Soul Screamers Collection. Rachel Vincent

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      She only blinked at me, staring into my eyes as if they fascinated her. As if she saw something there no one else could see.

      I started to ask what she was looking at, but stopped when a purple blur caught my attention on the other side of the room. A tall aide in eggplant-colored scrubs checking in on us, clipboard in hand. Had it been fifteen minutes already? But before she could continue with the rest of her list, Paul appeared in the doorway.

      “Hey, they’re sending one over from the E.R.”

      “Now?” The female aide glanced at her watch.

      “Yeah. She’s stable, and they need the space.” Both staff members disappeared down the hall, and I turned to see that Lydia’s face had gone even paler than normal.

      Several minutes later, the main entrance buzzed, then the door swung open. The female aide hurried from the nurses’ station as a man in plain green scrubs stepped into the unit, pushing a thin, tired-looking girl in a wheelchair. She wore jeans and a purple scrubs top, and her long pale hair hung over most of her face. Her arms lay limp in her lap, both bandaged from her wrists to halfway up her forearms.

      “Here’s her shirt.” The man in green handed the aide a thick plastic bag with the Arlington Memorial logo on it. “If I were you, I’d throw it out. I don’t think all the bleach in the world could get rid of that much blood.”

      On my right, Lydia flinched, and I looked up to see her eyes closed, her forehead furrowed in obvious pain. As the aide wheeled the new girl past the common area, Lydia went stiff beside me and clenched the arms of her chair so tightly the tendons in her hands stood out.

      “You okay?” I whispered, as the wheelchair squeaked toward the girls’ hall.

      Lydia shook her head, but her eyes didn’t open.

      “What hurts?”

      She shook her head again, and I realized she was younger than I’d first guessed. Fourteen, at the most. Too young to be stuck at Lakeside, no matter what was wrong with her.

      “You want me to get someone?” I started to stand, but she grabbed my arm so suddenly I actually jerked in surprise. She was a lot stronger than she looked. And faster.

      Lydia shook her head, meeting my gaze with green eyes brightly glazed with pain. Then she stood and walked stiffly down the hall, one hand pressed to her stomach. A minute later, her door closed softly.

      The rest of the day was a blur of half-eaten meals, unfocused stares, and too many jigsaw puzzle pieces to count. After breakfast, Nurse Nancy was back on duty, standing in my doorway to ask a series of pointless, invasive questions. But by then I was annoyed with the fifteen-minute checkups, and beyond frustrated by the lack of privacy.

      Nurse Nancy: “Have you had a bowel movement today?”

      Me: “No comment.”

      Nurse Nancy: “Do you still feel like hurting yourself?”

      Me: “I never did. I’m really more of a self-pamperer.”

      Next, a therapist named Charity Stevens escorted me into a room with a long window overlooking the nurses’ station to ask me why I’d tried to claw open my own throat, and why I screamed loud enough to wake the dead.

      I was virtually certain my screaming would not, in fact, wake the dead, but she seemed unamused when I said so. And unconvinced when I insisted that I hadn’t been trying to hurt myself.

      Stevens settled her thin frame into a chair across from me. “Kaylee, do you know why you’re here?”

      “Yeah. Because the doors are locked.”

      No smile. “Why were you screaming?”

      I folded my feet beneath me in the chair, exercising my right to remain silent. There was no way to answer that question without sounding crazy.

      “Kaylee … ?” Stevens sat with her hands folded in her lap, waiting. I had her undivided attention, whether I wanted it or not.

      “I … I thought I saw something. But it was nothing. Just normal shadows.”

      “You saw shadows.” But her statement sounded more like a question.

      “Yeah. You know, places where light doesn’t shine?” Much like a psychiatric hospital itself …

      Wide-eyed, I watched as Lydia hauled herself up, using an end table for balance. One arm wrapped around her stomach, she held her free hand out to me, tears standing in her eyes. “Come on,” she whispered, then swallowed thickly. “If you want out, come with me now.”

      If I weren’t busy holding back my scream, I might have choked on surprise. She could talk?

      I sucked in a deep breath through my nose, then let go of the chair and slid my hand into hers. Lydia pulled me up with surprising strength, and I followed her across the room, through a gap in the cluster of patients, and down the girls’ hall, while everyone else stared in the opposite direction. She stopped once, halfway down, bent over in pain again as a horrifying screech ripped through the air from the other side of the unit.

      “It’s Tyler,” she gasped as I pulled her up and pressed my free fist against my sealed lips, physically holding back my screams. “The new guy. He hurts so bad, but I can only take so much …”

      I had no idea what she was talking about, and I couldn’t ask. I could only pull her forward, moving as much for her benefit now as for mine. Whatever was wrong with her was somehow connected to Tyler, so surely distance from the commotion would be as good for her as it was for me.

      At the end of the hall, we stumbled into my room as the shouting grew louder. Lydia kicked the door shut. My eyes watered. A deep keening had started at the back of my throat, and I couldn’t make it stop. All I could do was hold my mouth closed and hope for the best.

      Lydia dropped onto my bed and held her hands out to me, her face pale now, and damp with sweat in spite of the over-air-conditioned room. “Hurry,” she said, but as I stepped forward, that terrible grayness swept into the room from nowhere. From everywhere. It was just suddenly there, leaching color from everything, thickening with each second that high-pitched squeal leaked from my throat.

      I scrambled onto the bed with her and used my shirt to wipe tears from my face. It was real! The fog was real! But that realization brought with it a bolt of true terror. If I wasn’t hallucinating, what the hell was going on?

      “Give me your hands.” Lydia gasped and doubled over in pain. When she looked up again, I took her hand in my empty one, but kept my mouth covered with the other. “Normally I try to block it,” she whispered, pushing limp black hair from her face. “But I don’t have the strength for that right now. This place is so full of pain …”

      Block what? What the hell was going on? Uncertainty pitched in my stomach, almost strong enough to rival the dark fear fueling my uncontrollable keening. What was she talking about? No wonder she’d quit speaking.

      Lydia closed her eyes, riding a wave of pain, then she opened them and her voice was so soft I had to strain to hear it. “I can let the pain flow naturally—that’s easiest on both of us. Or СКАЧАТЬ