“I’m gonna’ get you out of here, Boyd.” My gut roiled at the thought. To get him out mean that he would see what I could do…that he would know me for who I truly was. I couldn’t let that get to me though. What mattered most was getting Boyd out alive.
I stood up, using the metal shelf beside me as a prop. My weight made it wobble slightly, since it was one of the few shelves that was no longer bolted to the floor.
“Whoa…easy there,” Boyd said. “Wouldn’t want that thing coming down on me, now would ya’?” he laughed, hacking blood onto the cement.
Not joining in with Boyd’s humor, I braced the shelf against the wall, making sure it was steady before heading back to the receiving area where the high-bays aimed their light.
“Thought I was gonna have to come and separate the two of ya’,” Marcus said, adjusting the collar of his blazer. “Ye claimed to have Castella’s obelisk when I spoke to ya’.”
“I’ve got it,” I muttered, digging in my pocket and pulling it out.
Lyle tightened his fists by his side, clenched his jaw.
With both hands twisting the stone, I cut my eyes at Marcus. “After I summon Vár, this’ll all be over, right?”
He nodded in approval, impressed that I’d found out that he wanted to summon the goddess of contracts. “You’re quite the clever summoner, I see. Takes more than a miracle to figure out what goes on in this ole’ noggin of mine.” He touched his head. “There might be an opening to work with me after ye’ve done what I’ve asked of ya’.”
That was Leprechaun for, “He’s going to kill us afterwards,” but I didn’t let on that I knew what he was up to.
Taking a few steps closer to Marcus, I listened to the depths of the obelisk making sure I didn’t dive as deep as I had the first time I’d used Castella’s stone. I explored the abyss from a bird’s eye-view, acquainting myself with the boundaries before I invited Vár to inhabit the gem.
The obelisk’s aura swelled inside of me, heating up my hand, uniting with my core, warbling a bright pink as I invoked Nathan’s soul to action.
“Don’t ya’ be tryin’ nothing there, missy,” Marcus warned. “Summon the goddess with yer æther and get on with it.”
Grimly, I nodded with a sigh, as I drew power from the stone. Nathan’s soul flowed out of the obelisk and into my body, surging through my veins and pours. With my gaze latched on Marcus, I screamed, grabbed the brass zipper of my coat, and summoned a brazen sword into my right hand.
Using all the strength I could muster, I ran the blade clear through Marcus’s belly, yanking up on the hilt with both hands several times, before sliding the sword out of the wound.
Mouth open, eyes wide, Marcus’s lip trembled, both hands wanting to clench the sword or the wound or me. Before he could do either, he lowered his eyes, then landed hard on his side.
Lyle eased over to his body, examining it.
Still breathing uncontrollably from the surge of adrenaline, I let the sword rest by my side, the tip of it scraping against the cement.
Lyle knelt over him and checked Marcus’s neck with two fingers. “He’s dead…”
I nodded, swallowed hard.
Yet, something was wrong. Marcus had stood too close to me. He’d let the blade impale him. I staggered back, nearly losing what little breath I had left in me. Where’s the soul?
“What is it, Rebekah?” Lyle sauntered over to me, no longer interested in the body.
Instead of responding, I held the sword in front of me, twisting it in the bright light. No blood…no blood. Clean.
“Lyle, get back,” I warned, staggering backwards.
Footsteps, slow and easy, clicked around the corner of the extended metal shelves, until the silhouette of a six-foot seven man wearing a blazer and slacks came into view. The body on the floor faded away into nothing, no trace of its existence left behind. “Oh…missy…sad to say ye’ve gotten yerself into a wee bit of trouble now…”
Chapter
TWENTY-SIX
The brazen blade dissipated from my grasp, dispersing into particles, as I withdrew Nathan’s soul back into the obelisk. Marcus didn’t halt from coming towards me with a condescending glare that iced chills through my soul. I hadn’t noticed straightaway, but two more sets of footsteps kept pace with his from around the corner.
To Marcus’s left was a boy, perhaps my age or a year or so younger. His chest was bare and rippled with muscle. He wasn’t much wider than Lyle, however. Raven feathers sprouted from in his head, forming an intricate headdress that appeared to be designed specifically for him.
The beak of an eagle curled down over his forehead to the bridge of his nose, and earrings swooped from his ears, each with turquoise dream catcher charms. He wore black jeans, and he walked in an aggressive wrestler’s crouch – one foot sliding forward, while the other trailed behind, never surpassing the first.
From the headdress to the earrings to the three-talon necklace that rest at his sternum, I knew right away that he must have been Stephanie’s witch doctor brother.
Stopping several steps from me, arms to his side, Marcus said, “Ya’ meant to slay me…when I meant to set you free.”
To “set me free” was to kill me, I knew, but Marcus was trying to gain my sympathy through guilt. “Just let Boyd go, and I’ll do whatever you want,” I said.
“This coming from same little lady who might have meshed me insides with metal just a wee bit ago,” he replied. “Forgive me, Rebekah, if I don’t have the easiest time believing a word of what ya’ say. I’ll let the boy live after you conjure Vár for each of us to have a discussion with her.”
The veins in Lyle’s neck bulged – a subtle sign that he was ready to decant. “How do we know that you’re telling us the truth?”
“Tell me now, when have ya’ ever known me to deal in certainties? And even if I swore with me hand to me heart and the other to Asgard, ye wouldn’t take heed of a word of it. I don’t blame ya’ though…not one bit, might I say. Can’t say I’d have a different opinion were the tables turned the other way around.” He stood with his hands on his hips, splaying his blazer to his side. “Bear in mind, if ya’ will, that I’m not the one to take deals and arrangements lightly, so I’ll ask ye just one more time. Pull out the obelisk and summon the goddess, so I don’t have to make good on me threats to ya’.”
“We never made a deal with you,” Lyle retorted. “You bailed us out of jail on your own. And as far as the damages at your place, they happened because of the root you put on Rebekah.”
“One hundred and twenty thousand dollars did I spend to bail the two of ya’ out of jail. And ye claim that ya’ owe me nothin’. Ye claim that it weren’t what ya’ wanted. But to get out of jail, ye had to agree to the payment, am I wrong? And when I pull up my accounts, I still don’t yet see where the money’s ever been returned. As far as the root, I never put anything on Rebekah. Stephanie, me Druid healer, did that. Might I remind ya’ that ye didn’t have to follow after her. Ye didn’t have to destroy me house like you did, neither.”
Marcus stepped past me, now making his way towards Boyd. “Payment is payment, I suppose. If ye don’t want to summon the goddess, then the boy’s life is an even exchange.”
I shut my eyes, not turning around to Marcus. “Wait.”
He paused.
“I’ll do it,” I said. “I’ll summon Vár. Just…just don’t lay another hand on Boyd.”
“I’ve already granted ya’ one chance to deny me,” Marcus said, pivoting back to me on the ball of his shoe. “I don’t quite foresee me granting you another.”
With a weight on my gut, I dragged the obelisk out of my pocket. It hummed in my hands, pink light mingling in the illumination of the high-bays on the floor.
The obelisk heated my al
ready sweaty palms, and I swirled it a few times to get the best grip. Voices from the dead called to me, whispering seductive chants to follow them into the nether as I dove into the depths of the gem.
“Come to us,” they said. “Do not resist. Give in to the darkness.”
The tone of their mutters spidered down my spine, trickled into my bones like venom. For a span, I didn’t see the bright lights that shone at me. Only blackness. I felt my body tumbling into space. Nathan’s soul whirled around me, twisting about my limbs, tightening.
Then it happened. Something foreign. Something distant. Something I’d never felt before. The light and the darkness. The æther element shrilled in my body like lava. I wanted to scream, to let everything inside me burst out in a chaotic eruption of anguish and fury.
But I couldn’t. My mouth had been sealed tight, my vocal chords muted. But my eyes…my eyes were alive. I could sense them coat over with a black as dense as darkness, but yet I peered through them as if gazing through translucent ink.
My body trembled on the inside, and when I turned to Marcus, I could see that he was afraid of me, though he hid his horror behind a smooth smile and behind his easy eyes. When I stepped towards him, tremors like lightning danced up my leg from my feet to my thighs.
I can kill him right now…, I thought. But when I thought to reach for him, my body burned as if poison had been poured into my pores. The scream that I’d withheld sprang out of me. Lyle grabbed my arm to calm me.
“Rebekah…” he said.
To Lyle, I’m sure he thought he’d whispered, but what I heard were billows of sounds toppling over me, so much so that I flung out my hand to stop him. Only, my hand submerged into his chest. And though he was unharmed, I could feel the thump of his heart against my entire hand. I could sense the tiny waves of his brain signaling to him. And what was more – I could understand them – everyone of them – how they warned him to back away, how they were unsure how my hand had sunk into his chest, yet left him unfazed.
That was when I knew what the æther truly was – that it was energy, both light and dark, containing no mass in itself, but readily able to interpret matter…to compel it.
“Stop yer stallin’,” Marcus scowled, “and summon the goddess.”
I wondered if I could charge him and tear through him with the influx of energy I felt, but I second-guessed myself. When I’d touched Lyle, my hand had gone through him without hurting him at all. Would the same happen if I tried to attack Marcus? I couldn’t risk it, not with Boyd’s life at stake.
Not wanting to try Marcus’s patience any longer than I had, I lowered to one knee, put my fist on my forehead and connected with Vár.
No sooner had the words come to mind did I hear a piercing sound screeching like a dozen eagles in a nosedive from above the warehouse. An explosion ruptured the roof, hurling massive cement slats, metal rods, and conduit in every direction.
Winter winds howled in from the hole in the ceiling. Lyle and Marcus and the two he’d brought with him stumbled back. But I didn’t even move, still poised on one knee as a streak of white light streamed from the heavens in one continuous pillar over me.
“What do you want with me?” a dozen voices called. But the voices didn’t come from nearby. The came from within me.
Summoning Vár had brought the goddess from the skies and into my body. She’d completely taken over me, my own conscious being in the rear seat of her psyche. Her aura saturated the obelisk to capacity, giving me a headache so severe that I felt like a power drill was boring a hole through my temples.
“Never in vain do you summon a goddess,” Vár rebuked Marcus through me, fixing my focus on him.
Marcus showed no signs of fear or dread. “I offered me sacrifice for the length of years, just as ye asked. I called ye to make good on me promise – yer freedom in exchange for yer justice on my debtors.”
Vár used my body to take several steps closer to him. But something was loosening inside of me like a bolt about to slip off a screw. My hold on Vár is waning, I realized. It felt like someone prying a tightly gripped sword out of my hand.
“Your sacrifice is acceptable,” Vár replied. She reached toward him, a ray of light spreading from the tips of her fingers, filling Marcus from top to bottom as his arms dangled by his sides, receiving six hundred more undeserved years of life. “As far as your debtors,” she replied in many voices, “how do you intend to set me free?”
Droves of Pith from the dead clung to my mind, smearing my thoughts. Unknown voices whispered and wailed to me, beckoning me to let go, weakening my hold on Vár.
Marcus pointed at me once he’d received his benediction from the goddess of contracts. “The summoner who called ya’,” he said, “she isn’t strong enough to bind ya’ to her obelisk.”
Vár grinned, spreading my lips further up than I knew they could curl. “Can she not?” I felt her tug the invisible bind that I had on her.
Don’t let go Rebekah, I demanded. You can do it…just don’t let go.
Another tug. Light began to shine beneath my flesh as Vár wriggled a bit more loose from my control. Hold it, Rebekah… I felt like I was clenching the frayed end of a wet rope that was slowly slipping away from me.
This time…Vár yanked. My hold on her surrendered. I could feel the release of energy as she slipped away, detaching from my body, peeling out of me cell by cell, sending Nathan’s soul back into my obelisk.
My first thought wasn’t the danger we were in now that the goddess of contracts stood before me incarnate. It wasn’t the disappointment that Marcus had won, and it wasn’t the reality that Vár would come for me first now that she’d been unleashed – the starving caged dog who’d had a slab of meat thrown in front of her.
My first thought was how beautiful she was with her cinnamon brown hair that had been neatly combed past her shoulders with one thick braid in the center and thin braids along her temples. Her eyes were meadow green, and she wore a loose pearl robe underneath an auburn sash and a golden waist-wrap.
In the midst of the cross-section of light from the high-bays, she said to Marcus, “You have done your duty by setting me free. Now I will uphold my end of the covenant that you have made with me.”
Chapter
TWENTY-SEVEN
I nearly lost my spirit when Vár turned to me. A silvery sword formed in her right hand, each piece of it materializing until the flat of the blade shimmered in the light. In a deathly pace, she strode towards me, her robe wafting at her ankles with each step.
That was when Vár cast away every bit of her composure. Both hands clasped the hilt of the sword. She charged at me with a war cry so fierce that her voice rattled all the metal shelves in the warehouse.
I could have given in. I could have surrendered to death. I could have let her harvest her unrelenting justice straight from my soul with just one swipe of her sword…but I didn’t.
Summoning Nathan and fusing him with brass, I conjured a brilliant shield on my left arm. Vár’s sword swooped down and clanged against the shield, heaving me onto my back. The shield erupted into particles that clattered on the cement like dropped coins before vanishing. Nathan’s soul sputtered out of it. I reached to him and summoned him again before another one of Vár’s sword swipes hacked me in half.
A mound of stone rose from the cement, separating Vár from me as I twisted and turned to get my feet underneath me. With a straight thrust, her blade ate through the rock. The rubble crumpled to the ground.
Not hesitating, I called forth another cement entity – this one mobile and fierce, standing six heads higher than Vár. It swung at her with its left, then smashed at her with its right. Both assaults she eviscerated with furious sword flails, tearing the summon down to its knees with whorls of her blade.
Voices and darkness caved in on me as Pith accumulated. The lights seemed brighter, and I buckled forward, covering my ears as every noise and clamor sounded like metal grinding against metal. C�
��mon, Rebekah…not now…keep it together. But I could hardly see anything but white flashes and black streaks.
One blur in particular – one made of white and gold – appeared to be getting closer. Is that Vár? I was too disoriented to tell, too confused to even resist.
He was telling me what my body already knew, even though my mind was leagues behind the command. In a daze, barely able to stand, I tried to focus. The arm of the white blur raised to the sky, then descended down on me faster than I could gasp.
But, abruptly, it stopped. A ferocious roar tore in front of me in what I assumed – what I hoped – was Lyle in lion form. Lyle tackled Vár to the ground, mangling her wrist and biting at her robe.
When I glanced down, a shimmering reflection caught my eye. I staggered to the left, after hearing a squish beneath my black boots. A constant trickle trailed the sound, until I noticed that puddles of water were at my feet.
“Might wanna’ make use of it while you can,” I heard someone say.
Stephanie?
In answer to my question, blurred blue lights swirled around the body beside me as water leaked from her pores. I didn’t say anything. I just collapsed to a squat, put my hands in the water, and filtered the Pith off me as quickly as I could.
My vision cleared, and I could see that Lyle was still clawing at Vár. She rolled him off of her with a kick that launched him through the air, spinning. On his descent, he decanted out of lion form and into an eagle, just before hitting the ground, then soared up.
Before I could call a summon, lightning snapped around my body, jolting me to the floor where I splashed in the water making sparks sizzle off of me.
Seize the Soul: Confessions of a Summoner Book 1 Page 20