LITMIR.BIZ

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exhaled, and his hands relaxed. He’d made his decision, and I held my breath, waiting for it. “Fine. If you’re in, I’m in.” His focus shifted to the rearview mirror, where he glared at Tod. “But I’m in this for Kaylee, not for you, and not for your idiot pop princess.” The look he shot me then was part disappointment, part anger, part loyalty, and all Nash. His gaze scalded me from the inside out, and I squirmed in my seat as that heat settled low within me.

      But when he turned back to the road, the flames sputtered beneath a wash of cold fear. Nash would get involved for me, but the truth was that I had no idea what I was doing.

      What had I just gotten us into?

       5

      “OKAY, KAYLEE, FOCUS….” Harmony Hudson, Nash’s mother, leaned forward on the faded olive couch, licking her lips in concentration as she watched me. She wore jeans and another snug tee, her blond curls pulled into the usual ponytail, a few ringlets hanging loose around her face. Harmony was the hottest mom I’d ever personally met. She looked thirty years old, at the most, but I’d seen her blow out her birthday candles a month earlier.

      All eighty-two of them.

      “Close your eyes and think about the last time it happened,” she continued, and I sucked in a lungful of the fudge-brownie-scented air. “The last time you knew someone was going to die.”

      And that’s where I lost my motivation. I didn’t want to think about the last time. It still gave me nightmares.

      Pale brows dipped low over Harmony’s bright blue eyes—exact copies of Tod’s—and her dimple deepened when she frowned. “What’s wrong?”

      I stared at the scarred hardwood floor. “Last time was … with Sophie and Aunt Val.”

      “Oh.” Harmony’s eyes took on a familiar glint of wisdom, which, at first glance, seemed at odds with her youthful appearance. She was there when the rogue reaper killed my cousin and tried to take her soul. She saw my aunt give her life instead of Sophie’s—a lastminute act of courage and selflessness that had gone a long way toward redeeming her in my eyes.

      Until I’d learned that the other souls she’d sold to Belphegore would be tortured for eternity along with my aunt’s. Now I was leaning decidedly toward the Aunt-Val-deserved-what-she-got school of thought.

      Harmony watched emotions flit across my face, but as usual, she reserved her own judgment. That was why I liked her. Well, that, and the fact that she always had fresh-baked goodies ready to be devoured after our how-to-be-a-bean-sidhe lessons. “Okay, then, pick a different time. Just think back to any death premonition. One that was less traumatic.”

      But the truth was that they were all traumatic. I’d only known I was a bean sidhe for six weeks, and so far every premonition I’d ever suffered through had thoroughly freaked me out. And every wail was largely uncontrollable.

      Thus the lessons.

      “Okay.” I closed my eyes and leaned against the soft, faded couch cushions, thinking back to the most memorable premonition—other than that last one. Emma.

      My best friend’s death had been unbearably awful, made even worse because I’d known it was coming. I’d seen Em wearing the death shroud for at least two minutes before she collapsed on the gym floor, surrounded by hundreds of other students and parents, gathered to mourn a dead classmate.

      But I chose Emma’s death to focus on because hers had a happy ending.

      Okay, a bittersweet ending, but that was better than the screaming, panicking, clawing-my-way-out-of-the-Netherfog ending most of them had. I’d suspended Emma’s soul above her body with my wail to keep it from the reaper who’d killed her, while Nash had directed it back into her body. Emma had lived.

      But someone else had died instead. That was the price, and the decision we’d made. I’d felt guilty about it ever since, but I’d do it all over again if I had to, because I couldn’t let Emma die before her time, no matter who took her place.

      So two months later I sat on Nash’s couch beside his mother, picturing my best friend’s death.

      Emma, in the gym, several steps ahead. Voices buzzing around us. Nash’s arm around my waist. His fingers curled over my hip. Then the death shroud.

      It smeared her blond hair with thin, runny black, like a child’s watercolors. Streaks smudged her clothes and her arms, and the scream built inside me. It clawed at my throat, scraping my skin raw even as I clenched my jaws shut, denying it exit.

      As in memory, so in life.

      The scream rose again, and my throat felt full. Hot. Bruised from the inside out.

      My eyes flew open in panic, and Harmony stared calmly back at me. She smiled, a tiny upturn of full lips both of her sons had inherited. “You’ve got it!” she whispered, eyes shining with pride. “Okay, now here comes the hard part.”

      It gets harder?

      I couldn’t ask my question because once a bean sidhe‘s wail takes over, her throat can be used for nothing else until that scream has either burst loose or been swallowed. I couldn’t swallow it—not without Nash’s voice to calm me, to coax my birthright into submission—and I wasn’t willing to let it loose. Never again, if I could help it.

      This lesson was on harnessing my wail. Making it work for me, rather than the other way around. So I nodded, telling Harmony I was ready for the hard part.

      “Good. I want you to keep a tight rein on it. Then let it out a little at a time—like a very slow leak—without actually opening your mouth. Only keep the volume down. You want to just barely hear it.”

      Because the whole point was for me to be able to see and hear the Netherworld through my wail, without humans noticing anything weird. Like me screaming loud enough to shatter their minds. But that was easier said than done, especially considering how much time I’d spent trying to hold back my wail. Evidently suppressing it completely and letting just a little leak through were two very different skill sets.

      But I tried.

      Keeping my lips sealed, I opened my throat a tiny bit, forcing my jaws to relax. That’s where the whole thing went downhill. Instead of that little leak of sound Harmony had mentioned, the entire wail ruptured from my throat, shoving my mouth open wide.

      My screech filled the room. The entire house. My whole body hummed with the keening, a violent chord of discordant sounds no human could have produced. My head throbbed, my brain seeming to bounce around within my skull.

      I closed my eyes. I couldn’t take it.

      Cold, smooth fingers brushed my arm, and I opened my eyes again to find Harmony speaking to me. The room around her had become a blur of colors and textures, thanks to my inability to focus on it. Her pretty face was twisted into a constant wince of pain from the shards of steel my scream was no doubt driving into her brain. Male bean sidhes hear a female’s wail as an eerie, beautiful soul song. They crave the sound, and are pulled toward it. Almost seduced by it.

      Female bean sidhes hear it as it is. As humans hear it. As a titanic racket loud enough to deafen, and sharp enough to shatter not just glass, but your ever-loving sanity.

      Harmony glanced at her living-room window, the glass trembling in its frame. Because we shared a gender and species—though I was fuzzy on exactly how the whole thing worked—I could hear her words through my own screaming, but they sounded like they came from within my own head.

      Calm down. Take a breath. Close your mouth….

      I snapped my jaws shut, muffling the sound, but not eradicating it. It buzzed in my mouth now, rattling my teeth, and still seeped out like a moan on steroids. But I could hear her normally now.

      “Breathe deeply, Kaylee,” Harmony soothed, rubbing my arms until goose bumps

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