Ouroboros (Seven Relics Saga Book 1)

by Brea Essex

  “You know what I am?” he asked.

  “Of course.” She reached out and patted his cheek. Her hand passed through his face. “I knew what both of you were from the second you walked through the door.” She walked away before either of us had a chance to respond.

  “Hurry and copy down the spell. This place is starting to creep me out,” Zac said.

  I looked around to make sure the librarian was out of earshot. “Are you sure it’s the place and not the woman?” I asked.

  He pointed at me. “Bingo.”

  “Do all witches creep you out, or just that one?”

  “Hey, you said it.”

  “I know. But seriously, is it all of us?”

  He crossed his arms across his chest and glared at me. “Of course it’s not all of you. You should know better than that, Rhiannon. You don’t creep me out. But you have to admit, she’s a little weird.”

  “Yeah, I guess she is.” I hurriedly copied down the spell while Zac began to shelve the other books.

  “Be sure to copy that exactly,” he said over his shoulder.

  “I may not know much about magick, but that much is obvious.”

  After I finished copying, I stuck the paper in my pocket. I left the pen on the table. No way was I going to go hunting for the weird librarian to return it to her.

  It took us twice as long to return the books to the shelves as it did for the librarian to pull them down. “I’m pretty sure we’re putting these in the wrong places,” I whispered as we worked.

  Zac shrugged as he took a book from my arms and placed it on a high shelf that I couldn’t quite reach. “At least we’re putting them back.”

  “But aren’t we creating more work for her?”

  “Would it be better if we left them all scattered on the table?”

  “I suppose either way isn’t that great.”

  “And are you going to go find her so they can be put away properly?”

  I shook my head vehemently, which made him chuckle. “Let’s go,” he said as I placed the last book on a shelf.

  We walked out slowly, peeking around corners, trying to avoid the strange witch lady. We finally reached the front door, and stepped out into the street.

  “So, how are we going to find a store with climbing supplies?” I asked.

  “I’d assume there would be some near the mountain.”

  It was impossible to get lost, considering the peak looming in the distance. We headed in that direction.

  We found what looked like a sports store near the mountain’s base and went in. We had barely crossed the threshold when the shop’s proprietor approached us. “What can I help you with, Miss?” he asked in heavily accented English.

  “I need climbing boots, carabiners, a harness, a wind and waterproof jacket, a tent, food rations, a sleeping bag…” I continued to tick off supplies as the shop owner’s eyes grew wider and wider.

  “Are you planning on climbing Olympus?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh no, no, no!” he exclaimed. “Much too dangerous for a young girl like you.”

  “I’ve climbed plenty of times before,” I said.

  “But not the Olympus. It’s much too difficult a journey.”

  I crossed my arms in front of my chest. Zac remained silent—it’s not like the guy would have been able to hear him. “Look, I’ve been climbing since I was five years old. I’ve climbed plenty of mountains. Now, are you going to sell me the supplies, or will I have to take my business elsewhere?”

  He didn’t look happy. “Do you plan on going all the way to the top?”

  “I’m planning on climbing as high as I can get. If that’s the top, great. If it’s not, that’s okay too. But who wouldn’t climb a mountain, without attempting to make it to the peak?”

  He seemed satisfied by my answer. Turning away, he began to pull supplies from the shelves and put them on the counter. When I was fully outfitted, he showed me how to send up a signal if I had trouble. This I already knew, but I figured I might as well humor the guy.

  I quickly packed all the supplies in the backpack he sold me. I tied the tent and sleeping bag on the top. “You have done this before,” he noted.

  “Yes, I have.”

  After I had paid and left the shop, I breathed a sigh of relief. “For a minute there, I thought he wasn’t going to help us,” I told Zac.

  “I thought he wasn’t also.”

  “Well, we got all our food and everything in one place, luckily. Let’s hit the mountain.”

  “Now? Are you sure?”

  I squinted at the sky. It was about mid-day. “Yeah. Hopefully we can get a couple of miles and then set up camp before the sun sets.”

  He eyed me for a moment. “I guess you know better than I do.” He heaved a deep sigh. “All right, let’s get started.”

  Nine

  We reached the summit before nightfall. I was exhausted. The climb hadn’t been nearly as difficult as I’d thought, but it was my first time climbing since my accident. My head throbbed under my helmet where I’d cracked it open from my fall. Dropping my backpack to the ground, I said, “I guess I didn’t really need all this gear.”

  Zac didn't look affected at all. He wasn’t even winded. Then again, he didn’t actually have lungs. “No, I guess you didn’t.” Hands on hips, he looked around. “Why don’t we camp here, and try the spell in the morning?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Rhiannon, you’re exhausted. There’s no way you can cast a spell in this state. Just set up your tent, and we’ll try in the morning.”

  As much as I hated to admit it, he was right. I was exhausted. “All right,” I finally conceded. I untied the tent from my backpack and began to set it up.

  “I wish I could help you,” Zac said as he watched me.

  I paused and smiled at him. “It’s okay. I’ve done this plenty of times.”

  “Still, I’m feeling pretty useless.”

  “You’re hardly useless.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  We were both quiet for a moment. “Do you want to tell me now what was bothering you earlier?” he finally asked.

  I grabbed the sleeping bag and climbed into the tent. Zac followed me. “No,” I said as I unrolled my bag.

  “You can’t avoid it forever, you know,” he said, following me once again as I crawled back out of the tent for my pack.

  I waved a hand at him as I yanked the pack inside and pulled out some food. “It’s really nothing, and like you said, I’m exhausted. I just want to eat and sleep.”

  He dropped the subject and let me eat in silence. Afterward, I climbed into my sleeping bag and zipped it up. Zac curled up on the opposite side of the tent, and my heart plummeted. Maybe I was right. I didn’t say anything else. I rolled over so my back was to him. It took me a long time to fall asleep.

  I was immediately sucked into another shade—or whatever it was that Zac called them. This time, I realized I was trapped in a nightmare. I was in an unfamiliar building, with two girls I didn’t recognize. They were fighting over a guy. Apparently, they both liked him.

  They turned to face me. One had strange eyes that were flat and emotionless. “What do you think?” she said.

  I rolled my eyes. Sure, I’d play along until either Zac showed up, or I figured out how to get out on my own. “I think you two should both ignore him.”

  The girl with the darker hair gave me an incredulous look. “Ignore him? No, you have to help us choose who gets him.”

  “Well, it sounds like he’s leading on the both of you. You two are supposed to be friends, right?” I paused while they nodded. “Then act like friends. Don’t let a guy come in between you.”

  The girl with the strange eyes narrowed them at me. “You have to take a side,” she said. Her voice was off, too. She must have been the one who was possessed by the wraith. I sincerely hoped that Zac would get there soon.

  “You two are my friends,” I said, nodding my
head and hoping that was supposed to be true. I’d better not piss her—or rather, it—off. “I’d rather not take sides.”

  “But you have to choose!” Dark-hair exclaimed. “If you don’t pick, then we have to. And then we might not all be friends anymore. We’ll just end up fighting.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a metallic glint near the hand of the girl with the odd eyes. She—it had a knife! I held up my hands and began to back away. “Fighting isn’t the answer. No violence is. I’d really just rather stay out of the whole thing.”

  “You can’t,” Strange-eyes hissed in a sibilant voice. “You’re… involved now.” She took a step toward me.

  I grabbed Dark-hair’s forearm and yanked. “Run,” I muttered under my breath at her.

  She turned to me, confused. “What?”

  “Run!” I shouted. I turned and ran, dragging her along with me as Strange-eyes’ knife slashed down in the exact spot where Dark-hair had just stood.

  We fled down the hall, and reached a staircase. As we clattered down it, I tried to listen for the wraith’s footsteps. I could only hear two sets of feet running. Either it wasn’t close to us, or my hearing wasn’t as good as I thought. There was a third possibility, which I didn’t even want to consider: that wraiths didn’t make noise unless they wanted to.

  I skidded on a step and almost fell. I found my balance in time, but the dark-haired girl crashed into my back. My knees buckled, and we both fell, thumping down the stairs. I sprang to my feet, but the girl just lay sprawled out on the landing, moaning.

  “Ow…”

  “Get up!” I demanded, trying to haul her up.

  “That hurt,” she whined.

  Would I die in real life if the wraith killed me? I wasn’t about to take the risk. I slapped her across the face. A resounding crack echoed in the stairwell as it hit. Hopefully the crazy demon/wraith/whatever-you-wanted-to-call-it hadn’t heard.

  “Do you understand that she’ll kill us if she catches us?” I asked.

  The girl stopped whimpering and sat up. I reached out and pulled her to her feet. “Now run!” I demanded.

  I don’t know how long we ran for. Time was insignificant. Finally, we rounded a corner and came to a dead stop. We were back exactly where we had started. How the hell had that happened?

  Strange-eyes stood directly in front of us. “There’s no escape,” it whispered in that same creepy, snake-like voice.

  “Look, let us the hell out of here. Neither one of us did anything to you,” I said.

  She threw back her head and cackled. “Of course you didn’t. But if I let you go, I won’t get what I want.”

  I took a step toward her, even though I was terrified beyond belief. “I know what you are.”

  “Then you know what I’ll do.”

  She reached out and grabbed the dark-haired girl. The knife flashed as it was brought to her neck. The girl didn’t even have a chance to cry out. I didn’t see the cut, but suddenly a thin line of red sprang up under her chin. It quickly welled and began to spill down her front, pouring onto the floor.

  I stepped away in revulsion. It didn’t matter if the girl was real, or if this meant that she was dead in real life. It also didn't matter if this was a nightmare. It was still a life, snuffed out before my eyes… spilling out all over the floor.

  The wraith dropped the body. Crimson blood pooled on the ground as the heart pulsed its last beat. “Better run, little Necromancer.”

  I didn’t hesitate.

  As I ran, I hoped that Zac would show up soon. I had no way of defeating this wraith, and I had no way out of this nightmare. I wondered if it was something he could teach me. Maybe it was something only a Zayin like him could handle. Why had I not thought to ask him that before?

  There was no sign of the wraith behind me. This time, I managed to find my way out of the apartment building (I hadn’t even realized before what kind of a building I was in). I was sprinting down one of the outside walkways when I heard footsteps following me.

  I looked back over my shoulder, even though I figured it could be a big mistake. Skidding to a stop, I heaved a huge sigh of relief. “Zac! Thank God!”

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. One minute, I was falling asleep on the mountain with you. The next minute, I was trapped here. The wraith killed a girl. Was that real?”

  His face looked grim. “We’ll worry about that later. Right now, I need to deal with the wraith. Where is it?”

  “I left it back in the apartment where it killed that girl. I don’t know if it’s still there or not.”

  “Show me.”

  We ran back to where I’d come from. “It’s disguised as a teenage girl.”

  “How did you know it was a wraith?” he asked.

  “She had seriously creepy eyes, like flat, emotionless. They looked mostly black too. Like the pupils took up the whole eye.”

  “Sounds about right.”

  When we reached the apartment, the wraith was nowhere in sight, and the body was gone. In its place stood a dark-haired boy about my age. In his hand he held a large sponge, like one might use to wash a car. He was rubbing it back and forth on the wall, apparently trying to clean up the blood that was now spattered everywhere.

  “Stop!” I yelled at him. “You have to leave that for the police.” I didn't know whether it really mattered or not. Was any of this really happening? Better to err on the side of caution.

  He turned toward us. “Her blood. It’s everywhere.”

  “I know.”

  “She was chopped into pieces.”

  A chill ran down my spine. If he was talking about the same girl, she hadn’t been chopped into pieces when I’d left. Nor had the blood been all over the walls. It had been spreading on the floor. What had happened?

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He advanced on us. Zac pulled me behind him and drew his sword. I had no idea where it had come from. I hadn’t noticed him carrying it before. This nightmare was messing with my brain.

  “Where did the girl go?” Zac asked, pointing his blade at the boy.

  “The body…” he whispered.

  “No, not the body, the other girl. The one who did this.”

  He gave us a blank look. “Other… I don’t know.”

  I heard a noise downstairs and moved to the window to look. Zac hissed at me to come back and stand behind him, but I didn’t listen. In the courtyard, a body was splayed out. As best as I could tell from my vantage point, it was the body of the girl who had housed the wraith. “Zac, come look.”

  Surprisingly, he listened. He backed toward me, all the while holding his sword pointed at the boy in the apartment. “Watch him,” he ordered me.

  I obediently turned away from the window to keep an eye on the boy while Zac glanced downstairs. “Is that the girl?” Zac asked.

  “Yes. The one who was possessed by the wraith.”

  “She’s dead,” he said flatly.

  “What?” I turned back toward him. It was a big mistake. The boy inside the apartment lunged at us. I saw the look in his eyes as he got close to us. Now he was the one possessed by the wraith.

  Zac smoothly impaled the boy on his blade. The body slumped to the floor in a pool of blood. Zac casually withdrew his sword from the boy’s torso and cleaned it on the boy’s shirt. “Come on, Rhiannon. We don’t have much time.”

  I remembered all too well what would happen once a wraith was killed: the shade would implode. I didn’t want to be trapped there. We ran.

  Our footsteps echoed in the stairwell as we clattered down the stairs. Zac kept his blade in hand in case we ran into anyone—or anything—else. I didn’t know how he managed to run with it without stabbing either himself or me, but now was not the time to ask.

  We had made it outside to the courtyard when the ground began to shake. Zac ran behind me, pushing me with his free hand in an attempt to get me to run faster. Finally, we got beyond the building and he ta
ckled me. We fell to the ground, him on top of me. He held his sword out so neither of us got hurt. I closed my eyes against the dust from the debris as the building collapsed behind us.

  Suddenly, the shaking stopped. I cautiously cracked open one eye. We were back in the tent! I felt a weight on my back, and realized that Zac was still there.

  “You can move now,” I told him. “I think we’re fine.”

  He crawled off of me and sat on the opposite side of the tent. “Sorry. I just wanted to be sure you were one hundred percent safe.”

  Even though he had just saved me, I bristled. “Because you need me to find the Helm and get your body back?” I asked sarcastically. “Yeah, I’d say you need me safe.”

  “What?” He gave me a wounded look. “Is that what’s been wrong all day? You think I’m only sticking around because I need you to do some things for me?”

  I sulked in my sleeping bag. “Well, what do you expect me to think?”

  “Rhiannon… Yes, that’s why I originally sought you out. But I thought that after everything that’s happened over the past couple of weeks, you’d have more faith in me.”

  I glared at him, saying nothing, so he continued: “I’ve fallen in love with you as we’ve spent time together. I proposed to you. I wouldn’t have done that if I hadn’t meant it.” He searched my face. “You believe me, don’t you?”

  “I guess…”

  “I wish you would.” My huge yawn interrupted whatever he was about to say next. “Look, maybe we shouldn’t be having this conversation right now,” he said. “You’re way too tired. You might be technically asleep when you’re trapped in a shade, but it’s certainly not restful. Why don’t you get some sleep, and we can continue talking in the morning?”

  I nodded. “Thanks.” I lay back down without another word, this time facing him. Maybe I was punishing him for no reason. He had never given me a reason to not trust him. I’d sleep on it, and maybe I’d be calmer in the morning. This time, I drifted off to sleep and slept peacefully.

  Ten

  The next morning dawned with a storm hanging over the mountain. Thunder boomed in the distance. Lightning flashed, striking the peak. Luckily it wasn’t near us.