Rachel Vincent - Before I Wake

“The necromancer?” Tod frowned. “How do you know you can trust him?”

I shrugged. “Madeline trusts him.”

“But I don’t trust her. ”

“Neither do I,” my father added. “She doesn’t really care about you, Kaylee. She only cares about what you can do for her and the reclamation department.”

“That’s because she’s my boss, not my guidance counselor.” I exhaled slowly in frustration. “Look, we don’t have much time and we don’t have many resources, and Luca is too great an asset to ignore just because you don’t trust Madeline.” I focused on Tod. “Come meet him tomorrow at lunch?”

“Okay, but if he brings a Ouija board, I reserve the right to mess with anyone who can’t see me.”

“Fair enough. You talk to Levi tonight and, in the morning, I’ll see if Luca can pinpoint the rogue reaper again—he doesn’t even know who Thane is, much less that that’s who he spotted yesterday.”

“I love a woman with a plan,” Tod said, and my father scowled.

“Good, ’cause there’s more. Avari and Thane know that the best way to get to us is through our friends and family, and they know where to find everyone we care about. So we need to keep tabs on everyone. Tod, can you keep an eye on Nash and your mom?” I figured Sabine would be wherever Nash was.

Tod nodded, and I turned to my father. “If you can check on Uncle Brendon and Sophie, when she’s at home, I’ll keep up with Emma and with Sophie while she’s at school.”

My dad nodded, and I breathed a little easier. Literally. I felt better having a plan, even if that plan was vague and full of holes.

When Tod went to work and my father went to bed, I spent an hour trying to dig up enough interest to get through my chemistry homework, but chemical formulas and equations seemed no more important at one in the morning than they had twelve hours earlier, and every time my mind wandered, I found Scott, or Thane, or Avari, haunting me from my own memories.

After a solid half hour spent tapping my pencil on the page and twisting the amphora heart on its chain around my neck while Styx snored on my pillow, I closed my textbook and admitted defeat. School no longer felt relevant, because I knew for a fact that I wouldn’t need most of what I learned there.

Even if I decided to go to college, what would I do with my degree? Assuming someone would be willing to hire a doctor, or a lawyer, or a physical therapist who looked sixteen, I wouldn’t be able to hold any one job for very long, because it wouldn’t take people long to notice that I wasn’t aging. And it would take a very patient boss to overlook all the times I’d have to take a long lunch or an unauthorized hour off to hunt down a stolen soul.

Suddenly my future was looking long and boring. And frustrating beyond reason. And I’d only been dead a month.

What if the boredom and sense of futility got worse? What if I eventually lost my humanity and wound up like Thane, so bored I was willing to hurt people just to entertain myself? To break up the monotony of day after day and night after night of nothing.

If that were to happen, would I know it was happening? Would I even care? Once my friends and family were all gone, would I even have a point of reference for what humanity and normalcy look like? What they feel like? Would Tod and I be enough to keep each other sane and human enough to care about each other? To care about anything?

I closed my eyes and rolled over on my bed, trying to purge the litany of fears and useless questions marching through my brain, but I couldn’t get rid of them because I had nothing to replace them with except more fears and useless questions.

What if Luca couldn’t find Thane?

What if Levi wouldn’t help us deal with him?

How would I protect my friends and family from a hellion willing to use them to get to me?

The questions played through my head like a song list on repeat, but I had no answers, and after a while, the questions themselves stopped making sense. And when I looked up, I realized I’d been staring at the amphora in my hand for forty-seven minutes, without moving. Without breathing. Without even blinking.

My eyes and my throat were dry, but the really weird thing was that I had no urge to stretch or find a new position. Or to move at all. I could easily have sat there doing and thinking nothing for another forty-seven minutes or longer.

The even weirder thing was that that thought didn’t bother me. It didn’t scare me, though I knew it should have. I felt like a bear in hibernation, minus all the sleeping. I’d just…shut down.

That had happened before. Always at night, when I was alone. When there was nothing to do and no one to talk to. It hadn’t scared me then, either, but the next day, in retrospect, it always did. And it would again.

I was trying to decide whether or not to get up and find something worth doing, on general principle, when I heard a thud from outside. I froze and listened, and heard it again.

I was on my feet in an instant, racing down the hall in my bare feet. I grabbed a knife from the butcher block in the kitchen and fought memories of sharp metal, warm blood, and excruciating pain as I headed slowly for the door, telling myself I couldn’t die twice. Er, three times. I was halfway there before I remembered that I could make sure no one heard my footsteps.

Being dead takes a lot of practice.

At the door, I peered through the peephole, but saw nothing but my empty front yard, damp from a steady drizzle of spring rain. But then I heard another thud, this time followed by a familiar groan. I set the knife on the end table next to my father’s recliner and pulled the front door open.

Nash sat on the top step, leaning against the porch railing, a squarish glass bottle loosely held in one hand. His clothes were wet, his hair plastered to his head.

“Nash, what the hell are you doing here?”

He looked up, like he was surprised to see me. At my own house. “I’m drinking on your porch. Care to join me?” He held the bottle of whiskey up and I shook my head, then stepped out of the house and closed the door behind me, so my dad wouldn’t hear him. “ Why are you drinking on my porch?”

“The lawn’s too wet to sit on.”

“That’s because it’s raining. Give me that.” I pulled the bottle from his grip. “Did you walk here? You’re soaked.”

He laughed, but the sound was harsh. Half choked. “My mom frowns on driving drunk.”

“Your mother frowns on being drunk. Come dry off and I’ll take you home.”

“I don’t want to go home.”

“You need to go home. Come on.” I tried to pull him up but he was too heavy, so he pulled himself up, using the porch railing for balance. Standing, he stared down at me, his eyes half focused in the porch light. He blinked, too drunk to hide the swirls of confusion and longing in his irises. Then he leaned down like he’d kiss me.

I stepped back and put my empty hand on his chest, my heart aching for him. For me. For all four of us, and the ties twisting us together. “No. Don’t do this, Nash,” I said, and his next exhalation seemed to deflate him.

I stepped over the threshold and held the door open for him, and he trudged inside, dripping on the floor. “Where’s your boyfriend?”

“Working.” I pushed the door closed and set his whiskey on the half wall between the kitchen and living room, then dug a clean hand towel from a drawer in the kitchen. “Where’s your girlfriend?”

“In bed.”

“Yours?”

“Yeah,” he said, and I caught my breath, surprised by the hollow feeling in my chest—an unexpected residual ache. “That’s what you wanted, right? You want me with her, so I can forget about you?”