always have to be the one who says ‘stop’?” I demanded, my voice little more than a moan.

  “You don’t. In fact, at this point I’m considering a petition to have that word stricken from the English language.” His grin was almost lazy, the gleam in his eyes an effortless challenge. “If I did, would you sign?”

  “No fair. If there was a pen in my hand right now, I’d sign whatever you put in front of me.”

  “Good thing I’m not a hellion.”

  He was kidding, but thinking about Avari accomplished what I’d lacked the willpower to do on my own. Playtime was over.

  “I better get back. But I’ll see you at lunch?”

  “Yeah, but I might be late. I want to check in at work after my shift and see if anyone else has spotted Thane.”

  “Okay.” I gave him another quick kiss, then blinked out of the hospital and into a bathroom in the food court across the street from school, where I picked up a bag full of burgers and fries. Then, just for fun, I blinked into Emma’s third-period art class, careful that no one else could see or hear me, and leaned over her shoulder.