Soul Screamers, Volume 1

“That’s ridiculous!” I tossed another folded shirt onto the stack and tugged a pair of pajama pants from the pile. “A reaper can’t touch you unless your name shows up on his list, and when that happens, there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Avoiding reapers is pointless. Especially when they can help you.” In theory. But wasn’t my theory about the dead girls based on the suspicion that at least one reaper had strayed from his purpose?

“What truth is this reaper helping you look for?” Uncle Brendon sank back into the desk chair with a defeated-sounding sigh. He rubbed his temple as if his head ached, but I was not taking the blame for that. If every adult in my life hadn’t been lying to me for thirteen years, none of this would have happened.

“He’s sneaking a peek at the master list for the past three days, to find out if the dead girls were on it.”

“He’s what?” Uncle Brendon went totally, frighteningly still, and the only movement in the room was the tic developing on the outer edge of his left eyelid.

“Don’t worry. He’s not taking it. He’s just going to look at it.”

“Kaylee, that’s not the point. What he’s doing is dangerous, for all three of you. Reapers take their lists very seriously. People aren’t supposed to know when they’re going to die. That’s why you can’t warn them. Once you get a premonition, you can’t speak, right?”

“Yeah.” I plucked at some fuzz on the flannel pants, distinctly uncomfortable with the direction the discussion was now headed, and the guilt it brought on. “I tried to warn Meredith, but I knew if I opened my mouth, I’d only be able to scream.”

Uncle Brendon nodded somberly. “There’s a good reason for that. Grief consumes people. Imminent death obsesses people. It’s bad enough for a person to know he’s dying of terminal cancer, or something like that. But to know the exact moment? To have the date and time stamped on your brain, looming closer to you as life slips away? That would drive people crazy.”

I gaped at him, pants clenched tightly in both hands. “You think I don’t know that?”

“Of course you do.” He ran one hand through thick brown hair, exhaling through his mouth in frustration. “You know it much better than I ever could, and it got you hospitalized.”

“No, you and Aunt Val got me hospitalized.” I couldn’t let that one slide.

“Ultimately, yes.” Uncle Brendon conceded the point with a single crisp nod. “But only because we couldn’t help you on our own. We couldn’t even calm you down. You screamed for more than an hour, long after the premonition passed, though I was probably the only one who could tell when that happened.”

I turned and pulled open the top drawer of my dresser, then dropped the pj’s inside. “How could you tell?”

“Male bean sidhes hear a female’s wail as it truly sounds. After a while, yours changed from the soul song to regular screaming. You were terrified—hysterical—and we were afraid you’d hurt yourself. We didn’t know what else to do.”

“It didn’t occur to you to talk to me? Tell me the truth?” I plucked several pairs of underwear from the pile and stuffed them into another drawer, then slammed it shut.

“I wanted to. I even tried to at one point, but you wouldn’t listen. I doubt you could even hear me over your own screaming. I couldn’t calm you down, even when I tried to Influence you.”

“Nash could. He’s done it twice now.” I sank onto my bed at the memory, absently pulling another bundle of cloth onto my lap, placated by just thinking about Nash.

“He has?” A strange look passed over my uncle’s face—some odd combination of surprise, wistfulness, and concern. “He’s Influenced you?”

“Only to calm me during those two premonitions. Why?” And suddenly I understood what he was really asking. “No! He would never try to Influence me into doing something. He’s not like that.”

He seemed to consider my point for a moment, then finally nodded. “Good. I’m glad he can help you control your wail, even if he has to use his Influence. That’s certainly better than the alternative.” He smiled as if to set me at ease, but instead, the tense line of his mouth set me on edge. “But we’ve strayed from the point. Kaylee, you can’t get involved in reaper business. And you certainly shouldn’t have asked a reaper to spy on a coworker like that. If he gets caught, it won’t be pretty. They’ll probably fire him.”

“So what?” What was one lost job compared to an innocent girl’s life? Besides, losing a job wasn’t the end of the world; Emma was proof of that. She’d lost one every couple of months for nearly a year until I’d gotten her hired at the Ciné. “Soul-snatching seems like a pretty specialized skill, and Nash says there are reapers all over the world. Surely he can find another job somewhere else. He doesn’t like the hospital much, anyway.”

Uncle Brendon closed his eyes and took a deep breath before meeting my gaze again. “Kaylee, you don’t understand. There’s no coming back once a reaper loses his position.”

“Coming back? What does that mean? Coming back from what?”