Immortal Souls: The Immortal Souls, Magic & Chaos (Book 1)

by Karen M. Dillon

  She couldn’t help smiling; this conversation was the most entertainment she’d had in a while. “I’ve seen plenty of suspicious people,” Sam stated. “I’m not frightened of you and stop looking at me like that.”

  “Like what?” Jamie asked, his tone sounding deceptively innocent, but Sam could tell by the artful smile on his lips that he knew exactly what she was talking about.

  Sam stood, placed both of her hands on the desk and leaned slightly forward, looking straight into his ice-blue eyes, their faces barely three inches apart. She looked at him the same way he had been looking at her. “Like this,” she said slowly.

  Jamie licked his lips and breathed in. Sam knew that Vampires didn’t necessarily need to breathe, the only reason he would be inhaling would be to pick up her scent.

  One wrong move.

  “So,” Sam said, staying in his personal space, not that he seemed to object to her closeness. “You can either tell me what books you’re looking for, or you can leave.” She sat back in her seat and folded her arms across her chest.

  Jamie let his eyes wander down to just above where she had her arms folded. Unbelievable, Sam thought, what the fuck is wrong with this guy? He looked back at her face and smiled. “This is a public library,” he stated. “You can’t make me leave.”

  Sam smiled to herself. “You’d be surprised at what I can do.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Jamie smiled; this was the most scintillating banter he had ever shared with a near stranger. Just tell her, he thought to himself, if she finds it strange you can just influence her to think it’s not strange at all.

  Jamie frowned internally at that thought. No influencing, he ordered his brain. Usually he relied on his skills in mind manipulation to do just about anything that involved humans. He used it to shield himself from them when he didn’t feel like being seen. He used it to make women follow him home, then used it to make them forget everything that happened once they got there.

  But he wanted all of Sam’s thoughts to be her own, and all of her actions to be done of her own volition. If she thought him strange for what he was looking for, let her. Maybe she’d think that strange was good.

  Jamie looked at Sam, who was seated in her chair watching him with her arms folded, patiently waiting for him to speak.

  “I’m looking for books on Vampires,” he said with a sigh, and watched her face for a reaction.

  Her expression remained neutral. “Mythology or fiction?” she asked, almost as if it were an automatic response that she hadn’t given much thought to. Jamie was a little surprised and a little disappointed. She didn’t seem to care about what he was reading at all. For a while he’d thought maybe all of the banter had been her way of flirting with him, Apparently not.

  “I’m not sure what you mean by that,” Jamie said. Lying in an attempt to prolong their conversation.

  Sam looked at him as if he were a complete moron and sighed. “Mythology, as in the myths, the legends, the folklore on Vampires, and fiction, as in stories that people make up about them.”

  Jamie took his time answering, then said, “Could you explain that a little more?”

  Sam looked at him, the corner of her lips twitching in a momentary smile. “Seriously?” she asked. Jamie nodded. “You know what mythology and fiction mean,” she said with a sigh of boredom.

  Jamie innocently shook his head. “The meaning of the words, yes. But when it comes to library classification it could mean something different entirely.”

  Sam gave him an unconvinced look, then she shook her head a little and said, “Fiction, make-believe stories with Vampire characters that are written by people. People, human beings as a collective.” Jamie tried not to laugh, Was she going to define every word in that sentence? “Mythology,” she continued. “Myths, legends and folklore on Vampires. Vampires, annoying bloodsuckers who are allergic to sunlight.” Sam looked at Jamie and smiled brazenly. “But I’m sure you knew that already.”

  Jamie gave her a confused look and tried to hide his fear. How could she know? “Uh . . . ” Jamie had to think a little before speaking. Deny it! his brain screamed at him. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said slowly.

  Sam smiled in amusement. “What?” she asked innocently. “You’ve never heard of Dracula?”

  Jamie laughed a little and relaxed. Of course she didn’t know. How could she? “Right,” he said. “Dracula, of course I have. I read the book when—” Jamie stopped himself from speaking. He had almost said, ‘when it was first published.’ He took a quick second to think. Sam watched him as she waited for him to finish his sentence. She was smiling as if she could hear his thoughts frantically trying to find some words. Eventually he said, “ . . . When I saw the film.”

  “Which one?” Sam asked. “There’s millions of them, Nosferatu,” she counted them out on her hands, “Dracula 1931, Dracula 1958, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Dracula 2000—”

  “Uh . . . ” Jamie ran his hand through his hair as he wondered why she was asking. Was the one he’d watched really that important? “1931,” he answered slowly.

  Sam smiled as if that was the answer she had expected, then she laughed a little. Jamie looked at her in confusion, why was that funny? “That one’s hilarious,” she said when she’d stopped laughing. “Old horror films are so bad they’re funny.”

  Jamie smiled. “Yeah, I suppose they are.”

  “By the way,” she said with a patronising tone. “Dracula is a book of Vampire fiction. I know that may be a little confusing.” She batted her eyelashes innocently. “For you at least, because like most Vampire fiction it is based upon the myths.”

  Jamie raised an eyebrow and held back a smile. “Are you mocking me?”

  “Yes,” Sam admitted shamelessly. She smiled widely. “If you’re going to act stupid, you’re going to get mocked.”

  “How was I acting stupid?”

  “By pretending you don’t know the difference between a fiction novel and a book of mythology,” she said. “Speaking of which, you never answered.”

  “Right,” Jamie said, remembering why he had come here in the first place. He exhaled and ran his hand through his hair. “I suppose I would be looking for the mythology.”

  “Finally,” Sam said, and sighed dramatically before standing. She walked out from behind the desk and peered over her shoulder at him. “This way,” she said, using her hand to indicate forwards.

  Jamie followed her up the steps into the labyrinth of books, to one of the shelves near the back. Sam looked around the assortment of books, mumbling their names to herself, until her eyes settled on one of the shelves near the top. She moved over to the corner and pulled one of the ladders along the shelves to where Jamie was standing. “Stand back,” she said.

  “Do you want me to get it?” Jamie asked.

  She stared at him for a moment, her expression seeming amused. “How are you supposed to get it, when you don’t know what books you’re getting?” Sam asked rhetorically. Jamie didn’t reply. Instead he took a step back to make room for Sam to climb the ladder.

  She climbed to a shelf near the top and pulled a heavy looking, red leather-bound book off the shelf. “Catch,” she said as she dropped the book. Jamie caught it before it hit the ground. Sam let herself slide down the ladder and landed gracefully on her feet.

  “It looks really old,” Jamie observed.

  The leather the book was bound in looked worn and the colour was slightly faded. He opened it on a random page. Inside all of the words were hand written in faded brown ink. All of the illustrations were hand drawn. The pages were yellowed, the edges frayed. Jamie gently touched the page, lightly rubbing his fingers along the side, careful not to touch the lettering; it didn’t feel like paper, and it didn’t smell like it either.

  “Calfskin,” Sam said, when she noticed Jamie examining the book. “It’s about six hundred years old. A manuscript written in ye olde ancient times.”

  Ye olde ancient tim
es? Can she even hear herself speak? Jamie tried not to laugh.

  “So pre-historic it’s not allowed leave the library, so you’ll have to read here. And no turning down page corners, or underlining or sticky notes inside the book.”

  “That’s perfectly fine with me,” Jamie said, and followed Sam through the maze of books. He had been planning to read here anyway. “If it’s so pre-historic, should you really have dropped it twenty feet?”

  “I was assuming you had good reflexes. And besides, your job was catching, so if it had gotten damaged in the fall it would have been your fault not mine . . . ‘cause you would have been the one to let it hit the floor, not me.”

  Jamie laughed a little. “Wow . . . thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.” Sam stopped at a shelf near the stairs and pulled another book down. She placed it on top of the one Jamie was carrying. “Here you go.”

  Jamie looked at the other book she had given him. It was a dictionary. “Middle English to Modern English,” he read aloud. “What’s this for?”

  “It’s written in Middle English, so some of the words are spelled weird and some words meant different things back then. It’s just in case you get confused.” She smiled. “And considering the fact that you’re an idiot, you probably get confused pretty easily.”

  Jamie pursed his lips, not knowing whether to feel insulted and frown, or to feel flattered by her attention and smile. “Everyone’s an idiot sometimes,” he mumbled.

  Sam walked back to the librarian’s desk and sat down in her chair. Jamie placed his books on the desk closest to Sam and sat facing her, making it easy for him to stare at her a little less obviously.

  Sam picked a book up off the desk, the same one she had been looking at earlier, and flicked through a few pages before she started reading.

  Jamie carefully opened the manuscript to the first page, the pages were so old they felt like they might crumble if he didn’t handle them with care. He spent perhaps a second looking at the text before peering up at Sam.

  Jamie stared at her book curiously, wondering how—from the many thousands, if not millions of books—that one had managed to gain her attention. He glanced at the miniscule text on the back cover, skimming through the words. From what he could gather it was some kind of fantasy novel about a game and a shadow world.

  So she likes the supernatural . . . good to know, he thought as he smiled to himself, quickly turning away to look down at the manuscript so as not to be caught staring and smiling at her while she wasn’t paying attention.

  After reading through the first two pages of the manuscript, he paused when he realised that he had never introduced himself.

  When he looked up at her she was still reading her book, not paying him any attention. Jamie frowned, only through his disappointment realising that he’d been hoping to catch her spying on him.

  He cleared his throat to get her attention. Sam peered over the top of her book looking in his direction. Jamie smiled. “My name is Jamie, by the way. Jamie Williams.”

  Sam let a slight, almost inaudible laugh. What’s so funny about my name? he thought. “Samantha Jacobs,” she said. “But everyone calls me Sam.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The only noise breaking the silence was the continual turning of pages. For the rest of the night no one had entered the library, leaving Sam to spend the entire night reading while pretending she couldn’t see the Vampire watching her, while in the back of her mind wishing she really couldn’t see the Vampire.

  Because his presence meant that she couldn’t spend the night investigating every crevice of the building for something suspicious that would give her some insight into what those runes were.

  Meaning that she had a sleepless night of wondering to look forward to, which would be followed by a morning and afternoon of anticipation while she awaited another chance to check out the building.

  “We’re closing in ten minutes,” Sam announced, not bothering to look up as she did. She hit the spacebar on the computer multiple times, getting rid of the screen saver so she could legally steal the book she’d been reading. She typed her card information into the computer then ran the book past the scanner. This one was coming home with her. After she managed to get the program to close, which took so long it made her think the computer was so old it was probably made in the Stone Age, she shut down the computer and turned off the main switch.

  Sam looked up as she heard a chair scraping against the tiled floor, Jamie stood and closed the book he’d been ‘reading’ all night.

  “You can leave that up here.” Sam pointed to her desk, she would put it back in its place tomorrow night, that was if Michelle didn’t put it back first.

  “Have you ever read this book?” Jamie asked, placing it on the librarian’s desk.

  Sam looked at the cover of it. The library had two really old books on Vampire mythology. A few years ago she had read through all of the mythology books the library had to offer, so that she could laugh at all of the things they’d gotten wrong. “Uh, is it the one where Vampire is spelled, V-A-M-P-Y-R?” Jamie nodded. “Yeah, I’ve read it.”

  “How accurate do you think the information in here is?”

  Sam smiled. “I’d say about ten maybe fifteen percent accurate.”

  “That’s not a lot,” Jamie said with a frown. “I thought you said there was a difference between myth and fiction.”

  “There is,” Sam stated. “Myths are stories based on facts. Like exaggerated truths. And fiction refers to stories based on myths, so even more exaggerated than the myths are.”

  “And your guess is that about ten or fifteen percent of this book is fact and the other ninety or eighty-five percent is fiction?”

  Sam nodded. “Pretty much. It’s tricky to try get accurate information from myths, legends and folklore, because they’re different in different places, so you’ll never really know which place has more truths. What the people who write these books do is listen to all of the stories in all of the different places and make up their own myths from the pieces of information that overlap in all of the stories. But then all you end up with is a small part of a big story.”

  Jamie sighed. “So I’m not going to find anything useful in a book,” he said sadly. Sam felt a little sorry for him. She knew how difficult it was to be something different, but to have no idea what being ‘different’ entailed. “How would I find accurate information on Vampires?” Jamie mumbled to himself.

  It was loud enough for Sam to hear, so she answered him. “Find a Vampire and ask lots of questions.”

  Jamie laughed a little. “And how would I find a Vampire?”

  Sam thought for a moment, trying to think of a way to give Jamie some helpful information on finding a Vampire without letting him know that she herself wasn’t human. “Maybe you should stop thinking about how to find a Vampire.”

  Jamie looked at her curiously. “Are you saying I should give up my search?” he asked. Then after a moment’s pause in which he seemed to have realised what he’d just said, he smiled and jokingly added, “How can I ever become Van Helsing if I do that?”

  Vampires were usually extremely careful about what they said, they made sure to act as regular as possible when around anyone they thought was human, so if there was a trophy for ‘Most Obvious Vampire’ Jamie would be a definite winner. Sam had spent maybe twenty minutes in total talking to him and he naturally came across as a Vampire, with his attempts at normality being an afterthought. She smiled and shook her head. “Start thinking more about where you would be likely to find one.”

  Jamie looked at her for a moment, he clucked his tongue as he considered what she had said. “And where would I be likely to find a Vampire?”

  “Have you ever tried a Blood-Bar?”

  “What’s a Blood-Bar?”

  “It’s exactly what the name says it is. It’s a place where Vampire wannabe’s go to dance to heavy metal music, get it on and drink blood. What better place
to search for a Vampire than a place where they serve blood?”

  Jamie’s expression grew sceptical. “Is that a real thing?”

  Sam nodded. “Yep.”

  He looked Sam up and down, wearing the same sceptical expression. “And how would you know of a place like that?”

  “I have a friend who visits one frequently. It’s underground and very exclusive. But I can get the address for you if you want.”

  “If it’s very exclusive how am I supposed to get in?”

  “Because you’ll know where it is,” Sam stated. “Anyone who doesn’t have an invitation wouldn’t have the address.” And the security guard will sense that you’re a Vampire, Sam added in her head.

  Jamie smiled. “Would you go with me?”

  Sam sighed internally, she knew he would try to ask her out before the night was over. “No,” Sam said simply. Going to a Blood-Bar with a Vampire wasn’t exactly her idea of a fun night.

  “Why not?” Jamie asked smiling suggestively. “Don’t you want to go dance to some heavy metal, get it on and drink some blood?”

  Sam laughed. “If I do all of that during the summer, I’ll have nothing to do at Halloween.”

  “Well, the offer stands if you change your mind.”

  Sam took her jacket off the back of the chair and pulled it on while simultaneously putting the book into her bag. “Thanks,” she said. “But Blood-Bars aren’t really my thing.” Sam walked out from behind the desk. Jamie stood and watched her as she walked away. She paused and looked over her shoulder at him when she realised he wasn’t following. “Are you coming or are you planning to sleep here tonight?”

  Jamie smiled slightly as he pushed himself away from the desk. “Can’t wait to get rid of me,” he said sarcastically and walked past Sam out the library doors.

  Sam switched off the lights.

  A chill went through her body as she looked around the darkened library. Without the lights it looked terrifying. The lack of windows made the room pitch black, though Sam was sure she could see shadows moving in the darkness. Her instincts took over for a moment, causing her to slam the door shut and lock it quickly, so that nothing had a chance to step out of the darkness.