by Rob Cornell
“She taught me how to get rid of the infection,” I said, voice quivering. “Burn it right out of my system. It's gone, Sly. It is totally gone.”
The change in his expression lifted me up like a magic breeze. His jaw hung open, but a smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “Are you sure?”
I nodded. “I'm not fighting it anymore. That shit is out of my system.”
He broke into a laugh from deep in his belly, shook his head in wonder. “That is radical, brother. Totally rad.” Then he moved toward me. He wrapped his arms around me. His shirt had the smell of pot baked into it, but it wasn't fresh. Just Sly's normal old smell.
I hugged him back, hard. If I had to be honest, I teared up a little, too. “Sly, I'm so sorry.”
His embrace eased, but he didn't let go. “I know.”
“Are we good?”
He sighed. “I love you like a son, Sebastian. Always have. Always will. I just needed…still need, maybe…time, brother. Just some time.”
He gave me a thump on my back and pulled away. “I'm sorry about what I said to you before. I don't resent you.”
“You don't have to lie to me. You have every right to feel the way you do. But I can't stand the thought that we still aren't…family.”
“Then rest easy, brother. We'll always be family.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
I couldn't wait to share the news with Odi too. I raced home, the speed limit an unbearable burden, but I didn't need a speeding ticket right now. I was so jazzed, my hands shook as I tried to stick the key into the lock of my front door.
The second I was through the door I ran right for the basement. The soles of my boots knocked loudly against the wooden steps, the sound echoing in the stairwell. I felt the big dorky smile on my face. I couldn't help it, and I didn't care. I just couldn't wait to see the expression on Odi's face and hear the inevitable whoa dude come out of his mouth. Granted it was the middle of the day, and the vampire kid was fast asleep in his coffin. The basement was dark enough, though, that it wouldn't kill him if I opened up the coffin and roused him. Hopefully, he wouldn't be too crabby.
But the second my feet hit the basement floor and I cleared the stairwell, I froze.
Odi's coffin was gone.
A cold fist squeezed my heart. My jittery excitement turned to trembling fear. I scurried over to where his coffin normally lay and bent down onto one knee. I brushed my fingertips along the cool cement in the rectangle of missing dust, a stark sign of something absent.
Gods dammit. What the hell had happened?
A stupid question. I knew what had happened. The Maidens of Shadow had happened.
I shot to my feet, clenched my hands into fists, and spun on my heel. I charged back up the stairs. Marched straight out the door and stopped on the sidewalk outside. The sun felt hot against my face, while the wind sent chills through my body. It felt like a fever.
I stood there for a moment, wondering what to do next. Rushing out of the house had been an instinct. But now that rationality had caught up with me, I needed to figure something out.
I looked both ways down the street, as if I might find the answer in either direction. A blue compact car with a little too much rust drove by spewing exhaust. A pigeon cooed from somewhere nearby. Needing to do something, I got back in my car, buckled my seatbelt, gripped the steering wheel, and waited for some kind of inspiration to strike me. I racked my brain. And then the obvious answer hit me.
I couldn't do this myself. I needed help. And I knew a hell of a powerful sorceress that could do it. I just needed to convince her to change her mind about helping me find the Maidens.
Once again, I drove to the cemetery.
Urvasi needed to give me a damn cell number or something.
Chapter Twenty-Five
As I stood by my mother's grave, the sun warmed my scalp. But when I called on Urvasi, a chill ran through my whole body. Once more, when I turned around, there she stood. She was wearing a light blue sari again. She wore a golden pin in her hair in the shape of a lily, and her eyes shone with concern, as if she knew why I'd come.
I didn't give her a chance to ask and immediately told her what had happened.
She eyed me for a moment, lines of worry in her face. Then she shook her head. “Why have you come to me?”
“I came to you for help.” I thought it was obvious.
“You expect my help with that tooth?” She sighed, and seemed to deflate where she stood. “I'm afraid I cannot do that.”
“Look, this is not about revenge anymore. I need to find Odi. I need to find my apprentice.”
I could tell by her expression that no matter what I said, she wasn't going to help me. She didn't say anything, though.
I took a step toward her. “You say you can't help. What you mean is that you won't help, right?”
She held out her hands and shrugged. “Can't or won't, the truth remains the same.”
“So you don't give a damn what happens to my apprentice? Should I expect you won't give a damn about me either? If I'm in trouble?”
“You don't understand.”
“You're damn right. And you're not helping me understand one bit.”
She looked down as if she couldn't bear to look me in the eyes. “I'm sorry.”
“Sorry? My apprentice is kidnapped, you have the power to help, but you won't. And you're sorry?”
She clutched her hands in front of her. Then she finally had the guts to look me in the eye. Her gaze was so intense, I flinched.
“Have you not wondered why I only appear to you here? At your mother's grave?”
Of course I had, but I didn't see what that had to do with anything right now. “So what?”
“I have limitations, Sebastian.” She seemed to steel herself. She straightened her back, lifted her chin, then nodded shortly. “I am bound to this place when I am on the mortal plane.”
The words she said technically formed a sentence in English, but I didn't understand it. And the more I danced with her riddles, the longer the Maidens had to work out a plan for using Odi against me. “I don't care where you're from, who you are, or what you are. I know you’re a sorceress and a damn powerful one. As far as I'm concerned, that's all I need to know.”
I took another step toward her. I could feel my anger hot in my veins, which reminded me of the infection that had so recently boiled through me. For some reason, that made me even angrier.
“Please,” I said. “Help me.”
“You are not listening.” She held her hands out to either side of her. “You have never seen me beyond this place,” she said. “Because I cannot leave here. You wondered why your mother never told you about me. It is because she was forbidden to speak of me. I'm an outcast, Sebastian. I was banished to a realm in between by the Ministry.”
I gaped at her a moment, my mouth hanging open, my brain rifling through her words to make some sense of them. Banished?
“What could you have possibly done to get banished?”
She frowned. “That is my business. Not yours.”
I would have argued the point, but if my mom trusted her, maybe I could give her a chance, too.
“Your mother and I were great friends,” she continued. “A long time ago. But my being an outcast meant that Ministry law said I do not exist.”
“Then how did my mom communicate with you, to tell you to take over as my mentor? If she wasn't allowed to.”
“The law prevented her, but that didn't stop your mother. She was able to create a conduit, a gap between worlds, mine and hers. The kind of magic the Ministry may have executed her for had they learned of it.”
Now I knew where I got my rebellious streak from. Thanks, Mom.
“When she asked me to take over for her and your father, she moved the conduit to this plot so that if she died, I would be here when you visited.”
She had thought of everything. And it pained me to think that she had to make this kind of arrangement, because she knew her life was in dang
er.
“So you can't leave the cemetery?”
“I can't stray very far from this plot,” she said. “Not on your plane at least. But where I took you before? The room without doors? That's my home now.”
I wrinkled my brow. “Just that one room?”
She shrugged one shoulder. “It's a little more complicated than that. But essentially, yes. That one room is my cell.”
A shudder ran through me. I couldn't imagine being exiled to a magical prison that existed in a single room. Although, for a prison, it had been a pretty nice room.
“Well, if you can't help me, the Maidens have won.”
“Not necessarily.”
I crossed my arms. “I'm listening.”
“You have it within yourself to find them,” she said. “If they have a piece of your soul, you need only find your soul.”
I laughed. “If it were that easy, I would've done it a long time ago.”
“Before now you did not know the art of acceptance.”
Oh, not the acceptance thing again. Granted, it had performed a miracle by helping me get rid of the vampire infection. But I couldn't see how it would help me now.
Urvasi seemed to know my thoughts. “You trusted me before. Trust me again now.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Your soul is part of you. Just like your blood. And who controls you?”
I nodded. “Okay. Yeah. I control myself.”
“So if you control yourself, and you accept that control, you can find yourself.”
It sounded like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, even for a pair of sorcerers. But I had trusted her before, and she sure as hell had delivered.
“What do I have to do?”
She held out her hand. “Come home with me.”
I smiled, and it felt genuine, even with all the hell raining down around me. “Lead the way,” I said.
I took her hand, and together we traveled to her prison.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The room was different this time. No pillows or rack of staffs, and it actually had furniture. A two-seater wicker couch with plush cushions sat in the center of the room. Various paintings adorned the walls, most of them with an Indian flair. Several of them featured the goddess Kali in various poses. The only thing the same as the other room was the silver sword hanging on the wall. I wasn't sure what someone in a prison, especially a one-room prison, would need with a sword. But who was I to judge?
Urvasi gestured toward the couch for me to sit. The cushion was kind of thin, and I could feel the wicker creak underneath me. Urvasi sat next to me and folded her hands in her lap.
“What now?” I asked.
“Now you focus. First, study your body. Search every inch of your physicality. When you have become whole with yourself, when you feel every part of yourself, you will also feel what is missing.”
She stared intently at me. “This can mean many things. All of us are missing something. Sometimes several somethings. You may discover it isn't just a piece of your soul that has left you.”
I didn't know what that really meant, but I didn't ask her to elaborate. I didn't want to waste any time. I wanted to find the Maidens before they could try to get at me.
I laid my hands flat on my lap and closed my eyes. I tried to find the same center I'd had when focusing on the infection inside of me. I did as Urvasi said, flowing my consciousness throughout my body, noticing every inch of my skin, every bone, every nerve ending. You think you know how your body feels, until you pay attention to it in minute detail. I found aches and itches I hadn't even known I'd had. I noticed emptiness in my stomach and realized I hadn't eaten in too long. I also sensed the heat that coursed through me, and had been coursing through me seemingly forever. I had gained some calm when Urvasi taught me acceptance. But it hadn't obliterated my rage like I'd thought. A part of me still wanted to murder every Maiden of Shadow on Earth.
I didn't fight that rage. Urvasi wanted me to notice every part of myself, and I felt that that included my rage, that it included every bit of my emotions. This wasn't just about my body, this was about my entire existence.
I took a deep long breath and held it for a couple of seconds. My body hummed like an electrical transformer powering a city block. I had reached a point where I knew what every part of me was feeling in that moment, all the way to every hair on every inch of my skin. I could actually feel my organs the same way I could feel with my hands, touching the bones and juices within my body. My breath tasted like sand. My eyes throbbed in their sockets. I could even smell my sweat.
But now came the next step, the step I was uncertain about, the step that would determine if this worked.
I tried to feel my soul, starting with the part still within me. Since I had no idea what a soul felt like, I didn't know what I was looking for. I didn't know if I would recognize it if I found it. But as I drifted deeper into my trance, I touched something that buzzed like pure energy, and I knew right away that I had reached my soul.
I felt every twitch of my muscles around my mouth as I smiled.
Gotcha.
For a moment, I reveled in the energy of my soul, but then something turned inside me, something my soul brought to my attention. A gap. Full of nothing but sorrow and the image of my dead mother. I felt my tear ducts fill, then leak, felt the tickle of each tear as it ran down my cheek.
It was obvious that I would find this emptiness. Urvasi had warned me that it probably wasn't just my soul missing.
Then I felt that emptiness expanding. I thought of my father. I even thought of Toft Kitchens, and that moment when he told me he would need to sacrifice himself, and that I would have to be the one to kill him, all for the fate of a bunch of mortals an old vampire like him shouldn't have even cared about. Then I found another emptiness inside me. It was an emptiness that represented all I thought I knew, and how I hardly knew anything. I was part of Detroit's paranormal community, but that didn't make me anything close to an expert.
The last bit of emptiness I felt made me shiver. It was that feeling I used to have whenever I'd been with Fiona, before she had betrayed me. I had locked myself up in all the troubles of my present so that I hadn't even realized how much I missed this part of my past.
My instinct was to fight this memory. But I knew better. I couldn't fight it. It wouldn't do any good. Instead, I had to accept it, much as I hated to.
As I let myself float within all this emptiness, I reached out beyond myself.
Like an out of body experience, I felt something tug at my consciousness and draw me out of Urvasi's prison and back into my own world. Instead of showing up at the cemetery, I found my astral body standing in front of what looked like an abandoned hospital. On the building's brick face a series of metal letters read, “Warren Psychiatric Center.”
Was this the Maidens' new hideout? What an apt choice.
I floated through the front door, through narrow hallways with cracked tile floors, past rooms with broken down beds and old, thin dirty mattresses. I could smell the dust in the air and the damp stickiness of rotten things. Candles on either side of the hall, like runway lights, provided the only illumination.
I felt a force tugging at me, drawing me deeper into the hospital. I knew it was my soul. I floated down a hallway and then around a corner. Down a bit, on the right-hand side, was a nurses' station enclosed in thick glass, clearly meant to keep the patients out. Across from the station was a pair of double doors. One of the doors was hanging loose, while the other was closed tight. I heard screaming inside.
And I recognized the voice.
I hurried down the hall and into the room. It was a common room that looked a lot like the recreation room Mom had spent so much time in at the nursing home. At the far end of the room I saw Odi, wrists shackled with chains that hung from the metal rafters above the drop ceiling. He was naked from the waist up. The light from the circle of candles surrounding him made the shadows squirm over his skin, and reminded m
e of the shadows that had chased me through the streets of Corktown.
The shackles were clearly made of silver. Where they touched his skin around his wrists, the skin burned and hissed, steam coming off of them. He was also drenched, his red hair dripping, his body glistening with moisture. His wet skin steamed and sizzled, too. Didn't take a genius to realize he was covered in holy water.
Standing next to him was a woman with mousy brown hair who looked to be in her mid-50s. Her attention was on Odi, but I could see enough of her face, and she looked terribly familiar. It only took me a couple of seconds, then I realized that she looked like an older version of Wendy, one of the Maidens who had helped me defeat Goulet, and had died in the process.
This had to be her mother.
As his skin burned, Odi threw his head back and the pained cries that came from his mouth turned the skin on my physical body to gooseflesh.
The woman had a small smirk on her face. She held a mason jar full of clear liquid. Another empty jar stood on the floor at her feet. Droplets of water littered the dirty tiles.
Odi's screams slowly tapered as the holy water's effects eased. He looked at the witch with red eyes, but not the glowing red typical of vampires—he still maintained his human glamour—but the red-lined eyes of a torture victim.
“Why are you doing this to me?”
“Because I enjoy hurting what Sebastian Light cares for,” she said. “And because your screams fill me with power.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. I'd never heard of screams powering a witch. Maybe in some kind of ritual, in the middle of the casting. But I figured she was speaking metaphorically. Still not exactly comforting.
The witch splashed some more water at Odi's face. He jerked against the chains as he screamed again. Pieces of his flesh burned away, revealing some bone underneath.
Now his fangs came out. His eyes began to glow. He went from looking like a scared teenager to a vicious demon. Flames engulfed his hands, but with his arms hanging over his head and shackled, he couldn't throw anything at the witch.