Nine Souls

by Shayne Silvers

  Pure.

  Unconditional.

  Love.

  And it was the only thing that held me together as I gasped to suck in a breath over my tears. I wrapped my arms around him, squeezing as tightly as possible, the same as I had hugged my mom.

  No.

  Harder.

  I hugged this Baby Beast as hard as my inner child had always wanted to hug my father. And mother. Surprisingly, the misty Baby Beast had enough substance for me to actually feel the body within. Either that, or the cloud conformed himself into the shape of a small, helpless child.

  I finally detached, keeping my hands on the outside of his cloud, much like my father had kept hold of my shoulders after our hug.

  “Would you like me to tell you about your father? His name was Kai,” I whispered, smiling.

  The Baby Beast seemed to bob up and down wonderingly, lowering down to the ground of my cell as if it was a throne in our secret hideout.

  In the depths of Hell, one of the lowest points that existed in all of creation, a broken man told a boy about his hero of a father.

  And the celestial boy listened in rapt attention.

  A boy and a broken man found love in that land of despair, where Hope had no name, long since abandoned in the city of woe…

  Chapter 52

  I had fallen asleep at some point, overwhelmed by the unexpectedly pleasant storm of emotions that had bombarded me in the depths of Hell. As if they had scoured my soul clean. I woke to discover that the Baby Beast – B, for short, I decided as a temporary name – had huddled up against me, as if seeking protection. And I had subconsciously held him as I slept. He didn’t shift, so I assumed he was sleeping. I didn’t want to give him a true name, because then his name would be forever tarnished by the man he had met in Hell that one time, since I still had no way of getting out.

  Thinking of that, B needed to get going. He couldn’t just hang out down here with me. What did he eat? What did he need to stay alive? What if someone found him and attacked him? Imprisoned him? I began to panic, and this, apparently, woke B up.

  He darted away in a blink, and metal spines like a thousand needle-thin razors suddenly erupted from the soft, huggable cloud. He zipped back and forth aggressively, but not against me. Against… whatever it was that had made me afraid. He was essentially barking at the burglar that had woken me up in the night, ready to rip him limb from limb.

  “It’s okay,” I said with a smile, hiding my surprise at his sudden ability to kill. “I was just thinking of your safety. That you should probably go home soon. To your mother.” I patted the wall behind me. “I’m not going anywhere. I don’t even know where the door is,” I admitted.

  “I don’t think my mother would like that answer,” B said slowly, the silver spines slowly retracting back into the cloud.

  I grunted at the understatement. “Well, you obviously know the way down here. You can find your way back out. How did you even find me?” I closed my mouth, realizing that it sounded eerily close to do you know how far from home you are, how worried your mother will be?!

  And that would only serve to scare him. And make me sound like a grouchy old man.

  B didn’t even hesitate. “I followed your soul. I could hear you crying out. You are… a part of me, I think. But I don’t know how to find my way back. Your parents said you could help me. Help your family. I’m very tired…” he said, drawing the words out as if he really was at the point of exhaustion. I stared at him. My parents…

  I suddenly knew what my dreams had been. It had been B searching for me. Listening in on conversations with my friends, stalking everyone. I wondered if they had been able to see him. Many had acted like they could not. But my parents had.

  I watched in horror as he ever so slowly began to descend lower to the ground. When kids got like this, they were minutes away from a coma. Like a sugar crash. Oh, no.

  “B, listen to me. You have to go home. Right now. I can’t keep you safe. I have no power.”

  “You have powerful toys, they are just tired, too. And you know the way out. I heard the black one say so. Maybe it’s this room…” he said sleepily.

  I blinked at him, feeling a surge of excitement. “When did you get tired, B?”

  He shifted lazily, sinking lower to the ground. “After I came in here to talk to you.”

  “Shit…” I cursed. The cell was exhausting him. He didn’t have a body, and I was pretty sure he wasn’t a soul, since he’d had no problems traipsing about Hell. He was a Beast, something I barely pretended to understand. Maybe he was celestial, a being from another place, or a realm I simply identified as celestial. Whatever it was didn’t matter right now. He’d gotten in here without a problem. I needed him to help me get out. Not only because I wanted to get out, but because he couldn’t find the way out on his own. He needed someone with a map.

  The new guide to Hell. Me.

  And I had unleashed something deadly into my world – because I was sure my brief roommate was an asshole of the highest caliber.

  And he sure seemed interested in some of the same hobbies as Matthias and me.

  Arthur. Camelot. Guinevere.

  B had said my toys had power, but they were just tired. Did that mean… outside the cell they would work fine? “B, I need you to do something. We’ll take a nap in just a minute. Can you… get rid of this wall? Quietly?” I asked, not knowing how to phrase it so that he might understand, not sure how many words he knew. It sure seemed like he knew a hell of a lot, but I couldn’t waste time. We had to act fast. He was my only way out. And I was his only way out. We had to work together.

  “As you wish, Catalyst,” he murmured as if in a trance. I jumped, but seeing how slowly he drifted over to the wall, I didn’t pester him about the word he’d so casually used. He bobbed in a weaving pattern, like a child dragging his feet on the way to bed. I quickly gathered up my stuff, took one last look at the glow-sticks in the dark cell behind me, grunted, and turned back to B.

  The wall shimmered, and a thousand pounds of diamond grit collapsed to the floor, some of it rolling over my feet. I hefted my spear and dove through, not caring what was on the other side as B suddenly sagged completely to the ground like fog in a valley. I grabbed a hold of his… fluffiness where I thought his hair would be and tugged him after me.

  Startled whistles shrieked at me from my right, and I cut loose with my spear as three Candy Skulls lurched after me with their glass sword-hands. With each second, another arm appeared with another blade until each of them sported six or more arms – a shitload of glass.

  Magic surged up inside of me, and I smiled at their prettily-painted faces.

  “Early checkout, Candy Asses.”

  And I threw myself into them, drawing deep on the Fae powers that Barbie had rejuvenated me with. Remembering how difficult it had been when trying to take out the monsters in the white arena, I gave it more effort than probably necessary.

  A dozen silver spines – like I had seen B use – erupted from my hands, impaling the first two Candy Skulls. I didn’t stop, even as they shrieked, higher pitched, like teakettles about to explode. I swung my spear laterally, decapitating them. Their robes crumpled and their Candy Skull Masks bounced on the ground loudly as the ruby on my spear flashed twice, drinking in their… souls? The third Candy Skull warden took one look at me, the spear, and turned to run. I scooped up one of their Masks – not a full skull like I had seen others donning – and pointed my spear at the fleeing warden. A bar of blinding red lightning hammered into his spine.

  He simply ceased to exist, and my spear gobbled him up, too, the gem flashing brightly one time, devouring whatever it was that kept the Calavera vertical. I frowned at it before spinning to check on B. Now that we were out of the cell, he should be fine. Less sleepy.

  But he wasn’t. He was a deflated lump of cotton, not moving. Dying or dead.

  “NOOOOOOOO!” I roared at the top of my lungs, loud enough to… well, wake the dead.

>   And not knowing what else to do, I pointed my spear at B, unleashing a torrent of arcing red light into the Beast. The walls exploded all around us, shrapnel pelting my body and face.

  And I fell from these Hellish Heavens.

  Chapter 53

  I managed to open my mouth to scream but I touched the ground too soon for it to become more than a surprised grunt. As if I had fallen only a few feet. Still, I jumped instinctively as if to grab onto the lip above me before whatever I was standing on also collapsed.

  And it took entirely too long for me to return to the floor, like there was no gravity. Open air surrounded me, and it was windy as all hell. My feet finally touched the ground again.

  “That should have hurt a lot more,” I murmured, crouching against the ridiculously loud wind.

  Wait, I knew this sensation… It reminded me of a time when – as a five-year-old – I had been riding down fifty floors in an elevator with my dad and a bunch of his executives. I had looked at him, grinning and said, that makes my balls tickle. The group had erupted in laughter.

  I felt my balls tickling right now, folks.

  “Oh, shi—” I realized too late what was happening.

  I crumpled to the ground like I weighed a million pounds as the floor I was standing on suddenly hammered into something just as hard.

  And molten rock flared up around me in a complete circle. I gasped, eyes wide.

  I’d landed on a piece of rock from the hall that had also been falling. Then we struck the ocean of lava together.

  I groaned, lying on a black circle of stone now in the center of the lava ocean. I glanced up to see a rock bridge, shattered in the center, the two ends like broken teeth reaching towards the new hole I had made. I blinked, still aching from the impact of falling…

  Christ, that was a long way up.

  My prison cell had been above the ocean of lava? Checking the Map in my mind, I nodded. Yeah. That was right. I just hadn’t ever attempted to search the Map any deeper than my cell, not considering to check what was below me, assuming it was just more rock, not the fucking lava ocean. I grunted as I climbed to my feet, studying the edges of my island, watching as lava slowly oozed over the perimeter, swallowing it.

  I was still standing on the bridge I had destroyed. And it was now sinking.

  Frantically trying to decide how the hell I was going to get out of this, I didn’t see the sodden cloud until it was too late. It slammed into me like a pile of wet laundry, knocking me perilously close to the molten lava. My skin dried in a heartbeat, only moments away from serious proximity burns or something.

  Suddenly, I was yanked back into the center of our temporary rock island.

  I stared in relief to find B quivering in midair, sharp crackles of red zapping within his soul.

  “I was sleeping, and something woke me up. It feels… stained…” he said uncertainly.

  I just nodded. No time for explanations. “We need to get off this rock,” I told him.

  Without a word, he wrapped himself around me and began to rise, but before we had gone a few feet, he struggled, and we began to drift back down to the ever-shrinking circle of rock. “I can’t fly any higher with you. You’re too heavy. Or I’m too tired,” he said, terror creeping into his voice.

  “Fly…” I repeated dumbly. I reached into my satchel and pulled out a feather. “GRIMM!”

  I grabbed onto B, holding him like a football under my arm as black cords of lightning the size of miniature tornados slammed into the lava all around us, exploding in geysers of liquid rock. My Alicorn swept us up into the air not a moment too soon. I could smell burning leather and rubber from my boots. B shivered under my arm, wrapping himself around me in fear.

  “Fucking idiot!” Grimm snapped angrily. “You trying to get yourself killed? And why cloak yourself? I heard you calling, but couldn’t find you!” His fangs actually clicked shut at the end.

  “Virgin ears,” I snapped back at him, indicating B.

  He snorted most indelicately, pumping his shadow wings until we reached one of the broken edges of the bridge I had destroyed. “Land here for a second, Grimm.”

  “Why – the fuck – do you want to land, you crazy bastard?” he snapped, but he did obey, skidding his silver hooves across the black rock.

  I climbed off his back, holding B at arm’s length for a moment. “You okay, kid?”

  He quivered, which I took for a nod.

  “Okay. I need you to do me a favor. Hop into my satchel. I need to keep you safe.” Without a word, he shifted into the satchel as I held it open. “Keep your… top close to the top,” I said lamely, not familiar with Beast biology. “Just, stay near the open part.”

  He did, and I made sure he wasn’t about to fall into oblivion or anything. I would have asked him to hop into one of the other things inside, but they were all incredibly dangerous, and there was no telling what might happen.

  I looked up at Grimm who was eyeing the spear in my fist. He looked… very alert. But we didn’t have time to worry about that yet. We needed to get out of here. I carefully slid the spear into my satchel, preferring to have my hands free in case I fell off Grimm or needed to grab onto B or something. And if anything approached me, I wanted to feel them die up close.

  I stared down at the Candy Skull Mask, and a very slow smile split my cheeks. I turned it back and forth, studying it. I even reached inside it with my Fae magic, verifying that it was just a mask. A powerful material, but not anything that would do me harm. I held it out to Grimm. “Sniff this. Does it feel dangerous?”

  He did and snorted. “The previous occupant was… decaying rapidly, but it’s just a mask.”

  I nodded, and popped it on over my face. Then I climbed onto Grimm’s back, telling him where to go with a lightning quick assessment, the Map seeming to understand my desire. He launched into the air, flapping those great shadow wings like we were fleeing an erupting volcano. Perhaps we were.

  I shouted commands into his ears on instinct, the Map seeming to speak to me, as he flew. It was much faster astride Grimm, flying over various labyrinth’s and mazes, pockets of cells that would have guaranteed a deadly fight, and the vast open ocean of blood that would have taken me forever to walk across.

  That didn’t mean it was uneventful. Not in the slightest. The initial shock of seeing the Candy Skull mask over my head saved us from quite a few conflicts. But in those large open spaces where we had nowhere to hide, they soon realized we weren’t what we pretended to be.

  A handful of Candy Skulls peeled off from the ceiling, those arachnid ones.

  I grunted. Stupid idiots. I opened my mouth to tell Grimm to simply dodge them, letting them fall past us, when giant wings made of spider webs erupted from their backs, one great big pump of those sticky wings sending them gliding straight towards us at impossible speeds.

  I lashed out with whips of red flame, and then thinking of Talon’s cat of nine tails weapon, I made sure each tip broke off into nine tips instead of the one. I even made the tips shaped like crucifixes, just to be an asshole. The added focus hit me heavily, but it also created a ridiculous number of streams of fire for the Candy Skulls to avoid.

  Each whip that struck a wing lit it up like flash paper, and the Candy Skull hissed as it fell. Grimm made short work of the last Warden, not bothering to let it fall after I sliced off its wings, but deciding to stab it through the face with his horn. He shook it off violently, the mask ringing around his horn where he had pierced it. Like ring toss.

  After that we tried harder to stay concealed. Not that we feared taking on any more of the Candy Skulls, but we knew it was only a matter of time before alarms went off, or one of them decided on calling in backup rather than taking us on directly.

  So Grimm kept his fiery eyes alert for dangers, staying close to walls and corners rather than flying through the center of the various caverns. We still attracted attention from the hordes of souls, all shouting, cursing, and screaming at us for leaving them beh
ind.

  I reached into the satchel, placing my hand on B’s… head, I think. “You okay?” I asked, keeping my eyes out for danger.

  “Yes. I’m feeling better.”

  “Good. Just a little longer. We’re almost there,” I said. “I’ve been seeing through your eyes… And you called me the Catalyst…”

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “What is a Catalyst?” I asked, scanning our surroundings quickly.

  B hesitated, the flickers of green and silver popping back and forth inside him faster for a few seconds. The red had faded, but was still there. “It’s like a whisper to me. A memory of a dream. A promise to my kind, I think. But I don’t fully understand. Maybe I can ask mother…” he said, sounding sorry he couldn’t offer a better answer.

  I smiled down at him. “That would be great. I don’t understand it myself. You caught me off guard when you said it is all.”

  I leaned forward to pass on a few directions to Grimm after a quick assessment of our location with the Map. We were moving fucking fast. I’d almost missed telling him to turn down the tunnel that would save us an hour of flight time.

  I felt his muscles bunch up beneath me as he shifted course. He should be good for a few minutes. Unless we were attacked. We were almost upon the Arch where I had first entered Hell so long ago. I knew the only way out was to break the smoky ceiling window high above, but I wasn’t sure if I had anything strong enough to do it. I would just use overwhelming force.

  ‘Merica style.

  “B, I need to know what else is happening up there. What else you’ve seen. We may have trouble when we return…” I said, suddenly thinking of the wolves, and Raego, and White Fang. God, they felt like they were a million years in the past after everything else I’d seen. But I needed to know what we were walking into. If it had anything to do with the… thing I had released from Hell. He obviously hated King Arthur and his pals. And my dear old ancestor had just taken one of those Knights into Fae – the only lead on Avalon we had yet to find.