Rachel Vincent - My Soul to Steal

Nash lowered his voice even further as she walked toward us. “Did you go to the funeral?”

“Yeah.” Doug had been one of Eastlake High’s starting linebackers. Practically the whole school had shown up at his funeral—except for Nash. He’d been too sick from withdrawal to get out of bed. And Scott, their third musketeer. Scott had survived addiction to frost—but at a devastating price. He’d suffered brain damage and now had a permanent, hardwired mental connection to the hellion whose breath had killed Doug and mortally wounded my relationship with Nash.

“Hey.” Emma came to a stop on my right and glanced from me to Nash, then back before taking a seat next to me. “Someone bring me up to speed. Are we making up or breaking up? ’Cause this limbo is kind of driving me nuts.” She grinned, and I could have thanked the universe in that moment for the ray of sunshine that was Emma.

“How low can you go?” I asked, then crunched into a French fry.

“Lower than you know…” Nash replied, with a hint of an awkward grin.

Em rolled her eyes. “So…more limbo?”

Nash looked just as ready for my answer as she did. I exhaled heavily. “For now.”

He sighed and Emma frowned. Like I was being unreasonable. But she didn’t know the details of our breakup. I couldn’t tell her that he’d let a hellion take over my body and play doctor with him—to Nash’s credit, he hadn’t known it wasn’t me that first time—without even telling me I was being worn like a human costume.

I couldn’t tell her because the same thing had happened to her, and for her own safety and sense of security, I didn’t want her to know that her body had been hijacked by the hellion responsible for her boyfriend’s death. Her friendship with me had already put her in more than enough danger.

“Oh, fine. Drag out the melodrama for as long as you want. At least it’ll give everyone around here something else to talk about.” Something other than Doug and Scott.

If they hadn’t already had two weeks to deal with grief and let off steam, the whole school probably would have been reeling from the double loss. The looks and whispers when we passed in the hall were hard enough to deal with as it was.

“So, did you see the new girl?” Emma asked, making a valiant attempt to change the subject as she tore the crust from her triangle of pizza.

“What new girl?” I didn’t really care, but the switch in topic gave me a chance to think—or at least talk—about something other than me and Nash, and the fact that there was currently no me and Nash.

“Don’t remember her name.” Emma dipped her crust into a paper condiment cup full of French dressing. “But she’s a senior. Can you imagine? Switching schools the last semester of your senior year?”

“Yeah, that would suck,” I agreed, staring at my tray, pretending I didn’t notice Nash staring at me. Was it going to be like this from now on? Us sitting across from each other, watching—or pointedly not watching—each other? Sitting in silence or talking about nothing anyone really cared about? Maybe I should have stayed in the cafeteria. This isn’t gonna work….

“She’s in my English class. She looked pretty lonely, so I invited her to sit with us.” Emma bit into her crust and chewed while I glanced up at her in surprise.

First of all, Em didn’t have other girlfriends. Most girls didn’t like Emma for the same reason guys couldn’t stay away from her. It had been just the two of us since the seventh grade, when her mouth and her brand-new C-cups intimidated the entire female half of the student body.

Second of all…

“Why is there a senior in your junior English class?” Nash said it before I could.

Emma shrugged while she chewed, then swallowed and dipped her crust again. “She got behind somehow, and they’re letting her take two English classes at once, so she can graduate on time. I mean, would you want to be here for a whole ’nother year, just to take one class?”

“No.” Nash stabbed another green bean he probably wasn’t going to eat. “But I wouldn’t want to read Macbeth and To Kill a Mockingbird at the same time, either.”

“Better her than me.” Em bit into her crust again, then twisted on the bench as footsteps crunched on the grass behind us. “Hey, here she comes,” she said around a full mouth.

I started to turn, but stopped when I noticed Nash staring. And not at me. His wide-eyed gaze was trained over my head, and if his jaw got any looser, he’d have to pick it up off his tray. “Sabine?” he said, his voice soft and stunned.

Emma slapped the table. “ That’s her name!” She twisted and called over her shoulder. “Sabine, over here!” Then she glanced back at Nash. “Wait, you’ve already met her?”

Nash didn’t answer. Instead, he stood, nearly tripping over his own bench seat, and when he rounded the table toward the new girl, I finally turned to look at her. And instantly understood why she wasn’t intimidated by Emma.

Sabine was an entirely different kind of gorgeous.

She was a contrast of pale skin and dark hair, where Em was golden. Slim and lithe, where Em was curvy. She swaggered, where Emma glided. And she’d stopped cold, her lunch tray obviously forgotten, and was staring not at me or her new friend Emma, but at my boyfriend.

My kind-of boyfriend. Or whatever.

“Sabine?” Nash whispered this time, and his familiar, stunned tone set off alarm bells in my head.

“Nash Hudson. Holy shit, it is you!” the new girl said, tossing long dark hair over one shoulder to reveal a mismatched set of hoops in her double-pierced right ear.

Nash rounded the table and walked past me without a glance in my direction. Sabine set her tray on the nearest table and ran at him. He opened his arms, and she flew into them so hard they spun in a tight circle. Together.

My chest burned like I’d swallowed an entire jar of hot salsa.

“What are you doing here?” Nash asked, setting her down, as she said, “I can’t believe it!”

But I was pretty sure she could believe it. She looked more thrilled than surprised. “I heard your name this morning, but I didn’t think it would really be you!”

“It’s me. So…what? You go to school here now?”

“Yeah. New foster home. Moved in last week.” She smiled, and her dark eyes lit up. “I can’t believe this!”

“Me, neither.” Em stood and pulled me up. “What is it we’re not believing?”

And finally Nash turned, one arm still wrapped casually around Sabine’s waist, as if he’d forgotten it was still there. “Sabine went to my school in Fort Worth, before I moved here.”

“Yeah, before you ran off and left me!” She twisted out of his grip to punch him in the shoulder, but she didn’t look mad.

“Hey, you left first, remember?” Nash grinned.

“Not by choice!” Her scowl was almost as dark as her grin was blinding.

What the hell were they talking about?

I’d already opened my mouth to say…something, when Tod winked into existence on my left. Fortunately, I was still too confused by the arrival of Nash’s old friend— please, please just be a friend!—to be surprised by the sudden appearance of his mostly dead grim reaper brother.

“Hey, Kaylee, you…” Tod began, running one hand through pale blond curls, then stopped when he saw Sabine and Nash, still chatting like long-lost relatives, while the rest of us watched. “Uh-oh. I’m too late.”

“Too late for what?” Emma asked, but I could tell from the lack of a reaction from either Nash or Sabine that Em and I were currently the only ones who could see Tod. Selective corporeality was one of several really cool reaper abilities, and now that Emma knew about him, Tod rarely appeared to me alone. For which I was more than grateful—Em was one less person who thought I went around talking to myself when I was really talking to the reaper.