“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.

“No, not make it. We get it. Before it’s released.”

The stress he’d put on his words pulled me back. “You lift it?” I asked, eyes widening. If he could hack a music site, a hospital computer would be nothing.