Torn: A young adult paranormal romance (Breath of Fate Book 1)

by Angelina J. Steffort

  I thought of the day I had taken Jo to the nurse’s office—and the Shadowbringer who had invaded my efforts. And was close to rolling my eyes. “She hasn’t been feeling well a lot lately,” I agreed. “She says she’s fine, though.”

  Mom gave me a pensive look. “Not everyone who says they’re fine actually is fine.”

  Involuntarily, my mind flipped to the earlier months of the year when I had been still stuck in the aftereffects of the accident Leon and I had witnessed. How many times had I said I was fine? And how many times had it been true?

  “I’ll talk to her on Monday,” I promised. “And don’t worry about the Leon situation,” I added. “We’re good. The same as always.”

  Mom smiled, her nose crinkling as it only did when she was overdoing a fake-smile. Then she pursed her lips, pondering for a long moment. “Just know that it is all right when feelings change. It happened with your father and me.” She paused, waiting for my reaction as she talked about Dad, who she usually didn’t bring up. “It’s okay to fall in love with your best friend.” She smiled—a real smile this time. “And it’s okay to fall out of love again, too.”

  There was nothing I could think of to say. Even had there been something, I wouldn’t have been able to speak, for a sensation like a bolt of lightning ran through my chest, and it cost me all of my focus to keep my face straight.

  What was going on?

  Somewhere in the background, Mom’s phone buzzed. From the corner of my eye, I saw her get up and dive into her bag.

  It took about a second for Leon to show up beside me, still in his ethereal form, probably walking through walls and everything. It didn’t shock me half as much as it should have when he placed a hand on my shoulder and bent so his lips were at my ear. “Breathe, Laney,” he whispered without the least sign of worry that Mom could spot him showing in the calm flow of his breath.

  It was tempting to turn and look at him, to try and read from his face what was going on, but Mom—thank God she had gotten to her feet and was pulling a glass from the cupboard above the sink, humming some song we had listened to in the car on the way back from Santoni’s.

  “You can feel it, right?” Leon asked, the quiet calm before a storm in his words.

  There was no need for me to deny or confirm. He wouldn’t have bolted into the room otherwise.

  I wanted to ask what it was that I felt, if it was a bad sign that my chest felt as if it was breaking apart, but that would have needed spoken words … words that I would never let cross my lips while next to Mom. I eyed her slender figure as she filled up the glass with orange juice and turned with a smile.

  “I know I promised we’d do something together—” she hesitated as she took in my face, the expression that had to remind her of a constipated toddler rather than her teenage daughter.

  “Tell her it’s okay if she needs to work,” Leon guided me like a lifeline, his hand on my shoulder warm and light and evoking that exciting electric current I usually just felt in my ethereal form. In reflex, my eyes darted to my hands to make sure everything was still corporeal.

  I sighed through my nose.

  “It’s okay if you need to work, Mom,” I said and forced myself to smile. It was honestly the expression of relief I felt crossing my features, but the pain in my chest made it easier to hide just how glad I was I wouldn’t be expected to go on a shopping spree with her. Or play board games. Even if that was what I enjoyed most on our mother-daughter weekends.

  “Really?” Mom didn’t look convinced.

  “Nod,” Leon instructed, his thumb running over my shoulder in calming strokes, and I relaxed a bit. My chest expanded more easily at his reassuring touch, and my head bobbed obediently.

  “It’s fine, Mom,” I improvised. “I have homework to do and whatnot.”

  Whatnot was what I hoped Leon would explain to me the second I was out of Mom’s reach.

  So when Mom drained her glass of juice, I lifted my cup and gulped down the hot chocolate, grimacing at the rush of sweetness in my mouth. “I’ll be in my room,” I let her know as I braced myself against the table and got up, Leon lifting most of my weight as he wrapped his hands around my waist and pulled me upright.

  Mom was refilling her glass when I set my shaky steps toward the door and reached the doorframe before she turned. “Maybe I’ll call Leon to come over.” I managed a wink, which was meant for Mom as much as for Leon, who would have a chance to show up in his visible form and pick me up to do whatnot, and Mom would be none the wiser.

  “Should I help clean this up?” I gestured at the table just to behave as normal as possible.

  She shook her head. “You go call Leon.” A smile brightened her temporarily concerned expression. “I’m sure he’ll be delighted I am no longer claiming you for myself all day.”

  At that, Leon chuckled beside me. “You have no idea, Mrs. Dawson,” he murmured, and I was glad my mother couldn’t see or hear him.

  When she turned her attention on the table once more, Leon gently guided me up the stairs, letting me lean against him as if he were as solid as in his corporeal form. I didn’t think to ask him if I had switched, too. I didn’t have the muse to check with a glance at my hands. All I did was breathe through that pain that felt like a crack was running through my chest, breaking it open with sharp force.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “I am not sure whether don’t panic is the right way to put it,” Leon said in his most gentle voice, “but please don’t panic.”

  “Panic about what?” I blankly stared at him, now certain that I had flipped into the non-corporeal version of myself. “That thing that is prying my chest open?”

  The pain hadn’t ceased. It had gotten worse. Almost like someone was tearing an anchor from the inside out through my ribs.

  “That”—Leon acknowledged the plain panic in my face with a frown and sat down next to me where I was perched on the edge of the bed like a bird about to take flight—“and the reason for why you are feeling the way you are.”

  He had my attention. “Whatever it is, spit it out.” By now, anything had to be better than groping through the darkness of oblivion.

  “You are feeling a soul call—” He stopped himself as he noticed the realization on my face.

  “Like with Jo?” To my horror, Mom was the only other soul in this house at the moment, and if her soul suddenly drew me like Jo’s that night—

  What would I do? Could I simply rip it from her? Were Lightbringers even capable of killing? A shudder ran up and down my spine like spider legs.

  “No—” Leon shook his head, exasperated, and I wished he would simply say what he was thinking instead of waiting for me to figure it out.

  “Tell me,” I demanded and flopped back into the blankets, fixing my gaze on the cream color of the ceiling and the dust particles dancing in the late morning light. Frustration sounded heavy in my voice, dulling the pain for a bit.

  “You are feeling the call of a soul that needs to be transferred,” he finally said, his eyes squinting as he looked down at me, biting his lower lip for a moment as if hesitant to finish the thought. “Someone is dying, Laney, and you are feeling that there will be work to be done.”

  I froze right there on the teal sheets and counted the irritatingly regular beats of my heart while Leon examined me, face first, then my tight shoulders, my arms flattened to my sides, and my hands clutching the cotton beneath me. “Breathe,” he repeated. It was the only thing that made a difference. Focus on breathing.

  “So you’re saying,” I stuttered between hasty gulps of air, “that this is my future?” I pointed a stiff finger at my chest. “I will be hurting like this for the rest of my life whenever a soul needs saving?”

  To my surprise, Leon cringed at my words.

  “We’re not saving anyone, Laney,” he said quietly. “We are taking the souls where they belong.”

  I panted and clamped my hand around his forearm to pull myself upright again.

 
; “It will fade when you follow the direction of the tug,” he added and lifted a hand to gesture out the north-west window, and as I watched him, I knew it was true—that was the direction that anchor in my chest was trying to break through my ribs and sail toward.

  It was then that I noticed the frown hadn’t left Leon’s face. It was a slight crease between his arched brows that I had noticed that day he had taken me to the bookstore; the day before Gran had died.

  “You are feeling the same thing,” I concluded. He had to be. It was the same face. The rare frown on his usually so smooth and cheerful face.

  His chin dipped in response. “What did you think?”

  Now it was I who cringed. He had been living for too many years with this burden, without sharing it. His pain … he had been hiding it since he had been little more than a child. How did he stand it so calmly, so gracefully? I hadn’t even lived through one calling soul, and I was already despairing.

  “What do we do now?” I asked into the taut space between us where suddenly, nothing mattered but that I had so dearly underestimated the smiling boy who had been protecting me all my life. He wasn’t just divine; he was brave and strong. Stronger than I could ever be.

  He turned away as if he had read something in my eyes he’d rather not. “I know what I need to do.” He sighed and studied the floor rather than facing me again. “But it is up to you whether or not you’re ready to answer that call.”

  I loosed a breath, unsure of what was the right thing to do, of what he expected, of whether my decision would affect the chances of someone going to heaven.

  “The pain will fade the second someone takes the soul home,” he added, and by his phrasing, I could tell that he didn’t mean heaven only—there was a Shadowbringer ready to take the soul to the fiery pits of hell.

  And suddenly, it was very clear what I needed to do … even if it turned my stomach just to think about it. “I’ll come,” I whispered. “But you need to tell me what to expect first. And you can’t leave me alone wherever we’re going. I don’t want to get stuck with a soul I can’t deliver or lost somewhere in paradise.”

  Leon’s head flipped to the side, and his gaze locked on mine, eyes a liquid tone of caramel rather than the usual dark brown as if relief had brightened him from inside. “Here’s what you need to know.” He ran a hand through his hair, shoving back the strands that kept coming loose. “Travel with me on the angel essence; let the tug guide you. When we arrive wherever the soul calls us, all you need to do is watch and learn. You don’t need to inhale the soul; you don’t need to take it to heaven.” He gave me a serious nod. “I can do that.”

  I wasn’t sure if I found his words reassuring at all. “And what do I do?”

  At that, his frown deepened. “You observe how to deal with a Shadowbringer when he comes to claim what’s ours.”

  Cas.

  My stomach tightened for no apparent reason other than that if I followed the call of the soul, I would be facing the Shadowbringer who wanted my own soul as a trophy. And I wasn’t sure if I was ready. Especially not after what had happened at the cabin.

  If you ever feel cold, Laney, call for me. There is plenty of heat where I came from.

  I shook my head at the memory of Cas’s voice, of his bored gaze as he had stopped on the threshold. I still hadn’t worked up the courage to talk to Leon about what had happened at the cabin—not the Shadowbringer but that he had admitted he’d been about to kiss me.

  And that I hadn’t been at all intending to avoid it.

  If it hadn’t been for Cas, Leon and I might actually be what everyone already thought we were.

  To my surprise, that thought felt about as natural as I could allow myself to believe.

  I studied his face, his high cheekbones, and his large, dark-framed eyes, the tan of his skin, and the stark contrast of his white-blond hair. He was stunning even with the crease that angled his eyebrows together more narrowly than usual.

  “Let me handle the bargaining,” Leon tore me from my thoughts. “Just promise you won’t let the Shadowbringer upset you.”

  “If he is there,” I wondered aloud, trying to memorize everything Leon told me, to listen intently rather than stare at his face, “won’t he try to steal my soul?”

  To my surprise, Leon shook his head. “Not while he’s on duty. Securing a soul is the most sacred job in the world—even for the Shadowbringers. He won’t try anything until after the bargaining is over. Besides, I will be there the whole time. He can very well try—“

  Leon bit his lip as if he was cutting off his words.

  My chest ached, the pain more bearable now that I grasped the meaning of it and understood what I might actually be capable of doing to stop it. It was a relief to know I would be safe even when Cas and his disturbing stares would haunt me days after—I was already sure they would.

  “Also, the sooner you get acquainted with the procedure, the better. Once you have transferred the first soul yourself, you’ll be safe from him forever,” Leon added in an afterthought. A quite important afterthought, but it didn’t matter, for my mind was already circling the one issue that I had been unable to wrap my head around.

  “What does that bargaining look like?” I wanted to know. If that was truly the way things went, if someone negotiated on my behalf whether I could go to heaven or should go to hell, what did my life, my actions, my choices mean? If, in the end, all that mattered was how well the light side was prepared to bargain with the dark side.

  “It’s fairly easy,” Leon said with an unchanged expression. “Lightbringers get called to every soul who is worthy of going to heaven, even if they have done wrong, while Shadowbringers are called to every soul who deserves a place in hell.” He gestured in the air between us, shaping spaces, forms that made no sense to me. “If someone was only good in life, and it is clear they belong in heaven, a Shadowbringer may show up but never claim the soul. It is the same the other way around.” He paused to check whether or not I was still following him and found me listening attentively. His voice helped tune out the ache in my chest. “The vast mass of people however are neither—entirely good or entirely bad that is. They are something in between with plenty of sins and plenty of good deeds redeeming them. We feel—both the Lightbringers and the Shadowbringers—that there is a reason why they should be in either of the realms of the afterlife, and we feel the urge to secure them for our side. So we bargain, we negotiate, we try to convince the other side that the souls belong to ours.”

  I listened to Leon, my imagination running wild, my thoughts already ahead in a hospital where someone was bleeding out, Cas and Leon conversing beside the gurney, flipping coins for the soul. No, that couldn’t be it. It would mean there was nothing worth fighting for in our human life, once we had gone wrong. That there was no chance to be sure we would ever be safe from going to hell. Not that hell even was a concept I had truly believed in a couple of months ago.

  “How do you know,” I asked, unable to hold myself back. “How do you know who to fight for and who to give up?”

  He stared back into my eyes, a flicker of emotion crossing his features. “It is hard to explain. But you’ll understand once you are there. Once you see it happening. It’s like some part of us knows where that person stands on a scale between either side. It’s that one moment, only when they leave their bodies, that we know.” He shrugged. “A gift of the angel, I suppose. Like traveling on its essence or shifting into our ethereal form.”

  Suddenly, my own life flickered before my eyes. I had done plenty of things that I wasn’t proud of. Nothing that would give me a criminal record, but I was sure that when I died, a Lightbringer wouldn’t be the only one waiting to take my soul. There would be a Shadowbringer for sure.

  As if Leon read my thoughts from my eyes, he leaned forward and brushed his fingers across my cheek. “I will be there to fight for you when your time has come, Laney. No matter where you stand on that scale.” His gaze was fierce, but his hand w
as so gentle it made me shiver over the aching tug in my chest. “Even if hell were your only option. I would fight until the very end.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  When we arrived at the scene, my stomach turned. This wasn’t for the faint-hearted. Leon’s hand was still there on mine as we materialized in the crossing where a red van had been squished by a truck. The truck driver was being loaded into an ambulance while the driver of the van was being zipped up in a black body bag.

  So, this was it. The first dying I had heard. I didn’t even know if it was a man or a woman—all I could tell was that the person’s life had abruptly ended.

  “Any second now,” Leon said and pulled me closer toward the gurney where they were loading the deceased.

  The pain in my chest had faded the moment we had taken off to follow the soul’s call. Now that I was less than three steps away from the target, I could feel the thrumming of the life—not the physical life of the human body but of the soul that was struggling to hatch—like a beat to the cacophony of shouts and orders among the firemen and paramedics, the words of speculation among the spectators who had gathered by the edge of the town.

  Had I walked here from my home, it might have taken me twenty minutes or less, but traveling on angel essence, it had taken a blink of an eye.

  “There,” Leon commented, guiding me along as we followed the gurney to an ambulance. “Can you feel it?” He didn’t wait for me to respond but let his head flip to the side with a frown. “I was wondering if this time you were going to grace us with your absence,” Leon said sourly, and I didn’t need to turn and look to know who he was talking to.

  “There, there,” Cas said by way of greeting. “And then I thought you’d remember that you owe me a favor.”