Soul Screamers Collection. Rachel Vincent

attention of any dangerous Netherworld elements. I hadn’t saved her just to let her go again. Ever.

      Which is why I felt guilty asking her to cover for me. Unfortunately, I had no other options, since Nash would be with me. I really needed to find more friends. …

      “You’re not missing French, are you?” Panic peeked around the edges of Emma’s expression, and I laughed.

      “No, just history.” Emma’s memory for foreign vocabulary was as fragile as mine for dates and numbers. I helped her out in French, and she returned the favor the next hour, in history. It was a good system, and we weren’t really cheating. We were just … helping.

      I’d probably never need to know when the War of 1812 ended, anyway. Right?

      “Then come on, we’re gonna be late.”

      Grinning, Nash leaned forward and kissed me, but Emma dragged me back by one arm before I got much more than a taste of him. Nash winked and took off in the opposite direction. I watched him for several seconds, until Emma hissed my name, and I followed her, still looking over my shoulder.

      When I finally turned, I gasped to find myself less than four inches from Sophie’s overglossed sneer. “You almost flattened me,” she snapped, icy green eyes glittering with anger that went deeper than resentment of my intrusion into her social circle.

      “Sorry,” I mumbled, thrown off by the unexpected confrontation. It was easier to stay mad at her before, when her general bitchiness was superficial in nature. But now that pain and grief peeked out at me from behind the armor of her arrogance, I found it much more difficult to do anything but pity her.

      Even if she did blame me for her mother’s death.

      When my pride wouldn’t allow me to step out of her path—well, pride and Emma’s tight grip on my arm, refusing to let me back down—Sophie sidestepped me with a look so pompous it might have seared the soul of someone with a lesser spirit. But I could only return her look with pity, which fueled her anger even more.

      “Your cousin is such a freak,” Sophie’s best friend, Laura Bell, said at her side.

      Sophie rolled her eyes at me as she turned to march off down the hall. “You have no idea….”

      “Just ignore them,” Emma insisted, as I followed her around the corner and through the first door on the left, just as the bell rang. “Laura’s jealous of you and Nash.” Because she’d had him first, a fact she reminded me of at every possible opportunity. “And Sophie’s always been a bitch.”

      I slid into my fifth-row seat as Madame Brown—who’d probably never even been to France—cleared her throat at the front of the class. “She lost her mom, Em.”

      “So did you!” Emma hissed, flipping open her textbook in search of the homework she kept folded between the pages. When she’d actually done it. “And you don’t practice ‘bitchy’ like it’s a lost art.”

      Before I could remind her that I’d had thirteen years to get over my mother’s death, Madame Brown eyed Emma from the front of the class, a black dry-erase marker poised and ready in one hand. “Mademoiselle Marshall?” she said, thin black brows arched dramatically. “Avez-vous quelque chose pour dire?”

      “Uh.” Emma’s cheeks went scarlet, and she flipped frantically through more pages in her book, muttering under her breath. “Dire … dire …”

      “Something to say,” I whispered, without moving my lips. I was getting really good at that. “‘Do you have something to say?’”

      “Oh. Non, Madame,” she said finally, loud enough for the entire class to hear.

      “Bon.” Madame Brown turned back to the white board.

      Emma slumped in her chair in relief, smiling at me in thanks. “How do you say, ‘I hate this class?’ in French?”

      “Should we wait for him?” I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel, and glanced at the clock on my cell phone for the thousandth time in the last five minutes. “Maybe he got stuck at work.” As a rookie reaper, Tod worked from noon to midnight every day at a local hospital, ending the lives of the patients on his list, then taking their souls to be recycled. It was a creepy line of work, in my opinion, but creepy seemed to suit Tod.

      “Nah, he traded shifts with one of the other death-dealers. Tod will show up whenever and wherever he wants.” Nash bent at the waist to see me through the open passenger side door of my car, and behind him, digital numbers scrolled upward across the front of the gas meter as the price rose with each fraction of a gallon he pumped. “Calm down. It’ll be fine.”

      I forced a smile and clutched my hands together in my lap. But the moment my hands stilled, my foot began tapping uncontrollably on the floorboard. I’d never skipped a class before, and knowing my luck, getting caught seemed inevitable. But so long as we didn’t get caught until after we’d returned Addison’s soul, I was willing to face the consequences.

      Nash tore his receipt from the paper slot on the pump and slid it into his back pocket, then dropped into the passenger seat and pulled the door shut. “Let’s go!”

      I’d only had my license for about six months and had never driven farther than Fort Worth. Fortunately, once we got out of the Metroplex, Abilene was a straight shot along I-20, and with Nash navigating, the most complicated part of the road trip was deciding where to stop for dinner.

      At least, until Tod popped into my backseat with no warning, as I was bending for a sip of my watered-down soda. His bright blue eyes suddenly staring back at me in my rearview mirror startled me so badly I stuck the straw up my nose instead of into my mouth. “Ow!” I clutched my nose and dropped my cup in my lap, but Nash grabbed it before it could spill. His free hand went to the wheel, in case I dropped that, too.

      Fortunately, one good swerve put us back between the lines on the highway, even as my heart thumped painfully after a near miss with the guardrail.

      “Damn it, Tod!” Nash shouted into my ear, and I flinched even though I’d known it was coming. Those were the three words he yelled the most.

      When I’d recovered from the shock—to both my nose and my heart—I glared at Tod in the rearview mirror. “What took you so long?”

      “I was with Addy.” He stared out the rear passenger’s side window, but even at that angle, I could see tension in the tight line of his square jaw. “She’s a wreck, and I hate to leave her alone with her handlers. Damned parasites are worse than Netherworld leeches, sucking her dry one radio ad or guest spot at a time. I’ll catch up with her after we talk to Libby.”

      “What’s she doing in Abilene?”

      “Collecting Demon’s Breath from some eighty-year-old oil tycoon.” Tod didn’t look at me until I cleared my throat for his attention, as I flicked on my blinker and changed lanes to make room for a cop stopped behind a station wagon on the side of the road.

      “Where exactly is this oil tycoon supposed to die?” I envisioned a sickroom in a huge old house decorated with doilies and dust-covered photographs of laughing grandchildren. Where there would be nowhere for us to hide, if we could even get in.

      Maybe we should have let Tod go alone….

      “He’s in a nursing home. I know the reaper on duty tonight, and he’s planning to take an extra-long coffee break. I think Libby kind of freaks him out.”

      I had the feeling we should have been freaked out by her, too, and the fact that we weren’t was starting to scare me a little.

      An hour later, I followed Nash’s directions into the parking lot of the Southern Oaks nursing home, just as the sun sank below the roof of the low, orange-brick building. We were running late, so we jogged across the asphalt, the early November air stinging our lungs, and through the double front doors, where we paused to catch our breath to keep from making the staff suspicious.

      Except