Immortal Souls (The Immortal Souls: Magic & Chaos)

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."