Soul Screamers Volume Four: With All My SoulFearlessNiederwaldLast Request: 4

by Rachel Vincent

  “Sabine?”

  I turned slowly, still shaking from the cold, to find Kate Greer, the cook, staring at me, one hand still on the cafeteria door, which she’d just locked. At two in the morning.

  “Are you okay? Still sick?” she asked, brows lowered in a frown that looked more irritated than concerned.

  “I just couldn’t sleep.”

  “You...couldn’t sleep?” Her frown deepened, and she glanced at the tech still passed out on the couch. “Come in and let’s see if I have anything that will help.” She unlocked the cafeteria and shoved her keys into her purse, then held the door open for me.

  Great. How was I supposed to meet Nash if I couldn’t get rid of her? Fortunately, the drive would take him at least forty-five minutes, even with virtually no traffic. So I brushed past Greer into the empty cafeteria, dark, but for a single light shining in from the kitchen.

  “You’re shaking! Let’s get you something warm...”

  I followed her into the kitchen and she waved one hand at a folding chair. “Why are you here so late?” I asked, still shivering as she poured milk into a microwavable mug.

  “Just finishing up some work.” Greer set the mug in the microwave and pushed several buttons. “So...you can’t sleep, you’re pale, and you’re obviously cold. Any other symptoms I should know about?”

  I shook my head, and she watched me while the mug rotated. When the microwave buzzed, she took the milk out and stirred powered cocoa into it, then dropped the spoon in the sink and handed me the mug. Her fingers touched mine, and the sudden flash of fear, pain, and anger nearly blew me out of my chair. But the realization that came with it was a million times worse.

  None of what I’d felt was hers. It was theirs. All of it.

  My eyes went wide, but hers only narrowed further. She nodded, like something mysterious finally made sense. But the only thing I understood was that she was the problem. Whatever was wrong with the girls at Holser was wrong because of Kate Greer.

  How could I not have seen it? She wasn’t working the night I’d fed from BethAnne, and she was the only one not scared of me the next day. What the hell was she doing to them?

  She leaned against the counter and crossed her arms over her chest. “Okay, you’re obviously an empath of some sort, and based on the situation and your symptoms, I’m guessing...a mara?”

  I blinked, as stunned by her casual revelation of my lifelong secret as by the fact that she knew what I was. Finally, I nodded. “So what the hell are you?” Even as hungry as I was in that moment, I could never have drained sixteen girls at once, much less several nights in a row.

  Greer raised a brow over my language, then waved away my question, as if the answer didn’t matter. “I’m a fellow empath, of course, though of a slightly different variety.” She smiled, then opened the industrial-size fridge for a can of soda. “Wow. A walking Nightmare. Do you have any idea how rare you are, especially these days? Few women have seven kids anymore, much less seven daughters in a row. I’m guessing your parents gave you away?”

  “Like a naughty puppy,” I said, numb, yet still shivering while I sipped my hot chocolate.

  “I’ve only met one other mara, and she was old as dirt. Still scary as hell, though. You could have learned a thing or two from her.”

  “Wait...” I interrupted, as something she’d said finally sank in. “Seventh daughter?”

  “Yeah. You know, ‘...and the seventh daughter of the seventh daughter shall be born a night-hag and she shall feed from the fear of the innocent as they slumber...’” Greer stopped and raised both brows at me. “You haven’t heard any of that, have you?”

  “No.” And I’m not a hag. I took another sip and stared up at her, my mind spinning. “So...I have six sisters?”

  “Oh, no, not anymore.” She frowned, like that should have been obvious. “Not if they gave you up. Maras are almost always born to human families, and it’s really hard for humans to believe they’re not the only sentient creatures out there. Much less that their precious baby girl is literally a thing of nightmares. So the seventh daughter is almost always abandoned.”

  Abandoned? I’d known it, of course, but hearing it outright...it kinda stung.

  “A couple hundred years ago, there would have been others of your kind to take you in and teach you. But today...well, with the popularity of contraception and termination, there are fewer and fewer of you born. Especially in the U.S. So you kind of have to fend for yourself.”

  She drank from her can, then gestured with it. “You know, I knew there was something different about you. The others are like drops of rain in a puddle, but you’re a river of fear and resentment. Though based on the looks of you, I’d say that river has nearly run dry. Sorry ’bout that. Collateral damage.”

  “You’re...stealing their fear?” And clearly stealing what little I’d collected from them, as well as what I produced on my own.

  Greer’s eyes flashed in irritation and her gaze narrowed again. “I’m not stealing anything. I’m flushing out the negative energy and replacing it with acceptance and peace—exactly what girls like you need.” She hesitated, then gave a little chuckle. “Well, not girls like you, obviously. But the others...”

  What they need? Who was she to decide what they—what we—needed?

  “But that ‘negative energy’ is half of who they are! They’ve been through a lot. They’ve earned a little anger and aggression.” I know I had! “You’re turning them into...zombies!”

  Greer’s frown deepened, and another chill ran up my spine. “I’m turning them into respectable young women who finally have a chance to make something of their lives. How many of them would even be thinking about college and careers if they were still on the self-destructive paths that put them here in the first place?” she demanded, and I felt my temperature drop at least another degree. Goose bumps popped up on my arms, and I swayed on my chair.

  She was draining me where I sat!

  “This is a mutually beneficial arrangement, and I’ve made Holser into the top girls’ halfway house in the state. They should all be grateful to be here!”

  Wow. Was she serious? Regardless, she was clearly pissed, and the angrier she grew, the weaker I felt. At this rate, I wouldn’t be able to stand up by the time Nash got there.

  “What do you do with all the ‘negative energy’?” I asked through chattering teeth, trying to calm her down and buy myself some time.

  “Well, I need some of it, obviously. A girl’s gotta eat, right?” She grinned and patted her flat stomach, as if we’d just shared a great joke, and nausea churned in my guts at the realization that I’d said the same thing to Nash. “The rest of it I sell, or trade for the healthier energies I’m replacing it with. Fortunately, the dark stuff goes for much more than the shiny-happy, so I still pull in a tidy profit, even after expenses.”

  “You can sell fear?” I asked around still-chattering teeth, trying to hide my growing alarm and revulsion.

  “Of course.” She shrugged. “And despair, and pain, and anger, and everything at the opposite end of the spectrum, too. Everything is food for something, Sabine. You’d know that better than most.”

  “I guess.” But with her words, a new world had just opened up in front of me, and its dark, gaping maw threatened to swallow me whole. I didn’t know how to exist in a world where I wasn’t the scariest thing around. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. But the new fear that realization should have triggered in me was gone almost before I’d felt it, leaving me light-headed and hollow-feeling.

  Greer was taking it—all of it—before it could even ripen. And along with my emotions, she was stealing my energy—my very life force—much faster than she took from the others. Whether she meant to or not, she was killing me.

  No! Keep her talking, Sabine....

  “So...you’re like me?”

  “I’m an empath, yes.” She looked irritated at having to repeat herself. “But not like you. I am an emovere. By replacing what I take
with much healthier emotions, I’m making the world a better place, one rehabilitated delinquent at a time.

  “You, on the other hand...” She smiled at me in nauseating mock sympathy. “You can’t help what you are, but the truth is that you contribute nothing to society. You’re a dirty little parasite, sucking people dry in their sleep. Like a giant bedbug.” Greer set her can down and leaned against the counter at her back. “You’re lucky, you know, Sabine. Most people wouldn’t hesitate to squash a bedbug that had burrowed into their home. But I don’t want to hurt you.”

  A statement unsupported by my steadily dropping temperature.

  “But you can’t stay here, obviously.” She shrugged, like we were friends again. Greer gave new meaning to the word unstable. “One more night, and I might have accidentally drained you dry.”

  “What?” Her alternative to killing me was to kick me out of my court-mandated halfway house?

  “I think the best thing would be for you to leave tonight. Go find some sleeping drifter and have a good meal. The staff will report you missing in the morning, and when the police pick you up, Gomez will send you to Ron Jackson. Problem solved.” She brushed her hands together, like she was brushing dirt off her palms. Was I that dirt?

  No, and she couldn’t brush me off, either.

  “Hell no.” My hands curled into fists around the edge of my metal chair.

  “What?” Greer looked genuinely confused by my refusal.

  “I said hell no. I’m not going.” I stood, struggling to keep my jaw from chattering, but my legs were steady, since she’d stopped actively draining me. “I’m not going to prison just so you can keep selling stolen emotions on some weird-ass black market. This is where the judge sent me, and this is where I’m gonna stay, until the director decides to release me.” Any change in that plan would get me transferred out of Nash’s school, a separation I couldn’t tolerate.

  Greer’s jaw clenched in fury, and the blue of her irises darkened rapidly. “I can make your stay here very unpleasant, bedbug. And very, very short.” Her eyes narrowed to mere slits, and pain exploded in my center. If felt like the air was being sucked from my lungs, but she wasn’t taking air. She was taking the very last of the energy generated from my emotions, and when that was gone, Ron Jackson would be the least of my worries.

  “Leave her alone,” Nash said, and my heart jumped into my throat when I saw him walking toward us from the cafeteria.

  “Nash, no!” I gasped. “She’s an emovere.”

  “You should listen to your girlfriend, little bean sidhe,” Greer growled, her eyes almost solid black now. But my pain ebbed when she focused on him. “Your honey-voice won’t work on me.”

  Nash was unfazed. “Leave her alone and back the hell off, or you’ll spend the rest of your short life in the Netherworld.”

  Greer laughed out loud. “Take one more step, and you’ll spend tomorrow night at your own funeral, little boy.”

  Nash glanced at me and winked, like he had a plan. Then he took one step forward.

  “No!” I shouted. He’d forgotten to actually tell me the plan!

  Greer narrowed wicked black eyes, concentrating on him. Nash crumpled to the floor.

  I dropped to my knees at his side, and the minute my hand touched his face, I realized he was still alive. She hadn’t completely drained him. His fear called to me like a lighthouse on a foggy night, but I pushed past that to the peripheral emotions. The ones I normally wouldn’t touch. Even unconscious, Nash was still furious at her—and in love with me.

  “What is wrong with kids today? You never do as you’re told.” Greer lamented, as I leaned down and kissed Nash. This time I fed from those other, stronger emotions, and when I sat up, I was no longer shaking. My teeth no longer chattered.

  “Take your boyfriend home before I drain you both,” Greer said. “And consider this your one and only warning.” She twisted to reach for her soda, as if we weren’t enough of a threat to interrupt her caffeine fix, and the moment her back was turned, I lurched to my feet. I grabbed a lunch tray from the stack on the counter and rushed her.

  As she turned toward me, I swung the tray. The edge slammed into her cheek. Bone crunched. Her soda can went flying. Kate Greer fell backward and landed face-up on the linoleum. Her head smacked the ground and her eyes fluttered shut. She was out cold.

  For a moment, I stood in shock, not over what I’d done—it wasn’t my first time wielding a lunch tray—but that it had worked. Then I dropped onto her chest, put my hands on either side of her face—the right side of which was now soft and lumpy—and drank long and hard from the well of fear she’d filled earlier that night.

  She was glutted with it. Fat and lazy on the inside, and high on her own power. She was also delicious, and I was a poor kid in a candy store, stuffing myself because I knew I might never get a second chance. How often does one even meet an emovere?

  The more I drank, the better I felt, physically. But the angrier I got. She’d hurt those girls, who couldn’t defend themselves from a predator they didn’t understand. She’d tried to send me to prison. She’d threatened to starve me if I didn’t go. And she’d nearly killed Nash.

  So I drank. And I drank. I fed until I had all the fear she’d amassed. I fed until her cheeks went cold beneath my fingers. I fed until her breathing grew ragged and labored.

  “Sabine!” Nash pulled on my arm, but I barely heard him. “Sabine, stop! You’re killing her.” But that was the point. She’d tried to kill him, she would have killed me. Poetic justice.

  “Sabine, I said stop!” That time Nash hauled me off of her, then pulled me away. He wrapped his arms around me and turned us so that his body blocked hers from my sight. “You’re not a killer.”

  For several long moments, I could only breathe deeply and ride the high surging through me, like bolts of lightning striking me over and over. It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced, and it felt good. I felt hot, and alive, and powerful. Scary-powerful.

  Did Greer feel like this every night? No wonder she wouldn’t leave! Who could give up that kind of power and...feast? And if I hadn’t wound up at Holser, she never would have been caught. She might have feasted forever, convinced that she was shaping the next generation, while stuffing herself and her wallet on the emotions of neglected, abused delinquents.

  And now, so could I....

  No. That was my stomach talking. The sweet, succulent fear. But I didn’t need anywhere near as much as she had taken, and neither did she.

  “You’re burning up, Sabine. What happened?”

  I took several deep breaths, and when I could speak—when I could think straight again—I pulled away to look at him. “I took too much. And it wasn’t just fear. She was so full of anger, and everything she took from them, and I drank it.” And that’s when it hit me. “I would have killed her. Nash, I would have killed her if you weren’t here.” Then I would have gone after the girls. All of them, not just what I needed to survive. Because it felt so good, and without Greer to make them happy, they were going to shun me anyway, out of fear, so why not give them a real reason to?

  Because you’re not a monster. Not really. Not yet, anyway. But I could be....

  I saw my own true fear in that moment—I was afraid of myself. Afraid of what I was capable of. Of what I wanted to do, with the power still buzzing through me.

  Was Greer right? Was I just a parasite, feeding on the weak in their sleep? Was I nothing but a monster?

  No. Not as long as Nash saw something else in me. Even if I couldn’t trust myself, I could trust him. To see the truth, and to hold me in check. But without him...?

  “Promise you won’t leave me, Nash,” I whispered. “Promise me.”

  “You know I won’t.” He whispered it in my ear, his cheek cool against my overheated face.

  “Say it.”

  Nash stepped back and lifted my chin, so that my gaze met his. “You’re stuck with me forever, Sabine.”

  “Good,” I
whispered. But in my head, I heard what I didn’t dare say, even to him.

  Because I’m not sure what I’d become without you....

  * * *

  I took Kate Greer to the Netherworld and left her there, still unconscious. I had to do that part myself, because male bean sidhes can’t cross out of the human world on their own. I hadn’t known I could, until Nash’s mom had showed me how.

  When I got back, Nash and I held each other on my bed, where neither of us mentioned the fact that I’d refrained from killing the emovere myself, only to damn her to death at the hands of some monster in the Netherworld instead.

  We also didn’t talk about how I didn’t feel guilty for that—not even a little bit—or how that might mean that I was a monster. Or that I could become one, without even trying.

  We didn’t talk at all. We had a much better, more meaningful way to communicate.

  Nash snuck out before the sun came up, and as I watched him close the door, whispering a promise to come see me at every possible opportunity while I was stuck at Holser, I clutched the cell phone he’d given me, grateful for the lifeline of communication it represented. Surely hearing his voice would help keep me sane during our separation.

  * * *

  I called Nash nearly every night for the next week, lying in bed, stuffed with food made by Penny the relief cook and fears from the unmolested psyches of my fellow delinquents, but he never answered.

  At first, I assumed his phone was dead. No big deal. He’d charge it, then find a missed call from me. I couldn’t leave him a message, because his voice mail never kicked in.

  When my calls went unanswered on the second night, I started to wonder if Kate Greer had been too much for him. He’d never been scared of dating a mara—I knew that for a fact—but maybe seeing Greer and understanding what I might someday become was enough to scare him off. For a little while. Surely he just needed some time. Nash loved me. He’d call soon. I told myself that over and over, until I fell asleep around three in the morning.

  On the third night after Greer’s unexplained disappearance, I sat awake on my bed, staring at my phone, willing it to ring. I didn’t call him. I was giving him space. Giving him a chance to call me on his own terms. When he was ready. At some point during those long, silent hours, I began to hate the phone that never rang.