A Banshee's Wail (The Banshee Curse #1)

Chapter Nine

IT MIGHT BE pointless to say, but the Grim Reaper and I weren't friends. No matter how often I saw him on a day-to-day basis or he suddenly showed up out of the blue. We weren't buddy-buddy with each other, and we never would be. Still, having him point at me and say my name made it feel as if my heart was being ripped from my chest. It might've just been a dream, but it had felt real—and that's what really matters. I felt betrayed by a being that basically just forces you to acknowledge your own death and takes you up to the Pearly Gates—or the burning flames of Hell. Whichever one you were destined for by the end of your lifetime.

     So when I startled awake, my heart beating rapidly in my chest and that missing feeling in my body gone, I decided right then and there that I couldn't let Lyle come with me. It wasn't a hard decision for me to make—I'd been trying to get him to go back to the academy since before he'd even left. He wasn't listening though, and it ticked me off. And the Fates still weren't on my side, I realized, as I glanced around the abandoned store.

     “Good morning, Sunshine,” Lyle chirped when he noticed that I was awake. Why was he so overly perky?

     “It's nighttime,” I told him, my mood one-hundred percent below his.

     He looked up at me from digging through my backpack. “Good evening, Moonlight,” he said, each word accentuated by the intense stare he was giving me. It was kind of creepy. “Does that work for you?”

     “Go back to the academy.”

     “No.”

     “Then no, it doesn't work for me.”

     “Your logic is weird,” he muttered, going back to rummaging around in my bag. “How does me correcting on what time of day it is—or night—pertain to me going back to the academy?”

     “It has everything to do with it.”

     I sat up and reached for my bag, unzipping another pocket and pulling out the granola bars I had been smart enough to grab before leaving the academy. I held two up in front of him. “Are these what you were looking for?”

     He scowled at me. “Yes,” he muttered as he snatched one of the granola bars out of my hand.

     My lips twitched up at the corners as I unwrapped mine and took a bite out of it. We ate in silence, neither of us really looking at the other. I think it was awkward because he knew that saying anything would eventually lead to me telling him to go back to the academy. I wasn't going to let it go easily, and because we'd been together for all of a month, he knew how stubborn I was. Or, well, he knew about half of how stubborn I can be—which is a lot and not entirely something I'm willing to show him just yet.

     Eventually, though, the silence was broken. It would always be broken, I realized. Almost as if it was “made” to be broken. Odd.

     “So, where to next, Miss I'm-intent-on-leaving-Lyle-Bane?” Lyle asked, pushing himself to his feet.

     I glared at him.

     “Don't give me that look, you know it's true.” His face crinkled up as he grinned.

     I huffed and slung my backpack onto my shoulders.

     “Are you going to answer me?”

     “I don't know,” I said.

     “You don't know if you're going to tell me, or you don't know where we're going?” he asked as he followed behind me.

     I closed the door behind us firmly. “I don't know where we're going,” I clarified, turning to frown up at him. “In fact, it's not even supposed to be a 'we' thing. Go—”