Wraith ; Semblance

by Riley Mason

  I hit the ground with force and I feel like something inside of my arm snapped or torn. I don’t hear anything other than the footsteps coming at me but I can feel a numbness spilling on the inside of my arm.

  I slide back and spring myself up and kick twice balancing the weight on my arm. It succeeded in pushing him back but not much. It does give me enough time to use the blade, both sides of it and I slash down across his chest and then backwards spearing his ribcage and twisting before I grab it back out of the tuft of skin that its attached too.

  Bash goes down but already I can see the slit on his chest closing and the hand that’s covering the gash in his side while it spilled blood is already clotting.

  I need to cut his head off, that’s the only way that I’m going to kill him. That’s the only way that he’s not going to be able to come back. I need to separate the demon in his body.

  I run at him again, this time with my knee far out in front of me, a knee that’s cushioned with all the muscle that’s built up and perfected in my thigh for this strike but its slammed out of the way hard enough that I’m sure it breaks my knee cap and then a fist moves against my face which splits skin in at least three places. It takes a second of me being on the ground to realize that I was punched five times in that quick second.

  Blood is leaking down from my eye, the corner of my mouth and a few scattered places on my cheek and my nose. Most of it is under a pillow of swelling at this point.

  I feel a hand move through the sweat in my hair and begin to pull my body and again pin me up against a wall. As the heavy hand reaches down and grabs me by the throat again and lift me up I struggle and I fight but everything that I punch into Bash’s body is absorbed and fixed before it can do any lasting damage at all.

  “I want that soul Arinna,” he tells me.

  “Fuck you,” I tell him.

  The hand around my throat tightens and I can feel the suffocation clawing up my face.

  “Give it to me and I can save your life. I can give you all those memories back that everyone is hiding from you. You can know who and what you are. You can know your past just as well as you know your present.”

  I kick and it smacks into his midsection but he barely reacts to it.

  “You’re going to have to kill me and grab my soul before it moves on you piece of shit.”

  A surge of adrenaline drains into my body and I use the leverage that he’s pinning on my neck to move both my legs up and kick him as hard as I can manage with the strength inside of each leg into his chest. It’s enough to hear three cracks and to push him back separating his hand from my throat.

  In the steps that he’s backwards, I’m on the floor, picking up the staff, spinning it and I go to work.

  I cut across his chest nine times each time that I slash something in his midsection I spear something else with it. He’s doing well to protect his neck, he knows what I’m going after but I’m moving too fast for his body to defend and attack at the same time.

  I’ve cut through his face now three times as the blade slices through his hand and his forearm that’s protecting his throat but it’s enough for now. It keeps him moving backwards.

  I have him on the ground. He’s down on his knees. His body is strong enough to heal form the damage but it's not going to be instantly. I have a few minutes to work with while his body stitches itself back together.

  I could save him. I know for sure that it’s not Bash in there. I know the words, I know them in order and in their original language, I’ve know them since I was ten, it wouldn't be much to say them and to pull the demon out of his body and send it back down to the other side. Or I could end it.

  The possibilities play out in my head. I know how demons works. Once they’ve been inside a body, once they’ve stretched and adapted the skin inside a body to their own feelings and size, they come back to that boy, it’s a point of remembrance for them. Bash could be free of this demon but this demon will always remember his scent and I still don't know what value that Bash has to for me. What memories he has of me that I can get out of him for this.

  I can feel the pain running into my nerves as the adrenaline reservoir that doused my body begins to dry up. There’s blood everywhere. I doubt I can touch any single part of my body without my hand coming back slick and red. I can feel it, pain that stretched out to my bones from what he did to me. How he almost killed me. How I know deep down, somewhere that I don’t like to listen to all the time, that I shouldn’t be alive right now.

  I raise one hand, a free hand, palm outwards and I close my eyes. Before the first word is out of my lips, before I can hear the first recognition of my own voice speak a language long dead, I feel a hand over my wrist and it pulls it up and pins my body to the wall again. This time it's Sylis standing there.

  Chapter 95

  I fall to my knees, I’m too weak to hold myself up any longer. The pain is too deeply rooted inside of me now. Now, all the adrenaline inside of me is burned off completely and I’m left with the pain and soreness that’s reminiscent of the battle that I just fought with someone nearly twice my size.

  That was a strong demon, stronger than most that I’ve fought. Usually it's a lot easier to subdue and exorcise them out of the body that they’ve chosen. This one seemed content on killing me and hanging onto Bash for just a little bit longer.

  A single tear streams down my face, I don’t have the strength or the energy to wipe it away from my skin. I look over to Bash who’s on the floor but now he’s unconscious despite all the damage that I put into his skin closing in on itself. He’s lying there like he’s asleep on any other night.

  I feel a gentle hand caress under my chin, it doesn’t hurt even though I expected it to. I look up at Syllis hooded face as he looks back down at me, his eyes glowing from underneath the hood that hides his face even more so in the shadows of the trailer. “Why did you come here for him?” he asks me.

  “I had to,” I said, breath was moving in and out of me too fast for the words to come out evenly. “I had to kill him.”

  “No, you didn’t,” he said back to me.

  I feel him tilt my head back and then place all five of his fingertips on my face, the blood almost moving out of the way for him as he pressing his skin down on mine. I can feel whole again. I didn't’ feel anything heal itself, nothing in my body move, it was just fine like none of the events that just happened had actually happened.

  “Stand up,” he instructs me and I do it with ease like all the energy that I lost has come back to me too. “I want you to see what I see,” he says to me.

  He lifts his hand and presses his index and his middle finger to his temple and suddenly the body that is or was Bash isn’t there anymore. Now I can see the mass of inky black sliding through the vessel that holds it. It looks like clouds from a horrific storm that's suddenly taken on a liquid shape and could be bottled and moved. I could see mouths, the shape of them at least, poking through the surfaces and screaming like a body caught beneath waves that its arms weren’t strong enough to fight, venting their last scream into a night that didn’t care before they drowned.

  “How were you able to do that?” he asked me.

  “Do what?” I ask again for calcification.

  “Defeat him. That’s a powerful demon inside that body, no mortal should’ve stood a chance against it.”

  “Did you see me, I almost didn't,” I say back harshly, I think that Syllis forgot what I looked like before he healed me. There were at least four different bones broken inside of my body and that was before I really knew what was internally damaged.

  “You never should’ve gotten through the door Arinna, I don’t think your understanding me. This demon, this class that it is strong, it’s not an ordinary walker, its designed to inhabit and kill, not to torment. It feeds of souls and then it destroys bodies and its very well trained in dealing with Chasers.”

  “This is what the Angel wanted isn’t it, someone to be her eyes and ears. That’s
why she showed me this?”

  “Showed you Bash?” Syllis asked me.

  “The dream I had. I was a crow or a raven sitting on a perch of one of the dead trees in the yard. I saw Bash on the phone, I heard him say he wanted me dead.”

  “Show me,” he says.

  I walk outside and him and I are standing on the landing just outside the door. Syllis walks out to the tree that I point out to him. He reaches up with his hand and a bird moves down and hovers just above him. I can see that he’s examining it studying it like his eyes had managed to cut it open and he could see inside without damaging a single feather.

  He let it go and turned back to me. “She didn’t give you an ability to implant,” he said, his face wasn’t somber or relaxed, to her it looks suspicious.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Once you have seen her and spoken to her, your abilities, your body would start to change, adapt to what she wanted,” he said as he went back inside the house.

  “To change me?” I said back angrily.

  “For the better,” he told me. “Prepare you for what was coming after she made the selection.”

  We’re back inside and he and I are standing over Bash. “I want you to exorcise the demon out of him.”

  Chapter 96

  “Why?” I ask.

  “I need to know if you can contain him.”

  I look at him vaguely for a second. I want to know what he’s after and then I think that it's just another time that someone knows something that they don't want to tell me. Just another piece of me that’s trapped inside someone else’s head.

  I lower my hand again, I’m going to tear this demon out of Bash and make sure that when I send it back to the other side that it can’t make it back again.

  I hold my ground, making sure that my footing is locked firmly into place. With my hand, out I lower my eyes and then my head follows suit.

  The incantation is at the forefront of my head and then it starts to pour out of my lips. This one is different than the others. The others move quieter, as I speak the groans and the shifts and the pain start to move out of the vessels lips as it expresses what the demon is going through.

  This time nothing comes out but sharp pain running up and down my arm. I can feel it starting at my fingertips and then running clear up to my shoulder where it starts to claw at my chest.

  The pain is excruciating but its locked on nevertheless. It’s like my thoughts and my mind are anchored to the body that I’m trying to free from the lock the demon has on it. I don't even know if Bash is going to survive this, part of me is un-phased because I still don't know what the true motivations were in trying to kill me and I doubt that he’s going to be able to tell me much of what I need to know.

  I can see the mist that's sitting inside of Bash’s skin. I can see it start to convulse and shocks run through it as the roots that its dug into his muscle and his flesh begin to sever themselves as the chords holding it to the body start to fizzle out and rip apart.

  The vapor starts falling out of Bash’s unconscious mouth, as he lay there on the floor like a drunk spewing what he drank, it starts to flood out of his throat.

  I can’t pay any attention to Syllis even though I know some part of him is trying to break my concentration.

  That’s when the door shook hard enough to shake the entire metal shell of the trailer, it was enough to rip out the last bit of the demon cloud but not enough for me to banish it where I wanted too. Instead it slammed hard into the wall and passed right through the screen of metal that kept it from the outside.

  I went to Bash and checked his vitals when the door shook again, I saw Syllis watch me and then watch the door. “We have to go,” he said to me.

  I couldn't, I had to see what it was for myself. I went to one of the tinted windows that overlooked the barren land just beyond the trailers foundation and saw something that I didn't expect to see at all.

  There were at least fifty bodies, ragged and decomposed running at the door, slamming hard into it. They were moving, all of them were moving like their bodies were on fire and on this side of the door was the water to put them out.

  Then I saw it on the hill, two bodies standing there behind everything they had running around. I saw the creature there standing, its eyes so blue that I could make it out at this distance and I knew that the bodies running at the door were the ones that it had raised from the cemetery. It was next to it that took my true attention. I could see Gabriel standing there, looking solemnly at what he had created and what he had allowed to mature. Knowing full well that I was in here and that Bash was nothing more than collateral damage to what he wanted. He wanted me dead and he was using the wraith and all its abilities to make sure that I died.

  I turned and began to overturn things looking for something. It didn't take long for Syllis to ask me what I was looking for. For a second, I was so devoted to finding it that I didn’t even hear him.

  “A gun,” I said back. “Bash keeps an armory in here.”

  “You can’t go out there,” he said to me. “You’re not going to survive it.”

  “I don’t give a shit,” I told him anger flushing behind my skin like a fire that was raging out of control.

  Before I could find it, a pain had almost completely set fire to my body and I was down on my knees on the floor, almost writhing from the shock that the pain had put me into. I knew this pain, it was familiar as it walked over my skin. This was the same thing that Azrael had done to me before he sent me into the bar, this is who he had forced me into becoming. Something about it, something that he had left this inside my head had made this a possibility for Azrael that if I ever came this close to Gabriel, the presence inside of my head would find a way to take over for me.

  Then my body goes flat as Sylis hovers his hand over my chest and even though I can feel my back arching as my body is trying to bend to the pain that’s suffocating it, the force that he’s applying through the air that separates us is enough to tame that pain at least well enough to keep me on the ground.

  He looks at me, his vibrant eyes almost glowing as the light from outside is trapped somewhere in his dark pupils and displaying back through the shadow of the hood. “We have to go.”

  Chapter 97

  When my eyes finally open again, I can see that Bash isn’t with us anymore but Syllis still is. “Where is he?”

  “He’s safe for now,” the demon tells me. “But he’s far.”

  “How long has that demon possessed him for?” I ask even though I’m not entirely sure that I want to know the answer. I spent a lot of time alone with him and for him to raise his hands at me in the way he did meant that his mind was further ten I’d like to think that it was.

  “A long time,” Syllis said to me but left it vague, I was appreciative even though I didn’t want to be.

  I look around. We’re in a long warehouse it looks like. Something that was forgotten about a long time ago and fell into neglect. There was mold on the wall, films of dust covering most of the stone surfaces in the room. Cobwebs hung down low from the ceiling above. “Why are we here?” I ask.

  “Because there’s more in your head then I’ve seen and I need to know everything in order to keep you alive,” he turns to me, the glow casts from the shadow again under his hood.

  “What do you expect me to tell you?” I ask it. “I don’t even know half of what you know and it’s about my life that your trying to figure out. What makes you think it's going to change?”

  He walks closer to me.

  “There are things that I don't know because there is something inside of your head that’s protecting you and I need to know how it works and why it’s working. Back at the trailer, Gabriel called for you telepathically, I didn’t know until I saw you going for to door without a weapon. He wanted you and he was pulling you towards him, out towards the wraith and the wraiths army. I didn’t know what was controlling you but I couldn't summon you back. There wasn’t enough room for
me inside your mind to get control of you again. I had to teleport us out of there or else the army would've broken down the door and you would've went right to Gabriel.”

  “What do you mean I was going to him?” I ask for some sort of reassurance that I don’t really need all that much. My hand instinctively moves into my pocket and pulls out the vile of prescriptions that basically lives in there now. I twist the top and take four and crush them in between my teeth. Already I can see the clear orange at the bottom of the bottle and it's been a few days.

  “There’s a control that his mind is capable of, I know you know it. It’s fresh in your head like a raw scar, you know what he’s capable of.”

  “Then what else is there. What's in my head that you’ve seen already that I haven't. I need to know what’s up there. I can’t help anyone in this fight if I don't know how to control myself. I felt it back in the trailer. The change that was happening. I was becoming what Azrael wanted me to be. The demon that he made me was coming out and was going to show itself before I lost my consciousness.” I walk to him. “Tell me what I am,” I sound so helpless I don't want to but I can’t help it anymore. “I need to know what I am.”

  Syllis looks at me and there is no guilt or shame on his face. If he’s feeling any of those things there well locked away somewhere inside of him. As he looks at me I can feel his eyes bury underneath my skin, he’s looking for those things that are lost to me and I stand there anxious if not displaying all the patience that I can and wait for him to diagnose what’s in there, what he knows already and piece together what he doesn’t know. I wait because I have no other choice and at this point I have more than enough experience waiting to hear answers to questions I’ve never been able to ask anyone.

  Chapter 98

  By the end of whatever he was looking for, I’m down on the ground my body slick with sweat and there were tears mixed with blood that were sliding out of her eyes. When he stopped I knew it but I couldn't move my body all at once. I was paralyzed for those seconds that followed even though I know that he had put his hand down and he had stopped draining whatever memories that he would dig up.