Soul Screamers, Volume 1

The paramedics had been gone for less than half an hour, and the thick white carpet still bore tracks from the wheels of the stretcher. They’d rolled Aunt Val out draped in a white sheet, and Uncle Brendon and Sophie followed the ambulance to the hospital, where she would get stitches in the back of her head, and her mother would be officially pronounced dead.

Sophie didn’t understand what had happened; I’d known that from the moment she regained consciousness. But what I hadn’t anticipated was that she would blame me for her mother’s death. My cousin was technically dead when Aunt Val made the bargain that had saved her daughter’s life, and Sophie didn’t remember most of what she’d seen before that. All she knew was that her mother had died, and that I’d had something to do with it. Just like with my own mother.

She and I had more in common now than we ever had—yet we’d never been further apart.

“How did you know? About all of this?” I asked Harmony, waving toward the living room to indicate the entire disaster. But she only frowned, as if confused by the necessity for my question.

“I told her.”

Startled, I looked up to find Tod sitting across from me, his arms folded on the table, a single blond curl hanging over his forehead. Harmony smiled at him, letting me know she saw him too, then rose to check on the brownies.

“How did you do it?” I brought the teacup to my mouth for another sip. “How did you guide Sophie’s soul? I thought you were a reaper.”

“He’s both,” Nash said from behind me, and I turned just as he followed my father through the front door, pulling his long sleeves down one at a time. He and my dad had just loaded Aunt Val’s white silk couch into the back of my uncle’s truck, so he wouldn’t have to deal with the bloodstains when he and Sophie got back from the hospital. “Tod is very talented.”

Tod brushed the curl back from his face and scowled.

Harmony spoke up from the kitchen as the oven door squealed open. “Both my boys are talented.”

“Both?” I repeated, sure I’d heard her wrong.

Nash sighed and slid onto the chair his mother had vacated, then gestured toward the reaper with one hand. “Kaylee, meet my brother, Tod.”

“Brother?” My gaze traveled back and forth between them, searching for some similarity, but the only one I could find was the dimples. Though, now that I thought about it, Tod had Harmony’s blond curls....

And suddenly everything made a lot more sense. The pointless bickering. Nash knowing Tod “forever.” Tod hanging out at Nash’s house. Nash knowing a lot about reapers.

How could I not have seen it earlier?

“A word of warning…” Harmony gave me a soft smile, but then her focus shifted to my father. “You have to watch out for bean sidhe brothers. They’re always more than you bargain for.”

My dad cleared his throat and glanced away.

An hour later, the Hudsons had gone, and my father stood across from me at the bar, chewing the last bite of a brownie I’d had no appetite for. I set his empty saucer in the sink and ran water over it.

He slid one arm around my shoulders and pulled me close. I let him. He still knew no more about me and my life than he had an hour earlier—that much hadn’t changed. But everything else had. Now he could look at me, no matter how much I resembled my mother, and see me, rather than her. He could see what he still had, rather than what he’d lost.

And he was going to stay. We’d probably fight over curfews and get on each other’s nerves, but at least those things felt normal. And I needed a good dose of normal after the week I’d just had.

I sighed, staring down at the running water, too exhausted and dazed in that moment to even realize I should turn it off.

“What’s wrong?” Dad reached around me to turn off the faucet.

“Nothing.” I shrugged, then turned with my back to the sink. “Well, everything, really. It’s just that I’ve only met three adult bean sidhes so far, and all three of you are…alone.” Tragically widowed, in fact. “Do bean sidhes ever get happy endings?”

“Of course they do,” my father insisted, wrapping one arm around my shoulders. “As much as anyone else does, at least.” And to my surprise, he didn’t look the least bit doubtful, even after all he’d been through. “I know that doesn’t seem possible right now, considering what you saw and heard tonight. But don’t judge your future based on others’ mistakes. Not Valerie’s, and certainly not mine. You’ll have as much of a happy ending as you’re willing to work for. And from what I’ve seen so far, you’re not afraid of a little work.”

I nodded, unsure how to respond.

“Besides, being a bean sidhe isn’t all bad, Kaylee.”

I gave him a skeptical frown. “That’s good to hear, ’cause from where I’m standing, it looks like a lot of death and screaming.”