Free Ready & Willing by Elizabeth Bevarly

in one hand. Then she pushed herself up to standing, inhaled a deep breath and released it slowly, and met his gaze again, this time dry-eyed.
    “So if you showed up in the shop to meet me,” she said,
    “and I can’t give away your portrait, then I guess it goes to reason that you’ll be hanging around until you do whatever you have to do. Save Nathaniel Summerfield’s soul. Or whatever he has that passes for one,” she concluded with clear disdain.
    “In those assumptions, you are correct, Mrs. Magill,” Silas said. “I won’t be going anywhere until after that. And even then, I’m not entirely clear on the rules.”
    “But why me?” she asked. “Why don’t you haunt Nathaniel yourself?”
    The answer came to him immediately. “Because people without souls can’t be haunted.”
    Her dark brows shot up at that. “Then that means his soul is already gone. We’re too late. So you should be going.” Hastily, she repeated, “Nothing personal.”
    “It’s not gone yet,” Silas told her, not questioning his knowledge of that. He only knew it was true, the way he knew other things were true. “Not permanently. It’s somewhere between Nathaniel and the place souls go when they depart this world. Not here, but not there yet, either. It’s in . . .” He wasn’t sure what the word was for the condition.
    “Limbo?” Mrs. Magill suggested. “Purgatory? The astral plane?”
    “Not those, but something like them.”
    “So how do we get it back into your descendant?” she asked. “Because having met the man, I don’t think he has room inside for a soul anymore. He’s too full of loathsomeness.”
    “Yes, well, I can see how the lack of a soul might render one disagreeable.”
    “Oh, trust me, Captain, your great-great-however-many-greats grandson goes way beyond disagreeable. And I suspect he was that way a long time before he crossed paths with Edward Dryden.”
    Her tone of voice when she uttered the censure made Silas suspect there was something mingling with her disapproval that was not altogether disapproving. Mrs. Magill was turning out to be quite the intriguing houseguest.
    He reminded himself that it was he, not she, who was the guest here. An uninvited one at that. The sooner he completed the task he had been sent here to perform, the sooner he could return to wherever he needed to return and leave her to move on with her life.
    Strange, but even though he knew the place whence he had come was one of complete peace, joy, and solace, a setting that wanted for nothing and offered every comfort, he found himself reluctant to go back.
    He pushed the idea away. Nonsense. The world in which Audrey Magill lived was nothing like the one Silas had inhabited while alive. As many changes as the world had wrought in his own lifetime, they were nothing compared to the ones that had come since his death. He would never find solace or comfort in this world. From what little he had learned since his return—mostly by reading Mrs. Magill’s newspaper—peace and joy seemed to be absent here. Certainly the time in which he had lived had had its share of woe and injustice, but this brave new world seemed neither brave nor new to Silas.
    That thought, too, he relegated to the back of his brain. He had been charged with a task that must be completed. The sooner, the better. For everyone involved.
    He was about to say that very thing to Mrs. Magill, but she spoke first. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll go see your loathsome grandson again. And I’ll do whatever I have to do to get his soul back for him.” She crossed her arms mutinously across her chest. “Even if I have to shove it down his throat.”

Five
    AS AUDREY STOOD IN NATHANIEL SUMMERFIELD’S office the following day, she took perverse pleasure in the fact that she once again hadn’t made an appointment to see him. Oh, she’d thought about making one the day before, after talking to Silas, but she’d decided the guy was probably booked up weeks