Soul Mates

by Donald Hanley

  Soul Mates

  by

  Donald Hanley

  Copyright © Donald Hanley 2018

  All rights reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art by Donald Hanley

  The Random Encounters Series

  Personal Demons

  Soul Mates

  Other Books by Donald Hanley

  The Simulated Crime Series

  Simulated Murder

  Simulated Assault

  Simulated Conspiracy

  Simulated Assassination

  Simulated Blackmail

  Simulated Abduction

  Simulated Sabotage

  The Order of the Shamrock Series

  Lucky

  Faithful

  Hopeful

  Beloved

  The Knights of Excalibur Series

  Gawain

  1

  For fifteen minutes last month, I was a hero. I saved seven women – well, six women and a succubus – from being killed by a four-hundred-year-old sorcerer, kept an angry demon from rampaging through town, and sent the villain to his just rewards. Not bad for a high school student who just turned eighteen the week before.

  Unfortunately, the magical powers I bargained my soul away for vanished the instant Metraxion dragged Dr. Bellowes down into Hell and now I’m just plain ordinary Peter Collins again. Fortunately, Daraxandriel screwed up our contract – deliberately, as it turned out – so my soul is safe and she’s a mere mortal until her Dread Lord decides to forgive her and lift His curse. He can take His time with that, as far as I’m concerned.

  You’d think I’d be happy to be ordinary again. No one should ever have to face imminent death at the hands of a power-obsessed madman or worry about their friends and family being horribly murdered by some otherworldly creature, but I miss it. I miss the excitement. I miss being important. I miss making a difference.

  I want to be a hero again.

  “I’m home!”

  Silence greeted me as I closed the front door. I checked my watch but it wasn’t even five o’clock yet. Dad was probably still at work and Mom was no doubt helping out at some charity function or homeless shelter or old folk’s home or any of a hundred other possibilities, but Susie and Dara were pretty much homebound. Neither of them had a car – or knew how to drive one – so they couldn’t go visit any friends even if they had any. The safe bet was that they were in their bedrooms, avoiding any chance of contact with each other.

  I listened at Susie’s door for any signs of life but I couldn’t hear anything. I thought about peeking in to make sure she hadn’t accidentally turned herself into a frog but she tended to get surly when I interrupted her experiments. There was nothing I could about it if she was in an amphibious state anyway, so I decided to leave her alone until it was time to head out again.

  I walked into my room and discovered, to absolutely no one’s surprise, that Dara was exactly where I’d left her five hours ago, on her laptop playing Legends of Lorecraft. I enjoyed playing the game but she was absolutely addicted to it. She hit the level cap for her free account in a week and a half and then begged me for three days straight to get her a paid subscription until I finally caved. Now her character, the eponymous sorceress Dara Alexander, was at level 23 and closing in fast on my main, Coronox the enchanter, currently at level 28. I had no intention of letting her get ahead of me but she had a lot more free time than I did.

  She had her headphones on so she didn’t hear me come in. I watched her peer at her screen in a way that made me wonder, not for the first time, whether she needed glasses. She was otherwise perfect, from her heart-shaped face crowned by short red hair, her big brown eyes and full lips an open invitation to stare, her body firm and smooth and voluptuous, although I had to go from memory on that last bit. Ever since she was cursed with humanity, she’d taken to wearing clothes more often than not, not unlike Eve after taking a bite of that apple.

  At the moment, she was wearing my Dallas Cowboys jersey and little else, judging from the long bare legs tucked under her chair as she leaned forward. Little Peter approved of the view, as he always did, but I told him to settle down as I stripped off my DQ uniform shirt for the last time and tossed it on the laundry pile. I’d been a bit anxious when I turned in my notice two weeks ago but two years of mopping floors and refilling napkin dispensers after school was more than enough. It was time to move on to bigger and better things.

  I dug out a plain t-shirt from my dresser and tugged it on as I stood behind Dara’s chair, trying to figure out what quest she was doing. Wherever she was, it was dark and Dara Alexander held her long silvery wand overhead, casting a feeble light all around her. Her black tunic, black breeches, black gloves, black thigh-high boots, and black hooded cloak blended in with the deep shadows surrounding her, so all I could see was her face – an uncanny replica of Dara’s own features – and the rocky patch of ground she was standing on. I wondered if she was underground somewhere.

  Dara Alexander turned in a complete circle and then started walking, although I couldn’t tell why she picked that direction. The terrain underfoot was cracked and mottled but otherwise uninteresting, until a human skull appeared at the edge of the light, its empty eye sockets and gaping jaw silently screaming a warning to flee. Dara Alexander stopped and then Dara herself sat back in her chair, sniffing.

  “I smell fries,” she murmured to herself in that British accent that made every mundane utterance sound charming and sophisticated. She looked left and then right and then tilted her head back. “Gah!” She jumped up, knocking her chair backwards right into my stomach. I doubled over as she spun around and banged into her desk, clutching her heart as she gaped at me in surprise. “Peter! Don’t sneak up on me like that!”

  “I wasn’t sneaking,” I wheezed, holding onto the back of the chair to keep from collapsing on the floor. “You keep the volume up too high on your headphones.”

  “What? Speak up!” I pointed to my ear with my free hand and she slipped the headphones off, wrapping them around the back of her neck. Ominous background music blared out of the speakers. “What are you doing here? I thought you were at work!”

  “I was. I’m done.” I was able to breathe properly now, although I still couldn’t stand up straight.

  “You can’t be, it’s not even – ” Her voice trailed off as she squinted at the clock on the night table by the bed. “Oh. So did you bring me fries?” she asked hopefully.

  “Not today, no.” She still had trouble accepting that her human body worked differently than her demonic one and that eating nothing but french fries and pancake syrup would just make her ill. Convincing her to eat properly was harder than feeding brussel sprouts to a toddler. “Have you been playing this whole time?”

  “Well, maybe,” she hedged, looking everywhere except at me. “There’s nothing else to do when you’re not here.”

  “You could have gone with Mom to wherever she went.”

  Dara shook her head vehemently. “She’s helping at that animal place again.”

  “So?”

  She looked at me like I just told her to throw herself off a cliff. “Peter! There are cats there!”

  “Oh, right.” I wasn’t sure whether she harbored some deeply-ingrained demonic fear of cats or they reminded her of witches or she was just allergic to them. “Well, you need to find something else to keep yourself busy.” Her eyes strayed to the manga collections in my bookcase. “Something useful.”

  “Like what?” she asked plaintively. “School doesn’t start for two more months and I can’t get a job.” Technically she was an illegal alien, although I suspected the Citizenship and Immigrati
on Service would have trouble deporting her back to Hell. The spell or glamour or whatever it was that had everyone convinced she was an exchange student from London was still in effect, thankfully, but even Dara didn’t know how much longer that was going to last, now that she was a mere mortal.

  “Well, I don’t know. Do you have any hobbies?”

  “Collecting souls,” she said glumly.

  I had to bite my tongue to keep from responding to that. Not only would Mrs. Kendricks and the other witches immediately abandon their truce with her if she tried to bargain for someone’s soul, she was never any good at it anyway. Her total count of captured souls after more than four hundred years of trying was exactly zero, although to be fair, she spent most of that time trapped inside an enchanted geode.

  “I was hoping for something a little more mainstream, like cooking or knitting or something.” She just made a face. “Well, give it some thought. Maybe – what is that sound?” A faint chittering scraped at the edge of my hearing, sending shivers down my spine. Dara heard it too and we both looked around, until her eyes fell on her laptop screen.

  “Oh, no!” She yanked her headphones over her ears, cutting off the sound, and grabbed her mouse. Dozens of small white creatures surrounded Dara Alexander, skittering around at the very edge of her wand’s light. They looked like mutant scorpions, tails included. “Don’t distract me when I’m in the middle of a quest!”

  Still standing, she fired off Gloom, slowing their movements, and Lifesteal, killing them instantly and sucking their spirits into her wand. The light it cast flared up brighter, revealing another ring of loathsome multilegged things that scurried about when the light touched them and then charged right at her. Withering Aura dropped them in their tracks and Soul Burn ignited their disembodied spirits, pushing back the darkness even further.

  Now three translucent slugs the size of dump trucks attacked from the shadows on hundreds of tiny pseudopods, leaving behind trails of slime that slowly etched away the underlying rock. Dara Alexander had to deal with each one separately, dodging blobs of acidic spit as she cast Petrify and Scavenge on one and then used its life force to power Dark Void on the next and then used its life to throw a Soul Rift at the third, sending its front half into another dimension as the rest of it slumped into a disgusting, oozy mess.

  We both waited in tense anticipation for the next wave to come but nothing happened. Dara cautiously freed up a hand to pull one side of her headphones away from her ear. I listened carefully but I couldn’t hear anything except the slow plink of water dripping into a pool somewhere in the distance.

  “Is that it?” I asked. That battle seemed far too easy for her, although I had to admit Dara was really good at Lorecraft.

  “It shouldn’t be,” she said doubtfully. She reclaimed her chair and made Dara Alexander raise her wand again. With all the life force left over from the last fight, the sphere of light expanded outwards until it revealed a wall of natural stone worn smooth by eons of erosion. She turned in a circle again but, other than the pale carcasses of the slain creatures, there was nothing interesting in sight. “There’s supposed to be a Blind Worm down here.”

  “What in the world is a Blind Worm?”

  “I don’t actually know,” she admitted. “The seer wasn’t very specific. She just said there’s a Blind Worm sealed in the caverns that will bring eternal night to the surface if it ever escapes.”

  “Never heard of it.” That wasn’t terribly surprising, though. I started playing Lorecraft a couple of years ago but I doubt I’d been through even a tenth of it so far. “Are you sure you have the right cavern?”

  “The door I broke through back there had the symbol of the Worm on it. It has to be the right place.”

  “You destroyed a door to get in here?” She nodded. “That door didn’t happen to be the only thing keeping the Worm from escaping, was it?”

  “No, of course not,” Dara insisted, but it was obvious from the way she spun the camera around that it was. “Maybe I should go check it, just to be sure.”

  “Maybe you should,” I said, rolling my eyes. This was a pretty typical quest setup, where your actions had the potential to unleash unspeakable horrors on the locals if you screwed up. “Which way is it?”

  “This way, I think?” The uncertain note in her voice didn’t bode well for the unsuspecting folk on the surface. Dara Alexander hurried off as her light slowly faded but every circle of broken stone looked pretty much like any other and there were no footprints to help her retrace her path. She finally stopped as the pool of light shrank to a few feet across and then suddenly winked out, leaving the screen absolutely black. “This isn’t good,” Dara observed worriedly.

  “That’s the understatement of the year. Do you have any torches or light globes?” She shook her head. “You could cast Lifesteal on yourself,” I suggested doubtfully. That was a desperation move, since it would drain her own HP. “That might get you to the exit.”

  “Well –” She stopped and pressed her headphones over her ears. “Uh-oh.”

  “What?”

  “There’s something moving to the right.” She turned Dara Alexander in that direction but I still couldn’t see anything at all. Then she tilted the camera up and we both gasped.

  Something glowed faintly overhead. It was impossible to judge size and distance in the dark, but whatever it was looked big, like a monstrous centipede longer than a commuter train, with a head like a Chinese dragon and a tail pincer that could probably snip a car in half without even trying. It wound its way across the cavern ceiling between the stalactites, heading off to the left and moving incredibly quickly. Dara Alexander ran after it but she had no hope of catching up.

  “Stop it!” I yelled. “Don’t let it get out!”

  Dara huffed in frustration and targeted herself with Lifesteal. Her HP immediately dropped by half but she threw another Dark Void at the Worm. The void was invisible against the darkness and we couldn’t tell if it was going to hit or not, until the Worm suddenly stopped and turned its snarling head back in Dara Alexander’s direction.

  True to its name, the Blind Worm didn’t have any eyes but that didn’t make any difference at all. It doubled back on itself as Dara desperately searched through her spell bars and inventory for something that would at least slow it down. She grabbed a lightning ball scroll but she didn’t even have time to target the Worm before it dropped from the ceiling right on top of Dara Alexander.

  “Well,” I said after a lengthy silence, “that could have gone better.” Dara Alexander’s dimly luminescent spirit hovered disconsolately in the darkness. We couldn’t even see her corpse, which was probably just as well. The Blind Worm was long gone.

  Dara sat slumped in her chair, her arms crossed as she glared at the screen. “You distracted me,” she complained. “I could have beaten it.”

  “Right.” I moved over to my desk and woke up my laptop. I worked my way through this week’s password, although I wondered why I bothered with one since the only person it seemed to keep out was me, and fired up my copy of Lorecraft. “I’ll teleport you out of there and we’ll see if the sun is still shining.”

  A couple of minutes and a revive spell later, Coronox and Dara Alexander stood side-by-side in a tavern in Valeria as Dara and I scanned the global chat window for any sign of the Blind Worm. Disappointingly, all we saw was the usual idle gossip and pleas to join dungeon parties.

  “Well, I guess you didn’t start Armageddon after all,” I said. “Better luck next time.”

  “But I didn’t finish the quest!” she complained. “We have to go back.”

  “I don’t really have time for a full-blown quest.”

  “Please,” she begged. “It won’t take long.”

  “It just squashed you like a bug,” I reminded her.

  “I wasn’t ready. Please.”

  “I need to go in a few minutes.”

  “I’ll let you kiss me,” she offered, puckering her lips. “Please.”


  “You let me kiss you all the time. That’s not much of a bribe.”

  “I’ll show you my breasts,” she countered, grabbing the hem of her shirt. “You don’t get to see them very often.”

  That wasn’t exactly true – she still wasn’t in the habit of wearing pajamas at night – but Little Peter immediately voted in favor of the proposal anyway. I’d already gotten to second base with her but that was mostly happenstance. Two people sleeping in a bed made for one inevitably became very familiar with each other’s bodies. Third base, however, remained stubbornly elusive.

  “No,” I told her firmly.

  “But I don’t have any teleport spells! It’ll take me forever to get there by myself. Please?” She slowly pulled up the hem of her jersey, exposing her polka-dot panties and a good portion of her torso. “Please?”

  I cleared my throat. “Fine. I’ll get you as close as I can but then I have to get ready. Okay?”

  “Deal!” She dropped her shirt and watched me eagerly with her hands poised over her keyboard. I sighed and pulled up the map for the Province of Veridian.

  “So where’s that cave?” I asked. I hadn’t paid too much attention to the location when I retrieved Dara Alexander’s corpse.

  “Over here.” She pointed to her screen, which didn’t do me any good at all. I leaned over and tried to identify some landmarks near her finger.

  “Is that Fireaux?”

  “Yes, but the seer is south of that.” She squinted at her screen. “It’s called Dhorm.”

  I found the dot on my map, tucked away in the foothills along the southern border. “I haven’t been there before. We’ll have to go to Fireaux and walk from there.” Dara made a noise, which I chose to interpret as concurrence with the plan. “Hold on to your wand.”