Before I Wake ss-6 Page 10

  “How do they even know he’s out?” I said when the front doors had closed behind us, careful that only Nash and Sabine could hear me. “What, did Avari hold a press conference?”

  “I don’t know, but if I see him again, I’m going to expel the hellion by any means necessary,” Nash said. So far, the only means we knew of was to knock the host unconscious. “Maybe Scott can stay with me for a few days, so Baskerville can watch out for us both.”

  Sabine didn’t look happy about sharing Nash with another houseguest, but he didn’t even notice. “I’ll see you both at lunch. I’m gonna go see if the nurse will give me some Tylenol.”

  “I don’t think she treats hangovers,” I called after him, and when I turned to glance at Sabine, she was already walking off in the other direction.

  * * *

  At lunch, I went through the line and got a tray, because that’s what you do at lunch, and looking and acting normal had become a part of my job. I’d just sat down at my usual table and cracked the cap on my bottle of water when Luca came jogging up to my table. Instead of sitting, he leaned over with both hands flat on the table.

  “Hey, I know we just met, but I need to ask you for a favor—” I said, but he interrupted me before I could ask him to find Thane again.

  “I just saw Sophie crying, and I tried to find out what’s wrong, but she ran into the girls’ bathroom in the front hall. Can you go check on her?”

  I have to admit, I hesitated. Sophie had turned on me more times than I could count, and even after she’d learned the family secret, she’d abandoned me to the wolves on my first day back at school. And the last time I’d followed my cousin into the bathroom, I’d found her shearing a beauty queen with a pair of pinking shears.

  “Please,” Luca said, and I was surprised to realize he actually liked her. For real. Even more, he was worried about her.

  “Fine. But if a beautiful blond reaper shows up while I’m gone, don’t freak out. That’s my boyfriend, Tod.”

  Luca nodded, clearly confused, and I headed through the cafeteria and into the front hall, then pushed open the door to the girls’ restroom. The room looked empty, but someone was sniffling in the last stall.

  “Sophie?”

  The sniffling stopped. “Go away, Kaylee.” My cousin’s voice had that just-cried nasal quality, but lacked its usual hostile bite.

  “What’s wrong?” I pushed open the last stall to find her perched on the edge of the toilet seat, her phone cradled in both hands.

  “Like you care.”

  “Why would I be here if I didn’t care?”

  “I don’t know why you do half the things you do, Kaylee.”

  I crossed both arms over my chest, rapidly losing patience. “Okay, this is your last chance to soak up some free sympathy and attention before I go tell Luca you’re throwing a fit over a broken nail.”

  She blinked when I said Luca’s name, then her eyes filled with tears again. “Not that it’ll mean anything to you, but I just found out that Scott died yesterday, okay? How’s that for a broken nail? My ex, whom you got arrested, died in the mental hospital yesterday morning.”

  My hands started to shake, and I had to concentrate to keep my heart from stopping. “That’s not possible,” I whispered as Scott’s face flashed behind my eyes, twisted into a sneer that was all Avari.

  “Why? You think you’re the only one allowed to die around here? Not everything is about you, Kaylee Cavanaugh.”

  “Are you sure he died at the hospital?”

  Sophie set her phone in her lap to blot tears from her eyes with a thin square of toilet paper. “Yes, I’m sure. Where else would he be?”

  “And you’re sure it was yesterday? Not this morning?” Tod and I had seen Scott since then. So had Nash.

  “What is wrong with you?” my cousin demanded, frowning up at me through glittery mascara that had started to streak beneath her eyes. “You’re acting even weirder than usual.”

  I snatched the phone from her lap and ignored her protest while I scanned the article she’d been reading. My horror grew with every word, and when I saw the picture attached to the article, I stopped breathing altogether. It was a shot of me, sitting in my chemistry class, clearly taken through the school window the day before.

  The headline read Teen Returns to School the Day Her First Attacker Is Found Dead. The article went on to explain how, months before my math teacher tried to kill me, eighteen-year-old Scott William Carter was arrested and declared unfit to stand trial for attempting to commit the exact same crime. Scott, according to the article, was discovered dead in his bed at Lakeside Mental Health Center on Monday morning, during breakfast.

  The article ended with the reporter wondering what it was about me that made people want to kill me. Then he called me a serial survivor.

  The irony burned deep, deep inside.

  7

  “BUT HOW COULD he have died before you saw him?” Em whispered from across the table. She was trying to get caught up before Jayson arrived and we’d have to either table the discussion or move it elsewhere.

  “I don’t know,” I said, screwing the top back onto my bottle of water.

  “The list of things we can’t make sense of is extra-long and twisty today,” Tod said. He’d shown up with two boxes of pizza while I was still in the bathroom, but if any of the teachers realized he wasn’t a student, he’d have to leave. Or at least pretend to leave.

  “Are you sure you saw him last night?” Em asked, and Nash shook his head, staring at the slice of pizza lying untouched on a napkin in front of him. Tod had brought his favorite—pepperoni and mushrooms—but whatever appetite he’d had and whatever tolerance he’d been willing to extend to his brother had expired the moment he found out Scott was dead.

  “I’m not sure,” Nash said. “I don’t remember it very clearly.”

  “Okay, but we know what we saw,” Tod pointed out. “Kaylee and I saw and spoke to him in the hospital, more than twelve hours after the newspaper says he died.”

  “Ohh,” I breathed as a piece of the puzzle fell into place. “He wasn’t packing to be released. Someone else had started boxing up his things. Because he died.”

  “Can a hellion possess a dead body?” Sabine asked around a mouthful of pizza

  Tod shrugged. “Before today, I would have said no.”

  Emma frowned and glanced around the quad, on the lookout for Jayson. “Okay, but even if that’s possible, are you seriously suggesting that Avari possessed a body in the hospital morgue, dressed it in its own clothes, walked it across the street to the mental-health center, broke into the adolescent ward, then waltzed into Scott’s room, and no one noticed?”

  Sabine scowled, but before she could defend her theory, Nash pushed the pizza box toward the middle of the table and exhaled. “Can we please stop referring to Scott as a dead body?”

  No one bothered to point out that the description was accurate. This was just the latest in a series of losses that had begun shaping Nash’s life long before I met him.

  “Sorry,” Em mumbled, and for about a minute, no one spoke.

  Then the silence got the better of Sabine and she turned to Tod. “Okay, then, was he scheduled to die yesterday? Can you ask your boss?”

  “Don’t have to,” Tod said as Luca made his way across the quad toward us. “Lakeside is in my zone, because it’s attached to the hospital, and Scott died during my shift. If his death was scheduled, I would have been the one reaping his soul. At the very least, I would have known about it.”

  “Okay, Sophie’s calmer now, but they’re still sending her home,” Luca said, sliding onto the bench next to Sabine. “She’s in the office waiting for her dad, because school policy says that if she’s not fit for class, she’s not fit to drive, and they won’t let me take her home because I’m not a relative.”

  Emma blinked at him in surprise, then glanced at the rest of us in turn. “Who’s this?”

  I gestured to her with one hand an
d him with the other. “Emma Marshall, Luca Tedesco. Em is my best friend. Luca is a necromancer, and my coreclamationist. Or whatever. He’s also Sophie’s new boyfriend.”

  “Necro-what?” Emma asked.

  Sabine reached across the table to claim a half-eaten crust from Emma’s napkin. “He’s a metal detector for dead stuff.”

  Em glanced at Luca, her eyes wide in either interest or fear. “Like ghosts?”

  “No, like the undead.” He gestured at me and Tod. “And the recently dead. But once someone’s been dead for more than a few days or is buried more than a few feet deep, my accuracy suffers.”

  “That is both creepy and fascinating,” Sabine said. Then she gestured to him with the half-eaten crust. “I like him. Not sure why he’s wasting his time with the pole dancer, though.”

  Tod laughed out loud and I groaned. “Sophie takes ballet and jazz. She’s not a pole dancer.”

  “There’s more money in pole dancing,” Sabine insisted.

  “Actually, Sophie takes ballet and lyrical dance. She quit jazz last year,” Luca said, and every single one of us glanced at him in surprise. “What?” He shrugged. “She listens to me talk about dead people and soccer.”

  I shook my head, trying to draw my thoughts back into focus. “Okay, what are the possibilities? About Avari and Scott, not Sophie?”

  “Scott’s dead, and Avari’s possessed his corpse,” Nash said, each word short and clipped, as if they actually hurt to pronounce. As far as I could tell, he had yet to actually make eye contact with his brother.

  “That possibility should be easy enough to verify or eliminate,” Sabine said.

  “How?” Em asked.

  “Go look in the casket. If the body’s there, then Avari obviously doesn’t have it,” the mara said, and she actually looked sorry when Nash flinched.

  I glanced at Tod, and he shrugged. “Okay,” I said. “One of us should be able to handle that. Other possibilities?”

  “He’s not really dead?” Em said. “He faked his own death, like on a soap opera.”

  Sabine’s brows rose. “Or he’s undead. Something like the two of you.” She waved the pizza crust at me and Tod.

  I turned to Luca. “If you saw him, you could tell us whether or not he’s alive, right?”

  Luca nodded. “And if he’s close enough, I could sense and track him. But I should probably admit I’ve never intentionally faced a walking corpse.”

  Sabine burst into laughter, drawing stares from the surrounding tables.

  “You’re sitting next to two of them,” Nash said, too low for anyone outside our circle to hear.

  Luca glanced at me and Tod, whom he’d met while I was with Sophie, then turned back to Nash with a shrug. “Yeah, but they’re the good guys, right? I’ve never picked a fight with anything out to steal my soul.”

  Nash looked at Tod then, for the first time since he’d sat down, and I knew the fragile peace had met its end, at least for the moment. “Good is a relative term, and souls aren’t the only things worth stealing.”

  “Something can’t be stolen if it doesn’t truly belong to you in the first place,” Tod insisted, but Nash stood and walked away from us all without a word, just as Jayson stepped into the quad.

  “How come he’s always leaving?” Jayson asked, sliding onto the bench seat next to Emma. “I’m starting to take it personally.”

  “Don’t,” Sabine said. “He doesn’t like you enough to care whether or not you’re here.”

  * * *

  After school, I blinked into my room—being dead was saving me a fortune in gas—and dropped my backpack on my bed. I scruffed Styx’s fur and let her pretend to attack my fingers—if she’d wanted to, she could have bitten them clean off—then headed into the kitchen for a soda.

  I wasn’t thirsty. But if I hadn’t been dead, I would have finished at least one can of Coke before I even considered starting my homework, and lately it felt like observing the old routines was the only way to stay sane.

  I was three steps into the living room when I heard Harmony’s voice, and when I looked up, I saw her sitting at the kitchen table with my father, cradling a cup of hot tea in one hand. I started to say hi, but then she finished her sentence and I realized they could neither see nor hear me.

  “I’m sorry, Aiden. You have my word that he’s clean. Sobriety is harder to enforce. But I’m trying, and I think he is, too. He’s just having a really hard time right now.”

  “I know. But that’s not the biggest problem involving your sons and my daughter.”

  Harmony frowned into her mug and closed her eyes for a second, like she was steeling herself for more bad news. “What now?”

  “Tod and Kaylee are getting…physical,” my dad said, and I could feel my invisible cheeks flame. He’d left work early and called Harmony over just because I’d said the S-word? Seriously?

  Harmony burst into laughter, and my father’s expression of confusion must have mirrored my own. “They’ve always been ‘physical,’ Aiden. That’s how this whole thing started, remember? With a kiss?”

  My father’s frown deepened into a formidable scowl. “No. I mean they’re getting intimate.” He said the word like it hurt coming out, and the fire behind my face raged on.

  Harmony nodded and studied his expression, sipping from her mug, and it looked like she was trying to decide on the right response before she opened her mouth. I’d always admired that about her. “Okay,” she said finally. Then she set her mug down. “And you really think that two teenagers contemplating sex is worse than Nash showing up drunk on your doorstep?”

  My father blinked. Then he blinked again. “First of all, Tod’s not a teenager—”

  “And Kaylee’s not a child,” Harmony pointed out, and I wanted to hug her. Except that would have been the most awkward spyfail in history.

  “Doesn’t this bother you at all? They’ve only been together for a month. Doesn’t that seem a little…fast?”

  Harmony wrapped her hands around her mug on the table, but didn’t pick it up. “How long were you and Darby together before you…?”

  My father’s irritation paled beneath the new flush creeping into his cheeks. I’d rarely seen him embarrassed, and I’d never seen him blush before. Ever. “That’s not the point.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” Harmony smiled. “That’s what I thought. Yes, Kay and Tod have only been together for a month. And maybe I do think that’s too fast, even if that thought could reasonably be considered hypocritical, coming from either of us. But that’s not our decision to make.”

  “The hell it isn’t. She’s a child.”

  “No, she’s days away from her seventeenth birthday.” Which was the age of consent, in Texas. “And she’s dead. As is he. I don’t think adolescent norms apply here, Aiden. Not anymore.”

  “We’ll have to agree to disagree on that.”

  “No.” Harmony let go of her mug to take my dad’s hand, and he looked at her in surprise. She looked…scared. “Aiden, don’t chase him away. Please. I know you only want to protect her, and I want the same thing for Tod, but they’re good for each other. I promise you that. And if you chase him off because you’re afraid of letting your little girl grow up, then what do either of them have left? Eternity alone?”

  “Harmony—” he said, but she talked over him and refused to let go of his hand.

  “I wish you could have seen him last year. He was a different person. No longer the boy I lost, but not yet the man Kaylee found. He was…indifferent. He was slipping away. Your daughter changed that. He needs her. And she needs him. I don’t think you could keep them apart forever, but even a few years alone in the afterlife could be enough to change them both. If you ruin this for them, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. But they’ll regret it for eternity.”

  My father closed his eyes.

  “Eternity is a long time to be alone, Aiden.”

  Finally he squeezed her hand and met her gaze across the table. “What do you
want me to do?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “You don’t have to do anything but let them set their own pace. You don’t have to condone anything. You don’t even have to change your open-bedroom-door policy. Just…let them figure things out for themselves. Please.”

  I stopped breathing so I wouldn’t miss anything. I was too nervous to move closer, even though they couldn’t see or hear me.

  My dad inhaled deeply. Then, at last, he nodded. And I snuck back to my room, reeling from what I’d just heard.

  * * *

  Checking Scott’s coffin turned out to be impossible, because he didn’t have one yet. After a little digging in the online versions of the local newspapers, I’d figured out which funeral home his parents had chosen, but after a glance around the place—incorporealty has its advantages—I discovered that the body wasn’t scheduled to be picked up until the next day.

  Scott was still at the hospital morgue.

  That night, I made up for the morning’s chaos with a tray of fast-food tacos in front of the TV with my dad. I had to pretend to be surprised by the brownies Harmony had brought over. Fortunately, he seemed no more inclined to discuss her visit than I was to ask about it.

  After dinner, I made sure he saw me doing my homework for a couple more hours, then I made sure he didn’t see that Tod was in my room when he went to bed. My dad had agreed not to stand between us—though I wasn’t supposed to know that—but he hadn’t changed any of the rules.

  “You know what tonight is?” I said when Tod settled into the big bean-bag chair in the corner of my room. That was the only place he could sit without giving away his presence with the loud creak of springs or the squeal of metal.

  Tod tugged me down into his lap, facing him, and his hands settled at my waist. “What is tonight? And by the way, whatever it is, it can’t top this.” He pulled me down for a kiss and I lingered there, enjoying the moment.

  “Tonight is take-your-girlfriend-to-work night,” I whispered into his ear as his hand slid beneath my shirt and splayed across my back. “So… You should take your girlfriend to work.”