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Praise for the novels of

New York Times bestselling author

RACHEL VINCENT

“Twilight fans will love it.” —Kirkus Reviews on My Soul to Take

“A high-octane plot with characters you can really care

about. Vincent is a welcome addition to this genre!”

Kelley Armstrong on Stray

“I liked the character and loved the action. I look

forward to reading the next book in the series.”

Charlaine Harris on Stray

“Fans of those vampires will enjoy this new

crop of otherworldly beings.”

—Booklist

“My Soul to Take grabs you from the very beginning.” —Sci-Fi Guy

“Wonderfully written characters … A fast-paced,

engrossing read that you won’t want to put down.

A story that I wouldn’t mind sharing with my

pre-teen … A book like this is one of the reasons that

I add authors to my auto-buy list.

This is definitely a keeper.”

—TeensReadToo.com

Also available from Rachel Vincent

Published by

Soul Screamers

MY SOUL TO TAKE

MY SOUL TO SAVE

MY SOUL TO KEEP

Coming soon … IF I DIE

My Soul

to Steal

Rachel Vincent

www.miraink.co.uk

To all the real life couples, exes, and unrequited romantic interests, tangled up in love and nightmares. Sometimes that frayed knot is the best lifeline in the world. Other times, it works more like a straitjacket …

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks first of all to my editor, Mary-Theresa Hussey, who knew just what this book needed. Her suggestions challenged me to find better solutions, and the book is so much better for it.

Thanks to Natashya Wilson, for so much enthusiasm and support.

Rinda Elliot, for the lightning-fast critique, and for being the first to love Sabine.

Thanks to #1, who made fajitas and helped me figure out how to hurt a hellion.

Thanks to Ally, Jen, Melissa, Kelley, and everyone else in the YA community for advice, camaraderie, and for making me feel so welcome.

And most of all, thank you to the readers who have given Kaylee and her friends a place in this world. Without you, none of the rest of it would matter.

1

BY THE TIME the second semester of my junior year began, I’d already faced down rogue grim reapers, an evil entertainment mogul, and hellions determined to possess my soul. But I never would have guessed that the most infuriating beast of all, I had yet to meet. My boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend was a thing of nightmares. Literally.

“I WON’T BITE.” Nash looked up at me with a green bean speared on his fork, and I realized I was staring. I’d stopped on the bottom step, surprised to see him at school, and even more surprised to see him sitting alone at lunch, outside in the January cold, where I’d come to get away from the gossip and stares in the cafeteria.

Obviously he’d had the same idea.

I glanced over my shoulder through the window in the cafeteria door, looking for Emma, but she hadn’t shown up yet.

Nash frowned when he noticed my hesitation. But I wasn’t worried about him. I was worried about me. I was afraid that if I got within touching distance of him—within reach of the arms that had once been my biggest comfort and those gorgeous hazel eyes that could read me at a glance—that I would give in. That I would forgive, even if I couldn’t forget, and that would be bad.

I mean, it would feel good, but that would be bad.

The past two weeks had been the most difficult of my life. In the past few months alone, I’d survived horrors most sixteen-year-old girls didn’t even know existed. But a couple of weeks without Nash—our entire winter vacation—had nearly been enough to break me.

Whoever said it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved was full of crap. If I’d never loved Nash in the first place, I wouldn’t know what I was missing now.

“Kaylee?” Nash dropped his fork onto his tray, green bean untouched. “I get it. You’re not ready to talk.”

I shook my head and set my tray on the table across from his, then sank onto the opposite bench. “No, I just … I didn’t think you’d be here.” I hadn’t gone to see him, because that would have been unfair to us both—being together, when we couldn’t really be together. But I knew he’d been very sick from withdrawal, because my father, of all people, had called regularly to check on him.

And based on his brief reports, withdrawal from Demon’s Breath—known as frost, in human circles—was hell on earth.

“Are you … okay?” I asked, poking at runny spaghetti sauce with my own fork.

“Better.” He shrugged. “Still working toward okay.”

“But you’re well enough for school?”

Another shrug. “My mom was giving me a sedative made from some weird Netherworld plant for a while, to help with the shakes, but it just made me sleep all the time. Without dreams,” he added, when he saw my horrified expression. The hellion whose breath he’d been huffing had communicated with Nash through his dreams sometimes. And through me, the rest of the time. By hijacking my body while I slept.

I’d been willing to work through the addiction with Nash—after all, it was my fault he’d been exposed to Demon’s Breath in the first place. But his failure to stop the serial possession of my body—or even tell me it was happening—was the last straw for me. I couldn’t be with him until I was sure nothing like that would ever happen again.

Unfortunately, what my head wanted and what my heart wanted were two completely different things.

“I still don’t have much appetite, but what I do eat is staying down now.” Nash stared at his full tray. He’d lost weight. His face looked … sharper. The flesh under his eyes was dark and puffy, and he hadn’t bothered to artfully muss his hair that morning. The bright, charismatic Nash I’d first met had been replaced with this dimmer, somber version I barely recognized. A version I was afraid I didn’t know on the inside, either. Not like I’d known my Nash, anyway.

“Maybe you should have stayed home a little longer,” I suggested, slowly twirling noodles around my plastic fork.

“I wanted to see you.”

The fissure in my heart cracked open a little wider, and I looked up to find regret and longing slowly twisting the greens and browns in his irises. Humans wouldn’t see that, even if we’d had company. But because Nash and I were both bean sidhes—banshees, to the uninformed—we could see the colors swirling in each other’s eyes, and with a little practice, I’d learned to interpret what I saw in his. To read his emotions through the windows of his soul—when he let me see them.

“Nash …”

“No pressure,” he interrupted, before I could spit out the protest I’d practiced, but hoped not to have to use. “I just wanted to see your face. Hear your voice.”

Translation: You didn’t visit me. Or even call.

I closed my eyes, trying to work through an awkwardness I’d never felt with Nash before. “I wanted to.” More than I could possibly express. “But it’s just too hard to …”

“To see, but not touch?” he finished for me, and I met his rueful gaze. “Trust me, I know.” He sighed and stirred a glob of mass-produced peach cobbler. “So, what now? We’re friends?”

Yeah. If friends could be in love, but not together. In sync, but out of touch. Willing to die for each other, but unable to trust.

“I don’t think there are words for what we are, Nash.” Yet I could think of at least one: broken.

Nash and I were like the wreckage of two cars that had hit head-on. We were tangled up in each other so thoroughly that I could no longer tell which parts of us were him and which were me. We could probably never be truly untangled—not after what we’d been through together—but I had serious doubts we could ever really recapture what we’d had. “I just … I need some time.”

He nodded, and his eyes shone with the first flash of hope I’d seen from him in ages. “Yeah. We have time.”

In fact, we had lots and lots of time. Bean sidhes age very slowly from puberty on, so while I’d likely be carded until I was forty, if Nash and I actually managed to work things out, we’d have nearly four hundred years together, barring catastrophe.

Although actually barring catastrophe seemed highly unlikely, considering that since the school year began, my life had been defined by a series of disasters, barely held together by the beautifully strong thread of Nash’s presence in my life. At least, until recently. But now I was clinging to the wreckage of my existence, holding the pieces together on my own, trying to decide if I would be helping us both or hurting us by letting him back in.

“So, how’s Em?” Nash asked, his voice lowered as he glanced at something over my shoulder.

I twisted to see Emma Marshall, my best friend, heading toward us across the nearly deserted quad. Everyone with half a brain—or nothing to hide—was eating inside, where it was warm. Em carried a tray holding a slice of pizza and a Diet Coke, content to eat with us outside, not because she couldn’t face the crowd ready to judge her, but because she didn’t care what they thought.

“Em’s strong. She’s dealing.” And though she didn’t know it, in many ways, Emma was my hero, based on her resilience alone.

Doug Fuller, Em’s boyfriend of almost a month, had died from an overdose of frost two weeks earlier, and though they’d been connected at the crotch, rather than at the heart, she’d been understandably upset by his death. Especially considering that she couldn’t comprehend the Netherworld origin of the drug that had killed him.

Nash lowered his voice even further as she walked toward us. “Did you go to the funeral?”

“Yeah.” Doug had been one of Eastlake High’s starting linebackers. Practically the whole school had shown up at his funeral—except for Nash. He’d been too sick from withdrawal to get out of bed. And Scott, their third musketeer. Scott had survived addiction to frost—but at a devastating price. He’d suffered brain damage and now had a permanent, hardwired mental connection to the hellion whose breath had killed Doug and mortally wounded my relationship with Nash.

“Hey.” Emma came to a stop on my right and glanced from me to Nash, then back before taking a seat next to me. “Someone bring me up to speed. Are we making up or breaking up? ‘Cause this limbo is kind of driving me nuts.” She grinned, and I could have thanked the universe in that moment for the ray of sunshine that was Emma.

“How low can you go?” I asked, then crunched into a French fry.

“Lower than you know …” Nash replied, with a hint of an awkward grin.

Em rolled her eyes. “So … more limbo?”

Nash looked just as ready for my answer as she did. I exhaled heavily. “For now.”

He sighed and Emma frowned. Like I was being unreasonable. But she didn’t know the details of our breakup. I couldn’t tell her that he’d let a hellion take over my body and play doctor with him—to Nash’s credit, he hadn’t known it wasn’t me that first time—without even telling me I was being worn like a human costume.

I couldn’t tell her because the same thing had happened to her, and for her own safety and sense of security, I didn’t want her to know that her body had been hijacked by the hellion responsible for her boyfriend’s death. Her friendship with me had already put her in more than enough danger.

“Oh, fine. Drag out the melodrama for as long as you want. At least it’ll give everyone around here something else to talk about.” Something other than Doug and Scott.

If they hadn’t already had two weeks to deal with grief and let off steam, the whole school probably would have been reeling from the double loss. The looks and whispers when we passed in the hall were hard enough to deal with as it was.

“So, did you see the new girl?” Emma asked, making a valiant attempt to change the subject as she tore the crust from her triangle of pizza.

“What new girl?” I didn’t really care, but the switch in topic gave me a chance to think—or at least talk—about something other than me and Nash, and the fact that there was currently no me and Nash.

“Don’t remember her name.” Emma dipped her crust into a paper condiment cup full of French dressing. “But she’s a senior. Can you imagine? Switching schools the last semester of your senior year?”

“Yeah, that would suck,” I agreed, staring at my tray, pretending I didn’t notice Nash staring at me. Was it going to be like this from now on? Us sitting across from each other, watching—or pointedly not watching—each other? Sitting in silence or talking about nothing anyone really cared about? Maybe I should have stayed in the cafeteria. This isn’t gonna work….

“She’s in my English class. She looked pretty lonely, so I invited her to sit with us.” Emma bit into her crust and chewed while I glanced up at her in surprise.

First of all, Em didn’t have other girlfriends. Most girls didn’t like Emma for the same reason guys couldn’t stay away from her. It had been just the two of us since the seventh grade, when her mouth and her brand-new C-cups intimidated the entire female half of the student body.

Second of all …

“Why is there a senior in your junior English class?” Nash said it before I could.

Emma shrugged while she chewed, then swallowed and dipped her crust again. “She got behind somehow, and they’re letting her take two English classes at once, so she can graduate on time. I mean, would you want to be here for a whole ‘nother year, just to take one class?”

“No.” Nash stabbed another green bean he probably wasn’t going to eat. “But I wouldn’t want to read Macbeth and To Kill a Mockingbird at the same time, either.”

“Better her than me.” Em bit into her crust again, then twisted on the bench as footsteps crunched on the grass behind us. “Hey, here she comes,” she said around a full mouth.

I started to turn, but stopped when I noticed Nash staring. And not at me. His wide-eyed gaze was trained over my head, and if his jaw got any looser, he’d have to pick it up off his tray. “Sabine?” he said, his voice soft and stunned.

Emma slapped the table. “That’s her name!” She twisted and called over her shoulder. “Sabine, over here!” Then she glanced back at Nash. “Wait, you’ve already met her?”

Nash didn’t answer. Instead, he stood, nearly tripping over his own bench seat, and when he rounded the table toward the new girl, I finally turned to look at her. And instantly understood why she wasn’t intimidated by Emma.

Sabine was an entirely different kind of gorgeous.

She was a contrast of pale skin and dark hair, where Em was golden. Slim and lithe, where Em was curvy. She swaggered, where Emma glided. And she’d stopped cold, her lunch tray obviously forgotten, and was staring not at me or her new friend Emma, but at my boyfriend.

My kind-of boyfriend. Or whatever.

“Sabine?” Nash whispered this time, and his familiar, stunned tone set off alarm bells in my head.

“Nash Hudson. Holy shit, it is you!” the new girl said, tossing long dark hair over one shoulder to reveal a mismatched set of hoops in her double-pierced right ear.

Nash rounded the table and walked past me without a glance in my direction. Sabine set her tray on the nearest table and ran at him. He opened his arms, and she flew into them so hard they spun in a tight circle. Together.

My chest burned like I’d swallowed an entire jar of hot salsa.

“What are you doing here?” Nash asked, setting her down, as she said, “I can’t believe it!”

But I was pretty sure she could believe it. She looked more thrilled than surprised. “I heard your name this morning, but I didn’t think it would really be you!” “It’s me. So … what? You go to school here now?” “Yeah. New foster home. Moved in last week.” She smiled, and her dark eyes lit up. “I can’t believe this!”

“Me, neither.” Em stood and pulled me up. “What is it we’re not believing?”

And finally Nash turned, one arm still wrapped casually around Sabine’s waist, as if he’d forgotten it was still there. “Sabine went to my school in Fort Worth, before I moved here.”

“Yeah, before you ran off and left me!” She twisted out of his grip to punch him in the shoulder, but she didn’t look mad.

“Hey, you left first, remember?” Nash grinned. “Not by choice!” Her scowl was almost as dark as her grin was blinding.

What the hell were they talking about? I’d already opened my mouth to say … something, when Tod winked into existence on my left. Fortunately, I was still too confused by the arrival of Nash’s old friend—please, please just be a friend!—to be surprised by the sudden appearance of his mostly dead grim reaper brother.

“Hey, Kaylee, you …” Tod began, running one hand through pale blond curls, then stopped when he saw Sabine and Nash, still chatting like long-lost relatives, while the rest of us watched. “Uh-oh. I’m too late.”

“Too late for what?” Emma asked, but I could tell from the lack of a reaction from either Nash or Sabine that Em and I were currently the only ones who could see Tod. Selective corporeality was one of several really cool reaper abilities, and now that Emma knew about him, Tod rarely appeared to me alone. For which I was more than grateful—Em was one less person who thought I went around talking to myself when I was really talking to the reaper.

“To warn you,” Tod continued. “About Sabine.”

“She comes with a warning label?” Em whispered.

I crossed my arms over the front of my jacket. “Well, it can’t be sewn into her clothes, or we’d see the outline.” Sabine’s black sleeveless top was so tight I could practically count her abs.

Emma raised one brow at me. “Catty, much?”

“Well, look at her!” I whispered, both relieved and very, very irritated that neither Nash nor Sabine had given us a second look. A strip of bare skin showed between the low waist of her army-green carpenter pants and the hem of her shirt—an obvious violation of the school dress code—and she wore enough dark eye shadow to scare small children. And—most grating of all—the look worked for her. And it obviously worked for Nash. He couldn’t look away.

“I don’t think it’s her you have a problem with,” Emma whispered. “It’s them.”

I ignored her and turned to Tod. “I take it they were involved in Fort Worth?”

Tod nodded. “Yeah. If you’re into really dramatic understatements.” Great.

“Hey, you two, care to introduce those of us on the periphery?” Emma called, betraying no hint of Tod’s presence. She was a fast learner.

Nash looked up in surprise. “Sorry.” He guided Sabine closer. “I’m guessing you’ve already met Emma?” he said, and the new girl—his old girl—nodded. “And this is my …” Confusion flashed in Nash’s swirling eyes, and he dropped his hand from Sabine’s waist. “This is Kaylee Cavanaugh.”

Sabine truly looked at me for the first time, and I caught my breath at the intensity of her scrutiny. Her eyes were pools of ink that seemed to see right through me, and in that moment, the certainty—the terror—that Nash would want nothing to do with me now that she’d arrived was enough to constrict my throat and make my stomach pitch.

“Kaylee …” Sabine said my name like she was tasting it, trying to decide whether to swallow me whole or spit me back out, and in the end, I wasn’t sure which she’d chosen. “Kaylee Cavanaugh. You must be the new ex.”

Resisting the overwhelming urge to take a step back from Sabine, I shot Nash a questioning look, but he only shrugged. He hadn’t told her. He hadn’t even known she was there until she walked into the quad.

“I …” But I didn’t know how to finish that thought.

Sabine laughed and fresh chill bumps popped up on my arms, beneath my jacket. “Don’t worry ‘bout it. Happens to the best of us.” Then she turned—pointedly dismissing me—and grabbed her forgotten tray in one hand and Nash’s arm in the other. “Let’s eat. I’m starving!”

He glanced back at me then, and a flicker of uncertainty flashed in the swirling greens and browns of Nash’s irises before he turned with her and headed for our table.

As they sat, I turned to find Tod watching them warily. “How long ago did they break up?” I asked, without bothering to whisper. Nash and Sabine no longer knew we existed.

“Well …” Tod hesitated, and I frowned at him. Like Emma, he was usually blunt bordering on rude. “What?” I demanded.

Tod exhaled heavily. “Technically speaking, they never did.”

2

“SO, HOW SERIOUS were they?” I handed change and a receipt to a balding man in his forties. He shoved them both into his front pocket, then took off toward the north wing of the theater with a greasy jumbo popcorn.

“You sure you want to hear this?” Tod sat on the snack counter in his usual jeans and snug white tee, invisible and inaudible to everyone but me and Em. Not that it mattered. Monday afternoons were dead at the Cinemark. But then, so was Tod.

Emma leaned over the counter next to him. “I’m sure I want to hear it.” She was on a break from her shift in the ticket booth, but Tod and I were obviously much more entertaining than anything going on in the break room.

“I didn’t come to rub your face in it,” the reaper insisted, watching me as he snatched a kernel from Emma’s small bag of popcorn.

“No, you came because you’re bored, and my problems obviously amuse you.”

Tod had just switched to the midnight-to-noon shift reaping souls at the local hospital, and since reapers didn’t need sleep, he was now free every afternoon to bug his still-living friends. Which consisted of me, Em, and Nash.

Tod shrugged. “Yeah, that, and for the free food.” “Why are you eating, anyway?” Emma pulled her paper bag out of his reach. “Can you even metabolize this?”

Tod raised one pale brow at her. “I may be dead, but I’m still perfectly functional. More functional than ever, in fact. Watch me function.” He reached around her and grabbed another handful of popcorn while she laughed. “And that’s not all I can do …”

“Can we save the live demo for later, please? Bean sidhe in angst, here.” But the truth was that it felt good to laugh, after what we’d all been through in the past few months. “Seriously, tell me about Sabine.”

Emma grinned. “Does she have a last name, or is she a superstahh? Like Beyoncé, or the pope?”

I threw a jelly bean at her, from the open box I kept under the counter. “You know that’s not his name, right?”

Em threw the jelly bean back.

“Anyway …” Tod began. “Vital stats—here we go … Her name is Sabine Campbell, and she’s probably seventeen by now. She likes long walks down dark alleys, conspicuous piercings, and, if memory serves, chocolate milk—shaken, not stirred.” Tod paused dramatically, and the good humor shining in his eyes dulled a bit. “And she and Nash were the real thing.”

My grape jelly bean went sour on my tongue, and I had to force myself to chew. But he’d said were. They were the real thing. As in, past tense. Because I was Nash’s present tense. Right? We were taking a break so he could get clean, and I could come to terms with what had happened, but that didn’t mean he was free for the taking!

“Wait, the real thing, like hearts and candy and flowers?” Em asked, wrinkling her nose over the cupid cliché.

Tod started to laugh, but choked off the sound with one look at my face. “More like obsession and codependence and … sex,” the reaper finished reluctantly.

I rolled my eyes and poked through my box of jelly beans for another grape. “I know he’s not a virgin.”

“Well, he was when he met Sabine.”

“Ohh,” Emma breathed, and I dropped my jelly beans into the trash.

“Okay, so what?” I opened the door to the storage closet and grabbed the broom. “So she was his first. That doesn’t mean anything.” I swept up crushed popcorn kernels and smooshed Milk Duds in short, vicious strokes. “She didn’t save lives with him. She didn’t risk her soul to rescue him from the Netherworld. Whatever they had can’t compete with that, right?”

“Right.” Emma watched me, her eyes wide in sympathy. “Besides, we don’t even know that she’s still interested in him. They were probably just surprised to see each other.”

I stilled the broom and raised both brows at her.

Emma shrugged. “Okay, she’s totally still into him. Sorry, Kay.”

“It doesn’t matter. So long as he’s not into her.” I resumed sweeping, and accidentally smacked the popcorn machine with the broom handle.

Tod hopped down from the counter and held one blessedly corporeal hand out. “Hand over the broom, and no one will get hurt.” But I found that hard to believe. Sabine was making me doubt everything I’d thought I knew. And I’d spent less than fifteen minutes with her.

I gave Tod the broom and he put it back in the closet. “He hasn’t seen her in more than two years. Give him a chance to get used to her being here, and everything will go back to normal.”

Normal. I could hardly even remember what that word meant anymore. “You really think so?”

Tod shrugged. “I give it a fifty-fifty chance.”

“Doesn’t that mean I have a better chance of being struck by lightning at least once before I die?”

Em laughed. “Knowing your luck? Yeah.”

I pulled a plastic-wrapped stack of large cups from under the counter and began restocking the cup dispensers. “So, what’s the deal? How did they hook up?”

“I was limited by real-world physics at the time, so I don’t know the whole story,” Tod said, leaning back with his elbows propped on the counter.

“Just tell me what you do know.”

The reaper shrugged. “Nash was only fifteen when they met, and still coming into his full bean sidhe abilities—Influence doesn’t come on full-strength until puberty.”

“Really?” Emma said, a kernel of popcorn halfway to her mouth. “I didn’t know that.”

I hadn’t, either. But I was tired of sounding ignorant about my own species, so I kept my mouth shut.

“Yeah. Otherwise, the terrible twos would turn any little bean sidhe boy into a tyrant. Can you imagine Nash ordering our mom around from the time he could talk?”

Actually, I could, having had a taste of what out-of-control Influence looked and felt like.

“So, anyway, Nash was coming into his own, but he didn’t have our dad around to teach him stuff, like I did, so he was kind of mixed up. Sabine was abandoned as a kid, and she’d been through a bunch of foster parents. When they met, she had it pretty rough at home, and she’d gotten into some trouble. She had a temper, but nothing too serious. She and Nash just kind of fell into each other. I think he thought he could help her.”

Yeah, that sounded like Nash and his hero complex. We’d gotten together the same way.

I stared at the gritty floor, trying not to feel sorry for Sabine. Something told me she wouldn’t welcome my sympathy any more than she’d welcome my currently undefined presence in Nash’s life.

“Did Harmony like her?” I asked, unable to deny the queasy feeling my question brought on. I didn’t want Nash’s mother to like any of his exes better than she liked me, but the new fear went beyond that. Harmony and I shared bean sidhe abilities. We’d bonded beyond our mutual interest in Nash, and I wanted her for myself, just like I wanted Nash.

Tod shrugged. “Mom likes everyone. The two of them together scared the shit out of her, though, the same way you and Nash being together probably gives your dad nightmares.”

“So what happened?” Em asked, while I was still trying to process the fact that Nash and Sabine’s bond had been strong enough to worry Harmony.

When Tod didn’t answer, I looked up and he shrugged again. “I died.”

Emma blinked. “You … died?” She knew he was dead, of course, but that didn’t make his proclamation sound any more … normal.

“Yeah. I died, and Mom and Nash didn’t know I’d be coming back in my current incarnation.” He spread his arms to indicate his existence as a reaper—and his completely unharmed-by-death physique. “So they moved for a fresh start, just like we did after my dad died. We’d lived around here when Nash and I were kids, so this probably felt a little like coming home for my mom. It made everything harder for Nash, though. Because of leaving Sabine.”

“And he and Sabine never broke up?” I moved on to the jumbo plastic cups, fascinated in spite of myself by Tod’s story.

“He couldn’t get in touch with her. She was kind of … in state custody at the time. No email. No phone calls, except from family. Which she doesn’t have.”

Emma stood straight, brown eyes wide. “She got arrested?”

“I told you she got into some trouble.” “Yeah, but you didn’t mention that she was a criminal.” I shoved the cups down harder than was probably necessary. Nash’s ex-girlfriend—his former “real thing”—was a convict? That’s not scary or anything.

Obviously at some point his tastes had changed. Dramatically.

“What’d she do?” Emma said, asking the question I most wanted answered, but refused to ask myself.

Tod shrugged. “Nash never told me. But she got probation and a halfway house instead of prison, so it couldn’t have been too bad.”

“I’m guessing that’s a matter of opinion.” I twisted the end of the cellophane around the remaining cups and shoved them under the counter. “Maybe I should call him after work.”

“What are you gonna say?” Emma asked. “‘I’m not sure I want you back, but I’m sure I don’t want your ex-con ex-girlfriend to have you, either’? Yeah. That’ll start this little triangle off on the right foot.”

“This is not a triangle. This is—” a disaster “—nothing. Exes turn into friends all the time, right?” Emma and Tod exchanged a glance. “Right?” I demanded, when neither of them answered.

“I don’t know, Kay.” Emma crumpled her empty popcorn bag and tossed it into the trash can from across the counter. “But on the bright side, according to Mrs. Garner, the triangle is the most stable geometric shape. That has to count for something, right?”

“This is not a triangle,” I repeated, turning my back on them both to check the number of nacho cheese containers lined up beneath the heat lamp. I couldn’t afford to let my decision about me and Nash be influenced by Sabine’s arrival. Or her criminal record. Or her prior claim on my boyfriend.

When I turned back around, Em was still watching me. “Maybe you shouldn’t start grilling Nash about his ex until he’s back on his feet for sure.”

“Yeah.” Except by then she could have swept him off of them. Or knocked them out from under him. Either way, Nash off his feet would be bad.

“Marshall, your break’s over!” the new assistant manager called from across the lobby, fleshy hands propped on his considerable gut. “Back in the ticket booth!” His name was Becker, but when she made fun of him after work, Em replaced the capital B with a P. She’d called him Pecker to his face once, by accident, and he’d been yelling at her ever since.

Emma rolled her eyes, pushed the remainder of her soda toward Tod, and headed backward across the lobby. “See you after work.” We’d ridden together, as we usually did when we had the same shift. But now, more often than not, we had a third carpooler.

As if he’d read my mind—not a reaper ability, as far as I knew—Tod glanced around the snack bar as a group of junior high kids came through the front door, wearing matching aftercare shirts. “Where’s Alec?”

Tod, Nash, and Harmony were the only ones—other than my dad—who knew the truth about Alec, that he’d spent a quarter of a century enslaved by a hellion in the Netherworld. Until we’d rescued him in exchange for his help saving my dad and Nash from that same hellion.

I glanced at the clock. “He’s on his break, but he should be back any minute.” I’d given him my keys so he could eat a bag of Doritos in the car, by himself. Alec had grown comfortable with me and my dad, but the same could not be said for the rest of the general populace.

For the most part, Alec had adjusted well to being back in the human world. He was fascinated with the internet, DVDs, and laptops, none of which had been around in the eighties, when he’d become Avari’s Netherworld proxy—a weird combination of a personal assistant and snack food. I hadn’t even seen my iPod in days.

But he was still sometimes overwhelmed by crowds, not because of the numbers—he’d regularly faced large groups of terrifying monsters in the Netherworld—but because of the culture shock. He was getting to know the twenty-first century at his own speed through TV, news-papers—evidently people still read them in his day—and all the movies he saw for free at the Cinemark. But he got nervous when he had to actually interact with groups of people who didn’t understand his cultural handicap. So far, “Medium or large?” and “Would you like butter on your popcorn?” were the most we’d gotten out of him at work.

“Want me to find him?” Tod asked, as the gaggle of kids descended on Emma in the ticket booth. But before I could answer, Alec rounded a corner into the lobby, tucking his uniform shirt into his pants.

“Sorry. Fell asleep,” he said, then ducked into a small hall leading to the break room and service entrance. When he stepped into the snack bar a second later, scruffing one brown hand over short-cropped, tight curls, I couldn’t help noticing that he still looked only half-awake.

“Just in time. We’re about to get hit hard.” I pointed to the swarm of tweens, and his dark eyes widened. “Don’t worry, kids usually get Slurpees, candy, and some popcorn. Nothing complicated.”

Alec just stared at me as I dumped a bag of popcorn seeds into the popper, careful not to burn myself. “Hey, you missed the inside scoop on Sabine.” Em and I had told him about her on the ride to work, but his confused frown said he obviously hadn’t been paying attention. Not that I could blame him. After twenty-six years spent serving a hellion in the Netherworld, high school drama probably felt trite and irrelevant.

But Sabine was anything but irrelevant to me.

“It turns out she’s an ex-con. Or something like that. Tod doesn’t know what she did, but …” I turned around to look for the reaper and wasn’t surprised to realize he’d disappeared. I think the temptation to put a couple of the prepubescent punks out of their misery was a little too strong.

“Anyway, she definitely wants Nash back, and …” But before I could finish that thought, the kids descended on the snack bar, and my pity party was swallowed whole by the universal clamor for sugar and caffeine.

I pointed to the other register. “You take that one, and I’ll cover this one.”

Alec nodded, but when the first of the tween mob started shouting orders at him, he stared at his register screen like he’d never seen it before.

Great. Awesome time to succumb to culture shock. He’d been fine taking orders twenty minutes earlier, when there was no crowd. “Here. I’ll take orders, you fill them.” I stepped firmly between him and the register and shoved an empty popcorn bucket into his hands.

Alec scowled like he’d snap at me, then just nodded and turned toward the popcorn machine without a word.

I took several orders and filled the cups, but when I turned to grab popcorn from Alec, I found him staring at the machine, holding an empty bucket, like he’d rather wear it on his head than fill it.

“Alec …” I took the bucket from him and half filled it. “This is really not a good time for a breakdown.” I squirted butter over the popcorn, then filled it the rest of the way and squirted more butter. “You okay?”

He frowned again, then nodded stiffly and grabbed another bucket.

I handed popcorn across the counter to the first customer and glanced up to find Emma jogging across the lobby toward me. “Hey, Pecker sent me to bail you out,” she said, and several sixth graders giggled as she hopped up on the counter and swung her legs around to the business side. She thumped to the floor, and I started to thank her—until my gaze fell on four more extralarge buckets of popcorn now lined up on the counter.

What the hell?

I turned the register over to Emma and picked up a medium paper bag, stepping close to Alec so the customers wouldn’t hear me. “They’re not all ordering extralarge, Alec. You have to look at the ticket.” I handed him a ticket for a medium popcorn and a large Coke, then scooped kernels into the bag. “Didn’t they have tickets in the eighties? Or popcorn?”

Alec frowned. “This job is petty and pointless.” He dropped into a squat to examine the rows of folded bags and stacked buckets.

“Um, yeah.” I filled another bag in a single scoop. “That’s why they give it to students.” And forty-five-year-old cultural infants.

Alec had been nineteen when he crossed into the Netherworld—the circumstances of which he still wasn’t ready to talk about—but hadn’t aged a day while he was there.

“What’s his problem?” Emma asked, as I handed her the medium bag.

“He’s just tired.” Em didn’t know who he really was, because I didn’t want her to find out that he’d once possessed her body in a desperate attempt to orchestrate his own rescue from the Netherworld. She thought he was a friend of the family, crashing on our couch while he saved up enough money for a place of his own and some online college classes.

When I turned back to Alec, I found him leaning with his palms on the counter, staring at the ground between his feet.

“Alec? You okay?” I put one hand on his shoulder, and he jumped, then stared at me like I’d appeared out of nowhere. He shook his head like he was shaking off sleep, then blinked and looked around the lobby in obvious confusion.

“Yeah. Sorry. I didn’t get much sleep last night. What were you saying?”

“I said you have to look at the ticket. You can’t just serve everyone an extralarge.”

Alec frowned and picked up the ticket on the counter in front of him. “I know. I’ve been doing this a week now, Kay. I got this.”

I grinned at his colloquialism. He only used them on his good days, when he felt like he was fitting into the human world again. And honestly, in spite of his fleeting moments of confusion, some days, Alec seemed to fit into my world much better than I did.

3

THE HALLWAY IS COLD and sterile, and that should be my first clue. School is always cluttered and too warm, but today, cold and sterile makes sense.

I walk down the hall with Emma, but I stop when I see them. She doesn’t stop. She doesn’t notice anything wrong, but when I see them, I can’t breathe. My chest feels too heavy. My lungs pull in just enough air to keep me conscious, but not enough to truly satisfy my need for oxygen. Like satisfaction is even a possibility with them standing there like that. In front of my locker, so I can’t possibly miss the act.

I can’t see her face, because it’s sucking on his, but I know it’s her. It’s her hair, and her stupid guy-pants that look hot on her the same way his T-shirts probably look hot on her when that’s all she’s wearing. And I know she’s worn his shirts. Hell, she’s worn him, and if they weren’t in the middle of the school, she’d probably be wearing him now. She practically is, anyway.

I stop in front of them so they can’t ignore me, and she peels herself away and licks her lips, like she can’t get enough of the taste of him, and I know that’s true. My teeth grind together, and when I glance around, I realize there’s a crowd.

Of course there’s a crowd. Crowds gather for a show, and this is one hell of a show.

I say his name. I don’t want to say it. I don’t want to acknowledge him and what he’s doing, but I can’t stop myself. It won’t be real unless he says it, and part of me believes he won’t say it. He’ll say the right words instead. He’ll say he’s sorry, and he’ll look like he’s sorry, and he’ll be sorry for a very long time, but then everything will be okay again.

Instead, he shrugs and glances around at the crowd, grinning at the faces. The faces leer and blur together. I can’t tell them apart, but it doesn’t matter, because the crowd only has one face. Crowds only ever have one face. Et tu, Brute? It’s the mob mentality, and I am Caesar, about to be stabbed.

Or maybe I’ve already been stabbed, and I’m too stupid to know I’m bleeding all over the floor. But I know I’m dying inside. He’s killing me.

“Sorry, Kay,” he says at last, and I hate him for using my nickname. It sounds intimate and friendly, but he just had his tongue in her mouth, and now I want to cut it out of his head. “Sorry,” he repeats, while my face flames, and my world blurs with tears. “She knows what I like. And she delivers … “

They’re laughing now, and even though the crowd only has one face, it has many jeering voices. And they’re all laughing at me. Even Emma.

“I told you,” she says, shaking her head as she tries to hold back a giggle, and I love her for trying, even if, in the end, the laughter can’t be denied. It’s not her fault. She’s just playing her part, and the lines must be spoken, even if each word burns like an open wound.

“I told you it wasn’t worth saving. You can’t win the game if you won’t even play. You have to deliver….”