Despite all the pain I’d endured, there wasn’t as much blood as she claimed, certainly not enough for a squad to come in and desanitize my house. Minus the few drops on the table and the linoleum and the small pool on the chair I was in, there really wasn’t much to clean besides the blood on my clothes and hers.
“I think I can handle the cleanup,” I said.
“Aren’t you, like, afraid some withes’ coven might get a drop of your blood and hit you with a some bad juju or something like that?”
“Not particularly,” I said. That’s when I realized what her concern was. She thought that I was privy to withes’ hexes as readily as she was, and like everyone else for that matter. She was right for the most part, except for one thing. No witch in her right mind would ever use summoner blood or hair or mucous or anything else from a summoner’s body to cast a spell.
It would be like lightning a match in a room filled with gasoline – just not worth the effort. Our bodies talk to us – one of the many voices we hear. Even now I can hear screams and chants and cries from the blood that was spilled from me. As conniving as most witches were, they all knew better than to take anything from my physical body and use it again me.
“Not too concerned about the blood,” I said. “I’ll clean it up when I get some time.”
Stephanie shrugged. “If you don’t care, I don’t care. Mind if you I use your sink?” Without waiting for me to answer, she stepped into the kitchen, scrubbing her arms under the scalding hot water. How she was able to withstand the heat, I wasn’t sure. I figured she was healing herself while she used the hot water to get all of my blood off.
“How long have you been working for Marcus?” I asked her.
“Too long.” Her eyes got big when she said it, but she didn’t look at me. She just kept scrubbing away, her auburn hair swinging back and forth as she arduously ground into her tattooed arms.
“How long’s too long?”
“Somewhere ‘round six years or more. Wait. Maybe longer. More like seven and a half.”
“Doing what?” I got up, grabbed a dish towel from the drawer, poured some vinegar on the linoleum and commenced to scrubbing, the strong odor of sour acetone filling the dining room and the kitchen, burning my nostrils.
The question took Stephanie by surprise. Her scrubbing slowed, and she turned to me, unsure if she should answer, weighing the consequences of trusting someone like me.
“You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to,” I said.
“No, it’s not that.”
But it was that. She just didn’t want to come off all Robert Frost “Mending Wall” style, building a division between us while we both exchanged pleasantries.
“I’m a healer…” she admitted, “a Druid healer.”
The way she said it told me that it wasn’t a job she’d looked online to find, not one that she would have ever applied for again if it were up to her. “He got to you somehow, didn’t he?”
Stephanie nodded, starting back at her scrubbing.
I was going to ask her why Marcus needed a Druid healer under his employ, but I knew the answer already. In case he ever got injured, he needed to ensure that he survived. Simple enough. But that wasn’t all, and I could see that Stephanie had more to say about it.
As casually as one might say, “I’m a salesman” or “I’m a coach,” Stephanie said, “I’m an enforcer.” It lacked the confidence of how one might say, “I’m a doctor” or “I’m a pilot.”
As far as Druid healers being part of the vanguard, I’d never heard of them being used as enforcers. They weren’t as fluent with the more threatening forms of Empyrean – the ones that caused elemental damage like lightning or fire. They didn’t transform into tigers or lions. Instead, they morphed into the more clandestine creatures like rodents or snakes. And all they did was study herbs.
“Why make a Druid healer an enforcer? Seems like there are better usages for your talents than going out waging wars with other paranormals.”
“Combat medics,” she stated. “We’re trained to fight, but mostly to heal.”
“I’ve never heard of a Druid being too well versed in the offensive forms of Empyrean. Maybe a fire here or a bolt of lightning there. But not much more than that.” I was still on my knees, mopping the blood of the floor with my dishtowel. I reached in the drawer and grabbed another one.
“Because you don’t realize that all Empyrean is offensive.”
“Hardly. Since when is patching up people’s wounds offensive?” I mocked her.
Stephanie shook her hands dry. “Compliance.”
“Compliance?” I looked up at her, a little confused. Would she negotiate with someone on the brink of death, threatening that person that either he cough up what he knew or walk into the white light?
“Compliance,” she said again, this time drying her arms and hands on the burgundy hand towel that hung on the black handle of the oven.
I wasn’t sure what set me ablaze first – the wicked grin that crept up her lips, or the instant disgust at myself for trusting a Leprechaun. “What did you do to me?” I growled, rising slowly to my feet.
“Nothing more than made sure that you didn’t renege on Marcus’s arrangement. He paid a lot of money to get you out of prison.”
“I wasn’t in prison; I was in jail! And he paid that money without my consent.” My voice escalated with each word. I would have called for all the powers of the dead to tear this sorority broad to shreds. But I still didn’t have a soul.
I sprang at her, charging, shoulder low, aimed at her midsection.
When my arms spread to tackle her to the ground, my body screamed as the pain of a thousand gunshot wounds fired inside me. All it took was a word from her to send me cradled to my knees writhing in vinegar and smeared blood.
With breaths rushing out of me, I could only make out a few of her words as she knelt over me and whispered, “Do as Marcus said, and get the obelisk from Castella.” With two pats on my head, she stood and sauntered out the front door with an over-the-shoulder wave.
Chapter
EIGHT
The pain bled away as soon as Stephanie left my apartment. The surge of pain had been so debilitating that I couldn’t do much of anything afterwards, except lie there sniffing in vinegar, each inhale burning. I have to get up.
With some straining and keen maneuvering, I managed to get my hands braced underneath me. With a little more of the same, my knees followed suit. Up, I commanded myself. All the way.
It took a few minutes, along with a few flops back to the floor, but I was on my feet. My head swirled liked I’d been bludgeoned with a wooden mallet like one of those old cartoons. I found my coat and dug through each of the pockets until I found my phone, which wasn’t in either of the side pockets, but in the small breast pocket for some reason. Staring at the popcorn ceiling with the iPhone pressed against my ear, I called Lyle, told him what I’d done and how stupid I’d been, then plopped on the couch.
Lyle didn’t make one joke about any of it; he just listened and asked me how I was making it. I told him that I wasn’t.
“You want me to come over?” he asked.
I wanted to decline, to tell him that I could handle it on my own, but I wasn’t feeling that way, not right now. Instead, I said nothing.
“I’m on my way,” he said.
I pulled myself together and went to lock the door before washing my coat and clothes and taking a shower. I wasn’t worried about Lyle not being able to get in, since he was the only person outside of staff and maintenance who had a key to my apartment.
You might find it strange that I didn’t give a key a Boyd, but a key to a boyfriend made things bit too serious. I mean, I love Boyd, but I’m just not ready for that kind of commitment, at least not yet.
I cleaned up as best I could, loathing that I’d allowed Stephanie to heal me up. Lyle made his presence known with a loud call out to me so that I wouldn’t go staggering out the shower exposing e
verything under the moon and stars. “I’m in the living room,” he called.
A pair of tight black sweatpants and a gray cardigan overtop a white T-shirt was my outfit of choice. There wasn’t enough time to blow-dry my hair or cover up my blemishes with makeup, so I went into the living room, vigorously swabbing my hair with a long brown towel.
Lyle sat on the couch, picking lint off his jacket. “So this healing Druid put a root on you? I didn’t think they had that kind of power.”
I saw his eyes catch hold of the smeared blood on the kitchen floor. “It wasn’t as bad as it looks,” I lied.
“Blood equals bad to me.” He crossed one leg over the other.
“I didn’t say it wasn’t bad.” Drying my hair at the dining room table, I sat in the chair sans my blood. “I didn’t think Druid healers could do that either.”
“You think Marcus has witches working for him?”
“Doubt it,” I said. “Witches are only loyal to their own, so even if he did manage to get a few under him, they’d turn on him the first chance they got.”
“What if he found individual witches, hired them, and then created a coven with the ones he employed?”
“That’s even more unlikely,” I said. “A lone witch is a like a stray dog; she’ll find a pack, if she didn’t already have one.”
Lyle gave me a crooked look. “What do you mean if she doesn’t already have one?”
“Stray witches are awful. They never stop acting like strays. If Marcus picked one up, she’d probably be connected with a coven with a plan to lure him in.”
“Yeah, Marcus is smarter than that,” Lyle said with a sigh.
I beehived the towel around my head and sat back in the chair with my arm resting on the table. “One thing that Stephanie said that’s got me thinking is that she made mention of juju.”
Expecting Lyle to catch the reference, I waited. After a long moment, he said, “Is that supposed to ring a bell to me for some reason?”
“Think about it. Ju-ju.” I separated the syllables thinking that would get his gears moving.
After a shrug and a casual toss of the hand, he said, “That means nothing to me.”
“Juju. The word voodoo priests use to refer to Empyrean. To them, it’s the accumulation of luck. You know, like bad juju.”
“I’ve heard of juju before,” he said. “Just don’t know how this relates.” His eyes shuttered to a squint. “This Druid’s working with a voodoo priest?”
“Or priestess,” I replied. “And I’m wondering if the priestess—”
“Or priest,” he interjected.
“Or priest,” I added, “has some doll of me with the knife through its side. Maybe the Druid had to bind the doll to me somehow?” My inflection gave room for a question.
“It’s a possibility,” he said.
“Come to think of it, I did feel a tug when she reached her hand inside my stomach.”
Lyle scrunched his face, disgusted. “She stuck her hand inside your stomach? And you let her? That’s sick on two counts.”
“That’s not important right now. How do we fix this?”
Uncrossing his legs and sitting forward, Lyle said, “First we’ve got to get you a soul.”
The way he said it put me off. “Well, I’m not killing anybody.”
“You will if you want to get rid of that bad juju,” he taunted.
Killing was foreign to me, something I’d never done. Never. Okay, okay…maybe once. But you have to keep this to yourself.
There was this guy some years ago; I was about seventeen. He pulled a knife on me. I was driving home from work one night, and I saw this guy on the side of the road. He wasn’t looking for a ride, only sitting there behind his Camry with the caution lights flashing and with an empty red gas container in-hand. It was dark, but I could see that he was wearing a neat beige sweater…I remember because of how red it had gotten when his blood painted it, the thick crimson seeping out of his heart and into the fibers in pumping pulses like the tide seeps into the dry sand.
There wasn’t anything about him that set off any red flags. He wasn’t bumming for a ride, he wasn’t dressed down and dirty, and he was pretty much clean shaven, from what I could tell. When I asked him if he was okay, he disarmed me even more by saying, “Yeah, just waitin’ on a friend to come take me to the gas station. Should only be about twenty or thirty minutes more.” It seemed so dismissive, like my help was far from needed, so I went against all logic and offered to take him the five miles down the road to get him some gas.
It wasn’t until after he got in that the mood shifted – not from calm to crazy, but from calm to curious. He asked me questions that were a tad intrusive for a ten-minute car ride, wanting to know if I had a boyfriend or how much money I made. Then it got weird. He asked me if I liked to party, LSD style.
I declined and kindly asked him to get of my car. That’s when he flicked out his three inch blade and made a textbook demand for all of my money by saying, “Gimme’ all your money” – the first thing they teach you in Thievery 101.
Politely, I told him that I wasn’t going to give him all my money, but enough to get him some gas. Was I afraid? If you’d call clenching the steering wheel to keep my hands from trembling “afraid.” But I couldn’t give him my dad’s credit card. Not to mention, I still wasn’t fully convinced that he was the psycho murderous type. Just the kind of person who brandished a knife to scare girls like me out of a few dollars. My mind changed once the knife cut in my right shoulder.
Before he yanked the blade out, I bound the steel with the soul in the obelisk and created an iron entity in back seat that scared the piss out of him. I mean it. A coppery odor came from his soaked jeans. The iron entity, a soldier like the one in the hospital, ran its shortsword through the chair and through the crook’s heart before vanishing back into the nether.
The thief’s tainted black soul traversed through the roof of the car and into the sky. And it was black because of the soot and decay that his life had caused it. I didn’t usually touch souls that were that twisted, and this one was no different. I let it float away, a nervous wreck about what I’d done.
No cops came. Umara cleaned up the mess after I called her bawling my eyes out, nearly hyperventilating.
With a few more firm rubs of my hair, I whipped the towel off my head and threw it aside. “Maybe killing the priestess isn’t the best option,” I mentioned to Lyle, remembering the pain of what had happened to the thief in my car.
That made Lyle sit up. “It’s our only option. Think about it. They’re coercing you with this whole Druid-Voodoo priest alliance.” He made sure to stick with his chosen gender for the alleged priestess. “Take out the priest,” – he banged his fist into his palm – “the juju is broken. You even get a soul out of it.”
I didn’t like to kill people, even paranormals, no matter how vicious. I’d even let a few banshees go on living their haunting episodes of spooking entire families in desolate houses out in the middle of nowhere. “I’m thinking we should try something else. Umara maybe?”
Lyle grunted, ran his hands through his hair, and then slouched against the back of the couch. “Your life is in danger here. Or do you not understand that? What can Umara do? She has Empyrean wards and shields, not tweezers. How’s she going to pull this out of you?”
“Killing a low-on-the-totem-pole priestess won’t do me any good in the long run. You think Marcus is going to shrug off the death of one of his people like it never happened? I’ve already got Castella gunning for me; I don’t need Marcus after me too. If we can avoid dumb mistakes with him, we should. The key to that Leprechaun is to beat him at his own stupid little game, not to barge in ready to storm the castle. If we have to confront the priestess, then fine. But I think we should at least check with Umara first. Besides, it’s not like Marcus is going to kill me. He only put the root on me so that I would get Castella’s obelisk.”
What I said must have made sense to Lyle, because
he was doing the slow headshake, gazing at the ceiling. “What’re you thinking?”
My brush was on the coffee table, so I grabbed it and took my seat. “I haven’t worked out all the details just yet, but I may be onto something. When I spoke to Stephanie, I think I got to her little.”
“Got to her how?”
“For a second, while she was washing my blood off her hands, I asked her if Marcus was holding something over her head. She lost the act for an instant – the Druid healer sent by the bigshot Leprechaun attorney. For that moment, she was just a tatted up chick with a world of problems.”
“What? So you think if we find what Marcus has on her, then we might be able to turn her?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Whatever’s holding Stephanie back, if we can figure it out, we might be able to get at least a slight upperhand on Marcus.”
“What makes you think that? You have no idea who she is, how she thinks, or anything else about her for that matter. How do you know this isn’t part of the act? You know how Marcus is. Every angle becomes a wedge. The papers don’t call him The Owl for nothing – the attorney with eyes in the back of his head.”
“I don’t know,” I admitted, leaning forward, elbows on my knees, holding the brush in both hands. “This is all we’ve got right now. We’ll never be able to outsmart Marcus, so there’s no need trying. He wants Castella’s obelisk, and that’s that. I do think that it could be to our benefit to figure out why he needs the obelisk, though. And that’s where Stephanie comes in. Perhaps a snag of disloyalty from one of his workers might give us the edge we need.”
Lyle scoffed. “I doubt it. I still think he’s anticipated his people defecting. We either kill the priest, or we get Castella’s obelisk. Those are our options.”
“Why would Stephanie give me that sob story about how working for Marcus has been nothing but a long nightmare?”
“She didn’t say she didn’t like working for him.” Lyle emphasized each word, giving a half-frown.
Seize the Soul: Confessions of a Summoner Book 1 Page 6
