My Soul to Take by Rachel Vincent Read Free Book Online Page B

pockets and followed her over eight feet of sticky linoleum tile and across the theater lobby toward the snack counter.
    Jimmy Barnes was busy with a customer, but once he saw Emma waiting to talk to him, he rushed through the order so quickly he almost forgot to squirt butter on the popcorn. He had a bit of a crush on Emma.
    He wasn’t the only one.
    “Back already?” Jimmy nodded at me, then leaned with both plump arms on the glass countertop, staring at Em as if the meaning of life lay buried in her eyes. His fingers were stained yellow with butter-flavored oil and he smelled like popcorn and the root beer he’d dribbled down the front of his black apron.
    “Can you tell Kaylee what Mike said?”
    Jimmy’s goofy, puppy-love smile faded, and he stood, angling his body to face us both. “Creepiest thing I ever heard.” He reached below the counter to grab a plastic-wrapped stack of sixteen-ounce paper cups, and began refilling the dispenser as he spoke.
    “You know Mike Powell, right?” he asked.
    “Yeah.” I glanced at Emma with both brows raised in question, but she only nodded toward Jimmy, silently telling me to pay attention.
    Jimmy pressed on an inverted stack of cups, which sank into a hole in the countertop to make room for more. “Mike took a shift at the snack bar at the Arlington branch today, filling in for some guy who got fired for spittin’ in someone’s Coke.”
    “Hey, can I get some popcorn over here?”
    I looked up to see a middle-aged man waiting in front of the cash register, flanked by a little girl with her thumb in her mouth and an older boy with his gaze—and his thumbs—glued to a PSP.
    “Will that be a jumbo, sir?” Jimmy held up one just-a-minute finger for us and veered toward the closest of several popcorn machines while I dug my phone from my pocket to check the time. It was after nine and I was starving. And not exactly eager for whatever weird, creepy story Jimmy had to tell.
    When the customers left with a cardboard tray full of junk food and soda, Jimmy turned back to us. “Anyway, Mike called about half an hour ago, totally freaked out. He said some girldied right in front of his register this afternoon. Just fell over dead, still holding her popcorn.”
    Shock pinged through me, chilling me from the inside out. I glanced at Emma, and she gave me a single grim nod. As I turned back to Jimmy, a dark unease unfurled deep inside me, spiraling up my spine like tendrils of ice. “You’re serious?”
    “Totally.” He twisted the end of the plastic sleeve around the remaining cups. “Mike said the whole thing was unreal. The ambulance took her away in a freakin’ body bag, and the manager closed the place down and handed out vouchers to all the customers. And the cops kept asking Mike questions, trying to figure out what happened.”
    Emma watched me for my reaction, but I could only stare, my hands gripping the edge of the counter, unable to force my scattered thoughts into any logical order. The similarity to Heidi Anderson was obvious, but I had no concrete reason to connect the two deaths.
    “Do they know how she died?” I asked finally, grasping at the first coherent thought to form.
    Jimmy shrugged. “Mike said she was fine one minute, and flat on her back the next. No coughing, no choking, no grabbing her heart or her head.”
    A vague, heavy dread was building inside me, a slow simmer of foreboding, compared to the rapid boil of panic I’d felt when I saw Heidi’s shadow-shroud. The deaths were connected. They had to be.
    Emma was watching me again, and I must have looked as sick as I felt because she put one hand on my shoulder. “Thanks, Jimmy. See ya Wednesday.”
    On the way home, Emma loosened her seat belt and twisted in the passenger seat to frown at me in the dark, her face a mask of grim fascination. “How weird was that? First you predictthat girl’s death at Taboo. Then tonight, another girl falls down dead at the theater, just like last