Before I Wake (7 page)

I closed my eyes. “I feel it.”

“Can you feel it here?” His hand glided over my skin and around
the curve of my ribs until his finger brushed the edge of my bra, and I stopped
breathing, just for a second.

“I feel it.” I pulled him back up and slid my hands beneath his
shirt, feeling my way over his chest as I pulled the material up and over his
head. I dropped his shirt on the floor and laid my hand over his heart, and I
could feel it beating.

“Does it do that all the time?” I whispered, and he shook his
head, his eyes swirling with pale blue twists of need, and hunger, and something
deeper, and steadier, and…endless. “Mine doesn’t, either.”

Tod laid his hand over my heart and I blinked up at him. “It’s
beating now,” he said softly.

“Yeah. It is.”

He kissed me, and I didn’t realize my legs had wrapped around
his hips until he moaned into my mouth and pressed himself into me.

I felt so alive in that moment. So real and—

“Kaylee, are you home?” my father called from the living room,
and the front door slammed shut on the tail of the question.

“Shit!” I whispered, before I remembered that he couldn’t hear
us. He couldn’t see us, either, but I couldn’t hide the rumpled comforter.

Tod sat up and reached for his shirt while I straightened mine.
“Relax,” he said as he pulled his T-shirt over his head. “What’s he going to do,
kill us again?”

“Not me.” I ran both hands through my hair to smooth it.
“You.”

“You’re almost seventeen, and you’re dead. He has to know that
his parental influence is nearing its end stage.”

“He does. I think. We’re gonna talk about it. Just…not
today.”

“Kaylee?” My dad’s footsteps echoed in the hall, headed our
way.

I closed my eyes and concentrated on making myself both visible
and audible. “In here.” I opened the door and my dad stepped into the doorway as
I dropped the amphora around my neck. “Hey, do you wanna go out for…” His words
melted into a sigh when he noticed Tod, but then he rallied with a smile. “Hi,
Tod, I didn’t realize you were here. In my daughter’s bedroom. With the door
closed.”

“Happy to be here,” Tod said, and I groaned out loud.

“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.

“Then we wouldn’t be here asking you for help,” I said. We’d
come prepared for a strange conversation with Scott, but I found this apparent
lack
of strange even stranger than the strange
I’d been expecting.

“Why should I help you?” Scott demanded, and his voice had an
odd edge to it now. He wasn’t confused by either our presence or our questions.
“What did you ever do for me?”

Tod glanced at me with both pale brows raised. “Is it just me,
or does he seem a little saner than usual?”

“Maybe he’s having a good day,” I whispered, desperately hoping
that was true.

“I’m insane, not deaf,” Scott said, and when he stood, I backed
away. I was already dead, but because I was corporeal—I had to be, for him to
see me—he could do physical damage to me, as both my father and Tod had already
demonstrated on Thane.

“Can Avari hear us?” I wasn’t sure if Scott served as a sort of
amplifier, through which Avari could hear us directly, or if it was more of a
messenger service, where Scott had to mentally ask Avari everything we asked
him.

“He can hear you, so be careful what you say. He can see you,
so be careful what you do.” Scott stepped closer, and I backed up as Tod stepped
between us. The psych patient peered at me over the reaper’s shoulder. “And if
you’d come a little closer, he’d be able to taste you, too. Though he’d settle
for just a
little whiff.
”

“I don’t want to punch a mental patient, but I will,” Tod
growled.

“So the prince of death has become the white knight. I would
not have laid wager on that.” In an instant, Scott changed, without changing at
all. He stood straighter and suddenly seemed to take up more space in the small
room than he should have. His gestures became formal, but didn’t seem
overstated. He looked older. Scarier. He looked…familiar. “But you know you
cannot wear both hats at once, dark prince. Not for long, anyway,” the
Scott-thing said. “Someday you will have to choose.”

Chills raced up my spine “That’s not Scott.”

“I know,” Tod said as I stepped to the side for a better view
around his arm. “Avari?”

Scott’s mouth smiled, and it was creepy to see the hellion’s
mannerisms bleeding through the skin of a former classmate. “Human emotion is a
handicap to a reaper, Mr. Hudson. She melts your cold heart and softens your
hard edges, and she’ll keep at it until there’s nothing left of you but what
beats and bleeds and burns for her. And then the formless lump of a man you’ll
become won’t be capable of reaping souls. What will befall you then?”

“He’s possessed,” Tod whispered, and I could only nod, trying
not to hear what Avari was saying. Trying not to remember that he couldn’t
lie.

“If you stay with her, neither of you will see eternity.” Avari
glanced at me through Scott’s eyes, and the hunger in them terrified me beyond
what I’d thought I could feel in death. “Give her to me, and you will live
forever.”

“I’m already dead,” I said.

“So am I,” Tod pointed out.

“But you don’t have to be.” The hellion focused on Tod,
ignoring me completely. “Give her to me, and I’ll give you a body. A real one,
that breathes and beats on its own. One that can age, and change, and truly feel
every proper pleasure and base desire. And when that one wears out, there will
be another body, fresh and young. They will stretch into eternity for you, and
with them, untold lifetimes in the human world, a part of it again, instead of
watching from the fringes. All of that, in exchange for one, insignificant
little soul. You will forget about her by the end of your first mortal lifetime.
Your second, at the latest. Or I could help you forget her now, if you’d
prefer.”