Read My Soul to Take Online

Authors: Rachel Vincent

My Soul to Take (9 page)

BOOK: My Soul to Take
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“I’m not even sure that saying something would have helped,” I said, feeling my courage flounder. “But I swear I tried.”

Aunt Val rubbed her forehead, then picked up her mug and started to take a drink—until she realized she hadn’t poured one. “Kaylee, surely you know how all this sounds.”

I nodded and dropped my gaze. “I sound crazy.” I knew that better than anyone.

She shook her head and leaned across the bar for my hand. “Not crazy, hon. Delusional. There’s a difference. You’re probably just really upset about what happened to Meredith, and your brain is dealing with that by making up stories to distract you from the truth. I understand. It’s scary to think that anyone anywhere can just drop dead with no warning. If it could happen to her, it could happen to any of us, right?”

I pulled my hand from hers, gaping at my aunt in disbelief. What would it take to make her believe me? Proof was pretty hard to come by when the premonitions only came a few minutes in advance.

I slid off the stool and backed up a step, eager to put a little space between us. “I barely knew Meredith. I’m not scared because I think it can happen to me. I’m scared because I knew it was going to happen to her, and I couldn’t stop it.” I sucked in a deep breath, trying to breathe beyond the guilt and grief threatening to suffocate me. “I almost wish I
were
going crazy. At least then I wouldn’t feel so guilty about letting someone die. But I’m not crazy. This is real.”

For several seconds, my aunt just stared at me, her expression a mixture of confusion, relief, and pity, like she wasn’t sure what she should feel.

I sighed, my shoulders fell. “You still don’t believe me.”

My aunt’s expression softened, and her posture wilted almost imperceptibly. “Oh, hon, I believe that you believe what you’re saying.” She hesitated, then shrugged, but the gesture looked more calculated than casual. “Maybe you should take a sedative too. It will help you sleep. I’m sure everything will make more sense when you wake up.”

“Sleep won’t help me.” I sounded acerbic, even to my own ears. “Neither will those stupid pills.” I grabbed the bottle from the bar where she’d left it and hurled it at the refrigerator as hard as I could. The plastic cracked and the lid fell off, scattering small white pills all over the floor.

Aunt Val jumped, then stared at me like I’d just broken her heart. When she knelt to clean up the mess, I jogged down the hall and into my room, then slammed the door and leaned against it. I’d done the best I could with my aunt; I’d try again with Uncle Brendon when he came home.

Or maybe not.

Maybe Nash knew what he was talking about when he said not to tell anyone.

7

F
OR SEVERAL MINUTES
, I stood still in my room, so angry, and scared, and confused, I didn’t know whether to scream, or cry, or hit something. I tried to read the novel on my nightstand to distract myself from the disaster my life had become, and when that didn’t work, I turned on the TV. But nothing on television held my attention and all the songs on my iPod only seemed to magnify my anger and frustration.

My mind was so full of chaos, my thoughts coming much too fast for me to grasp, that no matter what I did or where I stood, I couldn’t escape the miserable roar of half-formed thoughts my head spun with. I was starting to seriously recon sider that sedative—desperate to just be
nowhere
for a little while—when my phone buzzed in my pocket.

Another text message from Nash. U OK?

Fine. I lied. U? I almost told him he’d been right. That I shouldn’t have told my aunt. But that was a lot of information to fit into a text.

Yeah. With Carter, he replied. Call U soon.

I thought about texting Emma, but she was still grounded.
And knowing her mother, she stood no chance of a commuted sentence, even after practically seeing a classmate drop dead.

Frustrated and mentally exhausted, I finally fell asleep in the middle of the movie I wasn’t really watching in the first place. Less than an hour later, according to my alarm clock, I woke up and turned the TV off. And that’s when I realized I’d almost slept through something important.

Or at least something interesting.

In the sudden silence, I heard my aunt and uncle arguing fiercely, but too softly to understand from my room at the back of the house. I eased my bedroom door open several inches, holding my breath until I was sure the hinges wouldn’t squeal. Then I stuck my head through the gap and peered down the hall.

They were in the kitchen; my aunt’s slim shadow paced back and forth across the only visible wall. Then I heard her whisper my name—even lower in pitch than the rest of the argument—and I swallowed thickly. She was probably trying to convince Uncle Brendon to take me back to the hospital.

That was
not
going to happen.

Angry now, I eased the door open farther and slipped into the hall. If my uncle gave in, I’d simply step up and tell them I wasn’t going. Or maybe I’d just jump in my car and leave until they came to their senses. I could go to Emma’s. No, wait. She was grounded. So I’d go to Nash’s.

Where I wound up didn’t matter, so long as it wasn’t the mental-health ward.

I inched down the hall, grateful for my silent socks and the tile floor, which didn’t creak. But I froze several feet from the kitchen doorway when my uncle spoke, his words still low but now perfectly audible.

“You’re overreacting, Valerie. She got through it last time,
and she’ll get through it this time. I see no reason to bother him while he’s working.”

While I appreciated my uncle standing up for me, even if he didn’t believe in my premonitions either, I seriously doubted Dr. Nelson would consider himself “bothered” by a phone call about a patient. Not considering what he was probably getting paid.

“I don’t know what else to do.” Aunt Val sighed, and a chair scraped the floor as my uncle’s shadow stood. “She’s really upset, and I think I made it worse. She knows something’s going on. I tried to get her to take a sedative, but she busted the bottle on the refrigerator.”

Uncle Brendon chuckled, from across the kitchen now. “She knows she doesn’t need those damn pills.”

Yeah!
I was starting to wonder if my uncle wore chain mail beneath his clothes, because he sounded eager to slay the dragon Skepticism. And I was ready to ride into battle with him….

“Of course she doesn’t,” Aunt Val conceded wearily, and her shadow folded its arms across its chest. “The pills are a temporary solution, like sticking your finger in a crack in a dam. What she really needs is your brother, and if you’re not going to call him, I will.”

My father? Aunt Val wanted him to call my dad? Not Dr. Nelson?

My uncle sighed. “I hate to start all this now if we could possibly put it off a while longer.” The refrigerator door squealed open, and a soda can popped, then hissed. “It was just coincidence that this happened twice in one week. It may not happen for another year, or even longer.”

Aunt Val huffed in exasperation. “Brendon, you didn’t see her. Didn’t
hear
her. She thinks she’s losing her mind. She’s already living on borrowed time, and she should not have to spend whatever she has left of it thinking she’s crazy.”

Borrowed time?

A jolt of shock shot through me, settling finally into my heart, which seemed reluctant to beat again for a moment. What did that mean? I was sick? Dying? How could they not have told me? And how could I be dying if I felt fine? Except for knowing when other people are going to die…

And if that were true, wouldn’t I know if I were going to die?

Uncle Brendon sighed, and a chair scraped across the floor again, then groaned as he sank into it. “Fine. Call him if you want to. You’re probably right. I just really hoped we’d have another year or two. At least until she’s out of high school.”

“That was never a certainty.” Aunt Val’s silhouette shrank as it came closer, and I scuttled toward my room, my spine still pressed against the cold wall. But then she stopped, and her shadow turned around. “Where’s the number?”

“Here, use my phone. He’s second in the contacts list.”

My aunt’s shadow elongated as she moved farther away, presumably taking the phone from my uncle. “You sure you don’t want to do it?”

“Positive.”

Another chair scraped the tiles as my aunt sat, and her shadow became an amorphous blob on the wall. A series of high-pitched beeps told me she was already pressing buttons. A moment later she spoke, and I held my breath, desperate to hear every single word of whatever they’d been keeping from me.

“Aiden? It’s Valerie.” She paused, but I couldn’t hear my father’s response. “We’re fine. Brendon’s right here. Listen, though, I’m calling about Kaylee.” Another pause, and this time I heard a low-pitched, indistinct rumble, barely recognizable as my father’s voice.

Aunt Val sighed again, and her shadow shifted as she slumped
in her chair. “I know, but it’s happening again.” Pause. “Of course I’m sure. Twice in the last three days. She didn’t tell us the first time, or I would have called sooner. I’m not sure how she’s kept quiet about it, as it is.”

My father said something else I couldn’t make out.

“I did, but she won’t take them, and I’m not going to force her. I think we’ve moved beyond the pills, Aiden. It’s time to tell her the truth. You owe her that much.”

He owed me? Of course he owed me the truth—whatever that was. They all owed me.

“Yes, but I really think it should come from her father.” She sounded angry now.

My father spoke again, and this time it sounded like he was arguing. But I could have told him how futile it was to argue with Aunt Val. Once she’d made up her mind, nothing could change it.

“Aiden Cavanaugh, you put your butt on a plane today, or I’ll send your daughter to you. She deserves the truth, and you’re going to give it to her, one way or another.”

 

I
SNUCK BACK TO MY
room, shocked, confused, and more than a little proud of my aunt. Whatever this mysterious truth was, she wanted me to have it. And she didn’t think I was losing my mind. Neither of them did.

Though they apparently thought I was dying.

I think I’d rather be crazy.

I’d never really contemplated my own death before, but I would have thought the very idea would leave me too frightened to function. Especially having very nearly witnessed someone else’s death only hours earlier. Instead, however, I found myself more numb than terrified.

There was a substantial fear building inside me, tightening
my throat and making my heart pound almost audibly inside my chest. But it was a very distant fear, as if I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around the concept of my own demise. Of simply not existing one day.

Maybe the news just hadn’t sunk in yet. Or maybe I couldn’t quite believe it. Either way, I desperately needed to talk it through with someone who wasn’t busy keeping vital secrets from me. So I texted Emma, in case her mother had lifted the cell phone ban.

Ms. Marshall replied a few minutes later, telling me that Emma was still grounded, but she’d see me the next day for Meredith’s memorial, if I was planning to go.

I wrote back to tell her I’d be there, then dropped my phone on my bed in disgust. What good is technology if your friends are always grounded from it? Or hanging out with teammates?

For lack of anything better to do, I turned the TV on again, but I couldn’t concentrate because what I’d just overheard kept playing through my mind. I analyzed every word, trying to figure out what I’d missed. What they’d been keeping from me.

I was sick; that much was clear. What else could “living on borrowed time” mean? So what did I have? What kind of twisted illness had “premonitions of death” as the primary symptom, and death itself as the eventual result?

Nothing, unless we were still considering adolescent dementia. Which we were not, based on the fact that they didn’t think I needed the zombie pills.

So what kind of illness could make me
think
I was crazy?

Ignoring the television now, I slid into my desk chair and fired up the Gateway notebook my father had sent me for my last birthday. Each second it took to load sent fresh waves of agitation through me, fortifying my unease until that fear I’d expected earlier finally began to take root in earnest.

I’m going to die.

Just thinking the words sent terror skittering through me. I couldn’t sit still, even for the few minutes it took Windows to load. When my leg began to jiggle with nerves, I stood in front of my dresser to peer in the mirror. Surely if I were ready to kick the proverbial bucket, I would know the minute I saw myself. That’s how it seemed to work when someone else was going to die.

But I felt nothing when I looked at my reflection, except the usual fleeting annoyance that, unlike my cousin, my skin was pale, my features completely unremarkable.

Maybe it didn’t work with reflections. I’d never seen Heidi in the mirror, nor Meredith. Holding my breath, and barely resisting the absurd urge to cross my fingers, I glanced down at myself, unsure whether I was more afraid of feeling the urge to scream, or of not feeling it.

Again, I felt nothing.

Did that mean I wasn’t dying, after all? Or that my gruesome gift didn’t work on myself? Or merely that my death wasn’t yet imminent?
Aaagggghhh! This was pointless!

My computer chimed to tell me it was up and running, and I dropped into my desk chair. I pulled up my Internet browser and typed “leading cause of death among teenagers” into the search engine, my chest tight and aching with morbid anticipation.

The first hit contained a list of the top ten causes of death in individuals fifteen through nineteen years of age. Unintentional injury, homicide, and suicide were the top three entries. But I had no plans to end my own life, and accidents couldn’t be predicted. Neither could murder, unless my aunt and uncle were planning to take me out themselves.

Lower on the list were several equally scary entries, like heart disease, respiratory infection, and diabetes, among others.
However, those all included symptoms I couldn’t possibly have overlooked.

That left only the fourth leading cause of death for people my age: malignant neoplasms.

I had to look that one up.

The description from a separate, respected medical site was dense and nearly impossible to comprehend. But the layman’s definition under that was too clear for comfort. “Malignant 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.

BOOK: My Soul to Take
12.55Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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