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“Well, you’re wrong. He’s not my soul mate, Paramour, or whatever else you want to call him. I feel absolutely nothing for him and I’m not going to just because you say I’m supposed too,” I snapped, scowling at him, my hands firmly folded together in my lap.
He sighed, shaking his head, jaded with my response. “You will, Claire. You can’t fight your seal. You’ll need him more than the air you breathe.”
That hurt. That hurt a great deal, because right now I felt like I needed Brent that much.
“How can you say that? Can you honestly say that you don’t feel anything for me? You’re a liar, if you can,” I chastened.
He looked at me exasperated, smacking his palm on his head.
“I do, Claire. You’re right, okay? But it doesn’t matter. I’m not supposed to and it can’t happen. Something is off with everything. How I do feel about you for starters. How I fell asleep or didn’t recognize Logan was a danger to you, and I didn’t feel your pain when Logan was in your room.”
“Wait,” I interrupted, “Logan was in my room? I thought that was a dream.”
“No, he marked you and to do that he has to touch you. An Adherent can only hurt you through the human Anchor that entertains them,” he replied, shaking his head as though he was trying to lose the image.
“Oh.” The thought of Logan in my room made me feel physically ill. “This is still so confusing, Brent. I don’t understand who Kace is or why he wants me dead.” The word dead rolling off my tongue made me shutter.
I sat, slowly picking at my eggs with my fork, while Brent started to tell me everything.
“Do you know anything about the spiritual world like ghosts, hauntings, souls, those kinds of things?” he asked. He took a large swig of orange juice and waited for my reply.
“You mean like supernatural stuff? Not really, but my dad and I used to watch ghost hunting shows on TV. They were so ridiculous. I can’t believe people actually think that stuff is real,” I laughed, before considering my situation. I felt like I had just been smacked and I had, really hard. Reality was sinking in and I had a strange feeling the rumors about ghosts at my aunt’s house were about to be more than town gossip. My fork slipped from my grasp, clinking noisily as it hit the plate. I elected to give up on eating for now.
“Well, I agree the shows are a little outlandish, but much of it is on point. We are Ghost Hunters, Claire. We don’t use special methods or equipment that measure PSI, nothing like that, but we are designed to hunt down lost spirits, ghosts.” Brent put it out there for me to examine.
I gulped. Did I just hear him correctly? “How is that even possible?”
“To start, a human life comes to an end. When this happens, their soul is released in the form of an apparition to The Appa-Realm. We refer to it as The Realm. You may have heard the term Astral Plane on one of the shows,” Brent questioned.
I nodded and he went on.
“The Realm is a world that exists above the physical world. Doyens are apparitions that control The Realm. Each has a specific job and gifted abilities to complete those jobs. Some of the Doyen’s are Agents. They are in power, if you will, like Royalty.”
“What do they have to do with us?” I asked.
“Once an apparition arrives in The Realm, an Agent determines if they are able to move beyond The Realm to whatever higher purpose they were designed for. The human life is somewhat of a training period, helping to prepare them for that. Humans need to live, fall in love, make mistakes and learn from them so they can serve a higher purpose when their human life ends. When a human dies, and has not completed their purpose in the physical world, they can’t move beyond The Realm. Sometimes the Agent has to physically return them. Such is the case when someone is brought back to life. Other times, the apparition has to complete their purpose in their current form, which is a great deal harder. However, it works and most of the time apparitions are able to complete their purpose and successfully move on to the next life.”
“And Kace refuses to do that?” I assumed.
“Yes, centuries ago Kace decided he wanted to remain in The Realm and haunt humans. Our kind has been hunting him ever since. Many apparitions have joined him over the years. They have the ability to freely come and go from The Realm, without an Agent. Apparitions only appear spirit-like when it’s dark. During the day they look like any other human. Our kind has the ability to not only see but communicate with them in the Physical world. ”
“Mediums,” I interrupted.
“No, Claire. Most Mediums are human, some with a minute ability and some with none at all, but they only communicate with the dead. There are a few of our kind with real abilities that choose to live as loners, working as though they are mediums, and they make a nice living doing it. As long as they don’t abuse their gifts, the Agents allow them to do so. Our kind is abettors to the Doyens. We’ve accepted our design as Chasers, half human, half apparition and the gifts that go along with it. We have senses and abilities to track apparitions or lost spirits, trap them, and return them to The Realm.”
“I don’t understand. How can we be both human and apparition?” The idea seemed completely impossible.
“When a life is saved, an apparition returns to physical form, and some cling to their human counterparts longer than others. If humans mate during that time, and there is an off – spring, depending on how strong the spirit is at conception, we are born.”
I remembered the story of a horrible accident my dad was involved in, at the mill where he worked, because the structure was old and run down. He almost died and the mill closed shortly after.
“My dad?” I asked knowingly.
“Yes, and your mother as well,” he explained. “She had fallen down the stairs shortly after your dad’s accident. The Agents returned her so quickly she thought she merely passed out. Three weeks later, you were conceived.”
“I had no idea,” I admitted.
“That is why you are special. The Agents have abilities too. Some are fated. The fated ones reviewed our future and determined that a Locket child would be born within the year, with abilities much stronger than the rest of us, inherently able to hunt and remove Kace. The child would come from two parents whose physical lives had been spared. There were six such children born before the end of the year. Agents found each child their Aegis, pairing them all. Once they determined who The Locket child was, the Agents would find that child’s Paramour as well.
