Soul Catcher

by Bridger, Leigh

  And I couldn’t ignore the blow that hit my head. That was the work of a flesh and blood man.

  I slid limply to the earth.

  The hard, cruel face of a demon looked down at me from a human face.

  “I will have my revenge now, bitch,” he said.

  And he dragged me away.

  *

  I slumped on my knees outside Father’s log house at the trading post. French Stick stood behind me, his copper-brown hand holding one end of the long leather thong tied to my bound hands. French Stick was once a normal man. He came from the overhill towns on the other side of the mountains, where he was known to be fierce and fair war chief. But French Stick had changed in a frightening way since joining the English against the Americans, and now even our own people whispered nervously about him.

  My cotton shirt, trailing to my bare thighs, was all I wore. It was bloody and shredded where the banes had clawed me. French Stick had jerked my leather skirt off as I lay, half-conscious, in the woods. He had shoved my legs apart and raped me. Blood stained my thighs.

  No wonder. A demon had taken over his body.

  “Father,” I whispered hoarsely. He lay on the ground, bleeding from the beating the English had given him. Nearby, Aunt Red Bird sat holding Uncle Turtle with his head in her lap. He had been bayoneted in one side. He breathed roughly, grimacing.

  The redcoats surrounded us along with French Stick’s warriors. The surviving people from town clung to each other inside a circle of muskets. There were only a few dozen terrified old men, women and children still alive. Since most of our warriors had gone to war, we were defenseless.

  A shrill English captain paced back and forth, looking down his nose at us. “This town betrayed its oath to the king of England. This peace town betrayed its oath to its own Cherokee brethren, who decreed that all Cherokees would fight on the side of the king.”

  “Wonaneya sent many a man to fight on the side of the English,” my father said, coughing blood. His hands and feet were bound. His eyes were swollen shut.

  “But Hagen McMahon, the Blood Cat Boys also come from this Cherokee town.”

  “Men are free to do what their hearts tell them.”

  “Men are not free to betray the crown, Mr. McMahon. Not even you bloody Scots-Irish.”

  My father spit on his boot. The captain drew back that boot and kicked him in the chest.

  “Stop,” I said. “What do you want from us?”

  “You are the wife of the traitor, Ian Thornton.”

  “Say nothing else,” Red Bird called. A soldier jabbed her in the back with the butt of his musket.

  I lifted my head proudly. French Stick’s leather thong cut into my wrists. They were raw now, like my vagina. “I am the wife of Ian Thornton, the patriot.”

  French Stick slapped me in the face. His long, dirty fingernails cut into my nose. Blood flowed. The English captain bent down to look at me. “Tell me where your husband is. I will spare these people—” he gestured toward my family and the remaining townspeople of Wonaneya—“if you do your duty the King of England and tell me where your husband is.”

  “Tell him no’ a damn thing,” daughter,” Father wheezed.

  The captain gestured to French Stick. “Tell your warriors to slit the old man’s throat.”

  French Stick gave the order. One of his men, one of our own Cherokee tribesmen, leapt forward with a long hunting knife ready. He jerked Father’s head back by its graying red hair and aimed the blade at his throat.

  “Spare him,” I gasped.

  The captain raised a hand, pausing the execution. “Tell me where your husband is. If you tell me the truth, I’ll spare you and yours. Truly.”

  The bane had said Ian and his men were in Ludaway, a few days’ ride away. Maybe the bane was lying. I hoped so. Wincing, I squinted up at the English officer. “What will you do with my husband and his men if you catch them?”

  “Arrest them and hold them prisoner. That is all I can guarantee. Once I have them in my custody your family and the other people of this town will be set free.”

  Without this chance, my father, aunt and uncle, and the rest of Wonaneya would die for sure. My head whirled. Time. I was trading hope for time. Ian was smart and strong; the Cherokee kinsmen with him would never surrender. Was I betraying my husband and my people or saving us all with a desperate play of chance?

  “My husband and his men are near the town of Ludaway,” I said.

  The captain smiled. “Thank you, Mrs. Thornton. Are you telling me the truth?”

  I raised my bleeding face. I thought he was honorable, even if French Stick, behind me, was a demon. “You have my word.”

  “Very good then.”

  French Stick gestured to his warriors. They slung their muskets and tomahawks over their shoulders and set off through the forest at a lithe trot. The captain straightened, his shoulders back. He turned to his recoated men, then dismissed my father and the rest with a shrug of his hand. “Kill them,” he said in a bored tone. “Kill them all.”

  The warrior who held my father’s head stabbed the knife into his throat. Before I could even scream he sliced Father’s neck from ear to ear. Blood spurted. Father’s beard became a sopping crimson sponge. His eyes went blank.

  I met Aunt Bird’s despairing eyes just before the warriors and redcoats slammed their tomahawks and bayonets into her body and Uncle Turtle’s. The people of Wonaneya screamed as the soldiers fired into their midst. The warriors set about hacking the scalps off the fallen. Our people were killing their own tribesmen and mutilating them.

  I gagged. Betrayal was an acid in my throat. I watched my father die, his eyes staring at me. I watched my aunt and uncle die; I watched the slaughter of my townspeople. I blamed myself. I thought I would die too, at any moment, and I didn’t care. But Ian would survive. Ian will not be caught. They will never catch him. I have not doomed my husband the way I just doomed my family and my town.

  Two redcoats headed toward me, bayonets raised. French Stick stepped in front of me. “The woman is mine. That was the bargain I made for leading you here.”

  The captain raised a hand. His men backed away. He nodded to French Stick. “Do what you will with her.”

  French Stick took me by my bound hands and dragged me to a small barn near the trading post. For the last time I looked back at my father’s blood-soaked yard.

  *

  My boon and angels fought for me. Fox and Owl, the Small People, and others—they surrounded me as I lay naked, tied between two posts in the middle of the small, log shed where French Stick, the man and the demon, his nameless owner, tortured me. My good spirits tried to ease the pain, the humiliation, the terror. They fogged my brain so I drifted away at times; they battled the banes who gnawed and spit and tried to invade my most private places. But they could not stop the demon.

  French Stick sat patiently on a pile of blankets near the barn’s open door. He stroked long strands of black hair he’d cut off my head, carelessly taking bits of my scalp with it. He wove some of the bloody hair into a small mat and admired it. Other strands he braided into his own hair, which hung from a narrow swath off the crown of his plucked head. He attached my earrings to his own pierced ears. He rubbed my blood into his bare chest and licked it off his knife. He had carved long lines down my breasts, my arms, my legs.

  Just outside the barn door, water bubbled in a small iron pot on a fire he tended. Small pieces of my skin, cooking in that water, gave off a sickening, meaty aroma. He dipped a tin cup into the thin stew of my flesh and drank it as he watched me, his black eyes satisfied. I knew I was ruined, that if I lived there would never be anything pretty about me again. I never wanted Ian to see what was left of me.

  Ian. My only remaining desire? That he should survive. That he and his men would not be caught in Ludaway by the Redcoats and Cherokee warriors. I prayed that the terrible, grinning bane who’d told me where Ian was, had lied.

  In the dark, fire lit shadows of on
e endless night, French Stick taunted me about Ian’s fate. He stood over me, his booted feet on either side of my bloody hips, and he untied the front of his britches, pulled out his penis, and pissed on me, my face, my wounds. My boons crowded closer, sealing my mind against the stinging pain. But nothing could take my eyes off French Stick. He wanted me to watch him.

  He squatted over me, smiling. “My men will make him scream,” he whispered. French Stick spoke in terrible detail about the horrors a Cherokee warrior could perform on a captured enemy, all the more real because I’d seen Cherokee turn on their own people in Wonaneya. I refused to let myself think of Ian being carved and punctured and burned and broken. My boons drove the images from my mind. Fox and the other fighting spirits crouched and snarled, snapping at the banes that watched both French Stick and me with glowing, hungry, red eyes.

  “Demon, I . . . banish . . . you,” I murmured through lips so swollen I could barely make a sound.

  French Stick threw back his head and howled with laughter. His eyes gleaming, he huddled close over me, casually circling the tip of his knife along the tops of my mutilated breasts. “You are so weak you can’t even banish the banes now. You’re no match for me, soul catcher,” he sneered. “You cannot see me. I’m safe inside this human form. Your spirits are weaklings who barely keep my banes away. They cannot stop me. You cannot stop me. Your husband cannot stop me. You cannot deceive and murder this body of mine, as you did with my Other.”

  I stared up at him, my vision blurry. My eyes cleared just enough to see the strangest emotion on his hard, hawk-nosed face. Grief. He tilted his cruel expression closer to me. The firelight glowed on his vicious, glimmering eyes. Tears. “You think only your kind knows love, soul catcher? You think this world and all the others belong to only your kind, only your idea of good and evil, only your notion of heaven?”

  I couldn’t form an answer with my swollen tongue, and he wasn’t waiting for it anyway. He hunched down so that his face was only inches from mine. He sliced the tip of his knife along the front of my ear. A part of me felt my skin splitting, but I no longer absorbed the pain. His eyes bored into me. “You and your soul hunter showed no mercy to her. So you will get no mercy from me.”

  Liver Eater. His Other. His . . . love. His . . . soul mate? I had never imagined demons having soul mates. But even if they did . . . my mouth moved sluggishly. My lips parted just enough to push out a few words. “Liver Eater showed no mercy for my people. I saved others by banishing her. She . . . belongs . . . in the dark lands of Hell.”

  He uttered a furious, growling sound no human could make. His face changed, shifted, enlarged. His coppery Cherokee skin bled into thick, greasy, gray flesh, pockmarked and sprouting stiff hairs. His hawked nose turned into a heavy snout, and his human teeth into long, yellow tusks.

  He was a pig-faced demon.

  “I have a taste for your ugly tongue,” he said. He rammed one hand inside my mouth and pinched my tongue between his fingers. He tugged it outside my mouth. He posed his knife to slice it free.

  Suddenly his banes shrieked in terror. An ax came down hard, cutting through the mush and skin of bane flesh, spewing bane gore into the air, then sinking into the bloody straw and clay floor with a bone-chopping thud. Pig Face vanished inside French Stick’s body again. He leapt to his feet, looking around wildly, his knife ready. The ax came down again and again and again. All the banes were screaming and running now. I couldn’t see my rescuer; I only heard the swoosh of his ax and the crunch of its thick blade.

  French Stick backed away from me. The sound of the phantom ax faded away. I heard the banes mewling in fear and pain, but they kept their distance from me, and so did French Stick.

  His terrible human face was tight with alarm, but slowly he began to smile. Then he threw back his head and laughed, a guttural, grunting noise lifting into the fire light. Finally he looked down at me with an ugly grin. “Your soul hunter can only threaten the banes, not me. I’m a flesh-and-blood man, and he is only a ghost. But I will let him enjoy his small victory. You can keep your tongue. For now.”

  He laughed again as he returned to his blankets and stretched out happily. “You know what this means, don’t you, soul catcher? Your husband’s ghost is here.” He smiled as he turned on his side to watch me suffer. “Because he has left this life.”

  I knew that was true.

  Ian, I moaned inside. Ian was dead.

  *

  The next morning, French Stick’s men delivered Ian’s ruined body to the trading post. They dumped it beside me, on the barn floor.

  My vision was cloudy. A blessing. But I could see what they’d done to him. They had tortured him to pieces before he took his last breath; the bloody corpse that lay beside me had been scalped and gutted. His body was so close to mine I could touch him by unfurling the fingers of one bound hand. I stroked the cold skin of his arm.

  I bled inside. I would never forget, deep in my soul, the sight of his body, and how I had betrayed him to the enemy. French Stick, who I now knew as Pig Face, squatted at our feet, grinning. “He died screaming,” French Stick said.

  That’s a lie, Bird Woman whispered to me. She sat by my head, stroking my face. Our kind helped him to stay strong. He wanted you to be proud of him.

  My heart, the heart of my soul, broke open. I had told them where to find him. How could he ever forgive me? And I had turned the Pig Faced demon’s vengeance on us by banishing his Other; my pride had never considered showing a demon any mercy or compromise. I had not believed her threats.

  Every terrible thing that had happened to Wonaneya Town, to my family, and to Ian, was my fault.

  French Stick bent over me. “In every life from now on, I will find you. And I will find him when he searches for you. I will destroy you both and everyone you love. From now on, you understand?” He spat on Ian’s corpse, then kicked me. “I will track you down. I will track down your spirit guides too. I will kill them. And you. And him. Over and over. Until even your souls give up. In every life, you will suffer. And he will suffer again, because of you.”

  The demon walked outside and began stoking his cooking fire in the morning sunshine. “Now I will eat your tongue,” he called. “After that, I will eat your heart.”

  I could still cry. Tears slid down the sides of my face. Not for myself, but for Ian. I need to die, I need to go, I prayed. Bird Woman. Uktena. Help me.

  Uktena curled gently around my mind. Bird Woman stroked my face. We don’t have the power to free a soul from this life. But the Talking Rock does.

  The white light crept over me and inside me. I am not strong here, it whispered. I am too far away from my place. I would have protected you and your soul hunter if you’d only stayed close to me.

  I know, Talking Rock. But can you help me leave this life now?

  Yes. The white light warmed me. I felt it squeezing my heart. Tell your heart to stop beating, Mele. It is tired. It will listen.

  Talking Rock, make me a promise. Hide my soul from Ian’s soul. I don’t ever want him to be hurt by my choices again. If we meet in other lives, don’t let me remember him. Make it hard for him to find me. If he can’t find me, maybe the demon can’t find him. Or the others we love. Promise.

  Her light filled my heart. I promise, Mary. I will hide you from him until you feel strong enough to fight this demon with Ian by your side again.

  Should I have shown his Other the mercy she demanded? Did I bring this horror upon us through a cruel act of my own?

  Demons are not redeemed by mercy. Never forget that. Now rest, Mary. You have other lives to live.

  I stretched my fingers along Ian’s cold arm. I touched the body I had loved, dying inside quickly, leaving that life forever, leaving him forever, for his sake.

  My heartbeat faded away. My vision dimmed, and I saw nothing else through my living eyes.

  I lifted myself from my corpse and stood, whole and unhurt in my spirit form. I looked down at mine and Ian’s damaged bodies w
ith a grief I thought no ghost could feel. I watched as French Stick, frowning, stopped arranging logs in the flames under his stew pot. He walked over to my corpse, studied my blank eyes and unmoving chest, then howled with frustration. Around him, the banes growled and gnashed their teeth.

  “Bitch,” he hissed, looking around the dimly lit barn. “Where are you? I know you’re still here, watching. Look what I’ll do to what’s left of you and your Other. He is a coward. His soul has deserted yours.” He went to his blankets and came back with a tomahawk. “Watch me, soul catcher, while I chop his body and yours to pieces and hang the pieces over my fire to cook.”

  He raised his lethal ax over our bodies. Something heavy whistled through the barn’s wide entrance in a swirl of wood and steel. French Stick staggered from the impact. His back arched, his head craned back. Blood spewed from his mouth. His eyes opened wide. His tomahawk dropped to the bloody floor. He sank to his knees. I saw that an ax—a corporeal ax, not the spirit-kind that had struck the banes—stuck out like a strange wooden arm from between his shoulder blades. Blood gushed down his sides and hips.

  Into the barn ran a red coated British soldier. He staggered from exhaustion. His tri-corner hat was gone; his uniform was dirty and streaked with grime. But he was young and muscular, with shaggy brown hair falling out of its tie.

  His eyes went to the mutilated corpses, and his face contorted first with anguish, then with rage. His gaze shifted to the kneeling, dying body of French Stick. He pulled the ax from French Stick’s spine then circled him, facing him, raising the ax again.

  The body of French Stick looked up at him as the life faded from its eyes. Slowly, the demon inside French Stick pulled the corpse’s bloody mouth into a smiling grimace.

  “She tasted good,” a voice gurgled inside its bloody throat.

  The red-coated stranger uttered a shriek of fury and swung the ax like a scythe.

  He hacked French Stick’s head from his body.

  The head, its long black tail of hair flying, thudded against the barn’s log wall and fell to the dirt floor. Bright-red blood boiled from the headless neck. French Stick’s body collapsed sideways, twitching.