Rachel Vincent - Before I Wake

Please don’t leave… .

“I’ll be back. You’re safe here. No one else can get in. There’s no door.”

“No door?” I hadn’t noticed, but now that he’d mentioned it, I realized he was right. The other room had no door, except the one leading to the bathroom.

“Reapers don’t need them,” he explained. “I’ll be back. If the water gets cold, run some more. Here’s a towel.” He laid one hand on a folded towel on the shelf above the toilet—one of only two. “Sorry, I don’t have a robe.”

“It’s okay.”

“Just…stay here. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Then he was gone.

I lay back in the tub, but it was short, so I had to bend my knees, and they got cold. I opened the guy-shampoo and sniffed the bottle. It smelled like Tod’s hair, and for some reason, that made me cry.

I tried not to think, but that got harder with each second of silence. So I slid beneath the surface. I didn’t even have to hold my breath. I just…stopped breathing. I don’t know how long I stayed under, blinking up at the world through hazy pink water. Minutes, maybe. Or maybe an hour. I didn’t have to come up, so I didn’t.

Until someone shouted my name. “Kaylee!”

Nash? No. Nash couldn’t get into Tod’s special reaper room. The water was messing with my hearing.

“Give her some privacy,” Tod said, and I blinked. Then I frowned.

“She’s not coming up!” Nash insisted. And it was Nash.

Water sloshed around me as I sat up with my arms crossed over my chest, to find Tod blocking the bathroom doorway with his back to me, one hand on Nash’s chest, holding him back. “She doesn’t have to breathe, remember?”

Careful to keep myself covered, I scrubbed water from my eyes with one hand and blinked at Nash just as Tod shoved him into the bedroom. It wasn’t a hard push. But it wasn’t a push that would be misunderstood, either.

“I brought you some clothes, but I couldn’t get your robe out of the bathroom without having to explain something to your dad.” Tod set a stack of clothes on the closed toilet seat, because there was nowhere else to put them.

“Thanks.”

“How do you feel?”

“Lost. I feel lost.” I was supposed to save souls, not take lives. I was supposed to protect my friends, not kill them. How had this happened? This couldn’t have happened.

Tod sank to his knees next to the tub and put one hand on my bare back. “You’re not lost, Kaylee. You can’t ever be lost, because I’ll always know where you are. And if I’m not there with you, I’m on my way, and nothing standing between us will be standing for very long.”

Tears blurred my vision again, but he was still beautiful, even out of focus. “Promise?”

“I swear on my very existence.”

I believed him. I’d never believed in anything more.

Tod stepped out of the room and pulled the door closed, but didn’t latch it, and while I lathered my hair on autopilot, I listened. I couldn’t hear all of it, but I heard enough.

“What am I doing here?” Nash demanded in a fierce whisper. “Listening to the two of you is like having spikes driven through my ears.”

“I think actual victims of impalement would disagree with you there.”

“She’s naked,” Nash hissed.

“That’s how a bath works.”

“You’re sleeping with her, aren’t you?” Nash made a horrible choking sound, and I flinched. “Is that why you brought me here? To rub it in my face?”

Tod exhaled, and I knew that whatever came out of his mouth would only be half of what he wanted to say. “I’m gonna have to take a rain check on the part where you get all angry and morose, but if you want, you can threaten to kick my ass again when I get back.”

“Where are you going?”

“I have to deal with Alec, but I don’t want to leave her alone. So could you hate me quietly for now and be there for her?”

“You want me to be your understudy? I’m not sure I have the dark wit to pull that off.”

“Nor the tragic backstory. Don’t be my substitute. Be her friend. This hasn’t truly hit her yet, but when it does, it’ll be bad, and I don’t want her to be alone when that happens. Do you?”

“No.” Nash sighed.

I slid beneath the water again and considered never coming up.

I WOKE UP in a cold sweat, with the sheets tangled around my legs, the pillow squeezed so tightly in my arms that feathers threatened to burst from the seam. But they weren’t my sheets. It wasn’t my pillow.

I rolled over to find Nash watching me from the armchair in the corner. The room was so small that his right knee touched the end of the mattress and his left was pressed against the TV cart. But this wasn’t Nash’s room, either. It was Tod’s. Tod had a room—really more of a big closet—and I was in his bed. Alone with his brother. Drowning in remorse and grief too thick to breathe through.

“You didn’t have to stay,” I said, sitting up to pull the pillow into my lap. My voice was hoarse from crying.

“Yeah, I did. There’s no door.”

“Oh, yeah.” I pushed damp, tangled hair back from my face. “Sorry. You want me to take you home?”

Nash shook his head slowly. “If you leave, you won’t be able to get back.” Because I had no idea where I was. “Are you okay?”

I stared at my hands in my lap, my legs crossed beneath me, bare beneath my short pj shorts. “Did Tod tell you what happened?”

“He said Alec died and you reclaimed his soul.”

I looked up in surprise, fighting flashbacks so vivid I could still feel Alec’s blood on my hands, warm, and sticky, and horrible. “Is that all he said?”

Nash’s eyes narrowed. “Is there more?”

“The dog. Falkor was dead, too. Butchered.” My eyes watered. Why hadn’t Tod told him what really happened?

“I’m so sorry, Kaylee.”

“Me, too.” But sorry didn’t cover it. Sorry didn’t even come close.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“Yes, it was.” The blood. The knife. The look in Alec’s eyes. “It’s all my fault. All of it.”

Nash exhaled and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, and when he looked at me, the unease and discomfort in his eyes echoed deep inside me, striking similar chords in my own heart. He didn’t know how to be there, in Tod’s room, with me, and I didn’t know how to be there, in the land of the living, with everyone else.

“Kaylee, I don’t know how to do this,” Nash said finally, and there was a fragile note in his voice. A delicate hesitance that made me want to apply a Band-Aid or spray on some disinfectant. But his wounds were too big for that.

So were mine.

“I don’t know how to talk to you anymore,” he continued. “I don’t know what you want to hear or what I’m allowed to say. But I do know you. You can sit there and tell me how much has changed, and how different you are now, but it’s not true. Death didn’t change you. It couldn’t. You’re still the girl I fell in love with the moment I first heard you laugh, and I still know exactly who you are.”

“Nash…”

“You would never hurt anyone,” he said, still watching me with that bruised look in his eyes.

“I hurt you.”

“Yeah. But not on purpose, and not as badly as I hurt you. That’s how I know that whatever happened, this isn’t your fault.”

“I killed him, Nash,” I said, and he blinked, then sat up slowly, staring at me in disbelief. “I stabbed him.” Then I burst into tears.

Nash circled the bed and sat on the edge of the mattress, then pulled me into a hug. “What happened?”

“I thought it was Avari.” More tears fell, and I half choked on them. “I thought he’d killed Alec and was wearing his soul. I thought I was freeing his soul, but… I killed him.” I could hardly form words around the sobs shaking my entire body, but Nash understood. His arms tightened around me, and I cried harder. I’d thought saying it out loud—admitting my guilt—would make me feel better. Like releasing the pressure behind a dam. But I felt worse for having said it out loud. Worse, knowing that Nash knew what I’d done.