by Lori Titus
Soul Bonded
Book 1
By Lori Titus
Soul Bounded
Book 1
By Lori Tutus
Copyright © 2018. All Rights Reserved.
Cover art by Andreea Vraciu
Edited by Loretta Sylvestre
Formatted by Kody Boye
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronically, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the proper written permission of the copyright owner, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events and situation are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Soul Bonded
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
About the Author
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Also By Lori Titus
Part One
The Deal
Preface
My soul is in hock, a mystical layaway.
It’s not exactly like selling my soul to the devil, but it’s close enough. I have to work for an earthbound demon for the next seven years. And if I do my job well enough, my contract is void. Unless he decides I’m more valuable to him for another seven years.
At least I’ll get a chance to say no. I have to manage to survive and keep myself in one piece during that time.
I’ve come across worse odds.
Chapter One
Natasha Taylor
“Hey baby. You’re up early this morning.”
My mother would pop up like this at the worst times. Just when I thought she was asleep or watching television in her room, she’d be up and wandering about the house. She’s always had the footsteps of a cat, and I swear she could just appear behind me.
On this morning she was wearing a red velour robe, the kind that zips all the way up the front. Her hair was wrapped in a satin scarf the same cheerful color. She looked younger than she was, and there was something childlike and hopeful in the way she smiled at me.
“Hi Mama. You finished breakfast already?”
She wrinkled her nose at me. “Since when have I ever liked pineapple?
I didn’t think she noticed. She’d eaten cottage cheese with pineapple the day before without comment. I’d told Indira not to buy her the kind with fruit. Mama liked her cottage cheese plain. Or at least, she did when she was cognizant of her memories. I wasn’t sure yet which was worse... the days when Mama remembered everything or the ones when she floated in her own daze. Clarity always left her too soon, and I found myself trying to grapple with the fog again. Some days her mind was more deeply obscured than others.
“Did you have some toast at least?” I asked.
“Yes, and the coffee. What on earth are you looking for?”
She’d caught me digging through the pantry for something I would rather not explain. I could only hope she hadn’t stumbled across my marijuana stash.
“Uh... I thought we had an extra coffee tin in here. Never mind.”
Mama nodded, as if I had bored her and she had places to go. “Alright. When is Zeke getting home?”
She hadn’t asked for him in months. I was hoping she never would again.
“Mama. Daddy’s not coming back anymore. He’s gone.”
“I told that Negro he had better get back by morning! He’s gone off on another job, hasn’t he?”
“Mama, you’re not understanding me. Daddy’s not coming home. Ever.”
She stared at me for a long moment. I could see her working the problem back and forth in her head. Something moved in her eyes; a slow, dreaded certainty descended upon her.
“Um, of course not,” she said softly. She crossed her arms.
I wasn’t sure she really did understand, or if it would hold longer than a minute. I stood there at a loss. Was it better if she thought that her husband left her, or should I tell her again that he died years ago? I’d had to explain this several times over the last few months. It felt like some part of me withered away each time I did.
I didn’t say anything. Instead I helped her back to her room.
The television was on though I knew for a fact she wasn’t paying attention to old reruns of I Love Lucy. She told me once that she enjoyed the companionable noise of chuckling in the background. As promised, the crumbs of toast were on her plate, but the cottage cheese was untouched. She’d drunk her coffee. That was one thing I had never seen her refuse.
I looked at the clock. Indira was due anytime.
We had the morning routine down to a science; I got up, got Mama’s breakfast together. When Indira arrived at nine, she would help my mother bathe, change her clothes, and bring her into the living room to sit up. Some days they would play card games while Indira watched the soap operas with her. Anything that kept her a little engaged and happy during the day.
Once Indira was there I could get ready for work myself. Go open the store at ten. Even though I closed the store at six, I would be there until seven or eight most nights. There was always something to do. Either it was shelving books, placing new orders, or polishing the African masks and sculptures up front.
The store, tucked in a little side street off La Brea Avenue, is my family’s legacy. My parents bought it over twenty years ago and worked tooth and nail to keep that space, even when the city wanted them thrown out. When the zoning battle was finished, the store was classed as a city landmark—a cross between a museum, bookstore, and community art shop.
Mama ran the place with two other employees for years after my father passed away. By the time I was sixteen I started helping out in the summers and after school; sometimes running the register or just cleaning up around the place. There was always some surface drawing dust. Mama couldn’t abide anything not being scrupulously clean. I’m afraid I’ve picked up her habits.
What she didn’t know was that by my teen years I was already deep into reading the books on Voudon and witchcraft. My time at the store just gave me an opportunity to sneak some forbidden reading.
She also didn’t know about some other books I’d kept that never made it to the store: Dad’s collection on exorcism.
Although I often wonder if it’s the whole truth, this is what my parents said when I asked them how they met: my father was a priest long before they met, an exorcist, officially trained and Vatican approved. He spent his time traveling from one town to another, casting demons from the bodies they’d decided to take unwanted residence in. He preferred to use the term “eviction.”
Dad never went into detail about exactly why he left the church, only that he got weary of it. Instead of becoming a parish priest somewhere, he decided to leave the clergy altogether. I never pushed the issue further than that.
“I haven’t ever been someone who just sits back, baby,” he’d told me. “The thing about exorcism is that you see faith at work. I didn’t see myself as someone who w
ould be happy giving sermons and passing out communion every week.”
He moved out to Los Angeles, took a regular day job.
He met a girl working in a coffee shop named Katherine. He went to that same place and bought coffee there every morning for a month before getting the courage to ask her out on a date. And the rest is history.
Mama said Ezekiel Taylor was the handsomest man she ever met.
THE PROBLEM WITH MY dad was he never got the thrill of exorcism out of his blood.
He would take a job every now and again. You’d be surprised how many people are possessed and live their lives not even realizing that a foreign entity has taken hold. And if you think that’s frightening, there are the all-out obvious cases, the ones with burning flesh or stigmata. Speaking in tongues? you catch someone spouting a dead language? They can make things float around the house while cursing you out? You’ve got yourself a winner.
“Remember that God gives you the power to tread on serpents,” he would say. “Once you’ve tangled with them, they have a taste of your soul, and evil spirits will never completely leave you alone again,” he said. He taught me how to protect myself. More importantly, he showed me what I needed to do to fight back against anything that tried to harm me.
I learned that exorcism is an art, not just reading Latin words. It was about a certain type of strength in the face of evil that most people simply don’t have.
No one should be required to have that, but....
My mother would never have allowed me to get involved, so Dad and I kept it secret. She would have been beyond livid if she ever found out. The two of them had agreed that I would not be brought up chasing demons.
IT WAS A USUAL MORNING at the store. Generally we don’t get many customers before two in the afternoon. People bring their children in to see our collection of West African masks. We even get a sale of one now and again, usually from one of our Ladera Heights (read: black and wealthy) customers or occasionally, a poser from Beverly Hills. I’ve had offers from movie companies to buy them in bulk from us but I have denied them. But the masks we sell have very specific spiritual meanings. I won’t sell them to someone who doesn’t know how to handle them. Instead, I’d sold them several books on the history of African art and sent them on their way, suggesting they have their special effects department craft something similar. The real thing might attract something other than the kind of fortune they were seeking.
When I heard the bell above the door ring that morning, I knew who it was.
Ronnie is my cousin, and after Mama got ill, I talked him into helping me with the store. He’s half Mexican, brown skinned with curly black hair and amber eyes. Women often approach me just to ask if he’s single. When I mention that we’re family they give me a skeptical look. You can just about see them doing the mathematics in their head trying to figure out how that happened. We both take after the Taylor side of the family. My brown skin has a redder tone to it, while his is more gold. Though you can see the African influence in our rounded features, his are subtly thinner than mine.
Women’s attentions are never lost on him. I’m pretty sure a couple of his exes were women he initially met at the store. It’s been this way as far back as I can remember. My friends were trying to get with him back when we were in middle school.
“Hey. I thought you weren’t going to be here today,” he said, leaning in the doorway of my tiny office.
I stared at him over the rim of my coffee cup. “What do you mean?”
Ronnie looked at the clock on the far wall and then back at me. “Aren’t you supposed to be at the bank in a little bit?”
“HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE to find out if I qualify?” I asked.
The loan officer looked at me over the black rims of her glasses. Her mouth moved, a twitch, like she wanted to smile but then thought better of it. Her blonde hair had strands of silver in it. The plaques on the wall behind her stated that she was the employee of the year three times in a row.
“Usually it takes about seventy-two hours. Occasionally, we’ll know sooner than that.”
“This was where my parents came to get the original loan to buy our store.”
“Well. First National has been through a change of ownership since then, twice I believe,” she flipped through a stack of paperwork, using the eraser tip of her pencil to check for signatures.
“Oh, you missed this initial,” she said, pushing the paper back at me.
“What’s your percentage of approvals?” I asked.
“Percentage?” she blinked. Her green eyes looked owlish beneath the lenses she wore. “We review each loan on a case by case basis.”
I sat back. I could already feel how this was going to go. I could have just applied online, but I was hoping that being able to speak with them in person would help sway their opinion. Sure, the store was struggling a bit, but our business had been around for thirty years. Being a customer in good standing should count for something.
I initialed where she asked me to and signed another piece of paper that she retrieved from her desk. She seemed morally offended that I had somehow not known about this one extra slip of paper and gave me a brief speech on why it was important.
“Is there anything else that you want to know?” I asked. “Specifics about our business? We’re not at all an ordinary store—”
“No, I think we have it all here,” she interrupted. “We’ll be in touch.”
I went back to my car and sat there for a few minutes. I didn’t tear up until I pulled into traffic. If I wasn’t able to get a loan to pay off expenses, it would mean taking out a second mortgage on the house where I grew up. If I let the store go, it meant Ronnie and I would both be out of a job. My family’s legacy would be gone. I had never worked for anyone else, and I knew I didn’t have the temperament to be anyone’s employee.
Maybe I would just have to learn.
If I did take out a second mortgage, I wasn’t sure that I could keep up with the payments. Business had been up and down. Independent bookstores didn’t bring in the kind of money they used to, and fewer remained open each year. It was truly feast or famine, with no telling what the new month would bring. Cyclical patterns that used to predict sales were obsolete.
I promised myself I would find some way to keep things going.
WHEN I GOT BACK TO the store, Ronnie was in the middle of a sale (good, as we were going to need more of those). I nodded at him and stepped back into my office. I closed the door. I knew he would probably want details about the bank, and I wasn’t ready to talk about it. I felt pressure in the back of my throat. I knew I might burst into tears if he looked at me the wrong way.
“Come on Natasha, no time for this negative shit,” I whispered.
I logged onto my laptop to look at our inventory. I wanted to plan a new sale, but I needed a theme. Something catchy. I didn’t want to just put everything on sale, or only items we had a few too many of. I wanted a theme to pull it together. Customers could smell desperation. The first one who asked me if we were having a closing sale might get clobbered.
We had rugs and pillows, candles... it would be a home themed sale. African inspired designs and prints to warm up your home.
I was almost finished assigning the new prices when my phone vibrated. I took one look at the text message and grabbed my car keys.
WHEN I GOT TO THE HOUSE Indira, my mother’s caregiver, was standing outside on the front porch.
“Where’s Mama?” I asked.
“Inside, sleeping now. I didn’t want to scare you, but I really thought you should know.”
I went straight back to her room, and sure enough she was in bed, sleeping peacefully. She lay on her side, with her right arm tucked beneath her pillow.
When I went back to the kitchen, Indira was standing in front of the sink, holding a cup of coffee. She looked like she had seen a ghost. I’d known her for several years before she came to work for us. When my uncle was ill, she was his caregiver, and when M
ama got sick, I was happy to find she was available. Her wide, dark brown eyes looked glassy as if she were fighting back tears.
“What exactly happened?”
“Your mother said she wanted to take a nap this morning, a little earlier than usual, but I didn’t think anything of it. So she went to bed, and I stayed in the room until I was sure she was asleep. I came out into the living room, and I was on the phone....” She blushed.
“Go on,” I urged.
“She had been asleep maybe twenty minutes, when I heard her screaming. I went back in her room, and she said that a man had come in her room. When she woke up he was standing at the foot of her bed?”
“Did you think she hallucinated seeing my father? She’s been talking about him a lot lately. In the present tense.”
Indira shook her head. “I don’t think so. She said this was a silver haired man. When I asked her, she said she didn’t know who he was but that he was bad. No one was in her room. Her door was closed. Her windows were closed. No one else was inside the house but the two of us.”
“Okay. I’ve got your point.”
“No, definitely not okay, Natasha,” Indira said. She opened a drawer. “She had this when I came in.”
I saw the glint of steel before she took the object from the drawer. This was a Deer Horn knife, a Chinese weapon shaped like two crescent moons inverted upon each other. It was used in martial arts, both easily concealed and useful for hurting anyone who got too close. I guessed that this belonged to my father. I kept his collection of weapons in a locked trunk in the attic. I couldn’t imagine how Mama got hold of it. Worse yet, Deer Horns came in pairs. I needed to find this one’s mate, and fast.
“You know I love your mother and you,” Indira trembled. “You’re good people and I want only the best for you. I think the time has come to realize that your mother is getting worse. From what I’ve seen with other patients, this may be only the beginning of how bad it’s going to get.”
