Shattered (the Spellbound Series Book 2)

by Rene Lanausse

  For a while, neither of us says anything. We just eat the food Nick made for us, and stare out at the water in companionable silence, occasionally people watching when something interesting enough catches our attention. I lie back on the blanket, and scoot over towards Nick until he wraps his arm around me, and pulls me closer. I’m nearly calm enough to fall asleep when Nick disrupts the tranquil air. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Anything.”

  “How would you feel if I went back to school?”

  I open an eye, and stare up at Nick’s face. “Back to school?”

  “I was in my second year of college when Eve turned me. I wanted to go back, but the bloodlust was so intense at first, I couldn’t handle being surrounded by humans in an enclosed space. And after that, I just got busy with other things, and forgot all about finishing my degree.”

  “What were you studying?”

  “Medicine, at first, but then I lost interest and couldn’t decide on a new path. Now I think I know what I want to do.”

  “Do tell.”

  “I want to be a teacher.” I grin at the thought of Nick as a teacher, and he takes it as me laughing at his new goal. “No, really! I think I’d be pretty good at it. And I don’t know, if we’re bringing a child into the world, I want to be able to say I did more with my life than ask ‘Would you like whipped cream on that?’ a hundred times a day.”

  “I can see it,” I tell him. “The kids will all be huge fans of Mr. Brandt when you make it.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about Mrs. Brandt? What will she be up to?”

  My heart nearly stops. I look up at Nick, and try to bury the panic swelling in my chest. I don’t know why I’m reacting so violently to the idea of marrying him; I’m carrying his child, that’s about as intimate as we can be. But at the same time, I can’t imagine myself marrying him. I don’t think I can see myself marrying anyone. It just seems like a dated ritual to me. I don’t want to ruin the moment, though, so I whisper back, “She doesn’t know yet. But I’m sure she’s going to be very proud of what her husband has done for them both.”

  “Are you alright?” Nick pulls back a little to examine me more closely. He must have noticed that something is off.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah… actually, I’m gonna go. I’m hanging out with the girls tonight, and I wanna be sure everything’s ready.”

  “Okay…”

  I plant a gentle kiss on Nick’s cheek, then push myself up, brushing myself off as I stand. Nick watches me with a wounded expression, and I want to make it better, but I don’t know what to say. I just lower my head and walk back the way we came, fully aware of the sad eyes burning holes into my back.

  24

  The moment I get home, I check to see if my mom’s back from work yet. She isn’t, so I grab the box from the back of my closet, and drag it out into the living room. I rummage through it until I happen upon the bangle, and I slip it onto my wrist. I want to know what I have to work with before I walk right into the fight of my life. I’m not sure how to pull out everything on the other side of the nexus, but I focus on emptying everything out onto the coffee table, and am surprised by the array of weaponry that materializes before me.

  Some of the items now in my possession are ones I’ve never seen before, presumably used to hunt creatures I’ve never heard of. But there are others that I recognize, like the hilt of an aura blade, an array of wood and silver bullets, a pistol to match, and a dagger that’s been dipped in holy water. None of these seems particularly useful, but I’ll take what I can get. I summon them back into the storage bangle, and leave it on while I slip into the rest of the outfit.

  Once the suit is on, and I feel ready for tonight, I stow the box in the back of my closet where it belongs. When I turn to leave my room, I spot Alyssa standing in the middle of it, and break into a grin. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her in full black, but it’s how I remember her best. “Nice outfit,” I mutter as I look her over.

  Alyssa looks down sheepishly at her choice of clothing, which isn’t nearly as elaborate as mine, but still effective. She seems to have just thrown one of Lily’s leather jackets over a black crop top, pulled on some ripped leggings, and dug her old combat boots out of the dark recesses of her shoe box. “You think so?,” she asks. “I was worried we would match.”

  “No, you’re fine.”

  “Trust me, I know.”

  I roll my eyes, and ask, “Are you ready to go?”

  “Pretty much. Do I need a mask?”

  “Nope.”

  “Good… I want them to know exactly what hit them.”

  I double check that I have everything I need, and then pull my hood up to add the finishing touch. I grab Alyssa’s hand, and squeeze it tightly as we’re transported from my room to the warehouse where I left Paul. Alyssa and I both illuminate the dark space with a spell, and I lead her towards the “clearing”, as I’ve come to call it. I listen for the sound of someone breathing, but only our echoed footsteps can be heard. Finally, we reach the clearing, and I’m surprised to see that Paul is nowhere to be found. The only traces of him are a chair lain on its side, and a tiny splatter of blood where his face must have hit the ground.

  The sound of chains clanking together startles me, and I can’t react quickly enough to prevent Paul from throwing his still-bound arms over my head, and pulling back to strangle me from behind. I manage to get one hand between my neck and his chains, but he still exerts enough force to leave me unable to breathe. Alyssa backs away, and I can see her trying to figure out how to knock out Paul without hurting me in the process. She shouldn’t bother; I know exactly what I need to do.

  I bend my free arm, and pull it back with all the force I can muster, hoping to hit Paul in the ribs. I’m rewarded by the sound of air forcefully leaving his body in a painful gasp, and the chain trying to strangle me slackens just enough for me to wriggle free. The second I’m free, I drop down, and sweep Paul’s legs out from under him, sending him crashing to the ground. I stand up to get a better look at my handiwork, and notice that he’s thankfully still conscious; I’m not quite done with him. I summon the pistol I brought along into my hand, and aim it straight at Paul’s forehead. “Are you done screwing around?,” I ask him.

  The gun doesn’t have any bullets in it, but Paul doesn’t know that. He looks like he might wet his pants as he lets out a shaky, “Yes.”

  “Good. We’re going on a field trip.” I reach down to grab Paul by the armpit, and pull him into a standing position. “Any more funny business, and I will shoot you,” I warn him. “Are we clear?”

  “Yeah… we’re clear.”

  I hold onto Paul with one hand, then put away the pistol and grab Alyssa with the other, before transporting all of us to the graveyard. The light of the bridge is bright enough that Alyssa and I no longer need our illumination spells to see where we’re going. I shove Paul in front of me, and order, “Lead the way.” I’m in no mood to root through the dark for a mausoleum when I have no idea where to start. Paul huffs, and takes the lead, grumbling about his poor treatment as we move.

  “What have you been up to all day?,” Alyssa asks as we walk along a row of faded headstones.

  I look at her as if she’s lost her mind. “Is now really the time for small talk?”

  “Why not now? This place is huge, so I’m guessing we’ve got a little while until we get where we’re going.”

  “Fine, then talk about your day.”

  “My day was spent searching for my girlfriend, who’s unfortunately still missing. Your turn.”

  I groan inwardly at Alyssa’s insistence on talking about this. “Okay… my day was spent having a picnic in the park with Nick.”

  “Yeah? How was that?”

  “It was fine, right up until he assumed that I was gonna be his wife someday.”

  “Oh… is that not something you
want?”

  I roll my eyes, but remain silent. Nick’s assumption is still burning in my mind, and there’s no way in hell I’d discuss something like this with Alyssa, of all people. Our friendship is strained enough as it is without discussing our romantic relationships at length.

  Alyssa seems to sense that I’m done with the subject, so she changes gears. “What are we looking for, anyway?,” she asks as we pass by a giant cross in the middle of the graveyard.

  “We’re looking for a mausoleum that belongs to the Martin family,” I tell her.

  “Martin?” I glance at Alyssa, whose brow is furrowed in concentration. “That’s weird. Don’t I know someone named-“

  Alyssa never gets to finish the thought. A knockback spell throws her into a slate gray obelisk, and holds her there. I gasp as I go flying backwards as well, and slam into a tall headstone marked B. Talbot. Paul stands before us, smirking as no fewer than fifty spellcasters appear in the night around us. One of them severs his chains for him, and as he rubs his sore wrists, he says, “Maybe if you’d treated me better, I wouldn’t have given the signal for an ambush the second we got here.”

  “Cry me a river,” I respond, though secretly I’m kicking myself for not bringing Paul food and water like I’d thought to do this morning.

  “You, I recognize,” Paul says while pointing at Alyssa. His focus shifts to me, and he asks, “But who the fuck are you?”

  This time, it’s Alyssa who speaks up. “Behold! Your mighty nemesis, the Asskicker! And her gorgeous sidekick, Smackdown.”

  I crane my neck to get a better look at Alyssa. “Since when are you my gorgeous sidekick?”

  “Are you telling me I’m not gorgeous?”

  “I’m telling you you’re not my sidekick.”

  “Enough!” One of the Lost snaps his fingers, and Alyssa and I are lifted off the ground several inches. “If you two think you’re gonna get through to the boss, you’re in for a rude awakening.”

  Alyssa and I share a look, and it takes an awful lot of willpower not to burst into laughter. Now that I can feel their strength collectively, I’m not worried about the outcome of this fight in the slightest. Clearly, these people have no idea what they’re up against. “Yeah, not happening,” I reply.

  “Not on the agenda,” Alyssa adds.

  I overcome the spell lifting me by pulling myself back down to earth, and when my feet slam into the ground, each of the Lost backs away slightly. Alyssa likewise cancels out the spell holding her aloft, and we nod at each other to signal that we’re ready to go on the attack. We dash side by side into the throng of spellcasters, who finally seem to grasp that they might have bitten off more than they can chew.

  I wrap my arms around the midsection of the first man I come into contact with, and tackle him to the ground before administering a sleeping spell. Then I turn, kick out at the next closest target, who grabs my leg and flips me onto my back. I blast him with a small fireball from where I lie, and roll into a crouch so that I can do the same to someone creeping up on Alyssa from behind. She mouths me her thanks, and then turns and smashes her elbow into the face of her next attacker.

  Fighting the Lost on their home field is much easier than I’d expected, especially with Alyssa by my side. The only difficult part is trying to avoid desecrating any of the graves; I clasp a hand over my mouth as the headstone of a G. Stacy crumbles under the weight of the spellcaster I threw into it. I’ll try to see if I can fix it later, but for now, I can’t worry about it too much. Aside from the fact that there’s a fight going on, I don’t want to break the devil-may-care façade that comes over me when I’m wearing the suit.

  I mow through most of the people in my path with ease, only hesitating when I come across one holding an aura blade. I pull out my own, and channel my energy through it until a light blue blade springs from the hilt. We charge towards each other, and our swords cross as we try to square off, but to my surprise, the blades pass harmlessly through each other. I don’t know why I’d expected them to act like lightsabers; they slide right through every other sort of matter without a problem. Thankfully, my opponent is just as surprised as I am, and his attention slips far enough that I can slice him across the belly, and step over his unconscious form before he deduces what took me less than a second to figure out.

  As their numbers dwindle, the Lost begin retreating one by one. They’re finally getting the message that Alyssa and I aren’t their usual opponents. They may have strength in numbers, but we can and will wipe them out regardless. Roughly twenty of them vanish into the night, and the ten left standing look torn between fighting and running. Alyssa and I make the decision for them. Five of them are standing on unclaimed plots, so I dissolve the ground beneath them to the point where only their heads peek above the dirt, then solidify it again so that they’re trapped. Then I put them all to sleep with one spell, and turn to watch Alyssa.

  She opted for the more violent route; her last opponent’s head hits the side of a grave with a resounding crack and he slumps to the ground in a heap. She catches my eye, and we both smile, and exchange a silent fist bump before searching for the mausoleum we came here to find. There aren’t any at all on the bridge side of the graveyard, so we walk further into the darkness, illuminating the graves around us with balls of light floating above our heads. It’s a bit of a hike, but we finally come upon a row of massive stone structures, and assume that one of them is the one we need.

  After a few minutes of searching, I spot the name Martin carved above the entrance to a mausoleum, and we stand in front of it for a moment, as if we’re waiting for something to come out. “Are you ready for this?,” I ask.

  “As I’ll ever be,” Alyssa responds.

  I reach out for the mausoleum door, noticing that this is the only one with a wooden barrier as opposed to an iron one. I knock four times, and stand back, wondering what the purpose of that instruction was. The door swings open towards us to reveal a staircase that extends far enough underground that I can’t see the end. Without hesitation, I start down the stone steps, keeping my light source in front of me so I don’t slip, or lose my way.

  When we finally reach the end of the staircase, Alyssa and I let out a simultaneous groan at the long hallway stretching out before us. I keep expecting to see skulls lined along the walls, or remains of any sort, but it doesn’t seem like we’re in a mausoleum anymore. In fact, I get the feeling we’re far deeper than anyone’s ever been buried in this cemetery. There’s no sound down here but the crunch of gravel under my boots, and Alyssa and I breathing, and I’m eerily reminded of every previous time the two of us have been underground.

  The hallway finally opens up into what looks like an atrium, held up by iron beams that don’t match the stone structure we’d entered. In fact, the whole space looks entirely different from what I would have expected; I’m stepping on mahogany as opposed to gravel, and the bare stone walls have given way to wood paneling interspersed with Renaissance-era paintings. I stop to inspect one when the light spells Alyssa and I conjured are extinguished by an external force.

  “Where are you?,” I mutter into the darkness. I’m blind in nearly every sense; even my second sight tells me that save for Alyssa, there’s no one down here.

  “Here, there, and everywhere,” comes a voice from the void. I can tell it’s the same agonizingly familiar voice from the video Krystal showed us this morning. This is it. We’ve found the leader of the Lost at last.

  “Show yourself,” I order, and I brace myself against Alyssa as I wait for a response.

  Mere seconds later, a dark presence appears on the other end of the atrium. I can’t see them, but I can feel them, and it seems like we’re dealing with something that isn’t quite human. Fluorescent light shines down on us from above without warning, and as my eyes adjust, I take note of a throne opposite from where Alyssa and I are standing. And sitting on top of it is the last person I’d ever thought I would see.

  Selene Martin’s cherry red l
ips draw back into a wicked smile. “Hello, girls. It’s about time we met, face to face.”

  25

  “Are you fucking kidding me?,” Alyssa asks. “I watched you die. We both did.”

  Selene steps off of her throne, and comes toward the middle of the room. “Technically, no,” she says. “You watched this body’s previous owner die.”

  “What…?”

  “In her final moments, Selene prayed for vengeance… and I answered.”

  I frown as I realize what’s going on here. The energy radiating from Selene’s body isn’t just inhuman; it’s demonic. “Who are you?,” I ask as the creature walks closer and closer.

  “I’m known as Alastor,” the demon responds.

  “And why would you choose to inhabit Selene’s body?”

  “That’s simple. If even the strongest of demons were to take over a weak vessel, their power could not be realized on the earthly plain.” Alastor stops in the center of the atrium, and explains, “Selene is one of the strongest to have died in quite some time, I realized that much when she summoned me twenty years ago for an unrelated matter. So when she offered herself, I jumped at the chance to take her body as my own. It’s just a shame that I couldn’t get to her sooner.”

  “What do you mean?,” I ask as Alyssa and I circle around Alastor. I want her to keep talking; the deeper she gets into her own story, the more distracted she’ll be.

  Alastor heaves a sad sigh, and says, “Usually, when one of my kind inhabits a host body, the original owner’s spirit resides in the same space, either offering guidance or trying to wrest back control at every turn. But before I could completely inhabit Selene’s body, her spirit passed from this plane to the next. This is a shell for my own use, and nothing more.”