I shook my head, uncomprehending. “I thought I was a death herald.”

“That’s what you are, not what you can do. At least, that’s not all you can do.”

CHAPTER 9

I leaned forward, angling my knee to avoid the gearshift, more curious than I wanted to admit as I waited for the rest of it. But he twisted to peer out his window. “My legs are getting stiff. Let’s walk.” He pushed his door open without waiting for my reply.

“What?” I demanded, leaning over the console to watch as he stretched in the parking lot, muscles bunching and shifting as he pulled both arms over his head. “You’re going to keep me in suspense?”

“No, just in motion.” I groaned with impatience, and he ducked into the car to grin at me. “What, you can’t walk and talk at the same time?” Then his grin widened and he slammed the door in my face. I had no choice but to follow.

Automatic lights flared to life as I stepped onto the concrete, bathing the entire lot, the adjacent, deserted playground, and part of the pier in a soft yellow glow. I circled the car and gave him my hand when he reached for it. “Fine, I’m walking. Start—”

Nash kissed me, one hand gripping the curve of my left hip, and the rest of my sentence was lost forever. When he finally pulled away, he left me breathing hard and craving things I could barely conceptualize. His gaze met mine from inches away, and I noticed that his irises were still swirling in the soft yellow light overhead. Or maybe they were swirling again.

Suddenly his eyes didn’t seem so strange. And neither did my fascination with them. “So…your eyes?” I whispered when I could speak again, making no move to step back. “Is that part of what male bean sidhes do?”

“My eyes?” He frowned and blinked. “The colors are swirling, aren’t they?”

“Yeah.” I leaned closer for a better look, and since I was so close, anyway, I kissed him back, sucking lightly on his lower lip, then delving deeper. Exhilaration shot through me when he groaned and gripped my waist with both hands. His hands started to slide lower, and I only stepped back when I got scared by the realization that I didn’t want him to stop.

“Um…” I cleared my throat and shoved my hands in my pockets, then finally looked up to find him watching me. “Your eyes are beautiful,” I said, desperate to bring the conversation back on track. “But don’t they kind of clue people in? That you’re…not human?”

“Nah.” He brushed a chunk of dark hair from his forehead and grinned. “It only happens when I’m experiencing something…um…really intense.” I felt myself flush, but he continued as if he hadn’t noticed. “A bean sidhe’s eyes are like a mood ring you can’t take off. But you can’t read your own, and humans can’t see it at all. Just other bean sidhes.” His held my gaze with an intense look of his own. “Yours are doing it too. More shades of blue than the ocean, swirling like a Caribbean whirlpool.”

Oh, lovely. My flush deepened until I thought my cheeks would combust. He could see what I was thinking—what I wanted—in my eyes. But I could see what he wanted too….

“Tell me the rest of it.” I turned toward the park with my hands still in my pockets. I wanted to know everything—but mostly I wanted to change the subject.

Nash stepped over a parking bumper and caught up with me in two strides. “Human lore says that when a bean sidhe wails, she’s mourning the dead, or the soon-to-be dead, but that’s not the whole story.” He glanced up to study my profile. “I’ve seen you hold back your wail twice. What do you remember about the time you let it go?”

I flinched at the memory, reluctant to revisit the event that landed me in the hospital. “It was horrible. Once I let it go, I couldn’t pull it back. And I couldn’t think about anything else. There was this feeling of total despair, then this awful noise that felt like it just erupted from my throat.” I stepped over a landscape timber, then onto the thick bed of wood chips carpeting the playground, and Nash followed. “The scream was in control of me, rather than the other way around. People were staring, and dropping purses and shopping bags to cover their ears. This little girl started crying and clinging to her mom, but I couldn’t make it stop. It was the worst day of my life. Seriously.”

“My mom says the first time’s always rough. Though it doesn’t usually get you locked up.”

That’s right; his mother was a bean sidhe too. No wonder she’d stared at me. She probably knew I had no idea what I was.

When we got to the heart of the playground—a massive wooden castle full of towers, and tunnels, and slides—Nash stepped beneath a piece of equipment and reached up for the first monkey bar beam. “Were you watching the pre-departed when he actually…departed?”

I raised an eyebrow in dark amusement, trying not to stare at the triceps clearly displayed beneath the snug, short sleeves of his tee. “Pre-departed?”

He grinned. “It’s a technical term.”

“Aah. No, I wasn’t looking at anything.” I sank onto a low tire swing held up by three chains, rocking back and forth slowly, trying to forget the words even as I spoke them. “I was trying to make the screeching stop. Mall Security called my aunt and uncle, and when I couldn’t stop crying, they took me to the hospital.”

Nash let go of the bar and settled onto the rubber-coated steps of a nearby slide, watching me from a couple of feet away. “Well, if you’d looked at the other guy, you would have seen the deceased’s soul. Hovering.”

“Hovering?”

“Yeah. Souls are fundamentally attracted to a bean sidhe’s wail, and as long as it lasts, they can’t move on. They just kind of hang there, suspended. You remember sirens in mythology? How their song could draw a sailor to his death?”

“Yeah…?” And that image did nothing to ease the apprehension now swelling inside me like heartburn.

“It’s like that. Except the people are already dead. And they aren’t usually sailors.”

“Wow.” I put my feet down to stop the tire from rocking. “I’m like flypaper for the soul. That’s…weird. Why would anyone want to do that? Suspend some poor guy’s soul?”

Nash shrugged and stood to pull me up. “Lots of reasons. A bean sidhe who knows what she’s doing can hold on to a soul long enough for him to prepare for the afterlife. Let him make his peace.”

I frowned, unable to picture it. “Okay, but how peaceful can it possibly be, with me screaming bloody murder?”

He laughed again, and I followed him up the steps to a wobbly bridge made of wooden planks chained loosely together. “It doesn’t sound like screaming to the soul. Or to me either. Your wail is beautiful to male bean sidhes.” Nash turned to look at me from the top step, his gaze soft, and almost reflective. “More like a wistful, haunting song. I wish you could hear it the way we hear it.”

“Me too.” Anything would be better than the earsplitting screech I heard. “What else can I do? Tell me the parts that don’t make me want to dig my own ears out of my skull.”

Nash pulled me onto the bridge, which rocked beneath us until I sat in the middle with my legs dangling over the side. “You can keep a soul around long enough for him to hear the thoughts and condolences of his friends. Or say goodbye to his family, though they can’t hear him.”

“So I’m…useful?” My pitch rose in earnest hope.

“Totally.” He settled onto the next plank, facing my profile with one leg hanging over the edge of the bridge and the other arching behind me.

My smile swelled, as did the warmth spreading throughout my chest, slowly overtaking my unease at the very thought of suspending a human soul. I wasn’t sure whether this blossoming peace stemmed from my newfound purpose in life—and in death—or from the way Nash watched me, like he’d do anything to make me smile.