Before I Wake. Rachel Vincent

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