Tattered Souls (Broken Souls Book 1)

by Richard Hein

  Stefan smiled. “Everyone wants to see magic wands, dear. I swear there’s no euphemism involved.”

  Stefan and Kate retreated toward the end of the narrow office. Dieter pulled a crystalline skull off the counter and spun it in his hand, turning his back toward them.

  “So, no one playing house in her mind?” I whispered. “You’re sure.”

  “Samuel,” Dieter sighed. “Please. It’s impeccable up there. As clean as a new-born baby’s soul.” He fished two fingers through the leering jaw and poked them through the eye holes, wiggling them at me. “Too clean.”

  My heart froze.

  “Everyone has an accumulation of dust and scratches they pick up over their exciting little lives,” the creature said, hefting the skull. He spoke low, the words almost hypnotic. Rhythmic. “The death of a dog. Catching the neighbors going at it in the back yard.”

  “Coming to work and finding someone threaded the toilet paper underhanded instead of god’s own proper way,” I said, nodding. “Traumatic experiences leave scars.” I glanced past him. “You’re saying she’s led an innocent life?”

  “It’s all too smooth. Oh, there’s recent damage, but there’s large swaths of her mind that look… pristine.”

  I swallowed. “You’re talking supernatural influence, then.”

  Dieter shook his head. “No, not really. In the global scale, that’s not even very likely. As you say, she could have led an innocent life. A coma. Memory loss. A wonderful experience with drugs perhaps. There’s plenty of things that can buff away those sharp edges that don’t require boogeymen. If the mind doesn’t remember the pain…”

  “Fair enough,” I grunted. “What about a physical accident?”

  Dieter sawed a hand from side to side. “Usually not. This is a mental trauma, so unless said accident caused some sort of issue in her brain.”

  “Well, as long as she’s not got something guiding her like a meat puppet, I’ll…” I sighed. “Keep doing what I’ve been doing and watch her I guess. Thanks, Dee.”

  I saw a flash of vibrant green at the back of the shop, and heard Kate’s gasp. Stefan flicked a silver wand around, trailing green light in a slow circle before placing it back in a box and secreting it away beneath a shelf. The two joined us again, and I found myself watching Kate in a new, totally different light than before. Again, I supposed. Kate was too busy frowning to notice. “Amazing, except we’re back to the fact that magic is dangerous,” she said, voice uncertain. “How exactly…”

  “Oh, we’re immune,” Dieter said.

  “Charmingly immune,” Stefan added.

  “There’s a bit of a loophole,” I said. The gears were grinding behind those sparkling eyes and dark frames, and I could see her reach the conclusion right as I opened my mouth once more. She turned and faced them, shuffling steps backing her right up to me and crushing me to the door. “They’re already possessed of course.”

  “That’s such a tacky term,” Stefan said, pressing the tips of his fingers over his heart. He rolled his other hand in the air and let his head drift back, long blond hair dancing across the back of his suit as he struck a somewhat dignified pose. “Universally co-dependent is more apt.”

  “Yeah, I’d hate to have an unflattering term for a parasitic infection. Look, are you going to help the nice lady out or not?”

  “The term is ‘symbiotic’, Samuel. Symbiotic.”

  The front door pushed open, and a young couple that screamed newly wed tourists tried to slide into the tiny shop. I stuffed a shoe in front of the door. “Sorry,” I said, shouldering the door back into their faces. “This meeting is for Illuminati members only. Go back to your regularly scheduled lives. We’re still watching and meddling.” The door thumped shut. I flipped the lock.

  “Your words wound,” Dieter said. “We’re also rather busy. We’ve found a good niche dealing with the stuff the OFC can’t or won’t. We can probably squeeze you in for early next year.”

  Kate grabbed at my arm and yanked me close to her. “Demons?” she whispered. “You brought me right to demons?”

  “Oh, her naivety is just so delicious,” Stefan said with a little laugh. “My God, dear, there’s plenty of other realities to choose from than that broken-down cesspool they call Hell. We’re hardly demons.”

  Kate’s eyes narrowed. She winced and pressed her palms to the sides of her head as she drew in a shuddering breath.

  “How did the OFC not exorcise you two?” she asked. “That’s… this is…. Samuel, what the hell?” When she blinked her eyes, I could see the pain was gone. Was that a note of curiosity once more? There was little doubt in my mind that by the time this was done, if the report went well, someone at the OFC would extend a formal invitation to Kate. New members weren’t picked up often, but they needed a certain lack of screaming terror at some things, and she sure fit the bill. Of course, I’d have to keep her alive first. “Magic and… universal co-dependency… is what they do.”

  “Let’s talk in the office,” Stefan said. “It’s too stuffy in here for a proper storytelling.” The twins threaded their way to the door at the back. Kate threw a glance at me, and I gave her an impatient shooing of my hand. Dieter pressed a hand to the door for a heartbeat and then threw it open. Air gusted as it tried to equalize, tugging at clothes and hair. I smiled.

  “You knew that was going to happen,” she said, leaning forward to peer through the portal after we were alone in the shop. “It never gets old for you, does it?”

  “Surprising you like that?” I said, stepping through. The air grew cold between heartbeats, stinging at my exposed skin and making my eyes water. Kate’s breath frosted on the air. “Not one damn bit.”

  “You’re asking me to do this?” she breathed. “With them?”

  “I’m with you. You know my particular inclinations on their kind.”

  “Ouch,” Dieter muttered.

  I made a face at him as Kate stepped out after me and closed the door behind us. For the second time in a couple of days, we exited our universe.

  Chapter 11

  Kate’s hand caught my forearm and clamped down hard.

  A dark expanse of an alien sky stretched above us, broken by a planet that covered half of the horizon. It looked like Jupiter, if Jupiter had been formed of swirling royal purples. Sparkling rings circled the sphere, a million twinkling lights that swept around whatever moon we were on. The reflected light of the planet made it like a pleasant morning, allowing me to see that we were on a barren landscape that swept away from us, a nearly smooth ball of rock. You could see the curvature of its surface. A Bavarian-style house stood nearby, the sort you found in overpriced tourist towns, rather at odds with the whole overwhelming aspect of it all.

  “Oh holy crap,” she breathed. “I’m sorry, but they’ve got Sanctuary beat.”

  “Really?” Dieter asked, tilting his head to one side. “I wanted something where we could ski, but Stefan insisted on this. It’s pretty enough, I guess. The house was our compromise. ”

  There was a patio set beside the building. Lawn chairs and a glass table complete with an expansive azure umbrella. I spun the umbrella with a finger as we walked by. Did it rain here, or were they loathe to break up the set? It certainly hadn’t been here the last time I’d done business with the twins.

  “What do you say?” I nudged Kate with an elbow. She jumped, ripping her gaze away from the swirling clouds of the planet that dominated our view. “Want to vacation here? Save on my frequent flier miles.”

  “Honestly, if we survive this, we should go somewhere completely mundane,” she said. She pressed closed to me, step matching my step. “Oregon. Let’s go to Oregon. Get away from all the crazy and do normal stuff, like read magazines or cross-stitch. We could…” Her cheeks flushed as she turned away rather abruptly and followed after Dieter and Stefan. I stared after her, stuffing my hands into my pocket and strolled along, whistling to myself. Well, if she wasn’t going to enjoy this, I was. I might not fully
trust the twins, but their home was slick.

  Kate paused, brushing back a dark strand from cobalt eyes as she breathed in the alien ambiance, watching the swirling planet that crowded the sky. I stepped close, more because the vast emptiness was more than a little unnerving. I could feel the heat of her, welcome in the unnatural chill.

  “So, I’m more or less invincible now,” she breathed without averting her eyes from the display. “We’re outside our home universe. We’re the Entities here.”

  “You’re more or less human,” I corrected. “Being blessed with a soul means we’re something different. The rules work differently for those of us burdened with such things.”

  “Samuel, you are a guest,” Dieter chided with a slow shake of his head. “A civil tongue would go a long way here.”

  “Hey, those of us with souls can say such things. It’s not my fault you all were spun into your universe lacking one.”

  “Why is that?” Kate asked. “Why us? Why humanity?”

  “Well, kicking puppies here would hurt them too,” I said, “but I get what you mean. I don’t think anyone’s ever figured that one out. Something special about our universe. A… colleague of mine once speculated that our dimension is some sort of ‘prime reality’ and all the other ones tie to it like spokes on a wheel. Too much salt in the batter or something. We have souls.” I waved a hand at our hosts. “They have willpower and thought crammed into a hard candy shell. The point is, please don’t go whacking me in the head with a chair all pro-Wrestling style just to see how awesome it is. It would be cool, but hit one of them. If we die here, or in Sanctuary, it’s just as permanent.”

  She nodded, eyes sparkling with a thousand unasked questions. Somewhere in the musty tomes of Sanctuary I figured an answer had been discovered and penned. Maybe Daniel had come across it, given how long he’d spent in the stacks like a nerd avoiding gym class, but if there was an answer, I’d never heard about it. My own curiosity had never burned as brightly as Kate’s, but I couldn’t argue that it was an oddity. I’d tested it after joining the OFC, and it turned out that paper cuts outside the universe stung just as badly as they did on Earth.

  The house radiated a feeling of home far better than my place did at least. A cuckoo clock, heavy wood furniture, a hefty iron fireplace with two great doors, and the head of some beast on a wall that looked vaguely like an elephant with twisted metal antlers,. Stefan flung himself down onto a heavy chair beside the fireplace and waved a hand. I heard the whisper of magic as fire licked up around the wood stacked within, and shivered.

  “So, about that loophole?” Kate prompted.

  “Ah, right,” Stefan said. “Back to the question at hand.” Dieter leaned up against the wall beside the door. “It’s rude to be nosy, dear. Shame that I love the inquisitive types, though. It was purely voluntary.”

  I followed Kate in, trying not to smile at the way she kept trying to peek out the windows at the glorious expanse of sky beyond. We eased ourselves down into wooden chairs that had been crafted to look like regal thrones, and found it surprisingly comfortable. Until I realized there were no verdant forests anywhere on this tiny moon, and the wood had to come from somewhere, and it wasn’t the local hardware store.

  “It was during the days when shadows crept across the land,” Dieter said, raising his arms rather melodramatically. “The armies of the Fatherland had—”

  I waved an irritated hand. “Can we skip with the propaganda film here? We’re on a schedule.”

  Dieter’s hands dropped, deflated. “You have no appreciation for theatrics, Samuel. There’s a certain air one must build to tell some stories properly.”

  “Add it to my bill.”

  Stefan and Dieter shared a look. “The short version, then,” Stefan sighed. “We worked for the other side during the Second World War, but had a change of heart and defected, bringing our out-of-universe friends with us. We had valuable information, weren’t a threat, and volunteered to become hosts. Thus we are here.”

  Kate gave a whistle. “That’s… wow. The OFC has no problem with this? You two don’t look a day over twenty-seven.”

  “You’re a wonderful girl and don’t let him be your little black raincloud,” Stefan said with a golden smile. “They tend to look the other way because it’s useful to have resources like us from time to time, and we’re not a threat. Technically since we volunteered, and the Entities were known to them rather well at the time, it was allowed. Uncommon, but allowed. The little club Samuel ran with is interested in keeping the worst offenders away, and we’re nowhere on that list. It’s probably more apt to say they simply look the other way because we’ve spent decades being useful and not stomping around raising problems.”

  “That’s it?” Kate said, glancing at me, eyebrows raised. “They make an exception for these two? I thought all Entities are bad.”

  “Good and bad are mutable terms,” Stefan said. He rose and crossed over to me, standing like a blond lighthouse before me. It was almost blinding, he was so damn pale. Which says a lot from a guy living in Seattle. Stefan nodded at me, a wave of hair cascading out toward me like a shampoo commercial. “We’re less bad. He doesn’t trust us, but we have a mutual use for each other.” His smile at me was rather vicious. “You could call it… parasitic, really.”

  I winced. I doubly liked how they didn’t deny her words. They knew it. I knew it. We danced around it like awkward teenagers at the prom.

  “Now, if you’d hand it over, please,” he said, holding out one snowy palm. “It reeks of magic in this place. I gather it’s what you wanted to see us about?”

  The bronze knife appeared in my hand with a little flourish. I hesitated for a moment. He was right on the money. I didn’t trust him. I had no problems tapping them for their assets, but at the end of the day, they were still outsiders. Who knew what their reasons for anything were. They looked human, they’d lived as humans for decades, but they decidedly were anything but human. Handing over our only link was risky, but I also knew how they worked. They could do things I couldn’t, like root around in Kate’s mind and make sure she didn’t have anyone sleeping on her upstairs couch.

  “I need to know its history,” I said evenly. “It’s old. Where did it come from? What was it used for? What does the writing mean? Everything.”

  “Is that Hebrew?” Stefan said, bending to peer at the weapon in my hands. I snatched it back and scowled up at him.

  “Are you going to help me or not?” I growled.

  “Well, it’s more interesting than our current work,” Dieter said, a little cautious. I could hear the undercurrent of excitement in his voice. “I mean, there’s been a rather massive lack of any serious incursions of late, so we’ve been getting by on magic tinkering and low-level exorcisms. This would be a succulent steak dinner compared to the scraps of the last few months.” The hook had been set. Now I needed to reel them in.

  “It’s for Kate, really. It’s her life on the line here.”

  Kate took her cue, managing to look a little weathered and ragged, as if she’d just been run through the ringer for the last few days. The perfect amount of tired and haggard, like someone had been picking at the threads of her sanity. I held back a smile as Dieter and Stefan swirled around her, offering condolences and comforting pats on the shoulder. Damn impressive performance. Of course, maybe it wasn’t a performance. Maybe she’d just let down her guard, opened the door on what was really going on. Maybe the way she was with me was the act, and this was burning her down more than I’d thought.

  “We’d love to help such a wonderful specimen of your universe,” Dieter said, practically glowing with his smile. “Let’s discuss payment.”

  My stomach knotted. “Uh, is an IOU okay? Unless you want my last few crumpled bills, I think we’re—”

  Dieter waved a hand. “A trade. We’d like you to invite us to visit Sanctuary.”

  “No.”

  “All we’re looking for is a little tour,” Stefan said qu
ickly. “Just putter around the place a little. Gather some stories for the guys on our bowling league.”

  I shot out of my chair, knuckles gripping the magic knife in a death-grip. “Not happening,” I said in a soft voice.

  “Surely a little visit can’t hurt,” Kate said. She reached up and worked my fingers open until she could pry the knife free from my hand.

  “Once I invite someone, it’s for life,” I said, slumping back down into my chair. “It can’t be revoked. That’s why I made a big deal about extending my invite to you, just to prove that I’m still technically on the books, even if they don’t like it. The Entity that runs the place may be a mental vegetable, but it still has enough awareness to bounce at the door. It binds you by your soul, and you can’t really revoke access to your soul.”

  I pointed forked fingers at the twins. “Except these two aren’t going to die. They might get sent home to, wherever they’re from—”

  “It’s tropical,” Stefan said with a smile.

  My glower quieted him.

  “So it never, ever gets revoked, unless one were to go to their home universe and stomp their faces in there. They could get exorcised a dozen times and still get back into Sanctuary. I’d be killed on the spot for such a thing. I can’t do day passes, kids. Name something else.”

  They didn’t seem too put out, which put me more at ease. Their faces scrunched up the way a six year old’s does when they’re thinking real hard. They both lit up at the same time.

  “We weren’t lying when we said we were busy,” Stefan said, a slow smile spreading like a wildfire across his pale face. “Magical dabbling may not be as mentally engaging as dealing with incursions, but there’s a bit of an art to it that can’t be rushed.”

  “Oh yes,” Dieter added. “A trade of business, then. We’ll work our magic — pun intended.” He threw a wink toward Kate, who grinned. I wanted to vomit. This universe could use some sort of cataclysm right about now, whether or not I was in it. “You can take on one of our smaller projects—”