by Jamie Magee
Disloyal Souls
Copyright © 2015 Jamie Magee
All Rights Reserved
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. With the exception of quotes used in reviews, this book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from the author.
Also, thank you for not sharing your copy of this book. This purchase allows you one legal copy for your own personal reading enjoyment on your personal computer or device. You do not have the right to resell, distribute, print or transfer this book, in whole or in part, to anyone, in any format, via methods either currently known or yet to be invented, or upload this book to a file sharing program. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.
Where To Find Jamie Online:
authorjamiemagee.com
Facebook
Twitter
Tumblr
Newsletter
Other Books by Jamie Magee
EDGE SERIES READING ORDER
Alphas Rise
Dark Lure
Sacred Betrayal
Risen Lovers
Fall of Kings
Queens Rise
Stolen Son
Disloyal Souls
COMBINED WEB OF HEARTS AND SOULS READING ORDER:
Insight
Embody
Image
Whispers of the Damned
Witness
Vital
Vindicate
Synergy
Enflame
Redefined
Rivulet
Imperial
Blakeshire
Derive
Emanate
Exaltation*
Disavow
The Witches
Revolt
Scorched Souls
*If you are a fan of Adult Paranormal Edge can be read with the Web of Hearts, before or after Exaltation--the stories share the same characters.
INSIGHT READING ORDER:
Insight
Embody
Image
Vital
Vindicate
Enflame
Rivulet
Imperial
Blakeshire (Drake's Story)
Emanate
Exaltation
Disavow
SEE READING ORDER:
Whispers of the Damned
Witness of a Broken Heart
Synergy of Souls
Redefined Love Affair
Derive (Aden's Beginning)
A Lovers Revolt
Scorched Souls
To me, the thing that is worse than death is betrayal. You see, I could conceive death, but I could not conceive betrayal. – Malcolm X
For Kandace – I will write faster, swear!
Season Three: Volume Two
Episode Five
Chapter One
Ambrosia is dead.
Talon’s thoughts swore to him as he clutched the perception of freedom. True freedom, a feeling he hadn’t had since he was a boy, since before he picked up his first weapon and slain another. A jolt this powerful, from one reality to the other, made him feel naked. It was chilling and stirring at once. So many doors he thought were closed to him were open once again. Emotions he was sure he’d long since buried began to swell. What was this magic? Hope?
How...how did I kill her? The visions of his near death, the sensations soaring through him made no sense. He recognized the power, the same way anyone would know an old friend, an old forbidden friend you never truly let yourself be free around because you knew once you did...you’d never be the same. No, he could not comprehend this now. Not when he was in the middle of a war, and his biggest headache and constant haunt in his mind was finally slain.
Victory must be appreciated, shown gratitude, and not questioned. If not, like a scorned woman, it will leave you as fast as it came.
Dying, or almost dying rather, gives a soul a nice kick in the ass, the kind of jumpstart that gives them one more shot to right their wrongs, and leave no regret behind. Watching Ambrosia die changed everything. He’d never see the world the same again.
Ever.
As his heart thundered, his shadowy stare remained on the nothing before him. Talon was standing between an ending and a beginning. His day to fall had come and gone.
It was discerning to him how a moment defines conviction. How his thoughts and actions were shaped by the state of his passions. His emotions—the most unstable and unpredictable parts of any soul—was running the show.
He could tell himself not to give a flying fuck, and with some degree of willpower, he’d get there. The lie would become a truth, even if only for a moment. Then again, no matter how much reason Talon had to hate, he could not control true emotions. The ones that would swell up without warning and laugh in the face of any false conviction he was clinging to. Talon hated those times, downright loathed the ever lovin’ fuck out of ‘em.
He had long ago discovered that every conviction was dated and subject to change with circumstance, more so perception. But somehow standing there, feeling liberated, he knew the dispassion he felt toward her was his truth. The female was a curse that had met her end. Nothing more.
He’d hated her from first sight. At the time, some small part of him thought it was a good omen. People he admired and held close in his life were often enemies first.
For Talon, it worked better seeing the bad first, feeling the wrath of hate. There were no surprises down the road. When he met someone he liked from the gate, he mourned them, always waiting for the veil of untruths to fall and his disappointment to set in.
It may be a fucked philosophy, never the less, it was his, and it worked.
Talon had decided that he would hate when it was time to hate, love when it was time to love. And so on.
Over the years, he could not grasp any kind of emotion for Ambrosia beyond annoyance. She was powerful, beautiful, intriguing, confident... it would’ve been so much easier if he had fallen for her. An easy match with a storybook ending.
Fuck fairy tales.
The mother of his child was dead. Gone. Never to return. What was he to do in front of the others? Mourn? Rejoice? He didn’t rightly know.
Then there was the way she died. What the fuck just happened? He kept telling himself not to question, to let it sink in and move on, but the awesome power he could still feel tingling through his soul refused to let his mind move forward to plan the coming battles.
Death had him by the balls, a new kind of death. Not the outnumbered in battle, nothing like a wound or fever that was taking its sweet time to torture him, ones he felt as a mortal. Real death. Not being able to see beyond tomorrow death. Now death was gone. He had no fucking clue how to explain any of this to anyone.
Endlessly he’d felt wiped, like he was standing back and life was moving him through the paces. He knew it was getting worse; it was taking him longer to focus, longer to realize where he was and what he was supposed to be doing. Talon thought for sure one of the boys would call him out on it long before he finally lost this grip on reality. It turns out, he held on to his stoic edge right until the end.
The night he went down in the entry of Saige’s home all he could think to himself was how fucking poetic, me a simpleton warrior dying in a noble BellaRose
mansion. Ah, it’s been a long time comin’.
Talon knew it was over. He couldn’t fight Ambrosia any longer. His plans moved to how he would escape her eternity. If he could go back to his life, fine. If not, so be it. All he knew was no matter how much hell he had raised, or pain he had given others, he didn’t deserve to be coupled with a demon for all of time.
Something was different with Ambrosia; the look in her eyes had changed. Her eyes held fury and humiliation that didn’t make him feel like a pet she had finally trapped, but revealed her fear. He loved that look. The look of horror in another was nothing short of a confidence booster. It told him they were on the same field, both weak in their own ways. If it weren’t for that one look that Ambrosia let slip past her icy façade, Talon would’ve never made it as long as he had.
When Ambrosia had finally gained the upper hand, and Talon sent a silent prayer asking whomever for forgiveness for his darkest sins, he felt them. The same haunts he had trained himself to outrun long ago were back. It was almost comical to Talon. Dying insane. Why the fuck not?
For the first time, he let down the walls he’d hidden behind in his mind. Instantly, he felt the spirits swell within. There were so many different levels of emotions that his head swam. Aggression. Coyness. Cleverness. Hatred. It didn’t matter how many emotions there were, or what direction they were coming from, all that mattered was they gave Talon a rush of agility. It had been so long since he felt alive that just an ounce of the haunts strength felt like an ocean of hope.
In some real way, Talon slipped back into himself and let them take control. He’d seen more witchy shit than he ever wanted to in his life, and never understood a drop of it. Somehow he still understood what was happening. Ambrosia was no fire Goddess; she was a cold-blooded murderer. No better than Zale fueled by all his greed. She aimed to take Talon for gain, not love. This declaration didn’t surprise him, what did shock him was that she thought he had any kind of power at all.
As calm and in control as Talon may’ve seemed when he brought Ambrosia to her demise, on the inside he’d passed the point of shock. With broken walls in his mind, with the acceptance that he was chained to beings that could come and go as they wished, he found a new perspective. And it was just as twisted as everything else in his life.
He knew the haunts guiding his way. Some more than others, but he knew them. At one point or another, they had crossed paths. Sensing Scorpio didn’t surprise him. Not sensing Dust, but instead Dagen was enough to turn Talon’s day around on its own. All of it was a mind fuck.
What mattered was he had his strength back, and a MC that needed a leader they trusted. They were his family. The battle with Ambrosia may’ve been laid to rest, but Talon knew his true war had just begun. He’d never been at a disadvantage this great and had no idea how to plan forward. But he’d be damned if he let anyone else know that.
When Talon first opened his eyes and found himself lying on the bed, he didn’t have to look around to know who was at his side. He felt them all. The last thing he wanted to do was deal with Dust right then. The male would not push him to explain what went down, but his knowing stare— the way he and Scorpio had always looked at him— would pull Talon into a mind fuck he was currently trying to run like hell from.
He didn’t need to see the worry in Talley’s eyes, he sure as hell didn’t want to see the same ‘I know your dying’ look Talley had given him since he’d first come back from the dead weeks ago. Right then Talon was calling himself cured, no matter what.
Then almost too naturally, his hand edged toward, then gripped the warm flesh of a hand he’d first felt as mortal—a touch that had awakened his soul. She’d come...Saige had been there. Was she there because she wanted to be...or had to be? She should’ve been here months ago, the cold side of his thoughts shouted as it thought back how weak he’d been, and for how long. Saige, his cure to everything, had let him suffer.
The part of him that had let him down a million times and counting told him Saige was there because she wanted to be. She had her reasons, ones he needed to try to understand, for letting him come as close as he had been to a final demise.
This was his Saige, not the cold, cruel woman she pretended to be as of late. Like each time before, when he woke from a near miss with death and she was there, he let himself pretend this time she’d stay.
It felt odd to think such a thing. It always did when they played their game of hate for years on end. For the first seconds it felt like surrender, something a warrior like Talon would never do, but then...it would feel like coming home all over again.
The touch was brief, to simple and ordinary for anyone in the room to even consider it odd. Inside Talon his mind, body, and soul were not only rich on the newfound possibility of living on, but also on the reality that he was no longer going to leave what was his on the table. He wasn’t waiting for perfect resolutions, and he wasn’t going to let anyone tell him he had to.
The slightest squeeze of her hand solidified the promise he made to himself. As he thought back to the beginning, when he was still a mortal, his stubbornness flamed into a perfect shield. A thousand spells and circumstances had made his long life rich with friends and victories seem more empty than full.
Almost two decades ago Talon thought he had a guardian angel watching over him when Saige’s image aged after a spell. He was sure that if he focused on the older woman she was and not the heart-stopping beauty she had always been that he could find a new degree of repugnance when it came to her. It worked, somewhat. Actually, it didn’t work at all, mainly because he avoided her. When he was forced to cross her path and slung every insult he could at her image, he left feeling miserable and drowned in self-loathing. It didn’t matter what she looked like. He saw and felt something more with her.
He’d never tell anyone, especially not himself, that he could perceive emotions. To him, it was instinct, his strongest one that had helped him see hell coming long before it approached. There were some people he could read with ease, others he had to focus on to be sure he wasn’t assuming the things he thought were coming through to him.
With Saige, he never had to focus, she came like a flood and had been drowning him ever since. He wanted to hate her for how deep and reverent her emotions were, for the sacrifices he felt her endure over the eras. But he couldn’t. Who she was on the inside was hidden from the world, from all but him. Knowing this used to amuse him, and then it hurt him to know she was grieving for a daughter she lost long ago, a love she had forsaken to save her sister from herself...for the Rapture she feared—and there was not a fucking thing he could do about it. These days he liked to believe he was indifferent. Downright team Reveca. After all, how many times could he let a female burn him before enough was enough? A million and counting...
It didn’t matter what Saige said or did. He could not hate her as much as he needed to. It was a fucked conundrum.
Bowing her head next to him, Saige was as she had been so long ago, a beautiful, young, empowered woman, afraid of all she knew, afraid of all she didn’t. The only difference between now and then was the wisdom of her soul he could feel pulsing through her touch...and all the pain they’d put each other through. Hating each other when they were meant to be unbreakable.
The spell that aged her over the last years could never hide her beauty, stifle what he felt and saw when he allowed their eyes to meet. He’d told her as much decades before when she walked by him like he was a stranger expecting him to not know the one soul he had coveted above all was a breath from him, masked in an illusion that could only alter her body. He’d laughed, “This is your solution for this era? Do you think me to be that much of a bastard,” he’d said as his hands coasted down her sides. “I don’t give a fuck what you look like,” his voice grew kinder as his dark eyes shifted across her gray stare. “If anything, it makes me mourn, we should’ve grown old together a thousand times by now.”
Saige had tried to scowl, but he saw her eyes water as
she bowed her head and said. “This is for the child. The Rapture is near.”
Not his child, not hers, but Jamison’s daughter. The male had three daughters, and not one of them were conceived in a way some would call normal. The youngest, Raven, was said to be the daughter of a fallen Dark Angel. She needed years of life to sustain a body that could carry a child to term. Saige gave them freely, fully believing this girl, like her own daughter, would be among the souls set to lead the Rapture.
The single glimpse he’d stolen of her, him realizing she cared enough to be there as he fought for his life was enough to cause his heart to thunder in his chest. The gentle lines she hidden behind along with the lightened strands of blond were gone. All the lean, youthful tone had returned to her flesh. Like the first time he saw her, she was as divine on the outside as she was on the inside. So beautiful that it was hard not to stare in wonder. A flower left unpicked, with a scent that had his name on it, one that pulled him into the world he was in now.
If he had walked away long ago—at the first hint something mystical was lingering in the air, he would be long dead by now, so would all his agonies. He gritted his teeth trying to slaughter the gratitude that was swelling in him as he thought of the first time he laid eyes on Saige, how she bewitched him with one shy glance.
If he had kept his seat and never followed Saige into the garden after they’d stared at each other across the longest dinner in the history of meals, he would’ve died before he ever lived. Talon owed the world to Saige BellaRose, though he was sure he would have given it to her long before the debt ever arose.
Trying not to slip into the surrender of coming home to this female in the modern reality they were both in now, he forced himself to think of every vile thing she had ever said or done to him. It was a practice that never worked. One look in her eyes, passed the surface of her hard façade, washed all the sins of her past away. To Saige, her actions were never right or wrong; they were what had to be done for the greater good. She had burned herself far more than those around her.
