Immortal Souls (The Immortal Souls: Magic & Chaos)

Chapter 43

"Sam . . . "

"What?" she asked without looking in his direction.

"There are two girls following us," he whispered staring straight ahead, acting as if he hadn't said a thing. "And one of them looks just like you."

Sam stopped walking; her heart skipped a beat. She took a breath and looked over her shoulder, already knowing what she would see.

A thin girl with silver hair, deathly pale skin and large dark eyes.

A Ban Sídh.

And beside her was a ghost, shedding silent tears as she looked at Sam with a face that was identical to her own.

A Feit.

Shit, Sam thought with an internal sigh, suddenly aware of how weak she felt as her eyes set upon the melancholic faces of the death fey.

"How long?" Sam asked. The Ban Sídh shook her head, refusing to answer as Sam knew she would. With a sigh, she nodded and turned back to Jamie, who was watching her intently. "It's okay, they won't hurt either of us."

"But—" Jamie tried to protest.

"It's fine."

Jamie looked at her, uncertainty written clearly on his face, then he sighed and nodded resignedly. They moved out of the grass and onto the cobblestoned streets of the marketplace.

"That's where we're going." Sam pointed to the store at the end of the road, where a boy with violet hair and green eyes sat holding a mandolin in his lap. He had the appearance of a sixteen year old, but Sam knew that he was actually more like a hundred.

Cayden smiled as Sam approached. He started strumming his mandolin, momentarily glancing at Jamie beside her. "Do I need to make changes to my ballad?" he asked Sam. "Do I need to make it more upbeat since the last time I saw you?"

She suppressed a grin and rolled her eyes. "Not now Cayden." Sam pushed the store door open and walked inside with Jamie close behind her.

"Who's that?" he asked, peering out the window at Cayden, who was still strumming his mandolin.

"That's Cayden."

Sam turned swiftly to look at whoever had spoken.

"He sits there all the time and makes songs about the people he sees," said the small girl as she looked from Jamie to Sam and back again.

Sam eyed the girl warily; she had been coming to this store once a month for the past three years and had never seen her before.

Not even once.

Which was weird because most of the people who came here did so on a regular basis.

Unless of course they were a new recruit to the world of Faerie.

The girl held an empty glass jar, turning it around in her hands as she stared inside it. Her skin was white as snow, she was paler than anyone Sam had ever seen in her life, including Jamie, and much like snow her skin appeared to have an unearthly shimmer. Almost as though whatever Power the girl possessed lived within every cell of her being. Her hair was pale pink, though Sam doubted it was her natural colour. Judging by the tone of her skin and the luminous reddish-purple shade of her eyes, Sam guessed that the girl's natural hair was probably the same shade as her skin.

The girl's eyes creased around the corners in a smile as she watched Sam assess her.

Sam didn't smile back.

There was something wrong about this girl. By the look of her it was obvious that she wasn't human. Sam could practically see the Magic leaking from her. But her senses picked up no traces of it.