Soul Taker

by William Massa

  The Paranormalist 2

  Soul Taker

  WILLIAM MASSA

  Contents

  Also by WILLIAM MASSA

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Also by WILLIAM MASSA

  About the Author

  Also by WILLIAM MASSA

  THE NIGHT SLAYER SERIES

  Midnight War

  Monster Quest

  Shadow Plague

  World of Darkness

  THE SHADOW DETECTIVE SERIES

  Cursed City

  Soul Catcher

  Blood Rain

  Demon Dawn

  Skull Master

  Ghoul Night

  Witch Wars

  Crimson Circle

  Hell Breaker

  Dragon Curse

  Vampire Quest

  THE OCCULT ASSASSIN SERIES

  Damnation Code

  Apocalypse Soldier

  Ice Shadows

  Spirit Breaker

  Soul Jacker

  THE PARANORMALIST

  Servants of the Endless Night

  Soul Taker

  Curse of the Abyss

  Lost Souls of Venice

  THE GARGOYLE KNIGHT SERIES

  Gargoyle Knight

  Gargoyle Quest

  STAND ALONES

  Fear the Light

  Chapter One

  10 Years Ago

  Some people spend their entire lives running. They move to new cities or new countries, change their names, subtly alter the way they talk and dress and groom themselves. They all share a driving need to reinvent themselves. If they can put enough distance between them and their past, it might stop casting such a large shadow over their lives.

  They hope that these superficial changes will allow them to forget where they came from, and forget who they really are. Praying, deep down in their tainted hearts, that new memories will replace old ones and that their hopes for the future will kill the nightmares of the past.

  Only rarely are such prayers answered.

  I know this from personal experience.

  I’ve been running for six years now, ever since my thirteenth birthday. That was the day I learned my father wasn’t who he claimed to be. The day I became the son of the devil.

  When the LAPD showed up in force outside our Malibu mansion on that fateful night, I thought it was a mistake. Little did I realize that they were here to arrest my father, whom they suspected of being responsible for a string of recent kidnappings and murders. And get this. The cops believed my father was a cult leader and a murderer.

  I know, talk about a crazy story. What were those boys in blue smoking?

  Unfortunately, they were right.

  To the world, my father was a successful plastic surgeon, a Malibu resident, a dedicated single father. But that wasn’t the whole truth. There was another side to the man. A very different side. You see, Mason Kane held sway over a flock of dedicated fanatics. The Children of the Void had committed terrible crimes in their mad quest to bring forth the end of the world, crimes that would have made Charles Manson turn green with envy.

  They were definitely following the crazy cult playbook to a T. With one notable exception: My father’s followers weren’t some random group of losers, social dropouts or disenfranchised teens. The members of his sick little club all belonged to the one percent—professionals, influencers, both old and new money.

  Don’t ask me how my father roped them in and sold them on all this black magic mumbo jumbo. I guess even rich people can be lost and hungry for a purpose. My old man could be quite charismatic and persuasive when he needed to be.

  After all, he had me fooled for years.

  While the heavily armed SWAT team swarmed our estate, a terrified boy searched for his father. I found him in the secret underground temple below our house. That’s right. The cult’s temple was inside a giant cavern underneath our Malibu mansion. As you can imagine, seeing my father loom over a rough-hewn stone altar—sacrificial knife held high, eyes gleaming with fanatical anticipation—left a lasting impression in my young mind.

  It’s not every day you find out that your dad is one of the worst humans to have ever walked this Earth. I knew the monsters were real.

  And that’s when I started running.

  You’d have done the same, trust me on that.

  After the cops gunned down my dad and arrested his flock, the press turned their attention to me. Fortunately, my aunt swooped in to the rescue. My father’s sister took me in, and I moved in with her family in Upstate New York.

  Leaving the mild California climate for one of the harshest New York winters on record was a shock in more ways than one. I felt like an alien who’d landed on another planet. Everything had changed in my life. New home, new school, new world. I adopted a different last name and pretended to be someone else. The press knew Mason Kane had a son, but they didn’t know what had happened to him. My aunt and her husband did their best to keep the ravenous media at bay and provide me with the most normal life possible.

  I did anything to not draw attention to myself. I became a shadow, the kid who people barely noticed.

  Years passed while I pretended to be just like everyone else. A regular teen whose biggest concerns were girls and grades and the zits on my face. Little did my peers suspect I couldn’t care less about all those things.

  I was branded, marked by darkness. Not only had I learned who my father really was, I had seen demons that day in the underground temple. Terrifying beasts that no horror movie could do justice to.

  My father was a murderer, a cult leader… and a black sorcerer who had tapped into forces beyond the imagination of mortal men. Those horrors were real. And it was only a matter of time before they’d catch up with me.

  Believe me, I tried to tell myself otherwise. Tried to forget where I came from and who I really was, tried to ignore the headlines. I refused to read up on my father’s terrible crimes. I did my best to forget my past, but my past refused to forget about me.

  I was fifteen when reporters appeared on my aunt’s doorstep. As my father’s crimes began to catch up with me in my teens, the rumors at my high school started to spiral out of control. At first, there were furtive, incredulous looks and hushed whispers. Soon thereafter, the bullying became a permanent fixture of my everyday existence. After I came home with a shiner and bloodied nose for the third time, my aunt got the hint and pulled me out of school.

  I never graduated. Fortunately, I was a big reader and passed my GED with little effort. Not that I worried too much about grades, or how they could impact my future. My father had amassed a small fortune, and most of it would become mine once I turned eighteen.

  I left my new adopted town as soon as I was old enough. One day after my eighteenth birthday, I started traveling the country in a beaten-up Ford.

  I was rich, but I refused to draw attention to myself, all too aware of the voracious appetite of the media. Six years had passed since that fateful night, and other monsters had replaced my father’s cult in the headlines, but there was still a hunger to learn more about the Children of the Void.

  Some stories won’t fade away; they become part of the public consciousness. Mason Kane was a homegrown, bona fide boogeyman haunting the media lan
dscape. Every year, new experts weighed in with TV specials and books about the cult, trying to expose how my father had exuded such control over his followers. None of them ever got close to the truth of the matter. They focused on social and psychological theories while ignoring the most obvious detail, the one that was practically staring them in the face—black magic was real.

  I couldn’t blame them, really. Even I found it hard to accept, and I had been there to witness the full extent of my father’s power.

  So I kept my head down, pretended to be someone else, and used my aunt’s last name wherever I went. It was a dark time in my life. I felt lost, cast adrift, with no idea where I was headed or what I wanted from my future. All I knew is that I had to get away. I couldn’t stay in a small town where everyone was in my business.

  I’d grown out my hair and a beard, as a kind of disguise. Under all that hair, no one would recognize the tabloid pictures of a clean-cut thirteen-year-old son of the devil that had hit the Web over the last year. Or so I hoped.

  I traveled from one town to the next, doing odd jobs here and there, not because I needed the cash but because I needed to escape my dark thoughts. Menial labor wore me out and slowed down the angry voices in my head that threatened to consume me. When I felt people were getting too close, I picked up my few possessions and hit the road again.

  I did this for months, one town after another, until they all blurred together.

  And then I met someone while passing through Denver, Colorado. And I stopped running.

  Her name was Caroline. I vividly remember the day I walked into the bohemian coffee shop in and the fair-skinned young woman with the purple hair flashed me a welcoming smile. Somehow I asked her out. We hit a local dive that night, and I quickly lost track of the beers and games of pool. Physical attraction soon became something deeper. I sensed this wouldn’t be just another conquest. The way Caroline looked at me, almost like she knew who I was and didn’t judge me for it, got to me.

  I don’t remember who made the first move. I don’t even recall going home with her that night. But when I woke the next morning, her soft body pressed against my bare skin, I knew it was time to stop running.

  But when her eyes flickered open, she called me by my real name: “I’m glad to have met you, Simon Kane.”

  Caroline had recognized me the moment I stepped into the coffeehouse.

  And she wasn’t scared of me. On the contrary. My past intrigued and fascinated her. Her place was tiny and filled with books on history and religion and the occult. She understood this world. She got me.

  Looking back, this should have set off alarm bells. But I was eighteen and blinded by love. A young man tired of being on my own who was ready to let someone in.

  “You can’t keep running from your past, Simon Kane,” Caroline told me on our two-month anniversary. Her porcelain skin shimmered in the candlelight of her artsy studio apartment, hiding the grime in the corners. Caroline loved candles. Red and black wax stains streaked the floor. I knew the place was a fire hazard but dug the atmosphere of the flickering flames as they painted spooky shadows on the spines of her mysterious books.

  “Accept who you are. Embrace it. Own it,” she insisted.

  I shook my head and fought back a sudden wave of anger. This was the first time I’d ever experienced a negative emotion toward my new love. Who was Caroline to tell me what I should do? She didn’t understand what it felt like being the son of a killer. She hadn’t been there when my father’s followers turned into inhuman demons.

  The scene had burned itself into my memories. It was a constant fixture in my nightmares. I was trying to pretend that the things I’d seen on that terrible day were the figments of an overactive imagination, and here was Caroline forcing me to revisit those terrible images.

  Before I could verbalize my growing anger and frustration, Caroline’s warm, luscious lips found mine, and my rage subsided.

  As she pulled away from me, her gray, magnetic eyes fixed on mine.

  “Go back, Simon. Return to the mansion where you grew up. Only if you confront your past will you find the peace you seek.”

  The idea of returning to Malibu filled me with anxiety. My guard went up, and my heart grew cold. Perhaps I’d been wrong to stay in this town. Maybe it was time to hit the road again.

  Caroline was either oblivious to my reaction or just didn’t care. The candles cast jagged shadows over her features as she pressed on.

  “You don’t have to be lost forever, Simon. You may think you’re running away from your past, but by hiding from who you really are, you’re only proving how much power your father still holds over you. He’s controlling you from beyond the grave.”

  I fought back another flash of anger. I was pissed because Caroline was right.

  In my heart, I knew all too well that I couldn’t keep running forever. I doubted that I would’ve found the strength to return to Los Angeles on my own, but with Caroline by my side, I felt like I could do anything.

  She made me stronger. Better.

  I didn’t know what was waiting for me in Malibu, but it was time to find out.

  After six long years, Simon Kane was going home.

  Chapter Two

  I pulled into the cobbled driveway of the gated Malibu mansion I had once called home. The sprawling, luxurious property formed a sharp contrast to my rusting set of wheels. Hard to imagine that all of this belonged to me. Palms trees swayed in the late afternoon ocean breeze as crimson sunlight bathed the palatial structure in a warm glow. The place looked like a playground for the well-heeled and not the house of horrors it had become in the nation’s collective consciousness.

  As I slowed the car, my heart whammed in my chest. Caroline squeezed my right hand, which was white-knuckling the rough, flaking material of the steering wheel.

  The grounds were well kept. In fact, the mansion looked the same as it had six years earlier. The bank handling my trust had maintained the property in case I wanted to sell it once it was officially mine. I doubted that anyone would bite. The last time the bank had tried to liquidate the estate, no one took the bait. Only the most eccentric individual would consider purchasing a home with such a sordid past, especially one that came with a forty-million-dollar price tag attached to it.

  Then again, L.A. was full of such characters.

  I studied Caroline and felt disturbed by the enthusiasm she was showing as we drew closer. Her face was open, eager, her eyes lit up with a sense of dark wonder. No longer did she look like a supportive girlfriend determined to help her beau confront the demons of his past. Instead, her unbridled enthusiasm made me think of my father’s followers, with their expressions of gleeful fanaticism.

  She relaxed when she felt my intense gaze digging into her. Her smile vanished, and her eyes cleared, perverse fascination giving way to concern. The rapid change in her expression made me wonder if I’d imagined the whole thing.

  “Wow, it looks exactly like the photographs,” Caroline said. “It’s almost like no time has passed.”

  I nodded. The same thought had cycled through my mind.

  I parked the car, took a deep breath, and then gave myself an internal push to get out of the vehicle.

  Caroline followed my example and sidled up to me. She grabbed my hand, the warmth of her skin reassuring. The girl staring back at me was everything I could possibly want. Sexy, smart, edgy, with the heart and easy smile of the girl next door. A caring woman who wanted me to break free from my past, and a person who had my best interests in mind.

  Funny how love can blind us to the most obvious truth.

  I headed for the entrance and fished out the house keys, which I’d picked up earlier from the bank that had served as the trustee of the estate until my eighteenth birthday.

  Here we go, I thought and unlocked the front door.

  I’d expected to inhale dust, but the property was in pristine condition. I remembered that weekly cleaning crews maintained both the grounds and the int
erior. Shit, the upkeep must have cost a small fortune.

  The place sparkled in the fading daylight, polished granite walls and French limestone floors as spotless as on the day the cops first barged into the property with their guns blazing. As my gaze took in the high cedar ceilings, I tried to shake the sensation of being trapped in a dream. It felt like I’d traveled back in time, and the last six years never happened. I was thirteen again and almost expected my father’s servants to emerge from the kitchen and offer me a lemonade and grilled peanut butter and jelly sandwich. This was nuts.

  “Are you okay?” Caroline asked, her voice heavy with concern.

  No, I’m not alright, I thought. I’m far from being alright.

  I merely gave her a weak thumbs-up, knowing I wouldn’t be able to lie convincingly if I opened my mouth.

  My chest tight with emotion, I gingerly explored the mansion. The great room, the wet bar, the sitting area. I passed wall-sized sliding doors that led out to a series of lavishly appointed decks that offered majestic views of the Pacific. The place truly felt like a luxurious, tastefully appointed mansion and not some haunted fortress of darkness. For a crazy moment I almost expected some paparazzi to pop up from behind a palm tree, camera ready to capture Simon Kane’s return to his childhood home.

  I could see the headlines now: Son of the Devil Returns to His Lair.

  Did I genuinely believe that coming back to this house would change anything? I was still Simon Kane, the son of the notorious cult leader Mason Kane. The only surviving link to the horrific drama that had played out under the roots of this sprawling estate.