I rolled my eyes, cursing Grace for leaving it there for me. “Yeah,” I said, shifting from foot to foot, terribly conscious of my hair. I hadn’t seen anyone here with purple hair except for the pierced goddess working at Hot Topic.

Ace was silent, his back to me as he filled up the cup. There was only one other guy working in the back room, cleaning the ovens. It was too early for lunch. “So, when does school start for you?” I asked, needing to say something.

Ace turned around, eyeing me slyly as he snapped a top on the shake. “Tomorrow. I wasn’t even supposed to be here this morning, and then they called. Man, I could’ve killed my mom.” He slid the drink to me. “I had my day already planned. Surfing the web and eating cheese puffs. That’s the last time I let my mom get the phone and answer for me.”

“I work part-time at a flower shop, and I hate it when my dad does that.” Ace adjusted his hat, grimacing. “If I’m at work, she knows where I am,” he said sourly. “She’s always checking up on me like I’m a kid. She works at the hospital, so she sees everything that comes in through the emergency room and thinks I’m going to get in an accident.”

My mind flitted back to waking up in my local morgue, dead from a car crash. My heart began thumping. I didn’t think it was the memory of me dying, though. A tingling was rising through my aura as a thought evolved in my mind. His mom works at the hospital? Can it be this easy? Maybe that’s what Barnabas meant about my instincts being good. “I hear you,” I said, glancing at Barnabas and Nakita, but they were staring at me, oblivious.

“So now everything I want to do today, I do tomorrow,” Ace said, shrugging.

I jerked myself back from my thoughts. “You said you have school tomorrow.”

“I said school starts tomorrow. I didn’t say I was going to be there.” Ooh, a little rebel, are we? I took a straw, tearing it open and jamming it into the shake. “You ditching your first day of school?” I asked, pretending to take a sip of my shake.

“Something like that,” he said, smiling right back. “I got more important stuff to do.”

“Like what?” I said, smiling like the cool girls at my old school had taught me before I ditched them.

Ace laughed, flattered on some level. “Music. Shoe and me, we get music.” He tossed his attention briefly to the black-haired guy in the back, and I felt a drop of disappointment. “You’re in a band?” I asked. Crap, it had been nothing after all.