Soul Screamers Collection. Rachel Vincent

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СКАЧАТЬ told me the feeling would be mutual. I gave him a shaky nod, and Nash opened the driver’s side door and stepped into the dark parking garage. I got out on the other side, and as I closed the door, he clicked a button on Carter’s key chain to lock the car. Both sounds reverberated around us, and by all appearances, we were alone in the garage. Which was good, considering the discussion we were in the middle of.

      “So what does Tod look like? Whitewashed skeleton skulking around in a black cape and hood? Carrying a scythe? ‘Cause I’m thinking that would cause mass panic in the hospital.”

      He took my hand as we made our way down the aisle toward the garage entrance, footsteps echoing eerily. “Do you chase after funeral processions in a long, dirty dress, hair trailing behind you in the wind?”

      I shot him a mock frown. “Have you been following me again?”

      Nash rolled his eyes. “He looks normal—not that it matters. You can’t see a reaper unless he wants to be seen.”

      A warm, late-September wind blew through the garage entrance, fluttering flyers stuck to windshields and fast-food wrappers scattered across the concrete. “Will Tod want us to see him?”

      “Depends on what kind of mood he’s in.” Nash walked past the huge revolving door in favor of the heavy glass pane, which he pulled open for me to pass through into the tiny vestibule. I held the next door for him, and we stepped into a small, quiet lobby lined with empty, uncomfortable-looking armchairs. The warmth of the building was a relief, and my goose bumps faded with each step we took away from the door.

      Nash ignored the volunteer at the help desk—not that it mattered; she was asleep at her post—and guided me toward a bank of elevators at the end of the hall.

      My shoes squeaked on the polished floor, and each breath brought with it a whiff of antiseptic and pine-scented air freshener. Either would have been bad enough on its own, and together they threatened to overwhelm both my nose and my lungs. Fortunately the elevator on the left stood empty and open.

      Inside, Nash pushed the button for the third floor. When the doors closed, the “welcome” scent faded, replaced immediately by the generic hospital smell, a combination of stale air, cafeteria meat loaf, and bleach.

      “Tod works on the third level?” I asked as gears grinded overhead and the elevator began to rise.

      “He works all over the hospital, but Intensive Care is on three, and that’s where we’re most likely to find him. Assuming he wants to be found.”

      A new chill went through me as his statement sank in. We were most likely to find Tod in Intensive Care—where people were most likely to be dying.

      My palms began to sweat, and my heart pounded so hard I was sure Nash could hear it echo in the elevator. What were the chances I’d make it through the ICU without finding a soul to sing for?

      Slim to none, I was betting. And since we were already in the hospital, if I freaked out this time, they’d probably put me on the express gurney to the mental-health ward. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.

      I was not going back there.

      My hand clenched Nash’s, and he stroked my fingers with his thumb. “If you feel it starting, just squeeze my hand and I’ll get you out.” I started to shake my head, and he ran the fingers of his free hand down the side of my face, staring into my eyes. “I promise.”

      I sighed. “Okay.” He’d already helped me through two panic attacks—I couldn’t stop thinking of them as such—and I had no doubt he could do it again. And, anyway, I didn’t really have any choice. I couldn’t help the next victim of an untimely death without finding Tod-the-reaper, and I couldn’t find Tod without checking all his favorite haunts.

      The elevator dinged, and the door slid open with a soft shhh sound. I glanced at Nash, bolstering my courage as I straightened my spine. “Let’s get this over with.”

      The third floor stretched out to either side of us, and one long, sterile white hall opened up directly across from the elevator doors, where a man and a woman in matching blue scrubs sat behind a big circular nurses’ station. The man looked up when my shoes squeaked on the floor, but the woman didn’t notice us.

      Nash nodded toward the left-hand hallway, and we headed that way, walking slowly, pretending to read the names written on disposable nameplates outside each door. We were just two kids hoping to pay respects to our grandfather one last time. Except that we didn’t “find” him on the chosen hallway, or anywhere else on the third floor, which was almost a letdown after my initial fear of entering the ICU. Fortunately, Arlington wasn’t that big of a town, and only three of the beds in Intensive Care were actually occupied. And none of those occupants was in any immediate danger of meeting a reaper.

      Tod was also absent from the fourth, fifth, and sixth floors, at least as far as we could tell. The only places left to look were the surgical tower, the emergency room on the first floor, and the maternity ward, on two.

      I did not want to find a grim reaper—even if he didn’t carry a scythe—in the maternity ward, and we would definitely be noticed in the surgical tower. So we checked the ER first.

      During my one previous trip to Arlington Memorial, my aunt and uncle had called ahead, and the mental-health ward had been expecting us, which meant we didn’t have to stop in the ER. So I’d never seen one in person until Nash and I crossed the front lobby and pushed through the double doors into the emergency waiting area. I have, however, spent plenty of time in the psychiatric unit,which is no trip to Disneyland. It’s populated with nurses who look at you with either pity or contempt, and patients in slippers who either won’t meet your eyes or won’t look away. But the ER holds its own special brand of misery.

      Far from the energetic rush of adrenaline I’d expected based on certain television hospital dramas, the actual emergency room was quiet and somber. Patients waited in thinly cushioned chairs lining the walls and grouped in the middle of the long room, their faces twisted into grimaces of pain, fear, or impatience.

      One old woman languished in a wheelchair beneath a threadbare blanket, and several feverish children shivered in their mothers’ arms. Men in work clothes pressed crusted gauze bandages to wounds seeping blood, or ice packs to purple lumps on their heads. At the far end of the room near the triage desk, a teenager moaned and clutched one arm to her chest as her mother thumbed through an old tabloid, blatantly ignoring her.

      Every few minutes, employees in scrubs entered through one end of the room, crossed the faded, dingy vinyl tile, and pushed through a set of double doors on the other end. Those alone read from charts or stared straight ahead, while those in pairs broke the grim near-silence with incongruous snatches of casual conversation. Regardless, the employees went out of their way to avoid eye contact with the people waiting, while the patients eyed them in hope so transparent it was uncomfortable for me to watch.

      “Do you see him?” I whispered to Nash, skipping over the sick women and children to scan the faces of the men.

      “No, and we won’t until he’s ready to be seen.”

      I stuffed my hands in my pockets, physically resisting the urge to take his hand for comfort, just because the ER creeped me out. If I couldn’t handle the huddled masses staring into space like zombies, how could I hope to face the Grim Reaper? Or even a grim reaper? “So how are we supposed to find him?”

      “The СКАЧАТЬ