The Soul Thief

  The Soul Thief, The Horizon Chronicles Book 1:

  Copyright © 2017 by Kim Richardson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system without the written permission of the author. The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

  Editing by Grenfell Featherstone

  Proofreading by Amanda Brown

  Cover design by Damonza

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition, 2017

  www.kimrichardsonbooks.com

  BOOKS BY KIM RICHARDSON

  SOUL GUARDIANS SERIES

  Marked

  Elemental

  Horizon

  Netherworld

  Seirs

  Mortal

  Reapers

  Seals

  MYSTICS SERIES

  The Seventh Sense

  The Alpha Nation

  The Nexus

  DIVIDED REALMS

  Steel Maiden

  Witch Queen

  Blood Magic

  THE HORIZON CHRONICLES

  The Soul Thief

  The Helm of Darkness (coming soon)

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE HELM OF DARKNESS

  BOOKS BY KIM RICHARDSON

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  For my sister, Tracy

  CHAPTER 1

  ALEXA KNEW SHE WAS DEAD when she saw the bright light.

  It was just like those near-death experiences she’d read about: the tunnel, the white light, the feeling of peace. She felt her physical body detach like the shedding of skin. Floating in total serenity, secure and warm, she soared towards the overwhelming light. She was drawn up into a beam of sunlight like a speck of dust.

  The air was cool and thick, humid and salty, like a sea breeze. The pain of the accident had melted away, and the light welcomed her.

  Deep down, Alexa knew she should be afraid. She should be terrified. But for the first time in her life she wasn’t afraid.

  She saw a pinpoint of dark shadow in the distance. As she drifted towards it, she could see it was the entrance to a tunnel. No. Not a tunnel, but an elevator. Suddenly she was riding in an elevator.

  She did not speak to the ape-like creature that operated the elevator. She spread her arms and looked down at her hands. She could see the floor through her hands. She wasn’t solid.

  Still, she wasn’t afraid.

  The elevator rocked, and the doors slid open. As she stepped out, the creature muttered something that sounded a lot like, Orientation, level one.

  She knew that animals couldn’t speak. She wouldn’t be surprised if she were delusional. It would have been totally acceptable under the circumstances. She was dead.

  Maybe her brain didn’t function the same way anymore. Maybe nothing did.

  The elevator seemed to have disappeared, and Alexa stood in an infinitely long white corridor. She could hear thousands of voices murmuring, and she began to feel anxious.

  Alexa had never seen so many people all at once. It looked as if every ethnic group from the human race was milling around busily in a maze of offices and corridors. And for the first time since she’d died, she felt frightened again.

  She tried to hide the terror that shook her as she followed the crowds.

  Within a few minutes she arrived at an ancient building with a mammoth oak door. A neon sign zapped and crackled above it.

  Oracle Division # 998-4589. Orientation.

  Orientation. It was the same word she thought she’d heard on the elevator. Perhaps the creature had spoken. Where was she?

  Alexa wished she were back in the elevator with the light and that feeling of protective warmth. She had felt safe there. Dread gripped her now.

  She braced herself, pulled open the door, and stepped inside.

  She stood in a large library-like room with corridors and passageways that led to smaller offices. Books and filing cabinets were stacked precariously all the way to the ceiling. The air was thick with the same salty ocean fragrance she had smelled earlier, and she could hear what sounded like pebbles rolling on a smooth marble floor.

  A door touched her behind as it opened, and she froze.

  Huge glass spheres with tiny bare-foot old men balancing on top of them like circus acrobats rolled into the library. The tiny men wore silver gowns, and their long white beards flowed behind them as they maneuvered the balls between the piles of books and files. It was the most incredible sight.

  She was transfixed.

  They were so preoccupied with their work that they didn’t appear to notice her at all. If she wasn’t important to them, she knew wherever she was couldn’t be so bad. It certainly wasn’t as bad as dying.

  Alexa could see what appeared to be another smaller office to her right. Cabinets were stacked on top of each other in there as well, and what looked like a five-foot round pool was mounted in the back corner. Another one of those tiny men sat on a large crystal ball behind a semi-circular wooden desk.

  “Come in, come in, Alexa Dawson,” he said in a strange, high-pitched voice, a voice that sounded like he had inhaled helium from a balloon.

  Alexa tried to ignore the creepy fact that this stranger knew her name. But her apprehension faded as soon as she saw the man’s cheerful face. Still, she approached him carefully, and as she did she noticed a soft, silver light radiating all around him.

  Finally, she found her voice. “Is this—” She cleared her throat and felt relieved that her voice sounded the same. It was her voice. “Is this heaven?”

  Back in life, she had never given any real thought to heaven, or even the possibility of an afterlife. She had just never imagined she’d be dead at seventeen.

  The man’s face lit up, and his blue eyes sparkled. “Horizon has many names. Heaven is one, yes, just like Utopia, or Shangri-La, or Zion. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what name you choose. They all mean the same thing. It’s where everything originated, and the place to which mortals return in the afterlife.”

  “The afterlife,” repeated Alexa, testing the words on her mouth. “I’m dead. Truly dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “I knew it, you know, that I was dead. It’s just strange to hear it. To say it out loud.” Alexa reached up and touched her face, her neck, checking to make sure she was there. Her face was just as solid as the rest of her. But there was something missing. And when it came to her, she thought she must have been stupid not to have noticed before.

  The rhythmic beating in her chest that had accompanied her throughout her life was silent. She had no heart.

&n
bsp; When she looked up, she found the man’s eyes showed his concern for her.

  “You’ll be fine,” he said. His gentle tone was strangely comforting. “Mind you, it takes a bit of adjusting in the beginning. But sooner or later, every soul adjusts, and you’ll be as right as rain in no time. I promise you.”

  Alexa focused on his smiling face and did her best to keep her fears from showing. She would keep her cool. She would not freak out. Not yet.

  The tiny man clapped his hands together. “A mortal death is never the end…just the beginning of something more exciting.” He spoke as if her mortal death was the best news ever, a great revelation.

  While Alexa’s anxiety subsided a bit, her curiosity increased. She couldn’t help it. It was her nature to want to know about things, especially when they concerned the great mysteries of life.

  “Are you an angel?”

  The man chuckled at that. “Yes and no. I’ll keep it simple for you. I’m an oracle. Archangels, guardian angels, oracles, and other ethereal beings dwell here in Horizon. It is home and headquarters for the immortals who govern and protect the mortal world from evil.”

  While this revelation should have energized her, Alexa mourned the loss of her mortal life. All the what-ifs and dreams she’d hoped one day to accomplish had been for nothing. She could see that the oracle sensed her discomfort.

  “Tell me, Alexa,” he asked her gently, “what’s the last thing you remember?”

  Images flashed in her mind’s eye. “I was at school,” replied Alexa. Her mind began to clear, and images began moving and coming together of their own volition, forming solid, real memories. “I remember falling. That’s right. I remember now. I was carrying my laptop with a stack of books and must have missed a step… I fell down the stairs, and I heard something snap. Then nothing. And then I woke up here.”

  The fall had killed her. She’d died at school during lunch. It had been the worst possible time because everyone would have been out of class. Her entire high school would have witnessed her death.

  She felt a rush of humiliation pass through her. It was a cold, prickly sensation. What must she have looked like! …on the floor, with the entire school looking at her dead body, her neck bent at an unnatural angle. She was horrified.

  But her embarrassment was nothing compared to the sadness she now felt.

  Her best friend Emma Middletown had moved away last summer, and she had made no other friends. No one would remember her. No one cared that she was dead. Not her deadbeat father, who liked his new family better. Nor her mother, who would probably have been too drunk to notice she was missing.

  The fact of the matter was, not a single soul would miss her…

  “It’ll be all right, Alicia,” said the oracle. His high-pitched voice was reassuring, and his whole face beamed.

  Alexa opened her mouth to correct his mistake about her name but then thought better of it. She had the unnerving feeling that somehow the oracle had read her mind.

  The oracle leaned forward on his desk. “Every single thing that happened in your life was to prepare you for what’s to come. Remember that.” He raised his hands. “For this.”

  Alexa shrugged. “But I’m only seventeen. It’s not like I’ve had lots of life experiences. Apart from having had a textbook case of a dysfunctional family, which I have loads of experience with, by the way, and which would have made me an excellent guidance counselor, I haven’t achieved anything. I’m not even out of my teens, and sometimes I secretly wish I were twelve again. I can’t even cook an omelet without burning the eggs.” She paused when she realized that she was prattling on. “Prepare me for what exactly?”

  The oracle’s brilliant teeth shone like stars when he smiled. “Because today, young lady, you’ll begin your training as a guardian angel.”

  CHAPTER 2

  ALEXA STOOD IN THE CROWD, just a foot away from the yellow Coffin Grove police tape. It was ten thirty at night, and the lamps in Pine Park did a real number on illuminating the amount of blood around the victim. The victim’s innards seemed almost juicy. If she were mortal, she would have puked all over her shoes. But she wasn’t.

  From where she stood, Alexa could tell the body was female and young, probably around seventeen or eighteen. Her black dress was shredded and covered in blood, and through it she could see dozens of long thin wounds on her pale skin. It looked as though some werewolf had shredded her stomach. The thick coppery smell of blood wafted in the air like a jar of pennies. Alexa felt like she was watching a scene from a police television drama through someone else’s eyes. Three crime scene investigators moved around the body collecting evidence and taking notes. Their white head-to-toe Tyvek suits shone in the dark.

  This had been a brutal murder. There was no doubt in her mind about that. But what bugged Alexa was the Legion suspected that someone or something supernatural had committed this crime. They did not think it had been the work of your regular serial-killer type with a penchant for werewolves. To the mortal eye, it would have looked just like a bloody murder. But Alexa knew something else had happened here. The girl’s soul had been lost.

  Her boss, the archangel Ariel, the commander of the Counter Demon Division in the Department of Defense in the Legion, had sent her here because the girl’s soul appeared to have vanished.

  Alexa had spent one year in the Guardian Angel Legion, and this was her very first field assignment. She was there to gather information and defend human life if need be. She was also charged to investigate a possible rift in the Earth’s Veil. If there was a rift where the barriers between dimensions had become particularly weak, it could create a portal that would attract demons and other supernatural creatures. It could become a “hot spot” for supernatural activity.

  Alexa had tapped into her angel senses, searching for a nearby rift, but she had only perceived the familiar warm wave of humanity. No supernatural entities. No death. Nothing.

  Alexa knew she had been chosen for this assignment because she had been born and raised in Coffin Grove. It was a small town in Westchester County, about thirty miles north of New York City, and it made sense that the Legion would want an angel on the case who was familiar with the town. Of all the places they could have sent her, she just hadn’t expected to be back here.

  Alexa wore her new mortal suit, and so she looked just like a human. She had arrived in a back alley one block from the crime scene, about half an hour before she had ventured into the crowd. It had taken her a while to shake the choking, spiraling-into-darkness feeling that her journey to Earth had caused.

  Even now her vision blurred, and she reached out and steadied herself against a lamppost. The archangel Ariel had warned her about the dizzy spells that angels experienced their first time in a mortal suit. What she hadn’t expected was that it would feel like she’d been spinning on a merry-go-round on jet fuel.

  Worse, she’d managed to drop her tracker mite. The tiny transparent beetle-like device earpiece that she used to communicate with the Counter Demon Division must have fallen out. So now she had no means to reach the Legion and no one to guide her. She was on her own.

  Alexa hated being trapped in a strange body. It looked and felt familiar, but at the same time it was eerie. She had the same long brown hair, and she kept it tidy in the same ponytail. She had the same long fingers, arms, and legs, and yet everything felt alien somehow. She even wore an ordinary pair of jeans, a white t-shirt, a military style black jacket, and a pair of light boots. She was herself, yet different.

  “It’s the closest thing to a real mortal body,” the archangel Ariel had told her. “These M-9s are our best suits. You can breathe. You have a beating heart. You can even cry. You’ll have the feeling of bones, but they’re not human bones. Everything is artificial. These suits mimic all the sensations of a human body. Mortals and demons will find it much more difficult to spot you, and you will not feel so detached from the mortal world. You’ll be able to stay on Earth for up to three months before the sui
t begins to deteriorate. But you’ll need to find a source of water before it does, otherwise you will alert demons to you real identity, or you’ll die.”

  For an entire year, Alexa had done everything in her power to avoid field assignments. She didn’t want to be transported back to the world of the living. She kept herself busy studying everything she could about demons and the supernatural. She trained every day in combat skills and acquired the stealth and agility to help her vanquish the different levels of demons from the Netherworld. She never thought she’d really have to use those skills, at least not so soon.

  Alexa strained to take control of her new body. The more she thought about how creepy it was to be in a human suit, the more she began to panic.

  Stop being an idiot. You can do this.

  Death hadn’t been the end she thought it was, but a new beginning. She had been born into another body, and she had been chosen to be part of an organization that was hidden from the mortal eyes—the Guardian Angel Legion.

  Alexa touched the star mark on her forehead. It sent waves of warmth through her as it glowed and then faded. It was the mark of an angel.

  And as a guardian, in addition to protecting mortal life, her primary role was to save mortal souls. The soul must be saved. The mortal body was secondary because the soul could always be reborn.

  Somehow this poor girl’s soul had simply disappeared. But Alexa knew that souls just didn’t disappear.

  A short, plump man in his thirties was busy taking pictures with his phone until one of the police officers snatched it from him. In fact, when Alexa looked around, the curious onlookers that stood behind the yellow tape all snapped away with their phones, as if the dead girl had been some kind of celebrity. Alexa’s eyes burned with anger, and her M-suit mimicked her old body by providing tears. It appeared to be a natural reaction, but there was nothing natural about it. It was scary how close the Legion had come to perfecting their new bodies. She should cry. But her tears were fake, and she tried to prevent them from flowing. Part of Alexa was glad the girl was dead because she wouldn’t have to watch strangers posting pictures of her mangled body on social media. The crowd’s behavior was disturbing. Yet, there it was.