LITMIR.BIZ

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because they’re in their sixties but they look, like, twenty-five. Like they could be my uncles. But they all have grandkids.”

      “Wait a minute.” Sabine scowled at Nash, and the sun seemed to fade a little. “I can’t stay the night at your place, but Sophie’s dad can? How is that fair?”

      “How’s what fair?”

      Tod appeared out of nowhere and sat next to me on the bench. He slid one arm around my waist, and it took all the self-control I had not to lean over and kiss him. Which I couldn’t do without looking crazy to the hundred or so other students in the quad who couldn’t see him.

      Em leaned forward to fill him in. “Your mom’s sleeping with Sophie’s dad, and Sabine thinks—”

      “Whoa…” Tod clamped both hands over his ears. “I don’t ever need to hear that sentence again. No need to finish it, either.”

      “At least we agree on something,” Nash mumbled, ripping the crust from a slice of cafeteria pizza.

      Sabine planted both palms flat on the table. “My point is that it isn’t fair that he can come and go as he pleases—no pun intended—”

      Everyone at our table groaned in unison, and Nash looked more than a little nauseated.

      “—but—and I am not kidding—I now have a nine o’clock curfew. Seriously. Nine o’clock! I am a creature of the night! You can’t impose a curfew on a living Nightmare! What am I supposed to do for the ten hours after lockdown? Maras only need four hours of sleep. Who the hell is he to tell me when I can and can’t leave the house?”

      “Your legal guardian.” Sophie sank her thumbnail through the skin of her orange and began to peel it. “Officially, as of eleven this morning. He called to tell me when he finished Influencing the juvenile court judge over brunch. I was supposed to tell you, but you know.” She shrugged. “I didn’t.”

      Sabine’s eyes narrowed and her mouth opened, no doubt ready to spew several inventive and highly entertaining threats aimed at Sophie, but before she could say anything, Luca cleared his throat and smiled at Emma. “Your hair looks nice today. All smooth and shiny.”

      “Thanks.” Em’s eyes lit up, and her smile made me want to smile back. It was a very nice change from the previous day’s lunch.

      Sophie glared daggers at her. “Keratin treatment and some Frizz-Ease. It’s not rocket science.”

      I glanced at Sabine in silent question, and she nodded. She was amplifying Sophie’s fears to heighten her envy of…anyone Luca so much as looked at.

      “Kaylee Cavanaugh?” a new voice said, and we all turned to see a sophomore whose name I couldn’t remember standing at the end of our table, holding a slip of paper out to me. “Are you Kaylee Cavanaugh?”

      “Yeah.” As if she didn’t know. Everyone in school knew who I was. Everyone within a hundred-mile radius knew who I was. I was the girl stabbed in her own bed by her evil math teacher. Not that most people knew Mr. Beck was actually evil, instead of just your average psychotic pedophile.

      “They want you in the counselor’s office.”

      Crap. “Okay. Thanks.” I took the slip of paper from her—my official summons—and when the sophomore walked away, I turned back to the rest of the table. “I completely forgot my appointment.” Turns out that when you’re nearly fatally stabbed, then lose your best friend in a freak park-swing accident less than a month later, the school guidance counselor likes to keep tabs on you.

      “Want me to come?” Tod ran his hand up my back, over my shirt. “If you keep her busy, I could convert the filing system from ‘alphabetical’ to ‘most deserving of psychiatric help.’” He leaned closer, and I knew no one else would hear whatever came out of his mouth next. “I’ve been meaning to make some special notations in Nash’s file anyway. Imagine the level of help he could receive if they knew the root of his recent academic decline was a deep-seated fear of the letter Q.”

      I laughed. I couldn’t help it. And though everyone else at the table looked curious, no one asked what Tod had said. They were finally starting to learn. “Thanks, but it’s hard enough to take grief counseling seriously without you singing ‘Living Dead Girl’ at the top of your lungs behind the counselor’s back.”

      “You mock one grief counselor, and you’re branded for life,” he mumbled. “Er…afterlife. I have a shift at the pizza place this afternoon, but I’ll pop in when I get a chance.” Tod kissed my cheek—the most we could get away with while only one of us was invisible—then disappeared. I grabbed my bag, said goodbye to my friends, then headed for the counselor’s office.

      Our school had two counselors, one for the first half of the alphabet and one for the last half. During lunch, the waiting room they shared was nearly empty.

      “You can go in,” the student aide said when the outer door had closed behind me. “She’s been waiting for you.”

      Because I was eighteen minutes late.

      I trudged into Ms. Hirsch’s office, trying to summon an expression appropriate for someone who’d just lost her best friend. Nuance was important. My grief had to fall somewhere between “sobbing, devastated heap” and “Emma who?” I knew from experience that either of the extremes would only get me sentenced to more counseling.

      “Hey, Ms. Hirsch. Sorry I’m late.” I closed the door, then slouched into one of the chairs in front of her desk. But Ms. Hirsch only watched me from across the desk.

      I set my bag on the floor and stared at my feet for a second, riding out the silent treatment—was that supposed to pressure me into talking on my own? But when I looked up, she was still watching me. No, studying me. Like she’d never seen me before.

      “Ms. Hirsch? You okay?” Was she in shock? Was I going to have to counsel her?

      “You’re smaller than I expected,” she said. Only she said it with someone else’s voice. She said it with a man’s voice, deep and smooth, and…rich, somehow. And totally out of place coming from Ms. Hirsch’s slim, delicately curved feminine form.

      She was obviously possessed, presumably by a hellion, but I didn’t recognize the voice.

      My pulse spiked and chill bumps popped up on my arms, but beneath that an angry flush began to build inside me. I knew I should be scared—I was sitting across my guidance counselor’s desk from a hellion I couldn’t identify—but since my untimely death, I’d discovered that there was a limit to my capacity for fear. I could only be threatened, stalked, intimidated, manipulated, possessed, and actually killed so many times before I began to acclimate to the constant state of fear. Before terror lost its punch, like a scary movie watched too many times.

      Anger, though…My capacity for anger at the Netherworld and at the host of Nether-creatures that had turned my afterlife into a living hell…that seemed to know no limits.

      Much like hellions themselves.

      My hands clenched around the arms of the chair. “Who the hell are you?”

      Ms. Hirsch’s left brow arched. “You don’t know?” At the sound of his voice, that warmth inside me spread, not comforting, but seditious. Like a fierce flame burning within me, demanding action.

      “Should I?” The fact that he couldn’t use her voice probably meant he hadn’t been in her body often enough to learn how to work all the gears and levers. Hopefully, he’d never been in her body before. I hadn’t even known she was eligible for possession.…

      “Not officially, but I’m a big fan of your work.”

      “My work?” I should have been terrified, but what little fear I felt wasn’t because my guidance counselor had been possessed, or because whoever was possessing her had obviously known when and where he could get to me through

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