Tattered Souls (Broken Souls Book 1)

by Richard Hein

  I pushed the door open to my apartment with an unenthusiastic hand. Hinges creaked.

  “Mi casa,” I said deadpanned. Darkness and the faint smell of mildew waited beyond.

  Kate peered in around me, looking reticent to enter the refrigerator box I called home. I swept in and slipped around my closet, hooking a right into my kitchen. It might not have been polite to leaving her standing in the hall, but my thought swirled with the ache of mental exhaustion and I was past caring. Trusting my post-work-stupor senses, I didn’t bother to flick on a light and made my way to the small fortress of plastic vodka bottles strewn about in the corner. My hands snatched up two or three at random and shook them, hoping for the familiar slosh of life-giving liquid within.

  The door closed behind me, and I felt Kate’s presence as she shuffled in a few steps, flicking on the living room light. Aha! A bottle that had slid into the sink was still a quarter full. I must have been getting sloppy if I was leaving so much lying around. Spinning the cap off, I pressed the container to my lips, letting the cheap alcohol right a few of the wrongs of the day.

  “I was expecting something more gothic,” Kate said. “Shelves crammed with ancient tomes and shrunken heads. Crystals or something.” I turned and watched as she wandered past into the living room, spinning in a slow circle. Her eyes took in the wealth of furniture and decorations that adorned it. My weathered couch, complete with a pillow and a couple of blankets balled up at one end. The blinds with too many slats broken. A waist high cardboard box that doubled as my dining room table and my desk. Beyond lay the hallway that led to the bathroom and a room that some might have called a bedroom, had it contained a bed.

  I gestured to the box with my bottle where a thin black device sat charging. “Behold my mystical tome, its extra-dimensional space containing thousands of books,” I intoned in a deep, arcane voice. “I have an e-reader. Shrunken heads are at the cleaners.”

  Her lips pressed into a faint smile, but she said nothing. It seemed some of the magic and excitement of meeting someone steeped in the supernatural was cracking. Good. I pushed past her, snatched up the blankets from the couch and spun around, looking for a place to put them. With a shrug I let them tumble to the floor and waved her over.

  Kate frowned at the faded cushions for a moment before lowering herself down. I took the comfortable spot on the wall across from her, took another swig, and fixed her with what I hoped was a smile that said I was serious, yet friendly.

  She shifted with clear discomfort.

  I dialed back the serious a tiny bit and sighed. Oh yeah. This was going well.

  “What was the deal with you running over those things with your car?” she asked. Her eyes searched the room once more, perhaps looking for proof I was of a mystical sort before settling on me with lips pressed thin.

  I scowled. “What?”

  “They’re invulnerable right? Weren’t you more likely to screw up your car? It seemed… petty.”

  Anger blossomed in my chest. The bottle sloshed as I swung it through the air. “Okay, first, that car is a tank. It can take a beating and still deal with the Seattle commute,” I said, fire licking at my words. “For another, they pissed me off. I didn’t ask for any of this. It has been three years, and they tried to grab you in my office, crappy as it is. I should put the repairs on my tab for saving you.”

  I could see her chewing over the words for a moment. “That’s what passes for professional with what you do?”

  “You didn’t come to the professionals. You came to me. Perhaps you’d like to revisit the part where I mentioned I was out?”

  She nodded. “Fair enough. I came to you. What’s next, then?”

  “Right,” I said, rubbing my forehead with the side of the bottle. The fire in me snuffed out. “Ben. Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

  Her posture straightened. She placed her purse down beside her with a fanatical neatness and fished the journal I’d seen from within its depths.

  “So, you’ll help me then?”

  I rolled a shoulder in a non-committal shrug. “Already helped. You’ll note the lack of being dead as a clear indicator. I’m going to listen now. After that, I’ll know where to send you.”

  Storm clouds passed across her face. She looked like she wanted to scream at me, but was holding back the urge by her fingernails. Her jaw stiffened, her eyes burning as she watched me for long moments. I let the silence play until we’d passed into the eye of the storm. There would be arguing later, but I didn’t want this now. I didn’t need my life upended by all this extra-dimensional crap again, but it appeared that someone had vetoed my opinion.

  It would have been easy to open my door, escort her out, and lock it behind her. I considered the possibility one more time. One call, and I could get her some aid. She’d lived this long without my help. Hell, she’d probably live longer without it.

  “You came to me because my name was in your brother’s journal,” I said once the twitching in her cheek passed. “Let me explain why. Once upon a time, there was a very young, very stupid man. He worked for an organization called the OFC. They’re sorta like the FBI, except when things go bump in the night, the OFC bumps back.”

  It did not feel good to talk about this. I drained the last of my precious elixir, leaned around the corner, and slung it into the pile. It bounced into the sink, back out, and clattered to the floor with a plastic echo.

  “OFC?” Kate asked.

  I held up a hand. “No questions. I’ll ask, you answer, and then we sort this mess out. Whatever your brother was into, he picked the wrong guy to write about before dying.”

  “Before being murdered,” Kate corrected, her voice a glacier. I ran a hand through my hair as a pleasant and familiar warmth began to drift through me. Right. Tact. An Entity had gotten hold of her brother and done horrific things. She’d lost someone she cared about. I watched her, the silence pressing in around us. I could see her hope guttering like a candle in a storm. She was calm facing crap that shouldn’t exist and had taken her brother, but the cracks were showing.

  Damn. Maybe I understood her a little too well.

  “The OFC deals with Entities,” I said, sliding down the wall. I dropped my elbows on my knees and turned to stare out the window. There wasn’t a view, just another building across the alley. Facing a young woman with problems like mine right then was a tiny bit too much, though. “They were given the classification of Extra Dimensional Entities, but it’s a stupid name. The things you see out of the corner of your eye, things that drag you screaming into the night. There’s some messed up shit out there, waiting beyond the edge of our reality. Some of them want to rule over us. Some want to wipe us out.” I rubbed a hand over my face. My lips felt warm and numb. “Most of them are so alien and unknowable we have no idea what they want.”

  “And demons are one of these things?” Kate asked. I smiled at the rain-streaked window and chuckled.

  “I like that,” I said, shaking my head. “You don’t ask if they’re real. You’re doing a hell of a lot better than I did.” I nodded and glanced up at her. My head felt full of cotton batting. Not drunk, but that pleasant buzz that shaved the edges off of things. It felt familiar, something I could focus on. “Yeah. Demons, angels, dark unknowable gods from the outer night. There’s an infinite amount of realities out there, many with things that want us to have a bad day.”

  “The OFC deals with this sort of stuff?” Kate asked. She leaned forward, palms on her knees. The intensity of her eyes made me uncomfortable. “Please don’t tell me they’re a secret organization.”

  I pointed a finger at her and shot her with an imaginary gun, like Grant had done to me. How about that. Middle management skills through osmosis. “Got it in one.”

  Her lips pressed into a thin line. “I see,” she said, kneading at one temple with a thumb. Her crystal eyes closed, and her breathing grew slow and rhythmic. Pain drew lines of worry across her face. I didn’t blame her, all things consid
ered. “I don’t know about all of this, truth be told. It seems a stretch.”

  I shrugged. “Whatever. You don’t have to. I don’t care. I don’t want to deal with any of this anymore. I’m out. Done. Retired.”

  “Ben’s journal—”

  “Brought you to me,” I said. “I’ll bring you to the professionals. That’s it. Then I can go back to failing my review. Start at the beginning.”

  Her eyes opened, and she stared at me. A soft bitter laugh rocked her body, sending dark hair bobbing as she hung her head. One hand lifted her glasses and rubbed at her eyes. “I’m going to need something more, Samuel. Bring in professionals. Sure. But if you say you worked for the OFC — past tense, mind you — then why is your name coming up now?”

  “Maybe your brother hadn’t heard I was out of the game? Whoever he got the information from hadn’t bothered to update their contact list?”

  Kate frowned. “Well, maybe. Ben couldn’t have been in this long, and he didn’t have a wide social circle. I knew his friends and none of them struck me as the mystic voodoo sorts. He plucked your name from somewhere, and you’re my only link to figuring this out. Let’s get going. I’m tired of living like this.”

  I had to give it to her. I’d have gone right to anger at being pawned off. Some of those jobs I’d lost were because of supposed anger issues. It’s not an issue when you’re having a heated debate with people that are morons. You’re just explaining their incompetence at high decibel. I smiled as I sat against the wall, swimming in my warm stupor. Fun times. I said nothing as I mulled over the question, feeling the weight of it. I did want to know, and that set every instinct screaming. “Bring her to the OFC,” they shouted. “Let them figure it out. They get paid to do that.” Good idea, instincts.

  I held up a hand. “Tell me about this journal.”

  “Ben called me a few months back and complained he was having problems sleeping,” Kate said. She took a slow breath, hands tapped a slow staccato against the edge of the couch. “Not just a little bit. Night after night of insomnia, swearing that there were… things in the room with him, looming over the bed in the darkness. Whispering. When he did sleep, he said he’d dream of horrible things.”

  I nodded. It was a story I’d heard dozens of times in my career with the OFC. A story I’d heard one time too many, just a little too personally. My stomach roiled at the memories, the alcohol mixing with nachos I’d had and threatening to make an encore appearance on my living room floor.

  “Did he say what his dreams were of?”

  Kate shook her head, but wrapped her arms around her body. A subconscious need to shield herself, drawing in tighter and away from the room and myself. I sat up straighter and ran a hand across my face, forcing myself to focus on her body language. Watching this hurting woman, my first instinct wasn’t to console. I watched her like a bug in a jar, a slow trickle of dread crawling up my throat. How much time had she spent around Ben after it started, anyway?

  How many opportunities for the infection to spread?

  I pressed back against the wall feeling vulnerable and warm. Crap. I should have done a bit more verification before I’d let her in the house. I watched her. The move of her arms, the way her eyes blinked, the unconscious little reflexes that made us human but were impossible for things wearing our flesh.

  “No,” she admitted, eyes flicking to the floor. “Just that they were horrific. Sometimes he’d call to talk about them, then call right back and laugh it off. After the third week, though, he wasn’t himself. Snapping at everything, brooding, always angry at me. I urged him to go to a doctor.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “I bet the dials on his paranoia went to eleven and he loudly declined?”

  I scrutinized her while we talked. I was pretty certain she was fully human. Like, sixty percent sure. Maybe seventy. I swallowed hard, throat dry, and felt an overwhelming need to drink. Manic laughter tried to claw out of me. Was three years enough to whittle away all my skills, my hard-earned senses until I was as dull as the rest of the apes? Couldn’t I be sure any more? I knew someone that could peek into a person’s mind and tell for certain. I might have been able to tell a few years ago, back at my prime.

  She nodded, shoulders slumping. “About two weeks before he…” Kate took a breath and licked her lips. “Two weeks before he was killed, he stopped calling. Stopped answering my calls. He wouldn’t even answer the door. He was home. I could see the blinds moving, but he didn’t answer anything I did.

  “They called it suicide,” Kate continued, voice quivering. Her fingers tightened on her purse. I wanted to get up and lurch across the room, to try and comfort her, but I’d filed that ability in the same drawer with my sanity. I nodded, more to do something than sit there looking stupid. I felt miserable. She was hurting, an ache I understood all too well, and my own demons froze me. I closed my eyes and pushed the whispers of the past away. “Opened his wrists at his desk. The police found this journal.”

  “And they didn’t find anything odd about it,” I said with a whisper. “I’ll guess undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia?”

  Kate’s smile was grim, eyes shimmering. She pantomimed shooting a gun at me. “Got it in one.”

  “Possessions and other EDE involvement usually get chalked up to that,” I said with a nod. It took a monumental effort to keep my face composed, to stop myself from breaking down right then and there as well. Experience is a cold, hard bitch sometimes. The next question was the hardest. The most painful.

  For me, not her.

  “What about magic?” I asked, pushing myself up to shaky feet so that Kate couldn’t see the flash of emotion across my face. “Did he dabble?”

  Kate shook her head and winced. She pressed a palm against one temple, eyes squeezing closed. “Magic,” she muttered. “No. Demons and magic. Magic and demons.” Her fingers worked languid circles against her skin. “That never came up at Christmas dinner, no.”

  “Did he ever mention it, even if you thought it was a joke or new age crap?”

  The eyes opened once more, unfocused. Pained. She slid her glasses up her nose with a thumb and pulled in a shaky breath. “Magic,” she repeated. “It’s still hard to actually convince myself this is all real, even having experienced it.”

  “It’s real,” I said, voice flat and cold as a frozen lake. This was a conversation I would have given anything to not be having. It was like that awkward phase when your parents wanted to have the talk with you, only there was more chance of otherworldly forces tearing your head off. I spun the ring on my finger as I tried not to look her in the eyes. She wouldn’t like what she saw. “And it’s usually how they get to you. It’s impossibly dangerous stuff, Kate. Russian roulette with half the chambers full.”

  “That’s how you were able to hit those… Entities and not leave a mark? They’re magic?”

  “It dented the hell out of my car,” I muttered.

  “Them,” she said, sighing. “Leaving a mark on them. Look. Samuel. My brother is dead. You saw those… things… and said they were bad news yourself.” Her eyes flashed with anger. “I don’t know much about whatever world you seem to come from, but I do know that world of yours killed my brother.”

  I said nothing and looked away.

  Kate rose from the couch and strode forward. “If you’re the sort of man that’s going to let demons, or Entities, or whatever the hell they are hunt me down and kill me because you had a bad life, then you’re as horrible as they are.”

  My gut twisted, the dull ache of memory and regret washing up like a tide, carrying with it all the detritus and filth I’d tried so hard to forget. God damn her. God damn it all.

  “How are you going to help?”

  I pushed from the wall, a pulsing knot of tension growing at my shoulders and neck. “I don’t. I take you to the pros, call in a favor, and let them deal with this.” I swallowed. “We’ll see what happens from there, Kate.”

  “As long as you’re a part of this,” K
ate said. “You saved my life already once. Ben called you out by name. I’d like to know why he did.”

  “You and me both,” I said, giving her a grim smile. “That worries me. Still, I need to report this. I really, really, really don’t want to go to them, and I’d be willing to bet they don’t want me anywhere upwind of them, but it’s for your benefit. After that…”

  I sighed and ran a hand over my face. Why didn’t I call them up and have them send a car for Kate? Why did I need to see this personally through? I had no obligation, no personal investment in this. Being a part of this wasn’t high on my bucket list. The worry gnawed at my stomach. The question burned like a pillar of fire in the night, guiding me to an answer I already knew. I refused to give it any weight within me. I didn’t want to think about it too hard, or all the crap I’d spent not dealing with would come bubbling back up.

  Maybe if I helped Kate, she’d live, unlike the last young woman I’d tried to help. At least I could point her in the right direction. If I acted quicker this time, maybe… I snarled in the vault of my mind and threw the thoughts aside. That way lay madness.

  I went to my closet and yanked it open. Hanging there, untouched since my days with the OFC, was my weathered black M-65 Field Jacket. I’d worn it for all my work with them. It was comfortable, it was functional, and it was bad ass. I stared at it, reaching up to run a hand along the familiar garment. It was the jacket of a man on a mission, of a man who knew trouble was coming.

  I reached in and pulled out my forest-green Columbia jacket instead and slipped it on. Seattle is rather cold and wet, after all. You can’t ever be too careful.

  I turned to Kate, fished out my keys, and lobbed them at her. She caught them. I untied Bugs from my neck and hung him on the door. I had a feeling I wouldn’t be needing it any time soon.

  “You’d better drive,” I said, numb. I needed some time to prepare myself.

  Chapter 4

  “Last chance to back out,” I said. My forehead pressed against the car window, staring across the parking lot. A single orange light pushed back the twilight gloom, a few dozen cars huddled beneath it as if the world ended in the darkness beyond. “Don’t have to do this.”