Soul Screamers, Volume 1

I stood on my toes to reach Nash’s ear. “He has backstage passes.”


Nash’s scowl made an irritated mask of his entire face, while onstage, Eden shed her jacket, now clad only in a bikini top and short skirt. “Where did he get them?”

“Do you really want to know?” Reapers weren’t paid in money—at least, not the human kind—so he certainly hadn’t bought the passes. Or the tickets.

“No,” Nash grumbled. But he followed me, anyway.

Keeping up with Tod was a lost cause. He didn’t have to edge past row after row of ecstatic fans, or stop and apologize when he stepped on one girl’s foot or spilled her date’s drink. He just walked right through seats and concertgoers alike, as if they didn’t exist in his world.

They probably didn’t.

Like all reapers, Tod’s natural state of existence—if it could even be called natural—was somewhere between our world, where humans and the occasional bean sidhe reside in relative peace, and the Netherworld, where most things dark and dangerous dwell. He could exist completely in either one, if he chose, but he rarely did, because when he was corporeal, he typically forgot to avoid obstacles like chairs, tables, and doors. And people.

Of course, he could easily become visible to both me and Nash, but it was evidently much more fun to mess with his brother. I’d never met a set of siblings with less in common than Nash and Tod. They weren’t even the same species; at least, not anymore.

The Hudson brothers were both born bean sidhes—that was the correct spelling, though most people knew us as banshees—from normal bean sidhe parents. As was I. But Tod had died two years earlier, when he was seventeen, and that’s when things got weird, even for bean sidhes. Tod was recruited by the grim reapers.

As a reaper, Tod would live on in his own un-aging body. In exchange, he worked a twelve-hour shift every day, collecting souls from humans whose time had come to die. He didn’t have to eat or sleep, so he got pretty bored for those other twelve hours of each day. And since Nash and I were among the few who knew about him, he typically took that boredom out on us.

Which was how we’d gotten kicked out of a mall, a skating rink, and a bowling alley, all in the past month. And as I bumped my way through the crowd after Tod, I had a feeling the concert would be next on the list.

One glance at the irritation glowing in Nash’s cheeks told me he still couldn’t see his brother, so I pulled him along as I tracked the headful of blond curls now several rows ahead of us, heading toward a side door beneath a red exit sign.

Eden’s first song ended in a huge flash of purple light, reflected on the thousands of faces around me, then the lights went out.

I stopped, unwilling to move in the dark for fear that I’d trip over someone and land in an unidentified puddle. Or a lap.

Seconds later, the stage exploded with swirling, pulsing light, and Eden now swayed to the new beat in a different but equally skimpy costume. I glanced at her, then back at Tod, but caught only a fleeting glimpse of his curls disappearing through the closed side door.

Nash and I rushed after him, stepping on a series of toes and vaulting over a half-empty bottle of Coke someone had smuggled in. We were out of breath when we reached the door, so I glanced one last time at the stage, then shoved the door, grateful when it actually opened. Doors Tod walks through usually turn out to be locked.

Tod stood in the hall beyond, grinning, both backstage passes looped over one arm. “What’d you do, crawl all the way here?”

The door closed behind us, and I was surprised to realize I could barely hear the music, though it had been loud enough to drown out my thoughts in the auditorium. But I could still feel the thump of the bass, pulsing up through my feet from the floor.

Nash let go of my hand and glared at his brother. “Some of us are bound by the laws of physics.”

“Not my problem.” Tod waved the passes, then tossed one to each of us. “Snoozin’, loozin’, and all that crap.”

I slipped the nylon lanyard over my neck and pulled my long brown hair over it. Now that I wore the pass, it would be seen by anyone who saw me; everything Tod holds is only as visible as he is at the time.