Revenant

by Catrina Burgess

  I looked from Dean to Wendy. “We’re safe for the moment. Gage…needs me. He’s promised he won’t hurt either of you as long as I do what he wants.” I wanted to believe that. I really did.

  “What happens when he no longer ‘needs’ you? What happens to you? To us?” Dean started to reach for my hand, but his fingers stopped just short of touching mine. “Gage doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who’s going to let us go merrily on our way.”

  “I just…need more time,” I answered.

  “To do what?” he demanded.

  I scrambled for a response. “He…he told me he has an extensive magic library. I need to get a look at his books to see if there’s anything in them that can help us get out of here.”

  “What does he have you doing?” Dean was as incessant with the questions as Luke, but just like with Luke, I knew I couldn’t tell him. What would he do when he realized I was the girl who’d brought terror to his people? “I can’t tell you.”

  And also just like Luke, anger filled Dean’s eyes at my refusal to answer his questions. “Why not?”

  I had a hard time meeting his gaze. “You don’t want to know.” My words were a whisper.

  “I don’t think you get to say that to me. Not when they’re holding me prisoner to force you to do…whatever you’re doing.” Dean moved closer. His face was now only inches from mine. “I want to know what this is all about.”

  I wanted to tell him, I wanted to come clean—but the words wouldn’t come out.

  The anger left his voice. “Colina.”

  “Let it go!” Wendy shouted. Anger twisted her face and she raised her hands as if she was going to attack him. Then, just as before, she seemed to catch herself. She took a deep breath and said, “It doesn’t matter why we’re here. We’re here. They can do whatever they want with us.”

  At her words, Caleb’s threats echoed in my mind. What about that dark-haired friend of yours? She’s a pretty one, she is… I think Jacob here has taken a real shine to her. Haven’t you, Jacob?

  I looked at Wendy’s torn shirt. “Did anyone hurt you?”

  She rubbed her right hand against the wounds on her left forearm. “No one touched me.”

  I pointed at the gashes. “Then how did you get—”

  She turned away before I could finish. I knew by her body language that even if I got the question out, she wouldn’t answer it. What if Gage wasn’t lying? What if Wendy tried to harm herself?

  The door swung open and Sonja sauntered into the room. She carried a large metal bucket. She walked over and put it down at my feet and then gave me an amused smile. “Gage said you need to clean up before tonight’s festivities.” She pointed toward the hallway. “In the kitchen is a bathtub.” She gave me a wide smile. “Unfortunately, princess, we’re roughing it out here. There is no indoor plumbing. I’m afraid if you want a bath, you and your friends are going to have to fetch and carry the water yourselves.” She motioned toward the door in the corner. “There’s a well a couple dozen feet from the house. You should be able to get all you need from it, but the water can be a little…brisk. I suggest you heat it up on the wood stove.”

  She turned and gave Dean a long, appreciative stare. “There’s a pile of wood around back. Looks like you shouldn’t have any trouble chopping up some wood for the stove. And if nature calls, there’s an outhouse back there, too.” She turned back to me. “And just a word of warning—I wouldn’t try to escape. There are things out there that love to chase after anything with a heartbeat.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I had to ask. “What type of things?”

  Sonja didn’t answer, but Wendy looked off into the distance and then sucked in her breath. When she looked back at me, her eyes were wide with fear. “Hellhounds.”

  Sonja nodded her head. “Gage does love his pets.” She gave me a look that left no doubt of what she was implying—I was one of those pets. “As long as you stay close to this building, nothing will harm you. We wouldn’t want anything to happen to you, not since Gage has taken a real liking to you.” She moved closer and brought her long red fingernails up in front of my face. “Here’s another word of warning—hands off. Those things out in the woods may be the least of your worries.”

  “I’m not interested in Gage,” I said between clenched teeth.

  “You say that now, but he has a way of worming into a girl’s heart. You’ll see. Before you know it, you’ll be mooning at his feet like all the others. No one is immune to his charm for long. He has a magnetic personality.”

  “A psychotic personality,” I said under my breath.

  She gave a quiet laugh. “Just wait. Before you know it, you’ll succumb to his will. We all do. We can’t seem to help ourselves. But he’s mine. Got it?”

  I put up my hands in surrender. “Got it. He’s all yours.”

  She turned and sauntered out of the room.

  Dean spoke up. “Pleasant girl. Can’t wait to meet Gage. Maybe she’s lying about the creatures out there.”

  “She’s not.” Wendy grimaced in distaste and moved to look out a dirty window. Over her shoulder I could see the looming shapes of the trees.

  Dean turned and looked at me. “So what now?”

  “We do as she says. We get cleaned up,” I answered.

  His eyes narrowed. “That’s the plan? Follow their orders? Whatever the crazies say, we do?”

  I nodded. “For now, that’s the plan.”

  He didn’t look happy at my answer, and I didn’t blame him, but I wasn’t about to rush into anything. I would not risk everyone’s lives by doing something reckless.

  I walked over and picked up the bucket. “You can chop some wood, and I’ll get some water from the well. You heard her—we’ll be safe as long as we stay close to the house.”

  Dean and I stood face-to-face, glaring at each other. Wendy stood watching the two of us.

  He finally shrugged his shoulders and gave a loud sigh. “Fantastic. Always wanted to be a lumberjack.”

  Without another word, I headed for the door. When I opened it, sunlight blinded me. They’d kept me in the dark for days, only allowing me outside at night, and now I was feeling the repercussions.

  Dean blinked quickly, looking up at the sky. “Nice day.” He gazed off into the distance.

  Two men dressed all in black were standing guard about twenty feet away. They had guns slung over their shoulders.

  I scanned the nearby woods, looking for a glimpse of the hellhounds. I didn’t see them. Could Wendy be wrong? I remembered the last time I’d seen one, how it attacked a mage, rushing the man and somehow tearing out his soul. The sound of its growls and teeth gnashing had given me an uncontrollable desire to run. If I closed my eyes, I could still hear the mage’s screams as the beast consumed his soul. How can we get past hellhounds?

  I forced my thoughts back to the task at hand. The bucket swung back and forth in my grip. I spotted the well and headed for it. It was not unlike the well I had fallen into when I had run across the fields outside the renovated barn Luke’s cousin owned so long ago. It was during the rituals—during the time when I was opening myself up to the darkness. That well had something down inside it that had tried to drown me. I looked down into the well in front of me now and wondered what evil may be lurking in its depths.

  At the top of the well was a wheel with a rope attached. I struggled to pull the rope hand over hand until a bucket full of water eventually rose to the top. I clumsily poured the water into my bucket. A good portion of it splashed onto the ground. When the bucket was mostly full, I hefted it up and with two hands carried it back to the house.

  I met up with Dean in the kitchen. He had five or six pieces of wood in his arms. He dropped them onto the floor. “Someone already chopped some wood. Too bad—I was hoping they would leave me alone with an axe.”

  “You think you could use an axe against armed men and hellhounds?”

  His eyes didn’t meet mine. “If I’d finished the trials and
was a dark mage, I would have learned the spells that made me bulletproof.”

  Luke is bulletproof. I hadn’t learned that trick yet. When I found the old mage, Walter, who’d helped me, I’d been intent on only one thing—bringing Luke back. He hadn’t taught me the spells I needed to become a proper death dealer.

  Dean started to load wood into the old stove. “I know Gage said that any magic you use will cause my collar to collapse, but he specified your magic. I don’t think he would tie his own hands. So I was thinking, if we can somehow disarm those men, I could rush them and maybe get them to use some magic on me.” He looked up at me. “Wendy told me about the night we escaped the asylum and how I became really strong. If I’m strong enough, maybe I could overpower the hellhounds.”

  I wondered if the horror I was feeling was showing on my face. “She told you what happened?”

  “She explained how the magic Weatherton used on me morphed me into something with extreme strength.”

  I searched his face, looking for any signs that she’d also told him how he’d turned berserker and ripped Nurse Harrington to pieces. Dean had no magic of his own, but when the magic of others hit him he became something else. Something incredibly fast and powerful. And when he turned into this other thing, he seemed to lose any humanity, any consciousness. He reacted in fury, with a mindless brute force, attacking anyone in his path. He didn’t know that in berserker form he’d killed poor Andrew and then tried to kill Wendy before coming after me. He’d been seconds away from killing me when he’d miraculously morphed back to normal. Had it just been luck? Or did a part of Dean hear me when I was pleading with him for my life?

  There was no guilt or shame on his face. Wendy must have left out the worst parts of what happened. “When did Wendy tell you about it?”

  “They put us together when they first took us. They put us in a cell for a day and a night. Then they came and dragged her out. I hadn’t seen her again until today.” He turned toward me, and this time his eyes were full of concern. “Colina, what do you think happened to her? The marks on her arm—did they do that to her?”

  I leaned over, preparing to heft up the heavy bucket. Before I could, Dean moved next to me and took the bucket out of my reach. He lifted it with ease and slowly poured the water into a large pot sitting on the stovetop.

  I wiped my hands on my jeans, but it was useless—my pants were equally dirty. I couldn’t wait to be clean again. “I don’t think so. Gage said Wendy tried to harm herself.”

  His voice lowered to a whisper. “You think she did that to herself?”

  “I don’t know what to think.” I hoped when I got her alone that I could get her to tell me what happened.

  Dean dropped the bucket and grabbed a box of matches from a nearby shelf, approaching the stove. It was ancient, comprised of a wood stove married to a small oven. Its black iron looked impossibly heavy and solid, and the tarnished brass fittings made it look more like a steam locomotive than a cooking implement. A small pile of dry, old wood was piled on the floor, and Dean began to build a fire inside the stove as if he knew what he was doing.

  “Have you ever lit one of these things?” I asked nervously.

  “No, but I’ve started my share of campfires.” He worked on it for a bit until finally a few flames appeared. He straightened and turned back to me.

  “Dean, promise me you won’t try to get someone to use their magic against you.”

  “But if I change and get strong—”

  I raised my hand to stop him. “Do you remember anything from when you changed?”

  “No,” he admitted. “I’ve tried, but it’s a blank.”

  “When you changed, you weren’t in control. You didn’t seem conscious of what you were doing. You… You were very strong and very violent.”

  His eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, violent?”

  I regretted ever starting the conversation.

  “Colina, what do you mean I was violent?” he demanded when I didn’t answer him.

  He wasn’t going to let it go. “Dean, you…you killed Weatherton,” I finally admitted.

  Confusion filled his eyes, which was quickly replaced by shock. He hung his head for a moment, and then seemed to shake it off. Anger glowed from his eyes and squared his shoulders. “That madman deserved to die.”

  I continued in a quiet voice “But did Nurse Harrington? Dean, you were like…unearthly strong. You ripped her to pieces.”

  He looked at me in shock. “I did what?”

  “You ripped her into pieces. Before that you killed—” I stopped talking abruptly when I saw his expression.

  He gripped the tops of my arms, panic rising in his voice. “Colina, tell me.”

  “Dean—look, you didn’t mean to. You didn’t know what you were doing.” I didn’t want to tell him, but this wasn’t like keeping the secret of what I was doing for Gage. This was something Dean had done—a power he possessed. He had a right to know. “You…killed Andrew.”

  He flinched as if I had struck him. “Andrew is dead?”

  “You didn’t know what was going on. You beat him to death. And you hit Wendy.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth I wished I could take them back. The look on his face was one of pure despair. Before he could say anything, I rushed on. “But you didn’t hurt her badly.”

  He watched me for a moment before asking softly, “Did I try to hurt you?”

  I shook my head. “You wouldn’t hurt me.”

  “But I tried—did I try to hurt you?” he demanded.

  I reached out and grabbed his arm. “You…came at me, but you stopped before anything happened.”

  His fingers wrapped around my hand. “I could have killed you,” he said softly.

  “But you didn’t. You didn’t even lay a finger on me.”

  “Why didn’t Wendy say anything?”

  I didn’t know why Wendy had kept the gruesome details to herself, though I didn’t blame her for not telling him. I wished now that I had kept my mouth shut. He looked so sad, so utterly devastated. He wasn’t to blame, but now he knew he’d killed. And not for the first time—but he didn’t know that. A part of me wanted to unburden myself and tell him what his mother had confided in me—during the second ritual, Dean had become possessed by a killer who squatted inside him. No one knew anything was wrong until the madman killed a couple of girls that were part of Dean’s guild.

  Dean had no memory of it.

  But looking at his tortured expression now, I knew I couldn’t devastate him further. He’d have a hard enough time coming to grips with this. I started to say something, to offer some comfort, but before I could, he pulled away from me. He turned and walked out of the room.

  * * *

  When I made it back into the main room, Wendy was still on the piano stool. She was looking down at her feet, but she spoke as I moved closer. “It’s an old mining town.” She looked up at me. “This place. The buildings outside. They like to set up in old mining towns. Their kind likes to live underground, and the mining towns already have tunnels for them to live.”

  “Their kind? Who are they, Wendy?”

  Her eyes were wide. “It’s not who they are that is the problem, it’s who they want to be.”

  She sounded like Mildred, talking in riddles. “I don’t understand.” I waited for her to answer, but she just looked at me in silence.

  I finally couldn’t take the silence anymore. “We will get out of here.” I said it with more confidence than I felt.

  Wendy’s expression became vague and she stared off into the distance for a long moment before answering. “You will escape. I’ve seen it. But not me.”

  Wendy was a powerful reader, but she’d never mentioned seeing the future before. I didn’t want to believe what she was saying. “I would never leave here without you.”

  She gave me a ghost of a smile. “You won’t have a choice.”

  “You had a vision? You saw the future? Tell me what you saw,” I demanded.
I wanted to reach out and shake her. If she knew what was going to happen, why wouldn’t she say anything? “Wendy, tell me what you saw,” I demanded again. When she still didn’t answer, I lowered my voice and pleaded. “Whatever you saw might help us get out of here…please.”

  My request landed on deaf ears. She turned her face away without saying a word. I sat down on the bench next to her and gently put my hand on her arm. The cuts were red, angry wounds against her pale skin. They were deep—they would leave scars. “Did anyone take a look at these?”

  She gave me a half smile. “There was an old man. He seemed to have some healing power.” Wendy ran her hand across her arm. “They were deeper, but he made them better.”

  “Wendy, what happened?”

  She looked away, refusing to meet my eyes.

  I wanted out of this place. Out of this nightmare.

  I looked over and noticed Dean, who stood in the doorway, watching us. I gave Wendy’s hand a squeeze. “The water is warming up. Do you want to take a hot bath?”

  This time she gave me an actual smile.

  Chapter 3

  It took us a dozen trips to the well to fill the bath for Wendy and Dean. I elected to go last, knowing the tub would be filthy when I was done. Dirt, dried blood, and who knows what other fluids that ooze from bodies as they decompose covered me from head to foot. Touching rotting corpses over and over couldn’t be sanitary. I wondered how many deadly diseases lived under my filthy nails or in my matted hair.

  As I carried a few pieces of wood back into the house, a zombie work detail moved slowly by, dragging garden tools. I looked around quickly, but Dean was inside tending to the stove fire. A bored-looking death dealer dressed all in black kept an eye on them. Two banshees floated in the air around the group, whirling around any zombies that began to stray. After observing for a moment, I realized that the death dealer was using his banshees to move the zombies along, like herd dogs tasked to keep lambs in line.

  At the rear of the line, an especially bloated corpse stumbled and fell to the ground without even trying to catch itself. It hit the dirt and burst like a bag of wet cement. The death dealer stood over the mess with an expression of distaste and poked it with his boot. The corpse’s head popped off with a wet sucking sound and rolled away.