Immortal Desires by Laura Eno

Two factions of Immortals fight for the human race, though at odds with each other. One serves Order, the other Chaos. At stake is the Tobar d’anamacha—the Well of Souls—and with it the pairing of soul mates.

Occasionally, humans are forced onto the battlefield. This is one of those stories. (leading paragraphs of Chapter One, Immortal Desires)

After being stood up at the altar by her fiancé, Deanna Cameron is given the chance of a dream job, one with many perks, an apartment in the building she is working in, a free cafeteria, and travel to places she could only dream about before, such as the first assignment to go Scotland and check on accommodations at a castle-turned-hotel. Before she leaves, she encounters a strange man, almost a ghost, keeping watch on her in her new apartment in Boulder Colorado. What she does not know is that she is the soul mate of the last laird of the castle that is now the hotel she will be staying at. She flies to Scotland, sees his picture above the mantle, and then, during a walk in the cemetery, she finds a Celtic broach and suddenly she is whisked back to 1505 to meet with the laird, Ian Mackay.

Robert Thornton of the Light Street Corporation isn’t your average good looking mega-millionaire corporate CEO. He is a Guardian of the Well of Souls, someone who helps souls back to the Well to be paired with their soul mate in future lives. Guardians work with the Aeneas Council, the Gods of the Souls. Ian Mackay is an Immortal who works for Robert as a Guardian and is none too happy to find out that the new lost soul that Robert has hired with intents on recycling into the well is someone who is meant to be his soul mate, Deanna.

Workings against the Guardians are the Contri, a group that believes that the only way to save humans from extinction is to keep soul mates from pairing. They do this by targeting humans who are carrying souls to be mated and killing them to banish the souls from the Well.

This book has so many twists and turns, changes in time between the present day and the 1500’s Scotland. We see the story as it happens in the 1500s, Ian’s reactions in the present, and how Robert is having to work on things. The process of getting the soul mates together, how Ian in the present is having to sit and await how his early self handles things is an interesting twist on time travel storytelling. 

I loved this book, Laura Eno is fast becoming one of my favorite writers and I am hoping there is going to be more to the Well of Souls. It has a fast pace and there are some really great scenes with Deanna’s modern woman ways and Ian’s “pigheaded Scottish maleness” pulling between them. Oh, and Ian does wear a kilt.

With the way it is set up and the way it has been put together, Laura Eno has almost an unlimited pool of stories to write about (pun intended). The book has some nice, gentle love scenes but it’s not graphic by any means, I would give those scenes a PG 13 rating, mainly for the necessary language used to describe their lovemaking.