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SOUL CATCHER 
Book One: The Outsider TrilogyUrban Fantasy
Opening ChaptersDeborah Smith writing as Leigh Bridger www.deborah-smith.comwww.leighbridger.com1
 
Esse Quam Videre, “To Be, Rather Than To Seem.”— North Carolina state motto2
 
PrologueYeah, flesh is temporary and souls are forever, but that was no fucking comfort asI got ready to kill the man I’d loved for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years.“Don’t be thinking too hard about it, just do the deed, Livia,” Ian said softly.“When the fecking bastard comes up the stairs, kill him quick too. Then you and me willgo at him together. ’Tis the only way.”Ian’s blood seeped from the gashes in his side onto the gray, weathered floor. Thistime I couldn’t heal him. I could only free him. Outside, in the strangely bright sunshineof a North Carolina morning, things you don’t want to imagine in your worst nightmarestried to rip the building’s tall industrial windows out of their aging brick sills. Downstairs,the thick wooden door of the old Asheville Bible printing shop bulged inward as Pig Faceslammed it again. The wood began to splinter.I cocked the pistol. Everything inside me screamed against pointing it at Ian’sheart. Fucking irony. I hated his body; I ought to be able to kill it without caring. But afunny thing had happened on the way to that moment. I’d fallen in love with my husbandagain. Even in this ass backward life, despite the body he’d picked this time. Regardlessof what that body had done to me when Pig Face owned it.I knelt over Ian, straddling him. His blood stained my knees. I put both hands onthe shaking gun to steady my aim. My tears fell on his blood-stained face. He managed a3
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