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  “I’m fine.” My voice sounded strange to my ears, muted and sort of lifeless. “What’s going on?”

  A muscle in Dax’s jaw jumped, and his eyes were pure molten fury. He half-turned toward Althea as he answered me. “We’re leaving.” His arm was solid around my shoulders, his hand clamped into the top of my arm.

  Althea crossed her spindle thin arms across her chest and stared at him, her pale eyes unwavering. “I wouldn’t advise that. We haven’t finished our discussion.”

  Oscar shot him a warning look and then turned to Althea. “Perhaps it’d be wise to explain what we walked in on, Althea. Augustine—”

  “Attacked Cara. It was at my bidding.” She said this as if she was saying she’d asked him to provide me with extra towels. There was no hint of remorse or even indignation—there was nothing.

  Dax stood. His fists were balled at his sides, and they were steaming. “Why?”

  “To see precisely how you’d react. You’ve promised that you two won’t take any more steps to endanger the peace within our world, and yet, you seem willing to destroy anyone who comes near her.”

  “He was trying to take her soul.” Dax’s voice was quiet, but his words were a snarl. The menace and anger sizzled just underneath. “You put her in this room with a secret entrance through the bathroom. You were aware of his intentions.”

  My heart raced. Augustine had been trying to take my soul? Is that why I’d felt what I’d felt—so utterly empty? A shudder ripped through me, goosebumps sprouting on every inch of my skin. What if he’d succeeded? What would have happened to me?

  “It was a ruse. He wasn’t really going to complete the process.” Althea’s tone was complacent. I wondered if she was telling the truth, or if she was just a good liar. “To see how far you’d go, Dax. And it seems you’d take on the Astaroth to protect your betrothed.”

  Dax didn’t answer. There was no point in denying her words. Of course she was right; that much was plain to see. Dax would cut down anyone who stood between him and me without a thought to the consequences.

  “Now don’t misunderstand,” Althea continued, walking to the night table and absently picking up a little trinket box. “I do see why someone in your position might respond that way, Dax, especially after the unfortunate incident with Charlotte.”

  Confused, I glanced at Dax. His expression was stony, but there was fire in his eyes. His fists continued to steam.

  “That was more than a century ago,” Oscar interrupted, his voice cold.

  “Yes, yes, but that sort of thing tends to stay with one, does it not?” She set the trinket box down and sighed. “Nevertheless, our determination is this: we shall not interfere with the decision of the clan in Louisiana. As far as we’re concerned, you should not have acted as you did when the hound attacked Cara. And the clan is rather small—too small, we believe, to pose an actual threat to us. Of course, we will continue to monitor them.”

  The other matter is that of your betrothal. If you and Cara attempt to consummate your betrothal in any way except the acceptable way”—she looked from Dax to me to Oscar—“we will not be merciful. Your clan and Cara Beaumont’s family will be wiped out unhesitatingly. Is that clear?”

  I marveled at how she was able to make these cold threats without a change of tone.

  “Yes. It’s clear.” Oscar answered for Dax because it was apparent Dax was too angry to be acceptably docile. “And now, with your permission, we’d like to leave.”

  Althea smiled. “Certainly. Unless you’d like to stay for tea. The sun’s coming up.”

  “No, thank you,” Oscar replied.

  “Very well.” Althea swept out of the room with Augustine and Maximus close behind. Augustine didn’t even pause to give me a second look, as if it had been someone else who’d tried to take the very essence of my being.

  Oscar came up to me and took my hands in his while Dax watched, hovering protectively. “Are you all right, my dear?”

  I nodded, but my chin trembled as my eyes filled.

  Dax sat beside me and pulled me into his lap. We stayed that way for a long time, until I was ready to move again.

  Dax supported most of my weight as we made our way to his room. Oscar had already radioed the bush pilot, Freddy, and he was on his way.

  I was amazed at just how weak I was. I was still freezing, my teeth chattering so hard my vision blurred. Dax wrapped me up in a blanket and put his arms around me as Oscar bustled off to my room to finish packing for me.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “Augustine entered your room through the bathroom. There was a door hidden behind that floor-length mirror.”

  “It’s n-not your fault,” I said, trying to think warm thoughts, to let Dax’s heat seep into my bones. “How did y-you know?”

  “That he was in there with you?”

  I nodded.

  He pressed me to his chest and kissed my forehead, branding my skin with his lips. “I felt it. I felt that something was very, very wrong. A wave of sickness came over me; it was staggering. I pushed the door open to check on you—I thought maybe you were ill. But then…” He stopped. I heard him swallow and breathe in and out slowly. “Then I saw him on top of you. I saw him and I knew immediately what he was doing.”

  I shuddered, but not from the cold this time. “Thank you,” I whispered.

  He chuckled, but there was no joy in it. “You forget that if it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t even be in this situation.”

  I was silent for a little while, refusing to acknowledge his statement. Finally, I remembered what I’d wanted to ask. “Dax?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Who’s Charlotte?”

  All of his muscles tensed underneath me. “Charlotte was someone I knew a very long time ago. She… she died.”

  I could hear how much pain it caused him to talk about her, so I didn’t press the issue in spite of the stab of jealousy I felt. Instead, I asked, “What are we going to do about what Althea said?” I couldn’t imagine going a lifetime without being allowed to so much as move in with Dax, without going any further in our relationship.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “I don’t know.”

  Freddy picked us up right on time, and the plane ride back to his office in Resolute was uneventful. When we were back in Oscar’s car, I checked my cell phone messages while Dax and Oscar discussed the meeting with the Astaroth. I knew I should pay attention, but I was waiting on a phone call. My voicemail box was empty, and I had no new text messages. I frowned.

  It was Sunday, which meant James had had his meeting with his Captain yesterday. I’d specifically asked him to text or call me the moment he knew more about his new assignment. He’d been chosen to be a part of an elite team of soldiers in the National Guard, something that just didn’t sit right with me for a reason I couldn’t put my finger on. James had promised to give me an update even if he had to leave me a message while I was gone, but he hadn’t gotten back to me yet. It was totally unlike James to forget or renege on a promise, and I couldn’t help the little barbs of alarm that were going off in my head.

  I kept trying and re-trying his number on our drive home, but it just rolled over to voicemail every time.

  Dax stroked my hair. “Still no answer?”

  “No, nothing.” I chewed on my lip, glaring at the screen of my phone as if I could will it to connect with James’s.

  He always answered his cell phone. Always. And for his silence to come now, right when he’d said he was going to find out more about the classified, elite team… Something wasn’t right.

  On my seventh try, someone picked up. They didn’t say anything, but there was a silence on the line and his voicemail didn’t come on. I clutched the phone tight and sat up straighter. “Hello? James?” No reply. “James? This is Cara. Can you hear me?”

  More silence.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s in your best interests to cut off all ties with him,” said a voice. It sounded mechanical, almo
st like a pre-recorded, robotic message. “James Spellman has ceased to exist.”

  And the line went dead.

  THANK YOU!

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  IPPY award-winning author S.K. Falls likes to believe a degree in psychology qualifies her to emotionally torture her characters in an authentic fashion. When she isn’t writing her twisted love stories, she can be found gallivanting around Charleston, SC with her family.

  Visit her on the web at www.skfalls.com or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/authorskfalls

  Read on for an excerpt from book 2!

  FEVERED SOULS BOOK 2

  Your friend is your needs answered.

  He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.

  And he is your board and your fireside.

  For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace […]

  And when he is silent your heart ceases not to listen to his heart […]

  When you part from your friend, you grieve not;

  For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

  - Friendship IXX, by Khalil Gibran

  EMPTY

  I could barely keep myself in Dax’s car until it had come to a complete stop. Unbuckling my seat belt, I opened the door and hopped out, racing toward James's front door.

  His house was a small, squat ranch-style affair with thick bushes lining the front yard. I raced up the few stairs to the wooden porch, and knocked on the door and rang the doorbell simultaneously. I was aware in the vaguest sense that Dax was right behind me, his incredible heat shielding me from the winter. It was afternoon in Eden, but the sun's rays, muted through the clouds, provided barely any warmth.

  Oscar, Dax, and I had just got back from our journey to Ellesmere Island in rural Canada, where we’d been visiting the Astaroth—judges of the demon world. We’d dropped off Oscar at the mansion before coming here to James’s. I’d barely been able to tolerate the wait, though both Dax and Oscar drove much faster than the speed limit. The past few days had been some of the most terrifying and stressful of my entire life.

  Not only had one of the Astaroth guards tried to take my soul, but the Astaroth had also refused to help us defend against Marion's clan's upcoming attack. And as if that wasn’t enough, I'd had an eerie, heart-stopping conversation with someone who'd answered James's cell phone.

  I’d called him because he had been strangely silent over the weekend. He’d promised to let me know how his meeting with Captain Reubens had gone, so I knew something had to have gone wrong. James would never go back on a promise, especially not when he knew how worried I was about him joining Reubens’s “elite team” of soldiers.

  "James!" I kept knocking and ringing the doorbell, but no one answered. The inside of the house looked dark, but with the blinds down, I couldn't see anything. Feeling more and more hysterical, I jiggled the doorknob—locked.

  "Here." Dax's hand was gentle on my shoulder. "May I?"

  I stepped aside, blinking back tears. James was the only friend I had in Eden; the only person who'd pushed past the barrier I'd erected. Besides Dax, of course, but he and I were fated soul mates—our connection existed on another level. James had made an effort to get to know me, and when he realized that his crush couldn’t go anywhere because I was in love with Dax, he still stuck with me because he genuinely enjoyed my company. I hadn’t ever had a friend like him.

  With a quick twist of his wrist, Dax opened the locked door. He stepped into James's darkened living room and stood silently for a moment before turning on the lights. "It's empty."

  I trusted his super senses, but I wasn't ready to leave yet. There had to be something to be gleaned from in here. "Maybe his room’ll give us a clue about where he is." I walked toward the back of the house, looking for James’s bedroom. Though I'd dropped him off a few times after Kendo practices, I hadn’t actually been inside his house before. Seeing all his furniture and material possessions sitting in the dark made his disappearance seem too real, too ominous. I forced myself to focus on the task at hand as I stepped into a tiny room off to my right.

  I turned on the light and looked around his tiny room; my eyes immediately settled on his computer. That'd be a good place to start.

  I fired it up with Dax looking over my shoulder. Thankfully, there wasn’t a password to input, so accessing his documents wasn’t a problem. On his desktop I found a folder titled Personal and opened it up. When I sorted the documents by date, files that James had scanned only a week ago appeared at the very top. My heart racing, hope pushing painfully against my chest, I double-clicked to open them.

  They were consent forms from a company called E.M.T. Labs. They’d wanted James's permission to do MRIs, PET scans, EEGs, EKGs, and a host of other tests I'd never even heard of. I frowned at the screen. What was the point of all of these? And was E.M.T. Labs related to the elite team that Captain Reubens had wanted James to join? The timing was too coincidental; I’d bet anything the two were connected.

  "That's a type of genetic testing, I think." Dax pointed to a scramble of acronyms in the list.

  I turned in my chair to face him. "What kind of genetic testing?"

  "I don't know." He thought for a minute. "But I have an idea of who would."

  Did you enjoy this excerpt?

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  Paranormal Romance:

  Fevered Souls Book 2

  Fevered Souls Book 3

  Fevered Souls Book 4

  Other Realm, Book 1

  Dystopian:

  World of Shell and Bone (Glimpsing Stars, book 1)

  Moon (Glimpsing Stars, book 1.5)

  Land of Masks and Moonlight (Glimpsing Stars, book 2)

  Copyright

  Episode 1

  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

  Episode 2

  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

  Episode 3

  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

  Episode 4

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Ch
apter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Episode 5

  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

  Thank you!

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  About the Author

  Sneak Peak

  Also by S.K. Falls