Rachel Vincent - Before I Wake

“You can’t tell Madeline!” I cried, chasing my father down the hall as he went for his cell phone. He’d left work the minute I’d called him, as soon as Thane left.

“Oh, yes, I can. I can’t believe you’re even thinking about keeping this from her.”

“I didn’t have to tell you, either, you know.” I grabbed his arm, and he finally turned to face me, forehead deeply furrowed, irises stubbornly still so I couldn’t see how scared he really was. But I knew. He was almost as scared as I was.

“Kaylee, I’m glad you told me, but I can’t reward your good decision with a poor one of my own. Madeline knows much better than either of us how to deal with rogue reapers and runaway hellions,” he insisted, already on the move again, and I shouted after him.

“If that were true, she wouldn’t have lost all three of her other extractors!”

My father stopped cold in the hall, then turned to face me. “I’m not Madeline’s biggest fan, but even I know that wasn’t her fault. She did the best she could with the information she had, and you’ll only be making her job more difficult and dangerous by withholding more information from her.”

“There’s nothing she could do with this information, even if we gave it to her!” I insisted. “She doesn’t have any other extractors to put at risk—I’m the only one left. The ones Avari took are trapped in the Netherworld in cold storage—whatever that means—and I have no idea what state they’re in. Thane still has a body, but that could be because he’s useful. For all I know, Avari’s already disposed of the extractors’ bodies, so their souls can’t escape. And that’s assuming he hasn’t already sold them.”

“Sold them?”

“Yeah. To other hellions. Thane says there are hundreds of them, and once they know what Avari’s up to, they’re all gonna want in on the fun, and no matter how bad you’re thinking that’s gonna be, I promise it’ll be worse. Mass-slaughter of the human race. Bodies dead and defiled. Souls enslaved and tortured. The end of existence, as we know it.”

My father stared at me without speaking for close to half a minute, and I could practically see the rapid succession of thoughts and fears as they raced across his expression. Then he scrubbed his face with both hands and met my gaze again. “Is there any chance at all that this is some massive misunderstanding, or the product of an overactive teenage imagination?”

“Nope,” Tod said, and I turned to find him in the hall. “Nash and I heard the whole thing.”

“Okay, then, what are the chances that Thane made it all up and Avari’s feeding off of our panic?”

“That’s not impossible,” I admitted. “But everything Thane said lines up with what we already knew. Missing reapers and extractors. Avari haunting the human plane in the guise of the dead.”

“Mr. Cavanaugh, I think all hell really is breaking loose,” Tod said.

“And if I tell Madeline…?”

“She’ll tell Levi, who may or may not hunt Thane down and kill him by removing the Demon’s Breath keeping his body functioning in the absence of his soul.” And then we’d have lost our source of inside information and any chance of more help from the only person in either world who had free access to Avari and his evil scheme.

“Look, no one wants to kill Thane worse than I want to kill Thane,” my dad said. “But Levi—much like me—will understand that there are bigger problems at hand. He won’t act rashly at the expense of so much human life.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Thane knows Levi would never let me return his soul, so if he finds out we involved Levi or Madeline, he’ll consider our deal broken and he’ll go after everyone we care about on his own, without waiting for Avari to give the orders. Emma. Sophie. Harmony. Who knows how many other souls he’ll be able to reap before someone catches him?”

My father sighed so heavily I wondered if he had any air left in his lungs at all. “We’re all already in danger, and so long as you, Tod, or Luca are around, Thane can’t sneak up on anyone.” Because he couldn’t hide from the three of us. “Levi and Madeline need to know, Kaylee. You have to be willing to compromise here.”

I exhaled, my thoughts racing. “Fine. We tell everyone—including Levi and Madeline—what Thane told us, but we make it sound like we pounded the information out of him, and we don’t mention my promise to get his soul back from Avari. I don’t think we can keep Sabine from finding out, for obvious reasons—”

“I can keep a secret!” Nash shouted from the living room.

“We all know how good you are at keeping secrets,” Tod said, and I elbowed him. “What, he can take shots at me, but I can’t return fire?”

“Exactly,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because you won the war, and he’s still nursing his wounds,” my father said softly, glancing pointedly at Tod’s hand, which was wrapped around my own.

“There was no war,” Tod insisted, and I knew from the intimate resonance of his voice that Nash wouldn’t have been able to hear it even if he’d been standing right next to us. “We didn’t fight over Kaylee. She made a choice. And no one feels worse about how that happened than she and I do.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that…” my father whispered, glancing down the hall toward the living room to drive home his point.

“You know, just because I can’t hear you doesn’t mean I don’t know you’re talking about me,” Nash snapped.

I swallowed another upsurge of guilt. Then I pulled us back on track. “So, you’re not going to tell Madeline about our deal with Thane?” I said, where everyone could hear me.

My dad only hesitated a moment, then shook his head. “No, but I reserve the right to change my mind, at my own discretion.”

I nodded. That was the best we were going to get.

“Sabine’s bringing Sophie over,” Nash said when we rejoined him in the living room. “And Emma’s bringing Luca straight from school.” They’d cut the school day short because of Brant’s death—a hauntingly surreal déjà vu for a student body that had already lost several members since the start of the school year—but Luca’d had to stay to talk to the police and school officials. “My mom’s dropping by before her shift starts at eleven.”

“I expect to hear from Madeline any minute, and I’m about to text Alec,” I said.

My father sighed, resigned, already heading for the home phone. “Another full house. I’ll order a giant sub.”

“Okay, here’s what we know,” I said, leaning against the half wall separating the kitchen from the living room, where six of my closest friends—plus Sophie—watched me, listening, and for just a second, the surrealism threatened to overwhelm me. What qualified me for the position I’d somehow assumed? Nash, Sabine, and Tod were all better fighters. My father had way more life experience. So why were they all looking to me? What if their trust was misplaced?

What if I got us all killed?

I glanced at Tod, suddenly unsure of myself, and he smiled and nodded for me to continue. There was no doubt in his eyes. None at all. He had more confidence in me than I’d ever had in myself.

“Um, Avari will be back, and he may not be alone. We don’t know how many other hellions currently have the ability to cross over, but we know that when they show up, they’ll look like…well, like the person whose soul they’re wearing. And since you can’t fight an enemy you can’t see, I’m thinking the best way to start is by familiarizing ourselves with what the enemy might look like.”

“What does that even mean?” Sophie asked. Her face was still swollen and her eyes red from crying.