“If he’d known what had happened to me, he would have been here, no question.”
Almost in response, the hospital door opened and my boyfriend of two years, Boyd, walked in. He wasn’t toned like Lyle or tall or handsome by today’s standards, but he treated me good, and he cared about me, which was really all I wanted.
He was slender, probably a few dozen pounds heavier than my 112. Even in the thick of January, he wore dark blue fitted jeans and a thin gray V-neck shirt underneath his cotton L.L. Bean coat. His hair was gelled to a spike and he’d recently been to the tanning bed because his skin was a deep bronze.
“Lyle,” Boyd said, “I see you managed to drag yourself outta’ bed pretty early on a Saturday morning.” He gave Lyle a quick punch in the shoulder, then smiled and turned to me. “Hey, lady. Heard what happened and came right away. Brought you a change of clothes and some chrysanthemums.” He held the basket in one hand, giving it one last look-over before handing it to me and kissing my forehead.
Lyle’s gonna’ hate me for this… “Boyd, you didn’t have to get me anything.” I took a deep whiff of the flowers and nearly sneezed my insides out. Somehow I managed to keep it down. “They’re very pretty,” I lied, sitting the basket on the tray table that held my uneaten bacon and soggy apple slices.
When Boyd turned to admire the flowers again, I rubbed vigorously at my nose, blinking hard and hoping the pollen hadn’t done its worst. The slight itchiness on the back of my throat was all the omen I needed. Great… And to make matters worse, Lyle was frowning and shaking his head.
“Well…guess I’ll leave you two at it,” Lyle said, rising from his chair like an old man.
“Don’t leave on my account,” Boyd said. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”
“I…uh…probably should be heading out anyway…especially with the uh…”
I figured I’d let him squirm, since he found it distasteful that I’d taken Boyd’s flowers over his. “Where you gotta’ go on a day like today? It’s too cold to do anything outside.”
Boyd was too busy stroking my hair to see the scowl on Lyle’s face that mingled a tad with a head-shaking half smile because he knew what I was up to. “I really should be going,” he said.
Boyd turned to him, arms wide as if offended, though his voice had no hint of aggression. “You and I are all she’s got out here. Her mom’s held up in Asheville with all the snow up there and can’t make it down for another few days. You leaving’s not going to make Rebekah feel one lick better, now will it?” Ever so often, Boyd’s Boston would rear its accented head, which was probably why he lived in Cary – the town known as the Containment Area for Relocated Yankees. Funny the things people come up with.
Lyle gave me a filthy look and took his seat, figuring that to continue arguing the contrary would’ve only made him appear to be difficult more than anything else. “Maybe for a little longer,” he said.
“That’s more like it.” Boyd put his arm around me, caressing my shoulder. “Now, Rebekah, what happened last night? I got a call from your mother this morning who must have heard from ole’ Finnegan over there,” he motioned to Lyle. “She was gonna’ come down, but with the closed roads all up and down the highway, there was no way out for her.”
Some people might have still thought my mom a bit unsympathetic for being unable to find a way through the seven inches of snow they’d gotten in the mountains. But with the roads closed and with her divorce from my father six years ago, she hasn’t had a financial leg to stand on.
She was just getting her accounting business off the ground when he left her, and so she’s been struggling to pay the mortgage on their newly purchased log cabin, which he left to her as part of the settlement. She could have the house if he could keep the car and the dog. On paper it sounded great. But he didn’t want to get stuck with a thirty-four hundred dollar mortgage payment.
I wish he’d left her for another woman or something like that – something to show that he at least cared for somebody other than himself. But in the end, he left because he was bored. Romance had become rote, and love a luxury, kind of like a trip to Hawaii; it was great while it lasted. So now there was only the postcard. “Wish you were here! Signed, Love.”
I didn’t hate him, not at all. What scared me was that I felt nothing for him. Maybe I’m as cold-hearted as he is. The thought came in a torrent that took me by surprise. I wasn’t anything like him, was I?
“My mother, did she say when she’d be coming?” I asked.
“Within the next few days, she hopes,” Boyd replied. “Now stop skirtin’ the issue and tell me what happened. You weren’t hangin’ with no dimwitted sorority girls, were ya’? You know how I feel about them.”
I never really knew why Boyd hated sorority girls so much. It wasn’t like they were any worse when they got liquored up, spun around, and told to pin the tail on the donkey at some out of control kegger. But just the mention of sorority girls put him on a soapbox about how women should have more respect for themselves.
The Price is Right was on in the background, and suddenly I felt decades older with the hospital’s thin gown draped around me and my unkempt hair tangled in all directions but the right one. I sighed. “I was going to the Pour House by myself last night when two people just started chasing me and shooting at me out of nowhere.”
“You went to the Pour House last night?” Boyd asked, eyebrows raised. “How was it? Was American Aquarium there?”
Does he not care that I was shot? Instead of making it an issue in front of Lyle, I just went along with the conversation. “I like American Aquarium, but that’s not a show I’d care to go to by myself.”
“Are you serious?” Boyd blurted out, taking his arm from around me, both hands in an exasperated gesture in front of him. “American Aquarium’s awesome! What? Did ya’ go see Funkuponya or something lame like that? I mean all they do is sing and play the bass guitar. Where’s the skill in that?”
Chiming in on that one, Lyle raised his hand and quickly put it down with a smug look. “Ever tried to play percussion and keep a tune?”
“Percussion? The bass guitar is a stringed instrument!” Boyd stated, thumbing over to Lyle. “Someone needs to go back to fifth grade, heh heh.”
Lyle didn’t respond; neither did I, even though Boyd was wrong. The bass had evolved into a percussion instrument over the years, keeping time with the drums more than the melody – an interesting fact that I’d learned from Lyle who was teaching himself to play the bass so that he could one day become as good as Leo, the lead singer and bassist for Funkuponya. Sadly, Lyle and I both knew that would never happen.
“Anyway,” Boyd said, “so you went to the Pour House, got shot at, and then what?”
Before I could answer, two solid knocks banged on my hospital door. Two men walked in…both of them cops.
Chapter
THREE
No one had warned me that the police officers would be banging down my door, especially not so soon. The one on the left was a dark-skinned man whose eyes were hidden behind pitch-black sunglasses. His lined jaw kept chomping on a piece of gum that he must have started chewing at the start of his eight o’clock shift, and here it was nearly noon.
The other officer appeared to be calmer, as if twenty-something years on the force had gotten him two things: a bald head and some common sense, the latter of which brought with it a courteous “Hello ma’am” and a “Hope your day’s going well.” Both officers wore the standard Raleigh PD light blue shirt tucked into black slacks with pockets up and down the legs.
Being a summoner hadn’t made me a fool to the law. I’d avoided the police and their investigations for years, not wanting a casually overturned stone to give evidence of who I was or what I what I could do. I replied back with an easy, “I’m fine sir. How about you?”
Boyd, not too keen with those of the law due to specific types of greenery that he often toted along with him, decided to edge on out after kis
sing me on the top of my head like he was my father. “Call me if you need anything.” Before stepping out, he winked and pointed at Lyle, clicking his teeth without giving so much as a nod to the officers.
“We’re investigating the events that took place last night…” Officer Stoneface looked at his notepad to find my name, pushing his sunglasses up with his index finger, the other fingers gripping a Raleigh PD issued ballpoint ink pen. “Ms., uh, Scarlet.”
“What about last night?” I pushed my dark hair behind my ear. “I was chased and shot at and here I am…lucky to be alive.” I wasn’t being a hardnose, but I rarely played well whenever I was buttered up to be interrogated – not that Officer Stoneface was doing too much buttering.
“Facts to which we are all privy,” the officer replied, shoving his sunglasses up again. “But we’re not here for that.”
I frowned and looked around. “I’m not a mind reader,” I said. But Lyle was. Unfortunately, he had to have skin-to-skin contact – a handshake that he was now standing up to initiate. That boy’s good.
“I’m Lyle Finnegan,” he said, blocking the Showcase Showdown on The Price is Right. Officer Stoneface latched his hands in front, pen in one hand and notepad in the other, giving Lyle some grim look that hid behind the glasses.
Lyle kept his hand out for an awkward amount of time. Lucius Lyle Finnegan, I marveled. I had to hand it to him; he wasn’t backing down. Coincidentally, neither was Stoneface.
“I’m Officer McKinney,” said the courteous older officer, extending his hand past Stoneface and giving Lyle a brisk handshake.
“Nice to meet you,” Lyle replied, stuffing his hand in his pocket and taking his seat again. He gave me a quick look – one that was so cold that it nearly froze me in place. These officers weren’t here on a casual investigation. They knew something.
Being that my skills were abundantly low when it came to high-pressure situations with any kind of authorities, I grabbed a soggy, and now warm, apple slice from my tray, pretending to be interested in having my fill.
University Housing at NC State University had once almost reprimanded me when my resident advisor busted into a party in my suite. Not wanting anyone to get in trouble, I blurted out, “We’re not drinking!”
After a stunned look on her innocent face coupled with a suspicious peek over my shoulder, I quickly realized that she hadn’t busted into our suite at all. She was only doing her routine nightly check, but my guilty conscience made my lips move faster than my brain. Thirteen girls were written up because of me, and it would have been fourteen had I been drinking along with them. Needless to say, I soon became the backstabbing outcast.
The soggy apple slice was gone, so I nervously grabbed another. Please don’t say anything stupid, Rebekah. What did they know? What could they know? What did they want, these officers? I was the victim here. I was the one who was shot at.
Whatever it was, Lyle knew. I made wide eyes at him, briefly waiting for him to give me some signal of where to start. He touched the side of his head, then pinched his fingers together to where they nearly touched, indicating to me that these guys didn’t know too much, only a little. Or at least that was what I hoped he meant. What if they knew a lot, and he wanted me to tell them a little? I chomped into the apple slice that had ripened into a dirty brown from sitting out.
I went with the former, believing that there was nothing that either of these two officers had on me. I started easy. “What I’ve told you is already in the police reports, so I’m not exactly sure what you’re looking for.”
Lyle smiled when I answered, but I still wasn’t convinced of what his makeshift sign language meant.
Officer McKinney came a little closer, letting one hand drag on my bed while the other thumb hooked into his utility belt which housed his handcuffs, a flashlight, a small pouch – probably used for rubber sanitation gloves, and another set of handcuffs. But I couldn’t take my eyes off his gun.
“Ms. Scarlet,” he said, his aged voice steeped in southern honey. “We have reason to believe that the shooting last night, you know, down by the Pour House – well, ma’am, we aren’t entirely convinced that the events that took place were merely circumstantial.”
“Meaning?”
Officer McKinney dragged a glance back to Stoneface who said, “The shooters were looking for you. Any reason why?”
I had a few ideas, but none deserving of being shot at. And even if I did know, there was no way I was going to divulge that information to these two. There were a host of reasons that a Master Summoner like Castella might want to gun down a Journeyman Summoner like me.
Binding souls to bodies acquired heaps of Pith, essentially residue from conjuring the dead – bad stuff that caused confusion and an increase of spiritual voices. One summoner generating Pith affected other summoners for miles around. It was rarely advisable for more than a handful of summoners to inhabit the same territory.
Had I known about Castella before enrolling into NC State, I might have never gone. But I didn’t know. And my trainer, Umara – not a summoner herself, but a fairy and a Paranormal Advisor – had neglected to warn me of the consequences. Maybe Castella had recognized my increase in Pith and she was after me as some resolution to a turf war, one that I had no idea I was in until last night. If that were true, then why did she shoot at me? Why not conjure a summon instead?
I wished it were as simple as abandoning the territory. Except it didn’t work like that. The Pith bound themselves to me the more I summoned. They never detached, unless, of course, I was dead, or if I summoned the element of water to cleanse my soul. Even summoning water generated Pith, just not as much.
Fairies and witches and even shapeshifters had it easy – or Decanters, rather. Their powers came from Empyrean – a universal source of magic that they could dip into and swim in like Scrooge McDuck diving into his vault of coins. Not us summoners. We conjured the dead, a scarcity, and when the supplies were limited, summoners got aggressive.
“I have no idea why the shooters were looking for me.” Good answer, I told myself.
Stoneface said, “Our sources say otherwise.”
“If you think you know the answer, then why come here berating me?” I reached for another apple, keeping my eyes fixed on both of them.
A stubby nurse with thick glasses and short, graying hair waddled into my room, both officers glaring at me. Even Officer McKinney’s southern gentleness had soured and spoiled. His fat pink lips poked out, and I became suddenly aware of the black sunspots on his puffy nose and cheeks – blemishes that went along with the gray nose-hairs that blossomed from his wide nostrils.
The nurse checked my temperature and blood pressure, asked me if I needed anything, and left almost in the same motion.
McKinney waited for the door to click closed and stepped a little closer, the handcuffs on his belt rattling in their case. Police chatter chimed in and out on his radio, which he turned down to quiet the murmurs. “Ms. Scarlet,” he said, voice becoming an authoritative warning, “our source seems to believe that you might have had a hand in the unexpected fah-talities of so many officers on last night’s eve.” His words dragged out of him like dead bodies.
I wasn’t quite sure what he was referring to, so I tilted my head to the side. “One gunman fled the scene. The other one, a woman, stayed. There weren’t any fatalities.” By the way that McKinney glowered at me I was losing my confidence.
“Five squad cars. Ten officers – eight of whom have met their maker and two who are in critical condition.” His old hairy fist tightened on my beige blanket before he realized his frustration and let the covers go, patting them softly before hooking his thumb into his belt along with the other one.
I waited for a further explanation, or at the very least, for an accusation to follow. But the accusation was in his furious, quivering eyes. Officer Stoneface still stood with his sunglasses covering his expression, arms crossed in front of him as he stared down at the hospital bed.
McKinney huffed like he was out of breath. “A gun? A gun? Guns don’t mangle their victims, or tear holes in their bodies as big as beach balls. Guns don’t tear people’s heads from their bodies, leaving them…them…them unrecognizable.” McKinney trembled when he punched the bed. I snatched my leg away, even though he wasn’t anywhere close to hitting me.
That’s when I realized that my ankle had been shackled to the bedpost. They suspect me…that I’m the one who killed the officers.
“Now tell us why you did it…” he said, slouching forward, one hand out as he pleaded with me. “In God’s name, tell me how you did.”
My mouth hung open, my head shaking slowly. I didn’t know what to say. Lyle fidgeted in his seat, probably wondering if I was going to make a move, to summon some entity and try to escape. I couldn’t do that. These were officers of the law! I would not do that, even if they did mistake me for some lunatic of a psychopathic mass murderer. I wasn’t a killer – far from it. They didn’t know that though. Judging from Officer Stoneface’s stone face, neither of them was willing to believe otherwise.
Besides, if I wanted to do any bindings, that was impossible, at least without killing one of them first. Last night I’d lost the soul that had been stored in my obelisk, and there weren’t any other souls nearby for the taking.
I said the first stupid thing that came to mind. “There must be some misunderstanding.”
“Oh, there is,” Stoneface said, unmoving.
“We can’t understand why you did what ya’ did,” McKinney interjected, “why you’d wanna’ kill an entire police squadron in cold blood.” His voice escalated, his eyes growing an angry red.
“I didn’t—”
He punched the bed again, this time aiming his finger straight at me, nearly touching the bridge of my nose. “Don’t you sit there and lie to me! Bartley, Jacobs, Davis, Nealson, Land, Mansfield, Nickelson, Olark! All of’em, dead by your hand! Need I name more?” His eyes bulged, his nose nearly kissing mine. I pulled my head away, not too forcefully, however.
Seize the Soul: Confessions of a Summoner Book 1 Page 2