Chapter 15
Soul
Soul hounds didn’t sleep, so I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten here… but this had to be a dream. I’d never seen a place like this before.
I didn’t remember falling asleep. There’d just been the comfort of being in my true form, the feel of Caiden’s warmth spilling against my side. There’d been the soft sound of his breathing, that steady beat of his heart… and then I’d closed my eyes to the dark room and opened them… and I was here.
In front of me, there was an endless field of blue flowers, soft vines that twisted and covered the grass like a blanket.
The sky above me was littered with a thousand stars that glistened in soft blues and greens…
and in the center of the field, Caiden stood with one hand wrapped around his waist, looking up at the sky.
This had to be a dream, because I’d never seen anything so beautiful. It had to be a dream, because things like hell weren’t real, but I was pretty sure heaven was laid out in front of me.
“Caiden?” I called out his name, almost reluctant to break the silence, worried that if I said anything, all of this would dissolve around me.
I wanted to stay here. If I could choose a moment to have, one thing to take with me into endlessness…
it would be the way Caiden looked under the light of the stars, surrounded by that sea of blue.
At the sound of my voice, he turned, and the soft breeze seemed to follow his movement. It brought the sweet scent of flowers spilling around me like a second skin as he smiled.
“I really didn’t think I’d be in a place like this again.” I didn’t understand the near laughter in his voice.
“Again?”
Caiden shook his head. “Honestly, Cole and I have shared everything else. It shouldn’t be a shock that we shared the same dream when it came to something like this…
” His eyes dropped between us to the red thread that trailed from the center of my chest to his.
“I can see it so clearly here. I don’t know how I ever missed it to begin with.
” Caiden lifted his hand and gently traced along the edges of the crimson line, and I felt it pulling somewhere just behind my ribs.
I wasn’t sure why I was frozen in place, but I waited until he lifted that same hand and held it out to me. “Come here?”
I was moving before the words left his lips, taking his hand like it was the only thing keeping me attached to this strange world. I’d never really taken the time to notice how perfectly his fingers fit with mine. Like puzzle pieces interconnecting to make a whole picture.
To make me whole.
“Soulmates, huh?” Caiden leaned in, dropping his forehead onto my collarbone with a soft sigh. “If I’d known you were real when I was still alive, things might have been a little easier.”
I glanced at the field behind him, at the endless waves of flowers and the stars in the sky. “If I’d known about you when you were alive, I probably would have taken you before it was your time. It’s odd, the way things fall into line.”
Caiden glanced up at me, his eyes a burst of blue through the soft strands of his hair. “Fate, huh?”
“That fucking bastard,” I instantly responded, but my lips lifted into a smile to match his own. “He’s always meddling where he doesn’t belong. He always thinks he knows what’s right.”
Caiden moved forward, so I could feel the warmth of his body pressing against mine.
For a dream—and I knew this was a dream—he felt so real.
If this was my first dream, I wanted it to be the only one I ever had.
Standing here with the heat of him, with that sweet smile…
wrapped in that red thread and drowning in a sea of blue flowers.
“I don’t think I can be mad at him if it brought me here… if it brought me you. Everything makes so much more sense now, Soul. Everything I went through, everything I waited for. Everything I never had… it’s because it was here, waiting for you.”
There was still so much pain trapped behind his words, so much of his life that almost seemed left unspoken in the wake of his mortal existence cut short.
“I would never have had you sacrifice a moment of your life, Caiden. If it were up to me, if I controlled Fate, you would have been happy from the beginning. You would have lived a full life without regret, without pain. You would have always had a field of blue flowers, if that’s what you wanted. ”
He laughed, sweet tinged in melancholy. “Then you would have been there from the start, hm?” His lips were gentle when he brushed them back and forth across my chest, over that place where the red thread connected us.
It sent another jolt of warm pleasure spilling along my nerves, a sweetness I’d never felt before.
“It’s okay. I know things were hard when I was alive…
I know I had to be strong sometimes when I would rather have fallen apart…
but it’s okay. I saw Cole—how happy he was, how complete he seemed to be.
It was worth it… and…” He trailed off then, his eyes dropping back to the flowers.
If I wasn’t mistaken, his lashes were damp.
He didn’t stop me when I lifted his chin, didn’t pull away when I slid my tongue along his cheek to taste the salt.
Even his tears tasted like that first petal I’d put on my tongue.
“And what, little flower?” His words seemed trapped in his chest, like they were caught just behind his ribs, making those tears fall.
“I think I love you.” Caiden’s voice was soft, like even saying it aloud was terrifying.
“Even though I barely know you, even though none of this has been… normal. I think I was always going to love you. I always thought this field was just for Cole… but look…” He smiled, his words growing warmer, his fingers lacing through mine as he pulled me in and pressed his lips to mine.
“Soul, the flowers weren’t here before you came. ”
I couldn’t quite understand the weight of that last sentence, the way it seemed to light him up from the inside out… but maybe that was because I couldn’t get past the first words he’d said.
I love you.
Soul hounds couldn’t love. Then again, until the moment I’d met Caiden, I’d been certain that soul hounds couldn’t want, that we couldn’t need, that we couldn’t lust and desire. I hadn’t thought we could have soulmates.
But here he was, standing real and solid, every impossibility sculpted into the only shape that had ever been made to fit perfectly against every line of my heart.
He was everything.
“I was made to love you.” My whispered response drew a shiver from him when I pulled him closer—it wasn’t enough, though.
I lifted him until his legs dangled off the ground, sliding my arms beneath his thighs so he could wrap them around me.
Like this, we were chest to chest. Like this, my entire world was drowning in a sea of blue flowers and the perfect beat of Caiden’s heart.
“I thought my purpose was to hunt souls, to bring them to the Lake… but it was you. I was made to hunt one soul… just yours. I was made to find you.”
Maybe Death wouldn’t agree, but I didn’t need his approval to know it was true. Whatever purpose I’d thought I had, for whatever reason I’d been brought into existence, it was all for this.
For this moment.
For the way it felt when Caiden tilted his head back and I took his lips with my own in a soft kiss that made the wind around us pick up, so we were suddenly surrounded in a cloud of blue petals that smelled like home.