“Tell us why you did what you did,” Stoneface demanded, a tone far calmer than his partner’s now.
I didn’t know how to respond to that, and Lyle offered no consolation. I hadn’t done anything wrong. My Miranda rights allowed me an attorney, but I wasn’t convinced that my rights mattered to these two at the moment. Those non-cooperatives in the movies who folded their arms refusing to budge until their lawyer showed, well none of them had rubbed noses with these two before. I just wanted to go home, back to my single apartment and sleep in my own bed.
I wasn’t sure what tipped Stoneface over the edge – whether it was McKinney’s aggravation, Lyle’s silence, his own mounting frustrations, or my confused hesitations, but when Stoneface tipped, he fell hard. No longer refraining from showing emotion, he whipped out his beretta, cocked it, clicked off the safety, and aimed it at my head.
My hands flew up in surrender and Lyle leapt to his feet, grabbing the officer’s shoulder. “What’s your problem! You can’t pull a gun on an unarmed citizen, and in a hospital at that!”
McKinney diffused almost immediately. Now he had his hand over his holster, ready to draw on Stoneface.
What in the name of the dead is going on…?
“Put the gun down, Officer DeVries. We just came here to get a confession. That’s all. No need to be pointin’ a gun and such.” McKinney lowered to a slight crouch, one hand patting the air to calm down his partner, the other hand still covering his holster.
Despite McKinney’s plea, the gun fired. The muzzle exploded a bright orange and red. Only, the gun wasn’t aimed at me. It was aimed at McKinney. The bullet roared from the chamber, splitting through his skull, never exiting out the back.
McKinney’s body slammed against the wall, his arm reaching for purchase on anything it could find, but tangling in my I.V. Before he hit the floor, he was dead. I knew because of the dingy brown orb that bubbled out of his body – his sullied soul, a nebulous ball smaller than my fist that twisted and turned as it flitted out of him.
Lyle couldn’t see McKinney’s soul; neither could DeVries. That presumption proved true when DeVries snapped his head to me – the dark features of his face creeping over to a pale gray as fur sprouted from his skin like weeds.
A werewolf.
Commotion clamored in the hallway with frenzied nurses, opening doors to check on patients. Being ankle-cuffed to the bed, I had nowhere to go. I had to act now if I was going to live through this.
Before the gun fired again and before DeVries had fully transformed into his wolf state, Lyle had already grabbed the officer underneath his chin – the one place on him that was not fully covered, giving Lyle just enough skin to begin his decanting.
In a coloration as smooth as flowing water, Lyle’s arm took on the pale gray fur from DeVries, his arm thickening with taut muscles that tore his coat as his limbs widened and hardened. His bones creaked and contorted as the transformation forced its way through.
The momentary shock that DeVries had when Lyle grabbed him dwindled fast. Now in full werewolf form, DeVries reared back and crowned Lyle with the heel of his beretta, forcing Lyle, who’d only decanted partially into the werewolf state, to the ground chin first.
McKinney’s soul glided up the walls, roaming. I reached my arm out to the brown orb, beckoning it to me with a thought. The soul diffused into my body, warm and fresh, still vigilant from being newly freed. Because McKinney must have been weak-willed, his soul didn’t have the brilliant pink that a more powerful soul would have, so my summon would not be at full strength. Grasping the aluminum foil that covered the uneaten bacon on my serving tray, my eyes sparkled bright gray.
From the brilliance came a bolt as powerful as a thunderclap as the aluminum and the soul merged together, beginning first inside of me, then streaming in one rippling strand to the foot of my bed. The foil dissolved into vapor as the stream of gray culminated into a solid mass of metal.
The summoned entity stood as tall as the officer, wearing full armor forged in solid aluminum. The armor gripped tightly around the humanoid summon’s body, exposing the veins in its chest muscles and abdomen. One shoulder guard sat higher than the other containing archaic markings of a sun with the head of an eagle in its center. In its right hand, the arm with the raised shoulder guard, the summon wielded a short sword; its left hand was armed with a curved scimitar. The summon hacked the chain that linked my ankle-cuffs together, then turned to the werewolf.
Both swords came high and slashed down in a motion as swift as the wind. I was already out of bed and throwing on the change of clothes that Boyd had brought me when I heard the werewolf howling, blood splattering on the floor from the set of nubs he’d just inherited from the summon.
Lyle, who’d been knocked to the floor, sprang to his feet holding his head. Not caring whether I saw him in the buff or not, he stripped off his clothes, shoved them into his mouth, and swiftly decanted into the form of a bear. With one arm, he cradled me against his hairy chest. Lyle growled and backhanded the glass of the window, shredding through the blinds. Then, with me in his arms, he bound out the window.
Shattered glass sprayed through the air. Our bodies tangled in a flurry of clear projectiles over a dozen floors aboveground. Pain from the gunshot wound scraped up my side, and I screamed myself hoarse, not to mention I was still viced in Lyle’s bear hug that was squeezing the life out of me, coincidentally to keep me alive.
We’re going to die, I knew, frantic as the black pavement of the hospital parking lot grew closer.
Probably three floors from the ground, Lyle decanted into an eagle whose wingspan was nearly six feet wide. With his talons, he clasped my right arm and left leg, flapping his wings as desperately as he knew how to keep us both from crashing into the concrete.
We hit the ground, despite Lyle’s effort. He’d managed to break the fall by the strength of his wings thrusting upwards, and he’d strewn us into a patch of grass next to the pavement. My knees and elbows ached and throbbed. My wound leaked blood between the torn sutures. But we were alive.
That wasn’t enough to stop me from complaining. “What’s your problem, you idiot? You trying to kill us both?”
Lyle was still in his three-foot tall, six-foot wide eagle form, so he couldn’t respond, not with words anyway. He merely bated his wings and squawked arduously. Had he been able to talk to me, there might have been a few swear words in there.
Chapter
FOUR
Being that it was still daylight and cold, and being that I was still severely injured – a wound that worsened with each footfall – we knew we had to stay off the road as much as possible. The problem was that Rex Hospital was surrounded by roads – roads and cars and streets and people…and the police, as we soon discovered by the whine of the police cars that streamed into the hospital parking lot just as we’d left the scene, both of us making our way down Blue Ridge Road.
“What did you do with your summon?” Lyle asked, keeping a guiding hand on my back while I struggled to keep up with him. It wasn’t all that hard to stay at an even pace. I mean, I did have the proper motivation. A life term prison sentence was behind me, and freedom was ahead.
Technically, I hadn’t done anything wrong, except maybe hacking off the arms of a police officer, who just happened to be a werewolf. My involvement with his death couldn’t necessarily be proven…at least not beyond the required shadow of a doubt.
“My summon?” I said, replying to Lyle’s question as if he should have known. “It dispersed before we hit the ground. Too far out of my range to control it. And…I lost the soul.” Where in the name of the dead am I going to find another? Maybe at my job.
“Just wondering, because you now have more police bodies added to your death toll. Keep in mind that Officer DeVries’s had to have transformed back to its human form before anyone ever arrived on the scene.”
I didn’t have much of a retort for that. There are a lot of falsehoods out there about werewolves –
how they could only be killed with silver – silver knives or bullets or silver whatever. That probably started back in the Bronze Age, if I had to guess. The reason being was that bronze isn’t that great of a conductor of electricity. Neither is lead, for that matter, compared to metals like silver and copper and gold.
It was quite possible that some soldiers back in the Bronze Age tried slaying the werewolves and found themselves mauled with their entrails hanging from some beast’s jaws. With enough of these such ends, and perhaps with a few successful slayings with silver, the whole “kill werewolves with silver” craze came about.
Truthfully, any good conductor of electricity would do the trick: silver, copper, gold, aluminum, and sometimes brass, though I wouldn’t trust it. The silver wasn’t what actually killed the werewolves. It only made them killable, because werewolves’ bodies create a current throughout, something like electric eels.
Once a conductor penetrates the werewolves’ hides – a good conductor – the werewolves’ wolf state short circuits. So copper, gold, silver, aluminum, any weapons made of these materials would work.
“Those two dead officers may add to my death count,” I said to Lyle, “but it’s indisputable that DeVries shot his partner. My fingerprints aren’t anywhere near that gun.” I smiled and nudged him with my elbow as we hiked down Blue Ridge. “You’re more of a suspect than I am. I was ankle-cuffed to the bed, remember?”
“How in the world did I let you drag me into this?” He took a long breath and shut his eyes.
“That’s the price you pay for bringing me lilies.”
“Then I guess Boyd’s price must be about the same. He had to sign the visitor check-in list, just like I did.”
After organizing the details of what had happened, I realized that Lyle wasn’t completely right about that. “I doubt they’ll have much to say to him since the shooting had to have happened by the time he checked out.”
“Maybe he stopped by the gift shop first,” Lyle shrugged, fishing for some way to make me squirm. Frankly, Boyd was safe when it came to the law, at least in this case. As for other situations, well, I’d bailed him out of jail more than once.
“What is it about that Boston boy that strikes you as anything but annoying?” Lyle slowed down a few steps when he noticed that I was having trouble keeping up.
“Shouldn’t we be worried about the cops right now? We did just flee a crime scene.”
“We survived a crime scene,” he replied, shaking his finger at me. “The only thing that can be proven is that DeVries shot his partner. That’s all. And so we coincidentally did what we had to do to stay alive.”
“Did what we had to do? We jumped out of a freakin’ window! A window that’s supposed to be virtually unbreakable.”
Cars zoomed past us as we neared the road. We’d wanted to keep away from the streets, but there weren’t too many nooks to scramble into on Blue Ridge, so we kept south down towards the intersection with Hillsborough Street.
We both must have figured that we were far enough away from the hospital not to look too suspicious. The crazy part of me was becoming convinced that even if we were arrested, the prosecution wouldn’t have a leg to stand on, not with all the evidence indicating that we were innocent.
“I don’t think you should be concerned with broken glass and the unbelievable survival from the twelfth floor,” he said. “Whether we like it or not, the cops are looking for us. What concerns me more is that Castella’s got a target on your forehead. She missed her chance twice, and I don’t think she’ll miss again.”
Thanks, Lyle, I thought. I’d never known Castella to act ill towards any of the paranormals in Raleigh, not that I kept up with her dealings. I just couldn’t make sense of why she wanted to kill me, nor why she didn’t just conjure a summon and get it over with.
There was the possibility that I was a threat to her territory. That can’t be it. I wasn’t anything like some of the other summoners – touching and draining and clinging and binding everything they could get their hands on. Umara had warned me early on that I needed to be more conservative with my bindings, limiting them to necessity and training, not vying for power.
More cars speeded past us. Lyle reached for me every few minutes, bracing his hand on my back to make sure that I wasn’t anywhere near to toppling over or passing out from exhaustion. Despite the pain, I wasn’t too bad off.
When I looked at him, his skin had lost its warm peachy color, now appearing a petrified white, almost as pale as a vampire’s. “What happened to you? With your skin?”
He rubbed his temples, pushed his golden hair off his forehead. “Never been hit on a decant before. It takes time to absorb a paranormal form like DeVries. A little of me faded into him when I made the connection.”
I put my hand on his shoulder, examining him. “Goodness, Lyle. Are you okay?”
He nodded. “I’m more worried about you. It’s not like I lost anything when I faded into him. At least not much. Maybe just a few of my memories. Wouldn’t have been like that if the decant had finished.”
“Were you able to get anything from DeVries?”
“It’s hard to say. Since I didn’t complete the decant, I only grabbed a few things that may or may not be true. Most of it seems kind of foggy. It’s hard to tell if the thoughts are mine or his.”
“Because he hit you with the beretta?”
Lyle nodded. “Still got a bit of a headache.” He parted his hair and showed me a red knot that swelled at the crest of his head.
“It’s not that bad.” I made an unconvincing smile.
“You don’t have to lie. Feels like someone slipped a golf ball under my scalp.”
“It’ll heal. At least you didn’t get shot, right?” When he didn’t respond, I went back to the topic of the memories. “I know you said it’s a little foggy, but was there anything you got from him? Anything at all?”
Still staying off the shoulder of the road with traffic buzzing by, Lyle shook his head. “Nothing about Castella, surprisingly. Something about æther, maybe? I’m’ not quite sure what that means.”
I did though. But before I could tell him, the hum of blue lights and horns came screaming from behind.
Within moments, the police had subdued Lyle and me after raising our hands over our heads. I hadn’t managed to get my hands high enough because of the gunshot, which of course was cause for some authoritative commands and curses by the Raleigh PD. Once they saw the thick blood stain painting my parka, they realized that I wasn’t disobeying the law after all.
They handcuffed me in the front so I wouldn’t have to stretch my wound, then they stuffed us in two different squad cars, driving us downtown to the county jail. After a very invasive probe by the detention officers and an aggravating visit with the magistrate through a glass window where the gray-haired coot told me that scum like me deserved to fry, I was finally up on the housing floor with all the inmates in orange and white striped jump suits, myself facing a one hundred thousand dollar bond. Great.
Not soon after my pissed-off-capade through the Wake County Jail system did I hear my name called by one of the detention officers. Within an hour, I was back on the streets wearing my bloody coat and fitted jeans and boots. Who in the name of the dead has money to pay a bond that high?
When I stepped out on Salisbury Street, I saw Lyle who was wearing his black REI winter coat and blue jeans along with his you’ve-got-to-be-kidding me face. When I saw whom he looking at, my expression responded in kind.
It was Marcus Driscoll, the only man who could wiggle his way out of a straight jacket, a man who could find a loop hole in a straight line – a real four-leaf clover carrying, Shepherd’s pie eating, Guinness beer drinking, Irish-to-the-core, money-grubbing Leprechaun.
Chapter
FIVE
Seeing Marcus roiled my stomach on the cold stairs with people passing us, going in and out of the sheriff’s department. He looked to be in his mid-forties, but even that was a lie abo
ut him. If I were told that he’d lived a day less than six hundred years, I couldn’t have been convinced. His hair was short and thin and black, blowing a bit with the breeze.
He wasn’t the short, creepy Leprechaun – the ones that Hollywood got rich off of. I don’t think those kinds ever existed, unless there was that one or two that had been dwarfed at birth. Marcus was the opposite, being a six-foot seven inches kind of tall.
Unlike the Lucky Charms mascot, there was nothing green about him, except for his eyes and his money – something that he had heaps of, just like other Leprechauns, who by trade, were swindlerous rogues elated to finagle a dying man out of his last breath if there was anything to gain. On top of that, luck was always on their side. I gritted my teeth.
“Afternoon to ye,” he said, in his Irish accent through and through. His voice was, coincidentally, pitchy and conniving, despite his height and build.
“Marcus,” I scowled, bracing myself for his offer.
“Ah, don’t seem to be so ill. I just did ye a favor. A hundred and twenty thousand American dollars be hard to come by, even with my generous pot of gold at hand.”
A hundred and twenty? They only gave Lyle a twenty thousand dollar bond? Why was I upset about that? It didn’t matter. I had this scoundrel to deal with now. “We didn’t ask for your help.” I hated being indebted to a Leprechaun as much as I hated having a hole in my head – neither of which had ever happened, but certainly a hole in the head must have been more grueling than a hole in the side.
I knew that deals with Leprechauns almost always went sour. For the few that I’d heard of to the contrary, well something like death must have mysteriously fallen upon the avaricious scamp, because there were few who could outwit the Irish imps. That was why being hitched to Marcus was far worse than being in jail.
Seize the Soul: Confessions of a Summoner Book 1 Page 3