My Soul to Take

My Soul to Take

Love, murder, banshees, reapers and high school.

Kaylee Cavanaugh keeps seeing people surround by a shroud-like substance, and greets the sight with a soul-wrenching, ear-piercing wail, just before they die. Repeatedly. She just wants to be an average high school girl but this awareness of imminent death is making her a little crazy.

Just as she's at her wit's end, Kaylee meets Nash Hudson, the most popular student at school, who takes an interest in her. Nash tells her that she is not crazy, that she is in fact a bean sidhe- a banshee. Bean sidhes are an ancient race able to see when people are about to die. Their keening allows the soul of the recently deceased to make their goodbye's before moving on.

Nash knows because he's a bean sidhe, too. Male bean sidhe, he tells Kaylee have different powers from the more well-known females. They have no eerie lament to make souls linger. Instead they are able to influence and guide souls (and people).

When three perfectly healthy young girls collapse and die over three days for no apparent reason, Kaylee and Nash decide to do something about it. Kaylee wants them to save the girls- to guide their souls back into their bodies- but Nash warns against it. He says the reapers, the unloving beings who collect the souls of the deceased, wouldn't be happy- and you don't want an angry reaper coming after you. Besides, if you save one soul, another must take its place.

But Kaylee is not convinced. She suspects that the girls- all of them high school age- were not meant to die. What if there is a rogue reaper out there killing people before their time? Nash agrees it's a possibility but there's only one way to know for sure- to ask a reaper.

But dealing with reapers is dangerous. Bean sidhes and reapers are fundamentally one opposite sides of the metaphysical fence. Bean sidhes allow souls to linger while reapers are very officious in whisking them away. And, Nash warns, there are other unspeakable creatures out there for bean sidhes to worry about than just reapers.

Rachel Vincent spends most of her time with people she made up, in places that exist only in her mind. She likes books and mobile e-mail and reliable Internet access, and dislikes most cooked vegetables. When she's not reading or writing, she's probably watching movies or mastering the orange key on her Rock Band guitar.

My Soul to Take
Mira
Author: Rachel Vincent
ISBN: 9781741168648
Price: $19.99