It is hard to believe but there will only be two more posts for the Soul Screamers Reading Challenging following this one.
There are only two and a half weeks left in the challenge but it's still not too late to join in. Simply click on the SSRC button and find out how you can participate in this event which is hosted by the amazing Rachel over at fiktshun.
Today's thoughts will be all about Fearless, another short story in the Soul Screamers world, which you can find in the Kiss Me Deadly anthology. It was the only story of this series I hadn't read prior to the challenge.
In Fearless we get a glimpse as to how Sabine and Nash's relationship had been before Tod died and Nash and his mom moved away. We also get a better idea of who Sabine is and what she had to deal with while growing up.
I don't want to give away too much, so I'm only going to say we meet Sabine when she first arrives at the halfway house "Holser House" and not everything is what it seems.
Sabine is a Mara - a living Nightmare - and staying at Holser House, she learns a little bit more about her species. She also learns there are worse things out there than herself and it was very unsettling to see her actually being scared of someone - something - else. I say "unsettling" because she is Nightmare personified and for a Nightmare to be scared of something, it has to be something terrifying. At the same time, it makes Sabine appear more human. Showing fear and admitting it is definitely a human trait.
As for Nash and Sabine, their strong connection is so obvious and they seem like they are meant to be together - they seem to be complimenting each other perfectly.
Even though I absolutely love the character Syrie in Niederwald, I think I like this short story even better. It felt so intense from the very first page and didn't let up at all. Rachel Vincent managed to put in an amazing twist with only a limited amount of time available to fill. She is just that incredible with her words and imagination. Fearless is definitely a must-read for any Soul Screamers fan!
*****
Of course, this wouldn't be a post without my favorite passages:
Sabine and Anna-Rosa Gomez, Director of Holse House:
"I'm not violent."
She raised one of those arched brows at me. "You gave a car a baseball bat-makeover."
"Yeah, but I didn't make Tucker over." Which was what I would have done in his nightmare, if he'd been there, to mess with.
*****
"So peaceful. So hopeful. So... completely useless to me. Peace and hope are cute. But fear is my medium. It's the vibrant paint on the canvas of my life, the only color bright enough to mean anything. To truly feel. With it, I could paint her dream into a nightmare..."
*****
"[...] a new world had just opened up in front of me, and its dark, gaping maw threatened to swallow me whole. I didn't know how to exist in a world where I wasn't the scariest thing around. I wasn't sure I wanted to."
*****
My next SSRC read will be If I Die and I am already dying to pick it up again.
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