The Chosen Soul, no. 1, page 1
The Chosen Soul
Book one in the Chosen Soul Trilogy
by Heather Killough-Walden
Copyright 2009 Heather Killough-Walden
Smashwords Edition
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Heather Killough-Walden Reading List
The Lost Angels series:
Always Angel (eBook-only introductory novella)
Avenger's Angel
Messenger's Angel
Death's Angel
Warrior's Angel (release date TBA)
Samael (release date TBA)
The October Trilogy:
Sam I Am
Secretly Sam
Suddenly Sam (October 1, 2013)
Neverland Trilogy:
Forever Neverland
Beyond Neverland (release date TBA)
Never Neverland (release date TBA)
The Big Bad Wolf series:
The Heat (no longer available separately - purchase in the Big Bad Wolf Romance Compilation)
The Strip (no longer available separately - purchase in the Big Bad Wolf Romance Compilation)
The Spell
The Hunt
The Big Bad Wolf Romance Compilation (all four books together, in proper chronological order)
The Kings - A Big Bad Wolf spinoff series:
The Vampire King
The Phantom King
The Warlock King
(future The Kings books TBA; at least 13 total)
The Chosen Soul Trilogy:
The Chosen Soul
Drake of Tanith
Queen of Abaddon (release date TBA; 2013)
Redeemer (stand-alone)
Hell Bent (stand-alone)
Vampire, Vampire (stand-alone)
A Sinister Game (stand-alone)
The Third Kiss series:
Dorian's Dream (release date TBA)
Aleksei's Dream (release date TBA)
(future The Third Kiss books TBA; open-ended series)
Note: The Lost Angels series (not including Always Angel) is available in print and eBook format. All other HKW books are currently eBook-only.
The Chosen Soul
By Heather Killough-Walden
Book one in the Chosen Soul Trilogy
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Chapter One - The Chosen Soul
The woman’s screams were coming from inside of the small cottage. He paused before the wooden door and listened. Despite the raging storm around him, he could make out every whimper, every word whispered in agonized panic. Her voice had been worn ragged; she had been crying out in painful desperation for several hours.
He listened for a moment more and then knocked on the door.
Tortured wails continued from the other side, but within a few seconds, the door creaked open and a haggard looking man of indeterminate age peered back at him from the cottage’s candlelit interior.
The screams were much louder with the door open, and they poured out into the rain-soaked night like curses, mingling with the rising fog over the muddy streets.
“Yes?” the man asked, his brow furrowed. Dark circles beneath his eyes made his face appear hollow. He stood on the threshold with the hunched shoulders of a man who has not known sleep in some time.
“I request shelter from the storm, brother. My horse can no longer carry me. The roads are flooding and have become unsafe. I can tell that this is a bad time,” the stranger continued, with a glance over the man’s shoulder toward the hall from where the woman’s desperate pleas could be heard, “and I would not otherwise impose.” The stranger’s voice was smooth and placating.
The man stared out at him for a moment, his eyes glazed and tired. And then he jumped as another shriek tore through the night, jolting him out of his temporary daze.
“I’m sorry. Come in. Please have a seat. Forgive me,” he said, his voice rough with fatigue. “I can’t see to your further comfort this night. My wife is birthing our first child.”
The stranger sat at the table, nodded and waved at him with a placating gesture. “It is not a problem, brother. Go to your wife. I will just rest here.”
The man nodded and was turning around when a short and stout woman dressed in a white apron and bonnet approached hurriedly from the hall. “Master Alastair, boil the water. Your son is coming straight away. I’ll need those blankets I asked you for before. And the alcohol, where is it?” She stood with her hands on her hips, ignoring the stranger at the table as if she did not see him.
Alastair ran a hand through his hair and motioned for her to follow him into the small adjoining kitchen. Even as they moved, another piercing scream rang out from the back room. Conciliatory whispers followed after, indicating the presence of the midwife’s apprentices.
And then his wife was calling Alastair’s name. He bounded from the kitchen and disappeared down the hall, the newcomer at the table for the moment forgotten.
The stranger listened quietly as the laboring woman grunted under the pressure of the pushing that she could no longer deny.
Breathe and whimper, push and scream. Again and again, she repeated the suffering that was the torment of every mother. Until at last, when the apprehension in the house had grown to a nearly unbearable thickness, she screamed one final time and the sound was followed by that of a wailing infant.
Alastair laughed out loud and the midwife gently consoled the exhausted mother. The stranger remained unobtrusively quiet as the final munitions of child birth continued in the now much more peaceful back room.
However, the peace was short-lived.
In a few minutes, the stranger heard the mother cry out once again.
“Sarah, what is it?”
“No… Anna, something is wrong!” came the anguished reply of the new mother.
“Darling, what is wrong?” the man asked his wife. “What is happening?” he asked again, this time obviously directing his question at the midwife.
The mother screamed once more.
“Oh, by the gods…. There is another. Another child. She is having twins!”
This time the woman’s piercing howl split the night as none of her other cries had.
In the dining room, the stranger’s lips curled into a smile.
*****
The Sage Keeper of the Spring peered down into the swirling depths of the fount that he had been sworn to protect since he was a mere twenty years of age. Tonight, the pain in his old bones and joints was temporarily forgotten. All that mattered was the small black space of emptiness that now swirled along with the whiteness in the vast expanse below.
This was very bad.
The theft had occurred during Twilight, when the line between day and night was blurred and all of those who lived in the shadows, flanked by existence and fantasy, animated for the length of a thousand heartbeats and wreaked havoc on an unsuspecting world. At a time when he and the other Keepers should have been most vigilant, they had instead been overwhelmed by the sudden storm, bullied by unforeseen torrential rains and whipping winds into fortifying the Keep in any way that they could.
At some point between leading spooked horses into the covered stables and reinforcing the moat wall with bags of sand, he had realized that every Keeper within the ancient citadel was now preoccupied with fighting the storm. The Spring had been left unattended.
He had realized it too late.
In that brief lapse of vigilance, someone had entered the Spring’s Sanctum and done exactly that which its Keepers had guarded against for thousands upon thousands of years.
A soul had been stolen. And as the Sage gazed down at the darkness where its light had once been, he came to yet another grave conclusion. The soul chosen had been the oldest, brightest, most beautiful and powerful spirit within the Spring. Its absence actually seemed to vex the spirits that now swirled around the emptiness left behind. While he watched, this troubling unease spread throughout the Spring like a ripple upon the once calm surface of a glassy lake. The souls no longer swam in a seamless spiral. Instead, a few darted out of their normal paths like large, errant fireflies and some actually appeared to be confused as to which way to go.
The Sage Keeper gravely shook his head.
*****
Alastair Grey had never been so frightened. In his youth, he had been stabbed in the gut by a nervous mercenary when the caravan he was traveling with had been waylaid by thieves. He had been scared then. He remembered the fear of an end to life, to existence; a blackness that no one, as of yet, had managed to return from. He recalled the fear of losing everything – everything he felt and heard and tasted and owned. That was what the fear of death was like; it was a realization that you would never know anything ever again, and it was mortifying.
But he was more frightened now; perhaps because he was older, perchance a touch wiser, or maybe it was because he had so very much more to lose. The fear gripped him like a vise, squeezing his lungs till he could hardly breathe, causing his vision to tunnel inward even as he fought to regain control over his emotions.
He gazed down at his wife, at her tear-stained face, her parched and bleeding lips, and the pain in her green eyes that stabbed through his chest as surely as any mercenary’s blade ever had. She squeezed his large hand in hers as the midwife’s apprentices bustled around her prone form.
The midwife herself remained at the foot of the bed, her capable arms beneath the modesty blanket. Alastair watched as the adept woman felt inside of his wife’s belly, her expression more grim with each passing second.
Finally she straightened, and her bright, age-lined eyes peered up at him. The expression on the elder woman’s face was beyond disconcerting.
“She’s breached,” she said gently. “The cord has wrapped around her neck. It’ll take some work to unwind, but we may not have the time. Sarah’s contractions are coming harder and faster now. Each one constricts the child’s airways a little more. She has been without deep breath for too long already.”
Alastair stared at the woman. A strange kind of numbness had seeped into his limbs. His hearing came and went and he wasn’t certain he’d understood her correctly. He felt the blood drain from his face. “What are you saying, Anna?”
“I’m sorry, Alastair. I may not be able to save your daughter, and Sarah’s life is now in danger as well – ” Her reply was cut off as Sarah screamed yet again, the contraction visibly tightening her swollen belly and ripping a guttural cry of agony from somewhere deep inside of her.
Alastair’s cry of despair joined hers and he was instantly kneeling by the side of the bed, his wife’s hand clutched so tightly in his that he could no longer feel his fingers.
“What must we do? We’ll do anything – anything! Tell me what to get for you! “What do you need?” he continued. “Help her, Anna. Save my child! Save my wife!”
Anna moved from her position at the foot of the bed to stand by his bent and shaking form. She placed one hand gently on his shoulder and squeezed. “Master Alastair, right now you must allow me to work. Leave the room and have faith in the gods. I will do all that I can. I promise.” She spoke as gently, as persuasively as she could, but even so, he heard only half of what she said.
Somehow, he managed to rise. His numb fingers loosened their grip on his wife’s hand and as her arm dropped back onto the sweat-soaked mattress, he stepped away. He moved automatically, torpidly, without real knowledge of what he was doing or where he was going. In a few moments, he found himself in the hallway.
Behind him, seemingly in the far distance, could be heard the sound of a woman issuing orders, her method precise and practiced. And in an even further distance was the sound of another woman crying, weeping and shrieking, all hope gone from her wretched sobs.
Alastair entered the living room, his eyes downcast, his gaze unseeing.
The stranger watched him for a moment and then spoke. “I can help you.”
Alastair glanced up. His gaze focused and he blinked, remembering the man in black travel clothes that he had let into the house earlier that horrible night.
The man smiled gently. “I can help you, Alastair Grey. Both of your children can be born this night. Your wife can live many more years. You can be happy.”
Alastair blinked again. “What?” he asked, not understanding. What was the man saying? What was he offering? What could he possibly do that the midwife could not?
“Allow me to help and all will be well.” The stranger stood, one slow fluid motion, and Alastair noticed for the first time that he was very tall. Long blue-black hair fell in waves past the stranger’s shoulders. His skin was so fair that it seemed nearly translucent. His eyes were the bluest that Alastair had ever seen. They shone and glittered in stark contrast against the pale tint of the stranger’s face. Alastair’s brow furrowed. How had he not noticed that before?
The stranger moved around the table and came to stand before him. His tall figure towered over Alastair, but Alastair held his ground.
The stranger had said he could help. Alastair tensed as another cry rang out from their master bedroom. “What can you do?” he asked, his tone determined.
The stranger smiled. “Tell the midwife to step aside. She is of no further use to you. Allow me to see to your wife.”
Alastair stood stock still through yet another of his wife’s horrid agonizing wails and then backed up a step. He nodded resolutely and turned down the hall. The stranger followed silently behind him.
When they entered the room, the midwife glanced up, and her gaze fell upon the stranger’s form. She froze in place, her eyes widening.
“Anna, he is here to help. Please move and allow him to see to Sarah.”
The older woman shook her head once, but Alastair’s raised voice cut off her protests. “Now, Anna! Sarah does not have the time that you are wasting!”
In stunned silence, the midwife stepped back from the foot of the bed and was joined against the far wall by her two apprentices. The stranger moved to the side of the bed.
Sarah gazed up at him. Apprehension and exhaustion warred with each other in her green eyes. The stranger smiled at her and it was a kind smile. She blinked. He was beautiful, somehow; dark and otherworldly. The room seemed to melt around them and time slowed to the point of stopping.
He spoke, and when he did, it was as if he spoke to her alone.
“Can you feel her dying?” he said in a hushed tone, but the sound was louder, clearer than anything Sarah had ever heard.
She did not answer. The pain in her abdomen receded, leaving behind a heavy, deadened sensation. The fear that rode her system was paralyzing, and the blue fire that leapt in the stranger’s eyes held her mesmerized.
“Your daughter’s life slips away Sarah, as does your own. But I can save you both. Will you let me save you, Sarah?” he asked softly.
She nodded. She would do anything to save her child.
The man’s smile broadened. He rested a gentle hand on her stomach and closed his eyes. Sarah stared as a strange bluish light grew, pulsing steadily, beneath his palm. She could feel its heat radiating through her skin and into her swollen abdomen. It was warm, like a campfire in winter or a blanket at midnight, and Sarah closed her eyes. Little by little its warmth melted away her fear. Sarah felt a small kick in her belly as that warmth reached its mark. An unanticipated peace began to fill her middle, spreading outward over her entire body until every inch of her no longer hurt but felt, instead, light and strong.
The stranger removed his hand at last, and Sarah opened her eyes. There was new life within her. She could sense the baby’s little heart beating, feel her tiny lungs breathing.
Time sped up once again and the stranger moved back just as the midwife once more stepped forward, a sharp retort on her tongue. This time he stepped away from the bed, allowing the older woman to do what she felt she needed to do. Alastair looked from the stranger to his wife and then hurriedly knelt once again at her side as another contraction tightened her belly.
Sarah gritted her teeth against the expected pain, but it hurt far less than it had only moments before. She pushed when the midwife told her to push, and her eyes, no longer clouded with agony, glanced up. Her gaze locked with that of the blue-eyed stranger.
He nodded at her once and turned, silently leaving the room. His long black cloak billowed out behind him.
Sarah took a deep breath and pushed one last time as the midwife leaned on her swollen belly and, quite suddenly, like the break of dawn at the end of a truly horrid night, an infant’s cry rang out through the darkness.
