Souls Broken: Appalachian Souls, #2

By Bonnie Elizabeth

Solving one murder doesn't solve the secrets of Corbin Meadow.

 

While the county sheriffs believe they've solved the murders in Corbin Meadow, Kay, Zoe, and police chief Taran Rees know better.

 

Whatever was murdering people in town is still there. Kay is tied to the creature and feels trapped in the small town that she fled once before. But if she leaves, the town could be lost.

 

Their investigations take them to the paranormal studies department of Redwellyn University where their inquiries set off a whole new problem. Someone there wants the power Kay holds and they're willing to do anything to get it.

 

Now, Kay, Zoe, and Taran must race against another killer to save the town and to save Kay's life, but is it at the risk of their immortal souls?

 

Souls Broken is the exciting conclusion to the story that began in Souls Lost

• Language: English
• Publisher: My Big Fat Orange Cat Publishing
• Release date: Mar 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393542070

Bonnie Elizabeth

Bonnie Elizabeth could never decide what to do, so she wrote stories about amazing things and sometimes she even finished them. While rejection stung her so badly in person, she spent most of her young life talking to cats and dogs rather than people, she was unusually resilient when it came to rejections on her writing, racking up a good number of them. Floating through a variety of jobs, including veterinary receptionist, cemetery administrator, and finally acupuncturist, she continued to write stories. When the internet came along (yes, she’s old), she started blogging as her cat, because we all know cats don’t notice rejection. Then she started publishing. Bonnie writes in a variety of genres. Her popular Whisper series is contemporary fantasy and her Teenage Fairy Godmother series is written for teens. She has published in a number of anthologies and is working on expanding her writing repertoire. She lives with her husband (who talks less than she does) and her three cats, who always talk back. You can find out more about her books at her publisher, My Big Fat Orange Cat Publishing.

Book preview

Chapter 1

The changes between North Carolina and Tennessee come slowly. The trees look the same, but the mountains don’t look that much different, old and worn down by time. The smells in the air slowly changes from pine and time to pine dust and exhaust. The last is a new addition, of course, with the advent of cars and trucks and the ease of traveling that didn’t exist when the passes were there to accommodate men and sometimes horses and wagons.

On the Tennessee side of the mountains, autumn was well and truly underway, whereas on the North Carolina side, the mountains had just had their last hurrah of a summer, a warm tropical front that had pushed in when the state was sideswiped by a hurricane. Now the hurricane had become merely a tropical depression dropping rain upon the residents of Boston with a good, but not life-threatening, dose of wind. Still, North Carolina remained unseasonably warm.

Zoe watched Kay driving, sipping at the dregs of the cappuccino she’d purchased earlier at the coffee shop frequented by the students of Appalachian State back in Boone. The two women had started their day there, earlier than they’d have liked, but the hotel they’d chosen had thin walls and the people around them had been up early, getting ready to make the long trip back to down the mountain and loudly discussing their plans to stop and hike around Blowing Rock.

Zoe had gotten them to Boone the night before. Now Kay was driving them out in her bronze Honda CRV. It smelled of coffee and egg and bacon sandwiches picked up along the way. Kay had finished her coffee long ago, and now and then Zoe thought Kay saw her eyeing Zoe’s coffee with longing.

The radio was still off from when it’d begun playing only static. Kay hadn’t bothered to find any music from her phone, so they drove with only the soft purr of the engine and the wind around them.

Fortunately, they were out of the mountains now and coming up on the outskirts of Johnson City. They had to drive through the city, though, because their destination, the private university called Redwellyn University, was on the far side of it in a suburb called Redwell, probably named after the university and not the other way around. At least that’s what Zoe had gathered last night as she’d read about the place her laptop.

Last night, Kay had reserved two rooms for them in Boone, an extravagance Zoe didn’t particularly think they’d needed, but she hadn’t been the one who’d made the reservations. She could see Kay’s point. It wasn’t like they were good friends taking a girls’ road trip. They hardly knew each other, although they’d grown up in the same town. However, the day before Kay had saved Zoe’s life, made sure Zoe would remain safe along with the town, and had covered up the existence of the group of strange creatures that inhabited the area.

As far as Kay was concerned, consorting with those creatures had put her immortal soul in peril, and she’d been weepy and morose for the entire drive.

It hadn’t been a happy drive for Zoe either. She’d agreed that they needed to condemn the former chief of police, who was dying of liver cancer, to being framed for the murders that had happened in the town recently. That weighed heavily on her conscience, and she could appreciate the added weight Kay bore when she was the one who had had to say the words to make the wish that the creature would help frame the poor man.

Zoe had lived on the west coast for far too long to think about things like an immortal soul in the same way that Kay used the term, but she could appreciate the agony of such a decision. Still, neither of them had seen a better way out of the problem, nor had Taran, the current chief of police, who had been with them.

In the light of day, Zoe wondered if they couldn’t have just let the sheriffs continue to investigate and let the case go cold. Of course, from what she’d heard about Blake Fellows when she’d been digging around online late at night, he wasn’t the sort to let a mystery go easily, particularly not when someone else might die.

Zoe yawned, still tired after a restless night. She’d slept poorly, mostly because of the emotions that had weighed on her. She’d actually felt a bit more physically relaxed since she wasn’t staying in Corbin Meadow. She hadn’t realized how much she’d come to be on guard against the things that happened there.

Zoe had always had premonitions about things. It was probably because she had some of what the creature, Emrys, called the Blood though her link was weak. Zoe was only able to see the creature when she was with someone else of the blood, like Kay, though with Taran Rees, she had an inkling the creature was there. Taran had stayed behind to work with the county sheriffs and to try and get his own daddy to see a doctor.

It was best that he wasn’t with them. Zoe found herself a bit too attracted to the man and Kay had once been married to him. That was a triangle she didn’t want to be a part of.

The GPS was set for Redwellyn and when it told Kay to exit right, she did so without a glance at Zoe.

I think we’re getting close, Kay said quietly. I hope so. I hope this guy has an answer.

Zoe said nothing, just nodding, though that could have been because the CRV bumped over a poorly paved section of the off ramp. It knocked her teeth together and bounced her body to the side. Kay didn’t slow, although the way her body swayed in the seat she’d been just as affected as Zoe.

Professor Newton was the expert they were seeing in the Paranormal Studies department of the University. Zoe had heard of parapsychology where people studied telepathy and things like that but she’d never heard of a Paranormal Studies department before. Looking online, it appeared that they studied all the usual psychic phenomena as well as any other sort of unusual things. She’d been vaguely surprised that they didn’t have a Mulder or a Scully on staff considering that the studies seemed right up that alley.

Zoe wasn’t sure what they would be telling the professor when they met him. Would they just say it out loud? Hello? We have a problem with gnomes or elves or something. We’re wondering if you can help us. And then Professor Newton would take out a big book and they’d point to a picture and say, Yes. That’s the offending creature!

If it was that easy, Zoe had a feeling she’d have heard something about all that stuff before. After all, she maintained a frequent presence on Facebook and you could hear just about anything on that platform if you had a wide variety of friends, which Zoe liked to think she did.

She had lived in Portland, after all, and she’d heard a lot of weird things from folks there. She shouldn’t have been shocked that creatures like the one she’d seen existed given that she’d had her organs moved by a qi gong instructor and had visited a pagan ritual on Samhain and then again on the spring equinox. Tyler, her soon-to-be ex-husband, hadn’t liked her interest in that kind of stuff so she’d stopped going, although her friend LeAnne continued to attend rituals.

We’ll be early, Zoe said. They weren’t due to meet Professor Newton until one. But there’d been little enough to keep them occupied in Boone and both were eager to make sure they could make their appointment.

We can walk around campus, don’t you think? Kay said quietly. I’m not sure what else to do.

We could go get more coffee, Zoe suggested. Her cup was now empty, too.

Like I need something else to keep me that jittery. However, Kay pulled into a Starbucks that sat on the corner of a parking lot. There were plenty of cars but not so many that there weren’t any parking places.

Zoe got out and stretched. It was cool in Redwell and she wished she’d brought a coat rather than just her sweater. Kay unzipped one of her three suitcases and rooted around in there until she found a coat that seemed suited to the occasion. Like everything Kay had, it was elegant and refined and looked like it had cost a pretty penny. Zoe was curious about where her companion made her money. She said she did hair, but being a hairdresser couldn’t pay that much could it?

The question was, how would she broach that particular subject? Zoe wasn’t quite sure how to make it sound like she wasn’t just being nosy and jealous. Probably because that’s exactly what she was being, she thought.

Chapter 2

There’s an age at which men refuse to listen to anyone but themselves, and an age at which denial of death becomes the knowledge that death is an inevitability and where the hope of living forever fades into the background. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to come to terms with death and the idea of hearing the words heart attack are not ones that anyone wants to go in and hear, Taran’s father among them.

The Rees’ had a long discussion about Taran’s feeling that something would happen to his daddy. His momma had taken Taran’s side, and although his daddy insisted he felt perfectly fine, the slight breathlessness with which he’d been plagued had concerned the others and in the end he’d lost.

Which was how Taran came to be driving his momma’s Ford Explorer, a car only about three years old and that looked like it had just been driven off the showroom floor though, in fact, it had never sat on a showroom floor. Instead, it had sat out in the lot waiting to be sold from the first day it had been delivered with all the other 2014 Explorers until it had finally been sold after multiple test drives and rejections during the closeout before the 2015s had come in. It had had more mileage than most, but Taran’s daddy knew when he could get a bargain.

Naturally, Taran’s momma took excellent care of it because it was still in her mind new, though the new car smell had long since dissipated, hidden by the current scents of gardenia perfume and pizza, the first worn by the older women she often ferried around town, the latter favored by Taran’s daddy.

The black exterior baked the car on hot days and the black seats meant his momma kept a towel handy for the driver’s seat during the summer. That had been taken out to be cleaned and washed a few weeks earlier now that the black leather seats were no longer hot enough to fry an egg every time you got inside.

Taran turned down the radio because his momma looped Madonna and Cydni Lauper, Heart, and a few other bands from the early 80s through the speakers. When she was ferrying women older than herself she looped the Beatles, which, while Taran might prefer that, he wasn’t in the mood. His daddy sat grumpily next to him in the passenger seat, holding onto the dash as if he didn’t believe his own son could drive.

His momma sat quietly in the back, periodically flipping through her purse and then pausing, practically sitting on her hands as if she knew every movement she made was just because she was nervous and wanted to distract herself.

I hope we don’t hit traffic, she said unnecessarily, considering Taran was just hitting the highway towards Lenoir and there hadn’t been another car around. Certainly by the time they got there they might get a bit more traffic, but it was nearly noon on a Saturday and he doubted that they’d be running into too many more problems.

Corbin Meadow was well off the beaten path, and even those who drove through had a tendency to forget it was there. They might notice the gas station which sat along the highway or one of the fast food places that hovered along the edges of town, built because there were new people coming in, but they rarely remembered the town itself. Even leaving home to go to school before returning to join the police force, Taran had found he had a hard time thinking about the place. He could remember family and friends but Corbin Meadow often eluded his imagination, although he couldn’t have stayed away even had he wanted to.

Next to him, his daddy started to cough. Taran paid little attention as he watched a small black car, an old model Civic, weave slightly into his lane. He moved over to give the guy some room, looking at the license plate in case there was an accident. It was a Maryland plate. Knowing the state would be enough given that there were few Maryland plates in the area.

Pulling his attention back to the car, Taran saw his momma lean forward from the back, trying to give his still coughing daddy a tissue. An ominous rattle sounded when his daddy was able to gulp a breath in between his coughs. Finally he wheezed out a long breath and settled back in the seat.

Taran glanced at the older man. He felt cold all over, reminded of his grandmother’s saying of a ghost walking over his grave. Was his daddy’s spirit preparing to leave? The hairs on Taran’s neck stood up, tingling, like he was waiting for someone to reach towards him, perhaps his dead father’s hand.

You okay? Taran asked. He watched his daddy from the corner of his eye, trying to keep his attention focused on the road. His foot pressed the accelerator a little harder, pushing him up to fifteen miles over the limit. The sheriffs in the area were all working in Corbin Meadow. Likely none were left over for traffic duty on this small back highway.

Taran thought he saw his daddy nod, but he got no verbal answer. The silence stretched out.

Taran pushed the peddle a bit harder.

Bill? Taran’s momma reached forward again.

This time there was the undeniable reaching of his daddy’s hand towards his momma’s.

Sorry, Bill said, his voice but a scratching whisper. Still not sure what’s gotten into my throat.

Taran exchanged a glance with his momma through the rearview mirror. His foot pressed the accelerator harder still. Fortunately, there was no one on the road ahead of them. It remained clear until they came to the outskirts of Lenoir. Taran took a quick right turn once in town. The road took him up a steep hill, past homes that looked like giant stair steps in a kaleidoscope of colors, all crowded together.

He wound around to a street that would parallel the main thoroughfare. No one was on the back road, which was good, considering it was hard to pass someone in most places and locals often went far too fast to stop quickly when another car appeared.

Taran took a left, passing more narrow homes built on the edge of the steep hillside and then made a right onto the main road and then a quick left. Soon enough he was at the doctor’s office, a small white building just off the highway that ran through the town. The office doubled as an urgency clinic, hence the ability to get a Saturday appointment.

His daddy was still wheezing. His momma was still leaning forward. Taran was out of the car, walking around the front to help his daddy when his momma slipped out of the back. Dressed in white tennis shoes and dark green and white knit pants with a matching jacket, she looked ready for a cruise ship rather than someone worried her husband was going to die.

Bill stumbled out of the car. When did that step get so high? He tried to laugh, but his cough and the wheezing in his voice kept it from being funny.

Another look exchanged with his momma and Taran stayed with his daddy while she went into the doctor’s office to get him checked in and perhaps get them some help.

Although his daddy was dressed in long sleeves and the air was still warm, though it was cooling slowly, his hands felt