Wraith ; Semblance

by Riley Mason

  As he clears corners I’m there right behind him, making sure that as he advances I have his back and that I shoot anything walking. I think both of us have the same idea though. I don't think that anything is in here to help or hurt us.

  When we get to the table, we see it sitting there. A charred rib cage and a few others bones. My gun goes down, Bash’s’ follows suit. “What do you think he got out of her?” I ask.

  “Could’ve been anything,” Bash says looking down at what’s left of the body.

  “We have to burn it,” I say already looking around for what and where to make sure that the bones don’t draw back a spirit that went into the afterlife under less than optimal conditions.

  The body was still wet on the floor, chunks of skin were torn out of her. Only half of her face was still intact. Most of what was there, skin wise at least, was peeled off of her skull. “I got a pit in the back,” Bash said.

  We loaded the body into the pit and then he handed me a box of lighter fluid and he took one of himself. Both of us squeezed out the contents, bathing the corpse in the flammable liquid before each of us struck a match and threw it in. The smoke that rose was clear at first before it changed into a dingy black that floated up almost straight in the lack of wind that moved the air.

  The doorbell rang and it took both our attentions away from the body. I followed him back into the house and he went right for the front door putting his face to the peephole that was there. “Police,” he said to me I watch his hand check the lump in his back that’s his gun and I slide mine to my back as well.

  I pour a shot of whiskey and have it all gone by the time the door opens.

  “Sebastian Masters?” the voice of one of the cops say. I can see from here. There both on the beat. They’re wearing matching blue jackets both with their badges and walkies strung to the exact same place. Both of them are wearing the hats and both of them hold tans in the same swaying angles of their face. “We need to speak to you about the murder of Damien Spray,” he said.

  By the time the gun was in his face Bash had knocked it out but taken a kick to the stomach in retaliation for it. Both of them men attacked him, grabbing him while the other kicked and punched at the midsection and the face and the midsection, I could see blood spraying out.

  I charge into the room. One of them looks at me, there’s a bit of shock stuck on his face. “You’re not supposed to be here,” he says to me.

  He comes after me but not with the same intensity as each of them went after Bash. I fought him but he seemed more content with restraining me than he did with beating the shit out of me. Twice he threw me and I landed hard into the wall. He yelled at me, spit and blood in his mouth. “Stay the fuck out of this,” he said to me.

  I knocked one of them out of the way and went to the one that had mounted Bash and was throwing punches into his face and threw my shin into his face, I knew right away that I had smashed his nose and maybe his jaw in the process.

  “Get up,” I say to Bash. I grab his hand when his response takes too long to come to me and I pull him up to his feet.

  By the time Bash is up to his feet, both of the men, blood staining their faces are holding their side arms at him and I. “We don't want to shoot you,” one of them say to me. “You’re not the target don’t make yourself one.”

  Bash’s words come back to me and I can read the control that’s scrolling through these men’s eyes like a book that I’ve read before. “You’re not going to kill me,” I say back to them.

  “We will if we have to,” the other officer insists.

  I walk, gently towards them, my hands in the air in mock surrender. When I’m close enough I snatch one of them hard enough to pull the chamber off the cylinder and beat both of them with the brick of steel that’s in my hands before I throw it down to the ground to where they lay. Bending down I empty both clips and both chambers in a pile of unused bullets before I turn my attention back to Bash and see the shape that he’s in.

  Chapter 75

  I’m standing there over the body that’s no more than a small mountain of ash and a few stray bones at this point. Once the fire is extinguished, we’ll have to bury what is left of the bones. If I know Bash at least the way that he knows me, the ground is hallowed, it’ll contain the spirit that’s trapped in those bones. No one that’s possessed and then is killed by a wraith is going to pass with ease to the other side.

  As I stand there, my hands are wrapped around my chest. Just like before there’s blood on my hands but it doesn’t belong to me. I cleaned all the gashes and the cuts that are on Bash’s face. Once he wakes up I’m sure he has something to hide the scars that were carved into his skin if they don’t close up on their own. The cops are both tied up and the police cruiser is in the garage. I’m more than positive that it was Gabriel who sent them to Bash. Either the alliance between Bash and I became to public or he had no idea about me still being alive at least this close to his operation.

  Why he didn't’ want me dead now I still wasn't entirely sure about it. He had done everything to make sure that I was dead, he had killed me once as well. Those three shots that hit my chest were from his gun. I don't know what would've changed now. The only thing that I can think is that he needs me for something assuming he has an idea that I’m still alive. If he used me to revive the wraith, to find a home for the spirit that had to fuse with the human, then he might’ve thought that my work was done before another piece of the puzzle was shown to him or told.

  I walk back in the house I need to find a shovel, the smoke is floating white, I know the flames are about to die. As I shove the shovel into the logs to stoke them, I can’t help but thinking about killing Gabriel. How it's going to go, what way it’s going to happen in. I think about Bash too, Bash has made sure that I employ more patience then I’m sure that I have at this point. If it weren’t for Bash, I’m more then sure that I would've just exposed myself and done what needed to be done. Everyone has been using me for their own purposes, I felt that it was time to have my own purpose thrown into the game.

  When I get back in the house, Bash is standing there his face still has some stray blood but a lot of his face is swollen, most of the cuts are wet with red that's still coming out of his skin. “I want to thank you,” he says to me, his voice is groggy.

  “You don't need to,” I reiterate to him. “You would've done the same thing for me.”

  “But I didn’t have to,” he argues. “This whole thing complicates a very difficult situation as is now.”

  “Because now we definitely don't know whose playing on what side,” I surmise and I can see that he agrees with me.

  “Gabriel never had control of the demons. It was always the Identicals that he controlled.”

  “If he’s controlling the wraith, maybe the wraith is controlling the demons now and if the wraith listens to it then he would control the demons too,” I say. I wipe the sweat left there by the heat of the fire with the back of my hand. There is dirt stuck to my skin. I have a glass of Jim Beam neat sitting there that I use to quench my thirst. I also catch a passing glance of Bash he looks at me from under the swelling hanging over his eyes and I realize that I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. I’m still not sure about him. There are moments of connection but then there are moments of distance and hatred too.

  I let it pass. My past is not the most pressing thing right now. What these demons are doing to my body, what everyone seems to want from me is more pressing. It’s almost as if burning two demon vessels is soothing and calming, not the burning smell of human flesh as it roasts, my nose immunized itself a long time ago to that. Decomposition is nothing much either. It’s that I’m hunting again and it's a hunt that I know and I can control, something that comes natural to me.

  When I look back at Bash, I can see that the swelling stretched over his face like a purple mask has subsided. “It’s been working faster since you’ve been around,” he tells me.

  “Maybe I’m the good lu
ck charm,” I say it with sarcasm but it pulls a smile out of his face anyway. I only half mean it but it's more than enough for him. “I hope it heals like that when the war starts,” I say, polishing off the last of the whiskey and then turning the bottle upside down to refill it.

  “Demons are stronger this time,” he said, pulling off the blood-soaked shirt that hugged his body and went to a drawer to pull out another one. I see scars on his back and I feel a twitch in my stomach, it's almost like car sickness springing back into me. “It took most of their strength before to run the Identicals, this time they still have strength leftover.”

  “They’re fighting for something they believe in,” I say back to him passing a quick look at the fire.

  I look down at my arm and see a bruise in my fist and then another one in my bicep. “What are the odds that you and I would be here again in the same position that we were in before?” I ask. I like it, I like to hear those words because it's almost like I have the memories that it takes to root that question. Even though I don’t, I want that normalcy, even if this war is suicide, I want a taste of average on my tongue.

  “I never thought it would happen, not after how it ended for us,” he said throwing the shirt back over his head.

  “Sad how it did right?” I ask him.

  I see his face change, it toughened and then it sort of died. “I’ll keep an eye on the fire, take a shower, get yourself cleaned up.”

  I look at him but he doesn’t meet my eye. He doesn’t get anywhere near my eye. “Are you sure?”

  “I got this,” he says and then I watch as he walks passed me, stands out in the yard where the fire is huffing black and white smoke into the air. There is something, I feel like like I feel the sharp numbness in the bruises on my body, there is something there but he doesn’t want to give it to me. Not yet at least.

  Chapter 76

  I sit there in the shade about a block away from where I invaded Damien Spray’s home. I’m about a block away from where I killed him, skinned him alive, and took his face off his corpse and handed it to a demon, a demon that I allowed inside my body. There’s still pill residue sliding inside my veins, powdered icebergs in my bloodstream from that decision and how I tried to use them to cover up my memory.

  There is still caution tape over his front door but the cops have long gone. Most of the forensic work I guess has concluded and everything else they need to do will be done in a lab by men and women in white coats in sterilized rooms. They won't find out who did it, it’s not about that. They want to, I know they do. A murder that vicious needs a person to be responsible. It’ll be so much worse when they don't have one. I doubt that they’ll ever realize that possessions don’t leave fingerprints.

  I wonder how many of those murders were mine when Gabriel had his fingers in my head? How many murders match this motive and brutality, I’ve never looked.

  I figure I could look but if any of them feel like this, if any of them carry this excruciating guilt then I’m not entirely sure I want to know. I know it’s bad, I can tell because someone like Bash who is so good at brutal truths and honesty won’t even look me in the eyes to tell me or to not tell me. I also know Gabriel isn’t the most stable person, power like that infects especially once it's settled.

  I can’t help but replay the frames in my head. The look he had in his eyes when he saw me, almost like he half expected that it was going to be me that made the kill. Like a realization that he had assumed that I had died a long time ago and that there was nothing left of me except this thing that served someone he knew. That it was going to be me that hunted the Chasers.

  The sound it made when the blade ripped through his skin like ripping apart a thick plastic bag, the resistance on my fingers as I pulled the strips of skin back off his bone. That smell as I cut open his midsection, a lot of it was there when I was hoping more than anything that it was gone.

  There are still gaps, I wish that those memories would fall into one of those gaps and stay lost. I know it won’t but a girl can hope. I’m dangerous, I’m dangerous to those around me, I feel almost like I’ve been modified, that there are so many hands controlling my destiny that I’m nothing more than a soldier for whoever is behind the driver's seat. I’ll serve whoever occupies my head at any given time.

  I couldn't tell Bash that the demon, the girls brother was the one that had me kill Damien, I’m not even entirely sure that Bash has made the connection between Damien and I just yet and I’m not sure I want him too. I don't want to kill him, I don't want anything to make me kill him either. I’m scared that if I enter that frame of mind where someone else is running the show that I won't be able to fight them off long enough not to kill Bash, I already tried once, it was lucky for me that I underestimated him, I doubt my body will allow that to happen twice.

  I drive until I’m back in the city, stowing the car at some parking garage nearest to Central Park on the Fifth Avenue side. It feels like months since I’ve been here. How I used to sit here on the nights that I needed to find some semblance of peace in a world that was so filled with dark. It was like being a teenager, in the rush of a Chaser’s lifestyle, never once did I think that it would end in the tragedy that it did for all of us. It was something joked about but never something anyone actually believed would happen to them. In the end, were we people, driven by thousands of different motivations, the demons were more like machines, they wanted a freedom and could wait an eternity for it happen.

  It’s close to dusk as I take my seat on a bench that I’ve sat in a handful of times before. I’m being pulled into something and I feel like I'm going head first and blindfolded at the same time. I don't know how I can survive something that I don’t really understand and that’s something that puts me on an edge that I’m not really all that used too. I wonder now if I knew the first time this war happened. Was there anything in my mind that left me alive when I fought this war that I’m missing now.

  That’s not how it's supposed to be. Someone like Gabriel would have me kill a dozen people before he gave me scraps of my own memory, bits and pieces that he scraped from a much deeper surface.

  It’s as I’m sitting there that I feel something happen. It's a familiar feeling but it’s still strange and alien to feel. It’s like I can feel my body scattering, an instantaneous movement to nowhere and everywhere. That feeling when you get up to fast spread along your entire body. Just like that, I wasn’t in Central Park anymore.

  Chapter 77

  I’m in a cave now somewhere in a deep and heavy woods. I can smell the thick sweat of moisture floating in the air in a breeze so stiff it's’ like the humidity was caught in a giant spider web and the more it moved, the more it was stuck in place.

  The cave around me is laced with black rock so reflective it's almost glowing in the darkness as somehow the moonlight finds its way into the cavern.

  I walk with my feet sinking ever so slightly into the moist dirt as I move to the hall ahead of me.

  I’m not alone, I don’t expect to be. I can already tell that someone is there, in the opening at the cavern entryway up ahead. As I cross it, it’s like a city of tree root exploded underneath the surface, branches are everywhere, stalagmites and stalagmites spring up and down from the ceiling and floor almost like they were a designed artificial fortress for what is hidden inside of their walls.

  I see her, standing there a tall woman with almost glistening black skin like a fish smeared with oil and salt water pulled from the ocean. Carvings move up and down her skin, almost like the designs that are imprinted on my staff. The woman is tall and thin, wide at the shoulder but her frame is well built. Silver white hair is slicked back over her head to her ear like it's doused in water or sweat and frozen white eyes look back at her. It only takes a second of me seeing her before the image ahead of me changes.

  We are still in the cave but the woman looking back at me looks more familiar. A tall woman, similar build, two eyes of varying color with long blonde hair tied back
. If I had to guess, the woman looks like she could be related to me. There are features on her face that I recognize for my own. It’s like the woman in black saw me and interpreted me in a different light altogether. I feel like it's to put me at ease, it worked.

  “Where am I?” I ask her.

  “Where do you want to be?” she asks me right back.

  “I don’t think it's relevant,” I decide.

  “You might be right,” she says in reply. “I suppose you’re the girl Arinna?”

  “I am,” I say. “And you are?” I’m not nervous, not just yet, part of me is starting to mold a guess as to what this is.

  “I think you know already. You know because you’re the only one that's seen me and that’s why your still alive.”

  The thoughts clicked together inside my head. “The Angel,” I say.

  “The one you freed from the other side. The one who's stopping the seals from shattering, at least the final one” the girl says almost with rebuttal, like she’s not entertained that there is so much importance riding on her involvement.

  “You don’t want to help us?”

  “Would you want to?” she asks, looking up at me with mismatched eyes. “Lucifer will never stop trying to rise to this surface. It’s a game we’ve played for far too long. The protector of Lucifer trapped on Earth to make sure that he can never walk on its surface.”

  “We freed you,” I argue.

  “This is not freedom what you’ve given me. It's another prison, another trap that's been set for me to do what work was mandated for me to do.”

  “But you know our situation, you know this war is coming?”

  “I know every situation, every possible variable, I’ve witnessed the lifetimes of every possible outcome that will play itself out. Have you?”

  “How could I?” I argue.

  “That’s a gift is it not. You speak of my justice and service as if they are treats for good behavior.”