Free WeavingDestinyebook by G. P. Ching Page A

Soulkeeper."
    Jacob took a sip of water and made the gimme sign with his hand. "There's more to that story."
    She frowned. "I usually don't talk about it."
    "Well we could sit here in silence or you could share."
    She leaned back into her chair. "I was twelve when I became a Soulkeeper. My mother was beating up my father."
    Jacob raised his eyebrows.
    "I saw that. See, this isn't a happy story. That's why I don't tell people."
    "Have you ever told anyone?"
    "Just my Helper. Until recently, he was the only Soulkeeper I knew."
    "Tell me," Jacob said.  He leaned towards her and placed a hand on top of hers. "I promise, I won't judge."
    Mara stared at his hand until he felt self-conscious and pulled it back to his side of the table. She continued with her story.
    "People always think it's the other way around, that because the guy is bigger and stronger, he's always the beater. But my mom was a boozer and when she got violent my dad didn't want to hurt her, so he took it. I mean like, he took a beating regularly. Every time she'd get drunk, which was practically always. Looking back, it was really bad but, you have to understand, at the time I was used to it. It was a regular thing.
    "Well, this one time when I was twelve, my mom got really drunk and decided fists weren't good enough.  She reached for a kitchen knife, the big one in the block. I guess it's called a chef's knife. I was sitting in the living room watching SpongeBob, trying not to think about the sound of them fighting behind me, when everything went quiet. I knew something was wrong because they were never quiet. Mom was a loud drunk. I turned around and saw she had the knife aimed at my father's chest. He had his hands up like he'd surrendered and she was smiling like it was all a big joke.  And then she dove for him."
    Jacob tried his best to keep his expression neutral, but inside he couldn't believe what he was hearing. He gave a small nod to let her know he was listening.
    "There was this bell we kept on our coffee table, some antique piece of crap my mom had picked up at a garage sale. It was heavy and it was metal. I grabbed it and leapt over the couch. I wanted to use it to block the knife. But when it rang, everything stopped. I didn't know what the hell was going on. I don't know how long I stood there watching a freeze frame of my mother trying to kill my father. But at some point I turned my mother's wrist so that the knife pointed away from my father's chest.
    "Finally it occurred to me to ring the bell again. When I did, I realized that when I turned the knife away from my father, I'd pointed the blade toward my mother's chest. When time started again, she couldn't stop her momentum. She plunged that chef's knife into her own chest. I watched my mother stab herself with SpongeBob playing in the background."
    "Oh my god, Mara. That's..."
    "Horrible. Awful. Tragic. Excruciatingly painful."
    The words dripped with regret. "It wasn't your fault. The day I became a Soulkeeper, I almost killed two boys in my class. The water threw them thirty feet into a wall. All it would have taken was something sharp or the wrong angle and they'd be dead."
    "Huh. Well, my mom didn't die, but see when the cops came and I tried to explain what had happened, it sounded crazy. I didn't know what I was, so I told the truth. Then I told the truth again and again to a bunch of different people. And before you know it, I was committed to the Jacksonville psychiatric hospital."
    Jacob buried his fingers in his hair. Suddenly, his head felt like it weighed a million pounds. "How did your helper find you?"
    "He didn't for a full year. I lived there for three hundred and sixty seven days. And you know what? My parents never came to visit me. No one came to visit me. Then one day, an old man asked to see me. Right there in the visitor's center he explained to me what I was. His name was Dean Bell.  Ironic huh. I had a Helper named Mr. Bell."
    "How did he get you out?"
    "Oh, he