Shadow Hunter (Court of Life and Death Book 2)

by Melody Rose

  Daath sat down next to me a moment later and handed me a glass of water. I smiled at him before drinking half of it in one gulp. I almost felt like I could sleep right there on the study floor and not have another nightmare.

  Unfortunately, I had things to do outside of this comfortable little room.

  “I love you both,” I kissed Syrion and Daath each.

  “We love you too,” Daath smiled, cupping my face with one hand. I felt Syrion move my purple hair back and kiss the side of my head, which I leaned into. I closed my eyes again and let myself rest for a moment, knowing that it needed to end.

  “Will you stay with us tonight?” Syrion inquired.

  “Please.” Daath smiled sweetly like he was offering candy. “It would mean the world to get to sleep beside you again.” I’d been spending more and more time on Earth lately. As much as I wanted to stay with them - I truly did - I felt like after my excursion with Kalian today, I finally had at least some idea how to improve things on Earth. I wasn’t sure I could achieve what he had suggested, but the only way to see was to keep trying, and I knew the moment I diverted my focus from these tasks, the nightmares would grow even stronger.

  “I’m sorry, my Kings,” I sighed. “I need to go back to Earth. I would stay if I could… but there’s too much at stake.”

  Syrion nodded. “We understand…”

  “We’re disappointed,” Daath broke in with a playful smile, “but we understand. How long do you plan to stay on Earth for this time?”

  “At least a week. Maybe more.”

  14

  Myrcedes

  I jolted as a fire blazed before me. When the smoke cleared, I saw my apartment reduced to ash. I screamed, but no sound came out as I rushed to Lindsay’s room. She wasn’t there. I called her name, but once again, I was silent. I moved some debris to make sure she hadn’t gotten trapped underneath something, but she was nowhere to be found. Tears welled and stung in my eyes as I looked around my home that was now nothing.

  After getting a grip, I rushed out the door and headed for the stairs, covering my mouth as I flew through the smoke. The burning sensation filled my nose and flooded my lungs. I tried to knock on doors and tell people to run, to get out, to save themselves. No matter how hard I banged on doors and shouted, nothing made a sound. I ran out of the building and saw people scattered through the streets, some yelling, some sobbing, but one figure caught my attention. There was a mass of red curls attached to a pale body crumpled up on the ground. I ran over and turned the body over. Lindsay’s face stared back at me. Tears ran down my face as I shook her. Her eyes were open, but she wasn’t moving. She wasn’t breathing. I screamed and screamed her name, looking into her face, her human face that I’d known for twenty years and hadn’t seen since I’d become a reaper. But that face didn’t move. She didn’t move.

  I pulled her up and hugged her to my chest, rocking back and forth. Sirens, fires, and screams all blazed around me, but all I could focus on was my best friend.

  Then everything went dark, and I jolted awake. I shot up in my bed and looked around the walls of my apartment. I pressed my hand to my chest to make sure I could feel my breathing as I tried to steady it. Once I felt like the ground was beneath my feet again (well, so to speak, seeing as I was sitting in bed), I grabbed the glass of water on my nightstand and chugged it. I’d begun leaving a full glass next to the bed before I slept every night for this specific reason. I’d had snippets of this and other nightmares every night since I’d met Oli. I hadn’t had a recurring nightmare since before I met Syrion and Daath, so I’d gotten used to peaceful nights’ sleep. These nightmares seemed to hit me like a freight train.

  Despite how much I was missing Daath and Syrion and all my friends at the Castle, I was spending more time on Earth because of this nightmare. Every morning that I didn’t get to look at my apartment and my best friend, I felt overwhelmed with anxiety. Every day I didn’t do something to fix Earth, I felt guilty. And every day, I was consumed with fear for Kalian and the other fae and what I needed to do to save them too.

  I’d been practicing using hellfire to dispel magic. It was still hard for me to track where it was, so I’d only been able to do it a couple of times. I’d been doing what I’d done to the grocery store, trying to reach out my consciousness until I felt that same cold wall. I’d happened to run across it once in the coffee shop. A customer came in that was consumed by that feeling. I excused myself to the back, and while she was sitting in the lobby, I’d tried to focus my attention on her. I envisioned the hellfire burning, not her, but the magic surrounding her. I did that until I thought that it worked, and when I went back out, the cold wall was gone. She did come up and ask us to turn the heater off. I took that as a sign that it had worked, given that the air conditioning had been blasting the lobby at seventy degrees.

  Today, I had a day off from the coffee shop, so I decided to put up a glamour Lindsay had taught me that shielded me from everyone’s view, magical creature or not. I wore the leather vest and pants that I’d become so comfortable in and brought my scythe along. I had missed it. I couldn’t necessarily tote it around Earth, but the way it amplified my energy made me so much more comfortable, and I felt much safer.

  I walked out of the apartment building and stopped. There she was. The spirit that wandered this area often, the one I’d seen for months. She hadn’t been around the past few days. Today, though, I watched her pace along the fence. I smiled, more comfortable than I’d ever felt before around spirits.

  “Hello,” I called to her, grateful to hear my own voice again.

  She didn’t react at first, and I worried maybe she couldn’t hear me, but when I repeated the greeting, she whipped around to face me and stopped. She’d noticed before that I could see her, but I’d never addressed her. Her eyes immediately went to my scythe.

  “Hello. My name is Myrcedes,” I spoke softly, not wanting to scare her. Were spirits scared of me? Should they be? I didn’t know. This had never been something I’d addressed in reaper training. “Can you hear me?”

  She nodded silently. I couldn’t discern her expression as one of excitement or fear.

  “What’s your name?”

  She was silent for a while before she finally spoke. “Elaine.”

  I’d never heard a spirit speak before. Her voice mostly sounded normal, but there was an inexplicably ethereal quality to it.

  “Elaine,” I nodded. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “I’ve seen you before,” she spoke slowly. Her skin was dark, and so was her hair, but despite that, she was translucent. She was older than me, maybe in her late forties. “But never like this.”

  I nodded. “I’m a reaper. You know what that is?”

  “No,” she shook her head. “Is it bad?”

  “No,” I smiled. The conversation was slow. I knew she must be scared. “It’s my job to help people who’ve died cross to a different place.”

  Her face lit up. “That happens?” I nodded, and a look of sadness crept onto her face. “Why didn’t it happen to me?”

  I paused. “I… I don’t know, Elaine. I’m new. But I want to fix that. Will you trust me?”

  She nodded enthusiastically. I was a little surprised at how easily she trusted me, but then again, she quite literally had nothing to lose in doing so.

  “Stay here, Elaine.” I smiled before heading back into my apartment. Daath and Syrion had taught me that anytime I planned to leave my body, I needed to keep it safe somewhere. I went back to my bedroom and laid down before channeling my energy like I did when world jumping. Only this time, I made a point to leave my physical figure behind.

  I opened my eyes and saw Elaine. She was no longer transparent. When I was on the same plane, she was fully opaque, and I could see her features better. She had smile lines on her face and a very positive expression. I took her hand and smiled back at her.

  “Ready?”

  She looked as though she was about to cry and nodded. “
Ready.” Her voice sounded completely normal, as well.

  I squeezed her hand, and a tear slid down her cheek. It must have been years since she had felt someone’s touch. I nodded and closed my eyes, searching for that string of connection that I felt when collecting a soul, but it wasn’t there. I searched, but I couldn’t find it.

  “What’s wrong?” I could hear the concern in her voice.

  The problem was, I wasn’t sure. “Well… how long have you been, um…”

  “Dead?”

  “Y-yeah.”

  “About four years,” the spirit was clearly uncertain, but that was enough of an answer. Surely, after so long, the tie to the Bay had faded. I needed to find my way there on my own, but I was determined to do so.

  “That’s alright,” I smiled to reassure her. “I just have to figure out how to get there. Trust me, Elaine.”

  She smiled. “I do.”

  A wave of relief hit me, coupled with a feeling of necessity. It was necessary to do this. This woman had been wandering aimlessly for at least four years, assuming she’d be doing so forever. If anyone deserved to cross to the Bay of Souls, she did.

  I took her hand again and closed my eyes. The string to the Bay wasn’t there, but I tried to envision it, anyway. I would feel it reach out to me, inviting me. I thought of that invitation, the way the Bay looked from across the water, the way the ground felt when I landed, and the way the air smelled. I took a deep breath, and when I exhaled, I opened my eyes to find the Bay before me.

  The Bay of Souls was the place where spirits went to rest after their life ended. I had dozens of questions I wanted to ask everyone I brought to the Bay, but I always refrained. Daath had explained that the Bay looks different to everyone. It molded itself into a reality that the soul would inhabit for eternity. Syrion said he believed some shared eternity with others, and that he had taken souls to the Bay that greeted old friends when they arrived, but he was only guessing. There was so much uncertainty around the inner workings of the Bay, but that was how it was meant to be. It wasn’t a place for the living, so we didn’t need to know how it functioned.

  Personally, I saw a forest. I couldn’t remember the names of the types of trees, but they seemed thinner than normal tree trunks, and they looked like they’d all been set aflame once upon a time. It looked like a coat of ash covered everything. There were no leaves, and there never were, like it was always winter here. From the shore, the water looked black. Daath promised me it wasn’t, but I wasn’t itching to find out for myself whether that was true. If I did turn to face the water, I could see the Moonstone Castle across the lake.

  I looked over at Elaine. She dropped my hand and brought both of hers to her face, tears in her eyes.

  “This is it?” she cried softly.

  “Yes,” I smiled. “It’s different for everyone.”

  “Is this Heaven?”

  “Not exactly. But it is your home now, forever.”

  “Oh… Myrcedes,” she whispered, throwing her arms around my neck and burying her face in my hair. She was practically sobbing. I tried to envision the relief she must have been feeling, and I began to tear up myself. I rubbed her back and pulled away.

  “Go, Elaine. You deserve it,” I smiled.

  She nodded and turned, walking toward the forest before me. I watched her break into a sprint and disappear amongst the trees. Relief washed over me. I wasn’t sure if this was what I needed to do to save the Earth, but I wanted to do it, anyway. I realized suddenly that these souls mattered just as much to me as the ones that were still alive. It was a strange urge to save people who were already dead, but I was ready to follow it.

  I spent the next few days trying to fill both of my objectives on Earth. I was searching for the fae magic, but I made a point to seek out the spirits I’d always seen in order to help them. It was hard to find the Bay of Souls without that string connecting to it, but I got better at it each time. The hardest was a man in the park. He had been there for over twelve years, so his connection to the Bay was completely gone. He couldn’t see it at first when we got there, but his sight adjusted quickly. They all cried. The Earth seemed to be the only realm where people were blind to the magical universe around them, so if someone died and wandered Earth, they didn’t think there was anything else.

  On my next day off, I was wandering again. I’d heard on the news that Portland had a surge in crime the past week, so I drove two-and-a-half hours to the city that morning and parked in the parking lot of a nearby library. As soon as I got out of my car, it was apparent to me that fae magic polluted the air. It was sunny, and the thermometer said it was above 80 degrees, but I felt a chill I’d only felt around that magic.

  I locked my car and began walking down the street. Lindsay had helped me find different glamours to use for different purposes and taught me how to cast them. There was one that most reapers used to carry their scythes with them; it disguised the large and frightening weapon as a pen to the normal eye, so I was able to bring mine with me without worrying about the reaction.

  I tried to search for the source of the magic, but I wasn’t sensitive enough toward it to be able to narrow in on something like that. I heard an emergency siren go off down the street and saw a fire truck closely followed by an ambulance race down the street a block away. I didn’t know anything about Portland, and that seemed like a good enough place to start.

  I jumped three blocks away just as the vehicles passed me, quite thankful I’d trained as much with world jumping as I had. These short distances in unfamiliar places came easily to me now. I jumped down a few more blocks and watched them approach and turn a corner. As they did, I jumped again, following them in this odd way until I saw their destination: a corner store with shattered glass. I jumped to the store before they arrived and quickly saw what someone had called them about. On the ground in front of the door laid a young man who looked about my age. He was bleeding and had wounds on his shoulder and abdomen. An older man sat with him on the phone with 911, telling them he could finally hear the sirens in the distance.

  I considered asking what had happened, but that seemed like it would not be received well. Instead, I dug into the boy’s head, his memories. I didn’t need to search for what had happened, as it was fresh in his mind.

  In the store, the alarm went off. The boy hadn’t done anything, but the alarm had gone off, regardless. The cashier began to argue with him, asking what he’d tried to steal. He got close, and suddenly the cashier had begun shouting about being hit, even though the boy hadn’t touched him. The cashier shoved him in response, the boy shoved back, and with another shove from the older party, the young man went out the window, falling on the concrete. I sensed his pain where the glass he’d landed on cut up his back. There was something strange in his memories, though. The pain from the shoulder and abdomen injuries set in before the cashier had even made it outside, and the man immediately called 911. There had been no gunshots, but the wounds seemed closer to those caused by bullets than glass; they were rounded and deep. I sensed the same cold presence in the memories that I did in the air, though the boy would never understand what they were.

  I slid down the alley on the far side of the building, looking for anything off. I sensed something strange, and just as I turned to see what it was, a dark figure lunged at me. I ducked and jumped out of the way just in time. My eyes adjusted to see what looked like a human figure with sharp spikes on its hands, but not only was it translucent the way spirits were, it was dark like there was a shadow over it. I’d never seen a spirit that resembled that before. “Who are you?”

  Instead of answering my question, the creature lunged at me again. I bent over just before it reached me and slammed its torso with my shoulder. I half expected it to glide through me as spirits did, but this shadow was different. I felt its impact as it was thrown backward, stumbling and falling. I ran over and put my foot against its chest. “What are you?”

  I could see it clearly here. It was a pe
rson, but the face was fuzzy, like a grainy picture taken from just outside the camera’s range. The creature was mostly gray-scale. Its clothes were loose and haggard and just as transparent as it was, and the spikes on its hands were claws. It shrieked at me in response. That certainly wasn’t the answer I was looking for.

  It threw my leg off and scrambled to its feet. I recognized the shriek. It was similar to that of a wraith, but slightly different, almost higher in pitch. I grabbed my scythe from my back and widened my stance to steady myself. The creature flinched at the weapon, screeching again when the light from the sun reflected off the blade and hit it. I smirked a bit. “If the light hurts, this is gonna feel like a bitch.”

  I turned to generate momentum into the weapon and swung it at the blurry head of the creature. It jumped back, but not out of range. My blade managed to catch it across the collarbone, and it fell back against the wall, falling to its feet as it tripped over a garbage bag. I ran over and stepped on it again, pressing my blade against its neck. “Hold still.”

  It squirmed its body but knew to keep still from the chest up, lest it lose its head prematurely. I invaded the creature’s thoughts and was surprised to find two minds separate from one another.

  One mind was cold and blank like it had been turned off. There were memories, but they were distant. The other mind, however, was dark and chaotic. It was what had caused all of those things to happen at the store. It set off the alarm when the boy got near. Then, it punched the cashier in the gut, pushed the boy out the window, and sank its claws into him.

  I felt bad for the cashier. That would be impossible to explain, and I didn’t know how to help him without explaining the existence of whatever creature lay beneath my feet.

  The mind of the chaotic creature felt familiar in one way: fae magic was present. I dug deeper and found a memory of it the way it used to be. It was the child of a banshee and a wraith and had lived a perfectly content life, causing minimal disruption to the world around it. A few months ago, amidst the chaos Minerva’s minions had caused, it had been cursed by a fae and driven mad and possessed a wandering spirit, no different from Elaine.