Sabine scowled, but before she could defend her theory, Nash pushed the pizza box toward the middle of the table and exhaled. “Can we please stop referring to Scott as a dead body?”

No one bothered to point out that the description was accurate. This was just the latest in a series of losses that had begun shaping Nash’s life long before I met him.

“Sorry,” Em mumbled, and for about a minute, no one spoke.

Then the silence got the better of Sabine and she turned to Tod. “Okay, then, was he scheduled to die yesterday? Can you ask your boss?”

“Don’t have to,” Tod said as Luca made his way across the quad toward us. “Lakeside is in my zone, because it’s attached to the hospital, and Scott died during my shift. If his death was scheduled, I would have been the one reaping his soul. At the very least, I would have known about it.”

“Okay, Sophie’s calmer now, but they’re still sending her home,” Luca said, sliding onto the bench next to Sabine. “She’s in the office waiting for her dad, because school policy says that if she’s not fit for class, she’s not fit to drive, and they won’t let me take her home because I’m not a relative.”

Emma blinked at him in surprise, then glanced at the rest of us in turn. “Who’s this?”

I gestured to her with one hand and him with the other. “Emma Marshall, Luca Tedesco. Em is my best friend. Luca is a necromancer, and my coreclamationist. Or whatever. He’s also Sophie’s new boyfriend.”

“Necro-what?” Emma asked.

Sabine reached across the table to claim a half-eaten crust from Emma’s napkin. “He’s a metal detector for dead stuff.”

Em glanced at Luca, her eyes wide in either interest or fear. “Like ghosts?”

“No, like the undead.” He gestured at me and Tod. “And the recently dead. But once someone’s been dead for more than a few days or is buried more than a few feet deep, my accuracy suffers.”

“That is both creepy and fascinating,” Sabine said. Then she gestured to him with the half-eaten crust. “I like him. Not sure why he’s wasting his time with the pole dancer, though.”

Tod laughed out loud and I groaned. “Sophie takes ballet and jazz. She’s not a pole dancer.”

“There’s more money in pole dancing,” Sabine insisted.

“Actually, Sophie takes ballet and lyrical dance. She quit jazz last year,” Luca said, and every single one of us glanced at him in surprise. “What?” He shrugged. “She listens to me talk about dead people and soccer.”

I shook my head, trying to draw my thoughts back into focus. “Okay, what are the possibilities? About Avari and Scott, not Sophie?”

“Scott’s dead, and Avari’spossessed his corpse,” Nash said, each word short and clipped, as if they actually hurt to pronounce. As far as I could tell, he had yet to actually make eye contact with his brother.

“That possibility should be easy enough to verify or eliminate,” Sabine said.

“How?” Em asked.

“Go look in the casket. If the body’s there, then Avari obviously doesn’t have it,” the mara said, and she actually looked sorry when Nash flinched.

I glanced at Tod, and he shrugged. “Okay,” I said. “One of us should be able to handle that. Other possibilities?”

“He’s not really dead?” Em said. “He faked his own death, like on a soap opera.”

Sabine’s brows rose. “Or he’s undead. Something like the two of you.” She waved the pizza crust at me and Tod.

I turned to Luca. “If you saw him, you could tell us whether or not he’s alive, right?”

Luca nodded. “And if he’s close enough, I could sense and track him. But I should probably admit I’ve never intentionally faced a walking corpse.”

Sabine burst into laughter, drawing stares from the surrounding tables.

“You’re sitting next to two of them,” Nash said, too low for anyone outside our circle to hear.

Luca glanced at me and Tod, whom he’d met while I was with Sophie, then turned back to Nash with a shrug. “Yeah, but they’re the good guys, right? I’ve never picked a fight with anything out to steal my soul.”

Nash looked at Tod then, for the first time since he’d sat down, and I knew the fragile peace had met its end, at least for the moment. “Good is a relative term, and souls aren’t the only things worth stealing.”

“Something can’t be stolen if it doesn’t truly belong to you in the first place,” Tod insisted, but Nash stood and walked away from us all without a word, just as Jayson stepped into the quad.

“How come he’s always leaving?” Jayson asked, sliding onto the bench seat next to Emma. “I’m starting to take it personally.”

“Don’t,” Sabine said. “He doesn’t like you enough to care whether or not you’re here.”

* * *

After school, I blinked into my room—being dead was saving me a fortune in gas—and dropped my backpack on my bed. I scruffed Styx’s fur and let her pretend to attack my fingers—if she’d wanted to, she could have bitten them clean off—then headed into the kitchen for a soda.

I wasn’t thirsty. But if I hadn’t been dead, I would have finished at least one can of Coke before I even considered starting my homework, and lately it felt like observing the old routines was the only way to stay sane.