by William Stadler
ELEMENTAL DAMAGE
CONFESSIONS OF A SUMMONER—BOOK 2
COPYRIGHT 2015 WILLIAM STADLER
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CHAPTER
ONE
Still a little out of breath, I threw myself on the light blue couch, rustled my sweaty hair, and stared at the ceiling for a moment, before unplugging my headphones from my ears and laying my iPhone next to me.
Rebekah said, speaking from the pink obelisk stone in my black nylon gym shorts.
I said.
Being a Decanter—or a shapeshifter, as Rebekah liked to gall me, not call me—I’d gained a summoner’s abilities some months ago, and I found it quite useful that I didn’t have to be in my summoner decanted form to communicate with her, only to summon.
she quipped.
I picked up my phone from the coffee table and mindlessly swiped through a few of my favorite sites—REI.com being number one on the list.
Rebekah asked from the obelisk.
I said, I fumbled over my words, realizing how harsh that must have sounded. <…not that what happened to you doesn’t still get to me, because it does. I think about it a lot actually. Probably more than I should. Wait. That didn’t come out right. Not more than I should. But just enough.>
I said, letting my phone rest in my lap.
<…> Rebekah was silent. She enunciated it with a rich Hispanic accent.
Rebekah continued,
I turned my iPhone around in my hand a few times, feeling the obelisk heat up on my thigh as Rebekah became more exasperated.
I said,
Rebekah said.
My phone buzzed in my lap. Since I didn’t recognize the number, I only stared at the screen, but chose to answer it before it went to voicemail. This better not be a telemarketer. “Hello?”
I heard a flighty girl’s voice on the other end, though it seemed a little out of sorts. “Is this Lyle?”
“Yeah. Who is this?”
“Rebekah’s friend. Stephanie. Stephanie McPherson, the Druid Healer. We have to talk.”
CHAPTER
TWO
After confirming a three o’clock meeting with Stephanie at the Roasted Bean in Cameron Village, I hung up the phone. What could she possibly want with me? It wasn’t like she and I had so much as spoken before now. She’d only known that Rebekah and I were close friends. In fact, the last that Stephanie and I had even seen each other, she was leaving the crime scene involving our fight with Marcus so she could chase after her witch doctor younger brother, Philo.
I asked Rebekah.
I asked.
Rebekah chuckled before she fell silent in the stone, so I figured I’d get up, shower, and get ready to meet up with Stephanie.
After the shower, I threw on some blue jeans and a gray v-neck shirt, figuring that it was too warm outside for much else. I ran a few errands to waste some time, and showed up at the Roasted Bean right around ten ‘til three.
Stephanie was already sitting at the black metal latticed tables outside, sipping on a small green tea ice-blended freeze with extra whip caked into the bulb of a dome lid. Her long red hair hung from the sides of her head, not tied up or braided, and her sassy hot pink t-shirt accentuated her rosy lips. Tattoos wove up and down her body, disappearing underneath navy shorts that barely made it to her thighs…and I mean barely.
“Lyle Finnegan?” Stephanie didn’t get up from her seat and scarcely seemed to notice that I’d arrived. Had she not said my name, I might have assumed she hadn’t seen me.
“That’s me.” I dragged the metal chair across the concrete sidewalk and took a seat.
“Getting anything?” Nursing the clear plastic cup in both hands, she sucked out another sip, only looking up at me briefly before concentrating on her drink again.
“Not really.” It wasn’t that I was against a cup of iced coffee, especially on a day like today, but whatever it was that Stephanie had to talk to me about, well…it had my stomach in knots. After all, she’d never contacted me until now, and so we hadn’t discussed anything about the night that Rebekah…. I still wasn’t ready to talk about it.
“Green tea is a power drink for a girl like me,” she winked. Only then did I notice light strawberry blush on her cheeks. The scent of mango lotion wafted at me every time the breeze slipped past her. “You should have some.” She offered me her drink, tilting the lip-gloss-smudged straw towards me. I refused. She shrugged, dug her straw around in her cup a few times, making it squeak against the plastic lid, then scooped off a bit of whipped cream and tongued it from the tip of the straw.
Rebekah said.
Rebekah couldn’t “see” what Stephanie was doing, but she could probably sense it from the intense flare of emotions that rushed through me. And since Rebekah was now a soul, she could also sense Stephanie’s aura, which probably gave Rebekah a lot more insight into just whatever it was Stephanie was feeling at the moment as well.
“Stephanie, I’m not trying to be frank, but uh…you called me down here for a reason.” I rolled my hand in front of me a few times to move the conversation forward.
Her light-hearted expression gained about a hundred pounds. After a neat dab at the corner of her mouth with her square napkin, she slid the drink aside. “I know we haven’t said more than a few words to each other, so I feel a little weird asking you this.” She folded the napkin and let it rest on the table. “I’m sure Rebekah told you why Marcus brought me to North Carolina all the way out from California.”
“She said that Marcus needed a healing Druid to do some work for him. I guess he figured you were one of the best?” It came out as a question as I tried to gauge her reaction.
“That’s not all of it,” she said, flipping her folded napkin a few times. “A couple of years before I came out here, before Marcus found out about me, I rubbed shoulders with some dangerous people. Not like Marcus kinda’ dangerous. Guys like him were small-time in comparison. Guess his Leprechaun Code of Chivalry was actually worth its weight in gold when compared to the creeps I ran with.”
The conversation deadened when a group of teenagers came cackling by our table. Apparently, a blond girl in their group had spilled coffee all down her shirt and shorts, and two boys with her guffawed, while another girl dabbed at the spill with a few napkins, a smile full of braces plastered on her face.
When the teens had passed, Stephanie hunched towards me, elbows on the table, whispering, “You see, Lyle, back in California…I killed a man.” She held eyes with me, watching to see if I would balk.
I rested my elbow on the metal armrest, thumbed the side of my lip. Death wasn’t anything new to me. I’d heard men’s screams, watched them bleed out after being murdered in cold blood. I’d even taken down a few of my own—the nature of the paranormal beast. Not to mention, my ex-roommate, Carter, was a vampire—a hungry vampire…a greedy vampire. So it wasn’t that death frightened me. It was the killers.
Every killer had a motive, and that motive—depending on how visceral—petrified me to the core. Despite the terror, in response to Stephanie’s comment about killing a man, I was able to calmly say, “What does that have to do with me?”
To that, Stephanie sat back in her chair, folded her arms. “Just thought you’d like to know.”
There was something deathly stalking behind that grin of hers, but whatever it was, I didn’t get the feeling that she was threatening me. “Is someone looking for you?”
Stephanie shrugged, rolled her eyes. “Wouldn’t be the first time. When you cross as many states as I have, feathers are bound to get ruffled.”
Rebekah mentioned from the obelisk.
I asked Rebekah.
The obelisk heated up on the side of my leg when Rebekah said,
Stephanie snapped her fingers at me, then folded her arms again. “You still with me?”
I nodded.
“Thought I lost you for a second there,” she said.
“No, I’m with you,” I replied. “These feathers that you ruffled…did any of them happen to be your little brother’s?”
For a moment, she stared at me, then tilted her head to the side, her red hair slipping off her shoulder. “I may not agree with everything my brother does—nor he, me—but I’d hardly be at odds with him, not to the point of death anyway.” She squinted at me. “Why do you ask?”
Her suspicions reminded me that she had left the warehouse before Carter and I killed Marcus, meaning that she had no idea that I could summon, which also meant that she probably had no idea that I had conjured Rebekah’s soul that night. I wasn’t ready to let on about any of that. “I just figured that since you turned on Marcus, and Philo stayed loyal to him, that the two of you had a bit of sibling rivalry to deal with. It’s rather common in the paranormal world we live in.”
“Not likely,” she said. “Philo’s my little brother. Always will be. And no matter where I go or what I do, or what he does, he’ll always look up to me.”
“People change,” I frowned, throwing my hand up slightly, only to let it rest on the table. When I saw that she wasn’t fond of Philo turning on her, I offered, “Not that he will, but some people do.”
“Well, he’s my brother.” It was stated, and it was final. She look a long drag of her blended ice green tea, then set it back to the side, this time on top of the napkin to keep it from gusting away.
“Listen,” I said, being careful about which words I chose, “I’m not sure what I can do to help you. You seem to have some dangerous people on your trail, and I’m not looking to get my hands dirty.”
My hands braced on the armrests as I picked myself up, but before I was on my way, she dug into her pocket and threw a wooden carving on the table where it clanged on the metal lattice prior to settling.
The wood had been carved into a cross, though there was a loop at the top that I probably could have held with one finger through the hole. At the crest of the loop, the wood was charred and worn, while the edges of the entire engraving were tattered and frayed. Yet the frame of the carving was sturdy and intact, as if no amount of damage could split the item apart.
Rebekah asked.
I dropped into my seat, eyes latched onto the object in front of me. I replied to Rebekah. Still too dumbfounded to meet eyes with Stephanie, I asked, “Where did you get that from?”
“Remember the ruffled feathers you asked me about?” She took a drink. “Turns out, I found it on one of the bodies caught in my wake. Who doesn’t like a good souvenir?” she shrugged. “Except when the item of interest doesn’t belong to the dead man.”
Rebekah said.
I could almost sense the power of the ankh quavering in warbled waves through my body. I wanted to touch it, to hold it. But I knew better than that. Touching an ankh was insane. Finally able to take my eyes off it, I asked, “Do you know whose it is?”
Not answering my question, Stephanie stated, “The key to life. Or at least that’s what it was known as back in Egypt.” She eyed a couple passing by our table who’d taken an overly interested gander at the object. The short-haired woman with thin-rimmed glasses even took the liberty to stop at our table. But before she could open her mouth, Stephanie took hold of the ankh by the looped end, sliding it closer to her person, all while giving the fakest smile she could offer, more to mark her territory than to make the moment more comfortable for the woman.
The woman turned her nose up and mumbled some expletives under her breath, which made Rebekah chuckle inside the stone.
“The key to life?” I said, looking over the carving once more.
Stephanie nodded, sipped her drink that had become more liquid than slush out in the bright heat of the afternoon. “It’s known as an ankh.”
“I know what is,” I said. “But whose is it? Where did you get it from?”
I could feel the urgency in Rebekah’s voice, the stone nearly burning my leg from the force of her exasperation.
“It belongs to a Shaman,” Stephanie replied. “A powerful, powerful Shaman named Zakhar Nesterov.” Her Slavic pronunciation was firm and thick.
“Is he someone you knew back from California?” I asked.
Rebekah said again.
Stephanie traced the structure of the ankh with her fingernail. “Didn’t know him until I came here to Raleigh. After a run-in with him…” she looked down at her shoulder, as if he’d made his mark on her, but it had long since left her since she had the power to heal herself, “Zakhar left me a little…worse for the wear.”
When she pulled t
he collar of her pink shirt to the side to expose her shoulder, the skin was clean and smooth. Then, I noticed something uneven about it. “The tattoos are missing.” I pointed to her shoulder.
She let her collar adjust back into place, fixing the shirt about her body until it hung around her without tangles. “When Zakhar struck me, my skin melted. I got away from him and was able to rejuvenate the skin, but not the tattoos of course.” She looked at her shoulder once more, observing the break in the paths of tattoos where Zakhar’s lightning had cracked around her arm. “I need to get these redone,” she muttered, examining her skin.
Rebekah shouted.
I ignored Rebekah. “Then why not go to your brother? Why come to me? I mean, Philo is trained in this kind of Empyrean. Certainly more so than I am.”
“You assume I need your help,” she said, flipping her red hair out of her eyes.
“Why else would you call me down here?”
Rebekah said.
A pleasant smile came to Stephanie’s lips, and she slid her chair closer to mine, the legs of which scraped across the cement sidewalk. From her nearness to me, the aroma of mangoes wafted into my nose, her vibe seductive, alluring. She was stunning from just across the table, but from this close to me…Stephanie was intoxicating.
It was all that I could do not to drink in every part of her. What’s wrong with me? Keep it together, Lyle.
A tender whisper in my ear sent shimmers to my knees and back up into my chest when Stephanie uttered, “A girl can want two things, can’t she?”
My heart sputtered. My gut twisted. And it took me forever to come back to my senses. I must admit, I had some trouble coming out of my reverie.
Rebekah shouted again, this time more loudly.
With the afternoon sun tilting in the sky and Stephanie cuddled up next to me at the outdoor tables of the Roasted Bean, I would say that I was feeling rather crowded. She’d called me down to meet her because of her problems with Zakhar Nesterov—or so I’d thought—but it had also been because she’d wanted to make a move on me. And I wasn’t entirely convinced that the two didn’t go hand-in-hand—that she was merely making a move on me just so that she could stay alive.