But I tried.
Keeping my lips sealed, I opened my throat a tiny bit, forcing my jaws to relax. That’s where the whole thing went downhill. Instead of that little leak of sound Harmony had mentioned, the entire wail ruptured from my throat, shoving my mouth open wide.
My screech filled the room. The entire house. My whole body hummed with the keening, a violent chord of discordant sounds no human could have produced. My head throbbed, my brain seeming to bounce around within my skull.
I closed my eyes. I couldn’t take it.
Cold, smooth fingers brushed my arm, and I opened my eyes again to find Harmony speaking to me. The room around her had become a blur of colors and textures, thanks to my inability to focus on it. Her pretty face was twisted into a constant wince of pain from the shards of steel my scream was no doubt driving into her brain. Male bean sidhes hear a female’s wail as an eerie, beautiful soul song. They crave the sound, and are pulled toward it. Almost seduced by it.
Female bean sidhes hear it as it is. As humans hear it. As a titanic racket loud enough to deafen, and sharp enough to shatter not just glass, but your ever-loving sanity.
Harmony glanced at her living-room window, the glass trembling in its frame. Because we shared a gender and species—though I was fuzzy on exactly how the whole thing worked—I could hear her words through my own screaming, but they sounded like they came from within my own head.
Calm down. Take a breath. Close your mouth….
I snapped my jaws shut, muffling the sound, but not eradicating it. It buzzed in my mouth now, rattling my teeth, and still seeped out like a moan on steroids. But I could hear her normally now.
“Breathe deeply, Kaylee,” Harmony soothed, rubbing my arms until goose bumps stood up beneath my sleeves. “Close your eyes and draw it back in. All but that last little bit.”
I let my eyelids fall, though that small effort took a lot of courage, because closing my eyes meant blocking her out and embracing my own private darkness. Being alone with the ruthless keening. With the memory of Emma’s death, before I’d known it would be temporary.
But I did it.
“Okay, now pull it back. Deep inside you. Picture swallowing your wail—forcing it down past your throat into your heart. You can set it free in there. Let it bounce around. Ricochet. The human heart is a fragile thing, all thin vessels and delicate pumps. But the bean sidhe heart is armored. It has to be, for us to survive.”
I pictured my heart with iron plating. I forced my arms to relax, my hands to fall into my lap. I listened to my wail as it seeped from my throat, forcing myself to hear each inharmonic note individually. And slowly, painfully, I drew them back into myself. Forced them down into my center.
I felt the wail in my throat, in reverse. It was tangible, and the sensation was eerie. Downright creepy. It was like swallowing smoke, if smoke were sharp. Prickly, as if it were bound in thorns.
When I’d swallowed all but the thinnest, most insubstantial thread, I felt a smile spread slowly from the corners of my mouth to my cheeks, then into my eyes. I heard only a ribbon of sound, so faint it could have been my imagination. My shoulders slumped as an odd peace filtered through me, settling into each limb. I’d done it. I called up my wail when I needed it, and restricted it on my own terms.
I opened my eyes, already grinning at Harmony. But my grin froze, then shattered before my gaze had even focused.
Harmony smiled back at me, curls framing her face, her dimples piercing cheeks that should have been rosy with good health and good cheer. But now they were gray. As was everything else. A hazy, foglike filter had slipped over my vision while I was modifying my wail, like my eyes had been opened farther than should have been possible.
The Nether-fog. A veil between our world and the Netherworld.
A female bean sidhe’s wail allows her—and any other bean sidhes near enough to hear her—to see through the fog into both the human world and that other, somehow deeper one simultaneously. Or to travel from one to the other.
My head turned, my eyes wide with horror. I wanted to learn about the Netherworld, but had no interest in going there!
“Kaylee? It’s okay, Kaylee. Do you see it?” Harmony’s words were smooth and warm like Nash’s, but bore none of the supernatural calm his could carry. Harmony and I shared a skill set, and while Nash’s voice could soothe and comfort human and bean sidhe alike, ours summoned darkness, and heralded pain and death.
Nash and I were two sides of the same weird coin, and I didn’t like wailing without him.
My heart galloped within my chest, skipping some beats and rushing others, unable to find a steady rhythm. My palms dampened with sweat, and I rubbed them on the threadbare couch cushions, both to dry them and to anchor myself to the only reality I understood. The only truth I wanted any part of.
“Kaylee, look at me!” Harmony stroked my hand as she leaned to the side to place herself in my field of vision. “This is supposed to happen. I’m right here with you, and everything is fine.”
No-no-no-no-no! But I couldn’t speak as long as that last thread of sound still trailed from me. I could only glance around in panic at the fog layering Nash’s house like a coat of dust too fine to settle. It hung in the air over Harmony’s battered coffee table and old TV, darkening my world, my vision, and my heart.
My pulse raced, and each breath came faster than the last. I knew the pattern. First came the gloom, then came the creatures. I’d seen them before. Beings with too many or too few limbs. With joints that bent the wrong way, or didn’t bend at all. Some had tails. Some didn’t have heads. But the worst were the ones with no eyes, because I knew they were watching me. I just didn’t know how. …
Yet no creatures appeared. Harmony and I were alone in her house in the human world, and somehow alone in the Netherworld.
With that realization came the calm I craved. My tension eased, and my wail faded, thoughts of Emma’s death melting into my memory to be used again when they were needed. Or better yet, forgotten.
The haze cleared slowly, until Harmony came into focus. Her hair looked more golden than ever, her eyes much brighter than I remembered in contrast to the drab shades of gray that had covered her moments earlier. “You okay?” she asked, forehead pinched with worry.
“Yeah. Sorry.” I rubbed both hands over my face, tucking my own limp brown strands behind my ears. “I knew it was coming, but it still scared the crap out of me. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that.”
“Yes you will.” She smiled and stood, motioning for me to follow her into the kitchen. “It gets easier with practice.”
That’s what I was afraid of.
Harmony waved an arm at the round breakfast table, and I pulled out a ladder-back chair with clear finish chipping off the back and one missing rung while she headed for the oven. The timer blinking above the stove was counting back with thirty-eight seconds to go, and it never failed to amaze me how Harmony always knew when it was about to go off. That timer had never once interrupted one of our lessons, and none of her treats had ever come out over-or underdone.
Unlike the cookies I’d baked two nights earlier.
“There’s soda in the fridge.” She slid her hand into a thick glove-shaped pot holder and pulled the oven door open.
“How ‘bout milk?” I like milk with my chocolate.
“Top shelf.” She pulled a glass pan of brownies from the oven and slid it onto a wire cooling rack on the counter. I took a short glass from the cabinet over the sink and filled it with milk, then sat at the table again while she poured one for herself.
“So, explain to me why I needed to learn to do that?” I sipped from my glass, suddenly grateful