See How She Fights

by Michelle Graves

  “Why are you up so early?” I whined into my pillows. I wanted to kill whoever invented morning. It was a stupid time of the day.

  “Izzy, it is already half past nine. If you slumber much longer you shall waste the day away. We have tasks that need our attention. So, you should get up, get dressed and eat something. Kennan mentioned that I should remind you to eat. As such, I am waking you up and we are going to go have breakfast,” he said, moving to put his shirt on. How did all of these men get so ripped? Was there some sort of magical protein shake they all drank?

  “Fine. But I am doing so under duress.” I was somewhat surprised he hadn’t asked me to go and break my fast with him. The way he talked. It was almost as bad as Aberto. Stupid mystery man making me dream of “home.” I hated the lot of them today. I just wanted Kennan back and for this whole nightmare to be over. I knew that I would have to take over the Council eventually. I just hoped they would give me some sort of training grace period where I could retreat to Alabama and recuperate from this whole debacle.

  “Get dressed,” he said, sitting down in the chair to pull on his shoes.

  “You are bossy. I hope you know that,” I groused as I gathered some clothes from my suitcase. Getting dressed while exhausted did not make for wise fashion choices. I moved into the bathroom and brushed my teeth quickly. I unbraided my mess of wavy hair and got dressed hurriedly. I needed coffee.

  “Ready?” Conall asked, moving toward the door. It appeared I would be ready whether I was or not.

  “I suppose,” I grumbled.

  “Are you always this chipper in the morning?”

  “Only when Old Ones pop into my dreaming and then send me off to dream of ‘home’.”

  “You saw Aberto again last night?” There was a tone of surprise hidden in his question.

  “Yeah. I was asking Ren about Old Ones and poof there he was. Then he gave me the whole spiel about seeking and finding or something. Then off to dreamland to dream of Kennan I went.” I yawned loudly as I made my way blearily down the stairs.

  “He made you dream of Kennan? I thought you said he sent you to dream of home.”

  “Kennan is my home,” I said, moving toward the coffee pot. Must. Get. Caffeinated.

  “Hmmm.” Conall, ever the eloquent.

  “Hmmm, indeed. I just wish that man would stay out of my head.”

  “Kennan?” It was a banner day for confusing Conall. I should get an award.

  “No. Aberto. He is the unnerving one.” I smeared a giant glob of cream cheese on my bagel as I talked. I knew from experience I was less than eloquent in the morning. I was surprised Conall had been able to follow me thus far.

  “When you’ve been around for that long it is bound to happen,” Conall muttered.

  “How old is he?” Maybe someone could at least tell me that.

  “Not going to happen, Izzy. Let’s just say he is off limits conversationally and leave it at that.”

  “Fine.” I shoved a giant bite of bagel into my mouth and chewed sullenly. I was tired. Kennan was gone. Seers were still dying. Life sucked.

  “Don’t mope, it is not becoming,” Conall said.

  “Good morning, Izzy.” Molly lowered herself across from me.

  “She might bite you if you get too close,” Conall said to her.

  “Oh, I know not to fully engage her until after breakfast. I learned that back at the lab.” Molly flinched as she finished. I knew she must’ve been thinking about her mom. I couldn’t imagine how she was holding up as well as she was. I wouldn’t have been. It seemed everyone I loved had some sort of devious relative. I wondered if I had an evil twin out there I didn’t know about. I dismissed it and went back to angrily chewing my bagel. I would decimate it. At least that was within my control.

  Eleanor approached our table as I set about murdering my helpless bagel. She looked drawn and exhausted. I wondered when she had last slept well. From the look of her face, it had been a long while.

  “I have found what we need,” she said.

  “Well, what is it?” Molly asked impatiently.

  “We must find a soul walker to sever the connection.” Eleanor sighed heavily and laid her head on the table. She looked utterly defeated. “This is useless. We will never be able to stop them.”

  “What is a soul walker?” I asked. The food and caffeine had finally entered my system enough to make me cognizant of the present.

  “Something so rare it has not been seen since the time of the Old Ones.” Conall tilted his chair back and rubbed his hand over his head. “Perhaps we could just kill Xavier. If we can’t set the souls free, then that is a price we will just have to pay. We cannot allow him to wander this earth any longer,” he said with resolve.

  “Right, but what is a soul walker? What can they do?” I had the beginnings of a terrifying revelation.

  “A soul walker is a person that can separate their soul from their body and walk in alternate planes. They do not need to maintain a corporeal form to stay alive. So say a Seer is a soul walker, they can take their soul out of their body and both would still stay alive. In fact, even if the Seers body were to die, the soul would live on and be able to regain corporeal form when it transitioned back to this plane. But like Conall said, they have not been around since the time of the Old Ones.” Eleanor looked so distraught I had to say something.

  “I think I am one,” I mumbled as everyone turned to stare at me in unison. “What?”

  “What do you mean you think you are one? Shouldn’t you have mentioned this talent sooner?” Conall leaned towards me with such an intense look on his eye it unnerved me.

  “Well, how was I supposed to know it wasn’t normal? You people never tell me anything. Okay, so Ren might have told me it was weird and during the whole back tattoo ceremony I may have gone on walkabout outside of my body, but I didn’t know that was abnormal. There. Is. No. Handbook.” I was getting irritated. They didn’t want me to know anything, they kept stuff from me, yet they expected me to know this stuff.

  Stupid Guardians. Stupid old Seers.

  “Have you done this?” Conall asked.

  “Yes, during the tattoo ceremony when the pain started to build in the beginning I left my body. I don’t know how I did it, I just did. I was standing there, looking down at my body, and the only people that could see me were Ren and Aberto. Which I thought was strange at the time, but I got so caught up with everything afterward that I didn’t think anything of it. So, this means we can help those Seers, right?” Deflection. If I could get everyone to stop staring at me like gaping fish and get back on task, it would be a miracle.

  “We have some work to do then. Do you think that you can contact Aberto again? We may need his help to prepare you for this.” Conall looked thoughtful.

  “Isn’t there a book I could read or something?” I really didn’t want to see Aberto again. He was completely unnerving. I always felt off balance with him.

  “No, there isn’t enough time. Conall is right, we need to do this and soon. Kennan should return either this evening or tomorrow with the men. We must be ready to move as soon as possible. You must do this, Izzy,” Eleanor implored. Her eyes begged me to put aside my feelings and help.

  “Fine. But for the record, I don’t like putting my trust in a man who won’t even explain what he is. Just so everyone is clear on this,” I grumbled as Molly reached over and squeezed my hand.

  “I can be there with you if you want.” Her offer to help meant more to me than she could possibly ever know.

  “Thanks, but I am pretty sure this is something I will have to do alone. Isn’t it?” I looked to Conall and Eleanor for confirmation. Their simultaneous nods were all I needed.

  “Shall we?” Conall motioned with his hand for me to get up and walk ahead of him. I wasn’t exactly sure where we would be heading to do this little experiment.

  “Where to?” I asked.

  “I believe the office would be the best place to conduct this affair.” S
omething in his choice of words rubbed me the wrong way.

  “Sounds fantastic.”

  Alright, fantastic might have been an overstatement. It sounded horrible in fact. Aberto was the last person I wanted to see. Thanks to him, I’d spent the entire night dreaming of Kennan and not resting. I missed my Guardian and I wanted him back by my side. Things wouldn’t feel right until he was there again.

  We moved toward the office in a pack with the other people around the house bowing to me as I went. I was just glad that not many of the Council members stayed there often. The bowing set my teeth on edge. We made our way to the imposing, wooden doors and entered. I looked back at my friends as they waited outside the room.

  “I shall be out here if you are in need of me.” Conall bowed before closing the door. Molly gave me a quick thumbs up just as the door shut.

  “Well, here goes nothing,” I mumbled as I moved toward the couch. I hoped I could induce the dreaming enough to get Aberto to come. I laid down on the hard couch and thought of Aberto. I pictured his handsome face and sad eyes. Just as I started to center myself, the air began to shift.

  “You need me?” Aberto was looking down at a pile of papers as though he had always been in the room.

  I jumped off of the couch quickly. My heart was in my throat as I took him in. He was in a tight black sweater that defined every plane of his body and pair of jeans that should be illegal. I shook the thoughts from my mind.

  “Are you just waiting around for me to ring my metaphysical bell or something?” If I stayed snarky, I could get through this.

  “In a manner of speaking, I suppose I am.” He moved toward me with more grace than should be afforded a man of his stature. He stood over me, entirely too close, and began to reach his hand up to my cheek again. I backed away. I was not interested in whatever he was selling. His hand dropped heavily to his side and his eyes took on a look of sadness that I’d become accustomed to.

  “I need your help.” I lowered myself into one of the chairs, hoping he would take the hint and give me my space.

  “You need but to ask,” he said, lowering himself onto the couch across from me. At least I had my space now.

  “I need to learn how to soul walk, or whatever it is called when I yank my soul out of my body. It’s the only way I’ll be able to sever the connection between Xavier and the Seers that have been sacrificed.” I looked down at my nails and started picking the dirt out from under them. The way he concentrated on me set my stomach to flipping.

  “Who told you that I could help you on this quest?” he asked, leaning forward.

  “Conall said that you would be able to.” I never raised my eyes to his. I just kept talking to my lap.

  “What of your Guardian? Has he not yet returned?”

  “No, he should be back this evening, but I am sure he’d want me to learn how to do this as quickly as possible. We don’t have time to waste when people are dying.” I looked up at him infuriated. Whatever there was between Kennan and Aberto had no place here. This was about more than their ages-old pissing match.

  “Are you?” he leaned back against the couch once more. He assessed me with his eyes for a moment before continuing, “I will show you how to do this, but you must trust me to help you.”

  “Can I trust you?” It was something I’d wanted to know since my second marking. He had helped me and he had been there the last couple of times I’d needed him, but the secrecy about what he was unnerved me. Not to mention the way I felt when I was around him. I shared a connection with him that confounded me.

  “You hesitate because you don’t have the answers you seek. I swear to you, when the time comes, I shall reveal all that I am to you. This is not that time. You must have faith that I will do things in the time they have been ordained. For now, I ask that you trust that I will guide you in this task.” His gaze captured mine and I knew that there was absolutely no room for argument here. Either I trusted him and learned what I needed to, or I left the Seers to eternally be stuck between planes.

  “I will trust you in this.” I wanted there to be no misunderstanding. I trusted him to help me but nothing further.

  “That is all I ask.” He leaned forward once more and captured my hand in his strong grasp. “For now.”

  He stood up, letting go of my hand in the process. I never quite knew how to act around him. Everything that came out of his mouth was riddled with subtext and mystery. He left my head spinning.

  “What do we need to do first?” I asked, standing up so that I was eye to chest with him. These men were insanely tall. I hadn’t noticed before, but I thought he was probably taller than Kennan.

  “You need to lie down on the couch,” he said, moving to the other side of the room.

  “Then what, Old One?”

  What? If he wanted to be a man of mystery then I was going to prod him about it a little bit. It was driving me insane.

  “Then,” his glance held the hardest edge I’d ever seen, “you will try and separate your soul from your body.”

  He said it like it was the simplest thing in the world. As I lowered myself back against the pillows, I wondered if it was. I tried to think back to how I’d done it when I was getting the tattoo. Then it had been involuntary. The pain of the tattoo had caused me to split. I knew how to pull my soul back to my body. That feeling was familiar, but this was entirely foreign to me.

  “The last time I did this I was in a lot of pain. Could you punch me?”

  “I will not injure you,” he said with no trace of humor. It seemed Old Ones didn’t come with a sense of humor. “Clear your mind, Izzy. Center it on your soul. Think only of your soul. Picture your soul in a separate space from your body. They are two halves to a whole. Remove the ties that bind the two together.”

  His voice held such a pleasant cadence that I found myself working to comply with his commands. I sought out the ties holding me together. I mentally tried to untie them and for a brief second I stood just outside of my body, looking down before I was pulled back in. I felt as though a bungee cord had snapped me back into place. As I opened my eyes a wave of nausea threatened to pull me under.

  “I don’t think I can do this,” I mumbled, sitting up so that I could put my head between my knees.

  “Again,” Aberto said, not giving me a moment to regain my composure.

  “Can I have a second?”

  “You do not have the luxury of wasting time, Izzy. Now do it again,” he commanded. At least his eyes weren’t sad anymore. Now they held the focus of a man used to having his commands acted out. I certainly would not be the first to mutiny. I swallowed down my nausea and lay back once more.

  “Separate your two halves, Izzy. Focus on the differences between the two. One half of you lives on this mortal plane. The other half is meant for larger purposes. The soul half of you has been ordained to carry out the will of the gods.”

  “God,” I muttered. No matter how many of these guys tried to get me to change my stance, it was not happening.

  “God, gods, what have you. Your purpose is clear, Izzy. Your failure to master this will result in the sacrificed Seers being eternally trapped between planes.”

  Way to put it into perspective. Ugh. I laid there trying to do what he asked of me. I found myself repeatedly being pulled back into my body. By the fifth attempt, I was near tears. My head was spinning and I felt like the bagel I had eaten for breakfast was about to resurface. Each time I failed, Aberto would yell, “Again!” I didn’t think I could do anymore.

  “Enough,” I barely wheezed.

  “For now. You must eat. Where can you find nourishment?” Aberto asked, placing his hand on my cheek. He looked down at me with so much intensity, it made my stomach feel even worse. I lowered my head between my knees and tried to breathe deeply.

  “Could you talk like you are from this century please?”

  “You find fault with my manner of speaking?”

  “See, right there, a normal person would have sa
id, ‘what’s wrong with the way I talk?’ But you say that.” I peeked up to find him looking down at me with a crooked smile. It was the first time I had ever seen anything resembling happiness grace his face.

  “Perhaps you can teach me how to be more of current times in return for my teaching you how to soul walk?” he snickered, knocking me fully off kilter. Surely the world was coming to a complete end if Aberto was cracking jokes.

  **********

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Aberto stuck out his hand to help me up from the couch. I hesitantly reached out and grabbed it, allowing him to pull me to my feet. I felt the same deep pulling in my soul that I’d felt the first time I’d met him. I wondered if Old Ones had this effect on everyone they were around.

  “Let us eat, then we must return to your practice. If you wish to save these Seers, you must be able to sever the connection easily.” Aberto moved ahead of me to open the door.

  “Yeah, I got it. I kind of feel like I am about to toss my cookies right now, though. I am not sure eating is such a good idea.” I felt quite green around the gills. The thought of food was not at all appetizing at the moment.

  “I assume you are referring to the fact that you feel unwell. You must eat in order to replenish the energy you exerted in trying to separate yourself. You will feel better once you have done this. On my honor.” Aberto bowed deeply as we made our way into the hall.

  Conall stood straight as we left the room and stared openly at Aberto. There was a look of adoration and fear on his face. I really wanted to know what a freaking Old One was and why they garnered that sort of a reaction from the Guardians. First Kennan had admonished me for not being more proper with the guy, now Conall looked like he would do whatever Aberto commanded. It was ridiculous. Aberto looked to be the same age as the other Guardians I knew. I could not figure out what the difference was. Maybe he could shoot lightning bolts out of his butt. I looked over to find Aberto with a crooked smile on his face.