After dinner, my uncle Brendon took Luca for a drive around town—Sophie insisted on going—to see if he could sense either Thane or Mareth, who had yet to turn up. We were pretty sure Thane had snatched her and taken her to Avari, but no one wanted to admit defeat on that front. Not yet, anyway. And we still had no idea why Avari wanted another reaper.

Tod turned up as they were leaving and took one look around at the chaos and the mess, then tugged me toward my room to escape the noise. “There are several advantages to invisibility,” he said, closing the door at his back.

“The word of the day is spectral,” I said as my arms slid around his neck. “We’re not invisible right now, we’re spectral.”

“I don’t care what you call it, so long as it’s just the two of us. It’s crazy in there.”

“Yeah, but it could be worse. I, um, wasn’t able to keep this afternoon a total secret.”

“This afternoon?” He glanced at the bed for confirmation, and I could feel myself flush as I nodded. “Em, right?” he said, and I nodded again. “Kaylee, I don’t care who knows, as long as you’re comfortable with it. Assuming you made me sound good.”

I laughed. “She didn’t get the details she was hoping for.” I sat on the edge of my desk and pulled him closer, one hand on his chest as I looked into his eyes. “That’s between us.”

“I’m good with that… .” He leaned in for a kiss, but I stopped him.

“Sabine knows, too.”

Tod’s brows rose, and he leaned back for a better look into my eyes. “I didn’t think you two were that close.”

“We’re not. She’s crazy perceptive and psychotically honest.”

“Meaning…?”

“She wants to tell Nash.”

Tod frowned. “I don’t see how that could possibly be good for his ego. Especially if you told the story the way I remember it.” He grinned, trying to lighten the mood, but I couldn’t even summon a smile.

“I don’t want to hurt him any more than we already have. I told her that if she values our friendship, she’ll keep her mouth shut.”

“You’re friends now?”

“If that’ll keep her from spewing our personal business in front of the entire world, then, yes. We’re friends.”

* * *

“Sophie?” I set my backpack on the ground next to my usual lunch table, surprised to find my cousin sitting on it. I was almost always the first to reach the quad—a benefit of having no third-period class—but even when someone beat me there, it wasn’t Sophie. My cousin had never once sat at my table. In two years, she’d rarely even glanced our way without throwing an insult at me.

This time she just blinked at me andbrushed blond hair behind her shoulder. “Hey.”

My frown deepened. If she hadn’t spoken with her own voice, I’d assume she’d been possessed—that had certainly happened before. “Is something wrong?”

“No.” She frowned and reconsidered. “Well, yes. Everything’s wrong. But no one would know that better than you, I guess.”

“I meant, why are you here?”

She shrugged. “I’m meeting Luca. I have yet to convince him that he doesn’t have to sit in the social wasteland.”

“And you honestly think he’d be more comfortable in the intellectual wasteland?” I tossed a pointed glance at the table where she and her jock friends had been sitting every day of the two years she’d been at Eastlake.

Sophie exhaled and nodded, and I waited for verbal venom that never came. “I guess I deserve that. I just…” She hesitated, glancing at the grass for a moment before meeting my gaze again. “I never got a chance to tell you that I’m sorry for what happened to you that night. With Mr. Beck.”

Except that she’d had plenty of chances. She just hadn’t taken any of them.

“Oh.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “You mean the night I was brutally murdered in my own bed?”

Sophie flinched. “You don’t have to make it sound so…”

“So what? True? Because it’s true.”

“So…ugly.” Her face scrunched up, like she found the word personally offensive. Or maybe it was the truth that offended her. “You don’t have to go for the shock factor with every weird-ass sentence that comes out of your mouth. Especially considering that you got a happy ending.”

“Happy ending?” I couldn’t pile enough disbelief into my voice to accurately express how much of it I was dealing with. “What part of ‘walking corpse’ sounds like a happy ending to you? The part where I’ll never reach the age of consent or the legal drinking age?” Not that either of those really mattered anymore. “Or the part where there’s still a demon from another dimension out to get my soul, and willing to go through everyone I love to get to me? I understand that there’s a discrepancy between the way the world really looks and the way you see it, but I think you need to open your eyes a little wider.”

Irritation flared behind her gaze. “I’m trying to apologize, Kaylee, and you’re not making that very easy.”

“So sorry to have inconvenienced you with the truth. Go ahead. I’m listening.”

Yes, I was being hard on her. But life would be even harder on her, assuming she survived long enough to graduate. And with Avari on the warpath, there was no guarantee of that at all.