Rachel Vincent - My Soul to Steal

“Can you believe this?” Em whispered, scooting her desk closer to mine. “Yesterday he was fine, and today he’s dead. Right here in his own classroom.”

“Weird, huh?” And I couldn’t help wondering why Tod hadn’t told me someone was scheduled to die at my school, just as a courtesy. If I’d been there when it actually happened, I’d have been compelled to sing—or scream—for his soul.

“And sad. Makes me feel bad about not bothering with homework for most of last semester. Do you think he was grading midterms when he died?”

I frowned when I realized she was serious. “Emma, your test did not give him a stroke.”

“I think you underestimate my incomprehension of sign, cosign, and tangent,” she said, obviously trying to lighten the mood. And failing miserably. Her eyes narrowed as she watched me. “Everyone else is completely weirded out by this. Why isn’t this freaking you out, Kaylee?”

I could only shrug. “It is. It’s just that…” I lowered my voice and leaned closer to her. “I’ve seen a lot of death in the past few months, and every bit of it has been weird and wrong . After all that, it’s actually kind of good to know that Mr. Wesner died at his own time and that his soul isn’t being tortured for all of eternity. For once, death worked the way it was supposed to, and honestly, that’s kind of a relief.” Even if it did happen at school.

“I guess I can understand that,” Emma said at last. But I had my doubts. “Okay, enough of this. I’m depressing myself.” Emma shook her head, then forced her gaze to meet mine. “So…what were you going to say earlier?”

My news didn’t seem quite as catastrophic as it had before I’d found out my algebra teacher died, but the very thought of Nash and Sabine alone at his house still made my blood boil. “Nash spent most of the night with Sabine.”

“With her? Like, with her, with her?”

I shrugged. “He says they were just talking, but she’s on the prowl, I swear. She actually reminded me that Nash and I broke up. Like that gives her some prior claim or something.”

“Well, yeah, technically. You’re both his exes now, so…” Em hesitated, obviously wanting to say something I wouldn’t want to hear. “Does he seem interested in her again?”

“His mouth says no, but his eyes… His irises churn like the ocean every time I say her name. There’s definitely something still there, but I can’t tell exactly what it is. It’s strong, though. And she was spewing innuendo like some kind of gossip geyser, saying how great it is that Nash’s mom works nights. She’s making up for more than just lost time. Plus…” I felt like an idiot, saying it out loud, but it was the truth. “She’s creepy.”

“What do you mean, creepy?”

I scratched at a name carved into the corner of my desk. “I don’t know. She gives me chills. I think there’s something wrong with her. And Nash knows about it, whatever it is. He told me he’d talk to her. Like, he’d take care of her. I think she’s seriously unstable.”

Em raised both brows at me, and I rolled my eyes. “I know, that sounds hypocritical coming from me.” Usually I was hypersensitive to references to mental instability, because I’d spent a week locked up in the mental health ward a year and a half ago. “I don’t mean she’s crazy. I mean she’s…unbalanced. Dangerous. She’s a criminal, Em.”

Emma shrugged. “Tod says she did her time.”

“Yeah. A few months in a halfway house. I’d hardly call that paying for her crimes.”

“You don’t even know what her crimes are.”

“I’m guessing theft. She probably stole someone’s boyfriend.”

Emma laughed, and I gave in to a grin of my own. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about, Kaylee. Whatever they had can’t compare to what you and Nash have been through together. I mean, she’s human, right? How well can she possibly know him?”

I sat a little straighter. Emma was right. Sabine was a non-issue. I’d faced down two hellions in the past four months, not to mention assorted Netherworld monsters. Compared to all that, what was one stupid ex-girlfriend? Right?

BY LUNCHTIME, news of Mr. Wesner’s death had already been chewed up and regurgitated by the masses so many times that it bore little resemblance to the story Emma originally reported. In any other school, during any other year, a teacher’s death would have been a headline all on its own. But we’d already lost four students, and the yearbook’s In Memoriam page was getting regular updates. So while some of the snippets of conversation I overheard were flavored with either disbelief or morbid curiosity, most people sounded kind of relieved that life now made a little more sense than it had the day before.

After all, Mr. Wesner was pretty old and overweight enough that he’d wheezed with practically every breath. In a weird way, his death seemed to be giving people a sense of security, as if the world had somehow been shoved back into alignment with the natural order of things, wherein old, unhealthy people died, and young people talked about it over nachos and cafeteria hamburgers.

I paid for my food, then grabbed a Coke from the vending machine and made my way outside, where I found Nash sitting at a table on the far side of the quad. Alone. Again.

I felt bad for him. With the rest of the football team still reeling from their double loss, no one seemed to know what to say to the last surviving musketeer. But Nash’s solitude was a definite advantage to me. I headed his way, hoping Emma would be late again and that Sabine would walk off the edge of the earth so he and I could talk.

His eyes lit up when I sat on the bench across from him, and some of my tension eased. “Hey, did you hear about Mr. Wesner?” he asked. “Don’t you have him this year?”

“First period.” I twisted the cap off my bottle. “Em’s the one who broke the story.”

After that, he seemed at a loss for what else to say.

I knew exactly what I wanted to say—what I wanted to know—but I questioned the wisdom of actually asking. What’s that they say about beating a dead horse?

But after a few sips of my soda and a lot of awkward silence from Nash, my curiosity overwhelmed my common sense. “So…what’d she do?”

“What’d who do?” Nash asked, around a mouthful of burger.

“Sabine. What’d she get arrested for?”

Nash groaned and swallowed his bite. “Kaylee, I don’t want to talk about Sabine. Not again. Not now.”

“Well, you sure had plenty to say to her.” And in that moment, I hated Sabine for turning me into a paranoid, desperate shrew. Even more than I already half hated her for coming between me and Nash. But that wouldn’t stop me from asking what I needed to know. “How late was she at your house?” I’d never been there past midnight when his mom wasn’t home. If she was there after one, I was going to lose it. You don’t stay at your ex’s house alone with him past one in the morning to talk .

Nash exhaled, long and low. “Burglary and vandalism.”

It did not escape my notice that he’d answered my first question, rather than the latest one. Not a good sign.

“What’d she steal?” I took the top bun off my hamburger and squirted ketchup onto the naked patty, just to have something to do with my hands.

“Nothing, really.” Nash hesitated, poking his limp fries with a fork. “She took a baseball bat, but she didn’t actually leave with it.”

“What does that even mean?” I dropped the bun back onto my burger and tried to pin him with my glare. “She took something, but she didn’t really take it. What happened? She hit someone with it?” The poor, defenseless girlfriend of some guy she had a crush on, maybe?