Rachel Vincent - Before I Wake

This time she just blinked at me and brushed blond hair behind her shoulder. “Hey.”

My frown deepened. If she hadn’t spoken with her own voice, I’d assume she’d been possessed—that had certainly happened before. “Is something wrong?”

“No.” She frowned and reconsidered. “Well, yes. Everything’s wrong. But no one would know that better than you, I guess.”

“I meant, why are you here?”

She shrugged. “I’m meeting Luca. I have yet to convince him that he doesn’t have to sit in the social wasteland.”

“And you honestly think he’d be more comfortable in the intellectual wasteland?” I tossed a pointed glance at the table where she and her jock friends had been sitting every day of the two years she’d been at Eastlake.

Sophie exhaled and nodded, and I waited for verbal venom that never came. “I guess I deserve that. I just…” She hesitated, glancing at the grass for a moment before meeting my gaze again. “I never got a chance to tell you that I’m sorry for what happened to you that night. With Mr. Beck.”

Except that she’d had plenty of chances. She just hadn’t taken any of them.

“Oh.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “You mean the night I was brutally murdered in my own bed?”

Sophie flinched. “You don’t have to make it sound so…”

“So what? True? Because it’s true.”

“So… ugly. ” Her face scrunched up, like she found the word personally offensive. Or maybe it was the truth that offended her. “You don’t have to go for the shock factor with every weird-ass sentence that comes out of your mouth. Especially considering that you got a happy ending.”

“Happy ending?” I couldn’t pile enough disbelief into my voice to accurately express how much of it I was dealing with. “What part of ‘walking corpse’ sounds like a happy ending to you? The part where I’ll never reach the age of consent or the legal drinking age?” Not that either of those really mattered anymore. “Or the part where there’s still a demon from another dimension out to get my soul, and willing to go through everyone I love to get to me? I understand that there’s a discrepancy between the way the world really looks and the way you see it, but I think you need to open your eyes a little wider.”

Irritation flared behind her gaze. “I’m trying to apologize, Kaylee, and you’re not making that very easy.”

“So sorry to have inconvenienced you with the truth. Go ahead. I’m listening.”

Yes, I was being hard on her. But life would be even harder on her, assuming she survived long enough to graduate. And with Avari on the warpath, there was no guarantee of that at all.

“Look. My dad said you saved my life that night,” Sophie said, and I shrugged. I’d actually saved her life several times, but who was counting? “So I wanted to say thank you, and tell you I’m sorry for all the mean things I said about you being a crazy freak before. I swear I had no idea those weren’t personal life choices.”

I didn’t know whether to pity her or smack her. Fortunately, the decision was taken out of my hands when the bell rang and students started pouring into the quad with lunch trays.

Nash and Sabine arrived first, but Luca was only a minute behind, and one glance at what passed for chili on their trays was enough to make me grateful that I didn’t have to eat ever again, if I chose.

“Is my brother here?” Nash asked, sliding onto the bench seat across from me and next to Sabine. Sophie sat on his other side, so she could stare across the table at Luca.

“No, and I don’t know if he will be. He has to cover all the hospital shifts, with Mareth gone. Levi’s filling in for him tonight, though, so he can do a shift at the pizza place.”

“Because delivering pizza is more important than reaping souls?” Sophie’s brows rose as she took a carrot from Luca’s tray.

“Spoken like someone who doesn’t have to cover her own cell-phone bill. Or make her own car payment. Or buy her own clothes,” Sabine said, and I realized it would be hard for me to choose sides in a Sophie/Sabine cage match.

“So who pays your cell bill?” Sophie asked.

“It’s a prepaid phone,” Nash supplied, and from the look on his face, I could tell he regretted sitting between them.

“And how does she prepay for it?”

Sabine leaned around Nash to glare at Sophie, and I swear a cloud rolled across the sun and the whole quad got darker. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to.”

“Okay, truce!” Luca threw his arms out across the table, like an umpire declaring the batter safe. “Let’s talk business before Jayson gets here.” Em had been holding him back at the beginning of every lunch period—I could only guess her method of distraction—to give us a chance to talk about something more important than prom and postgraduation parties.

“Was your aunt able to ID the souls in the dagger?” I asked. The knife had been on my desk when I got out of the shower that morning, but Madeline hadn’t waited around to talk to me.

“Yeah. You were right. Other than the incubus, there were two souls, and one of them has been missing for seven months. It was last reported in the possession of a rogue reaper Levi says he killed.” Marg, of course. “They have no reason to doubt that Belphegore ended up with the soul, and as for how Avari got it from her… Their guess is as good as ours.”

Which meant we had yet to uncover the connection between Avari and Belphegore, or figure out what Avari wanted with the reapers.

“Did you find Thane?” I asked. Thanks to Tod, I already knew Mareth was still missing. Tod was pretending that didn’t worry him, but how could it not?

“No.” Luca exhaled heavily. “Either he’s left town, or he’s left the human realm altogether.”

“My money’s on the latter,” Sabine said, and Sophie laughed so hard she nearly choked on a carrot.

“What money?”

Sabine stood, fists clenched, and Nash pulled her back down.

“Sophie, Sabine beat up a reaper two nights ago,” I said. “And it’s entirely possible that she may one day be the only thing standing between you and a hellion ready to rip your head off and suck out your soul. Do you really think it’s wise to piss her off?”

Sophie glanced from me to Sabine, then back, scowling. “I’m not scared of her. I can handle myself.”

“Yeah, and hissing kittens think they’re badass, too,” Sabine said.

“Okay, listen,” I said, and I couldn’t quite shake the discomfort of having all four sets of eyes turned my way. I wasn’t used to being the center of attention, and the recent media coverage of my so-called attempted murder had done nothing to change that. But someone had to say what needed to be said. “Everyone here has some reason to dislike everyone else at this table. Except for Luca,” I added when he started to object. “But we don’t have the time or energy to waste hating one another, so from here on out, everyone gets a clean slate. No more grudges. Got it?”

“You know that’s a lot easier said than done, Kaylee,” Nash said softly, and we all knew he was thinking about Tod. About a betrayal he didn’t think he could forgive. But he was wrong about that.

“Yeah, I know. But I’m willing to—” The rest of that sentence died on my tongue as my gaze snagged on something behind him. A girl in a green-and-white-letter jacket, watching me from the edge of the quad, half-hidden by the brick wall of the building.

“Kaylee?” Nash twisted to see what I was looking at.

I stood and the girl smiled at me. My heart stopped beating.

No. It couldn’t be.

But it was.

Meredith Cole. Sophie’s fellow dance-team member, who’d died last September, here in the quad. I’d screamed for her soul. Which Marg the reaper had then given to Belphegore, the hellion of vanity.