Tortured Souls (Broken Souls Book 2)

by Richard Hein

  “Do you wish to control the Outsider in your head or not?”

  I shot it a glare. “Which one? Technically you’re just as much of an Outsider… Extra-Dimensional Entity thingy as…” I swallowed the name down and glanced away. “Maybe I want peace and quiet today. A little respite from both of you in my brain. It’s like a sitcom in here. A shitty one.”

  “I shudder to think what the hovel you call a mind would be like if left to its own devices, Samuel.”

  Normally I’d have risen to the occasion, but the weight of the day had ground any sharp edges down dull. “Are you sure this will help?”

  Sanctuary waggled a hand in the air with an entirely bored attitude. “Well, no,” it said, “but the point is to first control the symptoms. Much of that anger is a part of you via the entity inside your head. Thus we work on that. Strengthening your mental will has myriad applications, from magic to…”

  My jaw ached as I ground my teeth. A part of me. When possessed, the host and the greasy little parasite swap bits of themselves. The longer they’re together, the more they fuse. Just like the Twins, a pair of old Germans with their own demonic guests I occasionally worked with. They’d been stuck together like peanut butter and demonic jelly for over five decades now, and I wasn’t sure if they were separate personalities any more.

  And I’d been playing host to someone crashing on my mental couch for almost three and a half years. How much of me was really me? Would I even know what was different?

  “And you have learned of nothing that could just rip it out of my head?” I asked through clenched teeth.

  Sanctuary rolled its eyes. “Still no, Samuel. I have no way to connect with the outside world any more. I’m half dead already. Lobotomized. I can only exist in this little dimension now. I would discorporate on Earth, so it’s not like I can pop out and make a collect call.”

  “No one collect calls anyone anymore.”

  Sanctuary’s eyebrows rose. “Really?”

  “If you’re going to root around in my head, at least look at the stuff that relates to this century.” My eyes narrowed. “Is there any chance that Christina never left this pocket reality because she wanted to keep you from getting access to… I don’t know… anything?”

  “Naturally not,” it said, pressing the tips of its fingers to its chest and glaring down its nose at me. “The Boss was too entrenched in running this place to ever actually live. Now. If you want to be free of that demon, how about you hurry and relax?”

  I snatched up a book it had thrown at me and hurled it back. The encyclopedia-sized novel vanished in a purple flash an inch from that meticulous suit.

  That was the problem with sharing my head with something from beyond reality. Technically the universe I was now sitting in was inside its will, or mind, or maybe its dream. Sanctuary could shape reality around it as it saw fit. It frequently did to mess with me.

  Maybe it was bored.

  Half the time Sanctuary was purely in my head. While it could manifest books just to chuck at my head, it could also do things that only I could see. I found out early on when I inherited this horrific position that neither Daniel nor Kate could see Sanctuary’s manifestation. It didn’t take long to stop responding to anything the blue-suited prick did, lest they figure out I had something sitting in my head. While I could explain that Sanctuary had helped out the OFC for the last century and a half, that would hedge too close to uncomfortable questions about the other occupant in my mind. I couldn’t afford that.

  So there I sat, trying to get a hold on that anger while clutching at the sand that was my life pouring through my fingers. Six months ago I’d been a desk jockey, wrangling pivot tables and solitaire with a careful lack of enthusiasm. Thrown out of the OFC, I’d lived for three years, quiet and agonizingly mundane. It turns out that while killing your coworker slash girlfriend is frowned upon, hiding her possession by a creature from beyond our existence was a far worse offense. Lauren had killed many people while under the influence of a demon, including much of her family. They'd forcibly retired me, and my pink slip had almost come as a bullet to the back of the head for my transgressions.

  Kate had pulled me back into the supernatural world, hunting me down to help her unravel the apparent suicide of her brother. Unfortunately it had all been orchestrated by another Entity from beyond reality, the literal Archangel Michael. He’d spent years molding Kate into a tool and used her plight to stir me into action once more, knowing I’d leap on an opportunity to save a young woman from a fate like Lauren. Hook, line, sinker. I’d accidentally granted Michael access to Sanctuary in my haste to save Kate, and he called up a few dozen angelic buddies to lay waste to the place.

  Aside from Daniel, every single one of my former coworkers had been slaughtered. God, in his apparent infinite wisdom, had deemed the OFC a threat somehow and swept it all into the trash. I’d inherited the leadership and the symbiotic relationship with the Entity that ran Sanctuary.

  Except Sanctuary was a little annoying gnat, needling at me with its words. Which made for a migraine of a conundrum — back on Earth, the thing that called itself Lauren was free to stick its demonic fingers deep into my mind; here in Sanctuary I was free of that, yet Sanctuary was like an arrogant older brother that, oh gee, had demigod powers too.

  Pointedly ignoring Sanctuary, I let my eyes flutter closed again, blocking out the surrounding sights. I hadn’t redecorated after getting dumped into the hot seat, so most everything was still Christina’s. I’d taken down the movie posters from the seventies — just not my sort of thing — but left the Ansel Adams prints. A cart full of liquor bottles loomed nearby, ready to pounce on an unwary traveler.

  Harder was pushing away the ambiance of the place. The weight of the weathered grandfather clock, staring, disappointed in one corner. There was a palpable heaviness to the room, to the desk and position that came with it. It’s why I hadn’t bothered to change much. Aside from the crumpled pile of all my clothes on a chair by the door and the couple of boxes full of junk I’d salvaged from my apartment, it was the same. It felt wrong to come in and tear everything up after everyone died, a horror that was more or less directly my fault. I’d fucked up, and they’d all died, and I couldn’t walk away from that responsibility no matter how much I wanted to.

  I owed them better. Maybe if I tried my best the screaming in my dreams would stop.

  “You can’t spend all your time focusing on this, you realize,” Sanctuary said. “We — by that I mean you — need to form a battle plan for The Long Night.”

  “An upcoming apocalypse you can tell me nothing about,” I said.

  Sanctuary stared down at me. “I know only as much as I am told, but I take it seriously, Samuel. The founder of the Ordo sought me out as a sanctuary against a time fast approaching. I don’t know what it is, only that it’s the sole reason I haven’t been allowed to discorporate back to my home dimension. I exist here, trapped in limbo while people stomp around inside my dream like children in mud puddles.”

  Sighing, I let my eyes close. It was pointless to argue. Apocalypses, as things go, are usually bad. I should probably make more time to look into that.

  I sat in the center of my office, the stone floor curiously warm like it had baked in summer’s heat despite there having never been a sun in the sky here. Another slow breath. I had to remind myself that the anger wasn’t a part of me, that it was a tainted ‘gift’ from Lauren.

  With effort, I pushed all of that from mind and wrapped myself in calming thoughts again. Kitties and puppies frolicking in a grassy field. Hair metal. Rewatching Firefly.

  Three heavy-handed knocks on the door shattered my concentration. I groaned and slumped back against the heavy desk the size of an SUV.

  “Come in, Kate,” I said, thumping my head against the steel desk. Calm. Calm. Fucking calm.

  “Wow,” Kate said, pushing open the frosted glass of my door. Her eyebrows rose at the sight of me on the floor, but she didn’t comment on
it. “It’s almost as if I’m the only other person in this pocket universe and you knew who was knocking.”

  I grunted and pushed up to my feet, my little aborted meditation session at an end. “You need something?”

  “I would ask you the same thing,” she said, leaning against the wall in a near-identical pose to the one Sanctuary had used moments before. I gave a quick glance around my office, but it had vanished.

  “Two dozen cheeseburgers,” I said, sitting on the edge of my desk. “Winning the Lotto maybe?”

  She smiled faintly, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. Arms crossed, she watched me for a moment. My skin crawled. I hated being analyzed.

  “That’s not what I meant and you know it,” she said finally. Kate slid from the wall and sat on the enormous desk beside me. “This job used to have a hundred or more employees doing it, and a boss that had been here since the sixties. I’ve seen you when things were the worst and I know how you handle that stress. This is different. You’d have to be blind not to notice that something is wearing on you, and it’s not just the job. I’m new at this, and if my boss falls apart, I’m not learning at my full potential. I need you firing on all cylinders, Samuel, so tell me what’s up.”

  I’ve got the part-demon remains of my ex-girlfriend I killed rattling up around in my head, I thought, or something pretending to be her and preying on my guilt. Yeah. No matter how you phrase that it sounds bad. I let the question linger while I looked for an excuse.

  “I don’t know how she did it,” I admitted at last, choosing a partial truth to deflect Kate. I scrubbed a hand through my hair. “Christina. Running this place.”

  “It’s a big responsibility, Samuel,” Kate said. She pushed her glasses up her nose as she glanced sidelong at me. “You’ve been thrust into…”

  I threw up my hands. “No. I mean I literally can’t figure out how she did it. Look at this.”

  Spinning, I waved my hands like an aggravated stage magician over a hat stuffed full of emaciated rabbits. A stack of papers the size of Mount Rainier lay scattered across the surface of my desk. Multi-colored sticky notes covered an assortment of pages. Most of those contained four-letter expletives.

  I have a ranking system. It helps.

  “Like, seriously,” I said, snatching up a page at random and glancing over it. “You remember when I first brought you here? We told you that everything gets brought in.”

  Kate nodded. “Right. Food and water and even the furniture. This is all the dream of a near-dead Extra-Dimensional Entity and it didn’t include snack dispensers or glacier-fed lakes.”

  “I like London,” Sanctuary said, as a disembodied voice just beside my shoulder. “Jack the Ripper. Spring-heeled Jack. It’s a place of mystery, of—”

  “Right,” I said, cutting the Entity off. “But I can’t figure out the mechanics of how Christina ran this place. Where did she get the food? The water and the fuel for the generators? Did she have someone wander off to the local supermarket once a week for our rations of shitty coffee and stale bagels? Was it delivered by magic food-faeries? Does it rain from the sky like biblical manna?”

  Tapping a thoughtful finger on her cheek, Kate nodded.

  “You’d think I’d have noticed that during the years I worked here,” I said. “Big trucks backing up and dropping off enough resources for a hundred of us.” I met her gaze. “Not once. How did she pay for it? Or us? It’s not like I was out there charging by the hour to kick demon bugs out of Osaka or little scary clown monsters out of a kid’s closet in Anchorage.”

  Kate’s eyes went wide. “Please, please tell me that’s not a thing. Evil closet clowns are not something I signed up for.”

  “Is there an OFC bank account?” I said, ignoring her and snatching up another loose page. This one had a blue sticky note that someone had doodled a stick demon onto. I ripped it off and crumpled it. “Gold bullion in a vault here somewhere? Jesus, I’d settle for an enormous piggy bank right now. I don’t know how we paid for anything. There’s no books or ledgers or even a damnable Excel spreadsheet that kept track of this as far as I can tell.” I sighed and let the page drop. “For all I know Christina crapped dollar bills.”

  Once our supply of Pop-Tarts and instant coffee had dwindled, I’d asked Sanctuary about it. It had no idea. While it rode around in the head of whoever was running the OFC at that moment and Sanctuary more or less knew what they knew, the fact was it didn’t care. The EDE had a wonderful tendency to ignore anything that didn’t catch its immediate fancy and hadn’t paid attention to much of the rest.

  As luck would have it, a certain Archangel had left an impressive older BMW in my care while he’d been slaughtering my coworkers. It had sold for little. Kinda hard to sell properly without a title, and ‘well it belonged to an angel no stop laughing’ doesn’t add much to the Blue Book value. I’d taken what I could get for it just so I could afford to keep those of us left alive in basic supplies. Kate had wanted to keep it for herself, figuring she was owed after Michael had killed her family and used her as a pawn to shatter the OFC, but it seemed a conspicuous vehicle and we needed cash.

  I’ll be honest. It was depressing the first time I bought a single sack of groceries to feed every living member of the OFC. Kate, Daniel, and I had shared a pack of cookies.

  “Then there’s all the other crap that is still hanging around our collective, yet few, necks,” I said, holding up a hand. “The freaking Archangel Michael still has a direct red phone connection to your soul, and eventually he’ll be back.” I held up a finger. “Abezethibou the Coffin-Headed is still out and about on the loose.” Another finger. “I haven’t watched an episode of Game of Thrones in half a year.” A third finger joined the others. I gave them a wiggle. “I feel like Sisyphus here, struggling to keep all this stuff from rolling over us. Except the boulder is covered in spikes. And red biting ants.

  “Plus,” I said, sighing, “Daniel is never around, and when he is, he’s giving me these evil stares. You know he’s got a voodoo doll of me in his desk and is stabbing it every chance he gets. I’m not expecting warm and friendly group hugs here or anything, but he at least has experience and knows the score. I could use his help.”

  “You used magic, Samuel,” Kate whispered. “Not that I’m not appreciative of you saving our… my ass, but he had it drummed into him that using magic is pretty much guaranteed to scramble your eggs.” She blew out a breath. “He’s waiting for you to show you’re possessed and evil or something.”

  I stilled, hardly daring to breathe. The kid had a point. I just hadn’t been infected in the fight with Michael. Which was all the worse — the longer someone stays possessed, the harder it is to evict their unwanted tenant. While Kate and I had proved you could do a group exorcism, the two of them would have no chance of blowing out Lauren’s candles. If I told them now, I was sure Kate would understand. She wasn’t indoctrinated like the old guard had been, and she herself had been controlled by such a creature. Daniel, though?

  Daniel would probably just kill me. That was the rule on the books and I was sure he slept with a copy under his pillow.

  “What do you think?” I asked in a quiet voice.

  Kate snorted. “You’re not evil flavored. You’re just… Samuel-flavored.”

  “Now with one hundred percent more MSG,” I said. “Given all the packaged noodles we’ve been eating.”

  We sat in silence for another half-minute, pausing occasionally for an awkward smile or checking of the clock. Tiredness clawed at my eyes. I hardly slept as it was any more, and today had been a stressful day, what with being dangled by my ankles and tossed around like a dog toy. I needed answers, but I wasn’t finding any.

  My gaze wandered everywhere save the roll cart beside my desk, covered in liquor bottles. All of them had alcohol left in them and had since I’d inherited the position from Christina. For a moment, the urge to reach out my hand and snatch one up was maddening, an itch everywhere at once that cried out to be scrat
ched.

  Control my basest urges, Sanctuary had said. Right. I had to be in control of the little shit so I could master the big shit.

  “I’m going to refill the generators,” I said, rising.

  “Pop back to Earth for a minute and call Dieter and Stefan,” Kate added. “They sent me a text earlier and want to talk about a job with you.”

  “Couldn’t they have just texted me directly?”

  Kate crossed her arms. “Dieter says you’ve been ignoring them.”

  “I have,” I admitted, “and it would have been nice to keep ignoring them.”

  Dieter had a knack for telling if someone was possessed, and I really didn’t want to risk that right now. It was nice they were stepping up their side-business of tossing out particularly vicious demons, but I still had problems trusting them. They were, after all, demons themselves.

  “It’s a paying job,” Kate added with a roll of her eyes.

  “Oh,” I said, heading to the door. “Well, that’s a little different. Sure. I’ll buzz Heckle and Jeckle. Then I plan on foraging for whatever last remaining junk food we have left around here. After the crap I put up with today, I want to wallow in something with trans fat.”

  “I polished off all the chips,” Kate said, drumming her heels against the desk. She flashed me a wicked grin. “All that’s left are pretzels and Saltine crackers.”

  I held back a groan. “I guess I should head back to Earth and pick up a few groceries.” I pondered how much cash I had in my too-empty pocket. I’d already let my apartment go and was living full-time in the crappy little cul-de-sac called Sanctuary at this point. There wasn’t much farther I could stretch things. “Rice and beans, I guess. I always wondered what it would be like to be a pirate. Good chance I’ll get scurvy at this rate. Pirate Commander Samuel.”

  “Samuel isn’t a good pirate name. You’ll have to pick out something that strikes fear in the hearts of people.”

  “It’s Interdimensional Pirate Commander Samuel,” I pointed out. “On account of me living in two dimensions and all. Okay. I’ll go grab a few more supplies, then figure out a way to make more money so I’m not taking hand-outs from demons. Maybe sell my liver.”