Soul Weaver by Hailey Edwards Read Free Book Online Page B

did you say you’re tired of dying?”
    “Because you’ve killed me every night since—”
    “—the accident.” He completed her thought and lapsed into stunned silence.
    She burrowed into the blanket until only the crown of her head remained visible. He reached out to stroke her hair, amazed to feel the gentle waves fanned across the seat cushion.
    Though his pendant enabled his physical form to hold on to spiritual matter once freed from its host, the spiritual should only ever contact the spiritual. In this form, he shouldn’t have been able to touch her, yet he could. The caress soothed him, another unexpected facet of their bond.
    What horrors she must have witnessed. All because he hadn’t let her soul follow its charted course.
    Now what to do? Whether natural order, his tarnished soul, or a higher power was to blame, her end had come.
    If Nathaniel didn’t collect her soul, Delphi would throw him into the hottest pit in Hell and pass her collection to the next harvester.
    Bran was also a consideration of Nathaniel’s, because Bran’s mortal half put his soul in as much jeopardy as hers had been. Nathaniel acted as his tether, and love for his nephew promised Bran’s soul the journey home his would never make again.
    “Still here?” Her words slurred from sleep. Their bond hummed between them, unbroken by her death.
    “For a few more minutes.” He reached for her again, caught himself, and dropped his hand. He remembered her skin as soft and cold, but now it glowed warm from sleep.
    Before he gave in to temptation, to touch, he donned his pendant and left her to the peaceful dreams he owed her.
    His life, and her death, had just gotten more complicated.

Chapter Six
    The vague recollection of something peculiar about last night drifted along the edge of Chloe’s thoughts. Her dream had been different somehow, but the one time she wanted to recall the details, they were hazy.
    She’d fallen asleep with her book in hand, and the same awareness of being in a dream had blanketed her. A small taste remained of the usual death and violence, but she’d also dreamed about sorrow. She’d woken lonely, aching from the loss of something she couldn’t put a name to.
    As if she had found something she’d been searching for, and the rush of relief, belonging, was heady. Then she awakened to the same empty bed, in the same room from her childhood, and whatever she imagined she had found proved as insubstantial, as elusive, as always.
    She gave in with a sigh. She lacked the time to overanalyze this morning. Besides, this dream would give her something new to tell her therapist. She could imagine how that session would go.
    She could imagine Dr. Carmichael smiling at her coolly. “Has anything changed since your last appointment, Chloe?”
    “It’s odd you should ask. That nightmare man I’ve been dreaming about? You know, the one who tortures me the second my eyes close? Well, it’s like this… I don’t think he’s all bad. I think what he’s doing makes him sad, and he takes that out on me. What do you think about that?”
    Yeah. Dr. Carmichael would have a field day with her diagnosis—a patient who experienced Stockholm syndrome with the voice inside her head.
    But the man of her nightmares seemed so real, so terrifyingly there . Shoving a hand in her pocket, she took comfort from the sliver of pill wedged in the bottom seam. The grainy remains of the other half still soured her tongue, but it was progress. Half was better than whole.
    Her dreams might spin out of her control, but she would master her waking hours. The accident had made her aware of how fleeting life was, and she wanted to live hers to the fullest. She wanted to be a glass-half-full kind of person. An optimistic, embrace-the-moment kind of woman her father would be proud of, instead of one who wore her smile like a shield and hid behind it. It would take time for her to work her glass up to full from, well, empty, but she would get