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  Hope’s Promise

  Soulkeepers Reborn Book 2

  G.P. Ching

  Contents

  Books by G.P. Ching

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  1. Devil in the Windy City

  2. Hope’s Passage

  3. Revelations

  4. Best Friends

  5. The Garden

  6. The Pressure Cooker

  7. Dark Angel

  8. The Concert

  9. Dangerous Tidings

  10. The Island

  11. The Quest

  12. Lost Angel

  13. Chain Reaction

  14. Goodbyes

  15. New Horizons

  16. The Hand You’re Dealt

  17. The Hunters

  18. Body and Soul

  19. Mission

  20. The New Guy

  21. Promises

  22. The Estate

  23. Obsidian

  24. Lost and Found

  25. What’s Normal

  26. Hidden

  27. New Orleans

  28. The Demonstration

  29. A Bad Night

  30. Starry Night

  31. Connectivity

  32. To the Point

  33. Consequences

  34. When Push Comes to Shove

  35. Meat Locker

  36. Sorcery

  37. Jenny

  38. Masks

  39. The Gift

  40. The Magician

  41. The Test

  42. Witness

  43. New Beginnings

  44. Lost Souls

  Lucifer’s Pride (Excerpt)

  Chapter 1

  About the Author

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  Books by G.P. Ching

  Acknowledgments

  Hope’s Promise: Soulkeepers Reborn, Book 2

  Copyright © G.P. Ching, 2018

  Published by Carpe Luna, Ltd, PO Box 5932, Bloomington, IL 61702

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

  First Edition: March 2018

  eISBN: 978-1-940675-34-3

  ISBN: 978-1-940675-35-0

  V1.5

  Books by G.P. Ching

  Soulkeepers Reborn

  Wager’s Price, Book 1

  Hope’s Promise, Book 2

  Lucifer’s Pride, Book 3

  * * *

  The Soulkeepers Series

  The Soulkeepers, Book 1

  Weaving Destiny, Book 2

  Return to Eden, Book 3

  Soul Catcher, Book 4

  Lost Eden, Book 5

  The Last Soulkeeper, Book 6

  * * *

  The Grounded Trilogy

  Grounded, Book 1

  Charged, Book 2

  Wired, Book 3

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  1

  Devil in the Windy City

  The hunger burning in Lucifer’s belly had as much to do with the wounds still festering in his cheek and thigh as the decadent selection of humans who packed the sidewalk around him. It was late spring in Chicago. Unseasonably warm. Hot enough to feel like home.

  Today, he’d chosen an illusion from a magazine: a European soccer star with coffee-colored waves and muscles that nature never intended. He’d changed the face: made the eyes bigger and the nose straighter. Not a hint showed of the damage that lingered underneath. Damage caused by the Soulkeeper, Hope. He’d underestimated her. It wouldn’t happen again.

  Next to him on the sidewalk, a young woman glanced his way, a flirtatious smile drifting through her expression like a cool breeze. Too easy. Her pulse throbbed like a drum, and a bead of sweat rolled down her neck and disappeared under her halter top. He sensed she was older than she looked, maybe thirty, but her soul was remarkably well tended, practically innocent. If he drank her blood, fed on her flesh, and ingested that bright soul, it would do much to heal the injury the little Soulkeeper had inflicted. He rubbed his cheek.

  It wasn’t self-restraint that kept him from acting on his desires. On the contrary, it was a singular focus on something more important—revenge. Hope Laudner and her friend Finn Wager had sprung the trapdoor he’d created decades ago and allowed him to circumvent the prison he’d been sentenced to by the Great Oppressive Deity. The trapdoor had served its purpose. He’d transcended his prison and returned to Earth. What he hadn’t expected was that when the portal closed behind him, it had cut him off from the source of his power: the human souls trapped in Hell. To return to full power, Lucifer had to reconnect with Hell or he’d continue to suffer the constant drain this world had on his constitution. Such a feat wouldn’t be easy.

  Building a bridge between Earth and Hell was something he’d tried before, albeit from the other side. He knew how it was done. It required a vast resource of energy, powerful sorcery, and a sacrifice of body and soul. How he wanted that sacrifice to involve the destruction of Hope Laudner. He gritted his teeth. Ending her was going to take more than a curse or physical wound. She was immortal, blessed, and housed a nauseating amount of faith in that insolent teenage body. It would take an object forged in another world to kill her—an object that would permanently split her soul from her body. Kill the soul and there would be no regeneration.

  Luckily, he had the tool to do the job, and he’d hidden it here, in Chicago, before he’d been so rudely vanquished. Ironically, it was the same obsidian blade that had once plunged into Hope’s mother’s heart, only, at the time, Abigail didn’t have a soul. And once she received one, the dagger had already been pulled from her flesh. Forged in Hell, the blade was once buried under tons of dirt and concrete, but Lucifer had gone to great expense to retrieve it the last time he was here. It was the only weapon that could do what he needed it to do.

  “Good afternoon,” a solidly built woman said to him. She was wearing the uniform of a doorman, but she hadn’t opened the glass door for him. “Can I see your resident identification card?”

  “You don’t need any identification from me.” He looked her in the eye, using the slightest amount of power to influence her feeble human mind.

  She blinked rapidly and tugged on the door. It didn’t budge. Shaking her head, she swayed on her feet. “I’m sorry, sir. I can’t open the door without the chip in your badge. The security here is top of the line.”

  Indeed. Lucifer scowled at the thick layer of bulletproof glass and steel that separated him from what he wanted. He was already weak. Forcing his way in wouldn’t be prudent. “I’m a guest.”

  “The owner should have given you a guest pass. I’m very sorry. You can go down to the security office and they might be able to help you.” She pointed to a door on the other end of the building.

  Lucifer didn’t acknowledge the woman as he turned on his heel in annoyance and strode toward the location she indicated. To his dismay, when he reached the security office, his welcome was less than courteous. A man who looked like he hadn’t smiled since the Obama administration leaned toward the speaker mounted in the window. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m here to visit a colleague, and unfortunately, he neglected to give me a guest pass. Will you assist me in obtaining one
?”

  “Certainly, sir. What is your friend’s name?”

  “Mr. Bordeaux. Damien Bordeaux.” Lucifer had left everything to the demon of greed. Actually, it had been Damien’s idea to list his corporation as owner of Lucifer’s property in the event G.O.D. won the Great Battle. When Lucifer was cast into Hell, the humans were made to forget the war that took place between good and evil. God erased it from their minds and returned them to the pitiful lives they’d had before the clash. But, thanks to Damien, Lucifer’s property had been protected from falling into enemy hands.

  Damien was good with money. He worshiped the stuff. His greed was practically limitless. As the only fallen angel allowed to persist on Earth to balance out the last Soulkeeper, he’d flourished, and if the articles Lucifer had read were accurate, owned a little bit of everything these days. That would come in handy until Lucifer regained his strength.

  “You must be mistaken. Damien Bordeaux hasn’t owned anything in this building for years. He let the lease lapse on the penthouse almost a decade ago.”

  Lease. Lucifer had never understood how Damien structured the contract for the place. “Who owns the penthouse now?” Lucifer snapped. He was tired of this game. He focused his power on the man, prying the truth from him.

  “Nobody. It’s been for sale for over a year,” the man babbled, eyes dull. “They’re thinking of remodeling it into multiple units.”

  “That oily, maggot-meat, bastard,” Lucifer said through his teeth. He’d never given Damien permission to sell the place. And what had he done with the dagger?

  “Excuse me?”

  Lucifer did not respond to the man behind the glass. He ducked into the darkest shadow he could find and reached into the blackness around him. As the Devil, Lucifer owned the stuff Damien was made of and could call him at will. Only, as he searched the void to dig his metaphysical meat hooks into the fallen angel, his body buckled from the effort. Damien must be blocking him, and he was too weak to break through.

  He cursed. As a member of the Wicked Brethren, Damien had always been rebellious and more concerned with his own needs than his master’s. But in the past, Lucifer could persuade the fallen angel with promises of increased wealth and power. It seemed the impudent bastard did not wish to entertain such negotiations this time. Unacceptable. Lucifer would bring him to heel.

  To replenish his power and his resources, Lucifer needed to find allies who were motivated to help him succeed. And he needed to bolster his strength. He turned the corner, into a seedy part of town, long neglected. Vagrants lined the narrow side street, sprawled like eggs frying on the sidewalk. A semitoothless man waved a cardboard sign that read Please Help.

  Lucifer took one look at the track marks on the pitiful human’s arm and dropped a rock of crack cocaine into his bowl. “Why bother with the middleman?”

  “Thank you.” The man slid the rock into his shirt pocket.

  “It will kill you.” Sometimes the truth was more powerful than a lie.

  “So they keep telling me.” The man chuckled, wagging his head contemptuously. “I got nothing to lose.”

  Lucifer winked. “Not anymore you don’t.” He gripped the back of the man’s neck and pulled him off the sidewalk.

  “Stop! What are you doin’?” the man protested. Lucifer locked eyes with the homeless man, forcing him to see the truth behind his illusion. An echo of Hell burned in his pupils, flames, and death, and every dark and crawling thing. He chuckled as the man wet himself.

  The shaking began in the meatbag’s torso, the seizure taking a violent turn until the human’s eyes rolled back in his head. His soul practically jumped from his body into Lucifer’s grip, the dingy silhouette catching on his fingers as the man’s body slumped to the asphalt. The Devil wasted no time ingesting that soul. Although the power it infused was less than he’d hoped—the flickering flame of the man’s life force was barely worth the effort—it gave him enough strength to find the one person he suspected would help him. He reached out into the ether again, this time searching for a specific human soul, one he knew would be desperate and willing to do anything he asked for the right price. She was easy to find and closer than he expected.

  Twilight hugged the skyline as he made his way through the heart of the city, a smile spreading across his artificially handsome face. Darkness would bolster his abilities. He welcomed it.

  Outside a nightclub called the Goat’s Pajamas, Lucifer materialized in an alley on the North Side off the Red Line. The neighborhood wasn’t bad, but this place was squarely in the seediest section, a refurbished meatpacking plant, a lost artifact of a more violent world the city had all but paved over. He coasted past the bouncer with a wave of his hand and took a seat in a filthy booth near the back of the room.

  “Can I get you anything?” a twenty-something in a black T-shirt asked, his hands resting on the hips of his skintight pants.

  “Do you have a vintage Scotch whiskey, preferably from a year the world was at war, perhaps 1910 or 1938?”

  The boy frowned. “I’m not sure. I’ll ask.” Looking annoyed, he took off in the direction of the bar.

  The lights dimmed, and the woman he’d come to see took the stage. She wore a peacock-blue dress that looked worn and frayed at the edges. Her chestnut hair was neat but streaked with gray. Wrinkles had formed at the corners of her eyes as if she’d aged twenty years in the weeks since she’d left the island. Maybe she had.

  A full set of instruments was set up behind her: guitar, bass, keyboard, and drums, but no one came out to accompany her. He toyed with the folded paper tent at the center of the table advertising live music. She was the opening act for the real headliners, a band called Technothrob.

  Juliette Bittercourt gripped the microphone and parted her lips on an inhale. Lucifer grinned as she started to sing a blues number about the Devil, a woman, and a dare. He leaned back in the booth, throwing an arm across the padded leather seat. It wasn’t opera, as she was known for at Revelations, but the tune accentuated her powerful voice. A trickle of magic cut through the bar, the patrons pausing with drinks halfway to their lips to turn and stare at the enchanting sound.

  Only, she couldn’t sustain it. The magic left as quickly as it had come, and although her voice was good on its own, it couldn’t make up for her worn stage presence. She’d aged quickly since fleeing Revelations Institute. A few more weeks, and even a dive like this wouldn’t hire her.

  “Ripe for the picking,” Lucifer murmured. Two fingers of Scotch slid across the table to him.

  “This is the best we could do,” the waiter said.

  Lucifer sniffed. Horridly fresh with nary a whiff of sin. The waiter didn’t wait around for him to complain. Smarter than he looked.

  Abandoning the sorry excuse for a drink, Lucifer stood from the booth and navigated the tables toward the raised platform where Juliette sang. She began her second number, frowning at him as he took the stage beside her. Her eyes pleaded for help from the bouncer at the back of the room but the man looked like he had better things to do.

  Lucifer swept Technothrob’s guitar into his hands, pressed his fingertips into the strings, and began to play. If Juliette’s magic had trickled into the room, Lucifer’s jackhammered. The air vibrated with every strum. He drew upon the night, channeling moonlight and darkness into thick waves of melodious energy. A middle-aged woman near the stage knocked over her drink, and the man next to her ignored the splash of liquid that hit his thigh, instead staring, slack-jawed, at the duo.

  Juliette went with it, growling out the words and sashaying her hips. The patrons in the back drifted forward, leaving their valuables behind, bumping into the people ahead of them. The woman who spilled her drink ran her fingers through the ice cubes and then through her hair before joining the crowd swarming the stage. Her date was already reaching toward Juliette’s feet.

  With a wicked grin, Juliette removed the microphone from its stand and shuffled back from the hands reaching for her. She sauntered
to Lucifer’s side, stepping behind him to press her body into his back and sway to the music. More people filtered in from the street and pushed the tables aside to crowd every square inch of the Goat’s Pajamas. A line formed out the door, visible through a window near the stage. Lucifer smiled wickedly at the waiting patrons. Filthy humans. So easy to manipulate.

  The manager emerged from the back room to start collecting admission.

  Suddenly, Lucifer’s cheek began to ache. He was out of time. Out of power. He needed a soul, now. “Wrap it up,” he said into Juliette’s ear.

  Juliette finished her song and Lucifer thrummed his last note. Without hesitation, he encircled her wrist and dragged her from the stage. The crowd chanted, “More, more, more,” as the two disappeared into the backroom.

  “Back here,” she said, leading him into a dressing room that might have been a converted broom closet. “Are you one of them?” she asked searching his eyes.

  “One of whom, Juliette?”