SEIZE THE SOUL
CONFESSIONS OF A SUMMONER—BOOK 1
COPYRIGHT 2015 WILLIAM STADLER
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Chapter
ONE
Bullets hummed past my head as I bolted through the alleys beside the Pour House – a midnight pub in Raleigh where liquor and lyrics made the night wind by as smooth as the tunes that spilled out of it.
Before the shots started, I could hear the thudding baseline from inside. But little did I know, I wasn’t going in. Not tonight. Not while two psychos tailed me all throughout Moore’s Square.
People screamed, stumbling over benches and running into each other as they nearly broke their necks to get away. How they heard the muffled bursts from the silenced weapons, I didn’t know. I guess that when panic arrives, it comes in hordes.
The two pursuers – I saw them coming from behind – chased me through January’s freezing rain. Their black leather coats whipped at their waists while they leapt over benches or over parked cars to keep pace with me, a girl. I’d just crossed over twenty-three earlier in the week, and I’d intended to visit the Pour House to hear my favorite band Funkuponya and throw back a few Hell’s Belles – a delicious beer from Raleigh’s own Big Boss Brewery. But again, not tonight.
I’d been standing in line, shivering with my olive parka wrapped around me like swaddling clothes, my jet-black hair jammed inside at the collar – a natural scarf to go along with the plaid one that I’d chosen as an accessory.
Not a moment before I’d handed the tenant my money for the entry fee did I hear two pops snap into the brick wall beside me. At first I had only been startled, not hearing the loud bang associated with a beretta. But when my senses had come back to me, I quickly realized that the bullets had been silenced, and they were aiming for me. That’s when I dropped my ten-dollar bill and started off between the buildings that spit me out in plain view on Hargett Street right next to the IMAX.
With people screaming and scrambling in every direction but mine, it didn’t take long for me to notice that these two trigger happy gunmen were trying their hardest to take me down. Two shots snapped by my feet, forcing me to skip to the side a little, not wanting the steep heel on my shoes to get stuck in a crevice and send me toppling over and ending up with hollow points in my head.
My heart pounded in my chest, thumping wildly, somewhere around one hundred sixty beats per minute. I didn’t have time to calculate it fully, and the dead knew that if my paranormal advisor Umara Mayorsen caught wind that my heart rate had eluded me – for any reason, current situation included – I was going to have to pay in bindings. I couldn’t think about that. Not right now.
Another bullet zipped past my head, then two more. Were it not for the crowds of people, the gunmen would have been dead before their fingers could have pulled the triggers a second time. But I couldn’t summon in the open, not if I didn’t have to.
With people running like mad, it would only take one more alleyway before I’d send both of them to the stairway to heaven. I took a sharp right towards the IMAX. Its entrance faced a narrow brick path where the theater sat across from a kid’s museum called Marbles, which was of course closed at one o’clock in the morning.
“You can’t run forever!” the taller of the guys called, firing off two more shots that bit into the brick path under my feet.
He’d made the statement for himself more than for me, knowing that his lungs were empty oxygen tanks after all that running. His breathing came in heavy huffs and wheezes. But he was right. I couldn’t run forever – not with the cops on their way. And with the police station only a few blocks up the road, the lights would be here in no time.
This’ll have to do, I convinced myself, coming to a halt between the theater’s ticket booth and the museum walls. When I faced the two of them, the one on the left – a tall slender man wearing a balaclava and tight black jeans – shied back a few steps, his gun tip raising slightly. The handle quivered in his hand – a clear indication that he knew what I was and what I was about to do to him.
Wisdom and fear tend to go hand in hand. When we’re afraid, our minds prod us to a decision that we should have made. That’s what was happening to the gunman on the left. His slowly twisted brow and rapid increase in breathing warned him that whatever he was getting out of this wasn’t worth gambling off his soul.
Whatever boldness he had that kept him there was all but gone. He must have seen my lips part a little. The fear of my voice shook the coward to the core, believing that he was two words away from some malediction from me that would cost him his life. But he was wrong. If a summoner had to use her words, she’d gotten herself into a hole that she couldn’t get herself out of.
But what I needed was a soul – only one. The man on the left did a panicked stagger backwards before dropping his gun and high-tailing it down Hargett. The gun hit the ground, handle first, firing a round into the sky before it rattled onto its side. The slender gunman, the one who hadn’t taken his eyes off me – the one whose leather jacket was getting covered in a crystal clear sleet on both of his shoulders – this guy sneered at me, his beretta aimed at my head.
Whoever had sent this smooth-faced killer had lied to him. Either that or he’d greatly underestimated what I was going to do to him. And though I needed a soul to summon, I always carried one – one that had been bound to the obelisk that I kept in the left pocket of my parka, the place my hand had already been, gripping the pink stone as tight as a dagger.
I could feel the soul inside the obelisk humming, a deep ebbing warble that filled my body with pulsing palpitations, oozing into my veins like viscous venom.
Before the steel bullet spewed from the chamber, I could only respond with a thought – a thought that came so quickly that had it not been second-nature to conjure, the steel might have run its course through my skull. But the thought did come – amidst the sleet and screams and sirens and ambulance horns and fire truck screeches, it did come.
The thing about summons is that a soul must have a body…always. And when a soul has a body, then that soul can be controlled. And all I had to do to give that soul a body was to touch whatever material I wanted to summon – bricks or the nearby skateboard rails or glass or even rain.
With the thought that came, the soul from the obelisk swarmed into my body. My eyes burst into a deep gray – the color of the rail that I clamped onto, drawing energy from the iron, combining that energy with the soul, using my body as the vessel. The soul traced through my veins and into my eyes. In a flash as bright as polished steel, the gray glimmer from my eyes illuminated every brick and bush and weed in the alley making them instantly visible.
With the gun trained on me, the gunman whipped off his balaclava. His hair, as dark as mine, spilled out of the head-covering and down past his shoulders. That was when my body froze. The gunman wasn’t a man. She was Castella Rios, the Master Summoner.
I lost every bit of confidence I had in me. The glow in my eyes glinted away, and before I could turn and run, a bullet burned its way through my left side. Shocked, I clasped my hand to my waist, dropped to my knees, mouth open, freezing rain accumulating on my parka then melting away as my warm blood washed over the specks of ice, leaking through my fingers, warming away the chill of winter that had made them cold and stiff. Slowly, I fell to my back.
The brilliant gray that had beamed from my eyes drift
ed away, and the soul that I had once held captive in my obelisk escaped to the heavens, a tiny pink orb whose rosy luminance sparkled in the falling sleet.
Blue and red lights replaced the darkness of the alley as dozens of squad cars screeched onto Hargett. Officers barreled out of their vehicles, shouting formalities and cocking their guns into place, each of them commanding that this woman, Castella, drop her weapon and freeze as if the damage had not been done, as if I had not been lying there with my hands covering a wound that spewed blood out to meet the cold bricks with every heartbeat.
My vision dimmed and the squeal of the sirens hushed. Blue and red lights blurred into violet. I could only look up into the dark sky, freezing rain settling on my lips and forehead, as the pink puff of the lost soul escaped into the heavens, the place she’d longed to go for all these years.
Chapter
TWO
I woke up in the hospital to a plate of delicious breakfast: warm whole milk in an eight-ounce red carton – I’m lactose intolerant, but I suppose no one was around to inform them of my food and medicine allergies. I hope to the dead that they didn’t use penicillin on me. Unlike many people with a penicillin allergy, my symptoms were delayed – excess vomiting…and diarrhea, I’m ashamed to say.
Along with my breakfast there were three other items that wouldn’t have bode well with me. There were two strips of bacon, wrapped in aluminum foil, which might have been a delight had I not become a vegetarian. Not entirely by choice, but summoners hear a lot of voices…a lot of a voices. And everything that goes into our bodies seems to speak louder than any of the others. I shouldn’t say speak. Scream is much more accurate, while demand hits the nail on the head. I pushed the bacon aside.
Then there were the apple slices. I can eat these, I figured, reaching onto the beige partitioned plate and taking a bite. Soggy. I pushed the slices aside and lay back in the bed, the pain of the bullet wound throbbing. I pressed the button on the white clicker to give myself a few drops of morphine that flowed through a tube and into my arm. They had the contraption regulated so I wouldn’t administer myself an overdose, but with as much pain as I was in, I wasn’t sure that was entirely possible.
Two knocks on my hospital room door made me go into a frantic body covering fluffing fit, making sure my breasts weren’t flopping around – not that these B cups did much flopping – and making sure my undone and unwashed black hair behaved. It didn’t, at least not before Lyle Finnegan sauntered in, a bouquet of lilies with pearl petals that bloomed open as if they’d been neatly peeled apart, each of the flowers neatly arranged amongst greenery and set in a white wicker basket.
“Rebekah, how you holding up? I brought you some flowers,” Lyle said, shyly, cautiously holding up the bouquet for me to approve. His hair was a polished blonde, almost as if Rumpelstiltskin had woven it himself. His shoulders were stern and broad, his chin sharp, though it dipped in at the crest. But his eyes were different, ominous even, a storm-cloud gray that made me feel that he peered into my soul.
Still fixed on the flowers, I held a forceful hand up to stop him. “Don’t bring those another step closer.” I could see that I’d hurt him, so I eased up on my tone. “You should know by now that I’m allergic to lilies.”
Shrugging off the rejection and spinning the basket around to look at his gift, Lyle said, “What’s wrong with lilies?”
“I’m allergic to them. Don’t you remember anything?”
“I remembered to bring you flowers,” he smiled, showing his straight white teeth, something that I envied.
“But lilies, Lyle? I’ll be sneezing for a month if I come within ten feet of them. Why not chrysanthemums or carnations or something like roses? Why get flowers where the pollen’s on the outside?”
He wrinkled his brow at me and let the bouquet slip into the large green trash bin near the door. “How was I supposed to know all that? You were sick so I brought you flowers. You’re a girl, so I brought you flowers. Sick people like flowers. Girls like flowers.” He thumbed towards the door. “You know, about fifteen minutes ago, I thought this was a win-win. Besides, it’s the thought that counts.”
“I guess it doesn’t count for much then,” I said, rolling my eyes and crossing my arms, now self-conscious since the hospital did not provide bras. Despite the fact that the heat was on, my room was a corner room, so it tended to be a bit colder – not the most comfortable situation to be in with these sheets-for-clothes.
“There was no way I could have known that you were allergic to lilies.” He shook his head, sighed.
“I’m allergic to everything. How could you not have known?”
“So chrysanthemums next time,” he muttered, shaking a finger in the air to remind himself.
Arms still crossed, I shook my head.
“What now?”
“I’m allergic to them too.” I let out a light-hearted chuckle, knowing that there wasn’t much that I wasn’t allergic to, but messing with Lyle was worth the fun of pretending that one flower was better than the other. “Where’d you get lilies this late into January anyway?”
Lyle took a seat in the chair at the foot of my bed and crossed his legs, resting his elbows on the armrests. “They weren’t cheap, that’s for sure.” With the mood growing, heavier, he said, “I can’t believe they almost got you.”
Casually, I turned towards the window, though the blinds were closed. I couldn’t stare into his eyes right now, though they were the one certain thing about him, the one thing that never changed, never altered. “I’m not sure what happened. I was standing there, waiting for the woman to pull the trigger, but when the gun clicked, I hesitated.”
“So what you’re saying is that you’re human,” he shrugged. “You showed more guts than I would have.”
“That’s not saying much,” I muttered, attempting to lighten the mood.
“For a person who steals souls, you don’t seem to have one of your own,” he laughed. “I mean, I bring you flowers and you show your gratitude by—”
“I was only kidding.” I picked up the remote and pointed it at the television that sat on the entertainment center stand to the right of Lyle. “Besides, you’re nowhere near a coward. You probably would’ve morphed into a lion or something and torn her head from her shoulders…being a shapeshifter and all.”
“For the last time, I’m not a shapeshifter. I don’t shift shapes, moving around circles and squares until I get the picture just right.”
I rolled my eyes. “A Decanter then. Not much difference if you asked me.”
“It’s as different as night and day.” Lyle axed one hand forward to make his point as if he were a Florida State Seminole. “Shapeshifting, for one, does not exist. But Decanters absorb the form of another and mimic its attitudes.”
“Sounds like a shapeshifter to me,” I said, not really paying him any mind as I flicked through the channels.
I could tell that he was being overly sensitive today, probably because I’d almost been killed. Being the faithful friend that he was…well, he was concerned. And I was kind of being a jerk since I wasn’t giving into his concerns, making light of the bullet hole in my side.
At the thought of the wound, the tiny fibers of flesh ached underneath the bandage, and Lyle was on his feet in an instant when I showed how the pain was eating at me. I let him help – more for his sake than my own. But honestly, other than rubbing my back and fluffing my pillow, what could he do?
“You have to be careful,” he said, doing exactly what I expected – rubbing my back and fluffing my pillow.
Instead of arguing with him, I nodded, which was enough for him to relax his shoulders and take his seat again. “I just wish the pain would stop,” I said in a teeth-gritting grunt.
“It takes time.”
“Time that I don’t have. The woman I saw, the woman who shot at me…it was Castella. And if she’s after me, then I won’t be safe in this dead-forsaken hospital…not for too much longer.”
“
Castella, the Master Summoner?” he said. “You mean the woman the police gunned down. She’s not after you, Rebekah. She’s in a body bag, probably already carted off down to the morgue.”
I found that hard to believe. There was no way that Castella would have ever let the police gun her down. “Are you asking me if she was gunned down, or telling me?”
Lyle picked up a Cosmo magazine and flipped through the pages, not paying attention to any of it, using it more as a prop to continue on about Castella than for any kind of enjoyment. “I was telling you, but I see now that I probably should have been asking.”
“Did you see her body?” I asked.
“I wasn’t there, remember? Remember the whole conversation you and I had that night about how I wanted to go with you to see Funkuponya, but how you just wanted to go out on your own and how you never get any real you time? Remember that?”
“Lyle.” I called his name to pull out of him what was really on his mind.
“All I’m saying is that things might have been different had you let me go with you.”
He was growing slightly irritated, and I felt myself escalating in kind. “I can take care of myself.”
“Since when? Since last night? Because I’d hardly call that taking care of yourself.”
“But even still, you’re not my bodyguard.” To not seem aggravated, I clicked through a few more stations, but my furled brow and twisted lips gave me away.
“I don’t wanna’ be your bodyguard.”
I felt like there was more that he had to say, but he cut himself off, his eyes falling away from me and landing at the foot of the bed. So this is what this is about.
“I’m with Boyd. You know that.”
“You’re with him, but is he with you? I mean…where’s he now? Hung over from some long night at the Pale Ale?” He crossed his leg over the other and scratched at the sole of his white Converses.
Seize the Soul: Confessions of a Summoner Book 1 Page 1