Soulfire, p.1
SoulFire, page 1
SoulFire
A Touch of Magick (Book 4)
Savannah Kade
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Published by Griffyn Ink
www.griffynink.com
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Copyright © 2016 Griffyn Ink
All rights reserved.
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No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
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For ordering information or special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Griffyn Ink at Mail@GriffynInk.com.
Contents
Join Savannah
Also by Savannah Kade
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
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Afterword
Preview of ShadowKiss (Touch of Magick - Book 5)
About the Author
Never miss a sale or a free book! Keep up with Savannah HERE.
Novels by Savannah Kade:
The WILDER Books:
Our Song
Heartstrings
Love Notes
Music & Lyrics
The Wilder Complete Book Set
That Night in Nashville
Georgia Grace
The TOUCH OF MAGICK Series:
WishCraft
DreamWalker
LoveSpelled
SoulFire
ShadowKiss
The Touch of Magick Series: Complete Set
The AGAINST ALL ODDS Series:
Steal My Heart
Call Me Yours
Ask Me to Stay
Promise Me Always
Against All Odds Complete Set
The BREATHLESS Series:
Gifted
Perfect
Ruined
Rebel
Lucky
Charmed
Saved
Dreamer
The DARK FALLS Series
Dark Falls - Lori Ryan
Dark Secrets - Savannah Kade
Dark Legacy - Trish McCallan
Dark Nightmares - Becca Jameson
Dark Terror - Sandra Owens
Dark Burning - Lori Ryan
Dark Echoes - Savannah Kade
Dark Memories - Sandra Owens
Dark Rage - Becca Jameson
Dark Tidings - Trish McCallan
Dark Obsession - Lisa-Marie Cabrelli
Dark Passion - Lori Ryan
Chapter 1
Rae was standing in a long line at the lingerie store when she felt it again. That feeling of a finger sliding up the back of her brain. The universe telling her “pay attention.”
She didn’t ignore that. So she looked around the store, but saw nothing else. For a moment, she panicked. Was it a bad feeling? Was something about to go wrong?
Fifteen years ago, she’d been a kid in a clothing store with her family. She and her older sister Sloan had been sent to the back aisle to pick something out for the weekend. Rae had been looking at a red top with white stripes when she felt it. That slide up the back of her senses that always put her on alert. Only that time it felt bad. Bad.
“Sloan!” she’d whispered it harshly, terrified even though she didn’t know what of.
“Rae?” Sloan’s voice had been at a normal volume, just confused.
All Rae had wanted was for her sister to be quiet and for her parents to be in the same aisle. Her eyes must have told the whole story, because Sloan’s whole expression went round when she looked at her little sister. They had to go find their parents, even though Rae still didn’t know why she felt this way. She only knew that she did. And that she was never wrong.
Dropping the shirt she’d been admiring, she reached out and met Sloan’s hand where it was on the way to grabbing hers. When they touched, they connected. Rae felt things, but Sloan saw them. She only saw snippets and pieces, but it was sometimes enough.
As their hands joined, Rae heard Sloan gasp. She felt the churning in Rae’s stomach, the gut clenching dread that something was wrong. Rae saw the pieces that Sloan saw. Gunfire. Bodies. A square, armored truck.
Holding hands, they ran toward the back of the store. The two girls spotted their parents and made eye contact as the sounds started. The handful of store employees on duty abandoned their stations and began running toward the rear doors, holding them open for patrons to escape. There had been gunfire at the front of the store.
They’d learned later that two, armed men came in and gunned down the guards from the armored truck. They’d come to collect the deposit money at the bank next door. Despite being in full Kevlar, the two guards had been killed instantly. The robbers had made off with the entire set of four bags of money. They’d never been caught. And Rae had never forgotten it.
She still had some mild PTSD when she saw an armored car. To this day, she’d never felt anything that strong again. But now, standing in a checkout line at the back of the lingerie store, her first thought was, “Is it bad?”
She stopped, almost ducked, but managed to stay upright and attempted to look normal. She didn’t want to have a panic in the checkout lane. But a few slow breaths later, she realized the feeling wasn’t bad. Not at all. That was just her memory being worried.
Someone was in the store. Someone she knew? Rae couldn’t quite tell.
After a moment’s debate, she turned around and acted like she’d forgotten something. Despite having all her things neatly folded and ready, she headed toward the middle of the store. There was someone the universe needed her to see, and Rae didn’t ignore the universe.
She heard them before she saw them, though the voices didn’t trigger any memories, just the feeling.
Luke and Yasmin.
The couple that got married at the B-n-B last year. That feeling she got demanded that she stopped dead still in the lobby of the beautiful old house. Then she’d seen the pictures, of Luke and Yasmin, from infanthood all the way to their wedding day. The photos of Luke looked like they could be pictures of her grandfather. And here the two were again.
Rae stopped, stunned. She hadn’t been able to find them, and she had looked. She’d even used her boss’s database, but with no last name, and no knowledge of even what state they were from, “Luke and Yasmin” wasn’t enough to get her anywhere. Now here they were.
She followed them around a corner debating what to do. Was he the cousin they’d lost track of? She didn’t know. She didn’t even know if maybe Yasmin was the one that triggered the feeling. All Rae knew was that she felt it.
Still, here they were. In the lingerie store. That put really high odds on them living somewhere near here. It could be they were visiting and had lost all their luggage or something, but to Rae it looked as though they were shopping like locals.
She was trying to figure out what to say, how to introduce herself when she didn’t even know what she was to them—if anything—when they turned another corner. Rae followed subtly, not wanting to spook them. She didn’t think she was scary, but stalking people was not kosher.
She almost had a plan by the time she turned the corner. But in the end it didn’t matter. They had disappeared.
Chapter 2
Rae Woodward’s jaw hung open, and she couldn’t seem to get it to close. Tears were welling up in her eyes and her boss was looking at her in that way that men did when females were crying for no apparent reason. That look that was partway between what can I do to help? and what the hell did I do now?
Rae understood his concern. She was acting out of character—Rae Woodward was stoic, normally. And to top it off, her anger, irritation, and general shock were greater than that of the average person. Any Joe walking down the street could easily take the comfort of a friend saying, “You couldn’t have known.” But Rae could have. And should have.
What she shouldn’t have done was walk in here today. She shouldn’t have sat down and showed her boss the photos and asked for the next assignment. She should have said to herself, My life
But she didn’t do that, did she? Clearly not, because she was sitting here with Lincoln handing her a tissue that she absolutely did not want even though she needed it. She was hurt, she was angry, and maybe worst of all, she felt stupid.
Had Lincoln known what she was going to see? He had seemed a little distracted when she held the generic thumb drive and the eight-by-ten glossies she’d printed out in the front office. The usual hallmarks of a completed job, they’d slid nicely across the scarred desk and given her a feeling of satisfaction. It hadn’t lasted much past the moment when he traded her pictures for the business-sized check. Lincoln had some odd preferences; he believed in digital cameras and paper currency. Now the check was getting worried between her fingers and she wasn’t even looking at it. She had asked him the same thing she always asked. “What do you think?”
“I think you caught him cheating on his wife.” Lincoln usually gave her the commentary he knew she was looking for, but not today. This time, he’d just thumbed through to the next photo and the next, studying each as he went.
Rae wished he had really looked. The composition on the top photo was gratifying. The close up of the tall man kissing the willowy blonde was a study in the play of light on the planes of two faces. Passion perfectly captured. It would make the viewer cry.
Rae sighed. Unfortunately, it would make the viewer cry—because the viewer would be the kissing man’s wife. The wife, however, was clearly a brunette, and shorter than the woman being kissed in the photo. Rae, too, had almost cried as that particular shot had popped up on her screen at home. She wished she’d taken it with good old fashioned film. She would have loved to watch it bloom in the bath of developer the way she had as a kid.
But no matter how beautiful or well-framed this photo was, it would never be used in a gallery or sold to an admirer. It would likely be seen exactly once, by a woman whose heart it would break, then it would be locked away in Lincoln’s files, never to be looked at again. Except maybe at the divorce proceedings.
Sometimes Rae felt like she showed her naked soul in her art photographs. But this was just as excruciating. To know that she had captured the perfect moment. And to know that it would be forever hidden. She blamed the husband. He should have been kissing his own wife and not someone else’s. Then again, if he’d been kissing his own wife, she wouldn’t have been there. Suspicion was Lincoln’s bread and butter, and therefore hers, too. She needed to sell some real work. This P.I. stuff was going to kill her.
Just as Lincoln pushed the file into a tray on the corner of his desk to await his next meeting with the client, Rae had leaned forward and made the fated bad move: “Do you have another assignment for me?” She knew that getting a gallery opening was something that wasn’t going to happen to her very soon. Lincoln at least admired how she framed her pieces. And mostly it paid the bills.
“Actually, I do.” He pushed his swivel chair back toward the rickety file cabinet behind him, and rolled open a drawer, peeling the top folder from the stack within. The man liked his paper. Less hackable, he said. So far, nothing had tipped her off that this folder would be far worse than opening an anthrax envelope.
Nothing had tipped her off. That’s what burned. She got that feeling. Almost like someone was tapping her, in her brain, to get her attention. She hid it, because people didn’t like that, but that’s how it worked. She’d known when Sloan broke her arm in seventh grade. She’d known when Bobby Brannan dumped her in the ninth grade, though there was argument that anyone could have seen that coming from a mile away. And she’d known when her mother died in a car accident five years earlier. So how had she not seen this coming?
“Annette Lipscomb. Came in two days ago. Will be back next Thursday.” Lincoln thumbed through the papers that Annette had filled out by hand, then pushed the file across the desk as though it were just paper.
Rae glanced over the neat script that stated the reason for hiring Lincoln Cardman P.I. Still nothing about the assignment tipped her off that it was out of place.
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I suspect my husband is having an affair.
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Well, these days it seemed they all did. She flipped through a short list of reasons that Annette thought Roger might be seeing another woman. Then Ray began studying the longer list of preliminary paperwork that Lincoln already had in order. The credit card reports and other pages would help her know where to start. Maybe tell her what time of day to tail the guy. Where he had frequent haunts.
According to his credit card statements, he liked Le Bistro. Rae smiled. Le Bistro was one of her personal favorites. She could have the tuna steak sandwich while she worked.
Potential Cheating Husband Roger apparently also had an apartment elsewhere in town. On March Street even. Rae knew right where that was. He had also purchased a piece of jewelry recently: a ring, according to the receipt. Not that Annette had gotten any jewelry lately.
Rae had seen enough. Roger was clearly a right asshole. He didn’t sound like a “potential” anything; he seemed to be the real deal. So it felt good to take the assignment; she and Lincoln would nail the guy to the wall. He’d get what he deserved and she’d get enough to pay the rent and take off a few weeks to do her own work. Cheating Roger would pay for her next round of camera equipment.
Still, she should have said no. She should have been listening to the universe, but she wasn’t. Because when she turned the page her jaw opened to its current state and words became impossible to form. She felt her stomach knot, unknot and knot again. Cheating Roger was Roger Barett?
The photo of him was clear as day.
Lincoln just kept looking at her. His head tilted a little to the side. He had been married a long time and he knew when to wait a woman out. He also knew when he didn’t want to be involved. Clearly, he had decided that this was one of those times.
Rae’s jaw worked up and down, more like a fish than anything, and finally she croaked out a noise. “Lincoln?” Her voice sounded shaky even to her own ears. “Who is this?”
“Huh?” He finally focused on her face, coming out of the trance he had entered while waiting for her to make sense. “That’s the husband. Different last name.”
She took a deep breath in, mentally recited a spell for strength, and started to feel better. Then she had to talk. “Well, I can tell you for certain he’s cheating on his wife.”
Lincoln’s teeth pulled back. It wasn’t really a smile, of course. He was too confused to truly smile at her, but he was trying. Sort of. “Of course, he is. He’ll be covering that DVD player my kid wants for Christmas.”
“No.” Rae tried to sit up straight. It didn’t seem to be working. Despite casting a quick spell on herself for steel in her spine, she was wilting like spaghetti. “I know he’s cheating on his wife. I just can’t get the pictures.”
A frown marred the man’s thick brows. She had never refused a case before. “You know the girlfriend or something?”
She nodded.
“Me.”
It was barely a squeak. She shook her head and twisted the ring that had adorned her right hand for the last month. She’d thought the ring was sweet, the three sapphires beautiful, the sentiment genuine. After a moment, Rae realized what she was doing and yanked the thing off, tossing it on top of the file. “That’s the ring in the accounts. That’s what he bought. It lines up with the date.”
