Mortality Bites Box Set [Books 1-6]

by Vance, Ramy

  “You said our souls are trapped together. You said that you can feel me, feel when I do something that saddens or excites my soul. Tell me, can you feel this?”

  I shut off the radio, and holding the amulet with both hands, I formulated my question within me. When I felt those words with all my being, I uttered them out loud.

  “Where am I?” I said, and every fiber of my being knew exactly what I meant. Where am I? Where is the part of me that makes me, me? Where is my soul?

  As the words left my lips, hope filled me. Hope that I’d find myself again. Hope that I would be whole again.

  At first nothing happened, and I feared I’d asked the question wrong. Or worse, it wasn’t the question I most desired to know the answer to.

  A sense of despair grew in me, and just as hope had begun to exit stage left, a pattern started drawing itself on my left arm. The pattern filled itself—a tattoo of light brown and orange and green lines—and I began to understand what was happening.

  As the pattern grew, the radio started to crackle. I guessed the raspy man was right … he really could feel my soul, and right now my soul was probably buzzing with excitement as the lights started to form a pattern.

  My arm wasn’t just my arm anymore.

  It was a map. In the center, near the wrist, a glowing red dot.

  I looked closer at the map, trying to figure out where that dot was. It took me a few seconds to place the archipelago shape before I realized where it was telling me to go.

  “Oh yay,” I muttered with a groan, “I guess I’m going to Japan.”

  Part I

  A Beginning of Sorts

  NEW YEAR’S DAY (six hours in)—

  “Of course there’s a samurai,” I said as the beast of a man swung his giant naginata at me. I ducked under the bladed spear and briefly thought I could make a dash for the bridge behind, but I caught a glimpse of his left heel as he pivoted. His body twisted around like a fidget spinner before bringing the blade of his naginata in a low swoop.

  I saw what he was trying to do. He wanted me to try to run past him so he could slice me in half with the blade. Cheeky little bastard.

  The sword mounted on his spear swung harmlessly through the air, though “harmless” may have been an understatement. That blade was so sharp I was sure air molecules were being turned into air mulch. Is that even scientifically possible?

  “First, huh? What do you mean ‘scientifically possible?’ ” Keiko said. “And second, I already told you: he is the legendary Benkei. Benkei is not samurai.” From the corner of my eye I watched as Keiko cut down a shisa guardian dog with her sword. The poor creature didn’t stand a chance, falling into two pieces before her feet. “He is a warrior monk. There’s a difference.”

  “You say ‘potato,’ I say, ‘scary mythical dudes with half-moon spears po-ta-to,’ ” I said, deflecting his naginata with my dirk. “Now’s not the time to split hairs.”

  Several gunshots rang out and I turned to see Jean empty his pistol into three more shisa clamoring down from caves in the cavern’s walls. “I don’t know,” Jean said. “Profiling is terrible. I mean, would you like it if people referred to you as a baby in a kilt?” He managed to give me a smirk as he shot a fourth shisa without even looking in its direction. Show-off.

  “Cherub mask!” I cried out as the warrior monk upgraded his naginata for a nokogiri, a Japanese double-edged saw with a two-foot-long hilt normally used by farmers to hew down trees. Either this guy thought I was made of wood, or he really enjoyed chopping at people with sharp thingies.

  I managed to roll out of the way just in time for him to stick the cave floor with its blade. Hard. As in, stuck-in-stone hard. His nokogiri was stuck. Sure, given his strength and speed he’d pull it out in a second, but a second was all I needed.

  I pivoted before jumping on his nokogiri, using the wooden shaft of his weapon as a balancing beam. I ran up it and kicked him in the face. I got him right in his samurai demon mask’s nose and the blow knocked him back so hard he let go of his bladed spear.

  Score one for Ms. Darling.

  And as if my move wasn’t epic enough, I leapt over him, putting myself between the monk and the bridge he was guarding. All I needed to do now was run along the rope bridge to the other side, where my soul was being held captive in some jar or bowl or Tupperware or whatever it was souls were stored in these days.

  I had lost my soul a few weeks earlier when I had been temporarily turned back into a vampire. I had to admit, living without a soul had been … empty. To say I wanted it back was a dire understatement and it was only a few feet away. I could barely contain my fervor as I ran across the rope bridge.

  But my celebrations were short-lived. The warrior monk went old school, pulling out a good ol’-fashioned sledgehammer. And I do mean a sledgehammer; there was no fancy Japanese name for it—just a hammer. A hammer by any other name and all that.

  “Watch out for his hizuchi,” Keiko said as if I hadn’t seen the six-inch flat bit of the hammer swinging through the air. A “hizuchi”—so much for no fancy Japanese name.

  I figured he was going to chase after me and nail me right through the wooden bridge’s planks and down to the cave floor hundreds of feet below. Well, screw that. If anyone was going to end me Wile E. Coyote style, they’d have to do it to my face.

  I stopped and turned to face him, placing a hand on the bridge’s rope railing. He was heavy and the second he stepped onto the bridge the thing would start shaking. A lot. Possibly enough to knock me off and save him the trouble.

  Maybe he was counting on that, too. Much more efficient than sledgehammering me.

  But the monk didn’t charge toward me. Instead he removed his demon mask, revealing a pleasant, youthful face. He narrowed his eyes and pursed his lips as if conflicted.

  What could he possibly be conflicted about? I thought. He wanted to stop me from getting to the other side and the only way to do so would be to engage me here on the bridge. Right?

  I barely had time to consider what else was running through the ancient warrior’s mind when he swung his hizuchi like a golf club, knocking out the pegs that secured the ropes to his side of the bridge.

  He’d figured out an even more efficient method of killing me.

  The bridge dipped away and just like that, I was airborne. I didn’t have a chance.

  As I fell, I wondered what dying without a soul does to a person.

  Japan Airlines … the Soul of the Sky

  42 HOURS BEFORE THE NEW YEAR—

  I always liked the soft hum of an airplane engine. It was a constant, soothing sound that permeated the cabin, a sound that—as long as it played its steady tune—meant all was right with the plane, and by extension, the world. And this plane hummed with all the reassurance of a mother’s lullaby.

  If I could only bottle the feeling that sound gave me, I thought.

  “What feeling?” Deirdre asked.

  I lifted a cautionary finger, not removing my sleeping mask from my face. “No listening in on my thoughts, Deirdre.”

  “But milady, you said that out loud,” she said in a very serious tone. After all the time I’d spent with my changeling friend, she knew I had a habit of thinking out loud. But she always commented, even though she must have known the thought wasn’t directed at her.

  “Did I?” I said, hoping my intonation would reinforce the rhetorical nature of my question.

  “You did.”

  So much for that. I removed the mask and looked at Deirdre, who sat upright in the booth next to me. I, on the other hand, was about seventeen degrees from lying flat, my body inclined, my feet hanging out on the cushion provided in the first-class Nippon Airways pod.

  It was good to have money.

  “You’re too tense,” I said, making eye contact with the stewardess who immediately came over with a glass of champagne. “Enjoy this. We do, after all, have about nine hours left on this flight.”

  Deirdre shook her head, her anxious
face morphing into one racked with worry. “I cannot. Not with such an important mission before us. We must retrieve your soul and I swear by the GoneGods I will smite anyone who—”

  So that was what she was so tense about. The mission. Our little jaunt to the other side of the world, where my soul was supposedly chilling in some jar.

  A few days ago, I’d had no idea my soul had been ripped away from me. Not that there weren’t clues. A crushing, never-ending pit of despair overshadowing my generally sunny disposition, for one. But also I was being stalked via two-way radio by this weirdo with a raspy voice who claimed that not only was my soul lost, so was his.

  Raspy Man said we were soul-less mates. Hilarious. But after a while, even I had to admit he might have a point; the emptiness within me was undeniable. That, plus the little detail of having a magical amulet in my possession that had answered the question I wished most to know.

  “Where am I?” I had asked it, by which I had meant: Where is the part of me that makes me, me? Where is my soul?

  It had told me that not only was my soul missing, but it had also drawn a map on my left forearm.

  Like a tattoo. An ugly, morphing, magical tattoo.

  I hated tattoos.

  I groaned, cutting Deirdre off. She gave me a familiar look of confusion and hurt—the one that simultaneously said, “I have disappointed you. My apologies,” and “I am only trying to help you, selfish bitch.”

  And she was right. I mean, I’d only had to tell her what was going on and the changeling warrior had her bag packed before I’d even finished the story.

  I took the changeling’s hands in mine. “Deirdre, honey,” I said in a patronizing tone worthy of my mother. “First of all, thank you so, so, so much for your concern, but there is absolutely nothing we can do about that on this plane. Look around. We’re in first class. Enjoy the luxury now, smite the enemy later. I spent a fortune on these tickets, and—”

  “I thought you said you got a deal because we were flying two days before New Year’s.”

  “I did. But a deal in first class is still first class. The tickets still cost me my first born's college fund.”

  “I shall work to help replenish your dwindling finances.”

  “Deirdre,” I said, trying to break through the fae’s over-eagerness, “that was a joke. I have plenty of money. I was a forward-planning vampire with lots of assets and a diversified investment plan. I even have a 401k. And now that I’m human, I don’t have to worry about living forever, so it’s time to enjoy what I built up for the last three hundred years. So please, help me on that mission. The mission to enjoy.”

  She pursed her lips in answer.

  “Please. Try—for me.”

  Deirdre paused for a long moment before nodding. “I shall try, but this metal dragon is so … so unnatural and—”

  “She’s not worried about the mission,” Egya cackled from a pod across the aisle. “She doesn’t like flying.”

  The Ghanaian had been un-characteristically quiet this whole flight so far because, as he’d put it, “There are more movies here than in the video store back home in my village. And before you ask: yes, we still have video stores. Netflix has yet to conquer deepest, darkest Africa.”

  I looked over at my other friend who had offered to help me without a moment’s hesitation. Still, given the way he’d been leering at the screen, part of me wondered if he was only here for the movies.

  “Not true,” Deirdre said, setting her hands at her sides—the fae equivalent of throwing a huff. “In Mag Mell I often rode a crystal dragon into battle. We’d ride high above the ground, using the clouds as cover before diving through the cotton mist and smiting—”

  “—your enemy with your sword arm,” Egya said, waving a dismissive hand. “You’ve told us that story at least four times since boarding this plane. Face it, girl: you’re afraid of flying.”

  Deirdre sat motionless for a long moment and I knew the changeling well enough to know she was considering the Ghanaian’s words carefully. “No,” she finally said, “I am not afraid of flying. I am afraid of falling.”

  Way to self-reflect, my fae friend.

  “Aren’t we all, girl.” Egya giggled obnoxiously loud, which was quite uncouth of him seeing as we were in first class. Then again, outside of one woman who’d sat all the way in the front row, we were the only people in first class, so there wasn’t really anyone else to annoy.

  Well, except me. And given Deirdre’s downcast eyes, the changeling, too. And probably the woman up front. I take it back—there were plenty of people to annoy.

  Not that Egya noticed or cared if he did. His eyes were firmly fixed to his pod’s screen as his fingers danced across it, hunting for the next movie to watch.

  “Ignore him,” I said. “He’s just jealous you rode a dragon in the first place.”

  “Just seething. Now if you’ll excuse me, Dr. Strange awaits,” Egya added before touching the screen and escaping into a CGI abyss.

  I turned to Deirdre. “As I was saying, ignore him. Why don’t we pass the time with a little entertainment, too?” I leaned over and as I did, the Amulet of Souol fell out of my blouse. I tucked it back in before tapping Deirdre’s screen.

  “Milady, the amulet. You brought it with you?” she said in surprise.

  I ignored her, scrolling through the seemingly infinite list of movies.

  “Are you not afraid someone will try to take it from you?”

  I shook my head. “That’s why I brought you. You’re my anti-magical-amulet theft device.”

  “That I am!” she said, pounding a fist against her chest. “Still …” Her voice trailed off as she formulated her thoughts. “The amulet, it answers your greatest question. The one that burns through every fiber of your being. You asked it to lead you to your soul.” She pointed at my map that, for cosmic reasons I’d never understand, only I could see. Deirdre, despite not being able to see herself, completely believed me when I told her it was there. “And since every fiber of my being desires to serve you, perhaps I can ask the question of how I can best do so?”

  I groaned. “Deirdre, we’ve been over this. You can help me, not serve me. And as for asking the amulet a question, I know your greatest desire is to help me. But you know that the amulet will only answer one question. Mine happened to be about my missing soul. And while today yours would be about helping me, it might change later. I want you to reserve your question for …”—I searched for the words that would resonate with the changeling warrior—“an important mission of your own.”

  Deirdre’s eyes glistened with unescaped tears. “You are too kind, milady. Of all the warriors I have served—”

  “Uh, uh, uh,” I said, wagging a scolding finger.

  “Ahh, warriors I have helped … none have been as generous as you.” She pounded her chest again.

  I gave Deirdre a nod and continued scrolling through her movies until I found something I thought she’d enjoy. I finally settled on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

  I handed her the complimentary noise-cancelling Beats earphones. She resisted, but I pushed them onto her. “You are my friend, Deirdre. Not my charge or squire or whatever role you used to play in fae army heirarchy. And to that end …”—I pressed play—“enjoy now, smite later.”

  The changeling nodded before finally putting them on.

  ↔

  First class was normally my favorite place to be and even though I had been insistent on enjoying it, the truth was I couldn’t really enjoy anything anymore.

  Seems your soul is kind of instrumental to enjoyment. Without one, everything tasted flat, colors were muted and joy seemed capped just below the I’d-rather-be-anywhere-else threshold. It was like being severely depressed (and the GoneGods know I’d initially thought that was what was wrong with me).

  I wasn’t the depressed type. If I felt bad, I could generally shop it away. But there wasn’t a pair of pumps in this world or any other that could lift my spirits and even
though I’d only been like this for a few months, it was already costing me everything I loved.

  My grades were suffering, my life was stalled and my boyfriend… Well, let’s just say that my love life was in critical condition. It didn’t help that Justin had just been possessed by a dybbuk demon I had accidentally exposed him to.

  The result was that he didn’t go home for Christmas break. Didn’t go home and didn’t call home to tell his parents, either. So they came up to find him and that’s how I met my boyfriend’s parents. With them worried half to death that their son had missed turkey dinner and fully blaming the new girlfriend for the ensuing worry.

  Luckily, the dybbuk demon had been killed the day before. Thank the GoneGods for small miracles.

  In the end, we made up some excuse about how we’d been fighting, with me falling on my sword in apology. Needless to say they hated me, giving me the we’ll-never-accept-you death glare as they whisked him home for the rest of the holidays.

  And as for Justin, given I was the one who had exposed him to the dybbuk demon in the first place, I doubted we were friends—let alone boyfriend and girlfriend—anymore.

  But I couldn’t think about any of that now because I was on a plane to Japan so I could seek my soul. I pulled back my left sleeve and looked at my forearm, where translucent lines of orange and blue rolled over my skin like the ocean rolling in on a white, sandy beach. And as the two colors ebbed and flowed, I saw lines that I recognized as a bird's eye view of the Ryukyu islands. Of course, that was its ancient name. Now, most referred to Ryukyu as Okinawa, the southernmost islands of Japan, a tropical paradise and the setting of The Karate Kid.

  But besides an outline of the island, the magical map offered few additional details. I had hoped that as we flew closer to Japan it would change, do something—anything—other than this soft, constant shifting. I guess I’ll have to wait and see if anything changes when we land, I thought.