by Cege Smith
Of course, the reason that Jeffrey had helped Mikel was because he threatened Jeffrey’s family. Ellie knew that she would have done the same thing.
“So you are saying that you think we have a chance of being able to find him and bring him back here?” Ellie said. “What about all that stuff that Braz said about him not existing and possibly basically throwing the universe into eternal chaos if he fell into the wrong hands?”
“Frankly, I think he was being a bit overly dramatic,” Lucy said, batting her eyes. It was a silly gesture, but Ellie smiled nonetheless. “I deal in magic, remember? Magic made what happened to David happen. So magic can fix it, undo it. It’ll be some serious kind of stuff, way more than what I can do by myself, but I am sure if we put our heads together, we can do it. If David isn’t a threat anymore, then there’s no reason why the Council wouldn’t agree to let him stay here.”
“You really think we can do this?” Ellie asked.
“I wish you could see what I see, Ellie. You are badass. We’ll practice in the meantime so when the time comes, you’re ready,” Lucy said.
Ellie frowned. There was something that flickered in her mind when Lucy said that about her being ready.
Seeing Ellie’s face, Lucy put her hand over hers. “What is it?”
“I feel like I’m forgetting something important,” Ellie said, shaking her head.
“Mikel was messing with your head before you even left the Other Side,” Lucy said. “Don’t worry. Now that he’s not around to block them, you’ll remember. If you let me, I can poke around a little too just to make sure there’s not mystical mojo still in there. Just give it some time.”
Ellie sighed. “Time seems like a luxury we don’t have. What if they did something to get rid of David? I just can’t let that happen.”
“I have sources here, Ellie. Just as Lucy does,” Jeffrey said. “It wouldn’t do to rush headlong into a situation before we understand all of the angles. I know you are impatient, but give us time to plan this properly. Between the three of us, we can do it.”
“So basically what you are saying is that three heads are better than one, huh?” Ellie said with a small smile.
Lucy raised her glass. “In the big A, three heads are always better than one.”
David sat in the small cinderblock room and thought about everything that had happened to him. For one bright shining moment, he had thought everything was going to work out okay and that he and Ellie were finally going to be reunited. But then it was ripped out from underneath them, as surely as it had been the night that Mikel tricked Ellie into trapping both of them in the waypoint. Only this time, it was David who made a deal.
Braz stood outside the door to the cell and looked in on him. “Sorry the accommodations aren’t any more comfortable. I promise this is just temporary until we can figure out what to do with you. I know that sounds pretty jaded, but honestly you are safer here than you are anywhere else.”
David shrugged. “As long as it’s air conditioned, I don’t really care.”
Braz frowned. “I know that what you had with that girl is something special. And I love a happily ever after as much as the next guy. But Mikel caused a pretty big problem here and now you’re stuck cleaning up the mess. I have a lot of respect for how you handled yourself back there. If we can figure all of this out, I’d like you to consider a position within Purgatory. We could use good men like you.”
“I’m not a good man,” David said. “Based on what you’ve told me, I’m not even sure I am a man.” He leaned his head back against the wall. It was cool against his scalp, and he counted this as a small favor. Maybe someday, he’d be free again. That was the day he’d go in search of Ellie, and nothing would stop him. He knew that Mikel had gone to great lengths to get her to care about him, and he didn’t blame Ellie for being manipulated by him. She was a caring person by nature, despite her deliberate attempts to shut people out, and Mikel had used the situation perfectly to his advantage. But it still made his heart ache.
“Hello, David,” the familiar voice said, filling the room. Alone in that hellish room where Mikel sequestered him when he wasn’t using David’s body to taunt him with Ellie, David had made a decision. He had known someone who would want to get back at Mikel, and would be more than happy to use David to do it. After that, it had been easy.
He opened his eyes. “Hello, Lillian. I see that you got my message.” After all, Jeffrey had always had a thing for her.
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Veiled Shadows (Shadows #3)
By Cege Smith
Copyright 2012 Cege Smith
eBook Edition
Visit Cege's website and blog at http://www.cegesmith.com
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CHAPTER ONE
Ellie sat on a low stool in the middle of a narrow aisle surrounded by lush rose bushes and let their soothing, fragrant scent fill her lungs. She focused on the smell, trying to pick apart the scents and dissect them. Her breathing slowed, and she felt the tension drain from the muscles between her shoulder blades. The quietness of the greenhouse comforted her, reminding her of a time when her life was simpler. It was the time long before a devastating and unfair choice shattered her world and thrust her into a place she didn’t know existed. As her fingers crept up and brushed the soft petal of the rose bud beside her, a memory filled her mind. Her eyes closed as the vividness of the images swept over her.
She was eight and her parents were in the throes of a terrible fight. The yells were so loud that even tucked into her small bed on the second floor, Ellie felt the noise reverberating through the floor. Her body shook as sobs wracked her chest, and fat, hot tears pooled on her pillowcase. She put her hands over her ears and tried to block out the angry words. She wanted them to stop, but she had no idea what to do. After what seemed liked hours, the yells finally stopped, and she fell into a fitful sleep.
It was an epic event in her short life. Never before had her parents raised their voices at each other. Ever. So that singular event was unusual and strange. When her father came home from work the following day, Ellie was sitting at the small kitchen table tucked inside the breakfast nook. She was coloring while her mother made dinner.
Ellie remembered looking up from her coloring book and seeing her father, looking abashed, slipping into the room with an armful of deep, red roses. When her mother turned and saw him, her face lit up. It was like Ellie’s mother had been drowning in a pit of despair all day, and the obvious love and regret on her husband’s face saved her. Their embrace had been desperate and jarring. Her parents had always been affectionate with each other, but something about the way they clung to each other that day felt different. It wasn’t long afterwards, only a few weeks later that her parents died in a devastating car accident.
A thorn from the rose’s stalk that had been hiding beneath the petals dug deep into her fingertip and pulled Ellie abruptly back into the present. She cursed as she shoved her wounded finger into her mouth. The taste of her blood was tangy, slightly bitter, and wholly desirable. Her stomach immediately reacted and growled. It was a nasty reminder that Ellie no longer existed according to the rules of the mortal plane on the Other Side. No, now she was something much different.
There was something about that memory of her parents’ fight that tugged at her consciousness, even as she surveyed the multitude of rose bushes around her. The delicate flowers had been the wardens of Mikel, the man who spun a web of deceit and caught Ellie in it, as surely as a spider captured a fly
. Mikel was a representative of Hell, and he had set his sights on Ellie.
After Mikel had dragged her into the Afterlife, Ellie found herself assuming the role of Guardian of the waypoint that existed within the Bradford mansion. On the Other Side, the plane of existence where she lived her mortal life, the Bradford mansion sat on the Lake of the Isles in Uptown, Minnesota. Once through it to the Afterlife though, it existed as a place of transition where souls of the recent dead resided until they moved on to Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory. As the Guardian of the Bradford waypoint, it was Ellie’s responsibility to keep the souls safe until they moved on to their final destination.
The greenhouse was an anomaly in the strange place. Constant light streamed through the glass panels above her head, but Ellie had no idea where it came from as the sun didn’t exist there. Although it had been just a few days since Ellie had taken over watering and trying to coax the roses to grow they had a decidedly wilted look about them as if they knew their caretaker was no longer there. Mikel’s careful care of the roses was one of the few things that reminded Ellie that the man had once been human.
She refused to feel guilty about her part in Mikel’s downfall. He had influenced and manipulated her life with the express purpose of using her in his plans to take over all of the waypoints in the Afterlife. His plan failed when Ellie and the few allies she made in the Afterlife found a way to alert the other members of the council that monitored the waypoints. Mikel’s counterparts from Heaven and Purgatory, Braz and Falla, arrived just in time to save them all from Mikel’s wrath.
She was caught in the Afterlife because of Mikel, neither alive nor dead, but some scary place in-between. It was his fault that she had lost David, the man that she loved. Of course, she felt the weight of the guilt from her own decisions that brought David back to the Afterlife to begin with; she had made that choice for him not understanding the consequences. David’s soul wasn’t supposed to exist, and Falla and Braz took him into custody for safekeeping until the ones who controlled the Afterlife decided what to do with him. Ellie couldn’t help but fear the worst.
Ellie surveyed her finger as she pulled it from her mouth. The cut had completely closed. She knew that she should be surprised, but after everything that had happened to her, she found that she was starting to be immune to surprises. She wanted nothing more than to step out of this surreal reality with David at her side and return home to the Other Side, pick up where her life had left off, and forget everything that had happened. That life felt so far away that she was starting to wonder if she had imagined it. Her thoughts returned to Mikel and darkened once again.
Using David’s face, Mikel manipulated her feelings. He had done things for her in an effort to make her happy with her new life, which confused her once she discovered his ruse. As angry as she was at Mikel, he had shown her glimmers of genuineness that completely went against the idea of the person she knew him to be. In the last few moments before she betrayed him, he had confessed to her why he was drawn to her. He told her that she reminded him of his long deceased wife from his human life. She had no idea if what he said was the truth, but his story carried a ring of sincerity.
In those brief moments, she thought that she had seen the man beneath the evil, and it twisted her stomach to think that man, the one who was still clung to his humanity, was subject to the dire sentence that awaited him for trying to overstep his bounds in the Afterlife.
“If you keep frowning like that, you will have those wrinkles forever.” The light-hearted voice coming from the doorway to the greenhouse held a tinge of concern. Ellie turned to find her friend, Lucy, studying her. Lucy dressed for attention, and that day was no exception. Her hair was pulled up in a high ponytail, and the ends of her black hair swished around her shoulders. Her eye shadow was a screaming blue that matched the fitted electric blue top that clung to Lucy’s slim shoulders. The shirt was paired with black leather pants and sparkly silver heels that added at least four inches to Lucy’s height. Lucy always knew how to make an entrance.
“I’ve always had a brown thumb,” Ellie complained, switching her thoughts to a much safer topic. Lucy had been all too aware of Ellie’s softening toward Mikel, and it embarrassed her to admit even to herself that Mikel had gotten under her skin. “Anything green loved my mother. I don’t understand how I couldn’t have inherited any of that skill. Plants hate me.” She turned in a slow circle helplessly shrugging her shoulders and refusing to meet Lucy’s eyes.
“Are you sure you aren’t avoiding me? I feel like I’ve barely seen you the last few days.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Ellie saw Lucy move from the door to the greenhouse deeper into the room. Lucy moved with a gracefulness that Ellie envied. Bound to Purgatory for committing suicide in her life on the Other Side, Lucy for now was assigned to stay at the Bradford mansion with Ellie. It irked Ellie that Braz thought that she needed a babysitter, despite the pleasant company that Lucy offered.
Ellie wanted to shrink back into the bushes around her. She both hated and adored the fact that Lucy always seemed to know what she was thinking. But then again, Lucy was a witch, so it was possible that she was using magic to read Ellie’s mind.
As Lucy drew up next to her, Ellie forced a smile onto her face. “Why would I be avoiding you?”
“I don’t need to be some kind of therapist to know that your desperate attempts to keep Mikel’s roses alive is a way for you to try to alleviate your guilt for turning him in.” Lucy’s deep brown eyes were sympathetic.
Ellie shook her head. “Why would I feel guilty about sending that bastard back to Hell? He used me, Lucy. He dragged me to this place against my will. He’s the reason that my ex-husband is dead. He used my boyfriend’s face to manipulate me into caring about him. Everything bad about my life these days seem to start and end with him. I hate him.”
Lucy reached out and stroked Ellie’s arm. “You are a good person, Ellie. You may hate him, but you aren’t like him. Nobody expects you to be dancing a jig about making sure that he got what was coming to him. The guy’s an ass and he got off on being like that for a really long time. We all should be happy, but I get that it would be hard for you.”
A deep sigh ripped from Ellie’s lungs. “Mikel is gone and good riddance. What I care about right now is finding David before anything bad happens to him. We also have to figure out a way to dig up how my parents were connected to the Afterlife. Have you and Jeffrey come up with any brilliant ideas yet?”
As David’s face filled her mind, Ellie’s thoughts came into focus. David Mitchell had breezed into Ellie’s life after she had curled up inside herself and thought that her life was over. The last few years of her marriage to her ex-husband, Jake, and the ensuing divorce took a severe mental toll on her. David drew her out of her shell and made her feel something again that she thought wasn’t possible. He was handsome, kind, and thoughtful and he had done everything he could to keep her out of harm’s way.
Then she found out that David was also an unknowing pawn, just like her, in Mikel’s game to bring her into the Afterlife. David was over a hundred years old and had been born inside the Bradford mansion. That meant he was human, and Mikel was able to trap him inside the waypoint where time moved differently. David grew up, and then Mikel wiped his memories and sent him to the Other Side to meet Ellie and make her fall in love with him.
Mikel’s plan worked like a charm. When Mikel’s deviousness came to light, revealing David’s true identity, Ellie found out the sobering truth that David’s existence was an anomaly. A dark spell cast on him and his parents right after he was born that bound him to the waypoint, but his soul was up for grabs. His existence was dangerous for everyone.
“Nothing yet, but I’m still working on it,” Lucy said with a small shrug. “We’ve got nothing but time, Ellie.”
“We do, but what about David?” Ellie exclaimed. “What if they decide that he’s too dangerous to keep around anymore? What if they take his soul and send it away
forever?”
“Things don’t really work like that around here. Not everyone approaches situations like a Ripher, Ellie,” Lucy said with downcast eyes.
Lucy’s words felt like a sucker punch to Ellie’s stomach. Ripher. It was a dark, ugly word. One that was recent to Ellie’s ears, but was the reason that Mikel sought her out on the Other Side. In her human life, Ellie was a sensitive, which meant that she saw other people’s auras. It was a psychic skill that manifested after her parents’ death. Unfortunately, Ellie found out too late that it wasn’t the only power that she possessed.
Here in the Afterlife, in the presence of another psychically gifted person, Ellie was able to draw that person’s power into herself, essentially ripping it directly from their soul. That made her a Ripher. On Mikel’s order, in her first clumsy attempt to take possession of a psychic gift, Ellie had killed a man who was on his journey through the waypoint. To hide what she had done, Mikel forced her to take the man’s soul and made Lucy destroy it. Souls destroyed through that kind of black magic were decimated forever with no hope of reincarnation. Ellie now lived with the knowledge that she was also a murderer.
Lucy told her that Riphers were rare in the Afterlife, and those few that were found were ostracized. The night that Braz and Falla took Mikel and David into custody, they discovered that Ellie was a Ripher, another fact that Mikel had hidden from them. After that, Ellie still had no idea why she had been allowed to continue as the Guardian of the Bradford waypoint. For the last few days, she was waiting for the other shoe to drop and for the remaining Council members to reappear and take her away too. Everything inside of her screamed that it would be soon.
