Soul Screamers, Volume 1

Yes, but she needed a natural sleep, not the virtual coma induced by those stupid sedatives. Not that either of them would have listened to me, even if I’d offered my opinion on the subject of chemical oblivion.

For a moment, I envied my cousin her innocence, even as I watched it die. I’d learned about death early in life, and as inconsolable as Sophie was at the moment, she’d had fifteen years to prance around in her plastic-wrapped, padded, gaily colored, armor-plated existence, where darkness dared not tread. No matter what happened next, no one could take away her happy childhood.

Aunt Val watched Sophie swallow a single, tiny white pill, then walked her daughter down the hall into her room, where the bedsprings soon creaked beneath her slight weight. Ten minutes later, she was snoring obnoxiously enough to leave no doubt in my mind that my cousin had inherited just as much from her father as from her mother.

While my aunt put Sophie to bed, I grabbed a second Coke from Uncle Brendon’s shelf in the fridge—the one realm Aunt Val’s sugar-free, nonfat, tasteless regime had yet to conquer—and took it into the living room, where I checked the local TV station. But there was no news on at two-thirty in the afternoon. I’d have to wait for the five o’clock broadcast.

I turned off the TV, and my thoughts wandered to the Coles, whom I’d only met once, at a dance-team competition the year before. My eyes watered as I imagined Meredith’s mother trying to explain to her young son that his big sister wouldn’t be coming home from school. Ever.

Glass clinked in the kitchen, momentarily pulling me from the mire of guilt and grief I was sinking into, and I twisted on the couch to see my aunt pouring hot tea into a huge latte mug. My brows furrowed in confusion for a moment—maybe Aunt Val needed a sedative too?—until she stood on her toes to open the top cabinet. Where she and Uncle Brendon kept the alcohol.

My aunt pulled down a bottle of brandy and unscrewed the lid. Then she dumped a generous shot into her mug. And left the bottle on the countertop, clearly planning on a second helping.

She took a sip of her “tea,” then turned toward the living room, remote control in hand. The moment her gaze met mine, she froze, and her cheeks flushed.

“It hasn’t hit the news yet,” I said, and couldn’t help noticing how tired and heavy her steps looked as she crossed the tiles into the living room. Aunt Val and Mrs. Cole had been gym buddies for years. Maybe Meredith’s death had hit her harder than I’d realized. Or maybe she was unnerved by how upset Sophie was. Or maybe she’d connected Meredith’s death to Heidi Anderson’s—to my knowledge, she hadn’t yet heard about Alyson Baker—and had started to suspect something was wrong. As I had.

Either way, her skin was pale and her hands were shaking. She looked so fragile I hesitated to add to her troubles. But the premonitions had gone too far. I needed help, or advice, or…something.

What I really needed was for someone to tell me what good premonitions of death were if they didn’t help me warn people. What was the point of knowing someone was going to die, if I couldn’t stop it from happening?

Aunt Val wouldn’t know any of that, but neither would anyone else. And in the absence of my own parents, I had no one else to talk to.

My fingers tangled around one another in my lap as she sank wearily onto the other end of the couch, her knees together, ankles crossed primly. The frown lines around her mouth and the tremor in her hand said she was not as composed as she clearly wanted to appear.

That, and the not-tea scent wafting from her mug.

The last time I’d tried to tell her I knew someone was going to die, she and Uncle Brendon had driven me straight to the hospital and left me there. Of course, at the time, I’d been screaming hysterically in the middle of the mall and lashing out at anyone who tried to touch me.

Presumably, they’d had no choice.

Surely it would go better this time, because I was calm and rational, and not currently in the grip of an irrepressible screaming fit. And because she was already one shot into a bottle of brandy.

My nerves pinged out of control, and I reached absently for the scent diffuser on the end table to my left, stirring the vanilla-scented oil with a thin wooden reed. “Aunt Val?”

She jumped, sloshing “tea” onto her lap. “Sorry, hon.” She set her mug on a coaster on the end table, then rushed into the kitchen to blot at her pants with a clean, wet rag. “This thing with Meredith has me on edge.”

I knew exactly how she felt.

I exhaled smoothly, then took a deep breath as my aunt returned to the living room, the wet spot on her slacks now covering half of one slim thigh. “Yeah, it was pretty…scary.”

“Oh?” She stopped several feet from her chair, eyes narrowed at me in concern laced with…suspicion? “Were you there?” Had she already guessed what I was going to say?