Soul Keeper

by Tegan Maher

  “Pick it up,” Callum said, his voice barely higher than a whisper. His dark gaze was locked on the weapon in my lap.

  I did and nearly dropped it when raw energy washed over me, and a foreign magic rushed from it to twine with my own pink strands. It felt like the dagger was an extension of my arm, and the amount and strength of the magic it contained made the fine hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stand up.

  I dropped it back in the box and a brief flash of regret, sort of like something had been taken from me, washed over me.

  “Holy shit,” I said, wondering what had just happened. “Is that normal?”

  Brielle shrugged, her eyes still on the dagger now resting in the box. Since I’d broken my connection with it, it looked like a plain dagger. Well, not plain, obviously, because it was made of a diamond and was thus nearly clear, but it wasn’t sparkling with magic or anything.

  “Yes,” Callum replied. “Well, sometimes. I’ve never seen a divinity dagger before today. Like you two, I’ve only heard the myths. I didn’t think it was a real thing. Or at least a real thing that still existed. To answer your question, though, according to lore, when it meets a celestial it deems worthy, it bonds itself to that individual. If it doesn’t, it’s just a really sharp piece of fancy jewelry. But from what I’ve read—”

  He stopped speaking, and I glanced up at him. He was staring at me, a speculative look on his face.

  “What have you read?”

  Callum shook his head as if clearing it. “Nothing. Just that it only chooses certain people.”

  Brielle huffed a breath out through her nose. “I think it’s safe to say it considers Kira worthy, then, because if that wasn’t a bond being formed, I don’t know what it was.”

  That was an apt description for what it had felt like when the dagger had merged its energies with mine.

  A small white envelope sealed with Adam’s crest was taped to the inside of the lid. I peeled it open and pulled a note from it.

  Kira,

  This is a divinity dagger. If it bonds to you, as I’m certain it will, it will serve you in ways that will help you in your quest. The powers will reveal themselves as you need them. Trust in it even when you trust nobody else. And remember, dark magic is strictly forbidden in the human world.

  “Well,” I said, reading the note aloud. “That’s not cryptic at all.”

  I was a little miffed about the dark magic thing. I know he’d warned me not to use it, but sometimes it was just so much more efficient than light magic. I’d heard the myth the humans believed, that dark magic was bad and light magic was good, but things were never quite as simple as that.

  For example, hexes and curses could be considered dark if they weren’t used for self-defense purposes. Technically, that meant that when I’d cursed Kelly Whatsherface so that her wings had turned green in the fifth year of Angel Academy, I’d used dark magic. In my eyes, it was fitting. She’d been jealous of how easily magic came to me, so she’d made it a point to criticize every spell I’d cast, pointing out petty flaws and even making a few up. Honestly, she’d gotten off easy—Brielle had wanted to turn all of her green and make her feathers fall out.

  Since I was going up against demons, I probably wouldn’t have to worry about it while doing my job. It was my proclivity to use it in other situations that might get me in trouble. As much as I hated to admit it, I had a petty streak. Kelly was a perfect example, and I did stuff like that all the time without even really thinking about it. Rude person in the store? Drop a can of tomatoes on their toes. Somebody smarting off a poor clerk? Curse them so that the only thing that would come from their mouths was the Little Teacup song. That one was particularly fun, especially if I added an actual tip-over at the end. But … it was dark magic.

  “Do you think he means all black magic?” I asked, biting my lip. “Like, even the little stuff?”

  Brielle shrugged and refilled our coffee cups. “I don’t know. In a normal situation, I’d say no, but they’re really pissed at you, and you know Cassandra’s had it out for your whole family ever since she butted heads with your aunt and lost. Until you bag a demon or two and get them back where they’re supposed to be, you might wanna swear off it totally. Not so much as a spiteful case of zits.”

  Cassandra wasn’t just a member of the council. She was from one of the original families. A Seraph. And before you go linking her to the human ideas of angels, rest assured, those are incorrect. Angels are not inherently good. Because some of them have existed since pretty much the beginning of time, they tend to view existence differently than those of us who hadn’t been around for so long.

  Cassandra was one of those. Even though she didn’t look a day over forty, she’d spent eons collecting favors and building transactional relationships. Unfortunately, my Auntie Nevvie had set her sights on a certain cherub. Again, not what humans imagine them to be. They got the curly hair part right, but the rest is wildly inaccurate. Cherubs are sort of celestial errand boys. They attend to higher angels. That doesn’t mean they don’t have their own lives—just that those lives happen to revolve around somebody else’s.

  In my aunt’s case, she fell for one of Cassandra’s cherubs and he fell for her after meeting at a Christmas mixer. Nevvie was beautiful and intelligent but driven by her emotions, which means her judgment tended to list left of center a bit, especially when it came to romance. We sort of have a pattern there, I guess. The fallout from that had earned my family another century of keeping the gate, and Cassandra still wasn’t over it, especially considering Nevvie and Liam were still together.

  “Ooh,” Brielle said, setting her cup down and pushing to her feet. “I’ll be right back.”

  Without a word, she disappeared, only to reappear just seconds later holding a black leather leg sheath. She handed it to me. “You can’t hardly go around carrying the dagger in that box. Daniel crafted this for me, but it’s too big for my little peach-sticker. It should fit that perfectly, though.”

  I slid my belt through the top loop of the sheath, then wrapped the two straps around my left thigh and buckled them. Pulling the divinity dagger from the box, I slipped it into the sheath.

  Brielle clapped, her blue eyes alight. “It’s perfect!”

  “Thank you,” I said, giving her a quick hug before I turned to Callum. “Ready?”

  He nodded and swigged back his coffee. “Yup,” he replied after swallowing. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

  4

  I needed to stop by my house and let my aunts know what my sentence was. When Adam had swept me away, they’d been crying and scared. I couldn’t leave them like that, and just sending a note wouldn’t do—they’d want to see for themselves that I was good. I was waffling about showing them my wings, but I didn’t want them to hear that from somebody else.

  In addition to the personal aspect of the visit, I also wanted to take a peek at the family logs and see if there was a fear demon I might have overlooked or one in particular that stood out. If we were lucky, my aunts would have also started a list of who was missing. I wasn’t too keen on putting much faith into that sniveling soul Adam had interrogated in his office. If I’d learned anything, it was that people like that, living or dead, always held a little back in case there was something more in it for them later. I curled my nose at the thought.

  “Can you teleport?” I asked Callum, not exactly sure what a mage’s limitations were.

  He nodded and rolled his eyes. “Of course I can teleport. It’s one of the first skills they teach us after we pass the rudimentary part of our training. Or at least that’s how my mentor was. But since I’ve never been to your place, it might be best if you took the lead.”

  I noted he spoke of him in the past tense but didn’t know if it was because something had happened or if he’d just put that part of his life behind him. I didn’t like people poking around in my past, so I gave him the same courtesy and didn’t ask. Instead, I just held out my hand. When he took it, I
closed my eyes and let the swirling vortex of space consume us.

  A second later, I smelled the fresh scent of the forest after a good rain mixed with the faintest smell of sulfur. I’d intentionally landed us outside the gate rather than in the front yard so that Callum could see it. He stumbled a little when we landed, then opened his eyes. It looked as if we were standing in the middle of a pasture. Our milk cow, Bessie, was grazing as Tater, her companion goat, frolicked around her chasing a butterfly.

  A farmhouse sat in the distance beside a barn almost as big as it was. I smiled at Callum’s confused expression as he sniffed again.

  “I smell sulfur, but where’s it coming from?” he asked.

  I closed my eyes and drew upon the magic bestowed only to Gatekeepers, then took his hand and waved mine. The idyllic scene faded. The bluebird skies and fluffy clouds gave way to a roiling gray sky. Lightning flashed and thunder rolled, and a gray mist curled across the ground at our feet, obscuring our shoes. Directly in front of us, massive iron gates loomed, guarded on either side by gargoyles twice as tall as I was.

  “Whoa!” he said, spinning around to take it all in. The lush forest that had previously edged the pasture now offered nothing but burnt, dead trunks of long-dead trees, and the ground beneath them was black and barren. He rubbed his arms. “What is this? I mean, I know what it is, but where is it? Was this all glamoured?”

  I shook my head. “No, that sort of glamour would take a tremendous amount of energy to maintain, if it could even be done. The gate exists on a separate plane, sort of. Technically, it’s sandwiched between the planes of the living and the dead.”

  “So how did the souls cross over from here to our plane?” he asked, stepping forward to peer inside the gate. Souls stirred behind them, restless and waiting for a chance to escape. You know, just in case my mother came along again, I suppose. I pushed the bitter thought aside but only because it wasn’t productive. I had plenty of anger to direct at my mother later after I cleaned up her mess.

  A seed of worry had planted itself in the back of my mind. My mother was certainly an impulsive person with a head full of rainbows when it came to romance, but she wasn’t an idiot. It didn’t make sense to me that she’d been so careless. I shook it away. Two reliable witnesses had seen her do the deed, then run off with her lover.

  Speaking of those witnesses, Callum had stepped closer to the gargoyle and was examining it almost face to face.

  “These sculptures are amazing,” he said, reaching a hand out to touch it.

  “No,” I snapped, but was too late.

  “Boo!” The gargoyle said in a rusty voice, then snapped his teeth at Callum’s fingers.

  “Leo!” I snapped as Callum almost fell over backwards in his haste to get away from the grinning gargoyle. “Stop freaking him out.”

  “Why?” Leo asked, straightening his back and rolling his enormous head on his shoulders. “He should know better than to reach out and try to touch a gargoyle.”

  I rolled my eyes. “In his defense, real live gargoyles aren’t exactly commonplace where he comes from.”

  The other gargoyle, and guy named Freddie, stretched and stepped off his pedestal. “Still, he’s a mage and this is the gate to the Valley of Lost Souls. He should have been more surprised if we weren’t alive.”

  Callum had recovered and held his hand up to cut me off. “No, they’re right. I had that coming.”

  “Say,” Leo asked in his gravelly voice, snaking his head down to look at the divinity dagger. “Where’d ya get the fancy side piece?”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. Gargoyles were notoriously greedy and well known for double-crossing supposed allies, so just because I knew him and liked him didn’t mean I trusted him.

  “What? This old thing?” I asked, watching his expression. “I’ve had it layin’ around for years.”

  He cast it another appraising look, then turned his gaze to me. “Sure you have, princess. I hope you understand just exactly how much power you’re holding with that weapon.”

  “It’ll do for what I need it for,” I said with a casual shrug despite wanting to grill him on the dagger. He seemed to know more about it than I did, though that wouldn’t take much.

  “That it will,” he replied. “Be careful with it, Kira. You won’t find many willing to steal it—at least not if they know what it is—but that doesn’t mean there’s not that one guy who’ll mess up your world to get his hands on it because it looks powerful or valuable. I suggest you glamour it to avoid trouble.”

  Before I could respond, Callum stepped forward, once again in control.

  “You two are set to guard the gate, I assume?” he asked.

  Freddie nodded and stalked toward him, his leathery wings half-open for balance. “Yeah. What’s it to ya?”

  “What happened when her mother opened the gate? Why didn’t you stop her?”

  Freddie’s face twisted in offense. “Calista’s a gatekeeper. And it’s not like she just up and said, ‘I’m breaking out my boyfriend, so step aside, gentleman.’ She said she was doing a soul transfer, and we had no reason not to believe her. When we realized what she was doing, she hexed us.”

  I sighed. That explained the limit your black magic thing. Thanks, Mom. “And once she took him out, what happened?”

  Leo shuddered. “She disappeared with him as soon as she pulled him. By the time the hex wore off, the gate was open and souls were milling around. Some made a run for it, but others had no idea what to do or where to go, so they hadn’t hightailed it out like the others did. We rounded them up and put them back in.”

  “Yeah,” Freddie added. “What he said. We ain’t got no idea how many got out while we was out, though.”

  I had to smile at his accent and demeanor. Though I’d never been out in the human world, we did have television. We’re angels, not heathens. He would have made a perfect 1930’s mobster, except he was nine feet tall and made of stone most of the time.

  I sighed, wishing there was a way to microchip the souls the way people do pets or something. That way, we’d not only know who was missing but where to find them. As it was, I was shooting blind. I had no idea how many I was even chasing, which meant I had no idea when I’d get my wings back.

  “C’mon then,” I said. “Let’s get my stuff and head to Abaddon’s Gate. We need to strike while the iron’s hot before this one has a chance to get away. If my hunch is right, he won’t go anywhere until he’s fully charged. Magical lives give him—or her—much more power than human ones do, and with it being so close to Halloween, he’ll have plenty of cover.”

  I told Leo and Freddie goodbye and asked them to keep Aunt Nevvie posted if they heard any whispers or noticed anybody missing. They knew what souls ran together, and if nothing else, might notice some missing. Even a few names would be better than nothing.

  I took Callum’s hand and transported us back to our plane. Poor Tater happened to be nibbling on a flower when we appeared. He gave a little hop before his whole body stiffened, then fell onto his back, all four legs in the air.

  Alarmed, Callum rushed toward him, and I couldn’t help but giggle.

  He swiveled his head back to look at me, panic etched on his face. “Why are you laughing? We obviously scared him so badly he died. Maybe his poor little heart gave out. Come help me! I don’t even know where a goat’s heart is!”

  I gasped with laughter as he bent over and put his head to Tater’s side. When the little brown-and-white goat popped his head up and nibbled Callum’s hair, I bent double, tears streaming down my face.

  “Oh, thank the gods,” Callum said with relief, taking Tater’s face in his hands. “He’s okay!”

  When I collapsed to my knees with laughter, he turned to me, brows drawn in consternation. “What’s wrong with you? Do you always laugh at animals in distress? You’re a hideous creature.”

  I held up a finger and did my best to collect myself, wiping the tears from my cheeks as Tater climbed in his lap and lipp
ed his shirt, then butted his chest with his curled little horns.

  “He’s fine. He’s a fainting goat,” I gasped, clutching my side.

  “A what?” Callum tilted his head at me in confusion. Wherever he was from, it definitely wasn’t a farm.

  “A fainting goat,” I repeated. “Whenever they’re surprised, they fall over like that. It’s a congenital condition. He’s fine, I promise.”

  “You mean he’s supposed to do that?” he asked, one brow raised in disbelief.

  “Well, I don’t guess he’s technically supposed to do it since it’s a genetic flaw, but yeah. It’s normal for him. He does it half a dozen times a day.”

  I pulled in a deep, steadying breath and wiped my eyes, then gave Tater a scratch when he came over and climbed on me. “Don’t you boy? Tell the big, bad mage you’re just fine, aren’t you?” I crooned as he rubbed his head on me.

  Callum cleared his throat and snapped, “We should be on our way.” He brushed the grass off his pants and strode away from me.

  “Oh, c’mon,” I said, jumping up to catch up to him. “I wasn’t laughing at you so much as I was laughing at the situation. It was sweet of you to be worried about him.”

  He kept his gaze pinned straight ahead, pouting as we headed toward the farmhouse a couple of acres away. “It was mean. I honestly thought he’d died.”

  Great. Adam’s bad-boy mage had a serious case of oversensitivity and a distinct lack of a sense of humor. “No,” I snapped back. “It wasn’t mean. It was funny, and if you’d taken two seconds to think rather than react, you would have realized he’s my pet and that I obviously wouldn’t be standing there laughing if he were in trouble.”

  The corner of his mouth twitched just a little, and I elbowed him. “See, now that you’re over it, you can see the humor, right?”

  He rolled his eyes and smiled. “Yeah, I suppose I can. Though it’s mean to make fun of me just because I was worried. He really does that several times a day?”