My Soul To Take Read Free

two days it had taken to teach myself how to drive stick.
    Grabbing the roll bar, I swung myself inside; popped open the glove box, where I’d left the keys, and stared. “Dumbasses,” I muttered, shaking my head. Putting the Jeep into second gear, I punched the gas and made quick work of putting Nowheresville, P.A. and its last human inhabitant behind me. “Good riddance,” I told the view in my rearview mirror.
    My main focus is my own survival, the constant search for food and water and a safe place to sleep. For the most part, I am not unlike the two teenagers I had just encountered, the only difference being that I have an advantage most people do not.
    I have magic.
    Guns will only protect you so much against Skin Eaters. A lethal combination of animal and human, they possess incredible speed and agility, they self-heal at an unthinkable rate, and each one of them has a mouthful of fangs that could tear a human to shreds within minutes. One bite and you are done for. I assume it is their saliva that holds the poison that will eventually turn you into one of them, that is, if there is anything left of you to turn.
    I had only survived the initial attack on humanity because of one man. A Scandinavian Gypsy named Gerik Hjemsäter, who had fatefully been at the same Spring Carnival as me, when within minutes the world as I had known it had turned into something out of a bad horror movie.
    I had lived in his Gypsy camp with him and numerous other Romani families for nearly five months. They not only knew how to live off the land and could survive a catastrophe of this magnitude but also possessed powers that kept them protected from the outside world. Powers that I – as a Gaje, a non-Gypsy – had not been allowed knowledge of further than knowing of their existence.
    And that wasn’t even the half of it.
    During my stay in their camp, I would come to find out that I had been born with only half a soul, half of someone else’s soul. If that wasn’t creepy enough, Gerik, the owner of said soul and by association the owner of me, was supposedly my soul mate.
    It gets worse.
    Gerik was the proud owner of affinities for all five elements: earth, air, water, fire and spirit. Apparently, one person cannot hold onto this amount of power without going mad and eventually dying. Enter soul mate. Gerik had pursued me relentlessly in order to bond our soul and give me half of his magic. This, I was later informed, was the sole reason for my existence.
    Mmhmm. That’s it. My only purpose in life was to be the magical equivalent of a storage bin. Maybe that would have been all-good and fine if I had been willing to lay down my free will and succumb to a man I barely knew. Which I wasn’t. I was a damn stubborn soul mate.
    Enter Xan Deleanu. Part of the same Romani Clan, Xan was a beautiful and exotic combination of Romanian and Native American descent. With his dark and dangerously slanted eyes, knife-edged cheekbones and bronzed skin molded tightly over an impressive body, it had been easy to fall for him.
    With the help of Xan, I fought against the ties that bound Gerik and I together. The battle for my own free will was just as much physically painful as it was emotionally, but I had ended up free of Gerik and inadvertently married to Xan.
    At least I’d thought I’d been free.
    The camps magically protected borders were breached and, unable to fight against the sheer number of Skin Eaters, several Roma had died. Gerik, using his powers, fought to protect us all. Ultimately, it was him who had singlehandedly saved us by using the fifth and forbidden element – spirit.
    Like all things in nature, for every action there is a reaction. In Gerik’s case, his use of spirit transformed him into one of the most formidable creatures to ever exist in mythology. A dragon, er, half a dragon. Instead of thanking him for saving their lives, the clan banished him. Dark magic was a big no-no amongst the Gypsies, even if you had