by Liv Olteano
“Nathan Gallagher claims to want to join us in our efforts to apprehend his sister, as long as we don’t gravely wound her or end her life in the process. He says she’s dangerous and needs to be dealt with for her own good—save her from herself, he worded it.”
She nodded. “You’re under a spell. A truth spell, if I’m reading it right?”
“Napeva’s Tooth. He came up with the idea. This way, we’re both bound to tell each other the truth or see physical signs that we’ve lied and suffer pain.”
She gestured toward the sofa and armchair that were next to our weapons table. I followed her lead. As she sat on the armchair, I took a seat on the sofa, right next to her.
“Has the powder you asked for given you the truth you were seeking?”
I nodded.
“It is the soul you knew in another incarnation, isn’t it? That particular restlessness about you has dissolved.”
“New ones have taken its place,” I admitted. “I feel a very strong pull toward him. He claims to be attracted to me too. But I’m conflicted about acting on it. Falling for Menewa’s soul in another man’s body feels like a betrayal.”
She took my hand and squeezed it. “Menewa has been dead for more than a hundred years, my dear child. You cannot betray someone who’s been gone for a century.”
“But I can betray the memory of us.”
“Would you rather live a hermit’s life to make sure you’re not betraying that memory?”
That didn’t sound quite that appealing, I had to admit. But casual flings didn’t mean living like a hermit. Just a lonely and empty life—and it was weighing heavy on my soul.
“Your young lover would have wanted you to be happy, Claw. I’m sure of it.”
“But I don’t know if we can trust Nathan.”
“He doesn’t know if he can trust you, either. This is a sign from the ancestors. This man is important to you and vital to us. You didn’t come upon this soul again by accident.”
“What are you saying?” I asked, searching her gaze for some hint of what kind of news she had to deliver.
“This could be your last incarnation before you join the ancestors.” She smiled like a proud mother. “You have proven your worth as leader and dreamcatcher for more than a century and a half. Your honor and devotion have never come into question. This could be your last chance at true worldly happiness before ascension. Make the most of it.”
“Make the most of what?”
“Nathan’s soul is your true mate. No matter how many lives either one of your souls will have, there can never be happiness for you unless you’re together. It’s a hard fate to bear to have a true mate—not many souls have one. Life without him would be terrible torture now that you’ve found him. You’ve lived through losing your true mate once. It’s why this is so trying for you. Not many survive that kind of loss. You not only survived, but dedicated your life to helping others. So the ancestors are giving you a second chance at real happiness. Make the most of this opportunity.”
“So you’re saying I can trust him?”
“I can’t say that. You need to figure it out for yourself.”
“Should I tell him about us? About you? He’s asking.”
She considered it for a moment. “What does your gut feeling tell you?”
“That’s more Drew’s department.”
“Then ask him and take into consideration what yours says too. You’ll know what to do.”
“But if he tries to use the information against us—”
“Then you will deal with it accordingly. And you’ll know what his intentions are.”
“Good point. Thanks.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” she said, and I felt her dismissal soon after.
She vanished, and I left too. As I closed the doors behind me, I made a decision: I had to risk it. I had to get some clue as to what Nathan was truly after. And if he was going to betray me, then sooner was better than later.
Chapter Five
SOMETIME later, I found them all in the dining room, sitting at the table. Nathan’s face looked a little worse for wear, which made my gut clench. The pang of protectiveness I felt for him was bad news—particularly since the ones I would be protecting him from were the members of my own team. I did my best to hide my reaction.
Taka was grinning like a madman, and Drew seemed entirely too pleased with himself. Angelo’s face radiated mortification, and Ginger alternated between amusement and some semblance of guilt. This couldn’t be good, of that much I was sure already just by walking into the room.
I inhaled deeply and braced myself. “What happened?”
“We gave our guest a tour of our training room,” Taka replied innocently.
“A very lively tour,” Nathan muttered, and then half grinned. “One could call it almost explosive.”
“Insightful, you must admit,” Taka added.
Angelo glanced up at me and then away. “True that.”
“We should do it again soon,” Nathan said.
Taka grinned. “By all means. Whenever you’d like, I’m game.”
I had little doubt about the fact that someone had roughed up Nathan. Not too much, but the fact that he seemed to be pleased about it was just plain weird.
“I’m confused,” I admitted, looking at each of them in the hopes of getting some sort of a decent answer.
“They did a little training too.” Angelo winced a little. “We might have to replace some of our gear as a result.”
“Replace some of our gear? What the hell happened down there?” I finally snapped.
Angelo cleared his throat. “There was some training, which then led to sparring, which then led to—”
“Our new buddy is quite enthusiastic,” Drew chipped in.
“It came to blows,” I concluded and glanced at Nathan. “You don’t seem too brokenhearted about it.”
“I’m not. I was looking forward to stretching a bit. Besides, I love a good challenge.”
Taka smiled at him for a moment, then looked away. Interesting development: Taka only changed his mind about someone if they were really good fighters. And it took some skill to impress him.
“How is it that so many guys who can obviously hold their own live in a house together? What do you people do, exactly?” Nathan asked, looking at each of us.
They all looked anywhere but at him, of course. This was my call—after all, I’d conferred with Aashi about sharing info. Nathan’s hot gaze fixed on mine, and I got small shivers down my spine. His pull was so strong that I had to make a considerable conscious effort not to get closer. Something that felt so right couldn’t be wrong, I decided, so I said: “We’re dreamcatchers.”
He looked at me for a moment, at my wrists, then around the table at each member of my team. “Dreamcatchers,” he repeated and kept staring. “I think I read about that in the coven’s library. But I’m afraid I don’t really know the details. All I remember is that they were supposed to be mythical defenders of justice, doing away with evil necromancers or something like that.”
“Spaga,” I corrected.
“Spaga? I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the term.”
“Your sister is a caster. She has magic abilities, death magic and ley line magic in her particular case. She uses her power to create those spirit servants I’ve mentioned before—they’re ghouls or their smarter version, sepients. They go around stealing life force from unsuspecting victims. She and those spirit servants are spaga.”
“You’re saying my sister is an evil necromancer.”
“If the life-force-stealing shoe fits,” Drew chirped.
Nathan leaned back in the chair and looked down. “So her energy-borrowing needs have grown over the years. And she’s got servants doing what she could do in person.”
“Or she’s using that much more power that she diversified her procuring methods,” Taka cut in. “She’s draining you and who knows whom else on her own, and has her servants steal t
oo.”
“These spirit servants of hers, do they hurt their victims?” Nathan asked, his face growing visibly paler. “Or are they taking excess energy like I have?”
“You’re the only person we’ve ever heard of who feels better when having life force drained,” I explained. “The norm is it harms people.”
“What kind of harm are we talking about?”
“It depends on how much life force has been drained and how fast,” I said. “It can start off with a feeling of tiredness and end up in being bedridden.”
“After a number of attacks, victims tend to die,” Drew clarified.
“Die?” Nathan asked, looking up suddenly.
He seemed genuinely appalled, but that in itself didn’t mean that we could really trust him.
“Spaga victims die if we don’t come in to chase the spaga away,” I told him. “Once the draining process stops, if it hasn’t reached the critical point, they recover. It takes some time, but they do recover.”
Nathan ran his hands over his face and shook his head. “Jesus Christ. This is much worse than I’d originally thought. So my sister is basically draining people of their energy and putting them into their graves?”
Drew shrugged. “In short, yes.”
“She has to be stopped. It’s much clearer now than it was when I decided to come here,” Nathan said in a faint voice. “She’s a killer?”
“Cold-blooded and a coward about it, yeah,” Taka added with spite in his voice.
“This is a fucking nightmare,” Nathan muttered. “Could we continue this discussion later? I think I need to be alone for a while.”
Taka looked at me. “We know where to find you when we need you.”
I wasn’t quite sure if he’d meant to say that to Nathan or to me—or if he presumed we’d be there together so it was valid for the both of us. Which wasn’t that far-fetched an idea, I had to admit.
“Let me walk you to your room.” I waited for Nathan to get up.
When he did, he nodded at everyone and went up the stairs without looking back. Once he got one step into the bedroom, he looked over his shoulder. “Please come in and hang out with me for a while. If you’re not busy or something, I mean.”
My phone buzzed with a reminder that there was going to be a team leaders’ meeting in about two hours. I had to prepare and look over the brief for the meeting. But I had some time to spare. Something told me I’d always have time to spare for him.
“Sure, we can hang out for a bit,” I replied.
He walked to the edge of the bed and sat down slowly, as if afraid he might ruin the furniture or break himself from the contact. He set one hand on the bed and used the other to massage his temples one at a time.
“My sister is a killer.”
“Via proxy, but essentially—yes, she is.”
“How the hell could things get this fucked-up?” he muttered. “It’s all our fault for not doing the right thing by her when she was a kid. Maybe if my parents hadn’t sent her away, she wouldn’t have become this callous. Maybe—”
I sat on the chair by the bed. “Stop blaming yourself for her choices. She might have natural inclinations to drain life force from those around her, but it’s by no means a compulsion or a need. It’s something she chooses to do. It’s in her nature, I guess. No amount of nurturing would have changed that.”
He suddenly looked up, his gaze fiery. “You can’t know that for sure. I don’t believe in this nature bullshit. People are a reflection of their environments, no matter what urges they may have at any point. Her environment probably encouraged her to be callous and merciless.”
“I’m not arguing with you over that. You could be right. But there’s no way to know for sure. It’s not your fault. Any fault of your parents isn’t yours, either.”
He sighed. “You know what hurts right now? After being away from her for so long, I didn’t really recognize the sister I knew when I was around this woman. Only her power, though much stronger now, and her resemblance to the family. It feels like adding insult to injury to have it pointed out that I had nothing to do with things as they are now, not in a positive or negative way; that it simply has nothing to do with me. I think I’d rather see myself as partly guilty of how things went, than to contemplate not having anything to do with it—with her—at all.”
I patted his shoulder. “I understand that better than you might think.”
It had been a long time since I’d lost Menewa—my first lover and the only real love I had ever had, even if at the time I was young by today’s standards. We were just about the same age. We kissed for the first time on the bank of a river, with gurgling water as background to our mutual feelings. Our nights had been filled with moonlit skinny-dipping when it was warm, then lying on the thick grass and drying as we caressed and kissed each other. Those moments were perfect, and their memory was bittersweet. My sweet, tender Menewa—how I missed him and his laugh! Though I’d disciplined myself to not think about him that much from a point on, his absence was always a part of me—just like his presence had been such an important part of my life.
Losing him had nothing to do with me directly—I’d been a witness to his passing, and that was it. He’d fallen and broken his leg. Though he was cared for, his injuries got infected and he died. It had been nobody’s fault, and I knew that then as clearly as I knew it now. But the fact that I could do nothing hurt so, so bad. And it still bothered me now, such a long time later, though I thought I’d accepted his loss a long time ago. It hurt more when I thought about the fact that I had been powerless to protect him from whatever ended up killing him. Having nothing to do with it was no relief, but more of a burden. It had to be similar to what Nathan was feeling now about the way his sister had evolved over the years.
He set his hand over mine, and it brought me back into the present.
“Where were you just now?” he asked while searching my gaze.
“I remembered the loss of someone very dear to me.”
“Would this someone be a past life of my soul?”
I looked into his eyes and again pondered on the wisdom of mixing my past and my present. He wasn’t Menewa. His soul, no matter how old, was now Nathan Gallagher. The more I separated the two in my mind, the better things would be for both of us.
“Yes,” I finally answered.
“Was I—it—male or female?”
“Male.”
He grinned a little. “Were we involved?”
“What difference does it make?”
“A big one, I should imagine. I know nothing of that life, but you do. I’d like to know more about it, if you’d be kind enough to share. Who was I? What kind of life did I lead?”
“It wasn’t you, Nathan. It was someone else. Someone who isn’t among us anymore.”
“Okay. Who was that guy, then?”
“I don’t like to talk about that.”
“Please,” he whispered and took my hand in his. “Share this with me, Claw.”
My heartbeat sped up. I wanted to share many things with him. Since I’d told him about the magic powder and the history of his soul, it only seemed fair to share some information about it. But at the same time, it felt like mixing the two rather than separating them.
“Please,” he repeated.
I aimed my gaze at the large window behind him. “He was a funny and energetic young man; a skilled hunter, because he had the patience to stalk his prey. His laughter was rich and his voice melodic. He was kind and sweet. The world became a cold and colorless place without him.”
“How old was he when he died?”
“Much younger than we are—a teenager. I wasn’t much older, either.”
“So it happened some years ago.”
I cleared my throat. “Many years ago.”
“You’re not that old,” he said playfully.
“How much do you know about dreamcatchers again?”
“Well, I thought they were just a legend, to begin wit
h. So probably not a thing, I’ll give you that. Why do you ask?”
“I’ve been a dreamcatcher for one hundred and sixty years, give or take.”
He blinked a few times. “You’re shitting me.”
“I shit you not,” I replied with all seriousness.
“You’re close to two hundred years old?” he squeaked.
“More or less.”
“That’s a very intimidating thought.”
“Why intimidating?”
“I’m competing with a ghost of myself for your attention, and you’ve been around the block for more than a century and a half. You must literally know every trick in the book, and have done it all at least twice by now. I was hoping to make an impression. It doesn’t really seem like things are looking that good for me.”
I leaned closer. “Doesn’t it?”
He inhaled slowly. “Don’t be a tease.”
“I’m not,” I informed him and leaned in closer.
Our lips touched. I hesitated for a moment, then sucked his lower lip into my mouth. He groaned and deepened the kiss. It was like liquid fire dripping down my throat and filling me up with hot need. Decades of emotional solitude roared inside me, and my heart demanded the warmth I felt he had to give. I closed my arms around his neck and lavished his mouth with all the hunger I’d accumulated over the years. He shuddered and countered mercilessly, the hotness between us expanding and exploding into acute need. The connection was there, old or new—it didn’t matter. The insane attraction was there, too, and it certainly wasn’t a memory. I wanted to devour him, to incorporate him into myself forever in some way. But it was too soon to move forward. So I pulled back slowly, nipping and pecking his lips as I did.
He sighed. “You are such a tease.”
“It’s not my intention.”
“What is your intention? To drive me wild and then pull the plug on it?”
“We’ve just met.”
“I have no problem with fucking your brains out right now, or for you to fuck mine for that matter.”
“Trust me: I’m up for it, either way. But it’s too soon.”