Soul Screamers, Volume 1

I tried to follow his directions, but the panic was too loud, a private, frenzied buzzing as the scream built inside my head. It interrupted thought. Rendered logic an abstract concept.

Nash seemed to understand. He stepped in front of me so that we were facing, his nose inches from my forehead. He stared into my eyes and took both my hands in his. The crowd shuffled by, parting to flow around us like water around a river outcropping. Several people glanced our way, but no one stopped—I wasn’t the only young woman having a public breakdown in the gym, and most of the others were much louder than mine. For the moment, anyway.

I clenched my jaw shut, holding back the strongest soul song I’d ever felt as I let my gaze rove the crowd, passing over the boys and adults and lingering on the girls. She was here somewhere, and she was going to die. There was nothing I could do to stop that. But if I found her in time, and if I was truly capable of doing what Nash had explained to me, I could bring her back. We could bring her back.

Then all we’d have to worry about was avoiding the rogue reaper fury.

It may have been coincidence, or maybe my very real need, despite our strained relationship, to see that my cousin was safe, but my gaze settled first on Sophie. She stood beneath the basket at the far end of the gym with a group of teary-eyed friends, arms linked in a huddle of sorrow. But none of those red, damp faces intensified my panic, and not one of them was dimmed by a veil of shadows that only I could see. The girls were fine, but for their grief. Fortunately, I would not have to add to it.

Next my focus found another cluster of young women—freshmen, if I had to guess. Everywhere I turned there were more girls, some in dresses, some in dark pants, others in jeans, the official uniform of adolescence. It was like the boys and adults no longer existed. My eyes were drawn only to the girls.

But of all the faces—freckled, tear-streaked, thin, round, pale, dark, and tanned—none held my gaze. Not one cried out to my soul.

Finally, after what seemed like forever, but couldn’t have been more than a minute, my gaze found Nash again. My jaws ached from being clenched, my throat was raw from holding back the scream, and my fingernails had left impressions in his hands. I shook my head and blinked away the tears forming in my eyes. She was still there somewhere—based on the unprecedented strength of the cry building inside me—but I couldn’t find her.

“Try again.” Nash squeezed my hands. “One more time.” I nodded and made myself swallow the rising sound—an agony like gulping broken glass—but this time the consequences of repressing it were very real. Pressure built in my chest and throat, and I was increasingly certain that if I couldn’t release it soon or remove myself from the source, my body would rupture into one gaping wound of grief.

Desperate now, I looked over his shoulder, where people still pressed slowly toward the exit. Everyone in that direction faced away from me, identities obscured by the anonymous backs of their heads. A thin redhead, with long, loose curls. Two heavyset girls with identical black waves. A brunette with thin, fine hair as straight as a ruler. She turned, and I saw her profile, but the panic didn’t escalate.

Then one head caught my attention—another blonde, about fifteen feet away, her entire form dark with a thick, ominous shadow that somehow fell on no one else. The moment my gaze found her, my throat convulsed, fighting to release the wail my jaws held back. My chest ached for fresh air, but I was scared to take it in, afraid that would fuel the scream I wasn’t yet ready to release. The blonde was tall and curvy, her hair cut straight across the middle of her back. If she’d had a ponytail, I’d have sworn it was Emma.

But whoever she was, she was about to die.

I couldn’t speak to warn Nash, so I squeezed his hand, harder than I’d meant to. He started to pull away, but then comprehension widened his eyes and made a firm line of his mouth.

“Where?” he whispered urgently. “Who is it?”

Now weak from resisting the song, I could only nod in the blonde’s direction, but that was little help. My gesture took in at least fifty people, more than half of them young women.

“Show me.” He let go of my left hand but still clung to my right. “Can you walk?”

I nodded but wasn’t sure that I actually could. My head rang with the echo of screams unvoiced, my legs wobbled, and my free hand grasped the air. A soft, high-pitched mewling leaked from me now, the song seeping through my imperfectly sealed lips. And with it came a familiar darkness, that odd gray filter overlaying my vision. The world felt like it was closing in on me, while something else—anomalous forms and a world no one else could see—seemed to unfold before my eyes.