by Crymsyn Hart
“Who are you talking to?” Lina asked, realizing that she could not hear Omar.
Omar jumped down to the ground and skittered toward them. He came so fast, Darria almost forgot how quick he could be and what he must look like to the virgin eyes of the new undertaker.
“Keep it away from me,” Lina screamed, jumping back behind her.
Omar took one of his flying leaps and landed on the front of Darria’s shirt, grabbing her right breast. “Comfy?”
“Very, beautiful Mistress of Darkness.”
Darria rolled her eyes. “Get your hand off my boob before I give you nubs.”
“Couldn’t help it. I needed something to anchor to,” Omar replied to her in a loving tone.
Lina shrieked again.
She held on to Darria and tried to get away from Omar. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Omar wave at Lina. “Will you can it? You can see that she’s afraid of you.”
“Fine,” Omar mumbled. “I wasn’t talking about getting into her pants. I said that she’s bright. She’s blinding, actually. Her aura could light up a town. She’s also got wings, so she’s gotta be part fey.”
“Whatever she is, she’s off-limits. Now hush, please.” She pried Lina’s fingers from her. “Lina, Omar isn’t going to hurt you. He’s my familiar. He makes horrible jokes and tries to feel me up, but he won’t hurt you.”
“But he’s a hand. And you let him touch you? Ew, God.”
Darria removed Omar from her shoulder and held him in her hand, balancing on his fingers. He lifted his index finger and wiggled it at Lina. “He’s not going to hurt you. Omar used to be an undertaker in my line. This is all that’s left of him. His hand’s been in my Wunderkammer for years, and he decided to come back to life to help me out. I’ve been pretty lucky. Don’t be scared of him, and if you find him coming near any of your ... lady bits, feel free to step on him. Don’t worry.”
Lina poked Omar’s wrist bone.
“Oh baby, do it again,” her familiar groaned.
“Shush,” Darria sent him a sharp jab with her mind.
“Eeep!” Omar bellowed, and he quieted. She gave him the equivalent of a pinch. He jumped back onto her shoulder and stayed there. Rory kept staring at Lina. These two were already going to get into trouble, although Lina didn’t seem to have noticed him at all. Her eyes had been trained on Omar.
“She’s become an undertaker,” the bull said to Darria. “You were true to your word. Now, what can you do about the entities surrounding the cabin? I can’t banish them. They are driven by a power I am unable to reach. You should be able to put them back into place.”
“What are those things?” Lina asked.
“What do you see?” Rory responded.
Lina finally looked at him, and her cheeks turned crimson. She glanced down at her shoes. Darria shook her head. She was not explaining the birds and the bees.
“I-I see dark blobs, shadows that vacillate in and out. I can’t really make out any forms. What do you see? I’m Evangeline, by the way,” Lina said, introducing herself to Rory.
“Rory. I’m D-Darria’s assistant.” He shoved his hands into his jeans. “I can see them, but they aren’t good. I know that.”
Darria looked around the circle. The dark specters were closer than they had been before. More of them appeared while she was in the cabin. Someone must have known she was trying to help Lina become the next undertaker. She glanced at the bull. “I’ll try. There are a lot of them. If any of them get through, will you be able to keep them off me and the others?”
“Evangeline is my first priority. I’m bound to her since she is my undertaker. I do as she says,” the bull snorted.
A shriek echoed in the background. One of the dark forms was pressed against the circle. Green energy zigzagged along the protective barrier that enclosed them. The dark blobs pushed around it, trying to draw the energy out. The bull huffed, straining to keep up with the circle. With the energy becoming weaker, Darria could now sense the death and rottenness about the corpses. She took a deep breath and stepped away from the others. Rory grabbed her arm.
“What are you doing?” Rory asked.
She glanced around, taking a mental count of the beings around the circle. There were thirty at least but possibly more. The energy outside of the circle was building, growing darker than anything she had ever felt before. “I’m going to get rid of these things.”
“But you could be killed, possessed, or something else.”
“So, I get killed, possessed, or something else. Rory, you need to learn that with being an undertaker, there are things you have to do to make sure others are safe. It’s kind of part of the job. This is our territory. Lina has to get someplace safe. Something isn’t right in the universe. Without the undertakers, things can’t happen the way they’re supposed to. I-I don’t know what that means exactly, but if you think about it, you’ll know I’m right. The undertakers who were killed came to me that night you found me on the lawn, Rory. Something pulled them back from the spirit world and locked them to their flesh. None of us should have to endure that. I don’t sense flesh behind these dark blobs. Whatever they are, they used to be human souls. I can’t leave them to suffer. You guys are all my responsibility. Go back over and stay with the others. Do you understand?”
Rory nodded.
She squeezed his shoulder and glanced at Mercury. “If I can’t banish them, at least bring them to a safe place. Rory has my key. It can open any door to where you want to go. If things go bad, and my other half....”
“No. You’re not thinking that way,” Omar yelled. “You merged with your other half. You’re not going to go to the dark side.”
“I agree with the hand. You’re not evil. The darkness I sense in you is far outweighed by the light. I was wrong to judge you as harshly as I did earlier,” Mercury apologized.
Darria really wanted to believe the bull. The darkness in her might have settled into her soul, but she hadn’t used her powers since the merging. It might be that her necromantic side was waiting to take her over when it had its chance. Omar remained on her shoulder, not abandoning her. Her stomach flipped and flopped. Darria had no idea what she was going to do or how she could accomplish it. All the other stuff she had ever done had been on instinct and with very little direction until she had pulled Gerry’s soul from the other world. Her anger at trying to be killed had given her a focus. What was she going to do with this situation and the dark figures pushing against the energy dome?
“You can do this,” Omar encouraged her.
“If this goes south, you could end up as finger food.”
“I don’t serve him. I serve you. These creatures would find me a little dried out and bony.” The wisecrack made her smile, and her heart warmed.
“Thanks, Omar.”
Darria sat on the ground and shivered, but it was not from the coldness of the earth. The force from the two differences hit her like two fronts colliding, and she was stuck in the middle. Mercury’s energy held the circle together, but it was waning. The blackness of the spirits outside the circle threatened to suck her in. Omar squeezed her shoulder for reassurance. Her nerves were frayed. The others were counting on her. Darria needed to force the dark entities back, and maybe that would lead her to the one animating them and the one who was determined not to let her get to all the other undertakers.
How in the world am I going to do this? Darria didn’t need to glance behind her to know that the others were staring at her. Now that Darria had integrated her other half, she didn’t know how to really access any of that power. Sensing the dark energies around her was not something she had to think about. It was an extension of her, the same as the way she knew when a body was being delivered to the house. The twisted version was not something she wanted to think about again, but maybe it was just the thing that would help her access the other side.
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, recreating the scene where she was staring at the other sid
e of her. It was there, and this time, it smiled. “You need my help with this, don’t you?”
“I wasn’t sure you were still there. I thought we were coming together.”
“We are, but we’re never going to be completely together. I think we both know that deep down. Don’t worry about this. It’s something we can do. Relax and let a little bit of me in, your darkness, because that’s what I am: darkness with a voice. The darkness that’s animating these shades is nothing compared to me. Take my hand, and let us do the work. Don’t fight it.”
Darria slipped her hand into the other part of her and felt its cool, clammy skin slide over her own, a jolt of energy rushing through her. Omar moaned softly. She sensed that his spirit was closer than ever. Her fingers brushed the ground, and the energy of the circle swept through her. Death had happened at this cabin. Why hadn’t she felt it before?
“Because you still haven’t accepted that we are one and the same. Once you completely understand that, then this conversation won’t ever have to happen again. We are already in one another’s veins. Let it flow.”
Darria listened to from her other side as the darkness engulfed her. The taste of earth filled her mouth. When she opened her eyes, her vision shifted. The entities around the circle were no longer blobs. They were twisted things, segments of souls that didn’t belong together. Vampires and werewolves mashed into one being. Demons with fire-red eyes and fairies smooshed into creatures with three jaws and five arms. The suffering she sensed from these entities broke her heart. These soul-filled puppets were doing the bidding of something heinous. Her awareness passed over them until she discovered one that was mostly intact and not sewn together like the others.
“Let me help you,” Darria whispered to it. “I can release you.”
A glimmer of response came from it. She pushed a tendril of power into the mishmash of souls until she reached the core of the two entities who were glued together. Its desperate cry for release wrenched her heart. She had to stay focused so that she could dispel them. The two souls murmured something. Darria strained to hear what they were saying.
“...won’t let us. Destroy the girl. Save us...,” the two souls whispered to her. Darria delved deeper and sensed that the souls were remnants of a fairy and another kind of beast that she hadn’t encountered before. It was an animal, maybe a lion or a lynx.
Darria didn’t know what could have meshed these souls together, but most of them were too far gone they had lost their individuality. She could pry them apart by the seams. She could blast them apart and pray a harvester could collect the remnants of their souls once she was done.
“Kill the undertakers....”
She concentrated on the one who talked to her. The seams where the spirits were threaded together were so well stitched that any seamstress would envy the job. Darria pushed into the mashed-up wraith and encountered the exact energy she had met when she probed Gerry and the werewolf. Within her mind’s eye, she saw the tiny stitches that held them together. She lifted her hands and used her right hand as a blade to sever the threads. Darria began to cut the sutures and was hit in the chest. The force knocked her flat with hands that wrapped around her heart. The weight stole the breath from her. Power slammed against her, and she struggled to sit back up.
“Stay on your back like the bitch you are. Spread your legs, and maybe I’ll make it easy for you. You’ll love all of it.” It was a man with a raspy voice. Darkness hovered over her when she opened her eyes.
Darria pushed her hands against the weight. Something smothered her. For a second, she felt helpless, but her anger took control, and her power surged. She shoved the being on top of her. The thing flew off her into the circle. Darria concentrated back on the one being and on severing the ties that bound them together. She cut a few more layers before she was airborne and slammed into a large pine tree. Thin needles showered down around her. Something cracked in her back. When she moved, it was difficult to roll her shoulders. The black form lunged at her again, but she dodged out of the way, so the shade passed through the tree.
The wind whooshed by her, and hands clutched her throat. “I told you that if you remained on your back, I might make it easy. You were warned that I was coming for you. Here I am. I didn’t think you’d come after her. Two for one. I’ll kill you, and then, I’ll kill her.”
“I don’t think so.” Omar appeared as a full body behind the shade and wrestled it from her.
Darria let the rush of air come into her lungs. Her familiar manhandled the phantom. She could feel the struggle that her familiar had with the spirit to keep him off her, buying her time. She reached back to the spirits she tried to help. She couldn’t be as delicate as she wanted to be about it. Darria threw a bolt of her power along where the souls were joined. The connections groaned along with the souls. Pain spiked through her left hand. Omar had been hurt. Injure her familiar, and it would hurt her as well.
These ghosts around the circle might not be her opponent’s familiars, but they were connected to him. She pushed the pain away and sensed the strain Omar was pulling on her. He couldn’t keep up the fight much longer. Darria gritted her teeth and focused her power into a knife’s edge so that it would slice through the mass of two souls. She clenched her fists together and pushed with all her might. If these were regular dead people, it wouldn’t have been so much effort, but the being enlivening them was stronger than Oliver. It had more than harvester powers. The specters it reanimated had a slice of that power. The more forgone they were, their minds having been used and raped for their master’s purpose, the stronger they were, almost self-sustaining. They drew the energy of the darkness around them. The tethers she cut away weren’t so rooted. They wanted to be released. Darria raised her arms. The energy around her tattoos pulsated, along with the words on her left arm, the spell Oliver had given her from his boss to free human souls. Some of these things were remnants of human beings.
She read the words. “Spirit trapped by heinous act, take your leave to find reprieve, flee the flesh that bound you once, and speed onward into paradise hence.” The power flare hit each of the souls that had some human spirit attached to them. The energy left her breathless, and at the same time, she felt another stab in her left hand.
A scream erupted in the night.
She glanced at the shade Omar had been wrestling on the ground. Parts of him were sizzling with purple flames. The roars of those he pieced together also filled the night. The dark shapes around the circle also burst into flames. The one she had been working on rushed upward. Lights shone down from above and touched some of the ones who were on fire, pulling the spirits back into the place where they were supposed to go. In other places, the ground opened up and pulled the other flames under the earth. The energy of the circle collapsed. Many of the creatures fell apart because one or more of their parts had been torn from them. For the rest of them that were there, she could feel the seams that kept them together.
She couldn’t cut each one away individually. It would take too much time. Darria closed her eyes and plunged into the darkness of her soul, and it answered her. Words bubbled up her throat and rolled over the tip of her tongue in one effortless thread.
“Deadly threads that bind. Spirits sever ties.”
Energy flared down her arms and caused her to grab on to the tree. Screams of those who were gobbled up by the darkness and freed from the enchantments hurt her ears, but their joy of no longer being pinned down and smooshed together lifted her spirits, knowing she had done something good with her powers.
“Don’t think this is over,” the dark entity seethed. It had shrunk down in size, but it remained powerful. She had wounded it. “I will eradicate all of your swine.”
“Try to go up against me again. You won’t win.”
“That’s what you think. You have no idea what I’m capable of. You might have won this, but there is more to come. Take this.”
Fire exploded in her left hand. It felt like everything in it
was crushed. Something landed at her feet.
Omar.
A blade had been shoved through the center of his palm. Darria tried to move her left hand but wasn’t able to. She scooped him up with her right hand and held him close, but she couldn’t feel the spiritual connection she had to him.
“Omar?” she whispered.
No answer came to her.
Darria looked up at the darkness, but the spirit had vanished.
So had Omar.
Chapter 12
Darria set Omar down on the desk in her attic. Mercury had brought them home. He was in the backyard talking to Lina, Marie, and Rory. She was exhausted and wanted to be left alone. Her heart was sick from the loss of her familiar. The hand was charred. His fingers were shriveled. His skin was cracked and brittle. She looked at her left hand and saw no damage, but she couldn’t feel anything in it. Her heart felt broken as though something had been pulled out of her that she couldn’t fill.
“Mind if I come in?”
Marie stood in the doorway of her office. Darria glanced at the other woman. She had not asked what happened, but Darria figured she knew by now. The warmth in her eyes let her know that Marie cared.
“Sure, come on in.” Darria invited her in so she could pass through the enchantment over the office. The other necromancer took her left hand. She could feel the warmth of her energy passing over her.
“I’m sorry about Omar. I sensed his absence and the wound dealt to you. Can you feel my hand?”
“Yes.” Everything in her seemed to have died along with Omar.
“Good. It means you haven’t lost your familiar.”
“What do you mean? His hand is a desiccated, blackened husk that was a result of him buying me some time so that I could break free of the circle. I wounded the one after the undertakers. For retribution, he did this to Omar.”
“Omar didn’t die on you. If he did, your hand would also be shriveled.”