One dining room connected to another and that one to a breakfast bar, each fully furnished and each polished and shined by the housekeepers fortunate enough to make the cut to work for a hefty salary to keep their mouths shut about the things that they saw.
Even the housekeepers didn’t have access to the basement, however. Umara led us down into her laboratory, flicking on a light and descending wooden stairs that creaked as we stepped onto them. The stairs spilled into a common room with relaxed sofas – something that I might have used to decorate my place, not the impossibly overpriced velvets and leathers from upstairs.
To the right was a heavy wooden door that protruded from the wall, barricading the lab on the other side. Umara entered her passcode, spoke some unintelligible words of enchantment, then gestured us in.
The lab was nothing like the television labs with beakers and Erlenmeyer flasks popping up boiling bubbles of some colorful unknown fluid. The center of the lab was open, while the walls were lined with one extended stainless table that connected at each corner.
Above the long table were cedar cabinets, which held all the experimentation containers. Despite a Bunsen burner, a ring stand, and a Florence flask, everything else was put away.
Umara leaned against the stainless steel, crossed her arms, but not before tossing her hair off her shoulders. “So…are you going to enlighten me about the deeds that you two have ventured into?” Her words were sharp and polished.
Lyle scratched the back of his head. “We had a little run-in with Marcus.”
I expected her to be taken aback, to scold me on my carelessness. But all she did was shrug and say, “Who hasn’t? With a guy like him, your number’s bound to come up sooner or later. He and I don’t see eye to eye on just about everything, but he keeps his distance from me, and I do the same with him. One of his Druids get their hands on you? Is that what happened?”
I nodded. “Marcus said that he had a Druid healer who could fix the gunshot wound.”
“And he offered his services for free?” Umara gave a laugh-scoff, pushing herself off the table. “Nothing’s gratis with him. When’s the bill coming?”
It didn’t take long for me to spill my guts about the arrangements we had with Marcus and how he had already initiated his contract with Vár by killing Castella’s son. I showed Umara Castella’s obelisk, explaining to her how I was going to take it to Marcus so Lyle and I could get close to him and possibly take him down.
And to that, Umara said, “Have you lost your mind? What? You don’t think Marcus is prepared for you to burn him at the stake the first chance you get?” She threw a hand up. “You don’t know the first thing about summoning a god. Or a goddess for that matter. Because believe me, the two are not one in the same.”
I spun Castella’s obelisk in my hand. “It can’t be much different than summoning an elemental. It’s just that goddesses happen to really powerful elementals, right?”
“Give me that.” She held out her hand, expecting me to toss her the stone.
After Castella’s warning to take care of the gem, I elected to walk it over and place it in her hand. Immediately, Umara’s emerald flashed brilliant pulses. She lifted the obelisk up, turned it over, examined the top and the bottom, then tossed it over to me, making me do a juggling act so it wouldn’t smash onto the lab floor. Lyle winced until he saw I had full control over it.
It wasn’t that obelisks were fragile, but the slightest loss of mass created exponential differences in the stone’s ability to conjure.
“It’s going to be tight,” Umara surmised.
“Tight? What do you mean ‘tight’? When I connected with the stone, I wasn’t even sure it had any boundaries within it.”
Umara pursed her lips. “It’s tight. Vár’s aura has to have a place to ground itself if and when she comes, though I’m hoping it’s an if,” she muttered. “It’s like jamming a tent peg into the ground, then tying a balloon to it. As long as the peg is stable, Vár will be stable, but remove the peg and the balloon flies away. For your sake, I hope it’s not the latter.”
“Doesn’t sound so bad,” Lyle noted. “If Rebekah can’t keep the goddess grounded, then Vár’ll just leave back to Asgard, right?”
Umara tucked her hands into the pockets of her lab coat, giving a fake smile. “Wouldn’t we just love that? And, technically speaking, ‘flies away’ isn’t exactly what happens.” She touched a finger to her chin. “Balloons, when released, will rise and rise until you can’t see them anymore. Does either of you know why?”
“The helium,” Lyle said. “It’s lighter than oxygen, so it floats.”
“Correct. The oxygen molecules weigh more, so the helium carries the balloon up and up. It doesn’t care where it goes. It just goes, until one day, when all the helium is gone, it slowly descends somewhere that we can never find it. Goddesses, and gods of course, are different.” She raised an eyebrow with a flick. “They have a will. They know where they want to go, but the æther and the obelisk won’t let them. So, in the case of Vár, if you call her, she will come. She will do as you ask, and she will go back to Asgard. Why? Because her home is more bearable than being pinned down by some mortal.”
Umara squinted, tilted her head to the side, tapped her cheek. “But what if your binding to æther is feeble? And there’s no question that it will be. If you manage to, in some way, to create a bind to æther, your connection will be faint at best. Even if Castella had trapped your soul in her obelisk and used your aura to summon Vár, she’s not trained to sustain an æther binding, either. The result would have been the same – a weak binding.”
Lyle was leaning against the steel, both hands behind him braced against the table. “What happens if Vár is summoned and the binding breaks?”
Umara rolled her eyes, jerked her head back a little. “You mean when the binding breaks? Because if you summon her, she will not be contained.”
“What happens when she breaks free?” I reiterated.
“You cannot seriously be considering this,” Umara said. “Now’s your time to back out. And as your advisor, I advise you to do just that.”
“If I back out, Marcus gets away with murdering Alex. If I don’t summon Vár and if she decides to let him live, he’s just going to find another æther summoner to do it for him. How many Alexes do you think he’ll kill to get what he wants? How many has he already killed over the centuries? We have a chance to stop him, and I think we at least have to try.”
Umara shook her head. “Kill the snake before he frees the lion.”
“What?” I asked.
“It’s an old saying,” Lyle replied. “Common with paranormals seeking more power.”
“So Marcus is the snake and Vár’s the lion?” I asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“You got it,” Umara replied.
“Well what about this Druid root, can you at least take it out of me?”
“After hearing what you’ve sullied your hands with, that I can do.” Umara hurried to the cabinets above the Bunsen burner. She grabbed some crystals that were the color of cobalt, mashed them with a mortar and pestle, uninterested in the dust from the pestle that she breathed into her nose.
She ran some water from the sink, tapping the stream until it was cool to her touch. Then she filled a beaker to 250mL, added ice, and checked the temperature to make sure it was zero degrees Celsius. She streamed the cold water into an Erlenmeyer flask mixed with the ground crystals. The water hissed and snapped, engulfing the full color of the blue as the crystals diffused throughout the flask.
“Come over here,” Umara said. She picked up the invisible rope and held it over the solution at the sink.
The solution bubbled up until it coated the cord, making it visible as it ate through the bind like acid. Umara never flinched, which eased my nerves, at first believing that if any of it splattered, then I’d end up with acid burns.
“There,” Umara said, rinsing her hands in the sink. “That Druid’s pro
bably peeved right now, knowing that she just lost her root on you. As far as the knots in your insides, those will wither away. Nothing more than plant roots.”
“Will the bullet wound come back?” Lyle asked.
“Shouldn’t.” Umara shook her head. “The Druid healed you up quite nicely. It’s that binding job that she needs to work on.”
“She told me she was more like a combat medic, healing but fighting when she had,” I told her.
“Sounds like she’s more of a medic than anything of use for combat,” Umara replied.
With the root gone, I felt freer, though I hadn’t felt the bind before. It was mental, I guessed. But I did have a question for Umara, one that had bothered me ever since I had dinner with Boyd. “Umara?”
Her eyes shuttered when I called her name. “Yes, Rebekah?”
“I spoke with my boyfriend Boyd, and he told me that you were pushing him to break it off with me. He said that you told him my life was too dangerous for a guy like him, and that he’d end up getting hurt in the end if he didn’t step away. I know you’ve done a lot for me, and I appreciate it, but can I ask you not to involve yourself with my relationships?” The last syllable hit an uncertain peak, as I handed her my “back-off” speech in the nicest way I knew how.
A confused expression came upon her. She tilted her head to the side, folded her arms. “You have a boyfriend?”
Is she pretending she doesn’t know what I was talking about?
“Rebekah, I have enough to concern myself with here in the lab and with my trading. So though I do agree, that it’s probably not the best idea for you to have a boyfriend during your training, I honestly do not have time to put my nose in places that are of no financial gain for me at this juncture.” When I had no reply, she said, “Now if you don’t need anything else from me, I’ve got a few more disenchants to finish before nightfall. Blasted moon messes up a lot of these things, you know?”
Lyle and I saw ourselves out, which was impossible the first ten to twelve times we’d tried in the past. I still didn’t know my way around the entire floor plan, but I’d gotten rather savvy getting to and from the lab.
Some years ago, Lyle had tried to decant into a dog and sniff his way out. Luckily, Umara had seen the hairs forming on his skin and stopped him before several hundred Empyrean arrows ate through his body.
When he and I were back on Umara’s front porch, I started mulling over what she’d told us. “Lyle, if my binding to æther can be so easily severed, why would Marcus ask me to summoner a goddess? Do you think he’s just so desperate for an æther summoner that he’s willing to take a chance?”
Lyle let his hand graze the white banister as he descended the steps into the yard. “You’re using a lot of anti-Marcusims. Desperate. Didn’t know. Take a chance. When has Marcus ever been any of those? The day I see that, the day he ceases being Marcus in my eyes.”
“Then what could it be? You think he wants to let Vár run rampant? How would that do him any good?”
“You thinking about backing off from this like Umara suggested?” Lyle changed the subject.
I stuffed my hands in my pockets, the cold winds doing their best to take advantage of me. “I probably should. What do you think? Think I should just leave Marcus alone?”
His golden hair shifted in the breeze. “What do I think…” he repeated, biting the side of his lip.
“Your hesitation says it all.”
“I’m not hesitating,” he said. “I’m thinking.”
“Same difference in this case,” I replied. “If you thought I should go through with it, then I know you, Lyle, you’d just tell me to do it.”
“And what about if didn’t think you should go?” He rocked back on his heels, blew a cooling mist from between his lips.
I gestured to his entire posture. “Well, you’d be doing exactly what you’re doing right now.”
“What? Thinking? Maybe.”
“Look, if you don’t want me to go through with this, just let me know, and I’ll give Castella her obelisk and leave it at that. There’s nothing that Marcus can do to me now that Stephanie’s binding has been severed.”
He rocked back a few more times, blew out some more mist. “How many times has Umara been wrong? A handful, maybe? How many times has she been right? The odds are against us on that fact alone. Not only that. Marcus has got something up those green sleeves of his, and personally, I don’t care to know what it is. Does he want another six hundred years to live? I wouldn’t doubt it. But the man’s not an idiot. Even Umara agrees with me there. I’m just saying that we have nothing to gain by going to him, and everything to lose.”
“What about justice for Alex? Isn’t that worth it? I wish you could have heard him, the pain he was in. And to think that Marcus coaxed him with Daniel then killed him…I just don’t think we should let Marcus get away with that, not if we can stop it.”
“You asked me what I thought. I told you. Take it or leave it.”
“I’m trying to think of our options, Lyle. You don’t have to be so black and white about it. Imagine if you were Castella, and—”
“Hold that thought.” He held up his hand, and showed me the message on his phone.
Frozen in place, I nearly lost my breath. My number-five reason that keeping away from Marcus was impossible had come to fruition far sooner than I thought it would.
The message was from Carter, Lyle’s roommate, and it read, “If you w/ that girl, tell’er 2nite’s the nite.”
Chapter
TWENTY
Driving back to my place afforded Lyle a few bruises on his arm, because he wouldn’t stop imitating Carter asking me out on a date. “Hey, lil’ lady,” Lyle was saying, “why don’t me and you go out and paint the town red?”
He was particularly satisfied with himself for his ambiguity in “red,” knowing that when Carter painted the town the color of blood, it wasn’t at all figurative.
I didn’t have time for a date, not when I only had one night to get a soul before the day when I was supposed to meet up with Marcus, if I decided to go through with it. And after my boss at the funeral home almost caught me conjuring the last time, I didn’t want to take a chance of soul searching in the morgue during the day again.
That, of course, left me to find a soul at night – the very hours that Carter wanted to be “graced by my presence” – his words in a text after Lyle shot him my number.
Castella had left my apartment by the time I’d returned. Lyle left me with more hysterical laughter, abandoning me to dress myself for my exotic dinner date. I had the mind to cancel, figuring that I’d do well to tell Carter about Boyd. But to deny Carter was to verbally sign a death wish. Not my cup of tea.
My conscience was eating at me, and I felt that I needed to tell Boyd about my outing with Carter, but Boyd hadn’t called me back since he’d hung up on me earlier. He wasn’t answering any of my calls either.
If I told him about Carter, that would only make matters worse than they already were – no matter how unappealing Carter was. Under any other circumstance, Boyd wouldn’t have minded if I explained how the guy meant nothing to me and we were just grabbing a bite to eat – not to mention how hideous Carter was, but with our relationship on the rocks and with Boyd knowing that I’d been lying to him about the sorority-rushing thing, this just wouldn’t have worked in my favor, probably adding more to his suspicions than anything else.
All I could hope was that Carter and I would go somewhere, eat, and then I could go home. As simple as that.
I wanted to throw on some quick threads and get it over with, but as it turned out, I cared more about my appearance than I thought. A quick hop in the shower turned into twenty minutes. A desire to go wet-headed out in the cold turned into fifteen minutes with a blow dryer and another twenty minutes with a curling iron. And then my pale face ended up meeting my mirror for another ten – my solo Mary Kay party.
Fifteen minutes more and three changes of clothes l
ater, I had black curls swinging past my ears, clear lip gloss with violet eye shadow, skinny jeans with a turquoise sweater that dangled around my torso and showed a little skin on my left shoulder, all brought together by the turquoise high heels. Boyd would kill me if he saw me like this, no matter who I was going out with.
I slid my obelisk into my pocket and started outside, only to scream a yelp so loud that my neighbors several buildings down must have heard. “How long have you been standing at my door?” I asked Carter, who clearly had no intention of knocking.
“Long enough to hear you drain yer’ water two’er three times.”
He’d gotten rid of the anarchist hoody and thrown on a pen-striped blazer – wrinkled, but nice. He’d even found a pair of jeans with no holes in the knees, though there were tatters at the ankle hem. More surprisingly was that there were no streaks of blood up and down the sides. Carter had even combed his hair. Now it wasn’t just tangled and oily; it was just oily.
“Would’ve brought you flowers. But I know you’re allergic.”
Sheepishly, I looked away, pushed my hair behind my ear. “And…how do you know that?” It wasn’t like I’d ever told him, and Lyle surely hadn’t mentioned it – not the guy who’d brought me lilies in the hospital.
“I’m a vampire,” was Carter’s reply.
Oh…right… I hadn’t fully considered what it meant to be a prime sole predator of mankind. Carter could sense everything about me – my strengths, my weaknesses, namely my allergies, and my intolerance to lactose, and my—
“Guess you got shot couple days ago, huh?” He took the words right out of my mouth. “Healed up mighty nice.”
Bear in mind that he told me all this without taking one gander at my side. And even if he had, he couldn’t see anything.
We descended the apartment stairs down to the parking lot. I couldn’t stop my knees from knocking, and worse than that, Carter probably sensed how afraid I was. If he did, he didn’t mention it, which I was grateful for. I wasn’t sure what I was capable of saying in my current frantic state, so the less attention he drew to my uneasiness, the more tame my tongue would be.
Seize the Soul: Confessions of a Summoner Book 1 Page 15
