by Lisa Medley
“And Maeve?”
“If we can capture her and somehow render her unconscious, it will buy us some time to figure out how to expel Camael without hurting her in the process.”
“Time is wasting. Let’s go.”
The melee inside the bar reached a crescendo as Deacon opened the door and Bo slunk through, his head and chest low to the ground, though still as high as Nate’s upper leg when he followed behind him.
The second Nate spotted Maeve, the plan left his brain. He forgot to even worry about Bo. His one, all-consuming thought was to reach Maeve. Without even processing the pleas of the remaining bar clientele, he edged around the main dance floor where the demons had herded them like sheep, then zigzagged through the maze of overturned tables and chairs. His boots peeled from the sticky floor covered in spilled beer, mixed drinks and worse things with each step.
He felt like he was trudging through quicksand in slow motion, almost as if he were still in a dream, but this time, all of his senses were firing. The dank smell of vomit, sweat and booze filled the dark bar. It was the smell of all bars. It was the smell of desperation.
Nate didn’t hesitate as he crossed the last few feet to Maeve and when she turned to face him, amusement animated her face as her mouth tipped into a gruesome smile.
Maeve, but not Maeve.
His body began to hum with anticipation. He felt his aura manifest before he saw it—an electric blue cloud of color that turned Maeve’s amusement into fear. Whether it was her reaction or Camael’s, he didn’t know.
He reached for her.
Maeve turned her gaze to the floor in front of her and he heard the floorboards groan then crack. A portal was opening. The demons abandoned their mission and pushed through the crowd to stand along the thin fissure, riding the hardwood surf as it spread open. Six inches. Twelve.
The smell of sulfur steamed from the fissure.
The still-souled bar patrons coughed and gagged in the stench as they stumbled toward the red exit sign at the back door just as it opened, revealing the rest of the Authority. The team filed in like S.W.A.T., making straight for the demons who were now separated from the rest, courtesy of Bo.
Without thinking, Nate tackled Maeve to the ground and all hell broke loose.
A bright, electric-blue force field encompassed them both and the chaos around them fell away as Maeve’s Reiki light latched onto Nate like a lifeline. Maeve fought and struggled beneath him for her weapon. Involuntarily, he continued to draw in her energy in great waves. He watched an internal struggle play out across her face as she fought Camael for control.
Digging deep, he began to recite the one exorcism incantation he knew. The one that had worked on Kylen’s demon.
“Ex is vir everto, Camael, solvo is humanus vacuus vulnero physical vel mental, ex is vir nunquam ut reverto ut alius victus res a vomica super vos ut nunquam iterum reperio refugium in terra plagiaries.”
An icy chill filled their electric blue bubble and his breath chuffed out in small white clouds as he continued to chant. Maeve flailed and clawed at him, tearing his clothes and skin in her struggle, but she couldn’t penetrate the bubble. Nate watched as the Authority fighters dispatched the demons in silent warfare, carefully avoiding the partially opened portal.
After Nate’s third recitation of the verse, the light around them blazed, then arced from her heart to his, and an invisible fist closed inside the center of his chest in a brief but sizzling compression, preventing his heart from beating.
He was dying.
Maeve’s energy filled him, racing through his body in shafts of fire until he was sure he would burst into flames. Then he saw the first tendrils of oily black smoke ooze from the center of her chest. Her heart chakra.
Camael was abandoning his host.
Fear crawled up Nate’s spine as he brought himself up to his knees beside Maeve. Camael wouldn’t willingly leave her, not while her body lived.
So she was dying, too.
Camael’s essence continued to stream out of Maeve, pierced through the blue energy field and into the partially opened portal, filling it with a smoldering roil of black fog. Maeve lay boneless and unanimated. Seconds later her chest rose several inches from the floor and a smaller gray stream followed in Camael’s wake as he slipped into the portal and vanished.
Camael was stripping her soul on his way out.
Nate closed his eyes and reinforced the aura field, actively drawing forth Maeve’s energy this time, hoping beyond hope her soul would follow the powerful flow. There was no way in Hell Camael was taking her with him again, not any part of her.
Closing his eyes, he visualized the stream of gray flowing into him and willed her soul to him.
There was no reason for him to believe it would work. He wasn’t a reaper.
Pressure built against his chest and when he opened his eyes, he realized her soul was pressed against him. It couldn’t seem to break through. He reached for Maeve’s body and took her hand in his, sparking another arc of power. Instinctively, he opened his mouth to receive her soul.
The soul streamed into him, drawn inside like he was a vacuum, and pummeled against its new restrictions like a caged beast. Maeve’s body remained still as stone beside him and the last of her light extinguished, allowing the sounds of the bar to return to his senses.
But there were no sounds.
The bar was silent as a grave as the Authority reapers stood and gaped at Nate.
***
“Somebody want to explain to me what just happened?” Zachriel asked, toeing his boot at the severed head of the host before him.
“Looks like Nate just found his mojo.” Deacon approached him cautiously, hands out in a supplicating, calming gesture.
Bo moved to Nate’s side and growled a low, rumbly warning at Deacon.
Nate looked from the unconscious Maeve to the reapers and back again.
What the hell had happened?
He reached for Maeve’s neck, feeling for a pulse. It was faint and irregular, but it was there. Thank God.
He pulled her head and shoulders into his lap as Bo edged nearer, snugging up against him, literally guarding his back. Nate glanced around the bar at the remaining carnage. Dozens of beheaded demons and dead humans lay scattered across the floor, but no wanderers or living humans remained in the bar. Samkiel must have already gathered the wanderers and ferried them to the Purgatory holding area. The other reapers would clean up the bodies.
He could only imagine what tomorrow’s headlines would be as the survivors’ stories made it into the press. There would be no putting the genie back into the bottle now.
He hoped he hadn’t been too late for Maeve.
Maeve didn’t stir other than the faint breath that passed her parted lips. Nate had a ridiculous urge to kiss those lips, but he resisted. Most of the Authority still gaped at him and the rest of the bar stank of demon.
Wrong time, wrong place was an understatement.
He gathered Maeve into his arms and rose to his feet. She weighed nothing and her body was cold against his. She was practically a wraith. A shudder ran up his spine. Since she was as un-souled as one of the wanderers, that thought was a little too close to home.
“Dare, perhaps you could take Maeve to Purgatory. See Rashnu, no one else. He’ll find her an appropriate place to…rest,” Deacon said.
Dare stepped forward to relieve Nate’s burden, but stopped when Nate felt his chest vibrate with a warning growl of his own.
“Nate?” Deacon asked.
“He’s not taking her to Purgatory. She’s mine. My partner. My responsibility.”
“You reaped her soul, Nate.”
“She’s not dead.”
“She wouldn’t want to live this way, Nate.” Kylen flanked around Nate’s side, but stopped when Bo turned to face him, baring his teeth.
“You of all people, Kylen, should understand why she’s not going anywhere,” Nate said.
“I never lost my sou
l, Nate.” Kylen took a step closer.
“Neither has she. I’m holding it for her. That’s all.”
“Dare?” Deacon cut his gaze to Dardariel.
“One holding cell is the same as the next I suppose. But she can’t be left alone.”
Deacon scrubbed a hand down his face, shaking his head. “This is a terrible idea. Camael may be gone, but he’ll find another body, then another. At least he won’t be riding a reaper anymore, though, which means we have another chance to shut this shit down.”
“Tell us what to do, boss.” Leo walked to the edge of the jagged, still-open abyss and looked in.
Nate heard the wail of sirens in the distance heading toward the bar.
“The rest of you…clean up this mess. Nate, take Maeve home. For now. We’ll talk more there.”
Bo pushed up against Nate, his head pressed through the crook of his arm, resting in Maeve’s lap. A bright light filled the bar as Dare and Ragu gathered the decapitated bodies in their reaper glow and dissipated.
It sure beat burning the bodies. Another one of Nate’s past duties.
Nate concentrated on his trailer and willed them into the consecrated subway. As exhausted as he was, the room shimmied and wavered much longer than usual before he felt the pull.
What had he done?
Chapter Seven
Nate landed outside his trailer, thankful to have bypassed the commons area again. No way was he ready to explain how he’d come by Maeve, and how he intended to help her to Oreo and the women. Not yet.
Honestly, he didn’t have a plan.
It had all happened so fast. Hell, he didn’t even really understand any of it.
Maeve’s soul flitted inside him, alternately making him euphoric and nauseous, looking for a place to land and clearly uncomfortable in its new environs.
His heart hurt. Both a physical and emotional pain beat against his ribs with each constriction of the treacherous muscle.
What had he done?
He snugged Maeve’s body against him tightly, holding her frail form with his left arm as he grabbed the door handle with his right hand, flinging the door wide so he could carry her inside. Shuffling, he side-stepped through the narrow passage to his bed and eased her down onto the still tangled covers. By force of habit, he slid two fingers along her slim throat searching for the reassurance of her still beating heart.
Yes. She lived.
Barely.
The door slammed shut behind him and he heard Bo settle outside it. They were safe.
For now.
Nate pulled off her boots one by one, and then hesitated, staring down at her. He had no right to undress her any further. She wasn’t in any immediate medical distress and had only the most minor physical scratches and injuries, but she obviously hadn’t bathed in weeks. Her once silky hair lay in tangled, jet-black ropes around her head. Her pale, porcelain skin was translucent and seemed thin and unsubstantial to protect her from the elements, let alone contain the powerful force of her soul, which still fluttered for escape inside him.
He traced a finger across her slack cheek, a sputtering trail of turquoise light sparking along its path while his embattled heart pounded inside his chest.
Weariness filled him. It would take time to recover from whatever they had experienced together. His own eyes grew heavy with lassitude.
What he could do for her now was make sure she had nutrition, and as soon as the other reapers returned, they could offer her their healing energy, too. The best he could hope to do was to maintain her physical body until he found a way around their unusual dilemma.
Reluctantly, he left the side of the bed and pulled the plastic storage crate from the couch on the other end of the trailer. Finding what he needed, he unwrapped the IV nutrition bag and dragged the hook from beneath the couch. They hadn’t needed to use his purloined supplies since the house had burned to the ground.
He walked back to his bed and fastened the hook over the bookcase style headboard, then unraveled the tubes and needle, hanging the bag from the hook. Gently parting her eyelids, he shined his pen flashlight into her eyes to check her pupils. Without her soul, her brilliant green eyes had faded to a light gray color.
She still wore the sleeveless black tank from the end of summer. A human would have died from exposure. While winter in Arkansas wasn’t as extreme as other parts of the country, it got below freezing many nights and she hadn’t been well maintained. Maeve wouldn’t have been oblivious to the temperature or her conditions. Evidence of her physical suffering was clear to him as he examined her.
He tapped the inside crook of her elbow and pressed lightly, searching for a good vein. After several long seconds, he settled on one. Not a good one. She was very dehydrated and her veins were shriveled like dry grass. Uncapping the needle, he turned her arm to face straight up and slid the slim piece of steel home in one quick push. Nate flipped the clip on the tubing and the nutrition solution began to drip into Maeve’s arm.
His efforts seemed far from adequate and he wished there was something—anything—else he could do to alleviate her condition. He reached up and brushed her tangled bangs to the side, then released a heavy sigh. It wouldn’t be long before Deacon would be at his door, demanding answers Nate didn’t have.
He wouldn’t let them take her away to languish in a holding cell somewhere with the hordes of soulless wanderers they’d “rescued.” Nate hadn’t seen the accommodations himself, but he was sure they would not be up to his standards for Maeve.
He would protect and care for her. Whatever it took.
There was one other thing he could do for her here that no one else could. His tattoos grew tetchy beneath his shirt sleeves in anticipation of what he was considering. The sigils that circled his biceps were his magical barometer as well as protection, always monitoring the flow of magic, his own and others’. He’d been given his first one when he was sixteen, after a near fatal first encounter with black magic from a rival in the coven. The boy had been placed on probation by the Coven Board and banned from using magic for a year. Nate had learned a valuable lesson as well. Magic could be deadly.
The kid had never liked him, looked at him as an outsider since Nate hadn’t been born into the coven. When they vied for the affections of the same girl, Liam chose to summon dark forces to eliminate his competition and Nate had nearly drowned on dry land alone in his room. Soon after, Nate designed the permanent protection sigil that was tattooed on his bicep. The first of many. If he were the paranoid type, he’d have two full sleeves after everything he’d seen lately. As it was, he was confident he’d covered the most common magical bases with his ink.
Opening the drawer beside his bed, he retrieved his smudge stick and lighter. While they were safe inside the circle of protection he’d cast, its purpose was to keep supernatural outsiders from entering their compound. Now he needed to make sure Maeve didn’t unwittingly find her way outside the safety of his trailer unattended. While that seemed impossible in her current state, he didn’t know how the nutrition IV and healing energy would affect her if and when they managed to adequately revive her physical body. Without a soul to animate her, she’d be running on sheer survival instinct, which included eating—anything—at the top of the list. At least that’s what they’d seen with the humans so far. He shuddered, imagining the wanderers being fed like animals in a zoo.
The lighter flared to life and he ignited the bundle of herbs, and then blew out the flames to let the packet smolder. Due to the small size of his lodging, the task of cleansing the structure didn’t take long. Wafting the smoke into the four corners of the trailer, he recited the cleansing words aloud, the low murmur of his incantations the only sound in the room.
Next, he removed a ball of hemp twine from the same drawer and cut four three-inch strands. A binding spell was serious magic, but without it, Maeve might wander into even more danger. He laid the strings on the bed beside her. Closing his eyes, he summoned the energy of the elements an
d cast another, very specific circle of protection around his trailer.
He reached over and plucked a single hair from Maeve’s head from the root then another from his own and twisted them around one of the strands. Choosing a length of twine, he began to tie the knots as he chanted the spell.
The first knot binds my intention.
The second knot binds any ill-wishing
The third knot binds the one called Maeve to these four walls.
These knots shall hold the spell, until these knots are undone well.
Nate wrapped the knotted length snugly around Maeve’s thin wrist and tied the final knot, binding it to her physical body as well.
Unless he unbound the rope bracelet or physically removed her himself, she would remain safely inside the trailer. It was wrong to impose one’s magical will upon another. Free will was what made people human, but Maeve’s free will had already been compromised. He assuaged his guilty conscience with the justification that it was for her own good.
Satisfied, he crossed the trailer to the couch, emptied it of the other storage crates, and then stretched out across it, exhausted. Maybe some rest would grant him a clearer perspective. Maybe not.
What he needed was a miracle. And stronger magic.
The kind of magic only his coven could provide.
***
The last thing she saw was Nate coming toward her in the bar like a man on fire, then a blinding light. She’d felt every torturous tendril of her essence as it ripped free from its moorings. She’d fought against him, but as her own toxic energy was drawn forth and stirred with Camael’s angel essence, a noxious union resulted.
Camael became infused with her venomous energy, which he’d been unable to access on his own despite his possession of her body. Had he known the potential effects of her poison, no doubt he would have redoubled his efforts to tap into it. One consequence of riding a reaper was that while their bodies were much more durable, their greater gifts, or in Maeve’s case—curse, were unavailable to their parasite.
When her energy had been drawn against her will into Nate once more, she’d been helpless to stop it. Somehow, Nate had been able to wrench Camael out. Whether by his own power or the combination of her poison and his enhancing energy, she didn’t know, but Camael hadn’t been able to maintain his hold inside her. What did any of it mean for her now, though?