The Soulkeepers Box Set

by G. P. Ching

“Yes, but let it go. It’s not worth it. Trust me.”

  The blonde girl’s voice again … Missy, “I don’t know. He’s got nice hair.”

  “Well, he’s not bad looking, but who wants to date an egg?” Amy replied.

  “An egg?” Dane asked.

  “You know,” she lowered her voice, “white on the outside and yellow in the middle.”

  The table burst into laughter. Jacob shot a glance at Dane and his hands tightened into fists. Malini grabbed his arm again, her delicate fingers on his wrist draining all aggression out of him. For some reason, he didn’t want to make a scene in front of her. He was afraid if something happened, a fight, she might get hurt. Plus, she seemed above all this, and he wanted to be too. He turned back toward her.

  “Are they for real?” he asked Malini.

  “Hmm. I’m afraid so.”

  “I guess, where I’m from … in Hawaii, no one would ever use that word.”

  “I know. Not where I’m from either.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “All over really, but London last. I was born in India.”

  “I don’t get it, Malini,” Jacob said. “I mean these people act like it’s 1950. They don’t even know me.”

  “Most of these people have been here since well before that.”

  He laughed but then realized she wasn’t joking. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, take Dane Michaels, for example. His family settled here around 1900. His family has lived on the same land for over a hundred years. And Amy Barger, her family has lived in the same house for four generations. This town is like an island; all they know is each other. They grow up in the same houses, doing the same things as their parents.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “No. Think about it. Who would move to Paris? I mean besides us, and we didn’t have a choice. There’s not much here. Logically, if you grow up here and you are open minded, you go to college and never come back. If you like it here, which means that you are happy living in the same house, with the same people, with the same thoughts and ideas as the generation before, then you stay. If you stay, you marry someone just like you. It’s like inbreeding.”

  “How do you know all of this, Malini? I mean about the town history.”

  “My dad. He’s the only insurance agent in town. Houses, cars, life insurance policies, you can learn a lot about people by what they insure. That’s why we’re here. State Benefit decided to embrace diversity and hello Paris, Illinois. You know, he took over because the last State Benefit agent died.”

  “He died?”

  “Yeah. He was ninety-six years old and still working. Died in his office. Weird huh?”

  “Weird.”

  “But good for us. There’s no competition so, whatever these people think, if you want insurance in this town you see Jim Gupta.”

  Jacob opened his mouth to respond but was drowned out by the sound of the bell and the subsequent clatter of trays and chairs.

  “Do you want to study later then?” Malini asked.

  “Definitely. Bring your notes,” he said, “please.”

  She gave the proud smile again, lifting her tray and carrying it to the conveyor belt near the kitchen. Jacob collected his things and turned to follow. He was halfway there when something hard pegged him in the back, knocking him forward. On the floor near his feet, pieces of hard-boiled egg lay broken. He whipped his head around and met Dane’s cold gray eyes. A red tide of anger washed over him.

  Jacob glared at Dane with wordless hate and, as he locked eyes with the guy, he thought of ten different ways he could attack him. The fork on his tray had promise. He could do it; tear off the lid to this thing coiled inside of him and loose it on Dane. He might even enjoy it. He may not be as big as Dane but he was fast and he knew how to fight. More importantly, he had nothing to lose.

  Then he thought of Malini. She lingered by the door, watching the drama unfold with her books clutched against her chest like a shield. What would she think of him if he started something?

  No one moved. The cafeteria was so quiet he could hear the ice machine running. Time seemed to slow as Jacob stared, unblinking, at Dane. Finally, one of the lunch ladies cleared her throat, breaking the silent tension and Jacob backed down. The thing in his stomach coiled tighter like an unsatisfied hunger as he made for the door.

  No sooner was Jacob’s back turned than the cafeteria burst into laughter.

  He had to find a way home. If he didn’t, this might be the longest year of his life.

  Chapter 6

  Dane

  Dane Michaels wandered through the forest at the back of his family’s farm. He knew better than to call her name. Man, she could be a bitch when she wanted to be. She was beautiful though, way cuter than Amy.

  He wasn’t sure why she always insisted that they meet out here. He was sick of it. It was always on her terms, her rules. Sometimes she even blew him off entirely. She never gave any excuse, just didn’t show up. Today though, he wanted her there. He needed what she had more than before and he hoped she would give it to him quickly.

  Snow drifted down from the pine needles and stung his exposed skin. The wind blew right through his wool coat. He raised the collar around his ears and huddled into the thick fabric. He hated winter.

  “You’ve come alone?” she said. Her voice was smooth and as cold as the bitter air.

  Dane’s head snapped right. She was standing so close to him, close enough to touch, but he hadn’t heard her coming. Her platinum hair blew back from her face in the uneven gusts. Eyes, like blue ice, cut through him. The cold didn’t seem to bother her. In nothing but a blouse and plaid skirt, she leaned up against one of the lanky pines.

  “Yeah,” Dane replied. “So.”

  “I told you, I want to meet your friends.”

  “Damn … I’ve been bringing people back here all year. You’ve met everyone.”

  “Don’t lie to me.” Her face was suddenly inches from his, the line of her mouth a grim warning.

  “You’ve met everyone in my class that’s worth meeting,” he spat.

  “Then, who is not worthy?”

  Dane looked away. This was so not his idea of fun. “Whatever,” he said under his breath. He turned for home. Her hand shot out, so fast he didn’t see it coming. Fingers sank into his forearm, tightening like a vice. The pain was immediate.

  “Oww! God … stop! Let go!” Dane yanked his arm toward his body but her grip was like steel. The pain was intense, bone crushing. “Please!”

  That’s when he smelled her, a spicy, sweet scent that reminded him of fresh-baked pumpkin pie. It surrounded him, weaving into his nostrils and flaming out across his body until every part of him was salivating for it. He met her eyes again and a wave of pleasure washed over him like a warm bath.

  “Who have I not met, Dane?” she cooed. Her voice was soft now, soothing. She loosened her grip.

  “There are two kids that I don’t hang with much. A girl and a boy.”

  “Their names?”

  “Malini and Jacob.”

  “You will bring them to me. I want to meet them.”

  “Why?” he asked, but his voice cracked, weak and unsure.

  “I have my reasons. Bring them here, at this time of day, in one month.”

  Dane rolled his eyes. To get Lau here, he would have to either overpower the kid or pretend to be his friend. Neither would be easy but the thought of the second made him ill. He considered telling her he wouldn’t do it but then the smell came to him again, stronger.

  “Do you have more of that stuff, from before?”

  A thermos appeared in her hand and she held it out to him. Dane wondered for a fleeting moment where she’d gotten it. He hadn’t noticed the container before and she didn’t have a bag or a coat. She cracked the lid and the smell of cinnamon wafted out. All at once he stopped caring about where it came from and snatched it from her hand.

  He took a deep swig. The stuff b
urned, from his lips to his toes, but then the rush he was waiting for came on full force. Power. Pure liquid power coursed through his veins. In that moment, he was enough. He was bigger than this farm, this family, and this town. There were no boundaries to what he could do or what he could be.

  He reached into his pocket for a cigarette. Maybe he could do anything for this.

  “Tell me more about these two,” she demanded.

  Dane lit the end of the cigarette and took a deep drag. “I think, maybe, I could tell you a couple of things.” He rubbed his arm. For some reason, it felt sore. As he started to talk, he couldn’t remember how he’d hurt it. But he had no problem remembering everything he knew about Jacob and Malini.

  Chapter 7

  Excavation

  Two boxes. Everything from the apartment, all the material evidence that he’d ever had a family before coming to Paris, fit into two moving boxes. Jacob walked into the gaping mouth of the Laudners’ two-car garage and stared at the brown rectangles wrapped in packing tape.

  Strange, the thumping in his chest and the way his throat ached when he swallowed. He needed to open them, to go through his mom’s things. Uncle John said it would give him closure. But he hesitated. The truth was, he didn’t want closure; he wanted to believe she was alive. He refused to give up on her. But he also knew it was important to check that everything was there. To make sure, that when they did find her, all of her things would be accounted for.

  He pulled a pair of gardening shears off their hook on the wall and sliced through the tape at the top of the first box. It was filled with items wrapped in brown paper. Jacob reached in and unwrapped one—a glass. He grabbed another—a soap dish. Kitchen and bathroom items, all of it. He guessed the flat ones on the bottom were plates and the things on top were mixing bowls and drinking glasses.

  When Jacob sliced through the tape on the second box, white stuffing burst from the incision. The shears had sliced too deep, into the pillow that used to be his mother’s. He pinched the hole and pulled the pillow out. Her quilt was underneath it, folded neatly on top of her clothes and a short wooden box. He caught the scent of cherry blossoms, the smell of her favorite lotion.

  Resting his elbows on the sides of the box, he allowed his head to loll forward. With his eyes closed, Jacob could picture them there, sitting cross-legged on the quilt, playing crazy eights with a deck of cards so old you could tell the eight of spades from the fingerprint worn into the pattern on the back. Whatever happened to those cards?

  Jacob opened his eyes. The brown corner of the wooden box peaked out from under his mother’s salmon-colored sweatshirt. Was it a jewelry box? Did his mother own a jewelry box? He’d never, ever, seen her wear jewelry. If she’d had any before his dad died, they would have sold it a long time ago. Jacob absolutely did not remember the box. He reached in and pulled the shiny wood from under the linens.

  Koa wood, inlaid with a pale carving of a phoenix, the box looked much too expensive to have belonged to her. He tried to lift the lid but it was locked. The gold keyhole was small, like a diary lock.

  Jacob set the wooden box aside and dug deeper for the key. The moving box was an awkward height and the cardboard buckled under his weight. He swept his hand around the bottom and tried to feel for something that might contain small items. When nothing presented itself, he found a relatively clean section of concrete and unloaded the items one by one. The glasses, the plates, even the mixing bowls he freed from their paper cocoons. Everything was there, everything he remembered from the apartment. It looked like a rummage sale spread out across the driveway.

  There was no key.

  It wasn’t a complete loss though. Near the bottom of the bedroom box, he’d found a framed picture of his family, the one that had hung on the bedroom wall. Smile lines creased the corners of his father’s green eyes, serenity lingered in the curve of his mother’s mouth, and Jacob was missing teeth but nothing else. This was a picture of a family that didn’t exist anymore—a family extinct.

  The cold bit into him as he rewrapped and packaged the items back into the boxes. For more than an hour, Jacob worked to replace everything except for the picture and the jewelry box. He set those aside to bring inside. When he was done, he pushed the boxes into a corner of the garage and turned to leave.

  Across the street, the Victorian loomed black and blue, a bruise on the horizon. The wind rattled the ivy on the fence and knocked some icicles free. They fell like knives, slicing the snow-covered yard. Dead leaves swirled behind the wrought-iron fence. For a second, just a fraction of a moment, Jacob could’ve sworn he’d seen a face staring at him through the front window. He closed the garage door and hurried inside.

  Chapter 8

  Ancient History

  Days of school turned into weeks, then months, hours carved out of a forced routine. The weather was cold, school was hard, and Jacob got very good at coming up with reasons to avoid getting too close to the Laudners.

  The one light in an otherwise dismal winter was Malini. He ate lunch with her every day because he wanted to, not for the obvious reason that he couldn’t have sat anywhere else. She was the only thing he looked forward to most days.

  “You know, Jacob, I never told you what P.S. meant,” Malini said as she picked at her French fries, eating only the brown crispy ones. Friday was always hamburgers and fries. The burgers were leathery Frisbees but the fries were tolerable.

  “Yeah. I hear them calling you that. I haven’t asked you because it’s pretty obvious it’s not a term of endearment.” He reached across the table and dipped a fry into her ketchup.

  “It means push start. They’re making fun of me because I’m Indian. You know how some Indian women wear a bindi?”

  “The makeup on their forehead?” Jacob said, touching himself between his eyes.

  “Yes. Well, Dane and his friends seem to think a better term for the women who wear them is push start or P.S.”

  Jacob was speechless. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “You have to consider the source.”

  “Is that why you don’t wear one?”

  “No. If I wanted to wear one, I wouldn’t let those morons stop me. I don’t wear it because it’s sort of a Hindu thing and I’m Christian. I know that people now just wear them as makeup and it doesn’t mean what it once did, but I’ve never gotten into the habit. Most of the time I don’t even wear mascara.” She laughed and then shifted her attention toward the corner of her orange tray.

  “Effing idiots,” Jacob said. The knot in his stomach tightened. Malini was joking about this now but he knew how it must feel. It wasn’t right. He forced himself to smile for her sake. “Do you want me to pound them for you?”

  “Yeah sure, right now.”

  He faked to stand just long enough for Malini’s eyes to grow wide and her face to flush, then fell back into his chair, laughing. She clocked him on the shoulder. The truth was, Jacob thought he could take Dane and he had it coming, but taking on all of them in the cafeteria would be suicide. It wasn’t the right time. But someday, someday soon, Jacob was going to teach that guy a lesson.

  “Malini, what are you doing after school today?”

  “Walking home, as always.”

  “Do you want to study together again? I’m supposed to meet my uncle at his shop but then we could go to McNaulty’s.”

  “Sure.”

  McNaulty’s was a six-table family restaurant next to the Peterson’s Clothier up Main Street. Malini and Jacob had gone there a couple of times after school. It was usually empty on the weekdays and Mrs. McNaulty let them sit at a table for hours sipping free refills of soda.

  After school, they made their way down the cracked squares of concrete along Main Street. Malini pointed out the green necks of crocuses sprouting in the muddy patches on either side of the walk. The snow had melted, but Jacob had to take her word for it that spring was coming. The cutting wind seemed to disagree.

  “You know,
my father says your uncle’s shop has been here since Paris was settled.”

  “Really?”

  “Your family has been in Paris over one hundred and fifty years, Jacob.”

  “Wow, a hundred fifty years and I didn’t know they existed until just after Christmas.”

  “What?” Malini turned toward him, but Jacob ducked inside the shop. The last thing he wanted to talk about was the Laudners. But Jacob noticed for the first time the crumbling red brick around the entrance, the worn marble floor, the hand-carved sign: Laudner’s Flowers est. 1858.

  “Jacob, is that you?” Katrina’s voice called from the back room.

  “Yeah, Katrina. Is John around?”

  Katrina emerged, large clippers in her hand. “No, he had to go on a delivery.”

  “Could you tell him Malini and I are going to McNaulty’s to study?”

  “Tell him yourself. You’re supposed to stay and help out this afternoon. They’ve got the Harrington wedding tomorrow and need fifty feet of fern garland.”

  “Sorry, Katrina. Can’t.”

  “Whatever. I’ll just tell him the truth. You’re completely useless.” She rolled her eyes.

  Jacob was out the door before Malini could introduce herself to Katrina. He heard her beating feet down the sidewalk trying to catch up to him. He opened the door to McNaulty’s for her.

  “What was that all about?” she asked.

  “My uncle keeps trying to get me to work in his shop.”

  “Well why not? It doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “It’s a long story, Malini. Just don’t ask. You don’t want to know.”

  “If you say so, but I would love to have my own money.” She slid into a booth by the window.

  Jacob crossed his arms over his stomach. He’d been accepting spending money from his uncle for lunch, his cell phone, movies, and of course his new cold-weather clothes. Jacob hated taking the man’s money, but it couldn’t be avoided. He would have to get a job eventually if he ever wanted to earn a ticket back home, but he figured if his dad disliked the Laudners enough to legally change his name, then he wasn’t going to work in a shop by that name. It just didn’t feel right.