KAREN M. DILLON
MAGIC & CHAOS
BOOK ONE
The Evil Bunny, 2nd Edition 2016
Immortal Souls Copyright © 2008 Karen M. Dillon
Karen M. Dillon asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
This is a work of fiction. All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, without the prior written consent of the author. Nor may it be otherwise circulated in any form of binding other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN: 978-0-9929481-6-0
eBook ISBN: 978-0-9929481-1-5
Cover and layout design © 2016 Karen M. Dillon
Edited by Josh Brookes
IMMORTAL SOULS
For M. Donnelly…
… the first person to suggest I publish this
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
EIPLOGUE
PROLOGUE
1300 YEARS AGO . . .
Atropos stood with her sisters in the back of the grand hall, watching in mournful silence as the Witches and Demons arrived.
Shadows danced in gleeful anticipation, their presence darkening the aura of the room, making the air thick and hard to breathe, their very presence a taint which poisoned all they touched.
Things were not right and had not been for quite some time.
But recently, something had changed.
What had started out as simple acts of selfishness, strongly worded arguments and minor fights for freedom had turned into all out acts of war and brutality.
The current display being the most depraved.
Atropos looked on as three women strolled into the hall. All with white hair, white skin and white eyes.
They called themselves the Elder Witches.
Although their years did not show on their faces, they were three of the oldest Witches alive.
The sisters had just recently taken control of the Witches’ Kingdom and had organised these public executions as a display of power. And to show Her that they no longer abided by Her laws.
The sound of metal chains dragging across stone floors echoed throughout the hall.
All present turned to face the door where two guards walked in, both gripping the arms of a semi-conscious girl.
Her head was down, her long golden hair—matted with dirt and blood—was loose and obscured most of her face from view. Her clothes were torn and filthy, her pale skin covered with dark purple bruises, making obvious the abuse she had suffered at the hands of her captors.
Her feet barely touched the ground as they moved her; it appeared as though she was so limp that the guards were carrying most of her weight.
It was easy to sense—with the dimness that weighed on the girl’s usually bright, vibrant aura—that the Elder Witches had somehow managed to bind her Powers, knowing that if she were to have access to her Magic she could have easily brought an end to every being present with no more than a flick of her wrist.
The guards brought the small girl to the centre of the hall where a wooden stake awaited her. One of the men held her upright, keeping her back pressed against the wood, as the other tied ropes around her to hold her in place.
As they let her go, her body slumped forward slightly. She was so weak and powerless that she would barely notice what was happening until the pain became too much for her to bear.
Atropos felt a cold rage swarm through her veins, causing her stomach to turn with revulsion at what she was witnessing. Making her more furious with herself for not having enough Power to stop it.
The girl was no more than an innocent victim, caught in the middle of a war.
She gripped her ancient scissors so tightly it almost sliced through her hand.
Atropos felt a soft brush against the fingers that gripped the scissors. She looked down to find a hand holding onto hers. “Do not stain the scissors with your blood,” whispered Clotho. Atropos looked at her sister, seeing in her eyes the same guilt and sadness that she felt within herself.
She turned towards Lachesis who was staring straight ahead with unseeing eyes. “This isn’t right,” Atropos mumbled, fearing the repercussions if anyone else should hear her objection to these murders.
“There’s nothing to be done,” Lachesis said. Her voice cold and unfeeling. “Fate has been sealed. The prophecy has been written.”
A shiver ran down Atropos’ spine, making her stomach feel sick. She turned to find the source of her discomfort . . . and there he was.
The cloaked figure in the corner of the room.
A faceless evil shrouded in darkness with shadows seeping out of every pore.
The cause of all of the chaos, all of the bloodshed, was him.
There was a crash from outside the hall. A murmur of confusion swept through the crowd.
Atropos looked towards the door where she saw two more guards dragging with them a man who was struggling with all his strength to escape. His wrists were bound with chains, his face bloody and bruised.
Another innocent soul that had been sentenced to death.
“Don’t!” he cried out as he looked up and saw the girl tied to the stake. He attempted to run forward but was pulled back by the guards who were keeping him chained. “Don’t hurt her! Please! She’s done nothing to you!”
“Why has he not been spelled into silence?” asked one of the Elder Witches, the first time any of them had made a sound since entering the room.
The guards looked to one another, trying to decide which of them should answer. After a momentary pause the one to the left answered, “He spat the potion out. We couldn’t get him to keep it down.”
The Elder Witch stared at the guard for a moment, appearing pe
rsonally insulted by his incompetence. She turned to look at the man who was still struggling for his freedom. She sighed in boredom and waved her hand in his direction, sending out a current of energy which subdued the man, causing him to fall into unconsciousness.
“Bring the others in quickly!” ordered the Elder Witch in impatience.
The guards tied the now unconscious man to a second stake as more of the Elder Witches’ guards came into the room. Each pair with their own semi-conscious person.
In total there were thirteen stakes and thirteen victims. Each one innocent of any crime.
The room filled with an orange glow and a wave of heat surged through the hall as the fires were started.
Atropos turned her face away, not wanting the image of the burning bodies to be forever seared into her mind. She took a breath to calm her shaking hands and began cutting threads.
CHAPTER 1
Sam stood on the dewy grass of her backyard and turned her face upwards. She breathed in a gulp of the cold fresh air and watched as the grey sky of Abrams Place gave way to a sheet of darker grey.
The sun was setting invisibly again, the same way it had risen this morning. As she watched colourless swirls float through the already dull sky, she wished that she could see the colours of the sunset.
Especially now, considering it would have been the last time she would see them.
Sam closed her eyes and let the raindrops wet her eyelashes and run down her face, using the droplets of rain as a substitute for her tears.
Given Sam’s life, crying would have been something good, especially after everything that had happened.
Tears are supposed to be a way of evacuating your soul of the unnecessary clutter of feelings that would do you no good to hold onto. When you can’t cry your feelings out of your body, it’s for one reason.
You’re broken.
Sam believed that her inability to cry was some sort of punishment. Some people may think that not being able to cry would be great; if you can’t cry you must be happy all the time.
Those people are wrong.
If you can’t cry your bad feelings out it leaves them trapped inside your body. Slowly filling you up with nothing but pain and there’s not a thing you can do to make it stop. The tears that can’t come out drown you on the inside until eventually you can’t feel anything at all.
Sad things don’t seem sad.
Happy things don’t seem happy.
Even things that should piss you off leave you feeling nothing.
Sam’s inability to cry made everything seem futile. She was empty of every feeling but guilt.
One of the many curses that she had been plagued with.
For Sam death was an option. An option that she had thought about more times than any rational person should.
But she couldn’t help those thoughts, which floated through her mind like a dark cloud, every time another person died because she was too stubborn to just let herself die.
She couldn’t help thinking that this time she would just end it all. Who knew how many people she could save by just doing it.
So do it, she told herself. It will be easy, painless. Sam looked at the potion she held in her hand, a quick and simple solution. All she had to do was drink.
Sam brought the vial to her lips. The liquid smelled of raspberries. She had made herself a sweet poison, one that would be easy to swallow and would have painless effects.
She would fall asleep, her pulse would slow, as would her breath, until they both ceased entirely.
It will be easy, she told herself and closed her eyes.
She parted her lips to drink the potion, when the vial flew out of her hand and into a tree on the other end of the backyard. Sam opened her eyes and watched as the vial smashed into dozens of sparkling shards, sending the potion inside splashing out like tiny droplets of raspberry rain.
“Did you really think I was going to let you go through with that?” Jack asked rhetorically as he materialised next to her.
Sam was tall for a girl, about five ten in height. Which meant that most people were either the same height as her, significantly smaller, or only slightly taller.
But Jack, he was a lot taller than her, larger in both height and general size which made him practically giant for a man. He had blonde hair, a few shades darker than hers, unusually blue eyes and tanned skin covered in the blood-coloured marks of a Hunter. He looked to be somewhere in his mid to late twenties, but Sam had no idea what age he really was, or anything about him really.
All she knew was that he had been a Hunter, he was Scottish, he was dead, he was a Ghost and for some unfathomable reason he—of all the dead people in the universe—had been assigned to protect her from everyone in the world who wished her harm.
Jack wasn’t the sort of person to volunteer information about himself—all of the things she knew where things she had learned through observation—and whenever Sam asked him a question, he’d respond vaguely with a non-answer and if she pushed he would go on about ‘the rules’ insisting that there were some things he was forbidden to speak out loud.
He’d been with her for so long now though that the answers she had once needed no longer seemed important. Through the years they’d known each other she’d learned the important things.
Like the fact that he loved her beyond all comprehension and that he was fully committed to keeping Sam safe and alive.
And a lot of the time he was more committed to those goals than she was.
He was her ghostly guardian, protecting her from beyond the grave. He had been keeping her safe for her whole life, and right now she could see the worry plain on his face.
“The world would be better off without me,” she mumbled. “If I had done it sooner then everyone would still be alive.”
“No they wouldn’t,” Jack said surely. “People die because it’s their time to go. It has nothing to do with you.”
Sam sighed. There was no point arguing with Jack, as there was no way he could every really understand and she didn’t really feel like explaining.
“Whatever,” she grumbled as she turned her back to him and walked inside.
The moment the back door closed behind her, she heard a bang coming from the living room. For a moment Sam just stood there. She looked behind her to see where Jack was, her immediate thought being that he has to be the one making noises. But he was standing outside, the same place he had been when she came inside. She could see him through the kitchen window. He stood with his back to her looking up at the sky, or perhaps at something he could see and she could not.
Bang.
Sam looked towards the door in confusion and slowly walked out of the kitchen and through the hallway.
Bang.
She reached the doorway to the living room just in time to see a book fall from the shelves to the floor where two other books were lying. Jack appeared beside her. She turned to him. “Did you do that?” she asked accusingly.
“Go to the library,” Jack said while staring straight ahead, his eyes seeming slightly unfocused as he spoke. “They’re due back today.”
Sam stormed into the living room and picked the books up off the floor. Opening the cover on the first one to check the date stamp inside. Jack was right. She studied the books in confusion. “Didn’t I take these back two weeks ago?”
He looked to her and shrugged, his expression seeming just as confused as hers. “Obviously not.”
CHAPTER 2
Sam walked through the library’s wrought iron gates which squealed piercingly as they opened.
The library was the oldest building in town. From the outside it looked like an old Gothic church. It was made of a grey stone and had a steeple on top with a clock that had been added back in sixteen-twelve. It had arched windows and a giant arched door that was about ten feet tall and six feet wide.
People from outside of town often mistook the library for the church. But the town’s only chur
ch wasn’t built until eighteen-oh-six when the first outsiders moved in and began to question the town’s lack of religious establishment.
Sam walked towards the large doors with Jack strolling along behind her. She checked the clock on the library’s steeple; it was just about to turn six. She paused at the door for just a moment and swiftly turned her gaze behind, glaring out at the small empty road beyond the gates. Without having to look, she was fully aware that Jack was watching her; she could feel his eyes glaring into her from where he stood.
“What is it?” he asked.
It was July, but despite the fact that it was summer the sky was a dull murky grey, the sort of colour it turned when the rain had stopped, but the clouds had not yet dissipated and behind them the sun burned as it set, tinting the grey clouds brown with its glow.
But there was nothing unusual about the weather, or the fact that the streets surrounding the library were empty in summertime, which was why it was strange that, despite the vacant street, and the overall normality of the world as it seemed right now, Sam couldn’t help the stirring within her that made her feel as though there was something to be seen from where she now stood.
Yet no matter how long she stared, all her eyes saw was the normality and her brain told her there was nothing to be seen, despite a small voice within her screaming to the contrary.
With a sigh, she shook her head in response to Jack’s question and pushed the heavy wooden doors open.
The inside of the library, as always, was warm and welcoming and held the scent of books, both old and new.
She walked inside, her boots making a slight click on the white marble floors. Slowly she made her way towards the librarian’s desk where Michelle—the librarian—slept with her head resting atop a pile of books.
Sam tapped lightly on her shoulder in a feeble attempt to wake the sleeping woman. Michelle sighed in her sleep, but didn’t rouse.