Plagued: Book 1

by Eden Crowne

  “Hello, Keiko.”

  Her eyelids fluttered and the girl breathed more rapidly inside the mask.

  Pulling up a chair, Julian sat by the cold, metal-framed bed, taking her hand in his. The skin covering the knuckles and bones of her fingers was practically translucent, the veins clearly visible on her arm. He stroked her forehead, speaking softly.

  I had thought Julian hard and frightening behind that handsome face. Strange, mysterious, cold and unfeeling. His gentle manner with the girl was anything but distant. It took me by surprise.

  The girl's mouth moved and Julian lifted the clear plastic mask. She rasped out a few words he had to lean closely to hear.

  “This is Alexandra. I am going to watch out for her.”

  She whispered something again.

  Julian nodded and spoke softly into her ear for some time.

  I shivered. The room seemed colder than when we entered. Maybe the window was still open?

  It was. And something nasty was crawling through.

  A shadow rose up in the corner, a dark form taking shape, cloaked and cowled. I flattened myself against the hospital room wall edging behind the IV drips.

  “Julian,” I whispered urgently.

  “Yes. I see it.”

  Carefully replacing the oxygen mask on the girl, he reached into one pocket of his jacket as he stood, pulling forth an object of some kind. A pentagram or maybe a hexagram. Whatever, it had rather a lot of points. He held it ready at his side. “It is the Kiros, the same one I followed before. The creature wishes to take her essence and toy with it before allowing her to die. Stay behind me.”

  No urging necessary for that! If I had been any nearer the door, I would have been gone, gone, gone.

  Julian held the object in front of him. He whispered a quick rush of words in a strange language. The temperature in the hospital room plunged. Vapor coalesced as Julian spoke, coming in quick, short bursts, though his lips hardly seemed to move. In the corner, the shadow took on a more solid form. Lifting its head every so slightly, I saw the face beneath the cowl and recoiled. This thing, the Kiros, radiated darkness. Childhood nightmares made suddenly manifest. The monster under the bed crawling into reality.

  The girl lifted her hand. She looked up at me, her dark, sunken eyes unreadable. With an effort I didn't know I had in me, I swallowed my own terror, stepped away from the wall and took her hand in mine. There was so little flesh, it was like holding bones. I swallowed again.

  “Julian will deal with it.” There was only the slightest tremor in my voice. Facing the thing, I placed myself in front of her. 'Please let him deal with it,' I prayed silently.

  Julian spoke. Words and symbols formed in the air between him and the thing: black, silver, gold, and red. Fearsome things. I could feel the power radiating from them. The spirit stretched out its hands, long-fingered and gray. A keening sound came from its mouth that sent chills up and down my spine. Patterns appeared, hanging in the air, gray as the spirit's skin. Julian's summons and the Kiros' faced off against one another like soldiers on a battlefield. Writhing and coiling as though they were living things.

  Spells. That's what these mysterious words must be.

  This was real magic.

  Julian was magic.

  Even though I had witnessed some of his power between the walls of my walk-in closet, I'd mentally shoved it into the “think about it later” file. Here in the hospital room, there was no later, only now and the now was probably going to crawl over and bite me.

  Glancing down, I saw the girl's eyes close, her chest barely rising and falling beneath the sheets. It was probably better she didn't see this anyway. I wished I wasn't seeing it.

  There was an infinitesimal pause when nothing seemed to move and then, everything moved at once. Julian appeared to throw his whole weight directly at the wall of spells floating in the air. He sent the magic hurtling towards the Kiros. The spirit's symbols counterattacked. Magic against magic, Julian and the Kiros' spells battled. They writhed and fought with casualties on both sides, the shining words falling away in little puffs of dark vapor. Julian looked more like a conductor than a commander, orchestrating the battle with intricate movements of his hands and arms. His stance wide, he pushed forward inch-by-inch, only to be pushed back by the dark spirit. Forward and back, they battled each other – even though they never touched. Julian's breath was coming fast and hard, condensing in the freezing cold emanating from the Kiros. The sound of thunder shook the room. I couldn't understand why no one came.

  One of the symbols broke through Julian's battle line slicing him across the cheek. Blood dripped from the long, thin cut. More and more followed until Julian stood surrounded by a maelstrom of dark magic, the spells rending his coat, his shirt, his flesh.

  A symbol took form, larger than the rest. Floating a few feet off the ground, it was even blacker than the Kiros and it reached for Julian, engulfing him in an inky embrace. Julian's form disappeared inside the veil of darkness as though he had fallen into a hole. I couldn't breath for the fear. The Kiros looked straight at me, the keening wail rising in volume. It reached out with long fingers. I dropped the girl's hand looking around desperately for some sort of weapon. How could I fight magic?

  There was a wrenching motion and an explosion of light and dark. The bed slid several feet forward, knocking me to the floor. The keening wail was silenced. The center of the room suddenly cleared of darkness. Julian stood, breathing heavily. He wiped at the sweat and blood running down his face with one hand. Stopping its advance, the Kiros, backed away. Putting the force of his entire body into the motion, Julian threw a word as though it were a lance. A bright, shining word made of light that manifested into solid form. Flaring, it flew directly at the Kiros. There was a moment of total silence, an absence of motion and movement where the only thing I could hear was the blood pounding in my ears. Then the Kiros shattered like a glass figurine dropped on a concrete floor. Jagged shards skittering across the linoleum tiles. Within seconds, the pieces began to bubble and smoke until there was nothing left of the death spirit.

  Julian fell to his knees, gasping for breath.

  I couldn't seem to find my feet so I just stayed on the floor.

  It was a few moments before Julian could pull himself together, his jewel-like eyes refocusing to crystal clarity. Longer still until my heart stopped racing. Julian made his way back to the girl's bed, slipping the talisman into his pocket. I saw it quite clearly then. A six-pointed hexagram set inside a circle. My heart jumped into my throat as I flashed on those awful photographs from the Reaper, the faces. Their heads were positioned in a diagram shaped just like the object he'd used to battle the Kiros.

  I looked up at Julian though he had eyes only for the wasted girl. He grasped her pitifully thin hand. She began to tremble. Very shortly, her whole body convulsed with shudders and spasms.

  “We need to call the nurses.” I scrambled to my feet.

  “No, Alexandra. It is almost over.”

  As Julian said those words, her awful shaking stopped. He reached down and despite the tubes, gathered the frail girl into his arms. I saw tears running down her sunken cheeks. Julian's eyes glittered green, as hard as the rare gem they so closely resembled. She raised one hand ever so slightly. Reaching across her, Julian took the soft bear and nestled it next to the girl's cheek. Holding her, he rocked back and forth as though comforting a small child, making low, soothing noises.

  Again, the gentleness surprised me. The hard young man biting off his words and throwing them at me like stones was so at odds with the Julian here on the hospital bed. I remembered the emotion in the released demon's voice as he thanked Julian for freeing him. Perhaps there was more than anger beneath Julian Lake's brittle, beautiful shell.

  Energy was building up from somewhere, I could feel it. Buzzing like a swarm of bees in my ears and prickling along my scalp. With no more warning than the smallest pop of sound, the girl in Julian's arms flared brightly with a cold bl
ue flame. There was the briefest outline of a form, a silhouette, and then nothing. A thick whirlwind of shining dust specks swirled up and around in the antiseptic-scented air. No longer anchored to a body, tubes and needles swung away.

  The thick storm of dust particles circled Julian as though it had a sense of purpose. Around and around him it spun and then, as if on some unseen cue, fell silently to the floor.

  “She's gone,” I said, or maybe I just thought it.

  “Not just from this world.” Julian's voice was hoarse. “She is gone from forever. The Club has taken her soul utterly and stolen the welcoming mysteries of what is beyond this veil of life.” He paused, then looked directly at me with that piercing gaze. “It is not just a battle to the death, Alexandra. This is a fight for life after death. Your life after death.”

  I stared in horror at the pitiful pile of dust on the dull linoleum floor.

  “Save me, Julian,” I gasped.

  Chapter 22

  Dust Bunny Gonna' Hop, Hop, Hop

  “Here.”

  Julian handed me a stoppered glass vial about the size of my thumb.

  I looked at the vial, the question obvious in my eyes.

  Staring at me over the rim of his espresso cup, he took a few aggressive sips. The cuts on his face were already healing, the new tissue a little lighter than the rest. He'd buttoned his coat up in the taxi to hide the blood on his shirt.

  We were sitting on the narrow terrace of a coffee house in the Hiroo neighborhood. Vanessa and I had often drunk coffee and shared confidences at this very table. In school, the students called this area the Gaijin Ghetto – gaijin meant outsiders, non-Japanese like us – because of the disproportionately large number of foreigners living here compared to the rest of town. Totally tongue in cheek, since this district had more Mercedes in a four-block radius than the entire upper east side of Manhattan probably. The street was crowded with European cars, brightly colored taxis, and pedestrians of every nationality.

  Leaving the hospital the way we came, Julian pushed me into a taxi. A short ride later and here we sat, the moisture beading up on the glass of my iced latte as quickly as the sweat of fear on my forehead. My hands were still shaking from what we'd witnessed in the hospital room.

  As if feeling my gaze, his eyes flashed to mine and I flinched. His face had that same fierce expression as the morning I fell out of his bed. All the gentleness of his time with the doomed Keiko melting away. I didn't know why he was angry with me. I hadn't done anything to him.

  “You're fading.”

  Oh.

  He was right, of course.

  I'd crossed the line into the unknowable in that hospital room. Here at this coffee shop, looking into Julian's eyes, I could feel the world behind the looking glass shatter completely, exposing me utterly. Something truly awful had happened, changing my life forever or perhaps ending it. Future Lexie could analyze the physics behind the phenomenon another time. Present Lexie needed to focus. I did not want to turn to dust.

  He closed his hand over mine, the one holding the vial, squeezing my fingers so tightly, it hurt. “Drink, Alexandra.”

  “Why?”

  “The elixir will keep you strong, delay...” he paused, “the process until we can take all the parts of your soul back.”

  “No, Julian. Why are you here? Why for me?”

  He pulled away abruptly, his expression suddenly guarded, “Does it matter?”

  “Yes, I think it does.”

  His fair skin gleamed like pearls in the sunlight. He stared hard into my eyes and I had to steel myself to meet that stare.

  “They are monsters,” he said at last.

  “I'm beginning to understand that.”

  His eyes flicked away, burning into the table. “As am I.”

  He told me a story then. The “Fable of Precocious Julian Lake,” or “The Fool's Downfall,” as he called it, laughing without humor. His parents were from one of those cold, clichéd, titled British families, which – atypically – was absolutely rolling in money. “My father had the good sense to drink himself to death on the very fine vintages from our wine cellar before I was five, probably to escape Mother. As I grew up, I could hardly blame him. She is a, what would you call it in America? The head of her department, maybe? At one of those ancient colleges we English are renowned for. All flying buttresses and soaring egos. Metaphysical sciences, mystical studies her speciality. She'd have been burned at the stake a few centuries ago, now she publishes. Other children read fairy stories; I read grimoires with private tutors, in Latin, and compilations of sigils because that was what she demanded.”

  I looked at him blankly, “You lost me after 'burned at the stake'.”

  “Grimoires as we see think of them now, are spell books, really, to simplify. Sigils were, are, magical symbols that date from antiquity. They resurfaced in the pop culture of Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Though many belittle them, they have far too much validity for my liking. It is a long story. Let us just say we became enamored of the Club at a very young age.”

  “We?”

  His face went white. Such a tragic look of despair came over him that I gasped. My throat seized up and it was a moment before I could sputter, “Younger than me? I thought the cut-off age was usually eighteen, that I was an exception.”

  He shook his head, the fine silver hair swinging forward and back across his cheekbones. “That was a fabrication to pull the silken noose they had slipped around your soul a little tighter. One of their many, many lies. Everyone reaches the threshold at a different age. In some people, that flame is already burning at eleven or twelve. In others it does not flare until twenty, or even later.”

  I stared at him critically. Taking in the firm line of his jaw, the faint shadow darkening his chin. He seemed far more experienced and adult for someone who looked only a little older than me. “Are you, like, really a hundred years old, but frozen at this age?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like a vampire. After they die they get stuck at whatever age they were.”

  “I am not a vampire and I am not dead.”

  “Well, of course you'd deny it. They always do. You're absolutely pale enough to be a vampire.”

  He ran one hand through his hair in an impatient motion. “My ancestry is Celtic with a bit of Saxon thrown in. The family comes in two shades: pale and paler.”

  “You know what I mean, Julian.”

  “No, I don't!” He glared at me, the cold stare returning and I instinctively recoiled back in my chair. For a time he said nothing, turning his espresso cup around and around on the saucer with his long, tapered fingers. “Right now I am still growing, physically.” He shifted position in the chair trying to cross his long legs under the little table. Giving up, he pushed away, putting distance between us. “Boys mature slower than girls. When my body settles a bit more into manhood, then my metabolism will sync with my powers and I will appear to hardly age at all for a very long time. To become immortal though, you must continue to ingest souls. That is, after all, the ultimate goal of Club members. Your boyfriend Savan?”

  I flinched a little, hearing his name out loud. The longing for his voice, the touch of his hands, surging to the surface.

  “He does not just look like the model for Michaelangelo's 'David.' He was the model.”

  I could only stare.

  Tossing off the rest of the espresso, he continued almost reluctantly. “I was young and cruel, always determined to take whatever I wanted when I wanted it. Julian Lake would not end up the spineless victim his father had,” he faltered. “It was just me at first. I would become – or so I thought – powerful. Untouchable in my enchantments. Living proof of my mother's studies. That would show her.” He laughed harshly, the sound grating on my jumpy nerves. “All the initiations, I was cold and hard. Whatever they commanded, no matter how despicable, I did. I supped on dark enchantments and thrived. My life was not all clubs, lounges, and cocktails,
as it was for you. I took a soul to me, became a true member of the Club, condemned an innocent to death through my actions. Enthralled, emboldened and empowered, I brought someone in with me. We shared everything, we always had, always. She needed, I thought, to be a part of this new life. To have the power. We would live forever. Taking what we wanted. Her initiation process was not the same as mine, and I remember I was actually grateful for that.”

  He laughed again so harshly people at the other tables paused to look our way. “The other members explained that it differed for each person and I did not question that. What a fool I was! Such ego! To trust someone. To trust anyone. You are not the only person, Alexandra, to be beguiled by the Club's enchantments.”

  Speaking so quietly I could hardly hear him, he told me that one morning, another member, spiteful and angry at having lost the lottery, called and gave him an address. Nothing more. Descending into the basement of an abandoned building, he found her lying on the cold concrete floor, her head in a hexagram, her soul stolen away.

  They brought her into the Club not as a convert, but, in the delicious irony they seemed to relish, as a sacrifice.

  “A sacrifice to my vanity,” he said quietly.

  He began hunting the Club members then. Searching for those holding the portions of her soul. While he hunted, he concocted potions, trying to keep her strong.

  “Has anyone ever done that? Brought someone back?”

  I was hoping he would snap his fingers and say, “Yes, silly American, happens all the time.”

  “I don't know, honestly.”

  Not the answer I wanted to hear.

  “It took me nearly six months until I managed to find two of them, before...” He let the sentence trail unfinished. I knew how it ended now anyway, 'before she turned to dust'.

  “I wanted to die too. At the end, she said I must stay and fight the Club. Save others from her fate. She fell to dust in my arms, just like Keiko. Since then I have devoted myself to the study of these enchantments, enhancing my own developing powers. I am very strong. The Club was always afraid of me, even the senior members of the Council. That was why they sought to teach me my place with her death.”