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    Soulsearching
    Soulsearching
    Soulsearching
    Ebook29 pages21 minutes

    Soulsearching

    By Dayle A. Dermatis

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Layde leads a double life: as a Duchess on the Hll, and as a mysterious assassin in a blood-red cloak. Born without a soulstone, set apart from every other person by her difference, she wanders adrift until she falls in love with Sehra, also a hired killer...and a mother. Layde takes jobs to fill the hollowness inside, but Sehra kills by a code. Their differences threaten to drive them apart, and tragedy threatens to destroy Layde. Only the love of a child has a chance of bringing her back from despair’s edge.

    DAYLE A. DERMATIS has been called “one of the best writers working today” by USA Today bestselling author Dean Wesley Smith. Under various pseudonyms (and sometimes with coauthors), she’s sold several novels and more than a hundred short stories in multiple genres. She lives and works in California within scent of the ocean, and in her spare time follows Styx around the country and travels the world, all of which inspires her writing. She loves music, cats, Wales, TV, magic, laughter, and defying expectations. To find out where she is today, check out her website.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSoul's Road Press
    Release dateJan 5, 2015
    ISBN9781311488541
    Soulsearching
    Author

    Dayle A. Dermatis

    Dayle A. Dermatis is the author or coauthor of many novels (including snarky urban fantasies Ghosted and the forthcoming Shaded and Spectered) and more than a hundred short stories in multiple genres, appearing in such venues as Fiction River, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, and DAW Books.Called the mastermind behind the Uncollected Anthology project, she also guest edits anthologies for Fiction River, and her own short fiction has been lauded in many year's best anthologies in erotica, mystery, and horror.She lives in a book- and cat-filled historic English-style cottage in the wild greenscapes of the Pacific Northwest. In her spare time she follows Styx around the country and travels the world, which inspires her writing.To find out where she’s wandered off to (and to get free fiction!), check out DayleDermatis.com and sign up for her newsletter or support her on Patreon.* * *I value honest feedback, and would love to hear your opinion in a review, if you’re so inclined, on your favorite book retailer’s site.* * *For more information:www.dayledermatis.com

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      Soulsearching - Dayle A. Dermatis

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      Table of Contents

      About the Author

      Copyright Information

      THE DAY MY FATHER DIED, my mother’s soulstone cracked.

      A hair’s-breadth line winding down. A dark rivulet of parting where once the stone was smooth and smoky green, perhaps mirroring her now-unwhole and unhealed heart. She stared—unseeing?—at the stone, then dropped it in the pouch around her neck, nothing said. A week later, I returned home and found her soulstone parted from her. It lay on the hearth where she’d left it, alone and lonely. I knelt and took it, cupped it in my palm. No longer her soul’s smoke within and through; now the stone poised clear like a fallen teardrop orb, a round window, an empty eye.

      So I felt no surprise when they came and said my mother had been found at my father’s grave, the frown of grief now smooth-browed peace. As with my father’s—as with everyone’s—my mother’s soulstone snugged in its pouch at her breast when she was buried.

      Everyone, that will be, save me.

      After the funeral I returned to the manor house where I had grown. I replaced my corset and hoops with doublet and breeches, and swathed myself in my cloak of stormcloud blue, its lining sanguine. Sturdy boots on my feet, rapier knocking at my side, I nudged the door shut and left. Dusk worried at my heels like a sheepherder’s dog as I left the hilltop of my birth, unable to stay and knowing, dry-eyed and keen-minded, that it would be long before I would return.

      Several miles off the hilltop where the highborn kept their

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