Wraith ; Semblance

by Riley Mason

  It screams. It's a voice that suddenly begins working the strings in my body and lifting me to my feet but I see something that I didn’t expect to see. Something that flashes in my mind for no more than a single second before it vanishes. I know it because I’ve seen it recently. I see my brothers hospital bed there in a dark room and I see a black figure standing by its side through the shadows, void of features, I can tell that it's staring at me.

  Chapter 69

  I moved to attack him but he was fast, faster than Azrael had been. He side-stepped me and even with my blade out, he saw my move coming at him and slid out of the way as the bottom half of the sword cut through open air.

  I jumped turned and tried to drop a knee down that he took into his bicep and then pushed away.

  I spun now, sliding my blade through the air that he backed away from, sliding out of the way of each turn of the knife no matter which end of it was busy trying to cut him.

  Anger fills every bit of my veins as I rush at him again, this time faster than before and I rely on my knees, shins, and elbows do to most of the damage, leaving my blade as a backup to him. I know he’s going to move, he’s going to try and get out of the way. I have no idea what he thinks is wrong with me but he’s going to want to try and protect me and I can’t have that. I need to make sure that his skin comes into contact with me. I have to kill him I have no other choice, he has to die.

  Suddenly, I lose all interest in the fight and I stop dead in my tracks, I drop the staff on the floor and have to use one of the tombstones that's still intact for the balance that I need to keep me at my feet.

  It doesn’t matter. I fall regardless and land hard on my knees on a ground that feels like it froze years ago and it's still trapped in some winter that’s keeping the ground hard as rock rather than soft in the warmer months.

  I can feel breath fly out of my nose and lips as I’m suddenly overrun with a cold that seems to turn that anger in my blood to ice chunks in a river that’s suddenly fallen into the pit of freezing for the next few months.

  I’m alone and in a field, a large field one that is nothing more than a blanket of ice looked down upon by massive mountains cut with wrinkles of snow against their black surfaces.

  I’m there by myself with dark inky clouds in a sky that has no stars and no moon to it. It's nothing more than a veil of pure black that's staring down at me. I’m not as alone as I thought though. There is another there.

  I see the figure standing there in black at the far end of the field. I can see a set of ghostly blue eyes staring at me even through the distance that is separating us. I know what it is even before the eyes register in my head. It's the wraith that Gabriel brought back from the underworld. From a realm that nothing belongs and nothing should come back from its standing here growing straight and in seconds, I can see the bodies of those that it excavated from the graves that I’m inspecting now.

  All of them, every single empty grave has a body standing behind the wraith that’s now accounted for. All of them at some level of decomposition stare at me because their master, the one that leads them is staring at me with a unique look in its eye. I’m not sure of how to tell what it means to see it.

  I can feel my own eyes glaze over. It's like a black hand reached through my pupil and used my own skin to cover my eyes. It's like that hand is moving through my hand and scraping at everything that it passes.

  Pain fiees out of me and I feel like all parts of me are on fire. Like my skin was soaked in a gasoline and then a match was thrown to ignite the fluid with my arm restrained so I could do nothing to put it out. At the same time, my lungs began to tighten and it feels like I'm drowning.

  I look up and it's standing there watching me and with a motion in its own hand my head flies back, my neck angled so that it might crack at any second. It’s studying my face, it wants to know who and what I am.

  It let’s go of me, I’m back in world that I left, steam is flowing from my skin like my face was on fire but extinguished. I’m on the ground blood is flooding my mouth and even though I spit it out I can feel it moving through me again.

  “What the fuck was that?” Bash asked me. “Why would you do that?”

  “It was him,” I manage to say through the pain. “It was the wraith. He was the one that pulled up the bodies.”

  Chapter 70

  Bash helps me to my feet but I can see that he’s more than a little skeptical. The staff is on the floor, I must’ve dropped it when I fell down to my knees. He bends down, grabs it and hands it back to me. I still want to hurt him but the desire has died out a little bit. It's nowhere near as intense as it was.

  He helps me prop myself up on one of the tombstones that’s still intact and I look around, thick spit is in my mouth and I spit it up. There’s sweat on my forehead too and I wipe it clean with the back of my hand.

  “This thing was definitely here,” I say to him. “Without a doubt.”

  Bash walks up to me, that look of anger is stifled in his face like he wants to use it but he’s cautious to. It’s like he really does know me. I’m still more than aware that he knows something about me, part of me is sure that that something that he knows is forcing him to keep his hands to himself at this point. I’d want to kill me if the situation was reversed. If I didn’t, there would have to be one hell of a good reason why I didn’t.

  “I need to know what that was,” he says to me. “What was it that attacked you and what was it that stopped it.”

  As much as I wanted to tell him there was something inside of me that wouldn't let me tell him. It wouldn't allow me to recite that it was because of someone else that I couldn't say a single word about it. “The wraith,” I finally say. It’s not the entire truth but it’s more than enough to plead a case for me. “It made contact with me. Not here though. It took me somewhere else, it showed me all the bodies that it exhumed from here.” The words trailed off and my eyes got distracted as I watched the movement of officers that I could see on the other side of the hill that were there still scouring the scene. It wasn’t going to be much longer before they made it here.

  Bash reached out and touched my forehead with the back of his hand and then he reached around and touched the back of my neck. Then his eyes focused on mine. “There’s more to it,” he said, his eyes studying mine.

  “No there isn’t,” I say.

  “You have signs of possession,” he said to me, the patience was thin in his voice.

  “It’s nothing, trust me it’s nothing. It was the vision, that’s it.”

  “Visions don't make people do that,” he told me. “That’s intrusion that does that. Control. I’ve seen you do that before,” he told me.

  “Where the fuck did you see me do that before?”

  Bash took in a heavy breath. “When Gabriel had you under his control.”

  “Control?” I asked.

  “We need to get out of here, whatever it is, your psyche is to bend to be in such a hot place. We need to get you out, we can regroup, figure out what we’re going to do on the other side of this place.”

  As he helped me up, all I could think about was killing him. Having a replay of what I had done to Damien fresh in my head. I could almost smell the blood that was sitting in his veins waiting to be ripped out of his skin. It’s what I wanted. It's all I wanted to do. He was flesh and blood, I wanted to hurt him because I was told that I wanted to hurt things with blood in their veins.

  Before I knew it, Bash had his arm around my throat, a hand over my mouth and he was dragging me through the cemetery.

  Chapter 71

  I watch Bash use the back end of the flashlight to split the lock that’s protecting the door of the mausoleum. When he tugs the door open, he pushes me in first and then comes in himself.

  “Why are we in here?” I say, my voice is terrified, I don’t hear the sounds of my own voice as I say them. Then I realize that it's more than my voice, I am scared.

  I see Bash look at me indifferent
ly. It’s a tarnished look that he gives me. It's not what I want to see in his eyes. It only adds to the thoughts that are already starting to root in my head that I am more toxic than I give myself credit for. That regardless of what I bring to whatever is coming, that I’m a liability not only because of myself but because of the revolving door that my mind has become.

  “What are you doing?” I ask again, he still hasn’t answered my first question.

  “You’re not a stupid girl Arinna,” he says to me collecting his breath. “There’s too much inside of you.”

  I get a touch of something, like the hand of a mother or a father falling into the grip of a child after years have passed without it. The feeling, that single sensation isn’t from any physical contact that I’ve ever had, its coming from a place much darker and more private. It was born from that dark period when I wanted to take my own life and now it’s come back to remind me that it's not gone entirely.

  It's like having a disease and the doctor telling you that there’s no way that they can save your life. That treatment is an option but it’s not a solution. What he’s telling me is breaking things inside of me that I’ve struggled to piece back together.

  Now he looks at me, the light seems to rush into his eyes as his face crests the shadows of the room. For a second, I see the white spring back into his eyes, the white that’s latched to demon eyes but it fades in no more than a second. “I have to get it out of you,” he says his voice cracking. “I need to get it out of you.”

  I want to reply. There are thousands of things that come to mind but none of them have a chance to maneuver through my lips. My head turns upright as his palm spreads out and I can hear something slipping from his lips.

  In my head, it's like I’m falling backwards into a giant well, the well has what my eyes see ahead of it, the well I’m falling into is gigantic and black, blacker than any night my eyes have ever seen. As I fall, the image that's trapped where I left my eyes begins to stretch just as if I’m moving away from it. It’s not that, I know quickly that it's not that. I’m not moving away from my body, something else is just moving to fill my place.

  Burns starting racing up my arm as I can feel my skin slick with water hissing out steam as the water touches my boiling hot flesh. A scream surrounds me, it's loud enough that for a second, it robs me of my senses completely and utterly.

  I want to move, both minds inside of my body want to move but something prevents us from doing it. It's like we’re chained but chained is to slight a word to use to describe it. It’s complete and utter captivity. Like the demon held prisoner in jail, we’re strapped and locked into this one spot that my feet are still standing inside of.

  For a second, I’m outside my own body, looking down at myself from where Bash is standing. I see myself on the ground, the same form that I had in my apartment is happening right in front of my eyes. Now, except vomit dumping out of my stomach, its block and black smoke. Massive puddles of red are gushing from lips but the smoke is moving non-stop like a tsunami riding the quake that woke it from its sleep.

  As the rogue wave hits me, it’s not pain I feel, it's more of a recollection. I’m not recollecting my own memories, I’m filtering through Bash’s.

  Chapter 72

  Elizabeth woke up out of the sleep that had taken over her. She felt ill and her head hurt and she was sure sooner or later she was going to have to throw up.

  When her eyes opened, she wasn't entirely sure where she was. The room around her didn’t look familiar. In fact, it was extremely different from the last place that she could recall.

  What she did know was that she was laying on a hard wooden table surrounded by candles that were spilling out a bitter sweet smell into the air. The room around her was musty and old and looked like it was more antiquated than modern.

  Rolling up to her seated position, her hand went to her side and tried to find the gun that was supposed to be attached to her hip. It wasn’t there. Her hand moved and went to the other side of her leg to go on the scavenger hunt there to try and find it. Nothing was on the other side either. “Shit!” she said aloud.

  Propping herself up to her feet, she was careful, she could already feel that there was some dizziness swirling around her in head and she wanted to be mindful of how much force she put herself into.

  Stepping over the rug, she moved out to the hardwood floor and started to look around more intently. She still had no clue where she was.

  Her fingers glazed over the spines of the books that lined the shelves. If she had to guess she was sure that there would be hundreds of them, all varying sizes that sat there patiently waiting to be looked at or read. There were scrolls too, that was strange for her to see. They occupied the upper most shelving and they looked like they were close to falling apart rather than having been read too often.

  She almost didn’t even realize that there was someone else in the room with her. That she wasn’t there alone but by the time she saw the reflection staring back at her, the creature in black with blue eyes as he turned, she expected to see something, her hand expected to pull a weapon and her finger prepared to fire it but there was nothing there to hold or to shoot.

  When she went to turn around it was gone, only the wall stood where she had seen the figure.

  Now instead, as she turned around, she saw it there, not through a reflection but through her own eyes. Staring at it, the thing standing there, it wasn’t wide but it was lean at the shoulder, old pale skin gave way to incredibly blue sapphire eyes that looked back at her. A patience in his face that didn't’ seem like it belonged there. The figure looked dead not that it was any sort of living that had come for her.

  “Who are you?” she asked it.

  Its hand went out and she instantly fell to her knees, her eyes glazed over with a white and she found herself pulling at it trying to rip away the shielding that had fallen over her vision.

  She didn't hear the footsteps that came towards her. She didn't hear the sound of the metal moving through the air. The last thing that she felt was the blade ripping into her neck and twisting as it starts falling into her and began to wind up everything that it had just sheared through.

  The last thing that she heard was the sound of her own scream hit the air before it was trapped in her throat and her mouth, the skin of it in the last closed in on itself and closed down her lips until it was just one single piece of skin that ran over her face.

  Chapter 73

  When my eyes opened, that sickening feeling had come back to me like it had never left. I wanted to move which I was happy for but that sensation that had tried to force me into killing Bash had gone and faded, that I was the gladdest for.

  Looking around I could still see that we were in the mausoleum, the coffin that Bash had used was still propped open but now there were weapons and supplies laying there on the floor. Bash was there too, he was looking out of the one window next to me staring out the filthy glass at something in the cemetery.

  “How long was I out?” I ask, I’m surprised by how weak my voice actually sounds. I see the bottle of prescription pills on the ground, emptied.

  “Five hours,” he said back. He sounded tired but he sounded like his patience had filled itself up again.

  “Is that it?” I ask him, I hope he knows what I'm talking about, I don't have the energy to delve into a full on explanation.

  “Should be,” he says to me. He got it, I’m thankful for that. “We have a bigger problem.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Elizabeth is dead. Wraith got into my house and killed her. Left most of the skeleton for me, took what was left.”

  “Gabriel?” I ask.

  “Gabriel,” Bash agrees.

  “Where does that leave us with the seals?” I ask him, the shock of what he says doesn’t hit me all at once.

  “Close to ending our options. At this point the True Night needs a third seal before the gates can get back open again. We could gamble it and
go after the third seal assuming that Gabriel isn't sitting on it already or we could try and find this Angel.”

  “Do you think that’s really out there?” I ask him.

  “I don't think we have a choice but to believe that it is. This wraith is growing way too fast, we need a way to put its power into check.”

  “So, you think that’s where our real war is going to be.”

  “It’s not raising the dead for nothing. It wants something from it. I think it wants to give Lucifer an army, foot soldiers to allow his demons to run around as generals.”

  “What are the odds the Angel can keep it in check?” I ask.

  “Depending on what power it has and where it’s hiding. I don't know honestly.”

  A moment of silence surrounded us.

  “Cops have been through here pretty heavy. I think at this point their drawing on their own conclusions. They started to clear out of the scene. I say a few more hours and we can make a break for it.”

  I stand up and despite Bash notable objection in his face he doesn’t try and stop me. Even when I pick up my staff he’s more than willing to help me. “What was that you gave me?”

  “Nothing that you have to worry about,” he tells me, his eyes on the window. “Seven bodies made it out of their caskets last night. Not possessed, angered, it ended my bullets clearing that pain in the ass up.”

  “Do you have more?” I ask.

  “One more clip.”

  Chapter 74

  Each of us pulls into his driveway at his place. Him first and then me behind him. His gun is in his hand by the time he’s out of the car, I resort to my gun to, give the blades a break for a time.

  Slowly I watch as he throws the key into the lock and opens the door gently. I half expected him to kick it down and then go in charging like a bull.