“Something he doesn’t know about? Something that requires a scary-looking knife?”

Irritation flared in my chest. “Why do you care? I’m not doing anything wrong, and no one will get hurt. Haven’t you figured that out about me yet?”

But I could see the answer in his eyes, and it stung. He knew I wouldn’t intentionally hurt anyone. But he also knew that my friends and acquaintances had a shorter-than-normal life expectancy.

“Just help me. Please. I’ll owe you.”

Luca looked intrigued at that. “Fine. Levi’s usually in a room on the third floor. Northwest corner of the building. I’m pretty sure that’s his office.”

“Is he there now?”

Luca closed his eyes for a second, and his forehead wrinkled, like he was thinking. Or seeing something I’d never be able to see. “No. He’s down the hall with another reaper. And Tod.”

Crap. What was Tod doing in the reaper building, in the middle of his shift?

“Thanks.” I stood and replaced the dagger beneath my waistband. “I gotta go.”

“Okay, so when you say you’ll owe—”

I blinked out of his room before he could finish his sentence. We could work out the details at school.

Chapter Ten

Blinking into the reaper headquarters building was like playing hide-and-seek in pitch-dark—I had no idea where I’d wind up. Fortunately, I remembered to take the commonsense precaution Tod had taught me. I blinked out of Luca’s room and into the reaper building in incorporeal form. That wouldn’t keep reapers from seeing me, if there were any in the room when I appeared, but it would keep me from becoming a permanent piece of whatever furniture my arrival collided with. Which was good, because I landed in the middle of a table.

Fortunately, the room—some kind of break room, with a coffee bar and a couple of vending machines—was empty.

I stayed incorporeal, so that if I saw anyone coming before I was spotted, I could step through a door and into another room. Where I had an equal chance of being seen, come to think of it.

Reaper headquarters was not a good place for a dead girl to hang out.

The hall outside the break room was empty, but I could hear voices coming from several of the rooms that opened into the hall. The plaques outside the doors read things like “The West End” and “Downtown” and “DFW.” As near as I could tell, those were zones of the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, each of which had obviously been assigned an office and probably a crew of reapers.

Would a rookie like Tod have an office?

The door at the end of the hall—at the northwest corner, unless my navigation was off—was a door marked “Administration.”

Bingo.

I tiptoed down the hall, my heart pounding from nerves, like it had when I was still alive, until I realized that the more suspicious I looked, the greater my chance of being identified as a trespasser. But if I walked through the hall likeI belonged there, maybe anyone who saw me would assume I was a reaper.

After all, who’d be stupid enough to break into reaper headquarters?

Well, me, obviously. But I tried the confidence approach anyway, and I stuck with it even when my pulse began to race like it hadn’t since the day I’d died. I walked past two open doors, through which I caught glimpses of reapers at work. Or on break. I couldn’t really tell the difference, since no one was swinging a scythe or donning a long black cape.

The other rooms were empty, and when I got to the end of the hall, I walked right through Levi’s door, trusting that Luca was right. That the boss wasn’t home.

When I saw the empty room, I actually exhaled with relief. Then I jogged across the good-size room and snatched the letter opener from its obviously custom-made wooden stand.

The moment my hand touched the metal, I knew Madeline had been right. It hummed against my flesh, more a feeling than a sound—the soul trapped inside calling out to me.

With the letter opener in my left hand, I held the broken dagger in my right, ready to make the switch. Until I realized I had no idea how to do that. Calling the soul from its current home should be easy, but leading it into the dagger? I wasn’t sure how to do that. Normally, the soul would be attracted to the dagger on its own, because hellion-forged steel seems to call to displaced souls. But both the letter opener and my dagger were made of the same material, and I had no male bean sidhe around to help guide the soul.

Nor did I have time to stand around and think for very long. So, with my mouth closed, to keep most of the volume in, I let just a thin ribbon of my bean sidhe wail leak from my throat, calling to the displaced soul. That used to be a very difficult task for me. I’d only known my true species for eight months, and since then I’d learned what I could do mostly through trial and error. And a little trial by fire. And a lot of help from Harmony, the only other female bean  sidhe I knew.

She’s the one who’d taught me to call for a soul without letting loose the full power of my scream, which humans found painful, at the very least.

After less than a second, the soul within the letter opener began to leak out in a thin stream of foglike substance, attracted to the muffled version of my soul song. But I still had no idea how to get it into the dagger. I tried waving the severed blades through the ethereal stream of...soul, but nothing happened. My rough chopping motions sliced through the disembodied soul, which flowed right back together afterward.

Finally, when I heard footsteps outside Levi’s office, and my pulse began to race in panic, I set the letter opener back on its stand and backed away from it, still singing softly for the soul. It followed me, trailing out from Levi’s “conversation piece” until it hung in the air. When the soul, the dagger, and I were all as far from the desk as we could get without walking through the door, I let my wail fade into silence.