Fragile Spirits

by Lindsey, Mary

Paul Blackwell—Protector 993

  I texted Vivienne for the sixth time. She’d ignored my voice mails too—not that I blamed her. I pitched my phone on my bed and flopped down next to it. The girl had bound her soul to mine for who knew how many lifetimes, and I’d thanked her by basically telling her to get lost.

  No wonder I’d been blasted with her sorrow.

  I didn’t have Cinda’s cell number and she’d taken off before I’d thought to ask her for Vivienne’s address.

  “Now what?” I said out loud to no one. After staring at the ceiling for what felt like forever, it hit me. “Race!” He knew where she lived. He’d taken her there several times. Plus, I could check up on her injuries. I rolled over and grabbed my phone. I hit #2 on my favorites list and listened to it ring, and ring, and ring. Finally, it rolled to voice mail and I hung up, sending him a text instead.

  After several hours of waiting, I figured out he was ignoring me too. I’d just have to wait until I saw Vivienne at school tomorrow to apologize in person.

  But she wasn’t at school the next day. I searched for her all over the campus. I even prowled the lunchroom looking for her bright pink hair, but had no luck. I waited outside Mueller’s class, and when she hadn’t shown up by the time the tardy bell rang, I panicked.

  I ran out the front doors of the school and got in my car. A detention for ditching school was the least of my worries. Five lifetimes from now, a detention would be irrelevant, but screwing this up with Vivienne would be significant. I had only one resource left. I took a deep breath and dialed Charles. He answered on the first ring.

  “Um . . .” Uncharacteristically scattered, I pulled my thoughts together. “I need to find Vivienne,” I blurted out.

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “Is she lost?”

  “No, sir.” But I was. “She’s not at school, and I’m worried.”

  “Ah. Yes. She stayed home today to help her grandmother unpack and to make herself more . . . school approved.”

  School approved. “May I please have her address?”

  “Why on earth would you need her address?”

  I fiddled with the keys on my key chain dangling from the ignition. “So I can go talk to her.”

  He laughed. “I thought you had memorized the IC manual.”

  I had. Well, most of it. “I don’t understand, sir.”

  “Think, Paul, or rather, feel.” And he hung up.

  Crap. Now what? I opened my console and then slammed it shut when I remembered I’d given my copy of the manual to Vivienne. I closed my eyes and visualized the book. “Think, Paul, or rather, feel,” I repeated out loud. I could see the passages from the manual in my head. A Protector can feel his Speaker’s emotions . . . No. That wasn’t it. He can transmit chosen emotions to aid in calming the Speaker . . . No. I turned the imaginary page in my head. At the beginning of each cycle, a Protector will feel his Speaker emerge to readiness through the soul brand. The soul brand enables the Protector to find the Speaker like a tracking device. Yes! I’d had the answer all along. For a moment, I felt a twinge of jealousy for Alden’s and Race’s past-life memories. They already knew this stuff. I smiled. In a few lifetimes, I’d be proficient as well, with much less effort than it took right now. I had to get Vivienne back first, not that I’d ever really had her in the first place.

  I closed my eyes and listened. It wasn’t like regular listening. I listened with my soul. It was sort of like receiving a radio signal in the form of emotions. I pictured Vivienne and allowed my mind to focus only on her, relaxing my entire body. If I could locate her signal, she should be easy to find. I hoped Vivienne was close, since I had no experience with this and her soul brand was new. I couldn’t believe how stupid I had been to not have thought of this.

  I shifted in my car seat. “Come on, Vivienne. Where are you?” I took a deep breath and felt for her again. The back of my neck tingled slightly. It wasn’t a burn at all this time. There. I put my car in reverse and pulled out of the parking spot. It wasn’t like a hot/cold thing that let me know which way to go by stronger signals if I went the right way or weak ones if I took a wrong turn. Something in me just knew where she was. If I hadn’t been so worried about what she’d do when I showed up uninvited, I might have laughed. It was an amazing skill, and it made me feel like a superhero with special powers.

  Finding her was much easier than expected. I pulled up and parked in front of a tiny, white, wood-framed house that sat right on the edge of a residential area near downtown. It wasn’t the safest place around, and certainly not convenient as far as working together would go. The house next door appeared to double as a dog grooming shop, with a hand-painted sign that said BAD TO THE BONE. The house on the other side had boarded-up windows and looked vacant. Farther down the street, a woman was hanging sheets on a clothesline, but other than that, the area seemed deserted.

  After grabbing Vivienne’s backpack, I got out of the car and locked it behind me.

  The house had a new coat of paint and bright flowers in planters on the porch. A neon sign leaned against the railing. FORTUNES AND TAROT READINGS was scrawled over the shape of a palm. I could feel Vivienne’s soul’s transmissions as if her emotions were my own now. She was slightly frustrated, not upset or sad at all.

  After slinging the backpack over my shoulder, I raised my hand to knock on the green door, but it opened, and I nearly knocked on the tiny woman’s gray head instead.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Paul Bla—”

  “I knew you were coming,” she interrupted. A strange look came over her face. “I felt it. I saaaaaaaaw it.” She dragged the last words out so that it almost sounded like an ominous song. “Please, come in, and I will commune with the spirits of your fuuuuuuture.”

  “Actually, I’m just here to—”

  “Cut it out, Grandma!” Vivienne’s voice called from the back of the house. “He’s not buying it. He’s here to see me, not you.”

  The woman shrugged and spoke in a perfectly normal voice. “Well, in that case, come on in and make yourself at home. Would you like some sweet tea?”

  “No. Thank you.” I stepped into the living area, which looked like something off a Hollywood movie lot. Persian rugs littered the floor and bright scarves were draped over lamps, casting pools of color on the walls and ceiling. All it needed was a crystal ball.

  Incense burned by the door, and from the thickness of it, probably in every corner of the tiny house.

  I was so overwhelmed by my surroundings, I didn’t realize for a while that Vivienne’s grandmother was staring at me. Studying me, really. The pupil of one of her eyes was cloudy, as if she were blind in it, which was unnerving. I clasped my hands in front of me to keep from fidgeting and focused on Vivienne’s emotional transmissions while her grandmother focused on me. Vivienne felt . . . excited? Irritated too.

  “You have had a life of luck,” the old woman said. “Privilege.”

  Yeah, yeah. The old judge-someone-by-their-clothes-and-car routine. I said nothing. I certainly had been lucky, but I didn’t come from privilege. I stared down at a black cat rubbing against my legs.

  “I’ll be out in a second,” Vivienne called.

  “No rush,” I answered, meeting her grandmother’s hard stare and stepping away from the cat.

  “You’re one of them,” she said.

  I remained quiet because the way she said it sounded like whoever they were was not a good thing.

  “You’re with the Intercessor Council.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I . . .” Her tone was so changed, I wasn’t sure how to proceed. “I’m here to see Vivienne.”

  Her face pinched up. “She knows. She knows what you did to her mother and her aunt. I’m only here because I had no other options. She can listen to the dead, but she will not belong
to it like my baby did. She will not die for it like both of my daughters!”

  I took a huge breath and said nothing for a moment. “I’m sorry for your loss. I’ll protect her with my very life. She won’t be harmed.”

  If looks could kill, I’d have been dead on the spot.

  “Hey,” Vivienne said. She was wearing a silk robe with Chinese dragons on it, and her hair was covered by a blue towel bound around her head.

  “Hi. I, um . . .” I slid her backpack off my shoulder and held it out. “I brought this to you.”

  One side of her mouth quirked up. “Thanks.” She relieved me of it and pitched it on a cushion on the floor.

  “Sorry to just drop in like this. I tried to call and text, but you didn’t answer.”

  Her amusement surged, and she smiled at me as if I were a little kid. “My phone was in my backpack, which was with you.”

  Well, that explained it. I never even thought to search her stuff. “How’s your arm?” I asked.

  She rolled up her sleeve and held it out for me to see. The whiskers of navy blue stitches stuck out from the letters carved into her that had evidently been the deepest.

  I shuddered. “Looks like Race did a good job.”

  She turned her arm to examine it. “He did, but if he had called me sugar one more time, he would have needed stitches too.”

  I smiled, and the cat rubbed figure eights around my ankles. The silence stretched on forever.

  “Is that all?” Vivienne finally asked.

  I’d never felt so awkward. I needed to clear my throat, but that would have made it worse. “No. I also need to apologize.”

  Her grandmother made a harrumph sound.

  “I do,” I said, shifting my weight from foot to foot, causing the cat to slink away. “I had no idea you had . . . well, I had no idea you had gone to Galveston for that purpose.”

  Her brow furrowed. “What did you think I’d done?”

  “Pulled the plug,” I said, unable to meet her eyes. “Rejected me as your Protector.”

  For the longest time, she didn’t answer. “Well, that makes a lot of stuff make sense.”

  “He’s one of them. Don’t trust him,” her grandmother said. Despite the negative words, her voice had lost its hard edge from earlier.

  “Come with me.” Vivienne headed back the way she had come in, and I followed.

  “No boys in your room,” her grandmother called.

  “Yeah, right,” Vivienne muttered under her breath. “She’s just showing off.”

  Vivienne’s room was as unique as the rest of the house. Her walls were a deep purple, and her bed was more of a cushion on the floor than anything else, covered in crimson bedding. Brightly colored beads served as a curtain on the window, and dozens of paper Chinese lanterns hung from the ceiling. Boxes were strewn about, some open and some still sealed with packing tape bearing a professional moving company’s logo.

  She flipped the flap of a box open and pulled out a green shirt. “The stuff arrived three days ago, along with my grandma. She’ll have this place whipped into shape in no time. She has way too much energy.”

  “She doesn’t like me.”

  She shrugged and shut her door. “She doesn’t like the IC.”

  I crossed to the side of her room farthest from the door. “Neither do you. Why did you agree to do it—become a Speaker?”

  Her eyes didn’t leave my face. “Do you really want to know? You’re not going to like it.”

  I had to know. “Truth is rarely pleasant,” I said.

  She wrung the shirt in her hands. “Turn around.”

  I did. Rustling sounds came from her side of the room, and I realized she was changing clothes. I could feel the blood creeping up my neck. Her proximity was making me insane. I’d never felt like this before. It had to have been the Speaker-Protector bond that made my body hyperaware of her. I knew I was going to need to get over it, because we would be working very closely, and it was sometimes necessary to change in tight quarters and even for the Protector to stitch wounds and provide medical aid regardless of the location of the injury. Race had often amused us all with the stories from the furthest imaginable end of the spectrum. He’d seen it all.

  I hadn’t. I was just beginning . . . with this girl who drove me crazy and made my heart beat too fast. A girl I knew nothing about, including why she had agreed to join the ranks of the IC even though her grandmother blamed it for the deaths of both of her children. “Why?”

  I hadn’t intended to think out loud, and my voice startled me a bit.

  The rustling from her side of the room stopped. It took everything in me not to turn around.

  “What did that ghoul carve into my arm?”

  I shoved my hands in my pockets. “A word.”

  More sounds of her getting dressed. “What word?”

  “Revenge,” I whispered.

  “The ghoul and I have a lot in common.”

  My heart sank. One word. One simple little word that changed everything. Revenge had a unique meaning among the IC community. It was the common factor that motivated almost all malevolent spirits. It was a toxic motivation. Toxic—the same word I’d used to describe her at the restaurant.

  She turned me by the shoulder. “I warned you that you wouldn’t like it.”

  She was wearing the green shirt with black pants and a different pair of boots. These zipped up, rather than laced. A thick belt with triangle-shaped studs hung low on her hips. She still had her hair wrapped up in a towel.

  “You bonded yourself to me for multiple lifetimes for revenge? On whom?”

  She flopped down on her bed or cushion or whatever it was. “I joined the IC for revenge. It’s not why I asked to be tattooed or marked or whatever awful term they use.”

  “Soul branded.”

  “God. That’s worse than what I came up with. Yeah. That. I didn’t get soul branded for revenge. I could have gotten my revenge without that.” She lay back and stared at the ceiling.

  I took a step closer. “The two are intrinsically related. There is no one without the other.”

  She held her towel in place over her hair and sat upright. “Sure there is. I want to be a Speaker to get revenge on the bastard who killed my aunt.”

  “Revenge is a byproduct of something else. It’s not what you really want.”

  “You’re wrong. But that’s not why I”—she shifted uncomfortably and placed her hand on the back of her neck—“did this.”

  Her grandmother opened the door.

  “Just talking,” Vivienne said. “Nothing to see here. Move along.”

  “Sassy!” Her grandmother chuckled and closed the door.

  The room was small and intimate, and with the smell of this girl filling my head and her emotions flowing into me, I was a breath away from losing my mind. I needed to get out before I said or did something stupid and blew it again. “Are you hungry?” I asked. “I know a place that has great 911 enchiladas.”

  She grinned. “Starving. Can we bring something back for Grandma? She hasn’t made it to the grocery store yet.”

  I offered a hand to help her up. “Would she like to come with us?”

  “No.”

  “Yes!” her grandma’s voice called from the hallway.

  “No,” Vivienne said more emphatically, taking my hand. Her eyes widened, and a jolt of excitement from her soul slammed into me when we touched. She felt it too, whatever this attraction was between us. She didn’t pull her hand away, but just stood and stared.

  “You need a chaperone,” her grandma called. At this moment, I tended to agree with her.

  “And you need to get a life! Preferably one that’s not mine,” Vivienne said, still holding my hand.

  Her grandmother whooped and belly laughed from the hallway. “You get more like your mama
every day.” She laughed again and then her laughter faded as she went to the other part of the house.

  Vivienne released my hand finally, and my heart started again.

  “I like her,” I said, taking a step back, grateful I could speak at all.

  “I love her,” Vivienne replied. “There’s no one in the world like her.” She grinned. “And she’s totally nuts. Oh, I know what we should do. Let’s go to the fried chicken drive-through place a few blocks away, and we can drop some off for her and then go hang out somewhere else. That’ll make her happy and get her off my case for a while.”

  I was finding it hard to not watch her lips as she talked. I had to get out of there. “Sounds like a great plan. Ready to go?”

  A funny look came over her face. “Not quite yet.” She unwrapped the towel, and jet-black hair tumbled in a wet mass past her shoulders.

  My twinge of disappointment came as a surprise. The pink hair that was so unnatural and shocking at first had grown on me.

  She pulled a hairbrush out of a box by the door and ran it through her hair. “The school said that I had to have hair that was a natural color, or I couldn’t go there.” She grinned. “They said I was distracting.” She pitched the brush back in the box. “Now I’ll just have to find other ways to be distracting. Game on!”

  I laughed. “No doubt you’ll find a way.”

  “I always do.” She snapped on a thick leather wristband with a serpent on it and looped silver serpent earrings through her earlobes.

  As we left, her grandma was friendly to me, which was a huge relief. I had no chance of winning Vivienne over without Grandma’s approval—no matter how slight. Grandma might hate the Intercessor Council, but I’d make sure she didn’t hate me. In Vivienne’s words, game on.

  FOURTEEN

  We dropped drumsticks and mashed potatoes off at the house for Vivienne’s grandmother, and since it was a nice day, we drove to a park with a duck pond nearby.

  Even in November, the temperatures in Houston could reach the sixties, like on this day.

  Sitting on a park bench with a bucket of chicken between us, anyone looking on would think we were just normal people out enjoying a beautiful afternoon and an early dinner. But we were far from normal.