by Ramy Vance
“Then tell me.” I was getting frustrated.
“Souls were what allowed the celestial worlds to ...” he paused, searching for the word, “… be. When the gods left, they closed their heavens and hells not by will or power or magic, but by emptying their domains of human souls. The heavens and hells are not just closed. They are also empty. But should one single human soul find its way into one of the domains, well, that can change everything.”
I thought about that for a moment as the gravity of what he’d just said dawned on me. “You mean a single human soul can reopen Heaven? Or Hell, or Elysium or Tartarus?”
The reaper nodded.
“Then why not stand over a dying person’s bed and capture the soul as it leaves the body?”
“Ahh, if only it were so simple,” he said. “Make no mistake, there are Others of great power trying to accomplish that very deed, but to capture a human soul is akin to trapping the wind. Not so easy.” He lifted a bony, gray finger and touched my forehead. “As a way of thanking you for your aid on this day, I offer you a warning. You live without your soul. There will be those who will seek to exploit this anomaly, and therefore, you.”
And as if those cryptic words were payment enough for helping to protect his king and righting an ancient wrong, he folded his arms and walked past me without so much as a second glance.
↔
“So,” Justin said, “that was crazy.”
Speaking of karma, I thought.
“Huh?” Justin said.
“Never mind,” I said, waving away my out loud thoughts. This conversation was going to be hard enough without the wrong thoughts being aired. “Justin, we need to talk.”
“We do,” Justin said, reaching for my hand as we walked. I pulled mine away. He didn’t reach for me again. “I just wanted to say thank you. For saving me.”
“Is that what I did? Aren’t I the one who endangered you in the first place?”
“The only danger I’m in is explaining to my parents why I didn’t come home for Christmas … or call them. That’s going to be a doozy …” he trailed off, probably thinking about what he was going to tell them.
But that was his problem. My problem was him. “Justin, if it wasn’t for me you would never have been anywhere near that dybbuk. You would never have been possessed.”
“True, but I don’t see it that way,” Justin said. “I … I was the stupid one. I said something when you told me a dozen times to keep my mouth shut. I didn’t, so it’s on me.”
I stopped walking. “No, Justin, it’s on me. I’m the three-hundred-year-old in this relationship. I’m the one who should have known better.”
“What? Am I a kid who needs his—”
“Yes, you are. You’re nineteen. Nineteen. You should be going to bars and studying and getting stoned with your buddies. You should be doing things kids do. And what you shouldn’t be doing is following around an ex-vampire as she tried to make up for all the killing she’s done.”
“You were a vampire back then, Kat. It’s not—”
“No, Justin, you don’t understand. I remember every single life I took. I remember how they looked, how scared they were, how they tasted … every detail. I know that the demon in me demanded human blood, but I wasn’t completely not me. I was still there. I could have fought harder, like my father did.”
“He killed himself the day he was turned.”
I widened my eyes and nodded. “I should have, too. How many family tree branches were severed by me? How many?”
Justin didn’t answer, looking away.
“You don’t know. Well, neither do I. All I know is that I’m going to keep getting myself in dangerous situations as I try to make up for some of that. Again and again, until the day I die. I will do that with the hope that when I go, my soul is just that little bit lighter.”
Soul, I thought, as if I have one.
“And I’ll help you every step of the way.”
“Good,” I said. “You can help me by leaving me alone. I can’t keep doing what I’m doing if every step I take puts you in danger.”
“Kat, I don’t mind the danger. I just want to be with—”
“Then you’re an idiot. Just like anyone else who willingly puts themselves in danger. In the four months you’ve known me, you’ve been beat up, kidnapped and possessed by a demon. Do you really think you’re strong enough or smart enough to survive me much longer?”
He started to answer, and I put a hand up to stop him. “Let me answer for you. You’re not.”
He winced, his eyes closing as he tried to shut away the pain.
Good, I thought. Time to go in for the kill just like I’ve done so many times before.
“Maybe if you were strong enough we could be together, but you’re not. You’ve proven that over and over. This is it. We’re done, Justin. We’re done.”
I walked away from him, leaving behind the nineteen-year-old kid who was too stunned to follow. As soon as I was sure I was far enough away that he couldn’t hear me or catch up, I broke down in tears.
Epilogue
“Happy New Year, Kat,” Dr. Tellier said, wearing that same stupid smile he always does. “Well, it’s not the new year quite yet, but given we’re a few days away and I’ll probably not see you again between now and then, I thought I’d get a jump start on the whole thing.”
I ignored him and sat down in a huff. He was far too cheerful given the mood I was in.
“From your demeanor, I’m guessing it’s the ‘happy’ part that’s in question.”
“It’s not in question, Dr. Tellier. ‘Happy,’ ‘joy,’ ‘merry,’ and just about any other synonym you can think of didn’t find its way to me. Now, if you want to talk antonyms …”
“Hah. At least you’ve kept your sense of humor.”
“Barely,” I said.
“Want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“OK, let me rephrase my question: should we talk about it?”
“I broke up with my boyfriend.” My eyes widened as I tried to recall those words. The last thing I wanted to talk about was Justin.
“You did? Why?”
Too late. I sighed. “I still love him, but I’m no good for him.”
“As in not good enough for him?”
I mean, come on, I thought, I’m cute as a button, smart, strong … rich. Not that I said any of that (thankfully). Instead I let my you’re smarter than that look answer the question for me.
“So then what do you mean by ‘no good for him’?”
“I mean bad things happen to people I love. So I figured I’d try not loving for a bit.”
“I see. And these bad things … what do you mean by that?”
I thought about telling him who I was, and what had happened to me during my one semester at McGill. The fights, the funerals, the hate. And most recently I had walked away from Oighrig End’s death. I had claimed I would hold the fae to task, but in the end I hadn’t sought any justice for a murdered professor. That one weighed pretty heavily, too.
Instead of telling him all that, I chickened out and did what I always seem to do when the conversation gets hard: I changed the subject and made a joke. “The last time we spoke you said there are no cookie-cutter solutions, right? I can’t go to the Walmart for the Insane and pick something off the shelf?”
“If you could, I’d be out of a job,” he chuckled.
“And that would be a bad thing?”
The counselor didn’t do the typical joke, or dismiss what I thought was a throwaway comment. Instead, he paused and thought about it. I mean, he actually thought about it. After a long moment of consideration, he said, “Yes, that would be a bad thing. Not the part about mental struggles disappearing—that is harsh, and causes a lot of pain for many people. If I could wave a magic wand and make that go away, I would. No, the bad thing is the other part of my job.”
“Which is?” I said, curious.
“The part where I get you to think about the most imp
ortant thing in your life: yourself.”
“Oh brother,” I said, “you’re starting to sound like one of those cheesy self-help books. ‘You need to take a swim in Lake You.’ ‘You’ve built yourself an emotional prison and it’s time to fire the warden.’ Yuck!”
“I’m not so sure,” he said. “Cheesiness aside, there is validity to those comments. We do need to be introspective, swim in our own lakes to better understand what makes us tick. And as for emotional prisons and wardens … so often I have patients come in here, troubled by some event in their past that they are convinced still defines their present. But that’s not true—the only thing that defines your present is what your present self thinks. The past is dead. Gone. And sometimes you just have to move on.”
“What if you can’t?” I thought about my three hundred years of vampireyness and how much pain and death I had caused during those years. The thought of just letting it go and moving on felt like I would be taking the easy, selfish path.
I didn’t think any of that out loud, but this astute man must have gathered a general understanding of my resistance because he said, “I’m not telling you to forget your past, especially if you have something to make up for. I’m just saying that guilt and purpose are two different things. Guilt is the unconstructive punishment we self-inflict in some vain attempt to fix what was done. That’s useless. Purposeful action as an answer to the sins of our past … that’s something else. But purposeful action is only effective if we are our whole selves—clear-thinking, determined, strong. That’s the only way you can truly make up for the bad you’ve done.”
He put down his notebook and pen before leaning in close. “But so many of us don’t let go of the guilt because we don’t feel that we deserve to be whole. And there’s the rub: do you feel you deserve to be whole as you try to make up for what you’ve done, or do you feel that the emptiness you described to me is part of the punishment you believe you deserve?”
There are moments when my own emotions have surprised me. Moments when I have reacted to something said or done before I even knew what I was doing.
Hearing those words invoked one of those moments for me, and I did something I hadn’t done since I was made human again all those weeks ago.
I smiled.
↔
No cookie-cutter solutions. He was right about that.
But he was also wrong about a lot of things when it came to me. Truth was, there was no way for him to get it right, as I hadn’t told him nearly enough. But I knew. And what he said rang true: if I had a chance to make up for a fraction of the pain I’d caused, I needed a clear head, and I needed a strong will.
There’s the rub, indeed. I knew what I needed to do to be myself again, but refused to believe it because I thought I deserved to feel this way.
But if I was going to make up for all the terrible things I’d done, I needed to be myself.
Sure, there were no cookie-cutter solutions, but there was a difference between myself and others who were struggling with these kinds of feelings: I could finally admit what was causing mine.
At least, I could now.
Which meant that I had an advantage. I knew how to fix myself. And after speaking to Ankou, there was no more ambiguity or doubt as to what had happened to me.
My soul was missing.
Leaving the counselor’s office for what I hoped would be the last time, I thought about Sonia and her family. Nine lives ruined by something they had lost and could never get back. Nine lives destroyed because they couldn’t move on. Nine lives broken because their despair was greater than their will to live.
I couldn’t blame them. Fae love is so complete that it is practically physically impossible for them to heal when that love is lost.
But I’m not fae, and the part of me that was missing wasn’t lost. I could find it.
I turned on my heels, no longer going uphill toward my bed and comfort. Instead I went to the Other Studies Library.
Down in the archives, I retrieved the amulet and held it in my hands. I pulled out the radio to contact the raspy man, which crackled with his grating voice. “Katri—”
“You said our souls are trapped together. You said that you can feel me, feel when I do something that saddens or excites my soul. Tell me, can you feel this?”
I shut off the radio, and holding the amulet with both hands, I formulated my question within me. When I felt those words with all my being, I uttered them out loud.
“Where am I?” I said, and every fiber of my being knew exactly what I meant. Where am I? Where is the part of me that makes me, me? Where is my soul?
As the words left my lips, hope filled me. Hope that I’d find myself again. Hope that I would be whole again.
At first nothing happened, and I feared I’d asked the question wrong. Or worse, it wasn’t the question I most desired to know the answer to.
A sense of despair grew in me, and just as hope had begun to exit stage left, a pattern started drawing itself on my left arm. The pattern filled itself—a tattoo of light brown and orange and green lines—and I began to understand what was happening.
As the pattern grew, the radio started to crackle. I guessed the raspy man was right … he really could feel my soul, and right now my soul was probably buzzing with excitement as the lights started to form a pattern.
My arm wasn’t just my arm anymore.
It was a map. In the center, near the wrist, a glowing red dot.
I looked closer at the map, trying to figure out where that dot was. It took me a few seconds to place the archipelago shape before I realized where it was telling me to go.
“Oh yay,” I muttered with a groan, “I guess I’m going to Japan.”
(Not) The End
Orphaned Follies Blurb:
You should never meet your heroes. Especially when you’re a changling warrior embued with unimaginable power.
But that’s exactly what Deirdre, my fae roommated wanted … to meet her hero, Professor Oighrig End. Turns out the professor was speaking at some exclusive event, and me being a sucker, went with her.
It wasn’t like I had anything better to do. I was fighting with my boyfriend, I hated my life and I was so severely depressed that I really wanted to do was curl up in the feotal position and cry. Getting out would be good for me.
But then someone had to go murder the human professor. And because of the massive snowfall, we were literally locked in a building with his killer. What did Sherlock Holmes always say when faced with a mystery, “The game’s afoot?”
I don’t know about games. I do know that I really wished I had gone with my initial instincts and stayed in bed.
I’m Katrina Darling, a three-hundred year-old ex-vampire who really wished she’d more Agatha Cristie in her long, long life.
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About the Author
Ramy Vance is a Canadian who lives in Edinburgh with his wife, three-year-old kid and imaginary dog. He enjoys a beautiful city, whisky (Scottish spelling, not mine) and long walks. He writes kickass Urban Fantasy thrillers set in the GoneGod World (and elsewhere). Currently his greatest aspirations are writing more stories and finally get that real dog so he can have an excuse to go on even more long walks.
And yes, he lived in Montreal for several years where he attended McGill University—the setting of the Mortality Bites Series. But that was in the 1990s, so things might have changed a wee bit and not every detail will be accurate … sorry about that.
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