Rachel Vincent - Before I Wake

“Yeah. I just don’t want to be here today.”

She gave me a sympathetic smile. “That makes all of us.” Her smile faded and her eyes narrowed. “You guys didn’t do it, did you?”

“No. Turns out privacy’s kind of hard to come by when there’s a hellion and his psychotic reaper minion out to steal your soul.”

Emma frowned, but before she could demand details, Mr. Cumberland cleared his throat and started class.

Fifteen minutes into the lesson, I would have sworn the clock on the wall was stuck. The hands hadn’t moved in ages. I swear, time was deader than I was.

Sure, my previous math teacher was an evil, soul-stealing pedophile, but he’d never once bored anyone to sleep, which was more than I could say for Cumberland and his Bueller-esque monotone.

Halfway through the fifty-minute period, Emma kicked my desk, and I sat upright, startled. “I can see through your arm!” she mouthed, exaggerating each mimed word.

Crap! I’d forgotten to concentrate on being solid—I’d forgotten to concentrate on anything —and had nearly disappeared in the middle of class. I narrowed my focus and solidified my form, but it took every bit of willpower I had to make my physical form stick. Seriously, if Mr. Cumberland couldn’t summon any enthusiasm for the lesson, how were we supposed to summon the will to be there? Some of us literally…

Sabine was waiting in the hall after class. Alone.

“Hey, have you seen Nash today?” she asked, falling into step beside us.

Em shook her head, and I glanced at Sabine in surprise. “You didn’t pick him up this morning?”

“I decided to let him stew a little longer, but how am I supposed to know when he’s had enough, if he’s not here where I can see him stew?”

“Trouble in paradise?” Em asked, and Sabine glowered at her.

“He failed to save her from the clutches of evil,” I explained, and Em’s brows rose.

Sabine stopped walking and grabbed my arm, pulling us all to a halt in the middle of the hall. “He would have stepped up. Thane just caught him by surprise.”

“I hate it when evil doesn’t send fair warning in advance,” Em said, and the hall dimmed as Sabine’s eyes grew darker.

“How’s this for warning?” the mara growled at Emma. “Get lost, or I’m having your pretty little human boyfriend for lunch.”

“She doesn’t mean that,” I said as Em’s expression cycled through anger and horror before settling somewhere in between.

“The hell I don’t. I haven’t had a decent meal in ages, since someone insisted I stop feeding at school.” She glanced pointedly at me.

“Well, if you’d feed at night, like any normal Nightmare…” But I realized the problem as soon as I’d said it, even if she wouldn’t admit it. She couldn’t feed most nights because she was watching Nash. Almost twenty-four hours a day, since his relapse the day before I died.

With a heavy sigh, I turned to Em. “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure she doesn’t snack on Jayson. See you both at lunch.”

Em headed for class reluctantly, and I turned back to Sabine, but she started talking before I could. “This is your fault, Kaylee. He needs me and he loves me. I can see that in him when we’re alone, and he’d see it, too, if you weren’t always there, giving him something else to look at. If you’d stayed buried like any decent dead girl, none of this would have happened.”

I didn’t even know where to start. “I’m not going to apologize for my own existence, Sabine. Besides if I weren’t here, Nash wouldn’t be, either. He’d be sitting in jail awaiting trial for murder.”

“Because you framed him!” she whispered fiercely, dark eyes flashing. “No matter how you look at it, this is all your fault. So take me to him, now, so I can smack some sense into him. Assuming Thane didn’t go back for him last night.”

Thane. Shit. I hadn’t thought of that. And Harmony wouldn’t think to tell anyone he was missing, if she thought he was at school.

“I’ll go check on him, but I can’t take you with me.” Blinking all the way to Nash’s house was pushing the limit of how far I could go on my own without a layover, and I couldn’t get half that far with someone else in tow. “But I’ll text you if there’s anything wrong. Okay?”

Sabine scowled and grabbed my arm again, and this time she wouldn’t let me jerk free. “In case you haven’t noticed, Nash is in withdrawal again, but this time the drug is you. Don’t you think we ought to limit his exposure?”

Seriously? She was classifying me as a controlled substance now?

“I’m just trying to help.” And I’d go even without her approval. She didn’t own Nash, and he and I were still friends. We’d probably always exist in that weird twilight between friendship and more. We’d been through too much together to ever be any less to each other.

“Fine. But if anything happens to him because of you, I’ll…”

“You need some time to work on that one?” I said, pulling my arm free when I realized that for perhaps the first time in her life, she didn’t know how to finish a threat. “Threatening to scare me to death has kind of lost its punch, huh?”

“Just go get him. Please.”

The rare courtesy told me just how worried she was about him. So I nodded, then ducked into the nearest bathroom and waited until it was empty. Then I blinked into Nash’s living room, backpack and all. I set my bag on the floor and started toward the hall, until I heard the clink of glass in the kitchen.

I pushed the swinging door open slowly, expecting to see Nash, but I found his mother instead, and for a moment, I didn’t know what to do. Harmony and I hadn’t spoken one-on-one since I’d cheated on one of her sons with the other, then framed one for my murder. Since I’d eavesdropped the day before, I knew she thought Tod and I were good for each other, but I wasn’t sure if she’d actually forgiven me for what I’d done to Nash. Or if she ever would. And I had no idea how she’d feel about me popping into her house, unannounced.

But then she turned and noticed me in the doorway, and my chance to sneak out expired.

“Kaylee!” She stood and motioned for me to come in, and the minute the door swung shut behind me, she pulled me close in a tight hug. “I’ve been hoping you’d come see me, but I didn’t want to push you, if you weren’t ready.”

“So… You don’t hate me?” And in that moment, I realized that of everything I’d lost when I died, other than my heartbeat, Harmony was what I’d missed the most. She was the closest thing I had to a mother, but with everything that had happened between me and her sons, I’d thought… Well, I hadn’t expected open arms.

“Kaylee, I could never hate you.” She let go of me and pulled out a second chair at the table, then pushed a plate of cookies toward me when I sat.

Tears burned behind my eyes and I blinked, trying to keep them at bay. “But I got Tod killed and Nash framed for murder.” I certainly didn’t deserve her sympathy, much less her cookies.

“Honey, I know that was a hell of a crazy week, but you didn’t do any of that on purpose. And let’s not forget what else you did. You also saved Tod’s life and got Nash’s name cleared.”

“Doesn’t matter.” I sniffled, in spite of my best effort to hold back tears. “Nash hates me.”

“No. Nash wants to hate you, but he can’t. That’s the problem. He just needs time.”

“To learn to hate me?”

“No.” Harmony arched her brows at me, and I sobbed even as I laughed. “To forgive. To move on.”

“Tod and I… We messed up.”

She nodded. “Yes, you did.”