Soul Screamers, Volume 1

Aunt Val sank into the nearest armchair and drained her mug, then almost dropped it onto a coaster.

“Well, I can’t say this is entirely unexpected. Your dad’s already on his way here to explain everything.” My uncle’s hands hovered at his sides, as if he didn’t quite know what to do with them. Then he sighed and nodded to himself, like he’d come to some kind of decision. “Sit down. Please. I’m sure you both have questions.”

“Can I get anyone a drink?” Aunt Val rose unsteadily, her empty mug in hand.

“Yeah.” I gave her a saccharine smile. “I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

She frowned—for once unconcerned with the wrinkles etched into her forehead—then made her way slowly into the kitchen.

“I’d love some coffee,” Uncle Brendon called after her as he sank into the floral-print armchair, but his wife disappeared around the corner with no reply.

I dropped onto the sofa and Nash sat next to me, and in the sudden silence I realized my cousin hadn’t come out to interrogate me or flirt with him. And no music came from her room. No sound at all, in fact. “Where’s Sophie?”

Uncle Brendon sighed heavily and seemed to sink deeper into the chair. “She doesn’t know about any of this. She’s asleep.”

“Still?”

“Again. Val woke her up for dinner, but she hardly ate anything. Then she took another of those damned pills and went back to bed. I ought to flush the rest of them.” He mumbled the last part beneath his breath, but we both heard him.

And I agreed with him wholeheartedly on that one, if on little else at the moment.

Fueling bravado with my smoldering anger, I pinned my uncle with the boldest stare I could manage. “So I’m not human?”

He sighed. “You never were one to beat around the bush.”

I only stared at him, unwilling to be distracted by pointless chatter. And when my uncle began to speak, I clutched Nash’s hand harder than ever.

“No, technically we’re not human,” he said. “But the distinction is very minor.”

“Right.” I rolled my eyes. “Except for all the death and screaming.”

“So you’re a bean sidhe too, right?” Nash interjected, oiling the wheels of discourse with more civility than I could have mustered in that moment. At least one of us was calm....

“Yes. As is Kaylee’s father, my brother.” Uncle Brendon met my eyes again then, and I knew what he was going to say from the cautious sympathy shining in his eyes. “As was your mother.”

This wasn’t about my mom. So far as I knew, she’d never lied to me. “What about Aunt Val?”

“Human.” She answered for herself, stepping into the living room with a steaming cup of coffee in each hand. She crossed the carpet cautiously and handed one mug to my uncle before sinking carefully into the armchair across from his. “And so is Sophie.”

“Are you sure?” Nash frowned. “Maybe she just hasn’t had an opportunity for any premonitions yet.”

“She was there with Meredith this afternoon,” I reminded him.

“Oh, yeah.”

“We’ve known from the moment she was born,” my aunt said, as if neither of us had spoken.

“How?” I asked, as she slowly, carefully crossed one leg over the other.

Aunt Val lifted the mug to her lips, then spoke over it. “She cried.” She sipped her coffee, her eyes not quite focused on the wall over my head. “Female bean sidhes don’t cry at birth.”

“Seriously?” I glanced at Nash for confirmation, but he only shrugged, apparently as surprised as I was.

Uncle Brendon eyed his wife in mounting concern, then turned back to us. “They may have tears, but a bean sidhe never truly screams until she sings for her first soul.”

“Wait, that can’t be right.” I’d cried plenty as a child, hadn’t I? Surely at my mother’s funeral…?

Okay, I couldn’t actually remember much from that age, but I knew for a fact that I’d screamed bloody murder when I rode my bike off the sidewalk and into a rose bush, at eight years old. And again at eleven, when I accidentally ripped a hoop earring through my earlobe with a hairbrush. And again when I’d been dumped for the first time, at fourteen.

How long had I been making fatal predictions, without even knowing it? Had I thrown inconsolable fits in preschool? Or had my youth largely kept me away from death? How long had they been treating me like I was crazy, when they knew what was wrong with me all along?

My spine stiffened, and I felt my cheeks flush in anger. Every answer my uncle provided only brought up more questions, about things I should have known all along. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded, teeth clenched to keep me from yelling and waking Sophie up. I’d missed so much. Wasted countless hours doubting my own sanity.