The jasper soul, p.1
The Jasper Soul, page 1
Table of Contents
Books By Bailey Bradford
Title Page
Legal Page
Book Description
Dedication
Trademark Acknowledgements
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Epilogue
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About the Publisher
About the Author
Pride Publishing books by Bailey Bradford
Single Books
Breaking the Devil
Dark Nights and Headlights
Texas and Tarantulas
Belt Buckles and Cowboy Boots
Something Shattered
Yes, Forever
Southwestern Shifters
Rescued
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Reckless
Rendered
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Reverence
Revolution
Revenge
Reluctance
Renounced
Retrograde
Southern Spirits
A Subtle Breeze
When the Dead Speak
All of the Voices
Wait Until Dawn
Aftermath
What Remains
Ascension
Whirlwind
Love in Xxchange
Rory’s Last Chance
Miles To Go
Bend
What Matters Most
Ex’s and O’s
A Bit of Me
A Bit of You
In My Arms Tonight
Where There’s a Will
My Heart to Keep
Leopard’s Spots
Levi
Oscar
Timothy
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Gilbert
Esau
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Wesley
Nischal
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Riding and Regrets
Broncs and Bullies
Hay and Heartbreak
Vaqueros and Vigilance
Spotless
Hide
Hunt
Home
Heart
Coyote’s Call
Off Course
In from the Cold
Blue Moon Rising
Valen’s Pack
Run with the Moon
Exodus
The Vamp for Me
My Life Without Garlic
Don’t Stake My Life on It
Sunshine is Overrated
Don’t Drink the Holy Water
The Trouble with Mirrors
That’s One Cross Vamp
City Shifters
Bearly There
Harey Situation
Mystic Tattoos
One Too Many
Power
Exchange
Submit
Dominate
Calendar Men
Mr. January
Mr. February
Mr. March
Mr. April
Mr. May
Mr. June
Mr. July
Mr. August
Mr September
Mr. October
Mr. November
Yes, Forever
Yes, Forever: Part One
Yes, Forever: Part Two
Yes, Forever: Part Three
Yes, Forever: Part Four
Yes, Forever: Part Five
Mossy Glenn Ranch
Chaps and Hope
Ropes and Dreams
Saddles and Memories
Fences and Freedom
Riding and Regrets
Broncs and Bullies
Hay and Heartbreak
Vaqueros and Vigilance
Anthologies
What’s his Passion?: Unexpected Places
What’s his Passion?: Unexpected Moments
Racing Hearts: The Lonely Ones
THE JASPER SOUL
BAILEY BRADFORD
The Jasper Soul
ISBN # 978-1-78651-736-4
©Copyright Bailey Bradford 2019
Cover Art by Erin Dameron-Hill ©Copyright April 2019
Interior text design by Claire Siemaszkiewicz
Pride Publishing
This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Pride Publishing.
Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Pride Publishing. Unauthorised or restricted acts in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.
The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.
Published in 2019 by Pride Publishing, United Kingdom.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors’ rights. Purchase only authorised copies.
Pride Publishing is an imprint of Totally Entwined Group Limited.
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book”.
THE JASPER SOUL
An ancient evil stalks the earth, seeking to finish what it started…
Matt Callaghan is pretty sure he’s just an average guy. His tragic past haunts him and the only comfort he finds is something he’s not willing to explain to anyone else. The jasper stone he found as a child has been with him for over half his life, and he can’t be parted from it.
There’s more to the stone than Matt knows. Thousands of years ago, one man, the last of his people, was cast into the stone, his soul protected when his body could not be saved.
The evil that hunted him is still alive, still waiting for a chance to destroy the jasper stone.
Dedication
Sometimes we trap ourselves with doubts and fears, pain that someone handed to us. It’s time to realize how valuable we are, how deserving we are of love and happiness.
Reach for it, search for it, claim it.
Trademark Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:
Google: Google, Inc
iPhone: Apple, Inc
It: Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
Notting Hill: Universal Pictures
The Princess Bride: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
The Wizard of Oz: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.
Uber: Uber Technologies Inc.
Vicks: The Procter & Gamble Company
Prologue
The very distant past
Andilun was dying. The wound from his side was bleeding heavily, and his life was slipping away, his heart beating and pushing it out in ever-slowing pumps.
His legs had long since quit burning. Running was something Andilun was used to doing, but the distance he’d traveled while trying to escape his enemy had been great.
And despite his best efforts, despite his pleas to the gods and goddesses for help, despite his calls to his ancestors, he was going to die today, and his enemy would win.
Evil would prevail. Andilun grunted as pain spread through his back. Another weapon pierced his skin, tearing into his flesh.
This was not how the world was supposed to end.
His people, his lineage, were to have prospered. Instead, he, the last of them, would die.
No one would sing of them or tell their stories on cave walls. Andilun’s siblings had been slaughtered in the past three full moons. Now, on the dawn of the fourth one, he would
Clutching the stone tight in his hand, Andilun suppressed tears that stung his eyes. Limbs and leaves hit and scratched him as he continued to run, though everything around him seemed to slow, as if time itself was ceasing.
But it was only ceasing for him. He stumbled and, when his knees hit the ground, taunted by the laughter that had haunted him and filled him with both hatred and fear for much of his life.
Andilun tried to turn, only to fall, agony white-hot as it seared through him. His heartbeat was loud in his ears, louder than the rush of water. Death’s grip was more real than the cool liquid his left hand was submerged in.
His vision went first. The face of the monster that had hunted and destroyed his kind flashed across his sight in a blur he couldn’t interpret.
The pain gave way to numbness, then a chilling cold unlike any Andilun had ever felt before. He clenched his left hand as the spirits called to him. Now he heard the gods and goddesses speak to him. Now his ancestors reached for him.
Andilun ignored the unfamiliar words coming from his killer. He focused on his people, his gods and goddesses as they pulled him into their arms. Joy filled him, all but one part of him where the anger and need for revenge would not be eradicated.
He held the stone tighter. At first he thought he was hallucinating the sensation of heat searing its way up from his palm to his forearm. It raced throughout the rest of his body and Andilun knew then this would not be the end after all—not of him. Something was happening and whatever it was, he’d survive.
He would be back, and when he returned, he would destroy the one who had sought to destroy him and his loved ones.
Chapter One
Rocks have always fascinated me. When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up to be a geologist. Every time I found a rock that interested me, I’d pick it up and take it home, then crack that sucker open with a hammer as soon as I got the chance. Despite a few injuries—I’ve got a couple of small scars on my cheeks and one on my chin from rock chips flying off as I banged away—I never stopped doing it.
But I didn’t become a geologist, or even go to college. Life happens, as the saying goes. That’s never used as a positive statement. It always indicates a rough or bad time in someone’s life, which was true for me. I had neither the money nor the grades to get into a decent college, and it seemed like too much work, when I’d stopped dreaming of a better life.
I didn’t want to go there right then. Instead, I just wanted to sit in the early morning sunlight streaming through the breakfast nook window and study the one rock I’d never been tempted to break.
Holding the piece of jasper up to the sun made the greens and golds shine brilliantly. That stone always seemed to pulse with some kind of mystic energy. I know that’s crazy, and it’s just a piece of jasper polished from hundreds, no, thousands, of years on this planet. That I found it in the first place was stupendous luck.
I’ll never forget it. Me, Timmy and Erin had been best friends practically since birth. I was just beginning to suspect I wasn’t quite like them. All their talk of girls and what they wanted to do with a girlfriend if they ever got so lucky as to have one left me cold and, to be honest, a little queasy. It was nothing for them to throw around words like ‘queer’ and ‘faggot’ as insults. I was guilty of it, too. Maybe more so than them, because I was afraid of things I just didn’t understand, and I didn’t want to examine why I was confused about stuff like not finding girls attractive. Our church was a small one, all hell-fire and brimstone. Honestly, I never understood how anyone was ever going to make it into Heaven. It sounded like an impossible task, even with Jesus interceding for us.
Well, I’m rambling off-course. I couldn’t tell my friends what I suspected, even though we’d been best buddies all our lives. There was too much hatred when they said those words and though I tried to emulate them to defer suspicion, it only worked for so long.
That wasn’t what I wanted to remember today. I focused on the stone, the smooth, warm surface of it. Sometimes I fantasized that it was an ancient, sacred relic. Really, it was just an oval, smoothed over by the river and rocks where I’d found it. It held a glow that made it look polished, and who knew? Maybe someone had tossed the stone in the river not long before I found it. That was the most likely scenario.
Even so, I’d kept the stone a secret. When Timmy and Erin and I were out hiking in the wild of the beautiful Texas Hill Country, camping out for a few days because our folks figured we were old enough to do that then, we talked mostly about girls and sex and, of course, jerking off. I’d heard stories about boys doing that together all the time but still being straight. There was none of that for us. No one was going to whip out his dick and start stroking it around the other two. If masturbating was going to get us sent to Hell, then doing it with another guy—or two—would probably have gotten us the worst level of Hell.
It was our second day out, and the heat was getting to us. The river wasn’t too deep, the current not very strong. There were some rapids that were fun to go over in inner tubes but not so much on just our ass.
We didn’t care. We were kids, hot and excited about playing in the water. We stripped to our briefs and jumped in. We had to watch out for cottonmouths and such. There was nothing quite like shooting down rapids and having a snake zip along with us. Talk about water pollution. We caused many cases of it when someone pissed themselves in fear, and rightly so. Cottonmouths could be deadly if they got enough venom in someone.
Timmy hit the rapids and yee-hawed at first, then screeched that there was a snake and Erin and I were scrambling to our feet in a rush. Timmy’s blond hair was almost white, and so was his normally tan face when he shot out of the river, clawing at the bank and dragging himself up onto dry land. He was a mess of scratches, but Erin and I weren’t in much better shape. Both of us lost our footing and went down the rapids ass over teakettle, bumping and half-drowning ourselves in our stupidity.
As I grabbed for something to hold on to, my head under water, body bent like God only knew what, I opened my eyes. In that second, everything slowed. I saw the jasper stone, sunlight hitting it through the water. The beauty of it, the perfect shape, the colors—I couldn’t worry about dying just then. I snatched that rock up and before I knew what was when, I was standing up and walking to the riverbank, where Erin and Timmy lay panting.
I was bruised and scratched, but I felt calm, not breathless or fearful. I tucked the rock into my briefs, and I don’t know why I did that. I never told them about the jasper. I never told anyone and when the trailer I grew up in caught fire, the dryer having overheated and lit a shirt that had fallen behind it, the only thing I grabbed was that stone.
Chapter Two
Those attempts at stopping myself from remembering the past weren’t entirely successful and, as a result, I had not only a shitty day, but a craptacious week. Working at a bank had certainly never been my dream job, but that was where I’d ended up. Being a bank teller was not a rewarding career, either. Some of the people I dealt with on a daily basis were just dead-set on being assholes.
It wasn’t until I was walking home from work Friday that it dawned on me—my thirtieth birthday was coming up. In two days, in fact. I groaned and ignored the people walking around me giving me funny looks. My friends were going to want to either throw me a surprise party I really didn’t want-- though they’d mean well—or drag me out to party at Ben’s, the only gay club within a fifty-mile radius of our town. Neither option held much appeal. I didn’t feel like celebrating the big Three-O when I had nothing to show for three decades on this planet.
My mobile home was older than I was, though I did the best I could to keep it from looking like it was going to fall apart. I didn’t own it, either. I hadn’t had a serious relationship in so long that I’d given up on even a contentedly-ever-after, much less a happy-ever-after. Or even a not-always-miserable-ever-after. There wouldn’t be any new blood at Ben’s, either and there certainly weren’t any available gay men that I would be willing to date—and vice versa—in the local area. My friends were a mix of sexualities, but most of them were paired up or happily fucking their way through whoever appealed to them. I, however, had become exceptionally close with my right hand in the past couple of years. At this point, it looked like that relationship would continue into the far future.
