Rachel Vincent - Before I Wake

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 the body yet. There wasn’t a security guard or an EMT in sight.

As I walked, heading toward the department store at the very end of the mall, I let a thin ribbon of my bean sidhe wail leak from my lips, satisfied that no one else could hear it when a Sears employee walked right past me with a large fountain drink in hand. Any disembodied soul should have been pulled toward the sound, and I, in return, should have been pulled toward the soul. But I felt nothing.

Was I too late? Had the thief already taken his stolen soul and fled?

Frustrated, I stopped at the end of the mall, in front of the cornerstone department store, and crossed both arms over my chest, scanning the few shoppers for something—anything—that stood out. I was just about to admit defeat and return to Madeline empty-handed—secretly relieved at not having found the monster that would most likely have stolen my soul and ended my afterlife—when someone stepped out of the back hall that housed restrooms, storage, and the mall’s security office.

My gaze probably wouldn’t have snagged on the girl for very long, if hers hadn’t already snagged on me. She shouldn’t have been able to see me, yet she was looking right at me. And she looked familiar. Eerily, thoroughly familiar—every single part of her, including her short, sparkly dress, sequined sandals, and her long, reddish blond hair.

Familiarity bled into recognition, and chills shot through me, settling into my fingers and toes, reverberating the length of my spine. I’d never actually met her, and I’d only seen her once, but I would have recognized her anytime, anywhere, even if she weren’t still wearing the clothes she’d had on the night I saw her. The night I predicted her death. The night she died on the floor of the bathroom at Taboo, the eighteen-and-over dance club where Emma’s sister worked.

Heidi Anderson. Her death was the very first prediction I’d ever been able to verify, and that led to my discovery of my bean sidhe heritage, which threw me and Nash together as a couple and brought my father home from Ireland. Heidi’s death had changed my life and set into motion the events that had led to my death. Which was how I knew for a fact that I couldn’t possibly be seeing what I was seeing.

Heidi was dead, yet there she stood. Then she started walking. Toward me. She could clearly see me, even though I was sure I’d done the invisibility thing right this time.

I backed up, eyes wide, still clenching the heart around my neck, and still she came, smiling that creepy dead-girl smile, long hair swishing behind her with every step. I retreated until my spine hit the wall and there was nowhere left to go unless I blinked out of the mall. But I couldn’t do that. Someone was dead, and a soul had been stolen, and Heidi’s presence couldn’t be a coincidence.

Was she a ghost? Was there any such thing? I made a mental note to ask Tod or Luca when this was over and I wasn’t staring into the eyes of a dead girl. It takes one to know one, right? So was she like me? Was she undead? If so, where had she been for the past seven months? She wasn’t a reaper. Not a local one, anyway—Tod would have told me if she were. And she definitely didn’t work for reclamation.

“Kaylee, right?” Heidi said, and her voice wasn’t familiar, because I’d never heard her speak. “We almost met once. Do you remember?”

I nodded, my insides cold from shock, my hands shaking at my sides.

“Oh, you’re trembling!” Her smile brightened, but her gaze was cold. “Is that fear or guilt?”

It was actually confusion and terror, but admitting that seemed unwise, so I started with something more basic. “Are you real?”

“As real as you are.” She reached for my right hand, then held it in both of hers. Her hands were warm around mine, and undeniably solid.

“How…?” She was dead. I knew she was dead. Was she the corpse Luca had sensed? If so, what was she doing here? Was this a trap?

I couldn’t make sense out of all the possibilities, and I couldn’t make sense out of her.

“You’re asking the wrong question. How doesn’t matter,” Heidi said, and she laughed when I pulled my hand from her warm grasp. “What should matter to you is why. Ask me why.”

I blinked, but no words came out. I was drowning in shock and horror, followed closely by a devastating confusion.

“Okay, I’ll say your lines, but just this once.” Heidi cleared her throat and closed her eyes, and when they opened again, she frowned at me in a mask of bewilderment obviously meant to mimic my own. “Why are you here, Heidi, when we both know you died months ago?” she said in a falsetto that sounded nothing like me.

“I’m so glad you asked,” she continued in her normal voice. “I’m here because of you, Kaylee. Also, not coincidentally, I’m dead because of you. I wasn’t supposed to die, and you failed to save me, just like you failed to save all those other girls. Just like you failed to save the woman propped up on a toilet in the bathroom. I left the stall open. Someone will find her soon, and they may never know her death was your fault, but I’ll know it. And you’ll know.”