Free Before I Wake by Rachel Vincent Page B

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