Soul of Shadow: Chapter One
The first chapter of SOUL OF SHADOW… for subscribers only. 🖤
Here it is! The first chapter of SOUL OF SHADOW, book one in my new YA fantasy romance series.
This series follows Charlie Hudson, a girl entering her junior year at Silver Shores High School. From the outside, Silver Shores seems like your average cozy lakeside Michigan town, and Charlie, though grieving the loss of her twin sister two years before, believes herself to be as unremarkable as the place she lives.
But all of that’s about to change…
CHAPTER ONE
His shoes were found during the bonfire.
They were hanging from an ash tree, a pair of bright-white Adidas roped together by their bright-white laces. They were easy to spot, a patch of white among a crown of dark-green leaves. Were it any other night, the group of freshmen might not have even noticed. But it wasn’t any other night; it was the night after Robbie Carpenter had been officially pronounced missing.
The nimblest freshman scaled the tree and plucked the shoes from their branch. As soon as he hit the ground, he and his friends started to run.
~~~
Charlie Hudson watched the bonfire, feeling not even the least bit excited about junior year.
As she looked around at the party unfurling before her—the star-speckled sky; the plastic beer pong table stuck into the sand; the kids falling into little cliques in the crowd based on grade or social group; the gentle waves of Lake Michigan lapping against it all—she didn’t feel what she was supposed to feel. What the rest of her friends surely felt.
The back-to- school bonfire was a rite of passage for Silver Shores High School students. Every year, on the Saturday before classes began, they showed up at the beach with a half-dozen kegs of beer and enough vodka to drown a man in the desert. And every year, they got at least a few hours of partying in before the sheriff showed up.
Everyone there—kids that Charlie had grown up with, now at a time in their lives where they were not quite children but not quite adults—gathered around the bonfire, excited. They chattered loudly about which classes they were taking, how they expected the football team to perform this year, who was hooking up with whom. It was all infused with a sense of wonder, as if they stood at the precipice of possibility.
This year it felt different. Off. Some of the conversations were hushed, careful. Charlie heard words like clues and investigation and kidnapping thrown in with the usual chatter. One of their own was missing, and no one knew how to handle it.
At the far northern end of the beach stood the tall, rusty fence covered in signs that said things like DO NOT ENTER and BEWARE. At the end of the fence, where the sand met the water, chain-link gave way to a tall, thick pier made of rocks and metal. During previous back-to- school bonfires, one or two people got too drunk and tried to climb up onto the pier, but no one—not a soul—ever touched the fence. It was an unwritten rule in Silver Shores. An homage to the dozens of people who lost their lives during the accident at the Oxford Power Plant.
Still, the overall atmosphere that night was one of celebration, not mourning. Everyone seemed festive.
Everyone but Charlie.
She had nothing against junior year in particular. It wasn’t that this year, of all sixteen years that she had lived to that point, would be considerably worse than any of the ones that preceded it. It was more of an ever-pervasive feeling. A thin sheet of grime that covered every inch of her otherwise normal existence.
Reality didn’t suit Charlie. She loathed its repetitive days, the constant feeling of running through mud. She often came to this beach on her own and sat down atop the dunes. Closed her eyes. Felt the saltless wind on her face, the tickle of reed grass on her calves. These were her feeble attempts to break the rhythm of her life. To feel something new, anything at all.
She knew she should be more grateful. That she had a good life, good friends, a steady family, spare cash when she needed it. But she could never shake the feeling that something was missing. Some key fragment of her soul.
It had been that way since she’d lost Sophie.
Sophie had been Charlie’s identical twin sister. They’d had the same dark hair, the same thick eyebrows, the same blue eyes—light on the inner ring and darker on the outer—the same smattering of freckles across their nose and cheeks. Sophie had been her shadow. Her second half.
Until, late one night the first week of freshman year, she wasn’t anymore.
Charlie didn’t like to look too closely at her emotions. She didn’t like to acknowledge the voice whispering at the back of her mind, the darkness bubbling just below the surface. Sometimes she thought she could feel it, as if it were a creature living within her. She imagined it as a jumbled mass of pulsing, multicolored threads, wound too tight to ever untangle.
She sighed, pulling herself out of her thoughts, and rejoined the conversation her two best friends were having. The three of them were seated on a lopsided piece of driftwood, their feet stuck into the cool sand, a pleasant contrast from the fire roaring a few dozen paces away.
“I’m not telling you to join the student council,” Abigail declared from her place on the tallest part of the driftwood. She sat with her arms and legs folded, a can of Busch Light in one hand. “I’m just saying that another extracurricular would look good on your resume.”
“And I’m telling you,” Lou said, crushing her empty can with one hand before tossing it into the black trash bag hung up on a log a few feet away, “that swim team already takes up too much of my time as it is.”
Being around her friends was good for her. It drew her out of her mind. Let her think and feel and be something that she couldn’t be on her own. Let her forget, however temporarily, the shadows that lingered.
“But we have college to think of.” Abigail leaned forward, one dark, delicate hand resting atop her black jeans. “Showing devotion to a particular sport is good, but having a wide breadth of interests is just as important.”
Lou tapped one finger on her freckled chin. “Does being able to shotgun three beers in a row count as an interest?”
Charlie stifled a snort, then tuned out the conversation again. It was the same one she had heard a hundred times this summer: Abigail stressing over college admissions, and Lou doing her best to drive Abigail insane with how little she cared. She often wished she were more like them. More normal. Less locked in her own mind. But she wasn’t.
Her eyes wandered the moon-streaked sand around them. This beach was the largest and most popular strip of sandy lake-front in Silver Shores. Despite being located in Michigan, Silver Shores was a beach town. A beach town that froze into a spectacle of blistering snow and purple ice in the winter, but a beach town nonetheless.
The sand was cool between Charlie’s toes. The bonfire burned wild and hot. Laughter and bright orange sparks danced up into the sky. Lake Michigan was like the smooth surface of a diamond, broken only by the occasional ripple caused by the drunken sophomores who had decided it was a good idea to take out a canoe. Charlie shook her head as she watched them paddle sloppily across the horizon. Silver Shores didn’t need any more disappearances this week.
The party on the beach—an illegal bonfire surrounded by even more illegal drugs and alcohol—was an obvious and flagrant violation of local law. Not that anyone in attendance cared.
The person who cared perhaps least of all was Mason Hudson, Charlie’s older brother. She could just make out Mason’s face from between all the leaping flames. He was splitting a joint with a girl Charlie thought might be one of his many ex-girlfriends.
Though they were only a year apart, Charlie wasn’t close with Mason. Not anymore. Once upon a time, they’d been thick as thieves. Mason was annoyingly mischievous, always pulling pranks on his sisters: leaving buckets of water atop their bedroom door, putting lizards in their desk drawers, replacing their shampoo with purple hair dye. Charlie spent most of her childhood yelling at her older brother, but she secretly reveled in his attention. Sophie and she both did.
Charlie cut off that train of thought before it could go any further.
She went back to studying Mason and his ex-girlfriend through the flames. What was her name? Katie? Michelle? She had a vague memory of walking in on them making out on the couch over a year ago. Was it Susanne? Or—
That was when she heard the first yell.
It was quiet, distant. Someone way back in the woods.
“—and the admissions committee considers everything on your application,” Abigail was saying loudly to Lou, long braids swishing animatedly down her back. “In fact, seventy-five percent of schools—”
“Shhh.” Charlie put a hand on Abigail’s shoulder. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Abigail asked.
“I hear it.” Lou pulled a twig from the sand and tossed it toward bonfire, missing by a few feet. “It’s the sweet, sweet sound of Abigail finally ceasing to nag me. Well done, Charles.”
Lou knew that Charlie’s real name was Charlotte. But that didn’t seem to matter—just as it didn’t matter that her own real name was Louise. Charlie couldn’t think of a single person who referred to Lou with her given name, except maybe the occasional substitute teacher.
“That’s not what I meant,” Charlie said. “Listen—do you hear that yelling?”
All three girls fell silent. They quirked their ears up toward the sky.
It didn’t take long. The yells grew in volume and quantity, multiplying into what sounded like a pack of teenagers running through the forest, calling loudly into the night.
“What the—” Lou stood from the log, turning to face the trees.
Moments later, a group of boys burst out into the clearing. One was waving a pair of white shoes over his head.
“We found them!” the boy with the shoes yelled. “We found Robbie’s sneakers hanging from a tree!”
The partygoers erupted. Whispering or loudly arguing about what the discovery of Robbie’s shoes meant to the investigation. Many thought he was dead. Others thought he’d been kidnapped. No matter the theory, everyone was excited by the prospect of new evidence.
On the other side of the fire, Mason leapt to his feet. He looked thrilled as he took off toward the freshmen.
“Wait.” Lou turned to Abigail and Charlie. “They found his shoes? And nothing else?”
“Did you get a closer look at the tree?” Mason yelled from across the fire. “Search it for other clues?”
Charlie kept herself from rolling her eyes. Always eager for trouble, her older brother.
“No,” said the freshman. “We just grabbed the shoes and dipped.”
“It’s about a hundred feet in,” said one of the other freshmen. “The old ash beside that one big cluster of rocks.”
“Great.” Mason snatched the shoes out of the lead freshman’s hands.
“Hey!” the freshman said, trying to grab for them.
Mason held them just out of the freshman’s reach, waving them in the air. “Looks like it’s time for a little field trip, kids.”
A cheer rose from the crowd. Then the students of Silver Shores High took off, Mason in the lead, and stormed over the beach, toward the tree line. They surged into the forest as one.
“Excellent.” Lou rubbed her hands together. “Some excitement at last.”
Charlie stood, her chest fluttering unexpectedly at the prospect of following them into the woods. What was that feeling? Fear? She wasn’t sure. It was an unfamiliar sensation, like something long dormant was awakening within her. As a reflex, she reached around herself and touched her back pocket, checking to make sure her lucky deck of cards was still in place.
“No way.” Abigail crossed her arms over her chest, staying firmly seated on the driftwood. “Nuh-uh. This is a disaster waiting to happen. I refuse to be arrested at sixteen.”
“You’re already drinking alcohol at an underage party,” Lou pointed out.
Abigail’s eyes widened. “Christ,” she said. “You’re right. I shouldn’t even be here. I should never have let you convince me to come. I—”
Lou reached down and yanked Abigail to her feet. She pushed her friend toward the tree line. “Shut up and run.”
The girls hurried after the rest of the party. Lou took Charlie’s and Abigail’s arms, linking them with hers and skipping forward as if they were off on a picnic, not to investigate a potential crime scene.
“This is messed up,” Abigail whispered loudly. “We’re caravanning to see if we can find Robbie Carpenter’s body.”
Charlie had to agree. It was messed up. In all likelihood, Robbie’s mother was curled up on the sofa at home, sobbing, while a bunch of kids made investigating a potential piece of evidence into a party game. No doubt Robbie’s father, the local sheriff, would want to lock someone up for what was happening right now. And yet Charlie couldn’t bring herself to turn around. To tell herself to stop. Her feet propelled her into the woods as surely as if attached to a motor.
She glanced to the side. Through the trees, she saw a few other kids running forward, bare feet getting caught in roots and sand and dirt. Their path was lit by an unusually bright moon. It filtered through the oaks and pines whose branches tangled high above, lush and deep green and swollen with summer.
Her eyes had just begun to turn forward again when she saw it.
It was only a flash. An outline set against the moonlit trees, as brief and blurred as the blink of an eye. A deer, or large dog, or maybe even a panther, standing stock-still, partially concealed by the brush, watching them sprinting through the woods. Dark silhouette. Glimmering eyes.
Charlie twisted her body, trying to get a better look. For a brief moment, its eyes seemed to lock with hers. As if it were staring at her, too.
Then she tripped over a thick root.
“Je-sus!” Lou’s arm slipped out of Charlie’s elbow as Charlie flew forward, the wind knocking from her chest as she hit the forest floor.
“Charlie!” Abigail whirled around and ran to her friend’s side. “Are you all right?”
Charlie blinked rapidly, trying to clear her vision of the stars that danced so eagerly about its periphery. She groaned and rolled over onto her back, pressing a hand to her chest. It throbbed where it had collided with the ground. “Yeah.” She blinked several more times. “Yeah, I’m fine. Jesus, that hurt.”
“Good.” Lou bent over and wrapped a hand around Charlie’s forearm, hauling her up to her feet. “Because it sounds like they found the tree, and I’m not missing this unless you’re dying.”
“Nice of you to show some empathy,” Abigail said as she tripped along behind them.
Charlie didn’t dwell on her best friend’s typical lack of concern. Her thoughts were too consumed by what she had seen hiding in the woods. What was that thing? An oversized animal? A wildcat that had strayed too near civilization? It would be a bizarre sighting if so. Wildcats normally ran as far from humans as they could. Not only had it not run, whatever it was had stared right at Charlie, as if it were the one challenging her.
“Over here!” Lou tugged her friends toward a clearing.
The stars faded from Charlie’s vision, allowing her to see exactly where they were headed. She recognized it immediately: the old ash tree where she, Lou, and Sophie played when they were little girls. A place they had brought dolls and journals, built houses from sticks, dressed as pirates or zombies. It was a place of boundless imagination, back when Charlie had still dared to dream.
A deep desire rushed through her: to run full speed at the tree and leap as high as she could.
But that would be impossible. The clearing was completely full. People clustered together around the trunk, squinting into the moonlight, which only partially illuminated the tree. It wasn’t enough light. One by one, they lit their phone flashlights and pointed them up at the tree. The combined effect was that of a single spotlight shining bright and revealing into the darkness.
For several seconds, no one spoke.
Mason was the first to break the silence.
“Holy shit.”
SOUL OF SHADOW is out July 29th, 2025. Click below to preorder your copy.
