Prison of Souls (Science Fiction Thriller) Read online

  A bizarre idea occurred to me. Pure fancy. What if everyone who would ever be born in all the worlds in all the universe got together as spirits and made all the decisions before The Big Bang and then the universe was manufactured whole—past, present and future existing simultaneously—with no possible deviations and no free will except whatever each person had decided before they were born?

  It was a stupid idea. I found it compelling.

  I turned Crystal toward me and leaned into her, gazing into her eyes. The moon glimmered in the depths of her irises, waxed in the folds of her hair.

  If anyone ever asked me for the odds of our coming together as man and wife, I would mention neither the small size of our high school, nor the miniscule population of the town where we grew up, nor the librarian seating us at the same table on the day of my most significant adolescent seizure. I would avoid any answer that involved statistics or probability. My life wasn’t about odds. It was about choices, no matter when those choices had been made.

  “You always had faith in my innocence,” I said.

  “I did.” Her voice was soft, weary.

  I ran my hand through her hair. “How did you discount the surveillance footage, the eyewitness testimony, and the ballistics?”

  “I know you.”

  “I wouldn’t have believed it last week, but I really did shoot McSorley. I really did kill Helena Isaacson.”

  She sighed. “You were saving the world.”

  I shook my head. “I was the person in those surveillance videos.”

  She grabbed my chin and tilted my eyes toward her. “What I had faith in was your essential goodness. Nothing has changed that. I’ve simply had the curtain pulled back, affording a more complete picture.”

  She was my metronome, and she would stand by me through whatever fate or chance could throw our way. Given the bizarre manner of our introduction in the high school library and the way she had pounded her fists against the barricades of destiny at every turn to defend me, it was clear she didn’t care about the odds anyway.

  And for once in my life, neither did I.

  We stepped out into the yard, into the shadow of the catwalk, and walked through the high weeds, toward whatever destiny or happenstance awaited.

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  Thank you so much for reading Prison of Souls. If you enjoyed this book or received value from it in any way, then I’d like to ask you for a favor: would you be kind enough to leave a review for this book on Amazon? I would greatly appreciate it! A new author can never have too many reviews.

  Click here to leave a review on Amazon.com.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to Adam J. Nicolai, the best editor I could have hoped for. Thanks to my wife, Leslie, for supporting me through the process of writing this book. And thanks to my children, for inspiring me to reach higher.