Before I Wake (2 page)

Still, even if Nash and Sabine both came, there wouldn’t be
enough of my real friends to constitute a party, and I didn’t want to have to
talk to anyone else.

“So, what do you usually do on your birthday?” He didn’t know
the answer to his own question because he’d left me with my aunt and uncle—his
brother—after my mother died. I’d only had him back for seven months.

He regretted leaving me—I knew that for a fact—and that regret
was infinitely heavier for him, now that I was dead.

“Em and I usually rent movies and binge on junk food.” But that
wouldn’t work this year. I’d never had a boyfriend on my birthday before, and
I’d never had a father on my birthday before. And I’d certainly never been dead
on my birthday before.

My dad looked so disappointed I wanted to hug him. So I did the
next best thing. “Fine. A party. But a small one. Friends and family only.”

He gave me half a smile. “Decorations?”

“No. But you can get a cake. Chocolate, with cream cheese
frosting. And I get a corner slice.” If my appetite ever came back, I planned to
eat whatever the hell I wanted, for the rest of my afterlife. Calories mean
nothing to the dead. “And I wouldn’t turn down a couple of presents.”

“Done.” He gave me a real smile that time, and I was relieved
to see it. “I’m sorry I missed all the other birthdays, Kay.”

I shrugged. “You didn’t miss much.”

My dad opened his mouth to protest, but before he could speak,
a tall woman in a brown suit skirt appeared in the kitchen in sensible low
heels, her short brown hair perfectly arranged. “Jeez, Madeline.” My dad half
choked, then gulped from his mug to clear his throat. “Ever hear of
knocking?”

Madeline raised one perfectly arched brow at him. “Mr.
Cavanaugh, I’m doing you a courtesy by letting you see and hear me at all. If
that isn’t good enough for you, I can appear to Kaylee alone.”

Madeline was my boss in the reclamation department—she was the
one who’d okayed the cover-up that hid my death and kept Nash from going down
for my murder. She was also the only department member I’d met so far. My dad
didn’t like her. She hadn’t bothered to form an opinion of him one way or
another.

“It’s fine. Would you like some coffee?” He held up the
untouched mug he’d fixed for me.

“This is not a social visit, Mr. Cavanaugh.” Madeline turned to
me, arms crossed over her white blouse. “Kaylee, there’s some question about
whether or not you’re ready to begin work on your own as an extractor. Four
weeks is a rather short training period, we admit, but the soul thief you were
restored to deal with has killed again, and we can’t let this continue if
there’s any chance you’re ready to take him or her on now.”

A dull knot of fear blossomed deep in my stomach and I fed it
with doubts about my own abilities because I knew I should be scared. I
would
be, if not for the pervasive numbness that
settled deeper into me with each day of my afterlife.

“Wait a minute—who is this thief, and why does Kaylee have to
be the one to stop him? No one ever bothered to explain that to me. After all,
I’m just her father.”

Madeline focused her steely stare at him. “We don’t know who or
what the thief is, Mr. Cavanaugh. That’s part of what we need Kaylee to find
out. But we’ve already lost two agents chasing him, and frankly, because she is
a
bean sidhe,
Kaylee is our best bet at the
moment.”

I was far from sure I could actually do what she wanted, but I
couldn’t find any flaw in her logic. As a female
bean
sidhe,
in life, I’d been a death portent. When someone near me was
close to death, I got the overwhelming need to wail for the departing soul. But
what that wail really did was suspend the soul. Capture it. With the help of a
male
bean sidhe
—Tod, Nash, my uncle, and my dad all
qualified—I could reinstate that soul and save the life of its owner. But at
great cost. To preserve the balance between life and death, when one life was
saved, another would be taken.

Madeline had brought me back from the dead and recruited me in
hopes that my
bean sidhe
abilities would help me
succeed where the other extractors had failed. I desperately hoped she was
right, because the alternative was the end to my afterlife. A final rest, as she
called it.

“And you want me to do this today? Face this thief?” That fear
inside me swelled until I felt cold on the inside, like ice was forming in my
stomach.

“No. We don’t know the thief’s current whereabouts. But we need
to know you’re ready whenever we find him, so today is a trial run, to see how
you perform on your own.”

“But the target is real?” my father asked, and I was starting
to wonder if I even needed to be here for this discussion of my afterlife.

“Very real.” Madeline met my gaze. “Our necromancer has
pinpointed a reaper Levi can’t identify, which means this reaper isn’t from his
district.” Tod’s boss was familiar enough with his own employees to recognize
their restored souls from a distance. “We suspect he’s a rogue and we think
he’ll strike very soon. When that happens, I’ll come for you, and you will go
extract the stolen soul from him. Do you understand?”

“No.” In fact, I wanted to curl up in my bed and hide under the
covers. “If you know he’s there, why not go get him now?”

“Because he hasn’t stolen any souls yet.”

“So you’re just going to let someone die?”

Madeline scowled. “If we were to apprehend him now, we’d never
know for sure the reaper is a rogue and we’d lose this opportunity to see you in
action, on your own. Whatever life this reaper takes doesn’t outweigh our
opportunity to stop the thief you were restored to deal with. To put it in terms
you’ll understand, that’s like swatting a fly, but letting the hornet live.”

“Those aren’t terms I understand! What if yours was the life he
was going to take?” I shoved my plate away and stood. I’d found something else
that could beat back the numbness—anger. “Who are you to decide what one life is
worth?”

“I am your boss.” Madeline didn’t even raise her voice, and it
irritated me to realize she wasn’t as upset about this as I was. She wasn’t
upset at all. “This serial soul thief is much more dangerous than a single rogue
reaper, which makes the reaper an ideal trial run for you. Especially
considering that we can track the reaper, thanks to our new necromancer.”

A necromancer, I’d recently learned, was someone who could see
and communicate with the dead. Only
see
isn’t a
precise term. It’s more of a sense than true sight. Though in my case, the
literal interpretation also applied—a necromancer could see and hear me, even
when I made myself invisible and inaudible to everyone else.

“When am I going to meet this necromancer?”

“Today,” Madeline said. “He started class at your school last
week, and since it seems likely that the two of you will run into each other,
we’d like you to keep an eye on him.”

“Your necromancer is a teenager?”

“I believe he’s in his junior year.”

“Is he alive?” my father asked. He thought the dead-to-living
ratio of my friends and coworkers was high enough already.

“Both alive and human, Mr. Cavanaugh. He’s also a very polite
young man.”

“They’re gonna eat him alive,” I mumbled, and my father
chuckled. “Fine, I’ll keep an eye out for your necromancer, but I can’t promise
that associating with me will do him any favors, socially.”

“Thank you, Kaylee,” Madeline said, and I glanced up in
surprise over the courtesy. Not that Madeline was ever truly rude, she just
wasn’t very…personable. “I’ll find you when and if this reaper turns out to be a
rogue.”

With that Madeline disappeared, and my father sighed. “So much
for a normal first day back.”

I dipped a strip of bacon in a pool of syrup. “Dad, I can count
the number of normal school days I’ve had this year on one hand.”

“I know. I’m sorry about that.” He sipped from his mug, and I
shrugged, but before I could reply, Madeline appeared in the kitchen again, and
this time
I
nearly choked. “Change your mind about
the coffee?” my dad asked, but she only shook her head.

“The reaper made a kill. It’s time to earn your keep,
Kaylee.”

I swallowed the bite I’d nearly choked on then stood, nerves
buzzing in my stomach like I’d devoured a swarm of flies, even though I knew
what to do. I’d been practicing for a month. But… “I have to be in first period
in twenty minutes.”

“Then work fast.” Madeline reached into the pocket of her suit
jacket and pulled out what looked like a handful of metal, which she held out
for me to take. I lifted what turned out to be a heart-shaped locket on a gold
chain. It was pretty, in a sweet, dated kind of way.

“It’s heavy.” I frowned, trying to slide my fingernail into the
edge seam. “And it doesn’t open.”

“That’s because it’s not a locket. It’s an amphora. This will
hold the soul after you capture it. This was designed especially for you, to
look like something a young woman would wear.”

“A young woman from what era?” I mumbled, slipping the chain
over my head.

Madeline frowned. “Bring this back to me when you have the
soul. Do not try to apprehend the rogue. It’s up to the reapers to police their
own—we’re only concerned with the stolen soul he carries. Do you
understand?”

“Yeah.” I wasn’t looking to pick a fight on my first day,
anyway. “Where is this reaper?”

“He killed someone at the Daylight Donuts shop three minutes
ago. If you hurry, he might still be close. If you have trouble finding or
identifying him, sing for the soul.”

“Okay, but—”

“Go, Kaylee.”

I glanced from Madeline to my father, who nodded reluctantly.
So I closed my eyes and thought of the doughnut shop—fortunately, I’d been there
a million times. When I opened my eyes, I stood in the middle of the small
dining area. The shop was open, but empty, and a quick glance around revealed
the body of the owner on the floor of the kitchen, still in his long white
apron. But there was no reaper.

Panicked, I stepped through the locked back door of the shop
and into an alley, my feet silent on the concrete because I was both invisible
and incorporeal at the moment. I expected to have to wail for the stolen
soul—hell, I half expected to be too late already—but there the reaper stood,
near the Dumpster. Like he was waiting for me.

My breath caught in my throat, which would have been a problem
if I’d actually needed to breathe. I recognized the reaper, even in those
ridiculous sunglasses. I’d seen Tod give him to a hellion in the Netherworld to
keep him from reaping my soul. Yet there he stood, alive and
kicking—metaphorically speaking. The reaper who’d wanted me dead since the day
he killed my mother, thirteen years ago.

Thane. Back from the dead. Again.

2

“WELL, LOOK
WHO
survived her own demise.” Thane had clearly been waiting for
someone, but based on the surprise drawn in the arch of his brows, I was
obviously not that someone. “This is what happens when they replace an
experienced reaper like me with a rookie.” Thane shoved both hands into the
pockets of the black slacks he’d been wearing the first time I’d seen him, days
before I was scheduled to die, and my stomach clenched around nothing. I wasn’t
sure whether or not I should be personally afraid of him, now that my death date
had come and gone, but I had plenty of still-living friends and family he could
threaten if he decided he wanted revenge. “That
is
who sucker punched me, then sold me out, right? Your boyfriend’s reaper
brother?”

“No.” Well, yes, but Thane had missed the whole
boyfriend/brother drama, and I had no urge to fill him in. “What the hell are
you doing here, Thane?” And how had he escaped Avari, the hellion Tod had given
him to? “You have some kind of grudge against the doughnut industry? Did they
forget to give you sprinkles?”

“Cute.” He leaned with one shoulder against the side of the
Dumpster and crossed both arms over his chest. “I’m reaping what
you
sowed.”

“What
I
sowed?”

“This is all your fault, little miss won’t-stay-dead. You and
that blond reaper. Normally I hate sharing credit, but that doughnut guy is dead
because of the two of you, and everything else that’s coming…it’s all your
fault.”

Chills crawled up my arms. “What’s my fault? What’s
coming?”

A slow, creepy smile spread over his face. “Until next time,
little
bean sidhe…
”

“No!” I realized he was about to blink out of the alley with
less than a second to spare, and in my desperation to take the soul he carried
before he left, I accidentally unleashed my
bean
sidhe
wail at full power. Top volume.

Thane flinched and slapped his hands over his ears. Glass
rattled in the windows of the doughnut shop behind me, and something actually
shattered inside the Dumpster. If I hadn’t been inaudible to everyone else,
anyone within a two-block radius would have wanted to claw their own ears out of
their heads.

I’d grown as a
bean sidhe
over the
past few months, and death had further strengthened my skills, a fact I’d been
kind of horrified to realize during my training.

“What are you?” Thane asked, arms spread for balance as the
soul he’d stolen began to leach out of his body like smoke sucked out the only
open window in a room. But I had to read his lips, because I couldn’t hear him
over my own screech, and I certainly couldn’t answer.

The soul—a formless foglike shape—began to coalesce around him,
and for a moment, I panicked. I didn’t know how to actually get it into the
not-a-locket. Desperate, and acutely aware that I was running late for school, I
took the locket off and held it by the chain at arm’s length. To my immense
relief, the soul began to spiral toward the locket, and as I watched, it soaked
into the metal, just like Mr. Beck’s soul had soaked into the dagger I’d killed
him with.

When the soul was completely absorbed, I let my wail die and
slid the chain over my head.

“What the hell are you?” Thane demanded again, his eyes wide
with fear for the first time since I’d met him. Though the word
met
hardly seemed to do our introduction justice.

“You first. Why aren’t you dead?”

“I am. You can’t come back from death.” His focus narrowed on
me. “Which you now know from personal experience, don’t you?” But I didn’t know
how to respond without giving up information he obviously hadn’t yet figured out
for himself. Thane reached for the amphora around my neck, and I backed away. “I
don’t know what game you’re playing, little girl, but if you think being dead
puts you beyond Avari’s reach, you’re in for quite a shock. He’s pissed that he
didn’t get your soul when you died, and he’ll be willing to go through everyone
you love to get to you once he finds out you’re still…here. So why don’t you
save them all an eternity of pain and come with me now?”

“Not gonna happen.” I backed farther away, one hand clutching
the amphora. “He can’t get to me, and he can’t get to anyone else, either.”
Because hellions couldn’t cross into the human world. That was one of very few
things I still knew without a doubt since my death. “Go to hell.”

“I’m already there, little dead girl.” Thane’s voice faded to a
whisper. “Soon you will be, too… .” Then he blinked out of existence, and I knew
he was truly gone, because reapers couldn’t make themselves invisible to me
anymore. Unfortunately, the opposite was also true.

I took a minute to catch my breath and when the shock wore off,
a sharp new fear settled into its place. Avari’s threats were nothing new, but
Thane was back, and he was reaping again, and that was
very
bad.
But I couldn’t tell Madeline that I’d identified the rogue
reaper or why his presence was a surprise without telling her what Tod had done.
If she found out Tod had acted against a fellow reaper without authorization,
she’d tell Levi. Levi already suspected what Tod had done, of course, but as
long as no one else in a position of authority found out, he was free to keep
ignoring what he knew. Because he liked Tod. But if he was notified of the crime
through any official channel, he’d have no choice but to fire Tod, and an
unemployed reaper was a truly dead reaper.

I couldn’t lose Tod. But I couldn’t let Thane keep killing
people.

Shit!

A glance at the time on my phone threw another layer of trouble
over my already-problematic morning. I had five minutes to be in my first-period
class.

With a frustrated sigh, I closed my eyes and pictured my own
kitchen, and when I opened my eyes again, I was there.

“Here.” I shoved the amphora at Madeline and grabbed the
backpack slung over my chair at the table. “I gotta go.”

“Did you get the soul?” she asked as I threw my bag over my
shoulder.

“Yeah. The owner of the doughnut shop. Someone should call the
police.”

“Did you see the reaper?” my father asked, worry lining his
face as I scooped my keys from the empty candy dish on the half wall between the
living and dining rooms.

“Yeah. I’ll describe him later. I have to be in my chair in
three minutes.” With that, I blinked out of the house and left them both staring
at the spot I’d just vacated.

When I opened my eyes an instant later, I was in the girls’
bathroom, completely incorporeal. Which was good, because two freshmen stood at
the sinks, overdoing their lip gloss. I groaned in frustration, then stepped
into an empty stall and concentrated on becoming completely corporeal. Then I
flushed the toilet and threw the stall door open.

“I hope I’m not behind
her
in the
cafeteria,” one of the girls said when I rushed past the sinks, and I groaned
again, then went back to wash my hands for no reason at all. By the time my
hands were dry, I had ninety seconds to be in my chair. I shoved open the
bathroom door and ran for my math class, then slid into my seat just as the bell
started ringing.

On the bright side, being almost late to school meant that
neither the reporters nor the other students had time to mob me with questions.
But that didn’t stop my classmates from staring at me as a man I’d never seen
before started calling roll.

“Hey. I didn’t think you were gonna make it,” my best friend,
Emma Marshall, whispered from her desk next to mine.

“Me, neither.” During my convalescence, she’d come to hang out
on the afternoons when she didn’t have to work and I didn’t have to train, and
seeing her never failed to make me smile, even when I had to feign interest in
school gossip, which had never felt less relevant to my life. She didn’t pass on
the rumors about me, thank goodness. “I got a surprise visit from Madeline this
morning.”

Em’s eyes widened. “But it’s your first day back.”

“Also my first day on the job, evidently.”

“Kaylee Cavanaugh?” the new math teacher called, and thirty-one
heads swiveled my way, thirty-one sets of eyes watching me.

“Here,” I said, like I was used to being stared at by the
entire class. Before, I’d felt invisible. Now I really could be invisible—if
there weren’t so many people already watching me. So far, my afterlife seemed
made
of that kind of bitter irony.

“Kaylee, welcome back,” the man at the front of the class said.
“According to school policy, you have just over a month to complete your makeup
work. Please let me know if you need any help at all with the math portion.”

I nodded. I’d already finished my makeup work, but I couldn’t
admit that. Most stab victims aren’t concerned with school work during their
recovery. I wasn’t, either, but without the need for sleep, I’d had hours and
hours to kill when neither Tod nor training had kept me busy. During those
endless solitary hours, it sometimes felt like homework was the only thing
connecting me to the world I was no longer truly a part of.

The new math teacher—Mr. Cumberland—went back to the roll book
and Em leaned closer to whisper. “I can’t believe they even bothered filling
that faculty position again. They might as well rename the class Defense Against
the Dark Arts. I mean, seriously, who would answer an ad for this job?”

I shrugged, studying Mr. Cumberland. “Is he…?”

“Criminally dull? Yes. But so far I’ve seen no sign that he
intends to feed from the student body in any way. So? What was the job this
morning?”

Normally, no one paid any attention to Em and me whispering in
class, but with my unfortunate morbid-celebrity status, I could practically feel
the ears all around me perk up, hoping for some juicy bit of gossip about what
had happened the night Mr. Beck died. So I concentrated really hard on Emma, to
make sure she was the only one who could hear me.

“Rogue reaper,” I said, and when no one reacted, I knew I’d
done it right; hopefully anyone else who saw my lips move would think I’d
whispered too softly to be heard. “Thane’s back,” I added, and Em’s eyes widened
even farther in fear and surprise. But before I could elaborate, Mr. Cumberland
started class.

When the bell rang fifty minutes later, only a couple of people
headed for the door. Everyone else waited, slowly loading books into their bags
or digging through purses, not-quite-surreptitiously watching me. When Em and I
headed for the door, suddenly everyone else was ready to go, too.

“Today’s gonna suck,” I whispered.

As if the crowd of gawkers falling into step behind us wasn’t
enough, Mr. Cumberland chose that moment to ask Emma to stay after class for a
minute. Math had never been her best subject.

She glanced at me apologetically, then veered toward his desk.
I started to wait for her, but soon realized I wouldn’t be waiting alone. When
the second-period students began wandering into the classroom, adding their
stares and whispers to the collective, I pushed my way into the hall against the
flow of traffic and race-walked toward my locker.

But escape was futile.

Chelsea Simms, reporter for the student newspaper, was the
first to take the plunge, falling into step with me as I rounded the corner into
the front hall. “Hey, Kaylee, we’re so glad you’re back.”

“Thanks.” I walked faster, but she matched my speed.

“So, I heard you died. Like, your heart stopped on the
operating table.”

“Only for a few minutes.” I had to concentrate on remaining
corporeal, because my desire to disappear had never been so strong.

“But the news said you were dead. For real. They showed a body
bag on a gurney.”

Chills traveled down my arms in consecutive waves. Knowing I’d
died and hearing about it were two completely different things.

A familiar hazel-eyed gaze met mine from across the hall, and
my steps slowed as I passed Nash and Sabine, desperately wishing I could join
them. That we could talk, or bicker, or just stand in uncomfortable silence,
thinking of everything that had gone wrong between the three of us. Anything to
avoid the stares and questions from relative strangers. To escape the crowd
following me, a teen-paparazzi mob that felt more like a morbid funeral
procession, a month too late.

But Nash and Sabine only watched as the parade of crazy marched
by. I wanted to stop and talk, but I had
no
idea
where to begin. I hadn’t seen Nash since the day I came back from the dead,
and
“
I’m so sorry I dumped you and framed you
for my murder” seemed like a really bad way to start a conversation. Or rekindle
a friendship. Or ask for forgiveness.

Either way, Em had said the gossip mob only laid off Nash when
everyone heard I was coming back to school, and I couldn’t suck him back into
such a brutal spotlight. Not after what I’d already put him through.

“Kaylee?” Chelsea said, staring at me from inches away, and I
was horrified to realize she’d pulled out a pencil and a notepad, and was now
taking notes. “The body bag?”

“That was stock footage and a clerical error.” I finally
spotted my own locker through the sea of heads. “I don’t know what else to tell
you. The rumors of my death were greatly exaggerated,” I said, misquoting Mark
Twain. But though she seemed to believe me—after all, I was walking evidence of
my own survival—the questions didn’t stop.

“Did you see a bright light? Did your life flash before your
eyes?”

“If so, it must have been the shortest, most boring recap in
history,” my cousin Sophie said from her locker. But for once, her insult lacked
real bite, which was just as well, because no one seemed to notice she’d
spoken.

The crowd parted in front of me as I headed for my locker,
several doors down from Sophie’s, but before I could enter the combination, a
girl from my French class stepped into my private space, leaning with one
shoulder on the locker next to mine. I could tell from the bold combination of
curiosity and determination in her eyes that someone had finally found the
courage to ask what they all really wanted to know.