Soul Screamers Collection. Rachel Vincent

neoplasm” was doctor-talk for cancer.

       Cancer.

      And suddenly every hope I’d ever harbored, every dream I’d ever entertained, seemed too fragile a possibility to survive.

      I had a tumor. What else could it be? And it had to be brain cancer to affect the things I felt and knew, didn’t it? Or the things I thought I knew.

      Did that mean the premonitions weren’t real? Were brain tumors giving me delusions? Some sort of sensory hallucinations? Had I imagined predicting Heidi’s and Meredith’s deaths, after the fact?

      No. It couldn’t be. I refused to believe that any mere illness—short of Alzheimer’s—could rewrite my memories.

      Hovering on the sharp, hot edge of panic now, I returned to the search engine and typed “symptoms of brain cancer.” The first hit was an oncology Web site that listed seven kinds of brain cancer along with the leading symptoms of each. But I had none of them. No nausea, seizures, or hearing loss. I had no impaired speech or motor function, and no spatial disorders. I wasn’t dizzy, had no headaches, and no muscle weakness. I wasn’t incontinent—thank goodness—nor did I have any unexplained bleeding or swelling, nor any impaired judgment.

      Okay, some might say sneaking into a nightclub was a sign of impaired judgment, but I was pretty sure my decision-making skills were right on target for someone my age, and miles above the judgment of others. Such as certain spoiled, vomit-prone cousins, who shall remain nameless.

      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 nightstand. “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,