Free Obsidian Souls (Soul Series) by Donna Augustine Page A

heat I barely felt the cold.
                  The street sounds had started to fade and the jarring bumps had increased so I knew we had left the city. The speed made me nervous so I still kept my eyes closed. I could feel twigs whizzing past grazing my legs and arms.
                  As I felt us slow to a stop, I finally opened my eyes and looked at where we were. We had pulled up under a massive oak, and I could see the full moon blazing through the canopy of branches above, its light reflecting against the patches of snow on the ground.
                  He signaled for me to follow him. He was walking briskly and it was hard to maintain the same pace, he had to continually pause for me when I lost ground. As we walked, I could just make out a small flickering light in between the trees in the distance. The air had the faint smell of smoke.
                  “Is that where…”
                  He turned back to me, holding a finger to my lips, and shook his head slightly. Maybe I should have been nervous, but I wasn’t. I decided at that very moment, that from this point forward in my life, I would trust my gut. My gut told me Caden wouldn’t bring harm to me intentionally. My gut wasn’t so clear on anything else about him though.
                  We had been walking for about ten minutes, getting closer and closer to the fire. I could now see the top of a large flame reaching up wildly into the night, flickering beautifully against the starry sky. Once we got about seventy feet away, I could see the silhouettes of bodies appearing like black smudges against their flaming backdrop. The fire had to be at least twenty feet across and was monstrously high.
                  Caden grabbed my arm and brought me with him to a spot just beyond the clearing. We crawled low into some shrubs just out of sight, and I looked to him, asking with my eyes, what it was we were looking at?
                  He silently mouthed, “just wait,” to me. I turned back to watch as a group of about thirty men circled around the flame. Scanning the faces, I saw that one of them was Carl and my breathing hitched a notch quicker.
    If we were discovered, there would be no way out of this for me. I went from lying perfectly still to frozen.
                  I realized my fear hadn’t even begun once I saw what came next. Two men were walking to the side of the clearing out of view. When they came back, they had a struggling man in between them. It looked like he was in his early thirties. They slowly walked closer to the huge fire, dragging the struggling man with them. The other men started to holler and cheer them on as they formed a closed circle around the fire.
                  Sympathy overrode my own fear and I frantically grabbed at Caden motioning that we should try to do something to stop it. With a stone look upon his face, he shook his head no. I couldn’t just lay there and watch the man burn to death so I started to get up, but I couldn’t. Caden, anticipating my movement, wrapped a hand around my waist pulled me close to him pinning me partially beneath his own body. I had no choice left but to be a witness to the carnage.
                  The two men slowly stepped into the flames dragging the struggling man with him. What I heard next would forever be etched into memory. Howling screams of agony, that didn’t sound human, screeched through the air and the smell of burning flesh was so thick I thought I would choke on it. But, that wasn’t the end of it. I could see the two other men standing in the blazing fire, holding the man’s still struggling burnt flesh and they both had their heads thrown back in laughter. Their clothing had fallen off into ashes and they stood naked but unharmed, holding the burning man until there was nothing left but a charred skeletal frame.
                  When