“What are you doing?” He grabbed the wrist that held the stake, but she twisted out of his hold easily, the blood of a tent full of humans fueling her strength.
“I’m sorry, Elis. I am!” Both were on their feet now, dancing around each other like boxers in their corpse-lined fighting ring. “It’s because I love you that I’m doing this. Your spirit is somewhere in the ether as well, hovering, held hostage by you so long as you walk this world. But I can free it. I can free you!”
She lunged at him again, and again he barely evaded her. “I care nothing for this spirit you speak of, Juliana. The only thing I want is you. Please, stop this.”
She wouldn’t stop. She never would. It had been a mistake, searching for her beastly self, rejoining with her. Now the deaths of these humans blighted her once unmarred spirit. Although she had a mighty strength, Juliana could barely breathe under the weight of her guilt. And now Elis refused to come with her, refused to free his own severed soul.
Perhaps there was another way…
She plunged the stake, not towards him this time, but in the direction of her own heart. He had her in his arms before she hit the floor, the fact that she’d wished him dead made irrelevant by her sacrifice.
“Juliana! Why? Why have you done this?” He bent over her, trembling fingers brushing the hair from her face.
“There’s an end to everything, Elis.”
She gasped as her back arched, then jerked with spasms so violent, Elis struggled to keep hold of her. As blood escaped her beast’s ruined body, so too did Julianne’s spirit. One final spasm, and she was free, weightless and unbound. Had Elis not been focused on the corpse sheltered in his arms, he might have spotted her hovering above before the pull of her newly found mission carried her away.
She would search for Elis, the true Elis—the little boy with sticky candy fingers who grew into a man guilty of making only one mistake: loving the unlovable. She would find his spirit and bring him back to himself.
When that happened, it would truly be the end of everything. The world would be freed of them both, two less monsters to fear in the night.
Juliana was gone but not truly gone. Her memory became a torment that refused to ebb over time. Had she left Elis alone, fully alone, perhaps he could have gotten past what had happened. But her spirit still wandered the world, dipping in and out of his life at her leisure. This was not really Juliana, this was her disembodied spirit, the soul of the girl who had departed her physical form when she’d been turned. And yet, it was her. It looked like her, spoke like her. It had picked up hundreds of years of her memories. It knew him the way she had.
The smell of peppermint came first, and then she would appear to him, the spirit who was Juliana but not Juliana. Whether she was the same or not, he savored the torment her presence brought. Torturous though it may be, it was still better than the time spent without her altogether.
She came to him whenever she pleased, but always, without fail, she appeared on two particular eves: Christmas and All Hallows’. Christmas was, of course, the anniversary of their meeting and Halloween was the night in which she danced most freely upon the earth.
For years she’d been giving him updates he didn’t care to receive on his supposed spirit self. Each update was the same: “I haven’t found you yet, Elis, but I will. Don’t worry.”
“I won’t.” He’d turn to his newspaper, or later, to his computer and then to his phone, and pretend her appearance didn’t affect him. He wanted her to go away and also to never leave.
“You’re out there somewhere, Elis. You’ll be reunited. You’ll be freed.”
“Great.”
She’d say something more and he’d ignore her. When she left, he’d put down his newspaper, or his laptop, or his phone, and he’d weep.
It was no surprise when upon opening his door that October evening, she appeared on his porch alongside a group of superheroes and zombies. After tossing candy into the children’s sacks, he retreated inside, Juliana’s spirit at his heels.
“You’re still passing out breath mints, Elis? I’m surprised your house hasn’t been egged.”
Elis bit his lip. How would she know anything about such things? His house had been egged last fall, in fact. He’d never connected his choice of trick-or-treat candy with the petty vandalism.
“They remind me of…of…”
“Of me?” The spirit moved towards him, glowing bright. “Oh, Elis, you’ve a sentimental side to your beast, haven’t you?”
Elis’ eyes darkened. He hated when she referred to him as a beast. If anyone was a monster, it was her, ravaging him with memories of his beloved for the past century. Sanctimonious fool. She couldn’t see how hateful she truly was.
Juliana, or what was left of her at any rate, scanned his living room, taking in the clothes strewn here and there, crusty blood-stained cups left scattered across the coffee table. “Nothing changes with you, does it?”
Elis sighed. “Can we just get on with it, Juliana? You haven’t found him. You’ll keep looking. It’s for the best. Get the lads and lasses better candy next year. So long, see you at Christmas.”
“Elis!” She clasped her ghostly hands together, shaking them in front of her. “There won’t be a Christmas for you this year, because…I’ve found him!”
Dropping his bowl, Elis staggered backwards. Cellophane-wrapped pink and white pinwheels scattered over the tile floor. “What?”
She held out a hand, forgetting in her exuberance that he had no way to grasp onto it. “Come with me. We must do this now, before the night passes.”
For better or for worse, curiosity made him follow her out into the street, past groups of Halloween revelers, ghosts and witches, and vampires with fake fangs protruding from their silvery faces. Elis watched them with more than a little envy. They would remove their fangs and makeup at the end of the festivities. Their lives would be short and in that brevity, there would be meaning. Any suffering they felt would be as impermanent as they themselves were.
Juliana glided through the night, turning down one street and then another until they came to a neighborhood unfamiliar to him. She stopped at a nondescript yard, and he pushed open the rusted gate leading to a ranch-style house in need of a fresh coat of paint. They both paused at the front door.
“Knock,” she told him.
A balding man answered and let Elis in without question.
“Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to invite someone like me into your home?”
The man nodded. “I do. Let’s begin, Juliana.”
Elis nearly fell over. In all the years that had followed that day in the tent, no one but he had been able to see her.
His unease grew as the man offered him a seat at a tiny lace-covered table. Still, Elis let him grab his hands. He didn’t pull away when a warmth he’d forgotten was possible passed slowly from the man’s hands to his own.
“He’s here, Laurence, isn’t he?” Juliana stood behind the man, Laurence. Laurence rocked back and forth. She looked up at Elis. “Laurence calls spirits from the ether. He’s quite powerful for a human.”
Elis focused on the sound of her voice. He loved and loathed the sensation spreading through him, and he feared what would become of him if it continued. “Did he call you…from the ether?”
She gawked at him as though he’d gone mad. “I was called one hundred years ago. I’m here now, on this plane, and here I’ll stay until your soul is released and you are destroyed.”
For the first time, Elis began to struggle. He pulled his hands away from Laurence’s grip, but the man refused to let him go. Warmth washed over him. He hated that he loved it.
“Let it happen, Elis. He will come to you if you give your consent.” She flitted over to him, mint in his nose, honey on his tongue. “You want this, just as Juliana did.”
He closed his eyes. Juliana’s perfect midwinter face appeared in the darkness. “This is the way it has to be, Elis. Eternity has an end after all
.”
The spirit came to him then. His shrieks filled the house, the block, the town, the world.
He resisted just as Juliana had, but unlike the spiritualists, Laurence knew what to expect. Elis was handcuffed to his chair before he had the wherewithal to lash out at those around him. The pain was excruciating.
“Why don’t you kill me now?” He could barely stop himself from begging for the stake.
“Your spirit must defeat you first, beast.” Juliana cocked her phantom head. “It won’t be long.”
It was long. Longer than the entirety of his life, longer than the future with Juliana he’d once believed stretched out endlessly before them. It felt like he was stuck in a nightmare loop. In his delirium, he imagined his fingernails being pried up one by one. Even though he screamed and begged to have his entire hand chopped off just get the torture over with, the pain continued.
When morning broke, he broke with it, beast and spirit shattering into countless pieces within one timeless body.
It was later in the day when darkness threatened to fall again that the pieces began to fuse back together. The boy who craved peppermint, the turned creature who thirsted for blood, their desires merged in the most unexpected of ways.
The night was thick and dark when he said, “Uncuff me. I’m ready to meet my fate.”
Juliana cried with joy. His release would be her own, she claimed. They would depart this world, finally, together. Laurence unbound his wrists and stepped away quickly.
“The stake?” He held his hand out to Laurence who, with trepidation, gave it to him.
Elis clutched it to himself. It would be so easy to do what Juliana wished of him. If he went to Hell, the torment could be no worse than what he’d already suffered these past hundred years. Forced to endure without his goddess Juliana, separated from himself, driven into a fractured existence.
Juliana may never have accepted that the spirit and the beast could co-exist, but he knew it to be true. He was a monster and an innocent all at once. The joy and guilt and sorrow and happiness were his to bear for as long as he could. If there was to be justice for whatever crimes he’d committed, it would be for him to live rather than to die.
“Forgive me, Juliana.” He dropped the stake and left, running until he reached the edge of town and then on into the wheat fields beyond, hoping she would not follow.
He ran until he didn’t recognize where he was, until his feet ached and the soles of his shoes wore through. He ran and his spirit soared, and he with it, two halves of one imperfect, immortal being.
He ran until the thirst called to him, stopping him in his tracks.
Spirit and beast crashed back down to earth. Both would have to be fed. Both would have to live with the other, make amends for whatever Elis did. Both would endure together without their beloved Juliana.
Elis headed towards the horizon, a hazy skyline rising from it like a mirage, his mind—both minds—made up.
If Juliana could no longer satiate him, he’d find someone else who would.
Chapter Four
For all the confusion Elis Tanner displayed at the county fair, he was the one who had first contacted Sybille. She’d been on spirit seeker duty in place of her cousin Zareen that night. It was hard not to wonder if Zareen would have handled the situation better. Zareen had five more years of experience but having been trained in the family business since birth, Sybille was no novice. Besides, her great-gran had told Sybille that her gift, amongst a family of gifted, was extremely potent.
“Like a poison or a fine wine?” Zareen often asked in jest whenever Sybille brought up Gran’s declaration. No one was sure what the answer was to that. To her dying day, Gran refused to say.
Maybe he had come to her because of who Sybille was. Perhaps that made no difference and it had just been a matter of timing. Whatever the case, Zareen’s youngest was sick and Sybille agreed to cover for her. And so it was Sybille who opened the channel; it was Sybille who received him, though she hadn’t realized it at the time.
She should have known there was something awry right from the get-go. In the moment, though, she’d thought him strange, which in and of itself was normal. Each spirit had its own peculiar way of making contact. Aside from the occasional zombie or wayward shifter, it was bloodthirsters her family dealt with, and spirits of bloodthirsters, often disembodied for generations and grown eccentric in their isolation, were the most unpredictable of all.
The evening was stiller than most; no prospective clients pushed their way into her consciousness. She sat in a tiny office nook adjacent to the kitchen, phone turned off to avoid distractions, hands folded in her lap as her mind wandered in the ether. She didn’t move except to take an occasional sip from the mug of coffee she’d placed on the desk in front of her.
She stretched herself out and brought herself back. Ideally, she wanted the spirits to come to her, not the other way around. A prolonged out-of-body experience for a hierophant like Sybille was risky; confused, disembodied souls would keep her with them if they could, hounding her with questions, begging her to fulfill requests or do their bidding. They never seemed to realize that she couldn’t help them while detached from her body.
Sybille kept herself close, dipping in and out, never staying in the ether for longer than a moment before coming back to herself. With each new return, she hoped to bring a spirit with her, one that required her family’s services.
Last time she channeled, she’d been approached by the spirit of an elderly doctor. George Brownstein had been trapped for several decades—not a long stretch at all compared to some of her clients. Having been dead for so little time meant that the doctor was coherent enough to give Sybille a detailed description of the moments leading to his death.
Doctor Brownstein’s fatal mistake was to walk in on a fellow pathologist drinking the blood of a woman with stage four cancer. The pathologist saw nothing wrong with his actions—the woman was dying anyways—but Dr. Brownstein had been mortified. Knowing he was about to be exposed as a bloodthirster, the pathologist set to biting and turning his defenseless colleague. As the life drained from Brownstein, so had his spirit.
Two decades spent wandering in the ether passed. Brownstein’s spirit gradually came to realize he was trapped, unable to move on because of the creature walking the earth wearing his body. Like all bloodthirster spirits, he wanted this torment of existing neither here nor there to end.
“What do we do now?” he asked Sybille. “Can you help me?”
Of course she could. She circled her mind around him, wrapping him in a celestial embrace. “I can help you find the freedom you seek. For a price.”
“How can I pay you?” the doctor asked. “I’m a spirit. I left materialism behind with, well, with my material self. I have no money.”
It wasn’t money she was looking for. Not from him. “I need you to pay me in service, not cash. And I’m warning you now, it won’t be pleasant.”
“Anything is better than this ceaseless wandering.”
“Not anything. But in this case, what I’m proposing most likely is and it’s a means to an end. Your end. Tell me, doctor, what do you know about spirit possession?”
During that tenuous moment of contact, Sybille kept her explanations to a minimum. Spirits often flitted in and out of the Now World, otherwise known as the realm of the living, if they were inundated with too many alarming facts. She couldn’t afford to lose this client.
“You’ll be given instructions when the time comes and then you’ll possess me. Only for a little while. Then you’ll be freed.”
“Is that what it takes? Freeing me from my beast, I mean. Why?”
“That’s all you need to know right now. I have no reason to deceive you, but you must trust me, or this won’t work. Do we have a deal?”
The doctor spun himself around in circles, babbling to no one in particular. Sybille thought she might be losing him, but eventually he stabilized and, nodding slowly, agreed to her stip
ulations. She passed on the particulars of his case to Devin, the field agent working for her family, and that had been that.
This night was different. There was only so much time Sybille could stretch herself out into the ether before risking harm. When no clients had presented themselves in over two hours, she’d had enough. Head aching, she closed the channel and gulped down the rest of her coffee, grimacing as the bitter sludge hit the back of her throat. She put the kettle on and sifted through mason jars filled with her mom’s herbs until she found what she was looking for. Scooping a teaspoon of mugwort leaves into a metal tea ball, Sybille leaned against the counter waiting for the water to boil. It was a rare treat to find herself alone. With Zareen at her own house two doors down and her mother and uncle attending a conference up north, Sybille had the house to herself, not even a spirit present to destroy her solace.
She should have moved out years ago, but her mother and uncle weren’t the most self-reliant people. The state the house had fallen into during the semester she’d spent away at college had been alarming enough to make her return home and stay there, finishing out her undergrad studies at the local university.
They needed her and, in a way, she needed them too. A family of hierophants was a powerful thing, able to channel spirits as well as glimpse possibilities within timelines that had yet to occur. But what made them powerful also made them vulnerable. Many had trouble functioning in the world—Sybille wasn’t totally immune from this struggle herself. Beyond that, there were always the classic power-seeking asshats wishing to use a hierophant’s gifts for their own purposes. It helped to have a band of hierophants living in close proximity. Safety in numbers, as the expression went.
Tea steeped, Sybille headed upstairs to settle in for the evening. This was her idea of a perfect night: snuggled in bed with a cup of tea and a romance novel. Two chapters into the story of a dashing young pirate and his lady love, it happened. Or rather, he happened.
Blood King (Spirit Seeker Book 1) Page 3