They wailed and huddled together, cut off from God’s mercy and love. Their stunted souls were forced to give until they were used up, eventually withering into emptiness. Trapped inside this corpse, they could do nothing more than keep the body from rotting. The soothing voice turned into a grating demand, pressuring them to keep the dead girl’s body viable until a little priestess named Lydia would resurrect her.
The drums ceased. Dead silence.
Shania frowned in realization, pressed her lips together and tightened her fists for battle. Did the voice want her Lydia? She would never allow them to take her baby girl.
CHAPTER TWO
Deacon
The buckshot slammed into Deacon’s chest. The force knocked him clean off his feet, sending him crashing into the wall of ATL’s famous Perimeter Mall. Reading this guy’s file helped, but thank God Deacon’s premonition told him to wear a vest. He allowed the pain from the impact to wash through him as he low-crawled, taking cover behind a juice bar. The click-click-chunk of another round entering the chamber of the single-shot 12-gauge shotgun. The assailant’s desert boots crunched the broken glass.
This dude had a screw loose and kept yelling “Fire in the hole!”
Good, maybe I can take him out between reloads.
“D, you okay?” his partner, Rashad, yelled.
“I seen better days,” Deacon responded as he peered out to view his attacker.
“Fire in the hole!” the assailant bellowed.
Deacon pulled back as the blast exploded next to him, sending pieces flying, barely missing his face. Definitely better days.
A tiny whimper caught his attention. Deacon moved toward the other side. His gut clenched when a mother crouched down at the edge of the nearest store entrance, and pointed at her child tucked away inside the stand. One more click-click-chunk and the assailant would blast a hole clean through the girl’s hiding place. He must get the girl out of there. Have to save her!
“Noah, you don’t want to hurt anybody. Stop shooting so we can talk.” Deacon tried his best to calm the redneck vet down.
“Hell…fuckinꞌ insurance ’vestigators…all the same. Tryin’ to take my money.” The assailant’s voice lowered into a distracted mumble while he tried to reload.
Deacon almost took another chance to survey the scene, but Noah’s southern twang grew thicker, louder, reaching a desperate pitch. “I’m ailing. I needs my money!”
Smack. Click-click-chunk. Another round echoed.
Deacon cursed. His heart sped up. Noah would be on top of him soon, and the little girl would get hurt. Deacon realized one of the mall cops was signaling him from atop his two-wheeler riding machine. The guy resembled robo man ready for fake battle with his wand taser in one hand, helmet on his head, and twenty-first century manufactured chariot. This wasn’t a damn video game! Didn’t he realize he worked at the mall? The fool was going to try to roll up on Noah to take him down. Deacon waved. Idiot, stay back!
Deacon’s stomach lurched as a sour taste filled his mouth with an overwhelming sinking feeling. Before he could tell the mall cop to slow down, he sped up.
“Fire in the hole!” Noah lifted his rifle and fired, blowing the man clean off his two-wheeler. People clutched their bags as they screamed from their hiding places. Mall cop may as well have had X’d out eyes.
Hope the wind’s just knocked out of him.
“No-b-body t-t-taking my money. Ya hear? Man ran m-me down after I came back from ’fghanistan!”
Deacon hated being a PI for insurance companies sometimes. If a person received a big payout, they were always trying to prove fraud. Deacon and Rashad were supposed to follow Noah and take pictures of him to make sure his condition was real. This case shouldn’t have ended this way.
Deacon peered out again. Noah acted the part of a soldier by making sure mall cop was out of commission. Noah kicked away his taser and rolled him over so he could tie him up. Now was Deacon’s chance! He waved for the little girl to come out of hiding. She lunged across the juice-covered floor, wrapping her tiny brown arms around Deacon’s neck. Her pigtails and barrettes hit his jaw, and he sprinted to take the girl to her mother. He made it, when Noah opened fire on the juice stand. The mother mouthed thank you as she cradled her baby and bolted into the interior of the department store to safety.
He hated cases with PTSD war veterans. He was a vet too, and it hit his heart too close to home. He’d told his supervisor to leave this case alone. Sirens droned on underneath the quiet sobbing from the mother reunited with her child. Adrenaline caused Deacon to lean forward. He blew out a loud breath then made eye contact with Rashad, his godbrother. When Deacon’s parents died, he refused to move back to Georgia with his grandmother. Rashad’s parents took him in and raised them both.
Deacon signaled Rashad. They figuratively read each other’s minds. Neither one of them wanted to hurt the war hero, fellow brother in service. They wanted to take him down without using weapons. The next time Noah reloaded they would hit him from both sides similar to when they were kids on the Cass High football team in Detroit. Noah took another shot and went to reload. Deacon and Rashad rushed him, tackling him across a set of tables in the food court.
“Fire in the...” Noah groaned as he fought them, but they wrestled, pinning him down on his back.
Deacon took a deep breath and scanned the area.
His heart was elsewhere. One of those weird premonitions took him over. Had he met this man before? As he held Noah down, Deacon’s peripheral vision shook and sweat beaded up on his forehead. Spots formed in front of his eyes, flashing, clearing into a supernatural amber-colored haze. His awareness opened, and he was able to perceive what others could not. The man’s eyes glowed, yellowish.
Deacon saw a younger version of himself holding a machete-like sword in one hand and a Viking sword in the other. He was in a heated battle against men with eyes glowing like Noah’s. Then, it was gone. Hate when that happens!
Possessed, Noah sneered at Deacon. “Your royal blood stinks.”
Deacon glanced to see if Rashad heard him, but his brother continued to hold Noah down.
“Excuse me?” Deacon sank closer as he added more pressure with his elbow to the man’s chest.
“The Children of Loki will make your kind extinct one way or the other. We don’t care what kind of deal your foolish grandma made.”
Noah spit in Deacon’s face.
Deacon’s face flushed with anger, until another vision showed Noah cradling the torso of a fellow fallen soldier who’d been blown up by a suicide bomber. Deacon released the pressure, but Rashad punched the man in the nose like a real Detroiter.
“Asshole. Watch who you spittin’ on.”
Officers swarmed in from behind. Taking over the scene. Moving eerily slow. The officers pressured Deacon and Rashad with intense questions:
Where are your PI licenses?
How’d this happen?
Did you know this man was unstable?
His brain expanded and his gut tingled. Deacon answered endless questions, while deep inside he intuitively understood his mission in life was connected to the eerie premonition. He glanced over at Noah. The man seemed subdued as if he didn’t grasp his actions. His eyes no longer glowed. Deacon turned toward the little girl. Her eyes drew him into another premonition of a little girl with violet eyes similar to his mother’s. Deacon sensed she needed to be protected. The eyes belonged to the young girl from his first love’s MyFace page. His chest tightened.
His first love, Shania, still took his breath away. He dreamed of her beautiful dark-chocolate skin and her sweet scent. He loved her with all his heart. She’d broken him in places he didn’t know existed. After the breakup, he needed time to think alone. He kept his head down and joined the Marine Corps.
He worked hard, moving up the ranks to become a Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) in a few short years, but there was another side of him, too. He’d become extremely disillusioned and engaged in heav
y social drinking to take the pain away. He did his six years in the military, compartmentalized his pain by being exemplary and getting his college degree, but inside his ego took a beating. When Shania broke up with him, she touched his soft spot that released a whole other side of him. He spent years picking up the pieces and functioning after the heartbreak, but something was always missing and never returned, and after all these years, he still hadn’t recovered. Deacon frowned, rubbing his neck.
“C’mon, let’s jet. You want to kill him for spitting on you, don’t you?” Rashad slapped Deacon on the back.
“Yeah, let’s go.”
Atlanta traffic backed up on 285 both ways. That was different! In Detroit, everything ran parallel and perpendicular. Only Atlantans could design a highway in a full NASCAR circle. Gridlock on both sides meant sit and wait on the highway parking lot, forever. By the time they reached their offices in Marietta, the impact of the buckshot was a bone-deep ache in the center of Deacon’s chest.
He dropped his keys on the desk. Then peeled off his bulletproof vest and pulled back his chair. Sitting down, he cupped his head in his hands and raked his hair back with his fingers.
“Get it together,” he said to himself, but in reality, he was lost. He gazed around his cubicle. It was empty. Blank. It didn’t resemble other people’s cubicles with pictures of family, children, loved ones. There were no photos of his wife and child.
Alone.
Deacon’s thoughts spiraled into the past…his heartbreak. The only memory that counted was painfully fresh, as if it’d happened yesterday instead of ten years prior. He remembered feeling pleased to be waiting for Shania at the altar. He knew they were young, but he didn’t care. He didn’t care that he was white, and she was black. For all that seemed wrong, there was so much right with their love.
He loved her, no matter what his grandmother told him about the dangers of an interracial marriage. His parents taught him to love who he loved without prejudice. He’d done that. He’d been ready to offer his solemn vow and become soul mates. She’d been a singular joy in his life of loss. Neither of them had parents who were alive. They both shared wounds, but together they’d healed each other’s pain.
He’d been ready to give her all of himself. He had waited in the minister’s chambers, eyeing the door and waiting to see the love of his life dressed in white. The door cracked open, and a little man dressed in a suit that looked more for a funeral than a wedding walked in with a handwritten note. He stood solemnly, handing the note to Deacon.
No. He didn’t want it. His hands shook.
He couldn’t open it. How could he have been so happy in one second and crushed the next? Rashad stood next to him. He couldn’t deal with his godbrotherꞌs words. Deacon squeezed the note and put it in his pocket. He knew what it said. He took a solemn breath and came out of the memory. He couldn’t ever recover from the lovesickness.
He slammed his fists on the desk. His wife. He didn’t have one. It seemed the one girl who broke his heart made it hard for him to move on with his life. He knew this wasn’t normal. There were women who came into his life—beautiful women who he would have been honored to call his wife, but his heart was never in it. They took the loneliness away, but they never compared to the one who fractured his heart. After all these years, he still loved her. He still loved his beautiful Shania.
It didn’t help that periodically he imagined being close to her. It was like they were somehow spiritually connected. It drove him insane. In the quiet of the night in his deepest sleep, it was as if nothing blocked them from being together…as if they belonged together. The dreams were tortuous. He would be holding her, loving her, caressing her. He would dream of them making spiritual love. Over the years, the experience proved to be embarrassing. He would wake up like a teenager having sensuous ejaculations. He’d washed lots of sheet sets, but it was hard to love another woman when tormented by a lost love.
The one who got away.
Deacon tried his best in the real world to stay away from Shania. After he got out of the Marine Corps, he moved to Georgia. Tried to steer clear of any old friends who might connect them, and he especially tried to stay away from friending people who were friends with her on MyFace.
He recently made the mistake of thinking he could friend Shania’s best friend, Maddy, but when images of Shania and her little girl filled his updates, he almost broke down. Shania looked gorgeous, but sad. His heart reached out to her. He wanted to touch her, caress her, and love her. He wanted to wash away her pain. He’d even dreamed her child belonged to him. When he saw the picture of Shania with her recent boyfriend, he un-friended Maddy immediately.
It’d been ten long years since he’d lost the love of his life and he knew that she’d moved on, but seeing her with another man felt like betrayal. He wanted to bash the boyfriend. Something about the man wasn’t right. His rage was unjustifiable, so he did the right thing and made it his business not to view pictures of his lost love with another man.
He paused, a thickness in his throat. The little girl with his mother’s violet eyes called out to him in a premonition. She needed protection. His premonitions never failed him. His instincts told him to probe deeper.
Deacon closed his eyes and remembered when he finally read Shania’s note. Her words were totally damaging. She’d said she couldn’t throw her life away by being a teenage mother and marrying him. She really didn’t love him. She’d taken matters into her own hands and aborted their child. He must move on with his life. Just the same, a fierce protective instinct compelled Deacon to clench his fists and tap into the still part of himself where he could see premonitions.
For the first time, an image of a young Shania writing and dropping tears on the note came to him. When she finished writing, she rubbed her belly and sealed the envelope. Deacon’s eyes widened as the vision withdrew. He sucked in a breath while the shock radiated within his core. Shania lied to him years ago about aborting his child!? Was he a father?
CHAPTER THREE
Shania
Shania was determined to keep the voice from ever getting her little girl. Her trapped spirit tried to punch its way out of Nia’s death experience and through the corpse being kept vibrant. The lost souls blocked the escape passage and would not allow her to leave. The little ones clung to her light, clutching, suffocating her, and desperately trying to steal her life force. The frozen fingernails of the unjustly murdered girls scraped against her spiritual body. The choking weight of their intense anger engulfed her. Shania screamed as she shoved and kicked them away, but it was like trying to stop a rage-filled swarm of crawling insects.
“Someone must pay for our stolen lives!” the tiny voices moaned.
The souls united into a buzzing poltergeist that sought to drain Shania’s magical essence. Nia’s soul shone brightly. Shania glimpsed Nia’s kind eyes and dimpled smile. Her sweet spirit and thankfulness toward Shania forced the others back. She helped Shania by touching her face, sending warmth radiating through Shania’s soul. Nia gave her the hope of stopping this from happening to other girls. She willed Shania to live, and to save her daughter from this sorrowful fate.
“Never forget me. Help my parents remember that I-I meant something. That I-I was important and tried to do better.” Nia’s final words echoed, shaking Shania’s soul as the little girl pushed her.
Shania punctured through the crushing darkness. She materialized on the other side of the barrier holding those decimated souls. She pinched her lips together in sadness. Her soul would forever be scarred from being touched by the girls’ wrathful unrealized potential. Her spirit self took a deep breath, but a burning bitterness filled her throat as she landed in a foul-smelling mist. When will this torture end?
She sucked in her cheeks as her eyes widened…cautious. The hair stood, ramrod straight, on the back of her neck. She shuddered and scanned her new location. She rubbed her stinging eyes. The hazy room dripped with pure malevolence. Her stomach overturned,
and if she hadn’t been in spirit form, she would’ve thrown up.
Her consciousness hovered…unsteady. The figure of a woman appeared, who upon first glance seemed as beautiful as a goddess. The figure sang while bending over to straighten the clothes of the dead body of a tiny African girl. The child had perfect white lines painted on her face, and was dressed in kente cloth with beaded jewelry.
Was that the corpse where those lost souls were trapped?
Shania’s essence drifted to the other side of the foggy room. When she concentrated this time, the woman sped toward her as fast as a real goddess, closing the distance. Shania’s eyes searched for an exit, but the woman’s enormous body, radiating a crimson aura, blocked her view.
Wait, was it a woman? Shania did a double take. The woman morphed in front of her eyes. She couldn’t stop watching the horror show. The woman’s head cranked, turning unnaturally in a counter clockwise motion. Shania jerked, recoiling, trying to shield herself, but the creature was on top of her.
The face was mashed together in a heinous disfigurement of over-healed scars, connective lesions, all fused together in a painful contortion of discolored marks. Shania’s blood pressure rose and her stomach tightened, as the realization dawned on her that this woman was a trapped twin soul. The split-in-half monster resembled a hybrid of light-skinned/dark-skinned, male/female with huge glowing eyes and clawed hands.
It spoke, but Shania couldn’t understand the words. Finally, the desires became clear. It wanted…no, needed…her daughter.
Shania took deep, gulping breaths. No!
The disfigured creature gripped Shania’s soul, sending radiating pain throughout her existence. How had this thing grabbed her spirit?
Her mind went blank. Is this real? Her temperature rose with a constricting sensation in her chest. Shania’s eyes widened.
The beast shrieked in a high-pitched battle cry, drooling from the mouth, gripping her tighter. Shania’s heart accelerated. Her limbs tingled, especially her hands. Panicked, she pressed her fingers into clenched fists. Time slowed down. The twin soul’s breath smelled of rancid decay, but was eerily warm in the biting cold as bloodied fangs released.
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