Soul Breaker

by Clara Coulson

  Riker snorts and moves away from the nightstand, hobbling toward the opening in the curtain. “Our job is to interrogate her, not shank her, Ella. This isn’t a prison yard.”

  Ella trails her finger across the lowered railing of my bed and then throws up a mischievous grin. “Not yet, Nick. Not yet.”

  I tap my pencil on the paper and glower at the half-formed sketch of big blue ugly. “Say, when I’m done with this, can I come down there and watch?”

  Riker halts halfway through the curtain and tosses me a dour look, but shrugs. “Be my guest, kid. Just make sure you leave your stomach at the door.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Once I send off my excellent sketch of big blue ugly to be distributed to all the DSI agents now on the hunt, Navarro discharges me from the infirmary with a set of instructions for my arm, a firm pat on the back, and a closing statement about how he doesn’t want to see my unconscious body on one of his beds again anytime soon. From the infirmary, I make my way to the end of a nearly deserted hallway—everyone’s home for the night or out on the streets, working late—and find the row of main elevators, three of which are out of order. After a two-minute wait, a functional one shows up to take me downstairs.

  I head to our block of holding cells, which I prefer to call the dungeon. Thick metal doors and stone walls and long, twisty corridors designed to confuse potential escapees. An out-of-control air conditioner that always sets the temperature to tundra. Dim lights and dusty corners, cobwebs drifting in the air. It has all the ambiance of your average medieval torture chamber, with the added fun of defensive wards constructed by DSI’s practitioners.

  Monsters and magic users alike are thrown into the dungeon for safekeeping. Most of them come out again, for processing, to regular prison or magic prison or Eververse banishment or a dozen other possibilities, depending on the perpetrator in question. Some of them, however, never emerge from their assigned cell. And the vast majority of the time, their deaths have nothing to do with their DSI interrogators and everything to do with their inability to accept their capture.

  The sorceress appears to be one of these cases at first, ripe for suicide.

  I arrive at the cell where she’s being held, two guards on either side, and they let me into the small visitation room next door. A couple of chairs have been placed before a one-sided mirror, and I pick the seat farthest to the right, pull it closer to the glass to get a better view. In the cell beyond, Riker and Ella are sitting at a metal table across from the accused sorceress. The sorceress herself, all tangled hair and dirt streaks on her clothes, is, to my surprise, no older than the murdered college students. Which opens up a can of worms the size of both halves of Michigan.

  As implied by Erica, summoning a creature like big blue ugly is beyond the skill or knowledge of the average magic user. Which would make this young sorceress a prodigy. But how could a user so skilled fall under the radar of the ICM, especially once she went digging around in the field of dark magic? Unless someone more experienced helped her get the materials she needed to learn this magic.

  So are we looking at a tag team here? A master sorcerer and his apprentice?

  The mere thought sends a cold chill creeping down my neck. The last thing we need is a second murderous sorcerer on the prowl.

  I press my forehead against the glass and listen closely, eyes on the reactions of the incensed sorceress. At each question—What did you summon? Why did you want those students killed? Etc.—she bares her teeth and snaps her jaws, a wild woman, who wants nothing more than to tear into the necks of the DSI agents opposite her. She reads like she’s not quite all there, humanity stripped away, a beast left to thrash inside a human shell. The intelligence in her bloodshot eyes is that of a predator, not a person, something more fit to walk on four legs than two.

  Ella raps her fist on the table and says, “Where did you send the creature you summoned? What is it doing now?”

  The sorceress growls in response and tries to lunge at Ella, but the chains on her wrists and ankles hold her back. Behind her, on the walls and the ceiling and the floor, are scorch marks, signs that the woman tried to magic her way out of captivity during my stint in dreamland. Judging by the fading reddish aura emanating from her entire body, the woman must have used up most of her internal energy store in her failed escape attempt. Which was the point. Riker and Ella let her wear herself down first before they came in for questioning. Easier that way. Safer.

  Riker, who’s noticeably left his cane elsewhere (to avoid showing weakness), leans closer to the writhing sorceress and asks, “Why those two students? Jason Franks and Alicia Wilkins? Why did you want them dead? What did they do to you?”

  The sorceress bites in his direction and lets out a wailing, howl-like sound. Riker sits up straight again and makes a hand motion to Ella, under the table, where the animalistic woman can’t see it. Ella reads the message and gestures back, answering his question or making an additional comment. I wonder what kind of secret signal language they’ve created, and if it’s something I’ll be taught as time goes on. Because—

  The sorceress screams. So loud it hurts my ears through the glass. Riker and Ella hold their indifferent expressions, but both of them stiffen slightly, and I get the feeling they’re just as disturbed by the woman’s behavior as I am. Because sorcerers are not supposed to act this way.

  Sorcerers are simply practitioners who go off the goodness rails by practicing forbidden magic. Like Eververse summonings. Occasionally, they do dabble in things that drive them crazy, that change their personalities, that transform them from your average ne’er-do-wells to mustache-twirling villains who cackle at the slightest provocation. But I’ve never heard of any magic that strips your humanity away. Only the stuff that enhances the darker parts of human nature.

  So what the hell is going on with the woman in the cell? Is she not the sorcerer? Is she another victim of some kind, struck down by an awful spell? Was she a bystander who saw something she shouldn’t have and suffered the consequences? Or is there something weird going on, weird by even DSI’s standards?

  Ella forces her chair back a good foot and a half, metal legs grinding against floor tiles. Then she rises, smacks her palms against the tabletop, and the sensation of air rushing past me toward the cell reveals she’s charging her beggar rings to maximum capacity. But it’s not a threat of a lethal attack, an execution via Crow.

  It’s a threat of torture. Beggar rings are great for that. Shocking. Burning. Bone breaking.

  Ella doesn’t get that far, though; the sorceress goes there for her.

  The crazed woman senses the buildup of power in Ella’s rings and responds by thrashing in her chair, limbs flailing every which way. She slams one of her wrists into the edge of the table, and even though I’m sitting a room away, the sound of a snapping bone still reaches my ears. The sorceress screams again, a harsh, broken tone, and she twists her head side to side, shaking herself senseless, until foam starts leaking from her mouth, mimicking a rabid dog.

  Ella shoots Riker a look I can’t interpret, and the captain tugs something out of his coat pocket—a woman’s billfold—dropping it on the table. In a cold, emotionless voice, he says, “Tell me, Ally Johnston, age twenty-four, MBA candidate at Waverly College: How does a girl like you, good grades, good behavior, no criminal record, end up neck-deep in dark magic practices, summoning deadly creatures? How did you get yourself wrapped up in this mess? Did someone introduce you to black magic? Did you start dabbling on your own time and get lost in it? Did you use the wrong spell and drive yourself mad? Or did somebody else do this to you?”

  The sorceress, Ally, grits her teeth as pain radiates through her broken arm, but once it passes, she glares at Riker and bares her teeth again. This time, they’re bloody. She bit her lip or tongue. And her eyes, pink and swollen before the questioning even started, now sport broken vessels, whites turned crimson red. The woman appears as if she’s on the verge of exploding from the inside out, seam-
bursting pressure growing inside her, an unstable heat. I almost expect steam to start blowing out her ears any second.

  There’s something seriously wrong with this woman. And the longer this standoff goes on, the more I’m convinced that Ally didn’t do it to herself. That there is, in fact, a third party involved. If Ally was acting normal at the Memorial Garden—as normal as dark magic users can be—then it’s possible someone struck her with a curse when Ella was chasing her down. To keep her quiet? To scramble her mind and render her useless to DSI?

  If there were two enemies in the garden, why couldn’t there have been a third, hiding in the thick bushes or behind a corner somewhere? The maze was certainly large and complex enough to obscure the activity of any number of additional sorcerers. There could have been twenty-five faceless foes hidden in the shadows, and during the scuffles with Ally and big blue ugly, they all could have fled unseen. Escaped through the two dozen exits to the garden, spread across the Green Lake campus.

  This woman isn’t the victim of her own magic gone wrong. No way.

  Ella and Riker appear to come to the same conclusion. Riker swipes the billfold off the table and shoves it into his pocket again, sliding his chair back as he does so. Ella steps away from the table, shuffles past Riker, and heads for the door. As she’s knocking to signal the guards, she keeps her other fist clenched, ready to throw a force spell to knock Ally out should the cursed woman attempt to escape when the door opens.

  Riker uses the table to hoist himself up and closes with, “Since you’ve apparently lost the ability to speak, I’ll be sending a few doctors down here to take a look at you. I would suggest you cooperate with their exam, as they will restrain you if you struggle.” He chews on his lip for a moment, staring at the writhing woman across from him, who snarls, spewing bloody spittle, after his every word. The captain sighs. “You don’t understand a word I’m saying, do you?”

  The woman spits at him, but the red glob falls short, splattering on the tabletop.

  Ella peers over her shoulder. “Sorry, Captain. She must have taken a hit when I was chasing her. I did notice her stumble before I caught up to her, now that I think about it. That might have been a curse striking her, though I can’t be sure. There was too much magic saturating the air for my weak tracking skills to differentiate between.” She raps the door one more time. “Looks like I captured a nice dead end.”

  Riker makes his way toward the door, one slow step at a time. He hides his pain behind a stiff posture and a gait resembling that of a highly ranked military leader. If I didn’t know where to search for the signs of agony in his face, I would fall for the act, hook, line, and sinker.

  The door opens at last to reveal the armed guards on the other side, waiting with their weapons raised. They usher Ella out, then Riker, and slam the door shut again before the cursed woman at the table even has a chance to consider making a break for it. Instead, the woman sits there in a cold metal chair, trembling in pain and confusion, eyes with whites dyed grisly red glued to the door, lids drawn low. Alone.

  I almost feel sorry for her, but since I don’t know how involved she was with the murders of her college peers, I hold off the sympathy for now. I can always save it for later. When I’m sure it’s deserved.

  Since the show’s over for the time being, I push my own chair away from the viewing window, stand up, and stretch. Adjusting my sling so it hangs from my shoulder at an angle that doesn’t press too hard on my stitches, I step away from the window, take my eyes off the woman for the first time in twenty minutes, and head for the exit to meet up with my teammates before they leave the dungeon level. I’ll probably have to poke Riker in order to convince him to give me another assignment for the case, after my garden screw-up.

  Best to work my own magic before Riker returns to his office and gets comfortable. I reach the exit door and grab the knob with the hand not strapped to my chest. And—

  The hairs on the back of my neck stand up. A sensation twice as cold as the breath of absolute zero strikes my exposed skin, sinks into my veins, creeps along my spine, ice forming in my bones. My stomach ruptures like a stone breaking at a brutal fall, and all the organs in my gut crumble into dust. I choke, can’t breathe, lungs frozen solid. And my body is rendered immobile.

  I recognize the feeling. From the night Mac died.

  Dread.

  An infuriated gaze sears the gap between my shoulders, and in an instant, the ice within me melts, flashes steam from solid. I whip around to face the viewing window, hand reaching for weapons I no longer have on my person. My guns and knives and belt were sent to my personal locker when I arrived in the infirmary, and I didn’t think to make a detour to retrieve them before I came down to the dungeon. Because I thought I was safe in the DSI building.

  The sorceress standing at the table, staring straight at me through the one-way mirror, says otherwise. A powerful aura, orange-red, envelops her, stretching out from her hunched form in all directions, filling the entire cell. The walls and ceiling and floor sizzle at the touch of her building magic, and the metal chair behind the woman starts to melt. She leans forward, places her glowing hands on the table, and in a bright flash of light, the entire metal structure is vaporized by a fire hotter than the sun.

  It was a ploy, I think. The interrogation. She was playing Riker and Ella the entire time.

  The viewing glass cracks at the pressure of the heat growing, growing in the cell. The broken pane splits the woman’s image in my sight, a dozen different, warped angles of the insane sorceress…

  Wait.

  Half the broken shards of glass don’t show the woman in the cell. They show something else. Something with a face of nightmares, ripped from the fiery pits of hell. Hair made of hissing adders, writhing in a tangled nest. Beak like a well-fed vulture, coated with the guts of prey. Skin pink as raw fish, rotting on polluted shores. Demonic like the hammer creature, not something of this world.

  And that’s when I understand.

  A second before the window explodes, before I’m thrown into the wall, before the heat of a thousand suns rockets through the air above me, through the metal exit door that may as well be tissue paper, and down, down the dungeon hall. Going. Going. Gone.

  Ally Johnston isn’t a sorceress.

  Ally Johnston is possessed.

  Chapter Twelve

  When the ringing in my ears calms into a hum, and my back stops throbbing like someone beat me with a shovel, I unfurl from my fetal ball of terror and dare to crack an eye open. The viewing room is a minefield of half-melted glass and toppled chairs, and the exit door to my left now sports a hole the size of a smart car. Scorch marks decorate the ceiling and the upper halves of the walls, where the furious demonic spirit soared past in its fucking fire tornado. Man, I hope DSI has some good insurance for this building.

  Miraculously, I didn’t get burned to a crisp or skewered by the breaking glass. The spirit must have contained the bulk of its heat within a small radius, in order to give it the oomph to melt its way through doors and walls unimpeded. And the glass, which could have slaughtered me like a pig, was either melted before it got close enough to do any damage or blocked by my reinforced combat gear. I managed to cover my face with my arm a quarter of a second before the window blew.

  Given the mild sting radiating from my left ear, a single shard evaded my shield arm and nicked my skin. A single shard, out of thousands.

  Remind me never to mock the Matrix uniforms again.

  Unsteady, I use the damaged wall behind me to stand up and suck in a hot breath, tinged with the faint scent of smoke. Beyond the half-wall and empty window frame, the used-to-be-a-cell that once held the possessed Ally Johnston is now a malformed box, every wall warped inward or outward, the floor tiles charred and cracked, the chairs rendered nonexistent by the intense heat. The cell door is intact, but it’s fused to the wall, and someone’s going to have to saw it open in what I imagine will be an unpleasant restoration job.

  Bu
t the state of the room isn’t the worst part.

  The worst part is Ally Johnston’s corpse.

  She sits rigid on her knees, skin and bones burned black as night. The jaw of her scorched skull hangs wide open, skewed, as if she’s screaming. But no sound emerges from the chest filled with organs cooked to char, and below her visible ribcage, skin and muscle peeled away, the only noises I can hear are her intestines, crumbling. Ash.

  As I watch in abject horror, a shudder in the floor unbalances Ally’s body, and it topples over, disintegrating on impact. Her skull bounces off, rolling to a stop near the door, jaw still stuck, eye sockets empty, torched flesh clinging to her forehead and chin. A glob of something somewhat liquid oozes out from underneath; I think it might be her brain.

  Oh, my God. I stumble two steps forward and vomit on the floor, again and again, spilling the remains of what little I’ve eaten today. When my stomach runs out of content to purge, I dry heave, hunched over at the waist, hand on my knee barely keeping me upright. My lungs sting at the lack of air, but I can’t seem to make myself stop gagging.

  And here I thought Jason Franks’ death was gruesome.

  What’s left of the door to the viewing room flies open, revealing Ella and Riker in the hallway, surrounded by a whole contingent of guards. Ella takes one look at me and rushes to my side. “Cal! Are you okay? Are you injured?” She runs her hands over my body, searching for any serious wounds. When she finds none, she moves back a foot and finally notices the mess I made on the floor. Then she tracks her gaze up and up and up, over the half-wall and into the former cell. Ally’s body lies there, immobile and in pieces.