Before I Wake

“Kaylee, can I talk to you for a minute, please?” my dad said with a glance at the rumpled comforter.

“Um, yeah.” I followed him into the kitchen, where he pulled a soda from the fridge and popped the tab.

“I know things are inevitably going to change, but I’m not going to pretend to be happy that the two of you were here, alone, behind closed doors.” I didn’t bother to tell him that doors no longer mattered. The only time I didn’t feel alone was when Tod was with me.

“I don’t really want to have this conversation with you, Dad.”

“I don’t want to have it, either, but you’re kind of forcing my hand.”

“No, I’m not.” I took a soda from the fridge for myself, and after a moment’s consideration, I grabbed one for Tod, too. “If you think about this logically, you have to admit that most of the reasons for me to wait to have sex died when I died.”

My dad flinched. “You said it out loud. There’s no going back now, is there?”

“Nope.”

He was thinking about my mother. Wishing she was here for this conversation. I knew, because I was thinking the same thing. But wishes were worthless, so I launched into logic.

“I can’t get pregnant, and I can’t catch anything.” Not that Tod had anything for me to catch. “And I love him. And he loves me. Shouldn’t that be enough?”

“Yes. It should. And it will be.” He closed his eyes and gripped the edge of the countertop, like it was the only thing holding him up. Then his eyes opened and his gaze met mine, his swirling with brown twists of regret and nostalgia. “But you’re still so young.”

“I’m as grown up as I’m going to get, Dad. And hell, I died a virgin. I died because I was a virgin. So I hope you can understand why I no longer see the point in preserving something that only served to get me killed.”

“Okay.” My dad nodded slowly. “Those are valid points. Just promise me you’ll think about this before you jump into anything.” He flinched again, and met my gaze with what looked like great effort. “You haven’t already jumped…right?”

“No. There’s been no jumping yet. And I promise that I’m not done thinking. How’s that?”

“Is that as good as I’m going to get?”

“It’s as good as I have to offer.”

“Okay.” He didn’t look happy, but he didn’t look exactly mad, either. He looked…disappointed. And maybe a little scared. “You do understand that if we were to add up all the time we’ve actually spent together, you’d still only be around five years old to me, right?”

“I know,” I said, and his sad smile made me ache. “And you understand that I grew up during those years you missed, right? That’s not how I wanted it, but that’s how it happened, and I can’t go back and fix it. I can’t go back and fix anything, Dad.”

“I know. And I’m so sorry. So, how ‘bout I start making it up to you with Chinese delivery? We got this coupon in the mail….” He set his soda down and started digging through a pile of junk mail on the counter.

“Thanks, but I’m not really hungry, and Tod and I need to do something. Something work-related,” I added when his brows arched in suspicion.

“Oh. Okay.”

“But maybe we could watch a movie tonight?” I said when his disappointment nearly broke my heart. “Just the two of us?”

He nodded and forced a smile. “I’ll be waiting.”

Tod caught my gaze from the hallway, where he’d waited, unseen by my father, and when he took my hand so we could blink out together, he leaned close to whisper in my ear. “I’d say he took that pretty well. You know your dad’s the coolest dad on the face of the planet, right?”

“I know. One of these days, I may just tell him.”

“Do you remember the last time we were here?” Tod asked as we stood on the sidewalk in front of Lakeside, the mental-health unit attached to the hospital where Tod reaped souls and his mother worked the second shift as an R.N.

“How could I forget?” I felt a little queasy just thinking about it. “Feels different this time, though.”

“Because you can get in and out on your own?”

“Yeah.” That eliminated my fear of being trapped. Caught. Locked up. “Maybe I’ll pretend I still have to hold your hand to be invisible.”

“Role-playing. I like it.” His fingers curled around mine. “Have you heard from Lydia since we broke her out?”

Lydia was a psychic syphon and former psychiatric patient who’d saved both my life and my sanity by taking some of my pain into herself when I was locked up in Lakeside. Tod and I had freed her less than a month ago.

“No.” I’d tried two different women’s shelters—while I was incorporeal—before I’d realized she might not be allowed to stay without risking being put into foster care. “But I’ll keep looking for her.” She’d saved my life. I owed her nothing less.

“You ready for this?” Tod asked.

“Let’s go.” I closed my eyes and concentrated on Scott’s room, in the youth wing, on the third floor. Somewhere on the way, I lost Tod’s hand and started to panic, but he was there waiting for me when I opened my eyes in Scott’s room. “Guess I still need practice doing that in tandem, huh?”

“We have plenty of time to get it right. We have time to get everything right.” He started to pull me close, but I froze with one glance over his shoulder. Scott lay on his back, on top of his made bed, fully dressed, including laceless sneakers. His hands were folded beneath his head and his eyes were closed. Watching him when he didn’t know we were there was a little creepy. I still wasn’t used to being incorporeal on purpose.

I glanced around the room and frowned. Scott’s clothes were folded neatly on the open shelves bolted to the wall, but all of his other personal items—mostly photos of him, Nash, and Doug, who’d died of the frost addiction that drove Scott insane—were packed into an open box on the floor next to the desk bolted to the wall.

“Maybe they’re getting ready to move him,” Tod said, squatting to look into the box.

“Why? And where?” I didn’t look at his stuff. I didn’t want to see pieces of Scott’s shattered life and know that they all fit in a single box on the floor. I didn’t want to know how close Nash had come to sharing the same fate. I didn’t want to remember how I hadn’t been fast or perceptive enough to save either of them.

“Is there a way to let him see us without scaring the crap out of him?” I whispered, though my volume had no effect on whether or not Scott could hear me.

“There’s the slow fade-in,” Tod said, standing again, his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “But I’m a fan of the dramatic sudden appearance.” His grin was to lighten the mood, but I had trouble smiling at Lakeside. There was nothing funny about being locked up with only your personal demons for company.

In Scott’s case, the demon was real.

“Okay, here goes nothing.” I focused on Scott, trying to make sure he was the only one other than Tod who could hear and see me, in case someone else came in while we were there. That’s harder than it sounds, and I’d messed it up in practice more times than I cared to admit.

When I was pretty sure I had it right, I cleared my throat.

Scott’s eyes opened and his head rolled in our direction. His brows rose, but he didn’t look particularly surprised. Maybe because he was accustomed to seeing things that weren’t there. Maybe because he was used to seeing me in particular. Avari had been giving him hallucinations of me, a fact that creeped me out almost as badly as the hellion himself did.

“Hi, Scott,” I said, and he sat up slowly, feet on the floor, leaning forward with his hands curled around the mattress on either side of his knees. His eyes were clear and focused. He didn’t look medicated.

“I heard you were dead. Kinda assumed that meant I wouldn’t be seeing you again.”

“Sorry.” I wasn’t sure whether or not I should admit that I had, in fact, died. Scott was officially crazy, so no one would believe him, anyway. But I decided not to mention it. Just in case. “Scott, I need a favor. Could you ask Avari a question for me?”

“Why?” Scott looked straight into my eyes as he spoke, and his gaze was oddly steady.

“Because we can’t speak to him directly without crossing over,” Tod said.

“What if you could?” His focus narrowed on me, and my skin started to crawl.