Soul Bound

by Ella M. Lee

  Gently, giving me time to edge away if I wanted, he touched my hand. My throat closed and my eyes unfocused as pleasure pulsed through me. He felt it, too—the thread pinged warmly with his attention.

  He squeezed my fingers. “You’re exhausted. Go to bed,” he said, and tilted his head toward the bedroom.

  I sent a flicker of gratitude down the thread and received a startled smile from him as I left the room.

  I curled up in bed, but I couldn’t get that thread out of my mind. Ren’s right out there, it sang to me, and I was ashamed by how much I wanted to go back into the other room and curl into his arms instead.

  Excellent idea, the tiny voice said venomously. He’s not human, idiot.

  And it was right. No matter what, I needed to remember that Ren might not feel anything close to what I was feeling. It seemed like he did, but I had no idea how much interpretation the thread was doing, or how much interpretation my own brain was doing. Ren’s world had couples—parents, mates—but I didn’t know what that really meant, or if attraction worked the same way for his kind. A kiss was just one little thing, and it didn’t mean much against every other emotion and action in our lives.

  But I couldn’t help feeling deeply and irrationally pleased by our closeness.

  I gritted my teeth and pushed that thought aside. With great effort, I managed to dim the light of the thread, and the pressure of him faded.

  That’s better, the little voice in me said, offering a relieved sigh.

  Now the thread was merely an interesting curiosity, rather than an overwhelming river running through me.

  I closed my eyes again and let the thread fade along with everything else in my mind.

  Chapter 24

  I gasped over and over again, drowning.

  Not in water, but in sorrow and panic and fear.

  Eyes flashed through my mind. Vampire eyes, cruel and dark and hungry.

  The claws came next, tracing my skin, pinching it, teasing blood to its surface.

  I tried to scream, but no sound came out as fangs ripped into me, as pain ripped through me. I flailed, trying to escape, but hands as cold and heavy as stone pressed into me.

  I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, couldn’t keep my head above the terror and hurt.

  I cried without sound. I whimpered softly. I moaned until the dizziness overwhelmed me and my frantic heart beat itself into a frightened frenzy.

  And then I woke up.

  Soft hands touched my cool, sweat-slicked skin, shaking me gently. I fought them.

  Please, please, please don’t drag me back there, the voice in me begged, huddled and crying. To that darkness, to that place where horrible things happen.

  “Ari?” There was a sharp tug deep within myself alongside my name, like a bell ringing in me, like a cascade of calm reassurance.

  The hands still held me, pressing into me, but I recognized their soft touch.

  I opened my eyes.

  Ren hovered over me. His hands were closed around my wrists, his face agonized in the bare hints of light from the city on the other side of the curtains.

  Another wave of that reassurance washed over me, and I collapsed, every part of me feeling weak.

  I curled up and cried, remembering where I was. Remembering who I was with. Remembering that I wasn’t being ravaged by a blood-crazed vampire.

  The bright gold thread of safety shone in me, and I sobbed against it.

  Ren put his arms around me, gathering me close. He held me awkwardly, as though he had no idea what he was doing, but his grip was calming. I leaned into that thread between us, careful not to be rough with it, wanting to be close, to feel its light.

  I received a tentative reply, slight but firm, as though Ren had laid himself against it comfortably, too.

  Shaking badly, I tried to keep from falling into that blackness, that misery and hurt and despair.

  Ari? I felt the word more than heard it, recognized the shape of it as it wandered down the thread toward me.

  Ren, I tried, pulsing the beautiful syllable toward him.

  His whole body relaxed against mine.

  I let myself sink into him, and he adjusted his grip. It wasn’t so desperate or strange now, just tight and supportive.

  “Dream?” he asked in his pretty purr, and his voice made me feel safe.

  “Nightmare,” I corrected hoarsely.

  “I don’t know what that’s like,” he admitted, “but I felt…I felt your fear. No. Terror.”

  “Can you see what I saw?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think the bond offers that sort of concrete definition.”

  I understood what he meant. The bond didn’t give me words or clear images, it gave me impressions. The impression of an emotion, the impression of a name, the impression of a word, the impression of an action.

  “Did you want to tell me about it?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “You don’t want to know.”

  “Vampires?” he asked tentatively. I felt his brush of apology on the thread, as though he was sorry for asking.

  I nodded.

  A glimmer passed through the thread, the shape of a question. Stay or go?

  He was asking if I wanted him to leave.

  Stay, I supplied, tugging gently.

  Tentatively, he touched my hair, smoothing it back. I was still shaking against him, and he drew the duvet around us, holding me soothingly. I dug my fingers into him, not caring that we barely knew one another.

  I just felt grateful that someone—anyone—was willing to sit with me like this.

  “You were so scared,” he said after a few minutes. His voice was hoarse. As if to emphasize the point, his breathing became rapid.

  “I was,” I agreed.

  “Will you feel that again? When you go back to them?”

  “Probably,” I said, trying not to think too hard about it.

  I curled myself into him, wrapping myself around the thread, letting it sing in me. Ren sent faint flits of feeling down it—gentle reassurance, calm understanding, flashes of encouragement and something that felt like affection.

  I sent thanks and acceptance.

  We talked silently like that for a long time.

  Chapter 25

  When morning came, Ren was gone. I woke up alone in the tangled bedsheets, wondering if everything I remembered had been a dream.

  One look at Ren’s wide eyes as he examined me from his place at the dining room table told me it had been real.

  Neither of us said anything as I made myself breakfast and tried to shake off the lingering weights of sleep and fear. He tugged once on the thread, lightly and curiously, like a greeting, and I tugged back.

  Something in the soul bond had settled a little. The feeling wasn’t as intense. Or maybe I’d just gotten used to it.

  Once I’d seated myself with a plate of food across from Ren, he slid a book toward me. “Read this.”

  I looked up at him. He seemed well. If he felt any lingering aftereffects from my breakdown last night, he wasn’t showing them. His eyes were that clear emerald green, curious and interested as usual.

  I looked between him and the book. “Good morning to you, too.”

  He smiled. “I already said good morning, through our connection.” He tapped the book with a curved index finger. “I hope you’re a diligent student. You have a lot to learn today.”

  “Can I eat first?” I asked.

  “Can’t humans do two things at once?” A glimmer of teasing made its way to me.

  I was tempted to startle him with a broad stroke on our thread, but I would save that for when I really needed it.

  I wasn’t inclined to be petulant right now, remembering how nice he’d been to me last night. How many times in the past year had I silently begged for anyone to help me? How many times had I cried in the dark when no one could hear? How many times would I have killed for someone to put their arms around me like they cared?

  Ren had do
ne that without hesitation, without asking for anything in return, and I didn’t think he even knew what it meant to me.

  So I opened the book.

  To be met with heaps of squiggly lines that made no sense. I sighed.

  “I’m going to need to do some digging on the thread,” I warned him. I had to figure out how to access his abilities, preferably without hurting him or scaring him or pulling up things I didn’t want.

  He gave me a bored look. “That’s fine.” He picked his phone up off the table and studied it.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Planning for tonight. I need to find a place to take you where you can pick up vampire scents, but it has to be the right place. If you go to Shaw’s estate without seeming like you’ve been in the presence of vampires lately, it’ll be suspicious, but they have to be the right vampires. Higher level ones. I need to find a decent burrow.”

  Burrows were vampire haunts, mostly bars, where they could pick up information and humans and otherwise be less careful about their existence.

  “Can you go into a burrow? Won’t they know what you are?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Demons go into burrows all the time. You’ve just never noticed. Many drink human blood, or eat human flesh, or otherwise have desires they like to fulfill. Some eat vampires.”

  “Can you eat a vampire?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I haven’t tried. I like fruit,” he said, but I felt a brief glint of his curiosity.

  I looked back down at the book. The pages were pale and thin and crammed with information.

  Okay. I liked to read. I could do this.

  I brought our thread to the forefront of my mind and studied it. It led to Ren’s essence. Not his mind, exactly, or his heart, or his soul, but…everything that made up himself. I tried to recall how I’d understood his name last night. I touched the thread, featherlight, thinking carefully about what I wanted.

  I wasn’t trying to push anything to him, to evoke a reaction. I was trying to pull, to ask for help. I realized as I lingered at the edge of the thread that I’d been shying away from it this morning, in a way I hadn’t done last night. I loosened up, getting closer, removing the strange mental barrier I’d set up to try to keep my mind from wandering to his.

  Across from me, Ren shivered.

  “Sorry,” I murmured, circling the thread, trying to figure out how to approach it.

  Knowledge, I asked it gently.

  I looked down at the book.

  Understanding, I tried, tugging very slightly. I needed understanding of this book. I needed his skill with his own tongue. That understanding was somewhere in Ren, somewhere in the corners and cubbies and crevices of him.

  I rooted through them, looking for language. Luckily, his native language was something Ren was very good at, very strong with, and it didn’t take me long to intuitively track down where that information was.

  A little bit more and I would be there.

  Give, I instructed, finding the part of him that knew words, and I gasped as power sprang toward me and bounced within me, filling me.

  Ren dropped his phone, surprised by the tug of knowledge, and it clattered against the glass table and then the floor.

  His clumsiness startled a laugh out of me, but when I looked down again, I could read the words in front of me.

  The rest of the morning’s studying went similarly to my first experiment with the reading. Pulling knowledge out of Ren was a matter of doing some amount of digging in the corners of his organized self and practicing with that knowledge. Ren taught me how to summon those shadows that danced around him, and he told me they could be used to hide within or sense another being’s approach—like an alarm system.

  He taught me how to harden my skin against attack. That was, he explained, a thing he could scale up or down, making his skin as fragile as a new baby’s or as hard as stone.

  He taught me how to summon strength, and he watched while I crushed bricks to dust and warped metal rods into pretty designs. I twisted one into a complex little set of rings that shaped up to look like a Celtic knot. Ren studied that one and kept it, setting it on top of a pile of books rather than letting me add it to the discarded pile of metal he would recycle later. I tried desperately to hide my pleased smile, but Ren’s knowing look told me I hadn’t succeeded.

  He taught me how to move quickly, flitting around the apartment faster than a human was capable of, and how to assess an opponent for weaknesses—something he either knew instinctually or had been taught well.

  Each skill was easier to learn than I’d imagined it would be. It only took me a few tries to open the correct channel, so to speak, into Ren to drag the skill out. When I asked him why I was so good at this with no prior experience, he laughed.

  “Because I’m good at this,” he explained. “You’re using my own knowledge and experience. You’re using everything I am, and this is all natural to me. That’s what the soul bond does—it gives you the intuition to access me as though I’m part of you.”

  “So you could do this to me?” I asked.

  “Yes, if you had a skill or a piece of knowledge I desired.”

  “Feel free to learn about humans from me,” I said, waving my hand airily.

  “Oh, I’m learning plenty already,” he said, and he stuffed his headphones over his ears.

  Most of the day was a boring series of trial and error, while I used speed and strength to break various things in Ren’s apartment—which he would fix—and tugged knowledge out of the thread. Once I’d learned something, it was easy to remember how to get it back later, the intuitive nature of this bond really showing through, and I was surprised to find myself having fun.

  Later, as I explored his apartment, I noticed that not all of Ren’s books were from his own realm. Some had been purchased here, although most of his selections were about vampire or demon mythology. My gaze caught on a book called The History of the Devil, and I flipped to its index, looking for the word Baphometic.

  It had been rolling over in my mind, and the picture and short description on page 229 of the book reminded me where I’d heard it before. Baphomet, a demon “deity” that the Knights Templar had been accused of worshipping a thousand years ago. The drawing here depicted him with the muscled body of a man, dark feathery wings, and the head and legs of a goat.

  “Ren, are you related to this guy?” I asked, holding up the book.

  He nearly died choking on laughter before spitting out, “There is no Baphomet. Humans just saw several of our kind here on Earth, and they drew us more frightening than we actually look. They took the name from us, too. Baphometic sounds somewhat like my language’s word for my kind.”

  “So humans knew of your kind?” I asked. “Back then?”

  He tilted his head back and forth, his shoulders shifting uncomfortably. “That might be overstating it. There are always humans who know of the supernatural. Even now, there are those who know of demons and vampires and faeries. The wise ones hold their tongues.”

  He gave me a small smile that told me I was now included in that secret keeping. If I completed his task and earned freedom, I’d be one of those few who knew the world’s secrets and bore their weight. My throat tightened. I didn’t know how to feel at the idea of living a normal life while vampires walked the earth.

  And demons. And…

  “Faeries?” I probed.

  “That is what creatures of the Under Realm are called. They possess lower, lesser magics, little more than trickery. In the Mortal Realm, they are bargainers, and gamblers, and granters of small desires.”

  “There’s too much in this world I don’t know,” I griped.

  Ren’s eyes, when they met mine, seemed old and battle-weary. “You have a lifetime to learn, and it would suit you to do so.”

  His gaze cut to the book in my hand, an encouragement to get going.

  But supernatural knowledge wasn’t the only thing I needed to work on. The bond between
us was a mystery all on its own, one that required careful handling.

  The two of us tugged at the thread here and there, to see what would happen. I sent questions and information down it, I flooded it with emotion, I touched it in various ways—although I tried to keep from pouring too much feeling into it and alarming him.

  Ren did the same, responding to my inquiries patiently and often playfully. We quickly learned that he was the stronger of the two of us. In the early afternoon, while lying on his back on the couch listening to music, he crept a little too far along the thread and the sheer overwhelming press of him meant that nothing short of being next to him would calm my racing heart and sudden desire to touch him and hold him.

  He was startled and frightened as I wrapped my arms around him and put my head on his chest in a daze. He apologized profusely, more alarmed than I’d ever seen him, and I felt his shame and frustration through our connection for essentially compelling my emotions.

  “Ari, I’m sorry,” he had said. “I didn’t mean to. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said, holding onto him tighter.

  Whatever he’d done had put him so close to me on our thread that my body’s response was to need his touch, to light up under it.

  Ren didn’t seem to mind cuddling. After his initial wariness and regret, he put his arms loosely around me and closed his eyes, relaxing and going back to listening to music.

  “When is sunset tonight?” I asked eventually, as the day waned.

  “4:36 p.m.,” Ren responded.

  “Do you know where we are going tonight?” I asked.

  “Yes, I have a place in mind,” he said. “It should have the right clientele, and it should be safe enough for you. These will be the kind of vampires who know the etiquette of sharing humans. They’ll also know what a demon can do to them—if we run into trouble.”

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to kill vampires?”

  “I cannot kill or hurt members of the royal family. Every other vampire is fair game,” he said. “I have killed plenty of vampires.”