Rachel Vincent - Before I Wake

“Kaylee, it’s too late.” He turned my head gently so that I had to look. So that I had to see Alec’s soul, pale and clean, already wrapping around the hilt of the blade still in his stomach. “He doesn’t need a reaper—the dagger took his soul. He’s already gone.”

“No.” I closed my eyes, so I wouldn’t have to see Alec staring at the ceiling, his eyes empty. Dead. “No! This wasn’t supposed to happen. This isn’t how it works! I don’t kill people. I rescue souls. This can’t be…”

I dropped onto my knees again, sitting on my feet. My hands fell into my lap and left dark, sticky smears of blood on my jeans. The world started to lose focus.

“Kay, look at me.” Tod tried to pull me up with one hand, but I wouldn’t stand. I couldn’t. So he lifted me by both arms. “This is not your fault. Avari did this. He fooled us both. Alec’s fate was sealed the minute Avari possessed him, and you saved his soul from eternal torture.”

“No.” I shook my head, blinking through tears. “My knife. I stabbed him.”

“Kaylee, don’t do this to yourself.”

“How can I…?” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t have the words. How could I live with myself, knowing what I’d done?

I couldn’t. I wasn’t living, anyway. But I wouldn’t even be unliving when Madeline found out. She’d kill me for real, which was no less than I deserved, but my father would be devastated. Em would be devastated. Tod would be…

And it was all my fault.

Tod started to let me go, but my legs buckled beneath me. “Kaylee, hold it together. I need you to stand up.”

I stood, and distantly I saw him pull the dagger from Alec’s stomach and wipe the blades on his pants, where they left dark smears. “Come on.” He wrapped one arm around my waist and slid his hand beneath my shirt so that his skin connected with mine. “I’m going to take you some place safe, so you can get yourself together. So we can deal with this. I need to think.” He squeezed me so tight my ribs ached, and as the world dissolved around us, his last words echoed in my ears. “I won’t let them take you away… .”

The world pulled itself into focus around me again and when Tod let go of me, my skin felt cold without his touch. Everything felt cold.

“I’m freezing,” I whispered, and my teeth started to chatter on the last syllable, drawing it out.

“I think you’re in shock. Here. Sit down.” Tod led me by the elbow to a chair in one corner of the room. I thought the elbow thing was kind of weird—until I realized my hands were still covered in blood.

“How can I be in shock, if I’m dead?” I sank into the chair and laid my hands in my lap, palms up. And when I remembered why my hands were messy, the chattering got worse.

“That’s actually a really good sign. It means that you’re still tapped into your humanity. If you weren’t upset right now, I’d be worried. Well, more worried.”

I should have been glad to hear that I wasn’t turning into an emotionless undead monster—like Thane—but I couldn’t think past the blood on my hands and the memory of Alec staring up at me in agony as he died. “This doesn’t feel like a good sign.” And for the first time since I’d been restored to my body, I understood that it might actually be easier to let my humanity go—to divorce myself from emotion entirely—than to watch loved one after loved one die, or to live with the guilt of what I’d done to Alec.

Was that what had gone wrong with Thane? Had he given up his humanity to avoid suffering guilt and loss? If I took the easy way out, would I turn out just like he had?

“You’ve only been dead for a month,” Tod said, drawing me out of the most terrifying temptation I’d ever experienced. “Your emotions are going to be inconsistent for a while.” His voice sounded kind of distant, muffled by the sound of running water. “Sometimes it’s hard to feel anything, then suddenly you feel everything all at once, and I honestly couldn’t tell you which of those is harder to deal with.”

“This.” My voice sounded hollow. Why did my voice sound hollow? “This is the hardest to deal with.” The numbness I’d been resisting for weeks was suddenly the most appealing thought in the world.

But Tod had made it. He’d held on to his humanity in spite of the pain, and if he could do it, I could do it.

“Come here.” Tod stepped into the doorway, and that’s when I realized he’d left the room in the first place.

I stood and took two steps toward him. Then I stopped and glanced around. The room was tiny—space only for the twin bed, armchair, and a small television on a cart. “Where are we?”

He tugged me into the other room with him and I realized it was a bathroom. A tiny bathroom, with a shorter-than-standard shower/tub combo, a toilet, and a pedestal sink, with hardly any room between them. Water was running in the tub. Steaming water.

“This is my place.” Tod slid his hands beneath the sides of my shirt, and his skin was so warm. I closed my eyes and just felt him for a moment, blocking everything else out. Because everything else hurt. Then his hands moved, pulling my shirt up, and the way the cotton clung to my skin, sticky with blood, made me gag. “Arms up,” he ordered softly, and I couldn’t comply fast enough.

“You have a place?” Think about the place. Tod’s place.

Don’t think about Alec.

Don’t think about the knife.

Don’t think about the blood.

“It was supposed to be a surprise. Everyone gets a locker, but there aren’t enough rooms for all the reapers, and I’m kinda low on seniority,” he said, and I wondered if he was talking just so I’d have something to listen to. To keep my mind off things I shouldn’t think. “That never mattered before, though—I always just hung out at my mom’s house when I wasn’t working, whether they could see me or not. But after you died…” He shrugged, then tugged the sticky material over my head, careful not to let it touch my face. “I put my name on the waiting list the next day. This spot opened up yesterday.”

“Yesterday?” That was good timing. Too good. “Because of Mareth…” My eyes closed, denying this new layer of pain when I had yet to deal with the others. They were too heavy. I could hardly move. “This was Mareth’s room?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” He dropped my shirt on the floor, in the corner, then turned me by my shoulders and unhooked my bra. “But she’s not the only one missing. Two more reapers have disappeared in the past few days. One before her. One after her.”

“And you inherited a room.”

“Yeah.” He reached for the button on my jeans, but I brushed his hand away. I could do it. I wasn’t a baby.

“Because Levi doesn’t think they’re coming back.” I slid my jeans over my hips and stepped out of them one leg at a time.

“Yeah.” Tod reached over to turn the water off while I stepped out of my underwear, and I was already calf-deep in the water before I realized I was naked. In front of him. I should have been embarrassed, or at least nervous. I’d been naked with him before, obviously, but last time there’d been more touching than looking.

But he wasn’t looking now. He was very obviously not-looking, which was good, because I couldn’t think about being naked. Not until the blood was gone. The water was pink with it.

There was so much blood.

Tod set a bottle of guy-shampoo on the edge of the tub, along with a bottle of guy-body wash. “I’m going to go…take care of things. I’ll bring some clean clothes, too.”

I caught his hand, and finally he looked at me. At my eyes, which were wet again, and I wondered if we could both pretend I’d gotten bathwater in them. “Don’t leave.”