Before I Wake

“Forever?” The very concept of forever—of time without end—was too daunting to truly contemplate. Doing nothing for a millennia of spare time—even nothing with Tod—didn’t seem possible. Surely I’d lose my mind.

“What about you? What do you want?” In all the conversations we’d had in the past month—spilling secrets, doubts, wants, and hopes—it had never occurred to me to ask that.

“I have what I want.” His hand squeezed mine again, but it felt like he was squeezing my heart. “There’s plenty of time to figure the rest out. Hopefully it’ll go something like this …”

He leaned in for another kiss, and it took every single bit of willpower I had to pull away from him, when what I really wanted to do was climb into his lap, and bury my hands in his hair, and make a private spectacle of us both. I’d never had an urge so strong, and the reasons to resist were suddenly frighteningly vague.

Oh, yeah. Work. And school.

“I thought you had souls to reap …” I whispered, staring into the desire swirling in his eyes, wondering if he could see mine reflected back at him.

“They’ll wait.”

“I’m trying to do the mature thing here.” I groaned when he pulled me close again.

“I’m not.”

“Why do I always have to be the one who says ‘stop’?” I demanded, my voice little more than a moan.

“You don’t. In fact, at this point I’m considering a petition to have that word stricken from the English language.” His grin was almost lazy, the gleam in his eyes an effortless challenge. “If I did, would you sign?”

“No fair. If there was a pen in my hand right now, I’d sign whatever you put in front of me.”

“Good thing I’m not a hellion.”

He was kidding, but thinking about Avari accomplished what I’d lacked the willpower to do on my own. Playtime was over.

“I better get back. But I’ll see you at lunch?”

“Yeah, but I might be late. I want to check in at work after my shift and see if anyone else has spotted Thane.”

“Okay.” I gave him another quick kiss, then blinked out of the hospital and into a bathroom in the food court across the street from school, where I picked up a bag full of burgers and fries. Then, just for fun, I blinked into Emma’s third-period art class, careful that no one else could see or hear me, and leaned over her shoulder.

“Lunch is on me.”

Em yelped, and when she jumped, she accidentally painted a long yellow line across the canvas she’d been working on. Everyone looked up, and Em apologized, mumbling something about a bee buzzing around her head, then glared at me before turning back to her painting. “Not funny,” she breathed, like she was talking to herself.

“Sorry,” I said. But it was kind of funny, and laughing felt good, even if no one else could share the moment of levity with me. I understood then why Tod had stayed near his family after he died. The living bring out what life remains in the dead. I was drawn to my friends and family, and when I couldn’t be with them, the world—my entire afterlife—felt so much emptier in their absence.

I blinked into the empty quad and sat at the picnic table Em and I had shared with Nash and Sabine until the week I’d died, and since no one was watching, I concentrated on pulling myself onto the physical plane right there in the open. Then I munched on fries from my bag until the bell rang.

Unfortunately, I’d failed to factor my new infamy into my lunch plans.

The first few people who entered the quad with lunch trays glanced at me, then sat at their own tables and stared while they ate. The gawking wasn’t polite, but it wasn’t truly invasive, either, so I could deal. Then the quad started to fill up and more people stared, upping the ante with a little obvious gossip. But before long, people I actually had classes with—the ones who’d known who I was before Beck stabbed me—started asking if they could join me.

Most of them sat without waiting for an answer.

To their credit, they were outwardly polite. Most asked how I was feeling and several offered to help with my makeup work. One idiot even asked me to the prom. I could only stutter in response.

When my table filled up before Em and Jayson arrived, I started to panic again. I was sick of questions, and stares, and friends who hadn’t been my friends before. I wanted nothing to do with any of it. I just wanted to disappear.

And as soon as I had that thought, it started to happen. I could feel it—I could feel myself slipping out of the physical plane—and it took all of my concentration to remain visible. I propped my elbows on the table and buried my face in my hands, chanting to myself silently.

I want to be here. I want to be here. Iwanttobehere. But that wasn’t true, and it didn’t help.

Unfortunately, the rest of the table mistook my concentration for pain and everyone started asking me if I was okay. If there was something they could get me. Someone even tried to pull my hands away from my face to make sure I was still conscious. Evidently I’d stopped breathing.

“All right, back the hell off!” a familiar voice shouted as I jerked my arm free from whoever’d pulled it. I looked up to see Sabine staring down the boldest of my new “friends.” I knew by the almost liquid depths of her black, black eyes that she was unleashing their own fears on them, literally scaring them away.

Sabine was a Nightmare. For real. Though the politically correct term was mara, the old-fashioned one fit better, in my opinion. She could read people’s fears and weave nightmares from them, then feed from her victims in their sleep.

Creepy? Yeah. Especially when she’d tried to use her mara abilities and appetite to scare me away from Nash. But in that moment, in the quad, I was more than grateful for the rescue from someone I’d considered my nemesis a few short months earlier.

“Thanks,” I said when the last of the vultures was gone, and when I looked up again, Nash stood behind Sabine. Watching me. It killed me that I couldn’t tell what he was thinking or feeling, though I completely understood why he would control the telltale swirling in his irises around me now.

“Bastards have no self-respect,” Sabine muttered as the last of the crowd dissipated. “Even I don’t feed off the weak or the injured.”

I decided not to waste my breath telling her I was neither weak nor injured—physically, anyway. “Will you stay and eat with me?” I asked, glancing from Sabine to Nash, who closed his eyes and took a deep breath, then met my gaze again. “I brought burgers.”

Free food was usually enough to tempt Sabine, but Nash was another story.

“Is he here?” Nash asked, and I realized that was the first time I’d heard his voice since the day I died.

“He” was Tod, of course.

“Not yet, but you could stay till he gets here. Or you could just stay. You have every right to hate us both, but this doesn’t have to be …” Words failed me when the thought behind them trailed into nothing.

“Doesn’t have to be what, Kaylee?” Nash demanded softly. “Awkward and painful? Because if you know of some other way for me to view the fact that my brother stole my girlfriend, who then framed me for her murder, I’m willing to listen.”

But I didn’t. That was all true, and trying to defend either of us would only have made Nash angrier.

He started to turn away, and I stood, hyperaware of all the eyes watching us. “Please, stay,” I said, and he stopped. “Please, just…Maybe we could start again?” I said, so that only he and Sabine could hear. “I know we can’t erase everything that went wrong between us, but maybe we could kind of turn the page and start on a fresh one. Tabula rasa.”

Nash glanced at Sabine, who shrugged, then they both sat. And I realized I had no idea what to say. My plan ended with begging them both to sit with me, because I hadn’t really expected that to work.

“Um, Em and her boyfriend will be here any minute, which will probably put an end to genuine conversation, but…How are you?” I asked, pulling burgers from the grease-stained bag. His recovery from frost addiction had suffered a recent relapse and Harmony had said that kicking the habit a second time was even harder, because withdrawal was more severe.

“Do you even eat anymore?” Nash asked, ignoring my question entirely.

“I don’t have to, but, yeah, I can.” I handed him a burger and a carton of fries, and Sabine helped herself to the bag, impatient as always. “Nash, I’m so sorry.”

“You already said that,” Sabine said, folding the wrapper back from her burger. “You said it a lot, actually. Which supports my theory that apologies are basically pointless. They don’t fix anything, right? That’s why I rarely bother.”

“An apology isn’t a Band-Aid,” I insisted. “It’s an expression of regret.”

“Not that that matters.” Nash’s voice was deep and angry. He hadn’t touched his food. “Half these assholes still think I stabbed you, Kaylee. How is it that I stayed away from you, just like you told me to, yet I still wound up arrested and charged with killing you?”

“I didn’t have any choice.” That was the truth, and I needed him to believe that worse than I’d ever needed anything from him. “Beck said he’d rape and kill Em and Sophie if I didn’t cooperate. I couldn’t let that happen. He’d already hurt so many.” The memory chilled me, which made it hard to keep my heart beating, in a body that was already reluctant to cooperate. “But I fixed it. I told the police you weren’t even there.”