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“You don’t eat. You hardly ever talk anymore, and I haven’t seen you watch TV or pick up a book in days. I walk into your room, and half the time you’re not there, even when you’re there.”
“I’m working on that,” I mumbled, swirling a bite of pancake in a puddle of syrup. “Corporeality is harder than it looks. It takes practice.” And concentration.
“Are you sure you’re ready for school? We could give it another week.” But he seemed to regret the words as soon as he’d said them. Another week off would mean another week of me sitting around the house doing nothing when I wasn’t training as an extractor, and that’s what was worrying him in the first place.
“I need to go. They all know today’s the day.”
“They” were my teachers, classmates, and the local television stations. I was big news—the girl who’d survived being stabbed by her own math teacher. My father had stopped answering the home phone, and we’d had to change my cell number when someone leaked it to the press. They all wanted to know what it was like to nearly die. To kill the man who’d tried to kill me. They wanted to know how I’d survived.
None of them could ever know the truth—that I hadn’t survived. That was part of the deal—allowing me to live my afterlife like my murder had never happened. Protecting my secret meant keeping up with schoolwork and work-work, in addition to my new duties extracting souls from those who shouldn’t have them.
“If anything goes wrong, I want you to call me,” my father said, and I nodded. I wasn’t going to tell him that if anything went wrong, I could blink out of school and into my own room before he could even get to his car in the parking lot at work. He knew that. He was just trying to help and to stay involved, and I loved him for it. For that, and for the pancakes, even if I had no real desire to eat them.
We both sipped our coffee, and I noticed that his appetite seemed to have disappeared, too. Then he set his mug down and picked up a strip of bacon. “You know, I’ve been thinking about this Friday …” He left the sentence hanging while he took a bite.
“What’s this Friday?” I asked, and my father frowned.
“Your birthday, Kaylee.”
For a moment, I could only blink at him, mentally denying the possibility, while I counted the days in my head. Time had lost all meaning over the past month. Tod said that was normal—something about absent circadian rhythms—but it didn’t seem possible that I could have forgotten my own birthday.
“I’m turning seventeen …” I whispered.
Except that I wasn’t. The anniversary of my birth would come and go, but I’d still be sixteen and eleven-twelfths. I’d be sixteen and eleven-twelfths forever—at least physically. I would always look too young to vote. Too young to drink. Too young to drive a rental car, should that urge ever strike. And none of those limitations had ever seemed more pointless. What did it matter?
What did any of it matter, anymore?
“So, who do you want to invite to the party?” My dad picked up his mug and sipped, waiting for my answer.
I frowned. “I don’t want a party.” Very few people knew I hadn’t really lived, and of those, Nash and Sabine—my ex and his ex—currently hated me for framing Nash for my murder. I’d had no choice, and I’d accepted the duties of my afterlife mostly to unframe Nash—if I wasn’t dead, he couldn’t have killed me. But I couldn’t blame him for hating me.
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.
