I stepped back from him. “I can’t agree with this, Carter.”
“Don’t have to…it’s already done.”
All I heard was a ferocious growl coupled with flesh tearing and bones popping. I was already racing back to Avent Ferry, not wanting any part of that, doing my best to keep my balance with my heels twisting as I ran. How could he just kill him so viciously, like the man didn’t matter? I wanted to scream. Instead, I stood on the sidewalk and shut my eyes. That didn’t just happen; that didn’t just happen.
When I opened my eyes, expecting it all to just go away, something above the dark tree line caught my attention. It was bright and mostly pink and round and floating up to the clouds.
It took a moment for me to drink it in, but remembering what Carter had said and not wanting this man’s death to be in vain, I reached up and beckoned the soul into Castella’s obelisk, just in case I decided to confront Marcus. The warmth of the soul slithered through me as it channeled into the stone.
Chapter
TWENTY-ONE
Explaining to a soul that it had just died was never a good idea. You can’t ever tell how the soul will respond. Some freak out and buck like bulls. Others withdraw and disappear into the depths of the obelisk for weeks on end. I still can access them, but the summons are typically much weaker in those cases.
Fortunately, Nathan took it well – or as well as any one can post-life. He didn’t cry or ask too many questions, thankfully. How do you tell someone who’s been mauled by a creature that he’s never believed in that he had, in fact, been mauled by a creature that he didn’t believe in? When he asked me what happened to him, I kindly replied as vaguely as I knew how. “It’s hard to say.”
Today was the day though – the day that Marcus expected either Castella or me to waltz over to him and whip out our obelisk and call forth the goddess of contracts. As it stood, I’d finally decided to trust Umara on this and leave him alone. Having Nathan’s soul was necessary as a summoner, not as a summoner who intended to go and have a showdown with one of the most dangerous men Raleigh had ever known.
I was sitting on my couch in my apartment, contemplating when to make my break out of town. My heat had been going in and out, and now it was on the “out” phase, and had not come back on since I’d returned home after my rendezvous with Carter the night before.
I’d slept in my coat and socks, and after some serious shivering and moving of my fingers to keep them from going stiff, I figured I should get up and make myself a cup of tea.
I set the kettle on the stove after filling it with water and grabbed my white mug from the cabinet. There were several confident knocks at my door. Figuring that it was Lyle, I pulled the door open and stepped back into the kitchen to doctor up my tea while the water heated to a boil.
“Want some tea? I just started making it.” I peeled open the Zen tea bag and dropped it into the mug, letting the white tab hang over the side.
“I didn’t come for tea.”
The voice wasn’t whom I expected. Startled, I snapped my head to the door to see Stephanie who had the decency to wear jeans instead of shorts this time. She still wasn’t wearing a coat to cover up her thin black T-shirt.
“What are you doing here?” I set my cup on the counter, dug my hand in my pocket, feeling the obelisk heating up.
“Came to talk.” She let the door close behind her. Her red hair was dry and electric, like she’d recently channeled lightning through her body – not uncommon with Druids. However, having Stephanie channel lightning as a medic Druid was cause for alarm.
Still, I wasn’t buying it. “Disappointed that I severed your little Druid root?” There was no need hiding it, pretending that she didn’t already know. She probably had felt every ripple the cord made whenever I moved from one place to another.
“I’m not here to try to set you up again.” She let her hip rest against the kitchen counter, folded her arms. “I’m here because I need your help.”
“You can’t be serious. You set a root in me, then walked out laughing. Now you need my help. What’s this? Another one of Marcus’s little tricks?” I added some non-diary creamer to my tea, then a pinch more before placing the creamer back into the cabinet.
“Marcus already gave you your orders. Whether you did them or not is totally up to you. But think about it; if he believes you’re doing what he asked, why would he need to send me to enforce anything?”
“I can’t go back and forth with you right now. Why are you in my house? That’s the real question.” The kettle whistled beside me. Steam rolled out of the spout, flowing between us.
Stephanie reached for the kettle and moved it off the eye, which made the whistle ease away. “I’m not from Raleigh. I grew up in LA – LA county really. Long Beach. Marcus got my number somehow.” She rolled her eyes. “Not sure how he’d heard of me. After an hour long conversation, he was on a plane to LAX to meet me.”
Her hand rested on the counter before she gestured to an unwashed black mug by the sink, asking me, without saying, if she could have some tea. I frowned, thought about it long enough for her to sense my suspicions, but then I figured that a cup of tea never killed anybody.
I turned to the side, reaching up into the cabinet for a clean mug. Normally it wouldn’t have been an issue, only I’d been strewn across Raleigh over the past few days and dishes weren’t my number one priority. I hadn’t even finished cleaning up my blood from the linoleum and the carpet.
To my right, where Stephanie stood, out of the corner of my eye came a smooth pulse of blue light from the network of tattoos lining her body. I didn’t let it startle me. I kept moving glasses around until I could reach one of the mugs behind them, hoping she hadn’t seen me pause when her tattoos had come alive.
“Here you go,” I said, forcing my lips into an artificial grin. “What type of tea would you like?” I watched her eyes, waiting to see if anything in the kitchen unnecessarily captured her attention.
“Do you have Earl Grey?” She took the cup from me and the tea bag once I’d opened it for her. Without my permission, she titled the kettle into her cup, then offered some to me.
I picked up my mug from the counter and let her fill it three-quarters of the way. After I patted the air a few times to get her to stop pouring, I ended up with a nearly full cup and Stephanie’s profuse apologies.
“So Marcus went all the way to California to find you? Must be worth your weight in gold,” I said. “There’re probably hundreds of Druids between Raleigh and LA.”
“That’s what I thought too. Wasn’t anything too special about me, at least I didn’t think so at the time. That’s when I realized that I was a healing Druid more than anything else.”
“More than, say, an elemental Druid?” I picked up the string that hung from my tea bag, dunked the bag a few times in the cup, then tossed the tea in the garbage.
“Right. After a few more visits by Marcus and enough money to do gods know what with, I figured following Marcus wasn’t a bad idea. I hopped on a plane, left everything, and moved here.” A sole trace of blue light whirled around the labyrinth of tattoos on her right shoulder, then disappeared down her back.
What is she up to? “You came to North Carolina, found money and work with Marcus, then what happened?”
“He lied.” Her eyes snapped up from her mug to me.
“Lied about what?”
“Well, you know Marcus and his ‘code.’ It wasn’t a lie, but he didn’t tell me everything.”
“Everything? What’s everything?” I asked, taking a few sips of tea. It was still too hot, so I opted to nurse it between both hands to warm away the chill in my knuckles.
“He didn’t tell me he was recruiting my little brother who’s a witch doctor. An elemental witch doctor. One who wields electricity and fire like I’ve never seen. When I agreed to work with Marcus, I’m s
ure I was clear when I told him to leave my brother out of it. I know I was clear, because I was there when I said it.” She shook her head.
A witch doctor, huh? So he was the one who helped her to root me. “Marcus has a way of turning our words around on us.” I took another sip, not letting on that I noticed the blue light that traced her tattoos was now on her left shoulder.
“Mind if I take a banana?” she asked.
The bananas had turned brown on the counter, and I was just going to threw them out. “Sure. Take all of them if you want.”
“No, I couldn’t do that.” She waved me away.
“Go ahead. I can’t eat them when they get like that.”
“You sure?” Stephanie was already reaching for the bananas.
“Have at it.”
“Thanks a ton. I’m starving. Feels like I haven’t eaten in days. You’d think that with all the money Marcus pays me that I’d have time to spend it, but he’s got me running like a crazy person. And he failed to mention that I wouldn’t have my own place when I moved out here. He’s got me living with all these other paranormals in that place you and your buddies ripped apart.”
She set her tea to the side and wolfed down an entire banana in two bites. When I offered to take the peel and throw it away for her, she courteously declined, rolling the meat of the banana around in her mouth.
Holding onto the peel? Odd… “Now what were you saying about your brother?”
Stephanie held up a finger, pointed to her churning jaws. When she answered, she probably still had half the banana in her mouth. “He’s working for Marcus now, doing all kinds of things for him that I’d never agree with.”
“Was that why you were so distressed before you left my apartment last time? After you rooted me.”
“Sorry about that. That was Marcus’s orders, not mine. He told me that if I did that for him, he’d turn my brother loose.” She frowned and bit the head off another banana.
“But he didn’t let him loose, did he?”
She shook her head, breathing heavily through her nostrils, since the fruit filled her jaws. “Marcus’s version of ‘letting my brother loose’ was letting him do what he wanted to accomplish his missions. Not really what I had in mind when I agreed to set the root.”
Two other blue lights had now joined the sole blue light that traversed her body. The banana peel, along with the uneaten bananas, was decaying – not just to the overripe brown. These were rotting in her hands. More blue lights flowed through her tattoos. Her eyes became like cobalt balls inflamed.
With the first thought that came to me, I grabbed the kettle from the stove and flung the boiling water at her. Not the best idea. Druids drained energy from the earth and its resources, which was what she’d done with the bananas, and to my dismay, the water.
The tattoos pulsed bright blue, then rippled into her hands. Lightning snapped from her fingertips, blasting me out of the kitchen and onto the edge of the dining room table. The table capsized, throwing the unlit cinnamon candle off to the side.
Residual electricity cavorted about my body, stiffening my muscles and locking up any signals my brain tried to send to my appendages. Once the effect wore away, another bolt charged in Stephanie’s hands with a crackling sound like touching the leads of a car battery together.
My right hand flew to my obelisk, the other one to the wooden chair that lay on its side from where I’d fallen. Nathan’s soul flowed through me, bound with the aura of the wood, and from my eyes a summon the height of the ceiling poured out of me.
The summon’s body was wide and solid. Its head was jagged at the crown like a lumberjack had hacked down a tree with a rusted saw. With two arms to its side and its legs spread slightly apart, it roared at her, absorbing the bolt of electricity that Stephanie burst out at me.
Parts of the summon burned from the heat of the bolt, but the fires fizzled away, leaving charred marks on its bark. The summon swung at Stephanie, its dense fist ramming into her chest, knocking her into the cabinets. On the floor, she rubbed her sternum, moaning as the blue lights pulsed on her while she healed herself. The summon clenched both fists together and brought them down to smash her.
When Stephanie extended her arm to the entity, her fingers became vines that lengthened and twisted, reaching up and tangling around the summon’s arms. With one yank, she slung the summon to the linoleum, crashing its head into the oven and shattering the glass window.
The vines disconnected from her fingers and dropped to the floor. She rolled her arms in front of her, straining, tangling the summon in the cords. The vines tightened, cutting into the bark of the entity, splintering it at the joints until the summon became completely immobile.
With a sly grin, Stephanie sucked in a swift breath. In a violent exhale, she breathed fire out of her jaws in one continuous stream like a flamethrower. I leapt to the side. She and the flame followed me. Chunks of flame skipped from the blaze, lighting small fires in the carpet.
What is she doing? She’s going to kill us both. On my feet, I stretched to the summon, dispersed it, and drew the pink soul back into the obelisk.
Here goes. I screamed, hand on the stone, racing head-first into Stephanie’s flame stream. Briefly, the heat singed my skin, the flames engulfing me, swallowing me within.
With a thought, I executed a fire summon, tearing the flames from Stephanie’s jaws as if she’d vomited them up. The fires swirled around my body like a tattered auburn sash, settling onto my arms and torso, all under my control. Parts of the blaze roared up to my hair, swimming down from my crown to the tips of each strand, then fizzled out.
Stephanie, who was in a state of astonishment, flitted her head rapidly in either direction, until I saw her skin fall clammy and wet. Water spilled out of her pours, drenching my carpet, soaking the singed areas that had just began to smolder.
Before she could react with a water spell, I seized her throat with my hands ablaze, funneling every BTU of heat I could muster into her body.
The water that leaked out of her skin hissed as it boiled into a white steam that raced from her mouth and ears and eyes. Unlike the kettle of water that I’d thrown at her, which gave her strength when it connected with her skin, I was boiling her from the inside out.
She clawed at my hands only sending flames all about her body. Voices called to me, demanding that I make her suffer.
“Kill her,” they said. “Boil her alive.”
Nathan’s soul, merged with mine and the chaos of the flames, beckoned me to incinerate her, demanded that she die.
The roar of the flames in my ears and the seductive whisper of the spirits’ voices lured me deeper into her death. My grip narrowed around her throat, channeling volcanic temperatures into her body
Stephanie’s eyes, her feeble eyes, pleaded with me to release her, begged me to let her go, reminded me that she had a little brother to care for. Her tattoos sparkled a brilliant blue, surging up her neck and into her eyes and mouth – one last attempt to force me off her.
Rebekah, you have to let her go, I warned myself. With the flames roaring around me and through me, heeding my own voice was ineffective. Even when I knew I needed to release her, the rage of the fire forced my grip tighter. My thumbs pressed into the bulb of her throat, only allowing a faint wheeze to squeeze through when she tried to draw in a breath.
The blue lights at her neck paled away from blue to white to clear to nothing. Her eyelids sagged, and her head slowly leaned to the side.
Fight it, Rebekah. Let her go! When my hands finally obeyed, Stephanie crumbled over to the side, splashing in the soaked carpet. She wasn’t breathing.
With a whip of my hand, I dispersed the flames, channeling Nathan back into the obelisk. I dropped to my knees, and water pooled up from my weight, then seeped back into the fibers of the carpet.
Ignoring the freezing apartment and the water that I’d boiled that now had cooled, I checked Stephanie’s body for a pulse.
It wasn’t th
ere.
I killed her; I killed her. I looked over her body several times, arguing with myself about what to do next. Press on her chest or give her mouth-to-mouth first? Since she’d been strangled, I decided to give her mouth-to-mouth.
With two fingers, I removed damp strands of her red hair from her face. Then I sealed her nose and blew into her mouth. Her chest rose and fell, but not on its own. I did it again and again.
C’mon, c’mon. When she didn’t resuscitate, I interlocked my fingers and pressed the heel of my palm near the base of her sternum, pumping who knows how many times. Still no pulse.
From mouth-to-mouth to chest presses, back to mouth-to-mouth, nothing happened. Stephanie just stared deathly at the ceiling, not blinking, not breathing.
I sat on my haunches, defeated, ran my hand through my hair. Rarely did I summon fire. Rarely. I couldn’t control it, not like I wanted to. When it burned, it consumed, and with that, it burned my thoughts, my conscience, everything.
For a time longer than I could tell, I peered at her body, anticipating the blue lights to spark and trace through her tattoos. But nothing happened. With each second that passed, she tumbled deeper and deeper into the nether.
I have to call Lyle.
My grip was frail when I dug into my pocket to pull out my phone. When I pressed the Home button, the screen remained blank. I pressed it again, then tried holding the Unlock button, but still nothing came of it. Water damage…
With both hands clutching the device, I stared at the ceiling. What am I going to do? Stephanie had a brother to care for, and I had killed her. Was I going to jail? Of course I was. No cop would believe that two paranormals had gone toe to toe.
All they’d see was that I’d tried to burn her alive, then discovering that my apartment would burn with her, I’d dumped water all over her and my carpet and everything else. Then, with no remorse, I’d strangled her until she had nothing left in her.
Seize the Soul: Confessions of a Summoner Book 1 Page 17
