The Soulkeepers Box Set

by G. P. Ching

  “You did really well today, Jake. I can’t believe this was your first time skiing,” she said.

  “You too. You’re amazing. Is there anything you can’t do?”

  “Lots of things. But none that I’ll admit.” She smiled at him and he couldn’t resist leaning in for a gentle kiss. He pulled back a fraction of an inch.

  “How long have we known each other, Malini?”

  “About six months.”

  “You’re my best friend.”

  “You’re mine, too. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “I feel the same way. I just … I want you to know.” Jacob reached his toe forward until it touched the edge of the water. “I feel like I can trust you. I want to show you something. Something you’ve been asking me about for a while now. But don’t freak out, okay?”

  “This is about that day at the grocery store with Dane, isn’t it? Something else has happened.”

  He nodded.

  “Anything. You can tell me anything,” she said.

  “You’ll keep it a secret.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  Jacob asked the water to climb his leg to the hand that rested on his knee. Once it flowed into his palm, he willed it into a chain, freezing each link as it formed. Instead of the last link, he made a solid heart. The crystals formed facets within its center, flickering in the firelight like a gemstone. He wrapped the bracelet around her wrist. He didn’t need a clasp; the water melted and refroze in exactly the right size.

  Malini’s face was a mask of astonishment, her mouth slightly open, her eyes wide.

  “What is this, Jake? This thing with you, is it getting stronger? You can control it now. When did that start?”

  “Malini, can’t you just relax and enjoy this?”

  “No, I want to know. I’m worried about you. Do you understand this at all? I want to help you.”

  “For tonight, just for tonight, can you just enjoy it? Can we decide to talk about it tomorrow? I have something I want to tell you.”

  Malini’s mouth twisted into a disappointed scowl but he could see how much she wanted the night to continue. She was in as deep as he was, and she didn’t want to get out. As much as she was dying to understand the how of it, he was sure she was more interested in knowing what he had to say.

  “It’s cold,” she finally said, smiling again. Her shoulders relaxed as she admired the ice in the firelight.

  “That’s one of the problems. The other is, if I let go, it will melt. But I’ll get you a real one someday.”

  “I love it,” she said.

  “There’s something I want to tell you.”

  “What?” she asked. He watched the fire dance inside the heart.

  “I think I love you, Malini. I feel like I’ve known you forever and I will know you forever. I love you. I know we’re young but I want us to stay together.”

  Malini looked up from the heart, into his eyes. “I love you, too.” And, then she was kissing him. She lifted her wrist from his hand, the bracelet melting down her arm, and placed her palm on his face.

  Jacob hardly noticed the cold water that dripped down his chest. His whole world was her mouth, her face. Even when the fireworks began, sending showers of twinkling light over Lake Stelton, they had nothing on her. In front of the water, stretched out on the blanket, something told him nothing ever would.

  Chapter 30

  The Hardware Stone

  Snakes are everywhere. They drip from the branches of the tree, falling like strands of spaghetti to the sand and surrounding his feet.

  “Help, Jacob! Help me,” a voice calls from behind him. He turns to see Malini, her eyes wide with terror. The snakes close in. Jacob leaps into the air, flipping over the serpents and landing directly in front of her. He reaches for the canteen around his neck and pours the water into his hand. He wills it into a scythe of ice and slices at the snakes writhing at Malini’s feet. Scaly skin flies, rubbery flesh piling in the sand. They die, but more come.

  They talk to her in hisses, all of them at once.

  “Come with us.” They ignore the slashing scythe. “We will give you the world. Think of all the good you will do when you control it.”

  Jacob glances back, expecting to see fear on Malini’s face, but she is serene. She is resolved, calm as a stone. She lifts her hand to Jacob’s shoulder and, as she makes contact, everything becomes clear.

  Jacob knows exactly what to do. He drops the scythe, circles his arms, and delivers a two-handed push. Not a human push, a push from somewhere greater, with power beyond his own. The sky opens and the rain pours down. The serpents don’t stand a chance.

  * * * * *

  God, he hated his dreams. Jacob rolled over and looked at the clock—five-thirty. What he wouldn’t give for a full night’s sleep. He reached under the pillow to try to get comfortable. His fingers tangled in a cord. Rolling onto his back, he pulled his hand out and the red stone came with it, twinkling in the early morning light.

  Between his thumb and forefinger, he examined the stone again, the light picking up the network of facets under the smooth surface. When he would orient it in just the right way, a black square was visible, as if the stone had formed around an imperfection. He brought the stone closer to get a better look and the redness seemed to grow larger with his shift in perspective. A weightless shift, like free falling, overcame him. He reached out to grab the bed but it was gone. His room was gone. He fell into the black square at the center of the red and stood up in the oddest place he could have imagined. It was blank, an empty page.

  “Where am I?” he asked. His body felt funny, disconnected somehow.

  “In between,” a voice said.

  In the blink of an eye, he was standing in a hardware store. Behind the counter, an old man in overalls and a cap drummed his fingers.

  “Who are you?” Jacob asked.

  “You don’t remember me? Well, I guess I looked different when I gave you the stone.” Abruptly, the man shrank into the hunched dwarf woman, and then grew back into himself. “I thought this form would be easier for you,” he said.

  “What are you? What is this place?”

  “A gift from the Achuar. The Healer felt sorry for you, for the loss of your mama. She wanted to give you something. I am a window.”

  “A window?”

  “I am part of the Healer’s medicine, her gift of sight. I am a shadow of her mind. Ask me and I will answer.”

  “So I can ask you anything?”

  “You can. But I can only answer questions about the future, as it stands today. The future is always changing. Every decision is a fork in the road. I can tell you only where the road leads, today. But mind yourself, Horseman; knowledge of the future is a dangerous thing. Are you prepared?”

  “Yes,” he said, too quickly.

  “Then ask what you will.”

  “Where is my mother?”

  “That is a question about the present, not the future. I cannot answer.”

  “Then, will I find my mother?”

  The man pulled out a hubcap from behind the counter. He selected a variety of nuts and bolts from various bowls, and folded them into his greasy palm. Shaking them vigorously, he threw them like dice into the hubcap. They crashed and clanged. When they’d settled at the center the man leaned over them, reading their position against the metal. “Yes,” he said.

  “Is she alive?”

  “I can’t answer that question.”

  Jacob was beginning to understand. He tried again.

  “Will she be dead or alive when I find her?”

  The nuts and bolts made a sound like a cymbal as they hit the pan.

  “Neither.”

  “Neither. That doesn’t make any sense. Explain?”

  The man shook his head. Frustrated, he tried again.

  “Will I use the tree to find her?”

  Clang

  “Yes.”

  Jacob thought hard about how to phrase his next ques
tion.

  “How will I find the notebooks about the tree?”

  Crash

  The man studied the pattern of nuts and bolts. “Gideon,” he said.

  The white walls of the store bled to pink, then red.

  “Looks like it’s time for you to go. Y’all come back now, real soon,” said the man, waving his meaty hand. Backward Jacob flew, as if the stone was spitting him out. He fell onto his bed, into the square of light streaming through the window. Someone was banging on his door.

  “Time for church, moron,” yelled Katrina.

  “I’ll be right there.” He slid the stone back under his pillow and bounded out of bed, bracing himself for another long morning.

  Chapter 31

  Gideon’s Passage

  As soon as his obligatory Sunday brunch was eaten, Jacob crossed the street to Dr. Silva’s. He didn’t need an excuse, it was his job to feed the cat and weed the garden. In fact, he would do those things, but he would do something else as well. He would find Dr. Silva’s notebooks and learn how to navigate Oswald.

  The mosquitoes were becoming a nuisance after dark, so he decided to work in the garden first. He finished up by late afternoon, and then let himself in through the sunroom to feed Gideon. The big red cat was waiting, pacing the tabletop. Jacob pulled the next plate from the refrigerator and placed it on the floor.

  “You must be hungry, huh, boy,” Jacob said.

  Gideon didn’t move. The tip of his tail twitched.

  “You can eat now.” He tapped the edge of the dish and made a kissing sound with his lips. Gideon blinked in his general direction.

  “Okay. Whatever,” Jacob said. According to the stone, Gideon would somehow be the key to finding the notebooks but he didn’t understand how. Maybe it wasn’t the cat but rather something about the cat. He decided to search the library again. Maybe a book on cats or a picture of Gideon would be the clue he needed.

  He walked toward the front of the house. When he reached the bottom of the grand staircase, Gideon leapt in front of him, teeth bared. The cat growled a low warning, the hair on his back standing straight up.

  “Gideon, get out of the way,” Jacob said and tried to step around him. The cat struck, shredding his shin with his claws.

  “Owww. Son of a … damn it, Gideon! What the hell?” He reached down and pulled up his pant leg. Three rips in his skin dripped blood onto his sock. He limped back to the kitchen, not wanting the blood to stain the white marble floor. With a wet paper towel, he dabbed at the cuts. They stung fiercely. He had to sit down and put the scratched leg up in a chair to get a good look at it.

  Gideon followed him into the kitchen and sat too close for comfort, glaring in his direction. The stare was knowing, almost … human. An idea clicked into place as fast as his brain could process it. Dr. Silva was not human, and her cat was probably not a normal cat. What exactly the cat was, he didn’t know for sure, but what he did know was that if he wanted Gideon’s help he would have to take a more direct approach.

  “Gideon, I need to go upstairs.” Jacob looked the cat full on like he was talking to a person.

  The cat shook his head from side to side. He did understand.

  “I have to find Dr. Silva’s notebooks. The ones that say how to use Oswald. It’s important.”

  Again, the cat shook his head vigorously.

  “It’s the only way. I have to find my mom. I can’t just forget about her. She’s the only real family I have left.” He rubbed his eyes. “It’s not that I don’t like the people I’ve met in Paris. My friend Malini, my Uncle John, Dr. Silva, they’ve all become important to me. But the thing is, my mom is all I have left of my history. She’s my roots, my only link to who I really am. If she’s alive, the thought that she could be somewhere and need my help…” He shook his head. “I have to find her. I have to help.”

  The cat continued to stare but his eyes softened. Jacob was getting through.

  “Gideon, how do I make you understand?” He rested his head in his hands. “After my dad died, when I was, I think, eleven, my mom took me to the beach. It was a Sunday afternoon and our first time back since we lost him. I was boogie boarding. It was a great day for it because the water was rough and the waves were big. I’m not sure when exactly I knew I was in trouble. The water swept me from shore but I thought I could swim through it. I lost my board in the waves but I was a strong swimmer, always have been. But the harder I swam, the harder the water pushed. I swam until my muscles ached but went nowhere.

  “I think I realized I was caught in a riptide when I saw my mom wade into the water. She dove straight into it and let the water carry her out to me. While I struggled and panicked, she just went with the current. I was so tired by then that I stopped swimming. The ocean swallowed me and I saw the sun grow smaller through the surface as I sank. Frickin’ hilarious now, don’t you think, to know I almost drowned when my body was just waiting to give me the ability to control water?

  “My mom got there just in time. She put her arm under my chin and pulled my head to the surface. I caught my breath again and struggled against her grip. I thought we were going to die. She told me to relax, to let the riptide take us out to sea. Somehow, I calmed down enough to listen to her. Sure enough the surge of water eventually spat us out. Once outside of the riptide’s hold, she floated on her back, my head in her arm, and kicked us back to shore. It wasn’t until we reached the beach that she started to cry. She said, ‘You’ve got to be more careful, Jacob. We are all we have now. It’s just us. We’ve got to take care of each other.’ Don’t you get it, Gideon? She’s lost, somewhere, in her own riptide. No one is coming for her. I. Am. All. She. Has.”

  Gideon looked down at his paws. Jacob sensed that if the cat could shed tears he would.

  “Gideon, have you ever lost something, something so important to you that you felt like it didn’t matter if you lived or died to find it? What mattered is that you tried.”

  The red cat blinked slowly, and nodded. His green eyes expressed sheer agony. Jacob was surprised at the depth of it and out of pity reached out to scratch him behind the ear. Gideon jerked his head away, annoyed.

  “What matters to me is that I can look in the mirror tomorrow and know that I tried everything in my power to get her back. So what do you say? Will you help me?” he asked.

  Gideon’s whiskers pulled back from his teeth. At first Jacob thought he’d offended the cat. Then he realized Gideon was smiling. The cat leapt from the table and ran for the stairs. Jacob stood on his bloody leg and followed at a limp. The scratches must have been deeper than they looked because they oozed blood and burned like his leg was on fire. Hobbling up the stairs proved to be pure agony and took much longer than it should have. When he finally reached the library, Gideon looked irritated.

  “Don’t look at me like that, Gideon. You did this to me,” Jacob said. “My leg is shredded.” He held up his pant leg to show off the swollen red wound.

  Gideon twitched his whiskers. With a coughing fit that sounded like he had a hairball caught in his throat, he ejected an enormous wad of spit onto Jacob’s hurt leg.

  “Ewww,” he said and was about to rip into the cat for adding insult to injury, when to his amazement the pain started to ebb. As the saliva dripped down his shin, the scratches visibly healed.

  “I wasn’t expecting that,” he said.

  Gideon made a sound between a laugh and a growl. Jacob followed him to the wall farthest from the bedrooms. A tapestry of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse hung from a dowel, its length spanning floor to ceiling over the silver paint. Gideon looked back at Jacob and then walked into the tapestry. He disappeared.

  Mouth open, Jacob approached the wall that had just swallowed the cat. The cloth of the tapestry was rough against his fingers. Once, when he was younger, he’d seen a magic show where the magician had used layered mirrors to disappear. He ran his hand behind the tapestry, looking for an explanation for the illusion.

  The cat popped
up beside him again, shaking his head. He closed his eyes in a deliberate way, and leaped through again. What was he trying to say? Jacob closed his eyes. The first time Gideon had gone through with his eyes open. Why would he want him to close his eyes? What happened when he closed his eyes? He couldn’t see the wall. Gideon didn’t want Jacob to see the wall. What else had he done differently? He had jumped. Why would it be important to not see the wall and to jump? Maybe because seeing was believing. Maybe, Gideon was trying to tell him to not believe in the wall. Maybe, the wall was an illusion.

  With this in mind, Jacob kept his eyes closed and leapt forward. His feet left carpet but landed on hard floor. He opened his eyes at the base of a winding iron staircase on the other side of the wall. Gideon’s white teeth stood out from his silhouette, framed in light from above. Jacob followed as the cat led him higher and higher up the spiral. The stairs ended in a round room with hardwood floors and walls made almost entirely of windows. He was in the tower!

  The witch’s hat tower loomed over the west side of the house. It was what gave the gothic Victorian its characteristic dark mood. Jacob hadn’t noticed before that there didn’t seem to be any way up to it from the inside of the house. Without Gideon, he might never have found it at all. The view was stunning. Dr. Silva protected this place for good reason. He could see Oswald from up here, as well as the entire enchanted garden.

  He took a look around the room. A sophisticated telescope stood near the east window. In the center of the room, a gigantic mahogany desk with a marble top was covered in papers. Behind the desk, every square inch of a standalone bookcase was covered with books and papers. There was no lamp or overhead light. Instead, candelabras circled the room. With enough natural light still streaming through the windows, he didn’t feel the need to light them.

  Jacob walked over to the desk and started riffling through the mass of papers, mostly drawings of roots and leaves. Several experiments used chemical formulas that he didn’t understand. On the bookshelf, no less than twenty versions of the Bible took up an entire shelf along with books on Buddhism, Judaism, and Taoism.