Read My Soul to Take Online

Authors: Rachel Vincent

My Soul to Take (10 page)

BOOK: My Soul to Take
2.73Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

I was tempted to rule out brain cancer based on the symptoms alone, until I noticed the section on tumors in the temporal lobe. According to the Web site, while temporal-lobe “neoplasms” sometimes impaired speech and caused seizures, they were just as often asymptomatic.

As was I.

That was it. I had a tumor in my temporal lobe. But if so, how did Aunt Val and Uncle Brendon know? More important, how long had they known? And how long did I have?

My fingers shook on the keys, and a nonsense word appeared in the address bar. I pushed my chair away from the desk and closed my laptop without bothering to shut it down. I had to talk to someone. Now.

I shoved my chair aside and crawled onto my bed on my hands and knees, snatching my phone from the comforter on the way to my headboard. At the top of the bed, I leaned back and pulled my knees up to my chest. My eyes watered as I scrolled through my contacts for Nash’s number. I was wiping tears from my face with my sleeves by the time he answered.

“Hello?” He sounded distracted, and in the background, I heard canned fight sounds, then several guys groaned in unison.

“Hey, it’s me.” I sniffed to keep my nose from running.

“Kaylee?” Couch springs creaked as he sat up—I had his attention now. “What’s wrong?” He switched to an urgent whisper. “Did it happen again?”

“No, um…Are you still at Scott’s?”

“Yeah. Hang on.” Something brushed against the phone, and dimly I heard Nash say, “Here, man, take over for me.” Then footsteps clomped, and the background noise gradually
softened until a door creaked closed, and the racket stopped altogether. “What’s up?”

I hesitated, rolling onto my stomach on my bed. He hadn’t signed on for this kind of drama. But he hadn’t run from the death predictions, and I had to talk to someone, and it was either Nash or Emma’s mother. “Okay, this is going to sound stupid, but I don’t know what else to think. I heard my aunt and uncle arguing, then my aunt called my dad” I swallowed back a sob and wiped more moisture from my face. “Nash…I think I’m dying.”

There was silence over the line, then engine noise as a car drove past him. He must have been in Scott’s front yard. “Wait, I don’t get it. Why do you think you’re dying?”

I folded my lumpy feather pillow in half and lay with one cheek on it, treasuring the coolness against my tear-flushed face. “My uncle said he thought I’d have more time, then my aunt told my dad that he needed to tell me the truth, so I wouldn’t think I was crazy. I think it’s a brain tumor.”

“Kaylee, you’re adding two and two and coming up with seven. You must have missed something.” He paused and footsteps clomped on concrete, like he was on the sidewalk. “What did they say, exactly?”

I sat up and made myself inhale slowly, trying to calm down. The words weren’t coming out right. No wonder he had no idea what I was talking about. “Um…Aunt Val said I was living on borrowed time, and that I shouldn’t have to spend any of it thinking I was crazy. She told my dad it was time to tell me the truth.” I stood and found myself pacing nervously back and forth across my fuzzy purple throw rug. “That means I’m dying, right? And she wants him to tell me?”

“Well, they obviously have
something
important to tell you, but I seriously doubt you have a brain tumor. Shouldn’t you have some symptoms, or something, if you’re sick?”

I dropped into my desk chair again and ran my finger over the mouse pad to wake up the monitor. “I looked it up, and—”

“You researched brain tumors? This afternoon?” Nash hesitated, and the footsteps paused. “Kaylee, is this because of Meredith?”

“No!” I shoved off against the desk so hard my wheeled chair hit the side of the bed. “I’m not a hypochondriac! I’m just trying to figure out why this is happening to me, and nothing else makes sense.” Frustrated, I scrubbed one hand over my face and made myself take another deep breath. “They don’t think I’m crazy, so it’s not psychological.” And my relief at knowing that was big enough to swallow the Pacific Ocean. “So it has to be physical.”

“And you think it’s brain cancer….”

“I don’t know what else to think. There’s one kind of brain cancer that sometimes doesn’t have any symptoms. Maybe I have that kind.”

“Wait…” He paused as a gust of wind whistled over the line. “You think you have a tumor because you have
no
symptoms?”

Okay, I still wasn’t making any sense. I closed my eyes and let my head fall against the back of the chair. “Or maybe the premonitions
are
my symptom. Some kind of hallucination.”

Nash laughed. “You’re not hallucinating, Kaylee. Not unless Emma and I have tumors too. We both saw you predict two deaths, and we saw one of them actually happen. You weren’t imagining that.”

I sat up in my chair, and this time my long, soft exhalation was in relief. “I was seriously hoping you’d say that.” It helped—albeit a tiny little bit—to know that if I was dying, at least I was going out with my mind intact.

“Glad I could help.” I could hear the smile in his voice, which drew one from me in response.

I swiveled in my chair and propped my feet up on my night
stand. “Okay, so maybe I’m having premonitions because of the tumor. Like, it’s activating some part of my brain most people can’t access. Like John Travolta in that old movie.”

“Saturday Night Fever?”

“Not that old.” My smile grew a little, in spite of what should have been a very somber conversation. I loved how easily Nash calmed me, even over the phone. His voice was hypnotic, like some kind of auditory tranquilizer. One I could easily get hooked on. “The one where he can move stuff with his mind, and learn whole languages by reading one book. And it all turns out to be because he has brain cancer and he’s dying.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen that one.”

“He gets all kinds of freaky abilities, then he dies. It’s tragic. I don’t want to be tragic, Nash. I want to be alive.” And suddenly the tears were back. I couldn’t help it. I’d had more than enough of death in the past few days, without adding my own to the list.

“Okay, you’re going to have to trust me on this, Kaylee.” The footsteps were back, and then a door closed, cutting off the bluster of wind on his end of the call. Then his voice got softer. “Your premonitions don’t come from brain cancer. Whatever your aunt and uncle were talking about, that’s not it.”

“How do you know?” I blinked the moisture from my eyes, irritated with how emotional I was becoming. Wasn’t that another symptom of brain cancer?

Nash sighed, but he sounded more worried than exasperated. “I have to tell you something. I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”

8

S
EVEN MINUTES LATER
, I sat on the living-room couch, my keys in my pocket, my phone in my lap, my fingernails rasping anxiously across the satin upholstery. I was angled to face both the television—muted, but tuned to the local evening news—and the front window, hoping no one would realize I was expecting company. “No one,” meaning my aunt and uncle. Sophie was still out cold, and I was starting to wonder how many of those pills her mother had given her.

Aunt Val was in the kitchen, banging pots, pans, and cabinet doors as she made spaghetti, her favorite comfort food. Normally she wouldn’t indulge in so many carbs in a single meal, but she was obviously having a rough day. A very rough day, if the scent of garlic bread was any indication.

“Hey, Kay-Bear, how you holdin’ up?”

I glanced up to find my uncle leaning against the plaster column separating the dining room from the living room. He hadn’t called me that in nearly a decade, and the fact that he was using my old nickname probably meant he thought I was…fragile.

“I’m not crazy.” I met his clear green eyes, daring him to argue.

He smiled, and the resulting smile lines somehow made him look even younger than usual. “I never said you were.”

I huffed and shot a glare toward the kitchen, where Aunt Val was stirring noodles in a huge aluminum pot. “She thinks I am.” I knew better than that now, of course, but wasn’t about to let on that I’d heard their argument.

Uncle Brendon shook his head and crossed the eggshell carpet toward me, arms folded over the faded tee he’d changed into after work. “She’s just worried about you. We both are.” He sank into the floral-print armchair opposite me. He always sat there, rather than on the solid white chair or sofa, hoping that if he spilled something, Aunt Val would never notice the stain on such a busy pattern.

“Why aren’t you worried about Sophie?”

“We are.” He paused, then seemed to consider his answer. “But Sophie’s…resilient. She’ll be fine once she’s had a chance to grieve.”

“And I won’t?”

My uncle raised one brow at me. “Val said you barely knew Meredith Cole.” And just like that, he’d sidestepped the real question—that of my future well-being.

And we both knew it.

Before I could answer—and I was in no hurry—an engine purred outside, and I glanced through the sheers to see an unfamiliar blue convertible pull into the driveway beside my car, glittering in the late-afternoon sun. Behind the wheel was a very familiar face, crowned by an equally familiar head of thick brown hair.

I stood, stuffing my phone into my empty pocket.

“Who’s that?” Uncle Brendon twisted to look out the window.

“A friend. I gotta go.”

He stood, but I was already halfway across the room. “Val’s making dinner!” he called after me.

“I’m not hungry.” Actually, I was starving, but I had to get out of the house. I couldn’t possibly suck down spaghetti like it was a regular Monday night. Not knowing that my entire family had been lying to me for who knows how long.

“Kaylee, get back here!” Uncle Brendon roared, following me through the front door onto the porch. I’d rarely heard him raise his voice, and had never heard him yell like that.

I took off at a trot, slid into the passenger seat, then slammed the door and locked it.

“Is that your uncle?” Nash asked, right hand hovering over the gearshift. “Maybe I should meet—”

“Go!” I shouted, louder than I’d meant to. “I’ll introduce you later.” Assuming I lived that long.

Nash slammed the car into Reverse and swerved backward out of the driveway, twisting in his seat to peer out the rear windshield. As we pulled away from the house, I took one last look at my uncle, who stared after us from the middle of the driveway, thick arms crossed over his chest. Behind him, Aunt Val stood on the porch holding a dishrag, her perfect mouth hanging open in surprise.

When we turned the corner, I let myself melt into the car seat, only then noticing how posh it was. “Please tell me you didn’t pick me up in a stolen car.”

Nash laughed and glanced away from the road to smile at me, and my pulse sped up when our gazes met, in spite of the circumstances. “It’s Carter’s. I’ve got it till midnight.”

“Why would Scott Carter let you take his car?”

He shrugged. “He’s a friend.”

I just blinked at him. His questionable choice of companions aside, Emma was my best friend, and I would never let
her take my car. And I didn’t drive a brand-new Mustang convertible.

Nash grinned when I didn’t seem convinced, and his next glance lingered longer than it should have, then roamed south of my face. “He might be under the impression that you…um…need some serious comfort.”

My heart leaped into my throat, and I had to speak around it. “And you think you’re up for the challenge?” Flirting should have felt weird, considering the day I’d had. But instead, it made me feel alive, especially with the possibility of my own death hanging over me like a black cloud, casting its malignant shadow over my life. Over everything but Nash, and the way I felt when he looked at me. Touched me…

Nash shrugged again. “Carter offered to pick you up himself….”

Of course he had. Because he was Nash’s best friend, and Sophie’s boyfriend. And my cousin had seriously bad taste in guys. As, apparently, did Nash. “Why do you hang out with him?”

“We’re teammates.”

Ahhh.
And if blood was thicker than water, then football, evidently, would congeal in one’s veins.

“And that makes you friends?” I twisted to peer briefly into the tiny backseat, which was empty and still smelled like leather. And like Sophie’s freesia-scented lotion.

Nash shrugged and frowned, like he didn’t understand what I was getting at. Or like he wanted to change the subject. “We have stuff in common. He knows how to have a good time. And he goes after what he wants.”

He could easily have been describing my father’s German shepherd. As could I, when I replied, “Yeah, but once he gets it, he’ll just want something else.”

Nash’s hands tightened around the wheel, and he glanced
at me with his eyes wide in comprehension, his forehead furrowed in disappointment. “Is that what you think I’m doing?”

I shrugged. “Your record kind of speaks for itself.” And why else had he put up with so much from me? Why would a guy like Nash Hudson stick around through freaky death premonitions and possible brain cancer, if he didn’t want something?

Or even if he did, for that matter? He could have put in a lot less work for a lot more payoff somewhere else.

“This isn’t like that, Kaylee,” he insisted, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what “that” was. “This is…We’re different.” He didn’t look at me when he said it, but I felt myself flush anyway.

“What does that mean?”

He sighed, and his hands loosened around the wheel. “You hungry?”

 

H
ALF AN HOUR LATER
, we sat in Scott Carter’s car with the front seats pushed back as far as they would go. The setting sun took up the entire windshield, painting White Rock Lake a dozen deep hues of red and purple.

I was well into a six-inch turkey sub, and Nash was half done with some combination of provolone, ham, pepperoni, and a couple of meats I didn’t recognize. But it smelled good.

I’d already dripped mustard on Carter’s gearshift, and vinegar on the front seat. Nash had just laughed and helped me mop it all up.

If I was dying, I’d decided to spend every single day I had left eating at least one meal with Nash. Talking to him made me feel good, even when everything else in my life was totally falling apart.

I swallowed a big bite, then washed it down with a gulp from
my soda. “Promise me that if I do have a brain tumor, you’ll bring me sandwiches in the hospital.”

He eyed me almost sternly, peeling paper away from his bread. “You don’t have cancer, Kaylee. At least, that’s not why you’re having premonitions.”

“How do you know?” I bit another chunk from my sandwich, chewing as I waited for an answer he seemed reluctant to provide.

Finally, after three more bites and two false starts, Nash wrapped the remains of his sandwich and stuffed it between our drinks on the console, then took a deep breath and met my gaze. His forehead was wrinkled like he was nervous, but his gaze held steady. Strong.

“I have to tell you something, and you’re not going to believe me. But I can prove it to you. So don’t freak out on me, okay? At least not until you’ve heard the whole thing.”

I swallowed another bite, then wrapped the rest of my sandwich and set it in my lap. This didn’t sound like the kind of news I should get with food in my mouth. Not unless I wanted to check out earlier than I’d expected, with a chunk of turkey wedged in my throat. “Okaaay…Whatever it is, it can’t be worse than brain cancer, right?”

“Exactly.” He ran his fingers through deliberately messy hair, then met my gaze with an intensity that was almost frightening. “You’re not human.”

“What?” Confusion was a calm white noise in my head, where I’d expected fear or even anger to rage. I’d been prepared to hear something weird. I was intimately acquainted with weird. But I had no idea what to say to “not human.”

“Either your aunt and uncle don’t know, or they don’t want you to know for some reason, which is why I didn’t tell you yesterday at breakfast. But you’re killing me with this
whole brain cancer thing.” He was watching me carefully, probably judging from my expression how close I was to flipping out on him.

And honestly, if I’d had any idea what he was talking about, I might have been pretty close.

“I think if they knew you thought you were dying, they’d tell you the truth,” he continued. “It sounds like they’re going to tell you soon anyway, but I didn’t want you to think I was lying to you too.” He flashed deep dimples with a small grin. “Or that you have cancer.”

For a moment, I could only stare at him, struck numb and dumb by an outpouring of words that contained no real information. And I have to admit there were a couple of seconds there when I wondered if maybe I wasn’t the one in need of a straitjacket.

But he’d believed me when I told him about Heidi, as crazy as the whole thing sounded, and had talked me through two different premonitions. The least I could do was hear him out.

“What am I?” The very question—and my willingness to ask it—made my heart pound so hard and so fast I felt like the car was spinning. My arms were covered in goose bumps.

Fading daylight cast shadows defining the planes of his face as he squinted through the windshield into the sun, now a heavy scarlet ball on the edge of the horizon. But his focus never left my eyes. “You’re a
bean sidhe,
Kaylee. The death premonitions are normal. They’re part of who you are.”

Another moment of stunned silence, which I clung to—a brief respite from the madness that each new word seemed to bring. Then I forced the pertinent question to my lips, fighting to keep my jaw from falling off my face as my mouth dropped open. “Sorry, what?”

He grinned and ran one hand over the short stubble on his
jaw. “I know, this is the part where you start thinking I’m the crazy one.”

As a matter of fact…

“But I swear this is the truth. You’re a
bean sidhe.
And so are your parents. At least one of them, anyway.”

I shook my head and pushed my hair back from my face, trying to clear away the confusion and make sense of what he’d said. “Banshee? Like, from mythology?” We’d done a mythology unit in sophomore English the year before, but it was mostly Greek and Roman stuff. Gods, goddesses, demigods, and monsters.

“Yeah. Only the real thing.” He took a drink from his cup, then set it in the holder. “There’s a bunch they don’t teach you in school. Things they don’t even know about, because they think it’s all just a bunch of old stories.”

“And you’re saying it’s not?” I found myself scooting closer to the door, until the handle cut into my back, trying to put some space between myself and the only guy in the world who could make me sound normal.

“No. Kaylee, it’s you!” He watched me intently, expectantly, and while I wanted to wallow in denial, I couldn’t. Even if Nash was one grape short of a bunch, there was something compelling about him. Something irresistible, even beyond the sculpted arms, gorgeous eyes, and adorable dimples. He made me feel…content. Relaxed. Like everything would be okay, one way or another. Which was quite a feat, considering his claim that I was unqualified to run in the human race.

“Think about it,” he insisted. “What do you know about
bean sidhes?

I shrugged. “They’re women in long, wispy gowns who walk around during funerals, wailing over the dead. Sometimes they wail over the dying, announcing that the end is near.” I
sipped watered-down soda, then gestured with my cup. “But, Nash, banshees are just stories. Old European legends.”

He nodded. “Most of it, yes. They spell it wrong, for starters. The Gaelic is B-E-A-N S-I-D-H-E. Two words. Literally, it means ‘woman of the faeries.’”

My eyebrows shot halfway up my forehead as I dropped my cup back into the drink holder. “Wait, you think I’m a faerie? Like, with little glittery wings and magic wands?”

BOOK: My Soul to Take
2.73Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Book on Fire by Keith Miller
Copycat by Gillian White
Lunatic Fringe by Allison Moon
Sweet Olive (9780310330554) by Zondervan Publishing House
The Silent Boy by Taylor, Andrew