My Soul To Take

CHAPTER 13

Nash must have seen understanding on my face—and near panic—because he wrapped one arm around my waist and pulled me closer across the waxed surface of Carter’s car. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. An experienced bean sidhe knows how to stay safe. But we’re not experienced, Kaylee.” It was nice of him to include himself in that statement, but we both knew I was the newbie. “Besides, we don’t even know for sure that those girls weren’t on the list. This is all still theory. A very unlikely, dangerous theory.”

“We’ll know once Tod calls,” I insisted, the new information spinning around in my head, complicating what I’d thought I was prepared to do, should intervention prove necessary.

“That might not be tonight.”

“It will be.” He’d find out for us. Soon. Whether we’d actually gotten through to him, or he just really wanted my last name, I’d known in the instant before he’d disappeared that he would get us the information. “Call me as soon as you hear from him. Please.”

He hesitated, then nodded. “But you have to promise you won’t do anything dangerous, no matter what he says. No soul singing by yourself.”

Like I’d admit it if I were planning something risky. Besides…“I have no desire to see this Netherworld on my own. And my little talent’s no good without yours anyway, right?”

“Good point.” He relaxed a little then, and kissed me goodnight. I held him tight when he started to pull away, clinging to the taste and the feel of all things good and safe. Nash had become a shining tower of sanity in this new world of unprecedented chaos and unseen peril. And I didn’t want to let him go.

Unfortunately, in the world of curfews and alarm clocks, he couldn’t stay.

I closed and locked the door behind him, and watched through the front window until he backed out of the driveway and drove out of sight. I was pulling the curtains closed when something creaked behind me. “Kaylee?” I jumped and whirled to find my uncle standing in the hallway threshold, watching me.

“Jeez, Uncle Brendon, you scared the crap out of me!”

His smile was more of a grimace. “You’re not the only one around here with big ears.”

“Yeah, well it’s not the big ears that worry me so much as the big mouths,” I said, grateful that I could hear Sophie snoring again, now that the rest of the house was quiet. I padded across the carpet toward my uncle, then stepped around him and into the hall, desperately hoping he was bluffing. That he hadn’t actually heard my little argument with Nash.

He followed me to my room, and when I tried to swing the door shut behind me, his palm smacked into the hollow wood panel, holding it firmly open. “What’s going on, Kaylee?”

“Nothing.” Going for nonchalance, I kicked first one sneaker then the other onto the floor of my closet.

“I heard you two talking.” He leaned against the door frame, thick arms crossed over a broad chest, still well defined after who-knows-how-many years of life. “What are you planning at the memorial, and who’s Tod?”

Well, crap. I shoved aside a pile of clean, unfolded clothes Aunt Val had dumped on my bed at some point and sank onto the comforter, my mind whirling in search of an answer that was at least as much truth as it was fabrication. But I came up empty. Nothing I made up would ring true to him, especially considering he knew more about bean sidhes than I knew about…anything.

So maybe I should just tell him the truth…. That way, if the rogue reaper did show up at the memorial and Nash refused to help me out of some misguided attempt to protect me, surely Uncle Brendon would step in. He might act tough, but inside he was a big teddy bear, and he could no more watch an innocent girl die before her time than I could.

“You sure you want to hear this?” I pulled my legs beneath me on the bed, fiddling with the frayed hem of my jeans.

Uncle Brendon shook his head. “I’m pretty sure I don’t want to. But go ahead.”

“You might want to sit,” I warned him, reaching to pluck my iPod from my pillow. The earbuds had gotten tangled again; I guess that’s what I get for falling asleep wearing them.

My uncle shrugged, then settled into my desk chair, waiting with his arms still crossed over his chest.

“Okay, here’s the deal. And I’m only telling you this because I know you’ll do the right thing. So technically, I think my voluntary disclosure exempts me from any penalty for what I’m about to admit.”

His lips quirked, as if a smile had been vetoed at the last minute. “Go on…”

I inhaled and held the next breath for a moment, wondering where best to begin. But there was no good place to start, so I dove in, hoping my good intentions would bail me out during the less altruistic parts of the story. “Meredith Cole wasn’t the first one.”

“She wasn’t your first premonition?” He didn’t look surprised. Of course, he couldn’t have forgotten the other times—including the incident preceding my trip to the hospital.

“That too. But, I mean, she wasn’t the first girl to die this week. There was one Saturday night and one yesterday afternoon. It happened the same way with all three girls.”

“And you predicted them all?” Now he looked surprised, his forehead crinkled, brows furrowed.

“No, I never even saw the second one.” I glanced at my lap, avoiding his eyes while my fingers worked nervously at the earbuds, trying to produce two separate wires from a knot any sailor would have been proud of. “But I saw the girl who died on Saturday, and knew it was going to happen. Same thing with Meredith this afternoon.” Which I assumed Aunt Val had told him.

“Wait, Saturday night?” The ladder-backed chair creaked and I looked up as he leaned forward to eye me in growing suspicion. “I thought you stayed home.”

I shrugged and raised one brow at him. “I thought I was human.”

My uncle frowned but nodded, as if to say he’d earned that one. Still, I couldn’t believe Aunt Val hadn’t ratted on me. As cool as that was of her, I couldn’t help wondering why. Had all the “coffee” made her forget my indiscretion?

“So where did this first girl die?” He leaned back again, crossing thick arms over his chest. “Where did you go?”

Suddenly the wires now tangled around my fingers seemed fascinating…“Taboo, this dance club in the West End. But—”

He scowled, and even with thick brown brows casting shadows across his eyes, I thought I saw some movement of the green in his irises. I know that never happened before. I would have noticed. “How did you even get into a nightclub?” he demanded. “Do you have a fake ID?”

I rolled my eyes. “No, I just snuck in through the back.” Sort of…“But that’s not really the point,” I rushed on, hoping he’d be distracted by the next part. “One of the girls in the club was…dark. Like she was wearing shadows no one else could see. And when I looked at her, I knew she was going to die, and that panic—or premonition, or whatever it is—came on hard and fast, just like last time. It was horrible. But I didn’t know I’d been right—that she’d actually died—until I saw the story on the news yesterday morning.” Speaking of which…“Are the others dead too? The ones I saw last year?” My fingers stilled in my lap as I stared at my uncle, begging him, daring him to tell me the truth.

He looked sad, like he didn’t want to have to say it, but there was no doubt in his eyes. Nor any hesitation. “Yes.”

“How do you know?”

He smiled almost bitterly. “Because you girls are never wrong.”

Great. Morbid and accurate. Sounds like the sales pitch for a county-fair fortune-teller…

“Anyway, after I saw the news yesterday morning, I kind of freaked. And then it happened again that afternoon, and things got really weird.”

“But you didn’t predict that one, right?”

I nodded and dropped my hopelessly knotted earbuds in my lap. “I heard about that one secondhand, but had to look up the story online. This girl in Arlington died exactly like the girl at Taboo. And like Meredith. They all three just fell over dead, with no warning. Does that sound normal to you?”

“No.” To his credit, my uncle didn’t even hesitate. “But that doesn’t rule out coincidence. How much did Nash tell you about what we can do?”

“Everything important, I hope.” And even if he’d left some gaps, that was much better than the canyons my own family had created in my self-awareness. Not to mention my psyche.

Uncle Brendon’s eyes narrowed in doubt, and he crossed one ankle over the opposite knee. “Did he mention what happens to a person’s soul when he dies?”

“Yeah. That’s where Tod comes in.”

“Who’s Tod?”

“The reaper who works at the hospital. He’s stuck there because he let this little girl live once when she was supposed to die, and his boss killed the girl’s grandmother instead. But anyway—”

Uncle Brendon shot out of the chair, his face flushed so red I thought he might be having an aneurism. Did bean sidhes have aneurisms?

“Nash took you to see a reaper?” He stomped across my rug, gesturing angrily with both arms. “Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?” I tried to answer, but he barreled forward, stopping at the end of my bed to stare down at me as he ranted. “Reapers don’t like bean sidhes. Our abilities are at odds with theirs, and most of them feel very threatened by us. Going to see a reaper is like walking into a police station waving a loaded shotgun.”

“I know.” I shrugged, trying to placate him. “But Nash knew this guy before he was a reaper. They’re friends—sort of.”

“That may be what he thinks, but somehow I doubt Tod agrees.” And he was pacing again, as if the faster he walked, the faster he could think. Though my doubts about that technique stemmed from personal experience.

“Well, he must, ’cause he’s going to help us.” No need to mention that his help stemmed more from my involvement in the matter than from Nash’s.

“Help you with what?” Uncle Brendon froze halfway across the room, facing me, and this time his eyes were definitely swirling.

“Help us figure out what’s going on. He’s getting some information for us.”

My uncle’s expression darkened, and my breath hitched in my throat as the green in his irises churned so fast it made me dizzy. “What kind of information? Kaylee, what are you doing? I want the truth, and I want it right now or I swear you won’t leave this house again until you turn twenty-one.”

I had to smile at the irony of Uncle Brendon asking me for the truth. I sighed and sat straighter on the bed. “Okay, I’ll tell you, but don’t freak out. It’s not as dangerous as it sounds—” I hope “—because there’s this loophole in the exchange rate, and—”

“The exchange rate?” Uncle Brendon’s face went from tomato-red to nuclear countdown in less than a second. And then there was more pacing. “This is why we wanted your father to be the one to explain everything. Or at least me. That way we’d know how much you understand and what you’re still clueless about.”

“I’m not clueless.” My temper spiked, and I stretched to drop my iPod on my nightstand before I accidentally crimped the cord.

“You are if you think you have any business even contemplating the exchange rate. You have no idea how dangerous messing in reaper business can be!”

“Ignorance is dangerous, Uncle Brendon. Don’t you get it?” Standing, I grabbed a clean pair of jeans and shook them out harshly, pleased when the material snapped against itself, sharply accenting my anger. “Eventually, if the premonitions kept up, I would have been unable to hold back my song. I’d have wound up delaying some random reaper’s schedule and really pissing him off—not to mention whatever other invisible creepies are out there—with no idea what I was doing. See? The longer you all keep me bumbling around in the dark, the greater the chance that I’ll stumble into something I don’t understand. Nash knows that. He explained the possibilities and the consequences. He’s arming me with knowledge because he understands that the best offense is knowing how to avoid trouble.”

“From what I heard, it sounds more like you’re out looking for trouble.”

“Not trouble. The truth.” I dropped the folded jeans on the end of the bed. “There’s been precious little of that around here, and even now that I know what I am, you and Aunt Val are still keeping secrets.”

He exhaled heavily and sat on the edge of my dresser, scruffing one hand through unkempt hair. “We’re not keeping secrets from you. We’re giving your dad a chance to act like a real father.”

“Ha!” I stomped around the bed to put it between us, then snatched a long-sleeved tee from the pile. “He’s had sixteen years. What makes you think he’ll start now?”

“Give him a chance, Kaylee. He might surprise you.”

“Not likely.” I folded the shirt in several short, sharp motions, then tossed it on top of the jeans, where one arm flopped free to dangle over the side. “If Nash knew what my dad had to say, he’d tell me.”

Uncle Brendon leaned forward and flipped the sleeve back on top of my shirt. “Nash should never have taken you to see a reaper, Kaylee. Bean sidhes have no natural defenses against most of the other things out there. That’s why we live here, with the humans. The key to longevity lies in staying out of sight. In only meeting a reaper once in your life—at the very end.”

“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?”

“From the dead. Reapers are dead, Kaylee. The only thing keeping their bodies functioning and their souls inside is the job. Once a reaper loses that, it’s all over.”

“Nooo.” The socks I’d been pairing dropped into my lap as I tried to wrap my mind around what he was saying.

So when Tod said he’d almost lost his job for letting the little girl live, what he meant was that he’d almost lost his life. And if he got caught spying for me, that’s exactly what would happen.

Not cool. Not cool at all.

Why on earth had he said he’d do it? Surely not just for my name? I wasn’t that interesting, and my name couldn’t be too hard to find on his own. He already knew where I went to school.

“But we had to do it.” I met Uncle Brendon’s eyes, speaking the truth as soon as I recognized it. “We had to know if those girls were on the list. I don’t think they were supposed to die, and we won’t know for sure without a peek at the list.”

However, my resolve wavered even as I spoke. It was the same old moral dilemma. Did I have the right to decide whether one life was worth risking another? A girl I might not even know, for a guy I’d only met once? An already dead guy, who’d surely known the risk when he agreed to it.

Suddenly nothing made sense. I knew in my heart that these girls weren’t supposed to be dying, but trying to save the next one would expose me to creatures I couldn’t even begin to imagine in a world I couldn’t see, and put several other lives in danger. Including my own.

My shoulders fell and I stared at my uncle in almost paralyzing confusion. “So what am I supposed to do?” I hated how young and clueless I sounded, but he was right. I really had no idea what was going on, and all the good intentions in the world wouldn’t mean a thing if I didn’t know what to do with them.

“I don’t think there’s anything you can do, Kaylee.” Uncle Brendon looked just as frustrated as I felt. “But we don’t know there’s anything actually wrong yet, and until we know for sure, you’re just borrowing trouble.”

I tried really hard to keep an open mind. Not to jump to conclusions. After all, I wasn’t exactly rolling in evidence. All I had was a bad feeling and some soul-searing guilt. And even if I turned out to be right, my options were few and far between. Not to mention far — fetched. I’d just found out I was a bean sidhe and had yet to try out a single one of my purported skills. There was no guarantee I could do anything to save the next girl’s life, even if it was wrongly endangered.

Maybe I should just stay out of reaper business. After all, it didn’t really involve me.

Yet.

But what if it did soon? One girl from my school had already died, and there was no guarantee that wouldn’t happen again. And it could happen to anyone. It could be me, or any one of my friends.

“But what if I am right? If these girls are dying before their time, I can’t just stand by and let it happen again if I can possibly stop it. But I can’t save anyone on my own, and pulling someone else into it will just put more people in danger.” Like I’d risked Tod. And Nash.

“Well then, I think you have your answer. Even if you’re willing to risk yourself—and for the record, I will not let you do that so long as you’re in my care—you have no right to risk anyone else.”

I abandoned the laundry for my pillow, plucking anxiously at a feather sticking out through the pillowcase. “So I should just let an innocent girl die before her time?”

Uncle Brendon exhaled heavily. “No.” He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and took a long, deep breath. “I’ll tell you what. When you hear back from this reaper, if it turns out that these girls weren’t on the list, I’ll look into it. With your father. On one condition. You swear to stay out of it.”

“But—”

“No buts. Do we have a deal?” I opened my mouth to answer, but he interrupted. “And before you answer, think about Nash, and Tod, and whoever else you might be putting in danger if you try to handle this yourself.”

I sighed. He knew he had me with that last bit. “Fine. I’ll let you know what Tod finds out as soon as I know something.”

“Thank you. I know none of this is easy for you.” He stood and shoved his hands into his pockets as I dropped my socks into the open drawer behind me.

“Yeah, well, what’s a little mental illness and pathological screaming among family?”

My uncle laughed, leaning against the door frame. “It could be worse. You could be an oracle.”

“There are oracles?”

“Not many anymore, and most of those are truly certifiable. If you think predicting one death at a time is hard on your sanity, try knowing what’s going to happen to everyone you meet, and being unable to turn the visions off.”

I could only shudder at the thought. How could there be so much out there that I’d never known about? How could I not realize that half of my own family wasn’t even human? Shouldn’t the swirly eyes have clued me in?

“How come I never saw your eyes swirl before tonight?”

Uncle Brendon gave me a wistful smile. “Because I’m very old and have learned how to control my emotions, for the most part. Though that gets harder to do around you every day. I think that’s part of why your dad stays away. When he looks at you, he sees your mother, and he can’t hide his reaction. And if you saw his eyes, you’d have questions he wasn’t ready to answer.”

Well, not-answering was no longer an option…. “So how old are you? For real.”

Uncle Brendon chuckled and glanced at the ground, and for a moment I thought he wouldn’t answer—that I’d broken some kind of bean sidhe code of conduct by asking. But then he met my eyes, still smiling faintly. “I wondered how long that one would take you. I turned one hundred twenty-four last spring.”

“Holy crap!” I felt my eyes go wide as his smile deepened. “You could have retired sixty years ago. Does Aunt Val know?”

“Of course. And she teases me mercilessly. The children from my first marriage are older than she is.”

“You were married before?” I couldn’t keep shock from my voice.

That longing smile was back. “In Ireland, half a century ago. We had to move every couple of decades to keep people from noticing that we didn’t seem to age. My first wife died in Illinois twenty-four years ago, and our children—both bean sidhes — now have grandchildren of their own. Remind me and I’ll show you pictures sometime.”

I nodded, numb with surprise. “Wow. So are those kids any nicer than Sophie?” I couldn’t help but ask.

Uncle Brendon gave me a halfhearted frown, which smoothed into a sympathetic smile. “Frankly, yes. But Sophie’s still young. She’ll grow into her attitude.”

Somehow, I had my doubts.

But then something else occurred to me. “Ironic, isn’t it?” I took another step back, assessing him from a better vantage point—and an all-new perspective. “You’re three times Aunt Val’s age, but you look so much younger.”

He winked, one hand on the doorknob as he turned to leave. “Well, Kaylee, I can tell you right now that ‘ironic’ isn’t quite how she describes it.”