Soul Screamers

       MY SOUL TO TAKE

       MY SOUL TO SAVE

       MY SOUL TO KEEP

      Coming soon … IF I DIE

      My Soul

       to Steal

      Rachel Vincent

       www.miraink.co.uk

      To all the real life couples, exes, and unrequited romantic interests, tangled up in love and nightmares. Sometimes that frayed knot is the best lifeline in the world. Other times, it works more like a straitjacket …

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      Thanks first of all to my editor, Mary-Theresa Hussey, who knew just what this book needed. Her suggestions challenged me to find better solutions, and the book is so much better for it.

      Thanks to Natashya Wilson, for so much enthusiasm and support.

      Rinda Elliot, for the lightning-fast critique, and for being the first to love Sabine.

      Thanks to #1, who made fajitas and helped me figure out how to hurt a hellion.

      Thanks to Ally, Jen, Melissa, Kelley, and everyone else in the YA community for advice, camaraderie, and for making me feel so welcome.

      And most of all, thank you to the readers who have given Kaylee and her friends a place in this world. Without you, none of the rest of it would matter.

      1

      BY THE TIME the second semester of my junior year began, I’d already faced down rogue grim reapers, an evil entertainment mogul, and hellions determined to possess my soul. But I never would have guessed that the most infuriating beast of all, I had yet to meet. My boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend was a thing of nightmares. Literally.

      “I WON’T BITE.” Nash looked up at me with a green bean speared on his fork, and I realized I was staring. I’d stopped on the bottom step, surprised to see him at school, and even more surprised to see him sitting alone at lunch, outside in the January cold, where I’d come to get away from the gossip and stares in the cafeteria.

      Obviously he’d had the same idea.

      I glanced over my shoulder through the window in the cafeteria door, looking for Emma, but she hadn’t shown up yet.

      Nash frowned when he noticed my hesitation. But I wasn’t worried about him. I was worried about me. I was afraid that if I got within touching distance of him—within reach of the arms that had once been my biggest comfort and those gorgeous hazel eyes that could read me at a glance—that I would give in. That I would forgive, even if I couldn’t forget, and that would be bad.

      I mean, it would feel good, but that would be bad.

      The past two weeks had been the most difficult of my life. In the past few months alone, I’d survived horrors most sixteen-year-old girls didn’t even know existed. But a couple of weeks without Nash—our entire winter vacation—had nearly been enough to break me.

      Whoever said it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved was full of crap. If I’d never loved Nash in the first place, I wouldn’t know what I was missing now.

      “Kaylee?” Nash dropped his fork onto his tray, green bean untouched. “I get it. You’re not ready to talk.”

      I shook my head and set my tray on the table across from his, then sank onto the opposite bench. “No, I just … I didn’t think you’d be here.” I hadn’t gone to see him, because that would have been unfair to us both—being together, when we couldn’t really be together. But I knew he’d been very sick from withdrawal, because my father, of all people, had called regularly to check on him.

      And based on his brief reports, withdrawal from Demon’s Breath—known as frost, in human circles—was hell on earth.

      “Are you … okay?” I asked, poking at runny spaghetti sauce with my own fork.

      “Better.” He shrugged. “Still working toward okay.”

      “But you’re well enough for school?”

      Another shrug. “My mom was giving me a sedative made from some weird Netherworld plant for a while, to help with the shakes, but it just made me sleep all the time. Without dreams,” he added, when he saw my horrified expression. The hellion whose breath he’d been huffing had communicated with Nash through his dreams sometimes. And through me, the rest of the time. By hijacking my body while I slept.

      I’d been willing to work through the addiction with Nash—after all, it was my fault he’d been exposed to Demon’s Breath in the first place. But his failure to stop the serial possession of my body—or even tell me it was happening—was the last straw for me. I couldn’t be with him until I was sure nothing like that would ever happen again.

      Unfortunately, what my head wanted and what my heart wanted were two completely different things.

      “I still don’t have much appetite, but what I do eat is staying down now.” Nash stared at his full tray. He’d lost weight. His face looked … sharper. The flesh under his eyes was dark and puffy, and he hadn’t bothered to artfully muss his hair that morning. The bright, charismatic Nash I’d first met had been replaced with this dimmer, somber version I barely recognized. A version I was afraid I didn’t know on the inside, either. Not like I’d known my Nash, anyway.

      “Maybe you should have stayed home a little longer,” I suggested, slowly twirling noodles around my plastic fork.

      “I wanted to see you.”

      The fissure in my heart cracked open a little wider, and I looked up to find regret and longing slowly twisting the greens and browns in his irises. Humans wouldn’t see that, even if we’d had company. But because Nash and I were both bean sidhes—banshees, to the uninformed—we could see the colors swirling in each other’s eyes, and with a little practice, I’d learned to interpret what I saw in his. To read