I hesitated, knowing that a lie would only make things worse.
The warmth of the obelisk turned icy cold, freezing even through to my skin as Alex’s mood depressed.
Explaining to him that he could only sense through emotions was too tough to say. The dead never seemed to want to be dead.
There was a long silence.
<…No…>
Another silence came from the obelisk, then it raised in temperature, a growing outburst of emotion.
He shied away.
Alex sighed. he whispered.
Lyle gave me a raised eyebrow to see if I was getting anything from Alex, to which I nodded and kept listening.
My brow lowered a bit. “Lyle, ever heard of a man named Vair or Vor or something close to that?”
“Not that I know of. Why? Is he telling you something about him?”
I kept thumbing the obelisk in both hands. “He says that Marcus was looking for the guy.”
Stepping away from the sofa and leaning casually against the wall beside it, Lyle asked, “Why was Marcus looking for this guy?”
That really threw me into a tailspin. “Conjure him?” I shrugged to Lyle, confused, attempting to pull some strand of information from him. “What kind of man can be conjured?”
A grunt came from Lyle as he rustled his hair, thinking. “I don’t know of any man who can be conjured. I’m wondering now if the man your friend” – he nodded to my obelisk – “is referring to is actually a woman, and this woman is not a woman, but a goddess.”
“A goddess?” I said.
With a head-nod to the stone, Lyle said, “Ask your friend does the name Vár ring a bell.”
I inadvertently ignored Alex’s question. “Who is Vár?”
“The goddess of contracts – the Norse goddess, that is – the one to whom our lucky little limerick loving Leprechaun pays his tributes. I’m wondering if Marcus broke a contract with her, and he wants to have her summoned to make it right.”
“Probably not,” I said. “The Leprechaun Code of Chivalry.”
“Don’t give me that,” Lyle replied. “I’ll let Marcus know what he can do with that stupid code.”
“It still applies. He can break it if he wants, but that’d just invoke the other Leprechauns to come down hard on him and strip him for everything he has. Marcus is far from reckless. He’s not a liar, believe it or not, nor is he an oath breaker – certainly not when it involves the goddess of contracts.”
“I guess,” Lyle said, unconvinced.
Immediately, my nervous pacing resumed. “That still doesn’t explain why he wanted to have me…taken care of, or why he needs…Castella’s obelisk.” There was no reason hiding the name now that Alex knew.
Tapping the side of his cheek with his forefinger, Lyle said, “Marcus came to Castella to have her summon Vár, but where do you come into this? Maybe she couldn’t summon Vár. Any reason why that would be?”
My face turned pale, my skin growing cooler. “I get it now,” I said. “The æther. If Castella doesn’t have the potential for it, then she can never be powerful enough to conjure a goddess. There are only a few æther summoners out there, and she’s not one of them.”
“And that’s what Marcus needs,” Lyle stated, staring blankly at the wall opposite him.
“Which is why he needs Castella’s obelisk. Hers is primed for that level of conjuring, whereas mine isn’t. And she doesn’t need me alive to conjure Vár. She only needs my soul, which would give her the potential for the æther.”
Lyle gazed at the ceiling, one arm crossed over this chest, the other elbow resting on his crossed arm. “Why in the world would Marcus not kill you himself, or at least arrange for your death at his little ambush party? I still don’t understand that.”
“Maybe she wasn’t at the house, because she’s tired of working for him, and he can’t find her. That’s probably why he sent me looking for her.”
“Maybe,” Lyle shrugged. “We just need to figure out what this green son of a gun is plotting.”
“We know that he wants me to get Castella’s obelisk. And we know that he wants Castella to take my soul.” Instantly, my pacing stopped, my turning of the obelisk in my hand ceasing. I slowly dragged my gaze to meet Lyle’s. “He’s pitting Castella and me against each other.”
Lyle shut his eyes, letting his head rest against the wall, letting a long sigh escape from his lips. “Here’s the real question,” he said. “What does Marcus need with the goddess of contracts?”
Chapter
FOURTEEN
Lyle and I had deliberated for quite a while in my apartment, deep into sundown, which only added to the frustrations I had in dealing with Marcus, especially after being ambushed at his house off the road. And, yeah, there was still the date that I owed Carter, the blood-sucking vampire creep – not a name I dared even think within twenty yards of him.
After a few more back-and-forths, Lyle and I were outside in the January elements again, heading to do the unthinkable. We were going to find Castella. Not to kill her, I hoped, but to reason with her, as Lyle had mentioned. However, reason and enraged mother of a deceased son rarely went well together.
Lyle had suggested that we ask Carter for another favor…or that I ask Carter for another favor, rather. But Carter couldn’t help us track a summoner, since his specialty was tracking paranormals who used Empyrean.
So how does one summoner find another? It sounds like the beginning of a really annoying joke, I know. But there really is a practical answer to it.
In this case, the answer was even more obvious since the summoner in question had every intention of killing me dead and taking my soul as her own.
Summoners can follow the accumulation of Pith – which was probably why Marcus figured I’d be able to find Castella – so if I wanted Castella to find me, all I needed to do was to summon.
Staying in my apartment and summoning might have been permissible, but everything that’s permissible is not beneficial. The more visceral summons had a tendency to cause quite a ruckus, before being tucked away into the nether. That was cause for Lyle and me to scatter from the main road and venture into the woods across the street from my apartment complex, where no one would be except maybe this guy who’d been caught in the woods tent-camping for weeks on end – illegally, might I add.
Once we were deep enough in the thicket, where through the endless rows of trees only the occasional car could be seen traveling the road in the distance, Lyle and I both began our mantras. Lyle decanted into an owl, shaking his clothes free after demanding that I look the other way. He fluttered to the top of the trees to keep a vigilant eye out for Castella, while I drew power from the dead.
Being that I was well-versed in the earth elements, I conjured elementals from dead twigs or dying leaves or dried grass or a littered old aluminum can I found crushed and stuffed in what looked like a snake hole.
The beasts took shape and growled or howled or hissed, each of them dissipating before gaining a will of its own, a point in the conjuring when dispelling them required more energy and concentration – two things which were draining from me fast.
Not only that, the Pith was forming on my body in what felt like thick sludge. No one would have known, being that the Pith is invisible, but having it clinging to my skin felt like a severe case of paresthesia.
Beneath the barren boughs, I dropped to one knee, my hair swinging past my cheeks as I braced my hand on my forehead. Thousands of voices whispered to me, giving me commands, or making threats on my life, promising me riches if I gave into their demands. The voices were easier to control when I’d done no summons, or perhaps only a few, but with so many or with a summon that remained active more than a few seconds, the voices caved in on me.
Lyle flew down and decanted back to his human form, hiding his privates, though the darkness of the woods did most of the work. “Are you okay, Rebekah?” He put his hand on my shoulder, and I waved him away.
I wanted to tell him that I was fine, but for a moment, it was impossible to speak. The confusion and the voices and the sludge of the Pith weighed on me as if I’d hung a dead albatross about my neck. When the words did finally come, they were forced out in a painful gut-wretch as if they’d been buried in the deepest part of me. “I’m fine.” Was that even me who said that? I wondered. The voice didn’t sound like my own, but the murmurs in my head made it impossible to know.
Using a nearby puddle that had not evaporated from the freezing rain a few nights ago, I managed to summon water to clean away some of the Pith and clear my head. Without my permission, Lyle picked me up out of the dead wet leaves and debris that the night woods had enveloped in darkness. He brushed my jeans off and decanted back to owl form before I’d been given the chance to scold him about his indecent exposure. When he’d found a perch on a limb not far above me, I finally made it upright, staggering and groaning.
Something moved in the blackness beyond my vision. Lyle had already hovered towards the commotion to investigate. But it wasn’t Lyle who disclosed the visitor. It was Alex.
My gaze came up just in time to focus on a slender silhouette, lighted slightly by the headlights of a few cars that drove by the woods. Castella said nothing, warned me of nothing, nor did she extrapolate about all the reasons that she was doing the right thing and for all the right reasons.
Instead, she did what she did best. She summoned. There was no build-up from mounds of earth piling on top of itself, nor was there the conjuring of fire – the element that I had not learned to control. She jumped straight to wind, the most agile of the five elements.
Nothing did she hold in her hand when she connected with the wind, besides her right hand that tucked in the pocket where her obelisk rested. Her eyes lit up to a sparkling white for an instant, the color of the breeze, then the color ebbed away.
Fully expecting the winds to whistle up to hurricane force, I latched onto the closest tree trunk within range. But nothing happened, not until I realized that Castella had taken on the attributes of the wind within herself. She faded into nothing, disappearing before my eyes, leaving behind a wafting white vapor that spread out and vanished.
My shock morphed to pain as something hard like a shoulder burst into my midsection at the speed of a forty-five mile per hour wind gust, slinging me backwards, my arms flailing wildly about my head before my spine crunched into a tree, each vertebra hitting in agonizing succession.
Already in bear form, Lyle was on the ground, sniffing the air, grunting. I, on the other hand, clenched at my side – the same side that Stephanie had dug into. Before letting the pain overwhelm me, I scrambled to my feet, clawing at whatever debris I could grasp so that I could counter her summon.
Finding a handful of dirt, I pinpointed the carbon atoms within the dead leaves and summoned a black cloud of smoke, then sent the plume whirling in the space before me. When the wind shifted, the smoke drifted along with it, revealing the phantom silhouette of Castella cloaked by her binding with the wind. Quickly, I released the smoke summon, then summoned a stone elemental that rose from the ground and barricaded me from Castella.
I heard a solid thud as she rammed into the stone and rolled onto the ground, still invisible. Lyle mauled and swiped at the place of her fall, but Castella was no longer there, again becoming one with the wind.
Her breeze seeped past either side of the stone elemental, honing in on me and striking me from my left and the right, crunching me in between. My body went limp, and I collapsed, the stone elemental crumbling into bits as I lost the strength to maintain the summon. Voices from the dead shrilled at me, screaming for me to make them alive again.
The pain in my hips and ribs prevented me from clasping my ears from the shrieks of the invisible apparitions. I clawed deep into the dirt, writhing on the ground as the pain of the screams shimmered down my spine, forcing a voice that might have been my own to the surface in a vain attempt to conjure another entity. But I couldn’t.
The Pith thickened on my skin and in my soul and mind, blocking my thoughts from connecting with Alex’s soul in the obelisk. When I reached down to touch the stone, it was cold and distant. I pulled it to my chest, cradling it in my bosom, burrowing deep within myself to conjure a summon. None came.
When Castella materialized, her body formed together in a wind-whooshing whistle, each particle fusing together to reform the dark-haired woman with a loose-fitting cerulean sweater overtop what looked like black spandex pants. “You’re a hard one to kill,” she said, dropping a knee into my gut, making me blow out air like an overexerted bellows. Castella stood and let her knee smash into my body a second time, this time forcing me to drop the obelisk into the dirt where it rolled down a tiny hill and came to a stop.
Hefty bear footsteps thudded from behind her, but she never even looked back. With the flick of her hand, the ground beneath Lyle’s paws turned to mush, then clamped around him, swallowing all four of his legs and most of his body. Lyle decanted back to himself, waist deep in the soil, twisting and turning to get himself out.
“You won’t escape this time,” Castella sneered, beaming down at me with her dark eyes. In one smooth motion, she slipped her hand to her waist and removed a knife from its sheath, the other hand creeping up to my throat, her fingers like icicles.
Why use a knife? Why hadn’t she called forth a summon to end it all? In fact, why had she used a gun when I’d seen her at the Pour House in Moore’s Square?
As her grip tightened, she raised the blade above her head, a thin slither of moonlight making the steel of the dagger glow. When Castella brought it down, my body tightened, ready to swallow the razor-sharp tip, ready to excha
nge warm blood for cold metal. But that never happened.
Somewhere between the blade’s decent and my last inhale, Castella halted. Her grip about my neck loosened, and the fiery expression of anger melted away.
“Is someone there?” she said, turning her ear slightly to listen.
“Alex?” Castella replied, looking about frantically. “Alex? Where are you, sweetie?”
There was a brief moment where Castella’s confusion remained. Then, like a distant thunder, her voice rolled out of her, low and steady. “What did you do to him?”
My hand was pinned under her knee, and my words came out between coughs. “Nothing. I found him…like this…I bound him to the obe—”
“Do not lie to me!” She struck me across the face with the butt of the dagger. The dull throb lingered, engulfing my face with a swell of pain from my chin to my brow.
“Alejandro, what did she do to you? Did she hurt you? What happened to you?”
I managed to pull my arm free from underneath her knee, so that I could hold the side of my face. My stone wasn’t far away, so I reached for it slowly with Castella’s silent consent, clasping it in my hand as the pink gem hummed visual flashes whenever Alex spoke.
Castella stared at me. I couldn’t tell what she was hiding behind those eyes – anger, hatred, disgust.
“Nothing, darling. Nothing’s happened to you. We’re going to make it through this, okay?” The fury had drained from her tone completely.
Castella’s hand was not on my throat anymore; instead it rested on my chest just below my chin. To keep her tame, I didn’t move a muscle.
Seize the Soul: Confessions of a Summoner Book 1 Page 11
