Mr. Beck came back up the next row and put a paper facedown on Emma’s desk, but instead of moving on, he leaned over and whispered something to her. Something I couldn’t hear. Emma nodded. And when he walked away, she was grinning from ear to ear.

“What’d he say?” I asked, leaning across the aisle as he headed toward the whiteboard at the front of the room. Something had gone wrong on a cosmic level if Em had aced a quiz I’d barely pulled a B on.

She turned up one corner of her paper so I could see her grade. Fifty-four.

“Since when is an F a good thing?”

“He wants to talk to me after class,” she explained, eyes bright with excitement that gave me chills. Em had failed the quiz.

And caught Mr. Beck’s attention.

“What’d he say?” I fell into step with Emma as she left Mr.

Beck’s room several minutes after class, acutely aware that though she had a late pass, I did not. Then I remembered that didn’t matter. Next week, instead of serving detention, I’d be taking the great dirt nap.

“The usual. I’m a smart girl, but I’m not applying myself. Math is relevant to my future….”

She kept talking, but her answer faded into the ambient hallway chatter when a familiar set of dark eyes caught my attention, and goose bumps popped up all over my body. Thane stood across the hall, leaning against a bank of lockers in black jeans and a plain black T-shirt, still and silent against the rush of traffic and noise. He watched me, smiling intimately about the secret we shared. The future I would not have. The last moments of my life, which he would no doubt savor.

“Kaylee?” Emma elbowed me in the ribs. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” I made myself turn away from the reaper, confident no one else could see him. And absolutely certain that he was still watching me. “What were you saying?”

“Mr. Beck said that maybe I just need a little extra help to get all caught up.”

“That’s it?” If that was it, why was Em practically glowing, like she did at parties, when every head in the room turned to watch her dance?

Emma pushed open the door to the bathroom and I followed her inside as the second period late bell rang. “Yeah. He thinks I could bump my average up to a B with a little tutoring.”

“Who’s the tutor?” Please, please say it’s a senior with mad math skills…

“That’s the best part. He’s gonna tutor me himself. After school.” She grinned at me in the mirror, pulling a tube of lip gloss from her purse. “And I suspect it just might take me a while to pick up on the more complicated concepts.” Her eyes glittered with excitement, and my stomach churned. Something was wrong.

I leaned against the wall, clutching my books. Sabine was supposed to draw a foul, not Emma. Sabine could take care of herself, but Emma had no defensive abilitieswhatsoever, beyond a blinding distraction of cleavage, and she had no concept of how dangerous the world really was, even knowing that humans weren’t alone in it.

“Em, this is a bad idea,” I said, squatting to peek beneath the row of stalls to make sure we were alone. All good, unless someone at Eastlake had developed powers of invisibility. “Why don’t you just go hit on someone in honors calculus?”

“Because there’s no one hot in honors calculus,” she said without moving her lips, as she dabbed clear gloss on over her lipstick. Then she eyed me in the mirror, screwing the lid back on the tube. “What’s the big deal, Kay? It’s an hour after school, twice a week. In a classroom. If I have to learn function notation, shouldn’t I at least have something pretty to look at until my brain self-destructs?”

I dropped my backpack and leaned with both hands on the edge of the sink, staring at her reflection in disbelief. “Em, he could be dangerous. He’s not human!”

“Neither are you!”

“Yeah, and I’m dangerous! How many times have you almost died because of me?”

She dropped her gloss into her purse, then set her purse on the stack of books balanced on the edge of the next sink. “Why do you have to be the storm cloud, always raining on my parade? Why can’t you let me pretend—just this once—that someone smart, and hot, and thoroughly post-pubescent could possibly be interested in me?”

“Because you don’t need to pretend. He could totally be interested in you, and that’s the problem.”

“It’s just tutoring, Kaylee.”

“The last girl he tutored nearly bled out on the classroom floor,” I said, and Emma blinked, like she wanted to say something, but couldn’t quite put it into words. “Sabine’s going to figure out what he is and I’m going to find out whether or not he knocked up Danica Sussman.” And Emma was going to stay away from him, whether she liked it or not.

“Okay, don’t take this the wrong way, Kay, but how is it any of your business who Danica sleeps with?” She crossed her arms over her chest. “What are you now, the monogamy police?”

“Emma, he’s a teacher!”

“I know, and normally that’d be really creepy. But he’s twenty-two, and she’s eighteen. They’re only four years apart, and she’s a legal adult. If this were June and she was out of high school, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”

“But it’s barely March, and she’s still in school. And he’s an authority figure,” I pointed out, frustrated and beyond bewildered by her argument. Was it really so hard to understand that a teacher sleeping with a student was bad, no matter how old either of them was? “At the very least, this could get him fired.”