Wraith ; Semblance

by Riley Mason

  Bash put his finger harder on the trigger but now he wasn’t so quick to aim at her. Instead, he felt his body turning, shifting and pushing it to Gabriel.

  “Sebastian,” Gabriel screamed again, this time with a shrivel in his voice.

  Bash had no control, he had none, there were two people in his head and one was out screaming the other at this point, his body was nothing more than a passenger now.

  The first shot was fired and it caught Gabriel in the throat and send blood flying everywhere.

  “Empty the clip,” Arinna whispered and he could barely hear her with his ears but instead could hear her in his mind. He stepped over to Gabriel, blood was spitting out of his mouth.

  He rattled the trigger until every bullet that was inside of the belly of the gun was out and through the body that was laying on the floor.

  The second the final bullet sprang free and punched into Gabriel’s forehead, whatever control he had lifted entirely. He lowered the gun to his side and looked at her.

  Chapter 126

  I look over at Bash and then to Gabriel on the floor. I should feel a lot better but instead I feel worse, not in pain but indifferent. I can’t believe it's done, I can’t believe what we’ve done.

  Bash runs over to me and hugs me. I hug him back, the strength I can put in the hug is soft, my arms are so sore that it’s hard to lift.

  He’s relieved and he’s tired, and I can see scars on his neck that haven’t healed back into his skin yet. “The armies are gone,” he tells me.

  “I didn't know which one of them was in control of them,” I say, my mind flashing an image of both Gabriel and the wraith to me.

  I run my tongue over my lips and I can taste the remains of the blood that I extracted from the wraith and I wipe it off with the back of my hand.

  “Syllis is all that’s left,” I say looking up at the body hovering above the fire.

  “I don’t know,” I say back to him. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “What doesn’t?” he asks me.

  “All of this. The wraith, the Angel, Lucifer, all of it moved to fast. He sorted things out of my head but it still doesn’t make sense.”

  I take the blade and smooth out the flames with my bare hands and the blade is quenched, I summon the steel inside the handle and then hold it.

  “I don’t know if he should be free,” I say.

  “What about the seal?” he asks me. “Do you have it.”

  I pull it out. “It wasn’t opened, they just knew I had it.”

  “What do you think is in it?” he asks me.

  “I’m not sure that it matters anymore. Without the wraith, and without the second seal, the third one is useless.”

  We’re outside of the property. Gabriel has more than enough cars to choose from to make our way out. I chose the Charger, no one will be looking for it, not soon at least. Gabriel is a very reclusive man but he’s a very rich man. People understand the two together but not when they start to separate.

  I left Syllis in the fire, for now I think that that’s the best bet. I don’t like this feeling of hesitation I have to realize him. I know he’s safe in there at least for now. Time doesn’t matter for an agent of the other side, to them all time is relative it makes no difference if it's ten minutes or ten hours that he’s down there.

  I pull up to a cliff that overlooks the city, I miss it, I miss Hell's Kitchen more than I realize. I want that semblance of home, that simplicity, the small hunt rather than the big one. The small one means that I can hold a normal life still, the larger ones, the ones where everyone is dying to chase after judgement day doesn’t leave a secondary life, there’s no outlet that I can find for it.

  I have a beer in one hand, Bash does as well as we sit on the hood of the car. The seal is in my hand. I want it open but I’m not certain either that it should be. The blood of the wraith is inside of me, conditions aren’t right but they aren’t totally wrong either. Part of me isn’t sure I want to know why I drank that blood either. I don’t know if it saved me or hurt me in the long run.

  As I’m sitting there, I’m not anymore. Around me is that house on the bayou, the old trailer home down the street, the dirt road under me. The little girl is there too, the one with blood on her hands and clothes, the eyes on her staring up at me. “They deserved it,” she says to me but this time, I’m in the vision with something else. I can feel the seal in my hand. I can see ash falling down from the sky and a blood moon stretch out over the night. This wasn’t over, this was just another step towards Armageddon.

  Semblance

  RILEY MASON

  (LOST INNOCENCE-BOOK 1)

  PROLOGUE

  I sit there, surrounded by strangers.

  New people are funneled into session weekly. Three individual sessions take place per night, five nights a week. I come to different ones. I follow abnormal schedules because I don't like to speak. When an instructor sees me too often, they insist, put me on the spot to open up, telling me that I should be comfortable, that no one in the room is going to judge me, that they're the same as me.

  I can't buy that, not when I know my past. I put myself in a series of groups designated for survivors, for people who’ve faced trauma in their lives—individuals like me who have survivors’ guilt, who have to cope with the fear, with the nightmares of seeing those they love taken from them.

  Words like massacre are common here when I feel like they don't belong in a typical conversation, when they should be removed, separated from my vocabulary.

  I watch as men and woman tear up as they talk about their stories. Shedding the weight they have to carry around because anything that's associated with your parents’ murder is hard to erase. It's difficult to move on from a concept like that, from memories so horrific, so brutal.

  I hate speaking. I shy away from it because even after all the time that's passed—an entire lifetime that separates me from that moment, from that memory—I know I can't say it. I can't speak it, not for one second without my heart exploding inside my chest, without the pit of my stomach churning, eager to send everything in my body up through my throat.

  Tonight is no different. Despite the change in schedule, despite the absence of a set time and place that I will show up at, I try and convince myself that this might work. That I can move on. That I can have a year that belongs to me rather than another that belongs to a past that haunts me.

  I listen to these stories around me, the people that are so willing to talk about their families in the past tense, how they were taken, with brutal candor, honesty, and not showing off to a group of strangers emotionally connecting to a story that is so but sharing because it helps.

  The group, as we gather before the meeting starts when the narrators and the host are all gathered around fresh batches of new coffee—talk to one another, not eager but not shy either. They want to share because they know it helps. I can't conform to that idea, knowing how violent these thoughts are inside of me, what they've done to me, how they've conditioned my past, how they've altered the direction of my life.

  I want to give, I know I need too, but I can't. Even when I look down at my arm, the long sleeves that I wear even in the heated months of the summer hide the scars that past has given me, that I've given to myself. I carry my history with me.

  For a second, I think about going up there, standing up from my chair and spreading a story they are all eager to hear not because they want to trade atrocities, but because they want to help me. To direct me to heal because they know that if I share, I can start to heal. That I can begin the closure process that I've been hiding from.

  That I despise.

  I can't believe, not for one second, that this can leave me, that I can somehow let it go, that it can abandon me. It's stuck with me because I protect it because it's ingrained in my mind. Because it's part of me.

  CHAPTER 1

  I waited there in the morgue for what felt like hours. This wasn’t the first showing I had to endure
tonight. This one was harder than the other had been, though. It was one thing to put full grown adults on display, it was another to do the same with children, babies. The old and the geriatric were put out there for the relativesso the grieving families could see it, and despite their pain, they’d start to heal, their process could begin.

  I had to stand there and wait patiently. Wait for the viewing of a body which I had no emotional connection to, that I’d simply been tasked with analyzing, with dissecting, and performing the autopsy.

  They all knew what they were in for. Everyone who came up to that window knew exactly what they were to expect even if they hadn’t fully prepared themselves for it. It was the culmination of a life that had been part of theirs that just was no more, gone but not forgotten.

  It wasn't hard for me. It wasn’t easy either, but I had built up a bit of immunity to it. It still stung, I couldn't imagine that feeling would ever fully fade, but nothing that had come since was worse than the first time. When my degree had concluded, I had been forced to see one without the watchful eye of my instructor.

  The first time I had to do it, I’d nearly vomited. I’d been young, fresh out of graduate school, and alone. I think that was the hardest part of it. There had been no mentor there who could walk me through the process, to watch me to make sure I was as careful as I needed to be, to ensure it was handled right and with dignity. To learn how to deal with the people attached to the recently deceased, the ones that would come and bare emotions for the person laying in front of me, gone but not forgotten.

  I had been the girl who had stepped up to the spotlight because I thought that’s what it was going to take to get ahead. To put more things on my plate to see how much I was capable of handling. To know my limitations, fight through them when I could, let them destroy me if they had to.

  I’d wanted to be the one who could set the stage for what real-world looked like for a college student once the era of supervision had retired, once it had left us, once we were real. Until that moment, we were only in practice, never in the real world where our mistakes held consequences, our personal beliefs and experiences could be damaging, almost fatal.

  In my head, I had seen bodies, I had examined them, worked through mock autopsies, experimented and dissected actual body parts of people who’d left their precious organs to the likes of science for study. The homework that was assigned might've belonged to a car accident victim, someone who had no family left to grieve them, no one to ever visit their burial site, no one to remember them. Giving their body away just made sense.

  This was different, though. There’d been no human attachment to those pieces of meat that were sent to my university for me to practice on. No one would have felt if I failed, no one would force me to remember that failure. It would affect no one else but myself.

  To me, beyond graduation felt more like a zoo. Hundreds of people might be involved in one way or another in the procedures I performed on the body. Countless family members may dispute the technical findings uncovered when the body was exposed—when the organs had a chance to tell their story. When they had a chance to be studied and the data was interpreted.

  There were far too many people involved, not enough people to show support, but more than enough people to tell you were wrong, mistaken, and stupid.

  CHAPTER 2

  It was difficult standing there like a mannequin with a Ph.D. Standing and waiting for the family to have their moment, to say their final good-byes, to identify a body that until that very moment, there was hope that the ID was invalid. That the people who brought this to their attention were wrong, mistaken. That the person they knew, the one they loved, was just missing, absent from their life for a few hours longer than expected. Then when the curtain peeled back and they were put face to face with someone they couldn't believe had passed, I had to watch them break. I had to watch their chests rip open and their hearts unravel as they broke down in front of me, because I was nothing more at that moment than a wall fixture. A body that didn't move.

  The place where I had received my internship had originally failed to secure the soundproofing of the dividing rooms. There’d been a crack in the window that segregated the family from me when it came to the body put on display. The body had been part of a motorcycle accident and the lower half had been peeled off by the high speed and hard asphalt against soft skin.

  I had been choked up before the curtain-call, knowing that a family was adamant their son was missing, away for the weekend without calling, forgetful as was the right thing to do at his age, forgetting to call ahead, to tell someone you were going to go missing.

  The boy had almost gone head-on with a tractor-trailer, his helmet had done its job, preserved his face, but the bike hadn't reacted fast enough. It had been caught, dragging the boy's body beneath the truck, catching the fabric of his arm on one of the axles, dragging the boy nearly half a mile before the massive machine could come to its full stop.

  Even seeing the work that the truck had done had been hard on me despite my experience with the deceased. I’d had to cover my mouth when I saw the damage, how the flesh was literally burned off his bone. I’d closed my eyes, remembering to breathe, processing the sight, remembering my instruction as best as I could.

  With the body laid out, just before the cadaver was escorted to the viewing room, my peer coach, Dr. Sylvan had drawn a line on the deceased's chest, indicating where the blanket shouldn't go past, to just show his face to the family, assuring me it was more than enough for the ID we needed.

  I had performed well, standing there, the mask on my face, my lab coat pristine, my voice turned off, I was meant to stand there, remove the dressing, and place it back when the time came.

  When the curtain opened, I had closed my eyes, taking the last second for myself, to gather my intentions, coordinate what emotions I had, not knowing what to expect.

  My eyes had opened to see a family there, all of them looking at the figure hidden beneath the sheet. Not one of them looked at me. When the curtain had been peeled back, I’d done the same thing to the sheet on the table, carefully folding the sheet to the line Dr. Sylvan had drawn.

  I had waited there, my hands folded in front of me, it was the most uncomfortable I had been in my life. It was an experience I could never forget because it was one that had burned something into my mind.

  I had realized then there was a crack in the glass. I wasn't supposed to hear anything—the room was intended to be soundproofed. But I’d heard the woman break down, the boy's mother, breaking, looking at her child, a kid no more than twenty, laying on the table being identified because he was deceased in a motorcycle accident.

  There had been no choice but to hold myself together, for the sake of the family in front of me, I’d closed myself up. Retreating everything I was feeling back into my chest, back into the storage of my heart, where it would come back out later, rebellious that I had shut it out.

  CHAPTER 3

  I’d gotten drunk that night, I had to, I had little choice in the matter. The memories of that day had burned inside of me long after the shift had ended, and the parents of the boy had headed home to plan his funeral, to alert the rest of his family it was him.

  I’d felt responsible, knowing full well I had no reason to. There was not one decision which he had made that I was responsible for, all of them were him. Despite his age, he was an adult, I’d had to remember that. He had to bear the weight of his choices. Accidents happened, that was something I had tried to remind myself.

  I’d watched as that mother lost every string which had connected her to reality. Poured out every bit of love that had ever been brewed in her heart because the one person who was responsible for that was no more. The love could exist, but it had nowhere to go any longer. It would simply shrivel and waste away.

  There were reasons to think she would recover. She’d been young, there was a chance she might have another child sooner or later. I had found myself wondering if that was the c
ase. If she might do that, consider that after a time, when the death of her son had settled, and she had accepted it, if she would.

  It had broken me to watch, it’d been a secret I had to hold to myself because to tell it showed failure, I was too new to show any failure. I had to succeed, there’d been no other choice in the matter. It didn’t matter how hard it had been, there was going to be another time, somewhere down the line that would test me worse. My own life had tested me worse. Pushed me harder than I could fight back. It knew my weak points—this was just another one of those.

  I remembered waiting there as she watched, as she cried, as she hugged the family who had come with her, to share in the emotional wreckage that came along with a task like this. Something like this wasn’t for just anyone. I knew you had to have real love to do this for someone.

  I had been asked, only once to do this when I was younger, I had almost done it, almost gone into the room to do what they had asked of me before the Detective forced me not to, forbade me from doing it. Saying I was too young to have to be put through that. What I had gone through was more than enough. There was no point in repeating it.

  It had broken my heart to see her, to see a face change like that. To see a strong woman completely fall apart in a matter of seconds, losing every bit of strength she'd ever known, handing it all over because it just no longer meant anything to her, there was nothing precious about it anymore. The one thing in her life that had been precious was gone, ruined, laying there on a table, being eyed by the family who had to be sure it was him before the body could be released.

  She been given the report, the cops had already told her the reason for death, she had to have that mental image play in her head, despite having hope that it wasn't her son, that her son was still safe somewhere.

  She had gone into that room with reluctance, frightened from the truth that had been all but staring her in the face because the very last fact hadn't come out just yet. That visual account that gave the last bit of accuracy to the truth.