The Soul Keepers Series, Book 1

by Devon Taylor

  Only a few of them came back to life—some of the headlights, a smattering of the bulbs high up on the bridge’s arches. It was enough light to see by, but most of the bridge was still obscured by darkness.

  And when the light returned, everybody was gone. There were no psychons, no Basil, no Treeny, no Theo. No drivers who had abandoned their vehicles when the support cable broke. Rhett couldn’t see anybody … except for the girl standing right in front of him.

  Only, she wasn’t a girl. Rhett knew that from the start.

  She was standing only a few inches away from the soles of his shoes. She was maybe a couple of inches shorter than he was, but from this angle she seemed to tower over him. Her skin was pale, sketched with blue and purple veins that warbled down her arms and legs. The only thing she was wearing was a ratty hospital gown, faded by time—eons of it, probably—and hanging loosely around her. Her neck was ridged, corded and straining, but the face was soft in an intimidating sort of way, like she had nothing to lose. There was dark hair that hung down to her shoulders in knotted clumps. And her eyes … her eyes. They were entirely black except for tiny white pinpricks for pupils, like distant suns in a vast wasteland of space. Those little white dots stared into Rhett, stabbing into his severely exposed soul. He recognized that stare somehow and pushed himself back against the car, wishing he could go through it, trying to get away from her penetrating eyes.

  She was also sopping wet. From head to toe. The water dripped down along her arms and came off the hospital gown in fat drops. It splashed to the ground around her feet, making sharp, wet pecking sounds against the asphalt. It was just dripping water, but Rhett knew it was the same as what he’d heard aboard the Harbinger, alone in his quarters, all those times that he’d chalked it up to a leaky pipe. This girl, this thing, had come to see him before.

  Rhett opened his mouth but found no words there. His throat was empty. All the reserve energy he had was now dedicated to fear, a thrumming, panicking knot of it that was locked inside his mind.

  He didn’t need to speak, anyway. The girl, still staring at him—into him—opened her own mouth. And when she spoke, her voice was cataclysmic. It was a gentle young girl’s voice but surrounded by others. Not one voice, but a thousand. Like the whispers that came out of the tank in the steam room when the door was open, only amplified—shouting instead of murmuring. It dove into Rhett’s mind, flooded all his channels of thought, pulverized his memories, overtook every picture and word and sound. If she spoke for too long, he would surely go insane from it.

  “I am the speaker of languages. You are the keeper of souls. The decider of fates. The Twice-Born Son. If you do not heed me, I will obliterate you. If you do not abide, if you choose to act in dignity and courage instead, then the souls of your parents will be forever lost. These are your last days, Soul Keeper. Find your power. Then I will come for it. I will come for you. Know this—if you fight me, you will fall.”

  She stopped speaking, and in the haze of his disorientation, Rhett caught sight of the overturned car behind her. It reminded him so much of the car he’d been driving the night he and his parents died, the way it was crushed, the way it had flipped so easily under the force of someone’s carelessness. And yet, staring at the girl-thing on the road, surrounded by the carnage of ruined vehicles, he questioned whether it was carelessness at all …

  Before he could follow that thought, the few lights that had come back on went out again, blotting out the world. Rhett was left in the shadows, in delicious silence, the memory of her voice echoing through his head, threatening to send him into madness. He could still see those eyes. The sheer black emptiness of them, with just those little white holes for pupils. The only light that seemed to exist within her—within it—existed in those holes.

  The lights began to flicker again, all of them this time. The yellow and white glow stuttered up and down the bridge for a moment, until the lights came back on in full, illuminating the fog and the road and the towering orange structures of the arches.

  The psychons that had surrounded Rhett before the blackout were back, one above and one across from him, and when they saw him again, they dove. Their claws were splayed, their boney mouths hung open in mock laughter.

  Rhett didn’t think, just reacted. He fell to his side, letting his bum leg fall limp while he kicked up with the good one. His foot connected with the jaw of the psychon that had been reaching down for him. The bottom half of the jaw broke off with a sickening crunch and went spinning into the white curtain of fog. Whimpering, the thing fell to the ground beside the car and squirmed there.

  The other one was coming for him, its fearsome gait turning into a trot, then a run. Rhett had one option, and that was to keep kicking. He turned himself into position, his mutilated right leg dragging across the asphalt. He tried to imagine what the pain would be like if he could actually feel it, but couldn’t. He assumed it would have been astounding.

  The psychon was sprinting toward him now, weaving around some of the unmoving cars, vaulting over the tops of a few. Rhett braced himself for the impact, staring deep into the monster’s shiny-slick throat.

  But there was no impact. The psychon stopped short, skidding to a halt at almost the exact spot where the girl-creature had appeared. It had its head cocked, listening to something. After a few seconds it took a step back, its tiny, buglike eyes boring into Rhett with a knowing glare, a look that seemed to say it would have its chance at ripping Rhett apart soon enough.

  Rhett heard something else then, too, coming from the belly of the wrecked car, the thing that had drawn them all here in the first place. It was Mak.

  “Hey!” she cried. “Hey assholes! What the hell is going on? I’m stuck! Caught on … something!” She grunted, and there was the sound of something metallic being punched or kicked.

  The psychon turned toward the sound, eyeing the wreck, its thick saliva oozing through the gaps in its ever-smiling teeth. It was the soul the psychons had come for. And now the soul was inside Mak.

  In some far-off reality that existed only in his peripheral vision, Rhett was aware of Theo and Basil dispatching the psychons they had been fighting. Theo finished pummeling his with his fists, leaving a bruised, scraped, dented mound of gross muscle and bone, veiled slightly by its tattered cloak. Basil had left behind a pile of detached limbs, all dripping some sort of black sludge that must have been the psychon’s blood.

  In the span of a few brief moments, Theo moved on to the psychon that was still going after Treeny. He hopped onto the roof of the car that she was in, ax now somehow returned to his hand, and leveled it at the psychon. It quit lashing at the vehicle and made a bizarre sound, a sound that was full of pleasure, as if to say, Bring it on. Then it leaped at Theo, and the pair fell backward together, vanishing behind the car.

  The psychon that had made a run at Rhett stormed toward the original car wreck, where Mak was still trapped. Basil caught sight of this and made a noise that Rhett had never heard before. It was somewhere between a howl and a battle cry. He ran at the psychon but wasn’t fast enough. It jumped high into the air, bounding over two lanes of traffic at once, and landed next to the smashed, overturned vehicle that Mak was still battling to escape. It took hold of the wreck with both of its powerful hands and tossed the entire thing.

  The whole balled-up mess flipped through the air. Rhett caught sight of the lifeless arm that still jutted from the confusion of metal and leather and glass. It wobbled from side to side as the car rolled through the air, and it reminded Rhett of his own body, how it had seemed to almost wave good-bye to him back on the highway in New York.

  With a booming crunch, the car crashed onto the sidewalk and the railing at the edge of the bridge. The railing gave way, breaking off the concrete and bending down into a mangled curve. The car scraped and skidded, one end edging out over the drop to the bay waters. It teetered dangerously. Metal groaned and bits of concrete came crumbling off the smashed sidewalk.

  The psycho
n leaped again and landed near the destruction. But Basil was there to meet it. He had run full force toward the car when it came down and now was barreling toward the psychon. Rhett could see what was about to happen, and from his place on the ground, leg useless, all he could do was scream.

  “Basil, NO!”

  Basil collided with the psychon and sunk the curving blades of his twin scythes into the creature’s body. It shrieked, falling backward under the force of Basil’s tackle. Basil held on tight as the two of them, a tangle of skeleton limbs and dark clothes and flailing legs, went careening over the side of the bridge. They plummeted into darkness, with the fog quickly dampening the sound of the psychon’s screams.

  There were only two psychons left now—the one whose jaw Rhett had broken, who was still on the ground nearby, whining and wheezing, clutching at its reduced face, and the one that Theo was still working on. Rhett could hear them brawling behind the car that Treeny had been hiding in. Treeny herself was nowhere in sight.

  From the tottering wreck hanging over the side of the bridge came Mak’s voice: “Someone get me out of here!”

  Rhett looked around, hoping Treeny would show herself and at least go help Mak. He was surprised to find that he didn’t care if they all left him here as long as Mak got back to the Harbinger with that woman’s soul still intact.

  Treeny wasn’t there. Maybe she was helping Theo, but Rhett didn’t think so. Wherever she was, she was scared, and he hoped she was okay, almost as much as he hoped—willed—for Basil to be okay. But they were about to be down two team members instead of one if someone didn’t help Mak.

  Ignoring the writhing beast beside him, Rhett gripped the opening in the car he was leaning against, where the window had been. He pulled, heaving himself up and putting all his weight on his good leg. He attempted to distribute some of the pressure to the right one, but he nearly collapsed. The leg would take no weight.

  So, using the stopped cars as leverage, Rhett hopped his way back across the bridge. He leaned on hoods and clung to side-view mirrors. What he would have given for a damn crutch.

  As he made his slow way across the road, he glanced over to where Theo had taken on the other psychon. They were rolling around on the pavement together, Theo throwing punches and the psychon slashing at his face in return. Theo’s face was purple with blooming bruises and covered in angry red claw marks. His ax was buried in the passenger door of a nearby Honda. Rhett wanted to help him. But there was no time—not with only one good leg.

  He kept going for Mak.

  Finally, after the most cumbersome walk he’d ever taken, Rhett made it to where the car—which was about to be Mak’s tomb—sat half on and half off the bridge. He heard Mak screaming in frustration. There were also sounds of her beating and kicking and squirming inside. The car groaned and seemed to tilt slightly toward the drop.

  “Hey!” Rhett called. “Mak, stop! You’ll send the whole thing over the edge!”

  “Rhett?” she yelled back. “What’s going on? Where are the psychons? Where’s Basil?” Her voice sounded almost frantic at the end.

  Rhett peered over what remained of the railing at this section, staring down into the fog-covered black. There was no sign of any movement.

  “The psychons are mostly taken care of,” he said, loud enough for her to hear. “Basil is … gone.”

  “Don’t you tell me that!” she screamed. “Get me out of here, goddamn it!” She was flailing again, attacking whatever it was that had her trapped. The car really did tip this time. With a stuttering, metallic groan, it tilted like a seesaw toward the water.

  Rhett stood on one foot and stuck his hands into a crease in the metal of the car. He pulled. The car tipped back onto the bridge and nearly crushed the only useable foot Rhett had left. He used that foot to haul himself up to the part of the vehicle that was once the passenger’s side but was now the top. He crawled across the length of it, to the warped passenger window. When he looked down inside, he could see Mak, wedged between a shredded leather seat and a jagged shard of metal that had come out of the dashboard and was pointing right at her, aimed like a knife at her rib cage, at her heart. If she moved the wrong way, if that torn piece of metal happened to stab into her …

  There’s only one way to destroy a syllektor, Captain Trier had said.

  “Lean up against the seat,” Rhett said. Mak looked up at him, startled. She gave him a skeptical look. “Just do it! Suck everything in!”

  She took a deep breath and pushed herself as far up against the seat behind her as she could. When she did, Rhett could see behind her, could see an expensive purse and the keys dangling out of the ignition and the lower half of the woman who had died in the crash, her body white. Beneath him, Rhett felt the car leaning back toward the bay again. He took his shot.

  Sitting back, letting his injured leg dangle over the front of the car, over the fog and the water below, Rhett stuck his good leg through the window and kicked down as hard as he could. His foot connected with the sharp, angled chunk of car that had blocked Mak’s escape. It bent downward, giving her just enough room to pull herself out.

  Except she wasn’t going to be able to pull herself out. The car was slipping down toward the bay. Metal scraped across metal. Rhett yanked his leg out and reached back in with his arm. He felt Mak grab on to it. He pulled up with all he had, lifting her up and out. He had Mak in his arms without even having to think about it. They rolled together, off the back end of the car, and slammed onto hard concrete. There was one last metallic shriek as the car slid over the broken edge of the bridge … and then heavy silence, the car rocketing down into the black water.

  Rhett and Mak lay side by side, staring up through the fog, which was beginning to thin out, at a sky of disappearing stars. The sun was rising as the spinning world finally came to a stop around them.

  Mak sat up first. She looked around at the aftermath of the battle. Her eyes settled on something and got wide. Rhett sat up and followed her gaze.

  It was the psychon with the broken jaw. The jaw was growing back, bone emerging out of the taut muscles of its throat with an ugly squelching sound, like shoes in mud. The psychon was doubled over, clawing at its own face. The process of growing back missing body parts was obviously painful.

  “You didn’t kill it?” Mak hissed. Her hand crept over her shoulder, finding the handle of her machete.

  “I … thought it was injured,” Rhett whispered back.

  “We have to run now,” Mak said, slipping the machete out of its sheath and slowly pushing herself up onto her haunches. She never took her eyes off the psychon. “Can you run?”

  “I can try. But why? Can’t we just fight it? There’s only one of them and two of us.”

  Mak tapped her chest, not taking her eyes off the psychon, and Rhett understood. She had the soul. The psychon wouldn’t stop until it had its meal.

  “Get ready to run. NOW!”

  She was up in a second, reaching down and yanking Rhett up with her. Any harder and he would have been down an arm, too. They ran together between the lanes of cars, heading toward the city. Rhett moved as fast as he could, using the cars as support again. His right leg still wouldn’t take any weight, but he forced it to at least stay up and out of his way.

  Ahead, Rhett could see Theo and the other psychon on top of a car farther down from where they had previously been. Their fight had gotten much worse, and both sides looked beat to hell. Rhett watched as Mak approached the car from the front, hopped up onto the hood with one stride of her long legs, and sliced through the psychon’s middle. Its two halves went tumbling over the side, smacking onto the road and staying there.

  From behind them, the last psychon let out an angry, agonized scream that rattled the cables of the bridge. A couple of car alarms started going off. There was a crash and crunch of metal behind him, but Rhett didn’t dare look back. He focused on Mak and Theo in front of him, focused on hopping after them with as much speed as he could muster out of hi
s numb muscles. He was moving, gaining momentum … and then he was facedown on the asphalt. He had tripped over something.

  Looking back, Rhett flipped over and saw an arm sticking out from under one of the cars. It was pale and dotted with freckles, quivering. Treeny.

  Rhett clambered over to where her arm was. He glanced up, hoping not to see the psychon charging at him. There was nothing there. The thing was after Mak now, and it was Mak it was going to chase.

  Underneath the car, Treeny was shaking, staring with wide, wet eyes, her glasses close to falling off her face. She was letting her senses through, or maybe she couldn’t help it. Rhett put his hand out for her.

  “Come on,” he said. “Treeny, we have to go. I’m right here with you. You just have to take my hand.” She shook her head. Rhett groaned. “Treeny, I’m not going to leave you here, okay? I won’t. You have to come with me!”

  “It won’t be safe,” she whimpered.

  “It will be safe. I promise. Just take my hand.”

  She hesitated for another second, then reached out and took Rhett’s hand. He helped her out from under the car, and together they sped down the bridge, using each other as support.

  There was a roar from above. Rhett looked up and saw the dim shadow of the psychon racing across the uppermost cable that swooped down to the end of the bridge, right where Mak and Theo were running far up ahead. Rhett hobbled faster, leaning on Treeny for support. He could tell she was struggling, but she didn’t say anything. They pushed on, closing the distance between themselves and the other two.

  They passed the fire truck, with its lights still warbling. There was no horn now. And the truck was empty. Everyone must have evacuated the bridge when the cable broke, apparently not wanting to stick around to see if the bridge would hold.

  Up ahead, Mak had stopped running and was looking into the windows of cars, cupping her hands around her eyes. Theo was behind her, eyes locked on the psychon that was rapidly descending toward them.

  The sun was rising, casting a blue glow across the bay and the bridge. It was going to break over the horizon soon, and there was a silly part of Rhett that hoped the psychon would burst into a cloud of ash when it did. He didn’t think he would get that lucky, though.