As if her own dagger had twisted in her gut, Castella swallowed hard, and for that moment, she wasn’t breathing, her expression as still as steel. Not far from her, I could see that Lyle had decanted into a Burmese python, coiled about a tree, and pulled himself out of the quicksand.
Now dangerously hanging above the two of us, he eased down, opening his jaws, ready to strike. I gave him a cautious, wide-eyed glance to stay him on his branch, hoping that his nocturnal vision registered the gesture. When he hooked his neck back up, I knew he’d seen.
<…I think so…>
Since Castella had climbed off me, I lay back, elbows underneath me, waiting for Alex’s reply.
The obelisk in my hand began to heat up, thawing away the chill of my fingers.
Chapter
FIFTEEN
In the darkness of the January woods, I was able to roll slowly to my side with minimal pain and stand up. Castella didn’t have the courtesy to offer me her hand, which didn’t matter that much, all things considered.
Lucky to be alive, I brushed off my jeans with a few swipes, smacking dead leaves off my legs and out of my hair. Lyle had uncoiled himself from his branch and found his clothes, now in his human form.
Hearing that Marcus had killed Alex raised a whole new gamut of questions. What benefit was there in slaying the boy? Alex had no powers, from what I could tell, and any leverage that Marcus might have had on Castella was undoubtedly lost with the boy’s death. What also bothered me was what did Alex’s death have to do with Marcus’s desire to summon Vár. What is this Leprechaun getting himself into?
Lyle came to my side, and Castella crossed her arms, taking inventory of both us – first of me, then of him, then of me again.
It didn’t take Lyle much to realize that Marcus had killed Alex…with the help of a few gestures from me to nudge Lyle in the right direction.
“Now that you know we’re not against you,” Lyle said to Castella, can you tell us what deal you had worked out with the Leprechaun that made you willing to go after Rebekah?”
“Deal?” she said. “There was no deal with Marcus. There are never any deals with him. Only one-sided arrangements that he orchestrates while he walks behind you with a gun pointed to the back of your head.”
I picked a few more dead leaves out of my hair and gave my torso one last brush-off. “That’s against the code, isn’t it?” I asked, knowing I sounded naïve, but expecting Castella to clear it up.
“Code?” she scoffed, wiping the bottom of her eyes as a few tears threatened to fall. “It’s not against the code. If he gives you the rules of the game, then you have to play it. That’s the code.”
Not too many Leprechauns crossed my stomping grounds, mostly because Marcus had his territory pretty well defined, so there wasn’t much more that another Leprechaun could glean from the area. “What did Marcus want with you?” I asked.
Without beckoning to us, Castella started towards the road through the thicket, cracking twigs as she made her way. “The man does his research. He knows that you’re an æther summoner, and he wanted me to….harvest that.” She looked back at me before committing to her words.
Lyle wasn’t taking this as easily as I was. “We haven’t forgotten that you tried to kill Rebekah.” He wasn’t walking alongside us anymore, and Castella scarcely stopped to acknowledge him. “What’s to stop us from returning the fav—”
His words barely left his lips before Castella’s eyes lit up dark brown. She clenched him by the throat, dangling him in the air. His feet grabbed for purchase on the ground, and he clawed at her bare hands, making chocking sounds in the darkness.
“Rest assured, you Druid pig,” she said, “the only reason that you’re breathing is that my son is not far from us. It would be wise to shut your mouth.”
She let him go, giving him a forceful shove that made him stumble backwards, still coughing from where she had clasped his neck.
I stood there, dumfounded for a spell, until Lyle was standing upright again, sliding his hand back and forth over his throat where Castella had held him. It’d caught my attention, however, that she had thought Lyle was a Druid, but there was no need to bring this to her attention. Believing that he was a Druid gave Lyle the upperhand, because she probably didn’t realize that she’d broken an unspoken paranormal rule. Never touch a Decanter.
“Do you know any reason that Marcus would want to summon the goddess Vár?” I asked, unsure if she was still opposed to helping us.
“Vár?” she said. “Marcus has his hand in so many things, which is the reason he sent me after you.”
“What stopped you from doing it?” I was taking a chance with that one.
Castella gave me a look. “Who’s to say I still won’t hold up my end of the bargain?”
Lyle caught up with us, once he’d recovered from Castella’s hold on him. “Because you’re not a killer.”
“Am I not? Why don’t you ask those officers who never made it out of the ally at the IMAX a few nights ago,” she replied nonchalantly.
Officer McKinney had named several officers who’d been hacked to pieces on Hargett Street the night I’d gotten shot. None of them could have been killed by anyone that quickly and that gruesomely, besides Castella. If only the police hadn’t accused me of that.
“It wasn’t you,” Lyle said.
That made Castella halt and glare at him just near the road, now that we’d emerged from the woods. “Are you willing to bet your life on it?”
“I know it wasn’t you. You see, I’m not a Druid,” he admitted.
Castella’s mouth opened slightly.
“What I can’t figured out,” Lyle continued, “is why you’d want to take the blame for it.”
A bright green glow burst from her eyes in a quick flash. She walked towards him, but Lyle didn’t back away. “Decanter, you should learn to stay out of people’s heads.”
“I could,” Lyle shrugged, “but that won’t change what happened that night. You were as afraid as everyone else in that alley.” He squinted. “What you saw though…I can’t seem to figure it out.”
“You watch your tongue, or you’ll have it ripped out of your—”
“You wouldn’t do that,” Lyle interrupted. “And not only that, you can’t. You’re not a killer, so stop pretending to be. I’d be willing to bet that you haven’t ever killed anyone in your life.” He waited. “Thought not.”
Cringing, I wasn’t sure what Lyle was getting at. I was sure that at any moment, she’d summon an earth elemental and tear through my best friend’s chest before sending the entity after me.
“Castella?” I called, examining something distant and feral in her eyes.
When she noticed that I was examining her, she blinked several times and looked away. In a bit of a hurry, she started to cross back over Avent Ferry, not caring that cars sped past her. Before she stepped onto the busy road, I grabbed her shoulder, turning her towards me.
What I saw – the blaze in her eyes – nearly made me stumble to the ground. There was no pupil, and the whole of her irises burned bright red. She screamed, her voice so sharp that I gritted my teeth.
I leapt back and grabbed ahold to a tree, one hand on my obelisk, drawing from the power of both.
“Not so fast,” Lyle said. His hand clamped around Castella’s throat, a smooth grin easing to his lips. “A Wraith,” he said. “I knew you were in there.” Lyle’s
body dissolved from dense matter to a dull blue – the hue of the apparition that had invaded Castella’s body.
A phantom silhouette struggled within Castella, slinging itself to and fro, still grounded in her body, screeching as its pale blue form pulled to one side, then seeped back into her body.
Not letting go of the Wraith, Lyle had become a ghost, his eyes black holes – the only time I’d ever seen him decant and lose that ominous gray. His blonde hair bleached to white, and his mouth became nothing but a gaping hole of sable.
Lyle’s hand seeped through Castella’s skin and yanked the Wraith out of her. The entity was a mid-sixties man with thick shoulders and short hair – every part of him paled by his apparition form. The man snarled, fangs glaring.
After a long stunned look, Castella came to her senses. Her confusion morphed to disgust at seeing the Wraith. In one motion, she dug into her pocket, flicked on a lighter, and pinched the flame. The fire erupted at her fingertips, breathing up her arms and swirling around her hands and shoulders, all under her command. She sprang onto the Wraith, pinning its blue wrists to the ground while the entity shrilled and roared.
“Who sent you!” she demanded. “Who sent you!”
The Wraith snapped and bit at her, shrieking as the flames spiraling about Castella’s torso singed its body, burning its wrists an ashy black, then crawling down to its elbows, wrapping around the Wraith’s midsection.
“Please…” The Wraith spoke in a dozen voices, its body attempting to fade into the spiritual plane, but being brought back into the natural by the conflagration. “Please…don’t…”
“Who sent you!” Castella yelled again, clenching the Wraith’s jaws in her hand. Flames flared up the side of its face with its eyes wide open.
“Let him up,” Lyle said, still in apparition form.
Still holding the Wraith down, Castella looked up at Lyle, not saying a word.
“Let him go.” Lyle faded out of the spiritual form and decanted back to himself, a solemn look on his face. “He was only doing what he was told…I saw it when I decanted him.”
The flames around Castella’s arms sizzled out before she raised off the Wraith, who himself drained out of his spiritual form, lying on the ground, wide-eyed. Burn marks singed his green sweater from his wrists to his elbows, and the sides of his face were charred black, the flesh bubbling as the burns settled in, leaving the skin a shiny pink and red.
I’d run into a few Wraiths over the years, and all of them were like mosquitos. You never knew you’d been bitten until the skin started to itch. Except in the case of Wraiths, itching skin meant you were exhibiting extreme cases of bingeing on whatever it was that the Wraith wanted to dunk his head into.
If it was sex, then the body they inhabited went on sexcapades. If it was drinking, then the person became a raging alcoholic, and if it was murder…then the person would end up with a body count the size of a grocery list.
The problem with Wraiths is that they get to reap all the benefits of the fast life without any of the drawbacks – the perfect “no risk” lifestyle. Only the inhabited body ended up with the scars – the disease, the loss of life, the prison sentence.
I know to you it may sound like Wraiths get off Scott-free, walking away with their hands in their pockets, smiling all the way to the bank. Some do. Not all. Far from it.
One thing you have to keep in mind is that since Wraiths have these “no consequence” lifestyles, this in itself becomes their consequence. The more powerful paranormals take advantage of the Wraiths for this very reason, threatening them with fire or some benedict to cast them into the abyss by a local priestess, if the Wraiths didn’t cooperate.
The “lucky” Wraiths – and I use this term loosely – remained hidden. Unlucky ones, like the guy I was looking at on the ground, ended up with second and third degree burns. It wasn’t the burns I was worried about with him. Those, he could heal. It was his current state of mind that concerned me.
“We should probably go back to my place,” I said. “I live just across the street.”
Chapter
SIXTEEN
With a bit of vanilla mint tea and a scone, the Wraith brightened up more than he had in the street. His wounds were gone, since all he needed to do was fade into the spiritual realm again to rejuvenate his flesh – something he couldn’t do while being scorched to death. However, his green sweater was still singed and tattered.
In normal form, he told us his name was Daniel. But each of us knew that wasn’t true. Not that it was a lie. It just wasn’t true, somewhere in that gray area between the two extremes.
Wraiths, most of them, had invaded bodies so many times that they’d forgotten their own names. Many of them had even forgotten who they were, what they’d done, everything about themselves.
Daniel was no different. He was sitting at my round dining table, nursing his mug with the same blank stare a drunk driver might have if he were to get into an accident. Two hundred or so years ago, Daniel was probably handsome, before his fast life had depleted him to appear to be past sixty. Sadly, he probably had another hundred years or so left him.
Now that the burns were gone, I could see that his slender cheeks were touched with gray and white, leaving almost no black from his younger years. His wrinkles were canyons, especially across his forehead, and blue and red veins swelled at the tip of his nose.
I was seated on my retro couch across from Daniel. “Are you from Raleigh?”
Daniel shook his head, sipped his tea. “I don’t think so.” His voice was soft, timid.
“Do you know where you’re from? Any ideas?” I asked.
“All over,” he said. “Feels like I’ve been everywhere. Can’t remember any of it. They’re all these images in my head, but I don’t know if they’re mine or what.” He held up a hand to his head, wringing his mind for information.
“What brought you to Raleigh?” Lyle asked. “Got family here?” He was standing beside my couch against the wall, hands behind his back.
Daniel warmed his hands on his mug, savoring the steam as it fumed into his nostrils. “Look, I’m sorry, but I really don’t know.”
“What did you see when you decanted him, Lyle?” I asked.
Lyle frowned, gave a quick raise of the eyebrows. “Only thing I saw was the mission he’s on. Seems to be the only thing on his mind. That and Marcus.”
“Did you see anything else?”
“Only what I told you,” Lyle replied. “Everything else is like smudged ink. Not sure what to believe.”
Castella was sitting beside Daniel with her legs crossed. “Can you at least tell me how long you’ve been…” She shut her eyes, annoyed that she’d mistakenly let the Wraith inside her.
“A few days, maybe. Can’t say for sure.”
I could feel the obelisk heating up on my hip.
I wasn’t used to being around another summoner, and I’ll admit, it bothered me that she was able to hear my obelisk conversations.
Castella turned gravely to Daniel who sipped at the edge of his tea like the water was still hot. “You said that you invaded me a few days ago. How long is ‘a few days’?” Her brow lowered.
“I’m not sure he can remember the details,” I suggested, hoping to the dead that Daniel wouldn’t slip up and confess to what Castella was indirectly accusing him of, that he’d been the one who’d murdered Alex. This was the first time I’d actually wanted his amnesia to hold true.
“Surely he can remember something like that. It was only a few days ago,” Castella offered, shrugging smugly. She uncrossed her legs and
leaned forward on the table slightly.
“Four days ago, I’d say. Maybe three.” He scratched his head. “It’s all running together.”
“Well which is it, Daniel?” Castella said. “Three or four?”
Daniel must have caught the harshness in her tone, because he looked up from his mug, confused. “Did I…did I do something to hurt you? Because if I did, I’m sorry. You don’t know what it’s like, latching onto another person’s thoughts and feelings. At first it’s confusing, all these new ideas and emotions tangling in your brain like rusted barbed wire. But then…slowly…you begin to figure it out, you know. How it all works. Getting all the little intricate details of a person’s thoughts and discovering how to wire it all just right to get them to do whatever it is you want. Look, if something happened, I’m sorry.”
Castella gave me a disapproving glance, but I shook a finger at her before she could refute.
Alex was quiet for a moment, thinking, the obelisk warming the side of my thigh.
I could see Castella’s jaw tightening, but I was able to hold her off for just a tad longer.
“Why’s everybody so quiet?” Daniel asked, lifting his head from his mug and taking a gander about the room. “Did I say something wrong?”
I didn’t answer him; neither did Lyle or Castella.
When Alex finally replied, he said,
Castella was ready to spring on Daniel, tightening her fists and looking for something to latch onto for her summon.
He thought for a moment.
Seize the Soul: Confessions of a Summoner Book 1 Page 12
