Blood King (Spirit Seeker Book 1)

by Amber K. Bryant

  “That cover promotes unrealistic expectations of men’s abs. Also, clearly, whoever designed it wasn’t thinking about historical accuracy. Is that a zipper?”

  Sybille threw her book to her lap. A man with raven-black hair and cheekbones carved by Rodin stood at the base of her bed. The tight shirt he wore led her to think that the cover of her book wasn’t entirely unrealistic in its portrayal of the male physique. Not that the person in front of her was normal, or even a real person for that matter. The pale yellow aura silhouetting him and the fact that his feet didn’t quite touch the carpet were a bit of a giveaway. “What the hell are you doing here, spirit? I closed the channel almost an hour ago.”

  “Did you? I don’t know anything about a channel, love.” He shrugged and circled around to her side of the bed. “Nor do I know why I’m here. I must be dreaming.”

  “Spirits don’t dream.”

  He laughed. “They do if they’re bound to a living body.”

  Sybille resisted the urge to reach out and run her fingers through his spectral arm. “I don’t deal with the living, I deal with the disembodied spirits of unhumans.”

  “Unhumans?”

  “People who were once human and have since been turned into…”

  His eyes danced. “You can say it.”

  Sybille sighed. Poor guy. He was too confused to realize he was confused.

  When spirits came to her, they came devastated, vengeful, or both. Most were desperate. They were kept in the ether because their bodies still walked Earth in one form or another. They wanted only an end to their suffering. This must be what he wanted as well, only he was too far gone to be able to articulate it. She’d have to lay it out clearly for him.

  “If you want us to find your body and destroy it, there will be a price.”

  He laughed again. “I already found my body, and I’m quite happy with it as is. I’d be grateful if you kept it in one piece.”

  “What’re you talking about?” He must have been an old one. Ancient, maybe. The eldest bloodthirster spirits were easily confused, having been untethered for so long. “If you’d already found your body, you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t need my services. And while we’re on the subject of me, I still want to know what you’re doing in my head. You weren’t here when I closed the channel, but now you are. I don’t like it.”

  He pursed his lips and turned to pace the narrow strip of floor between her bed and the wall. “I still think I’m dreaming.”

  Sybille swung her legs out from under the covers and stood. “Do you know why spirits summon me?”

  He turned back to her and took in her bedroom attire, a tight black chemise with matching lace panties. “I can imagine. In my youth, such an outfit would have branded you a witch.”

  “I’m guessing that in whatever century you were a youth, I could be clothed head to toe and still be tossed off a ship to see if I floated.

  The spirit flinched. “That is undoubtedly true.”

  Sybille raised an eyebrow. She’d struck a nerve without intending to. Perhaps she’d been wrong to think this one an average bewildered spirit. “I’m a hierophant. It’s a kind of medium-slash-oracle-slash-psychic. My family specializes in assisting your kind.”

  “My kind?”

  “Bloodthirsters.” That word got his attention. He took a step closer to her, made as if to breathe in her scent, which of course was impossible given the fact that he wasn’t physically present. She repressed a shiver.

  “How do you know that word ‘hierophant’?”

  She shrugged. “I’ve always known it, just as I’ve always known spirits like you. I called my first spirit when I was five.”

  He sniffed again. “But why? What do you want from us?”

  “It’s not what I want from you, it’s what you want from me. You want me to free you.”

  “I already told you that’s not the case. I’m quite content.”

  That was unlikely. “Well, fine, not you. But I mean, your kind. Spirits don’t like feeling trapped.” She steadied her breathing again. Having him so near, non-corporeal or not, was highly distracting. His lips were temptingly close to her exposed neck. If he were to…

  Why was she even thinking like this? She wasn’t one to become attracted to her clients, especially given what they were. She wanted to help them, sure, but only in a professional capacity. Sybille didn’t like things to become personal.

  “You can reconnect the soul of a bloodthirster.”

  “What?” Her mouth gaped open in shock. “Absolutely not. Are you nuts? We don’t reconnect anything. That would be dangerous, possibly catastrophic. Honestly, the thought of giving a bloodthirster back its spirit, it’s…it’s…”

  He stood behind her now. “It’s intriguing?”

  Maybe a little, but she wasn’t going to let him know she thought so. “You’re surprisingly coherent given that you must be, what…four hundred, five hundred years old?” He took a step away from her, eyes darkened, forehead furled. “Not that you look a day over three hundred…or thirty, for that matter.”

  “Well, it’s been good to be back with my body.”

  “Yeah, see, that’s what I’m struggling with. You seem like you know what’s what until you say stuff like that, so let me fill you in. You died. Your spirit floated in the ether for all these years while your body went around pretending to still be you, feeding off the blood of animals and also humans, when possible. You had no choice in the matter, no control over what unforgivable things your corporeal self did. Now you’ve come to me because you want me to find your body—your bloodthirster—so we can kill it for you, and you can be released…move on. Whatever you think has happened, that you’ve been brought back to your body, that you cohabitate with the monster your body became in your absence—that misguided belief is just a byproduct of too many years in the ether.”

  His face remained impassive. She assumed he must be processing. Given what she knew of him so far, that could take some time. “What I mean to say is, you’re a little nuts. Don’t worry, though, I’m here to help you.”

  “Where’s here? Where am I?”

  “What? You’re in my bedroom, obviously.”

  “No, I mean, where do you live?”

  Sybille hesitated. Spirits never cared where she lived, only that she was somewhat near wherever their bloodthirsters were, so it wouldn’t be too impractical or complicated to track them down.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I live in Port Everan.” He circled nearer to her, eyes tracing the line of flesh where silk met breast before raising his gaze to meet her own. “And I’m betting that’s where you live as well.”

  “You don’t live anywhere. Your bloodthirster might, but you…”

  “I’m waking up.” His body tensed, but his eyes softened. “I’m going to find you.”

  “You already have.”

  Her words echoed off the walls of the empty room.

  Chapter Five

  Elis couldn’t get used to sleeping. Bloodthirsters, the kind of creature he’d been for centuries, had no need for it. They rested, lounged about, closed their eyes, meditated. But they had no mental or physiological need for sleep.

  The situation changed for Elis when that crazy spiritualist, Laurence, managed to reunite him with his soul. It was tiring work to have a conscience.

  Nearly two years had passed since Laurence had worked his magic, and still sleep seemed like something Elis had shrugged off as a child, a hobby he’d lost interest in. Yet he needed it now. He’d tried in the beginning to stay awake. Falling asleep felt like he was giving up his spot in the driver’s seat, so he’d resisted it with every bit of his control-freak mind.

  It was a battle in which he was soon defeated.

  At first, he dreamed of Juliana. In his dreams, she was not the spirit who had tormented him for the past hundred years. She wasn’t the beast, the bloodthirster with whom he had shared his life for so long. She was as he’d never known h
er to be: human. They lived together in a split-level house with a two-car garage and a picket fence. She baked cookies for him.

  Endless batches of cookies.

  These should have been happy dreams, but nothing associated with Juliana was ever truly happy. He hadn’t seen her since he’d gotten his soul back. She’d failed to show up at their usual meeting times—Christmas Eve, Halloween, a second Christmas Eve. Even battling with his newfound soul—a soul which was now a part of him as well as a fierce opponent of all things Juliana—he still missed her.

  Human Juliana, complete with apron and a fifties housewife vibe, was pure fantasy; even in his sleep, Elis knew it. He’d wake from a Juliana dream full of frustration, his brain throbbing. In wakefulness and in slumber, he couldn’t escape her hold.

  These dreams, these futile American Dream dreams, were remembered with a clarity Elis fought hard to muddy with copious amounts of whiskey-laced blood. In the dazed state the spiked blood imposed on him, her empty eyes still glared at his from behind a tray of warm peanut butter cookies.

  Then there were the dreams he could scarcely hang on to. These dreams, so intricate and vivid while he was experiencing them, became a chalk outline as soon as he began to stir. By the time he was wakeful enough to be able to make sense of them, the outline had been obscured, the chalk wiped away almost entirely.

  Elis was left with the sense that he had journeyed someplace else for a while, someplace realer than the black and white linoleum kitchen of his Juliana dreams. The aftermath was almost worse, however. For the first time since he was a young man, he’d had dreams that were pleasurable, only to have their contents lost to him, the torturous parts of his slumber remembered instead. This was so typical of Elis’ lot in life, he could only shrug and go about his day in a half-miserable, half-apathetic stupor.

  Spirit and beast—Elis had accepted that he was each of these things. He resented and cherished both and he most certainly hated Juliana for finding his spirit, for letting Laurence call him from the ether and return him to himself. Having a conscience was no way for a bloodthirster to live. The mere suggestion that he might have to kill a human to feed, something that would have raised no alarms in the past, now sent his own blood racing, making his wrists tingle and his chest tighten. Even slaughtering an animal brought about a certain amount of unease. Having become so unpracticed in feelings of personal accountability, it was no wonder he resented the fact that he was forced to feel them now.

  All the same, there was something to having a moral code again. A conscience. At one time, it had been Juliana and only Juliana who could make him feel anything resembling remorse. Now, his life was an artist’s palette of regrets—blue for his inability to connect with anyone else and yellow for every memory he had of every wrong he’d committed in his hundreds of years of existence. And always, deep, rich red for the fact this his sustenance so often meant someone else’s demise.

  As depressing as this palette might be, he had come to realize that his former life had been without color for so long, he’d accepted unquestioningly his monochrome, guiltless existence.

  He couldn’t go back to that. He wouldn’t go back.

  The thought that his forgotten dreams were the most colorful and happiest parts of his life haunted him. Given his luck, it figured that this happiness wouldn’t even be left to him as a memory.

  He came to Sybille every night for nearly a week. It was always after her channeling sessions, sessions that ended fruitlessly, not a single spirit making contact. Then, when she’d closed the channel and assumed she was by herself for the night, there he was, hovering over her kitchen stove as she stirred the pasta sauce, or in her bedroom, asking to be read a passage from her paperback.

  “You’re a closet romance lover,” she’d said to him on his third visit. “It’s okay, a lot of men are.”

  He’d scoffed but hadn’t outright denied it either.

  Slowly, Sybille became used to his presence. On the sixth day, her mother and uncle returned from their trip.

  “Darling!” Margot gave her daughter a kiss on the cheek. “Any clients come in while we’ve been gone?”

  “An older man, George Brownstein. Devin’s already taken care of his bloodthirster.”

  “Oh good…and the show?” The “show” as she referred to it, was the payment the spirits agreed to make in exchange for their eternal freedom upon the death of their bloodthirsters, the one she’d warned Dr. Brownstein would be unpleasant but necessary. Her family may deal in the supernatural, but their needs were very mundane—food, shelter, warmth. In other words, if they were going to do this sort of work, they needed to get paid.

  Luckily, there were people willing to compensate them, but only if they were given a proper shaking table, eyes rolled into the back of the head, speaking in tongues show. And so, that’s what they did. If the spirit wanted Sybille and her family to track down its body, to do the dangerous work of making their undead body dead-dead, then it had to agree to something it might find disagreeable: possession.

  It wasn’t exactly a walk in the park for Sybille either. It was one thing to open the channel, to let a spirit converse with her. It was quite another to let that spirit take over outright, use her voice to speak, use her hands, her legs to move. Lack of control during a possession was something she could never get used to. It left her exhausted, weak, and with a hangover that could battle a night at the bars.

  “Don’t worry, we got paid. He didn’t want to leave though. Talked on and on about his wife, who’s dead too, by the way. But, whatever, it’s done now. Devin says it was a straightforward kill.”

  Her uncle Peter swept into the room and Margot filled him in. “Zareen’s kids are sick for the millionth time and Sybille had one client while we were gone.”

  “Well, two actually. Sort of. I’m not sure.”

  They both turned to her in unison.

  “Go on.” Uncle Pete motioned for her to continue. Neither of them seemed too concerned by her confusion. The work hierophants engaged in was often puzzling, after all. “Do you expect it’s a vision?”

  There it was…the same question Sybille had been asking herself. This spirit was peculiar, both more remote and more personable than a spirit normally was. Yet he didn’t act like he was trying to forewarn her of some future event. If anything, he seemed mired in the past. Nothing about him made sense, and while filled with hidden meanings, a clairvoyant experience was just as its name would suggest it to be: clear. Sybille’s visions, like those of all hierophants, were rare. But when she did have them, it was always perfectly apparent to her that that’s what they were.

  She had no idea what the man who had been visiting her every day was.

  “I don’t think so. He’s strange. Not a normal spirit, but a spirit nonetheless. He’s been coming every evening and…”

  “Every evening?” Her mother held her hand up to her chest, her painted-on eyebrows situated in their perpetual state of mock surprise. “For how many evenings?”

  “Tonight will make six if he shows.”

  “Be careful, my dear.” Uncle Peter looped his flannel scarf onto a hook and headed for the stairs. “It sounds like it could be a preta rather than a bloodthirster spirit. Preta are such hateful little shits.” He paused, hands pressed to his lower back. “I tell you, my sciatica’s killing me tonight. I’m getting far too old for these long car trips. Margot, I’m heading up to bed. Say an extra charm or two for our girl, okay? See you both in the morning.”

  The women muttered their goodnights to him as he disappeared into the shadows of the house’s second floor. Margot turned her attention to Sybille, patting her shoulder. “He’s probably just an old spirit, but Peter is right. It’s possible that he’s a preta. Do use caution, okay, sweetie?” She poured each of them a cup of chamomile tea and handed a steaming mug to her daughter. “Drink up. You need it. What with all the coffee you insist on consuming every day, you’re going to make that extraordinary brain of yours short circ
uit.”

  “Please, Mom.” If Sybille’s brain were to implode, her mother would most likely be the cause of it.

  “Oh, I really must tell you about the conference. You’d be sickened at how wonderfully those charlatans, who shall remain unnamed, made out at this one. Truly awful, the level of gullibility some of these New Agers display. We could make a fortune off them if we were that sort.” She glanced at Sybille, who kept as impassive an expression as possible. No good could come from feeding her mother’s current line of thought. “But of course, we aren’t that sort. We would never stoop to unethical behavior just for money.”

  She droned on about the various manipulative practices deployed by some of the family’s chief competitors—the Thorstens, the Rometty family, amongst others—forgetting she’d promised not to name names. It was nothing new. Sybille had been listening to Margot’s complaints as long as she’d been able to understand these sorts of things. It would be futile to point out to her that they themselves had been engaging for years in their own form of psychic showmanship, all for the sake of a paycheck. Margot wouldn’t see it in that light. What they did was beyond reproach as far as she was concerned. They were ridding the world of monsters, after all. Even Sybille had to admit that this made a compelling argument in her family’s favor, morally speaking.

  Margot kept on with her overblown accusations while Sybille obediently drank her tea, doing her best to tune out the older woman. Soon, thoughts slipped from overpriced, careless tarot readings to raven hair and cheekbones carved from marble.

  It wasn’t long before her mother headed off to bed, spells uttered and a bowl of rice and sliced peaches meant to feed the supposed preta shoved in Sybille’s hands “just in case.” Sybille began her preparations for opening the channel again. Halfway in, she realized she no longer expected a normal spirit contact, but instead assumed Elis would come to her later.