Empty Vessels

by Meredith Katz

  M/M polyamorous paranormal romance. An unwilling psychic investigates a strange horror threatening the local fae population, helped by his ghostly best friend and the deer-antlered man that runs a mysterious antique shop.

  ***

  Haunted by the ghost of the man who saved his life at the cost of his own, Keith has developed an awareness beyond what humans can normally sense—a world of spirits, monsters, and fascinating people that can only be described as Others. When he starts to have prophetic dreams about strange creatures hunting down helpless Others, he realizes that there has to be something only he can do.

  Accompanied by Lucas, his best friend despite the complex feelings around his death, and the horned boy, a beautiful and mysterious Other, Keith knows that he has to confront his feelings and his fears in order to find his place in this new, strange world—and to protect the things that he’s coming to love.

  Empty Vessels

  Sixth Sense Investigations 1

  By Meredith Katz

  Published by Soft Cryptid

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher, except for the purpose of reviews. Purchase only authorized editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Thank you for supporting the author’s rights.

  Edited by Constance Blye

  Cover designed by Dian Huynh

  https://dianhuynh.artstation.com/

  This book is a work of fiction and all names, characters, places, and incidents are fictional or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is coincidental.

  Second edition August 2019

  First edition November 2017 by Less Than Three Press

  Copyright © 2017, 2019 by Meredith Katz

  Printed in the United States of America

  Digital ISBN 978-1-989646-07-6

  Print ISBN 978-1-989646-17-5

  To my darling Aveline,

  I love you forever and beyond. Someday, let’s become ghosts and haunt the same places together.

  The Sixth Sense Investigations Series

  Empty Vessels

  If Wishes Were Fishes (Coming Soon)

  Other Works by Meredith Katz

  Beauty & Cruelty

  The Cybernetic Tea Shop

  How Saeter Robbed the Underworld

  Smoke Signals

  Only Human

  The Cobbler's Soleless Son (Pandemonium 1)

  Behind Bars (Pandemonium 2)

  Hair to the Throne (Pandemonium 3)

  Empty Vessels

  Meredith Katz

  chapter one

  The clattering scrape of claws on the alleyway pavement sound loud even to his own ears, easy to follow, a dead giveaway. But the time for stealth is long past. Too little, too late. He thrusts his hand in front of himself—scaled, with black claws fully extended from each of the fingertips—grabbing a dirty plastic garbage bin and digging grooves into it as he shoves it aside just enough to squirm past.

  He hopes it will slow the Terror down.

  There's no time to worry about the humans still lingering in the restaurant next to the alley, closing up and tired, so he tries not to. They'll be fine—Terrors don't go after humans if better prey is around. It's his own hide he has to worry about right now, and he can't afford to spend his attention on anything except where he's placing his feet, what's ahead of him.

  No matter how aware he is of what's behind him.

  A fence looms at the end of the alley. He's got no time to stop, barely any time to slow. He bends his knees, hocks tensing for the upcoming jump as his lizard-like hands grab the top of the chain-link fence. He springs upward, body nearly horizontal as strong muscles tense, vaulting the fence, vestigial wings spreading to catch what air they can to propel him up, forward, past.

  Another scrape of claws as he hits the ground and nearly slips on the other side, mud and a wet patch of leaves catching underfoot. There's a spike of pain as his shoulder slams into the wall. He can feel skin tear on the rough brick. No good. Blood—any kind of essence—will only make it easier for the Terror to keep his trail.

  Still, it's better than falling. An image springs to mind—shadows crawling over skin—and then with a shudder and a desperately sucked gasp of chill air, he's off again, shoving off the wall and running as hard as he can.

  A splash, a corner rounded. Soon he'll be in the parking lot where he left his car—he's already passing the boundary, lined with the skeletons of dark trees in the middle of losing their leaves. It's empty at this hour, with nobody to run to for help, but once he's in his car he can get away from them easily. Just a bit further and he'll be free. He spots his old Corolla and his heart soars. He runs faster, not caring about his exhaustion.

  But they come.

  They swarm him from the front first, with grasping indistinct hands and a screaming maw bellowing. Their hands are darkness coating his scales, trying to swallow him in. Teeth and claws catch and it hurts, it hurts, it hurts.

  He roars back in fear and defiance, but there's a difference between the two sounds. He's still someone. The Terror in front of him is not, and won't have fear or empathy or any hesitation. He lunges desperately, fighting and swinging, claws connecting with a sludgy mass and splattering it on brick. It doesn't remember who it used to be. There's no way, no way at all, to convince it to not just kill him.

  That's what they do, just kill.

  But this Terror—these Terrors, he can see others behind the first—they're different somehow.

  They don't just feast on him, don't tear at him more than they need to in order to subdue him, although this is when they would. It's a spike of useless hope as instead, he's forced down under their unnatural, unspeakable weight, his scaled knees buckling as they press. He fights the entire way down, straining and struggling to get free, snapping sharp teeth into semi-solid flesh—but he is pressed down regardless.

  The one in front groans with hunger, longing to swallow him down, but resists, shifting around to hold him from behind. He struggles, helpless, as another approaches, something clutched in what used to be its hands. He stares at it in a blinding panic and confusion.

  "What the fuck is going on?" he screams, or tries to. He chokes halfway through the first word, his mouth full of something terrible and stagnant as the Terror's bulk presses down.

  The bottle glows, symbols crawling across its surface, and it seems to hurt the Terror to hold it, but it approaches nevertheless. The edge of the spout is sharpened into a spike and he realizes what it's for.

  His head is yanked back as the Terror behind him grabs him by one long, ridged horn. He tries to fight it, struggling, nostrils flaring for more air, mouth open. He's crying. The tears are hot on his face in the cold air.

  Slowly and firmly, letting him see every inch of its terrible approach, the Terror drives the spout of the bottle into his eye.

  ***

  Keith Marose woke with a strangled sound that might have been a yell if he weren't sleeping facedown. Trying to suck air, feeling as though the panicked flight in his dream were his own, he inhaled wet pillow and coughed.

  It took a few seconds of struggling to realize he was awake. When he did, he forced himself to move, rolling over with a strand of spit sticking from his pillow to his mouth. It settled coldly on his cheek and he made a face at the ceiling through blurry eyes.

  "Gross," he croaked, voice trembling.

  He thought he heard an answer, but he wasn't awake enough to be sure. Groaning, he rubbed his face with both hands, wiping his mouth and grinding sleep out of his eyes, then fumbled around next to the bed for the bottle of water he'd left there.

  The day outside was bright, su
n stabbing in through the curtains—though he wished belatedly that the word stabbing hadn't come to mind—but the shadows in the room abruptly darkened as the gulp of cold water helped wake him up. His second sight was beginning to take over for his normal sight again, showing him what the room normally hid: the memories the building held, becoming visible to him alone. Along with, of course, the dark shape hovering near the end of his bed.

  Another mouthful of water, swishing it around in his mouth to try to get rid of the sour flavor of bad dreams, and the shadow began to resolve into Lucas's familiar figure: Transparent and washed-out dark hair and brown skin, eternally in polo shirt and jeans. Broad-cheek boned, insubstantial as air, and smiling at Keith despite the concerned set of his brows.

  "Morning, sunshine," Lucas said, warm and sympathetic. "That didn't look like a good dream."

  "Yeah," Keith said weakly. He opened his mouth to reply again, but was cut off by the siren wail of his alarm clock suddenly splitting the room. Wincing, he twisted, fumbling to get it off. "It—" beep beep beep "—might have—" beep beep "—it might have been a true dream, too." He always felt stupid declaring that sort of thing, and dropped his gaze, still struggling to find the right button with numb fingers. Beep beep. "I don't know. It felt like that."

  Lucas leaned over him, one hand planted next to Keith's hip as he helped Keith get the alarm off by passing his hand through it. The electronics disrupted, and, with a popping sound, it began to flash 00:00. Keith leaned back in bed a little again, acutely aware of the chill of Lucas's presence. The coldness was too familiar to be uncomfortable these days, but it was still a bit of a shock to his system.

  "True, huh," Lucas said. "The way you were struggling, that doesn't sound like it'd be a good thing."

  "It wouldn't be," Keith agreed. He dropped the alarm on his bedside table and flopped back in his bed, inching backward into a sitting position to get out from under Lucas as subtly as he could. Lucas sat back, still watching his face, and Keith tried to give him a smile, unsteady and sickly with the dream still haunting him. "It was… bad."

  Frowning slightly, Lucas attempted to pick at the blanket. After a significant number of attempts, it finally dimpled under his insubstantial fingers. "Do you want to talk about it?"

  The sympathy in his voice rankled a little, mostly because if what Keith had dreamed was some kind of vision, he wasn't the one who deserved kindness. He knew Lucas would argue if he said that, though. Lucas always said that having to witness things was itself a burden.

  How Lucas could say that after everything that had happened to him, Keith didn't know.

  Still, it was eating at him, and it would make it difficult to focus on anything else today. And even if Lucas let him put it off now, he'd just ask again later.

  "It was… from the point of view of an Other," Keith said slowly. "I'm not sure of all the details because there weren't really many thoughts included, just a sense of fear and panic. Fight or flight, you know? Definitely an Other, though, part animal, like a lot of them are. I got the feeling this one was some kind of… dragon or something."

  "Uh-huh." Lucas leaned forward and rested his arms weightlessly on Keith's bent knees. His usually-optimistic face was serious, the details of his eyes blurring out of existence as he absorbed the gravity with which Keith was talking.

  Keith couldn't keep himself from meeting that dark blur anyway, trying to make out Lucas's features. He hated the way Lucas seemed to lose specifics when he focused on other people's situations. He didn't know why it happened, but it never seemed like a good thing that parts of Lucas could just vanish.

  "Anyway…" he continued, and took another drink from his water bottle to clear the sudden thickness in his throat. "There was a pair of Terrors, and the Other was trying to get away from them."

  "Not so unusual," Lucas said, from the darkness where his mouth should be. "There's been a lot of them around lately. It's probably because of those murders. You know that Terrors show up where there's a lot of negative energy."

  Not even trying to suppress his shudder, Keith nodded. "If they were just hunting, it probably wouldn't be worth talking about. But they weren't… They weren't acting like normal Terrors do. I mean…" He swallowed hard. His pulse was thundering in his throat, adrenaline up as he remembered the images from his dream. "For one thing, they were working together to corner their target. Terrors aren't smart enough for that. The Other in the dream thought that too."

  "Couldn't it be a coincidence?"

  "No, it…" He found it impossible to describe the bottle, the image from it. He tried and felt his mind shying away from the descent of that sharp spike. "No. they weren't trying to eat the Other. They were… they were doing something else. Using a tool—I think it was enchanted. Not sure what it was supposed to do, but it was lit up to my mind's eye, and…"

  He didn't bother to finish that, just let the words shrivel up and die in the air.

  Lucas was silent for a long few moments. Then, in a reassuring tone, he prompted, "Sure it wasn't just a normal dream? If they weren't acting normal, that sounds more like nightmare material than a premonition."

  Keith couldn't be sure either way. The fear didn't feel like his own, but he didn't know. Couldn't know. It wasn't as if there was an easy way for him to discern the border between reality and imagination. Hell, even right now, he didn't know if this was real. If Lucas was really here to talk to, or if he was just making Lucas up. It wasn't as if anyone else could see him.

  Some kind of response to trauma, his therapist had said, and he'd believed that for so many years. A horrible, horrible response.

  "Maybe," he said, finally. And then, unable to bear it any more, he reached down and cupped that shadowed, smeared face. He focused on his hand, focused on what it should feel like. As unwelcome as his powers were, at least he could make himself touch spirits, though it wasn't really a physical sensation so much as one in his sixth sense. He thought, sometimes, that having Lucas stuck to him might be unbearable if he couldn't feel him at all. At times like this, he was acutely grateful. He ran his thumb over what he remembered of Lucas's strong cheekbone, the high peak of his eyebrow, the broad line of his nose.

  Slowly, under the pass of his hand, Lucas's features came back into their proper form, energetic and easy-going and forever stuck in his early twenties. His broad lips dimpled gently under the touch of Keith's thumb and his cold breath gusted out against Keith's fingers as he said, "Either way, you've got to start getting ready, or you're going to be late for class."

  "Yeah," Keith said, and tried to forget.

  ***

  The student dorms at Stonybridge University were cramped old things from the 1930s which were seriously full of shadows and ghosts.

  Since he'd stayed in his hometown when he went to college, Keith couldn't get away from his reputation from high school, but even if nobody here had known him, they'd have figured out something was wrong with him. He couldn't stop noticing the shadows—and he was sure other people noticed him noticing them. As he made his way down to the showers, his toiletries in his hand and Lucas tagging along behind him, his eyes flicked to movement in a corner here, something hanging from the courtyard there. People gave him a wide berth in return.

  At least it meant that he didn't have to socialize in the dorm's bathroom, he thought self-mockingly. So in some ways, he was definitely coming out on top.

  He felt Lucas hang behind as he headed to the shower stall. Since Lucas was haunting Keith, he could never get much distance, but their short tether at least meant that Lucas was capable of giving him privacy to shower, use the facilities, change, and so on. And so on was definitely a concern, given that Lucas had been haunting him since he was fifteen, but Keith tried not to ask him to leave the room too often. It felt unfair, since it was hardly Lucas's preference to stick so close, and besides, he did owe Lucas his life.

  It was, however, a major contributor to why Keith had never had a boyfriend. Not that that was something he cou
ld talk about with Lucas either.

  At least Keith was alone for once, and tried to make the most of the shower as quickly and quietly as he could. When he came out after quickly changing in the small gap between curtain and stall door, he found Lucas sitting on the bathroom counter, legs dangling. He seemed bored, head tilted back to stare at some gross-looking patch on the ceiling, and if he weren't so transparent, or if he were reflected in the mirror, he'd look like any other student here killing time while waiting for a friend.

  Keith's heart hurt, briefly. "Ready?"

  "I think the ceiling's growing mold," Lucas said, but hopped off the counter to fall into step with him. He grinned aside at Keith, and without his mood really matching it, Keith grinned back.

  "I wouldn't be surprised if there was an entire ecosystem up there," he said, pretending to ignore the weird look he got from another student who pushed past him and walked through Lucas on the way.

  Class—The Legacies of Imperialism—was not exciting at the best of times, less due to the subject matter and more due to the professor's inability to put emotion in his voice in any way ever, and was made significantly worse by being a three-hour class. All his classes ended up in blocks of three one-hour classes a week, two hour-and-a half, or one three-hour one. Whenever possible, Keith tried to take the two classes a week option to reduce the total number of days he had to attend without it entering an ungodly, agonizing length. Legacies of Imperialism had been a trade-off he'd let himself take because the other options he'd had around his remaining electives were either super early in the morning or stupidly late at night. Who wanted to be in class at 9 pm?

  He wasn't always sure he'd made the best choice.

  He sat, as usual, at the back of the room, trying to avoid making eye contact with the professor and, by doing so, reducing the risk of having to speak in public. Lucas leaned against the wall behind him, and, in the margins of his notes, Keith tried to sketch what little he remembered of the bottle in the dream for Lucas to see. Despite its use, it hadn't been any kind of incidental shank, he remembered that much. It hadn’t been any old beer bottle with enchantments on it. The shape itself had been unusual, pot-bellied with a long narrow spout, sliced very deliberately into its sharp point. The angle on the pointed opening had been severe enough to remind him of a medicinal needle's head.