by Rob Cornell
I left Odi to his makeshift blankey crypt. When I came into the living room, Mom sat on grandma’s old wingback, elbows on her knees, hands covering her face. I could see her back hitch with each sob. The broom she had started using lay on the floor in a small pile of glass. Most of the rest of window shards remained where they had first landed.
Breathing the air was like licking an icicle.
I squeezed myself in next to her and held her. My eyes watered a little and made my eyelids sticky. The wind’s moan was as cold as the wind itself. I didn’t say anything. We sat there until dark.
Odi’s footsteps creaked in the hallway. I looked up as he came in. He took in the scene with question in his eyes.
“Sly’s gone,” I said.
His mouth fell open. “Aw, no. Man, I’m so sorry.”
I nodded my thanks then gave Mom a long, final squeeze.
“Let’s go home.”
We took my Jetta, leaving the Jeep to come back for later.
On the way home, I kept thinking about the Maidens and how they still had Sly’s soul. It didn’t seem right to bury Sly without it. But I didn’t know how that worked. I mean, how could they still possess part of his soul after he had died? What happened to the portion of his soul he’d still had when he died?
Thinking about a soul in such a tangible way made my head hurt. But I had seen the glass bottle with the glowing wisp of Sly’s soul inside. It had definitely been a thing, not just a concept.
Then a wild, maybe stupid, thought struck me.
If you still had a dead man’s soul, could you put it back in him?
I was headed south on Trumbull, almost to Corktown, when I slammed on the brakes and nearly ended up with a Ford Focus in my back seat. The driver laid on his horn. I flipped him the bird and made an illegal U-turn, heading north toward Wayne State University and a certain apartment across the street where a black witch coven called the Maidens of Shadow lived.
You might have heard of them.
The sudden stop and change in direction barely roused Mom in the passenger seat. She looked up, glanced around, then leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes.
Odi, on the other hand, bounced in the back seat at the sound of the horn, then nearly tipped over as I wrenched the car around. “Whoa, dude. WTF?”
“They have his soul.”
“Yeah,” Odi said, drawing the word out.
“We can give it back.”
“Not following, hombre.”
I didn’t know why he couldn’t fucking understand me. Did vampires get wax in their ears? “His soul, gods damn it. His soul.”
I glanced at Odi in the rearview. He folded his arms and leaned back. “Whatever you say, dude.”
Never mind. He’d figure it out when we got there. Assuming the Maidens would talk to me, or even let me in.
Somehow, I would make them.
I didn’t care how. I would threaten to burn down the whole building. They would hear me. They would listen. And they would answer my damn question—
Can we give it back to him?
Chapter Thirty-Three
Like before, Angelica met me in the lobby. I had left Mom in the car with Odi to watch over her. A strange feeling, having a vamp play protector to a sorceress as powerful as Judith Light, but she was human, too. And grief could bring anyone’s guard down.
Angelica still wore her leggings, but had traded in the snow boots for a pair of fabric flats. Her teal sweater had a thick turtle neck that ran up to her jaw line. One of her eyes had the yellowish purple beginnings of a bruise. I had a good idea who had given it to her, and, despite my general feelings about all the Maidens of Shadow at the moment, I felt an extra special disgust toward Angelica’s mother.
I pointed at the incoming shiner. “Mom get a little mad at you?”
She dipped her chin, her fingertips absently touching the forming bruise. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Are all the moms still visiting?”
“There’s no point. We failed them.”
The lobby had heat pumping from a vent somewhere I couldn’t see, but it didn’t do much to keep back the cold seeping through the glass front door. I was tired of feeling cold. And I didn’t think I could have a significant conversation standing in the lobby. Who knew who might come through on their way in and out, or what they would make of talk about pieces of souls and raising the dead?
“Can we go upstairs then?”
She brushed a lock of midnight hair aside and tucked it behind her ear. “We were never supposed to see you again.”
“If I thought I could have left you girls alone, I would have. Trust me. But with Sly’s life on the line…” I planted my hands on my hips. “I would have knocked on the doors of the gods to try to help him.”
She laughed. A sweet, normal laugh you’d expect from any average twenty-something who didn’t practice black magic or have an abusive witch for a mother.
“I don’t think the gods have doors,” she said with the barest smile.
“Then I would have built the doors so I could knock on them.”
Her gaze met mine. “Sly was lucky to have you as a friend.”
“Don’t know how true that is. I sure made his life difficult these past few months.” I took a tentative step forward. My boot tocked against the tile floor, the sound echoing up the stairwell above us in an otherwise silent space. I was surprised I didn’t hear any loud music or shouting or general partying. This building, after all, catered to students attending the university across the street.
“We should talk about this in your apartment.”
She shook her head. “Can’t.”
“Listen. Sly was my best friend in the whole world. I need…” I glanced past Angelica to the stairs behind her. I didn’t hear anyone coming, but this still wasn’t the place to talk.
Angelica didn’t seemed concerned.
“His death wasn’t your fault,” she said. “That…amateur. You said he did it.” She paused. “He did admit to it before you…ended him, right?”
“He told me he was the one who got him sick.”
Angelica’s dubious look sparked a small detail to come back to mind, some things Horton had said right before I’d killed him.
I’m sorry. I just, I was pissed, man. But he’s gonna get better. No harm done.
Horton had thought Sly would get better. If he’d meant to kill him, why would he think that?
There’s no way, man. It wasn’t me. I didn’t—
Those had been his last words. Convinced to the end that Sly’s death had not been his fault.
Simple answer. He had been lying. Begging me because he didn’t want me to give what he had given.
Yet the look in Angelica’s eyes caused doubt to churn in my gut. “Something make you think it wasn’t him?” I asked.
All at once, she shuttered her expression, cutting off any sense of thought or emotion going on behind her eyes. “You need to go.”
But her trying to shut me out told me as much as I needed to know. “You and your mothers. You did have something to do with it.”
“We didn’t kill Sly,” she said, voice flat and not a damn bit convincing. “You said so yourself.”
“When I talked to Horton, to the guy who cursed Sly, he made it sound like the curse was harmless. Murder hadn’t been his intention.”
“He was lying, of course.”
I slowly shook my head. The pieces coming together tied my gut into knots.
You killed the wrong man, that wicked part of my psyche insisted. You killed the wrong man.
“Sly’s soul,” I said. “The piece you have. It was still connected to him before he died. You said so yourself. Whatever you were doing with it could have killed him.”
Angelica took a step back, the sole of her flat scuffing against the old fashioned tile floor.
“I told you, our ritual shouldn’t have hurt him.”
“Shouldn’t isn’t couldn’t.”
He
r nostrils quivered. The wet glaze across her eyes betrayed the emotion she was trying to hide.
I let the possibilities spin through my mind until I came to an idea that made sense. “A man without all of his soul…” I trailed off, thinking aloud, but still watching her for any hint of a reaction to those thoughts, some sign that I was on the right track. “That made him weaker. At least when it came to a sickness of the soul, which was how Horton’s curse worked. He would have been fine if…”
Angelica took another step back, close enough to the stairs to put a foot up on the first one. “We couldn’t have known.”
“He would have been fine,” I said again, “if he’d had his entire soul. There was no way for Horton to know Sly didn’t have all of his.”
“We couldn’t have known,” Angelica shouted. Her voice echoed its way up the stairwell. The sound of a door swinging open echoed down in answer.
“Angi?” a girl’s voice called.
I looked up, but from where I stood in the lobby, I couldn’t see beyond the first flight of stairs.
“His soul was weak. Maybe your ritual made it even weaker, since there was still a connection between the piece you had and what he still had in himself. That’s what the healer told me. And you admitted the same thing when you came accusing me of doing something to break that connection.”
Angelica’s expression flattened even more. She sounded possessed when she spoke. “We are not compelled to answer to you. We are the Maidens of Shadow.”
I curled my hands into fists. The muscles around my jaw had locked. I had to forced them to move so I could speak. “You don’t feel the least bit guilty that you helped kill Sly?”
Footsteps coming from above. A set of bare feet judging from the soft whisper they made on the stairs.
“Here comes one of your sisters,” I said. “Will she give a shit? Or are all you black-hearted witches so far removed from your mortality, you might as well be demons yourselves?”
I recognized the girl who stepped around the turn in the stairs and came down behind Angelica. She was one of a pair of red-haired twins in the coven. A little thinner than what looked healthy, but with a cute, round face covered with freckles. The look in her eyes at that moment? Not so cute.
She wore a pink bathrobe open, a green sweatshirt and matching sweatpants underneath. For some reason, these girls often seemed dressed as if they’d just rolled out of bed.
“What’s going on, Angi?”
Angelica didn’t say anything.
I figured I’d fill her in. “Your little coven killed my best friend.”
Freckles came down to Angelica’s side. “He talking about Sly?”
Angelica didn’t look at her, or so much as nod. Her gaze stayed on me, eyes dull and moist.
Her coven sister sneered at me. “We had nothing to do with it. Why don’t you just leave us alone.”
“I’m not going through my whole story again,” I said. “Tell her, Angelica. Snap out of it and tell her how you helped kill Sylvester Petrie, one of the greatest men to walk this fucked up earth.”
Angelica blinked. Her faced softened. When she sighed, her body seemed to deflate. Her sister took Angelica’s hand. “What’s he talking about?”
“He’s right,” she said. “But there was no way we could know.”
Freckles looked back and forth between us as if we’d both gone insane. “Angi, you need to explain.”
After a nod, Angelica gave her sister the short version, ending with, “We couldn’t have known it would happen. But it’s true. He wouldn’t have died if he’d had his whole soul.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
I got through to Angelica. At least, I thought so. But it didn’t matter, because her sister took over the duties of stonewalling me. She put her arm around Angelica’s shoulders and turned her around. Then Freckles twisted her neck to look back at me.
“If you come here again—”
I held my right hand out at my side and lit it with blue flame. “Don’t threaten me, witch. I’m done letting you cunts intimidate me.”
A cold gust of wind blew at my back.
“Sebastian,” Mom said behind me. “Language.”
I looked over my shoulder. She and Odi both stood just inside the lobby door as it swung shut behind them. The wintry air that followed them in smelled fresh and clean. The cold didn’t bother me a bit. In fact, it invigorated me.
I turned back to Angelica and her freckled sister. Smiled. “A vampire, a sorceress, and the Unturned walk into a witches’ den. Sounds like the start of a pretty good joke.”
Freckles frowned. “You think you stand a chance against us?”
“According to Angi there, the moms have all skipped town. You girls have power, no doubt. But sorcery moves a lot faster than witchery, and the way I’m feeling, I’m willing to see how that goes.”
“For what?”
“For the soul of my friend.”
Freckles gave Angelica a gentle nudge up the stairs. “Go on. I’ll deal with them.”
Angelica stole a glance at me, then turned to her sister. “Kelly, don’t.”
“I’ll be fine.”
But Angelica only made it up three more stairs before stopping and turning back to me. “Please don’t do this,” she said to me this time.
“I want his soul,” I said flatly.
Kelly rolled her eyes and groaned with disgust. “We don’t have it, asswipe. Our mothers took it.”
A green sickness filled my stomach. My hands felt clammy. Even the one still holding my blue fire.
“What did you think you were going to do with it anyway?”
“Give it back to him,” I pushed through my clenched teeth.
“Oh, brother, you truly are an idiot.”
Odi stepped forward. “Dude, you don’t talk to him like that.”
Kelly shifted her poisoned gaze to Odi. “Or what?” She titled her head back. “You gonna try to get some of this? I dare you to try.”
A low, very vampirish growl rumbled out of Odi.
My first instinct was to tell him to hold back. But looking at that smug little freckled face of Kelly’s made me decide to let Odi growl as much as he wanted. Growl, and whatever else he might have in mind. A witch with a ripped open throat would find it difficult to utter a curse.
I also felt Mom’s magical energy swell against my back, giving me a boost of confidence. We could easily take Kelly down on her own. Angelica with her if we had to. Their ultimate power came from their combined strength. If we hit now, if we hit hard, we could wipe them out.
And still end up with nothing, dipshit.
I sure loved it when my inner voice called me names. But this time it spoke truth—except for the dipshit part. Killing five young witches wouldn’t bring Sly back, and it wouldn’t do much to convince the mothers to hand over the soul.
I clamped my mouth shut and counted back from five before I said another word.
“I want his soul,” I said slowly. “Figure out an excuse. I don’t care what. But get it back from your mothers.”
Kelly puffed her cheeks and blew, riffling her bright red bangs. Her eyes rolled. She threw her hands out at her sides. “Don’t you get it? They’re going to use it. It’s an ingredient.” She emphasized each syllable of the last word as if I might not understand.
“Use it for what?”
She shrugged. “I dunno. Not what we first had planned. It’s not powerful enough.” Her bitchy expression softened for an instant. Then her nose wrinkled and her eyebrows drew close. She nearly scalded me with her blazing stare. “Unless you plan on throwing that fire, Unturned, I suggest you get the fuck out of here.”
Mom’s magic grew closer, until she stood right at my side. Her power hummed, but the witches couldn’t sense it. It would take them some kind of spell to measure magical energy. They had no idea the mystical strength they faced in that moment.
“Ladies,” she said.
Angelica wrung her hands and nibbl
ed at her lower lip.
Kelly sneered. “Back off old lady. Just because we helped you once, doesn’t make us girlfriends.”
Mom calmly inclined her head. “I appreciate your help. It led to closure I desperately needed.”
“Then what do you want?”
“Same thing as my son. Sylvester’s soul?”
Kelly’s gaze danced from one of us to the other, measuring up her three challengers.
My flame hand dripped with sweat. It took concentration and some extra energy to control fire for an extended duration. I had let some of my concentration go, allowing the flame’s heat to touch my hand a little too much, just like I had warned Odi about.
I readjusted my focus and directed the flame’s heat away from me again.
Kelly glanced back at Angelica.
“We should help them,” Angelica said. “It’s Sly.”
“Didn’t you hear what he said? He wants to put the soul back.”
“So what?” I asked.
“It won’t work,” Kelly said. “You can’t just shove it back into him.”
“Fine,” I said. “But there is a way, isn’t there?”
She had thin lips, and when she pressed them together, her mouth looked like a small cut across her face. I tried to read her eyes. There was more than anger there. A little fear, I thought. She didn’t want to answer.
But Angelica did.
“A good healer could do it. I don’t know how it would turn out with such a small piece.”
Kelly snapped her fingers at Angelica as if she were a naughty dog. “Shut up.”
Angelica lifted her chin. New light filled her eyes. “Excuse me, sister? Is that how you speak to an elder?”
If not for the tension in the air, I might have laughed. All those girls looked the same age to me. When they were talking elders, they couldn’t have meant much more than a handful of months, maybe a year. At the same time, it fit so well. They all acted like an extended family, and a family’s pecking order often started with the oldest child on down.
Kelly straightened her spine and pressed out her chest. She looked ready to talk back, but then Angelica tilted her head ever so slightly, the message subtle but clear. Try me, bitch.
