Soul Breaker

by Clara Coulson

  “Maybe Desmond can help,” Ella offers. “He’s one of the best beggar magic users we have. You should ask him for some pointers when the rest of the team gets back from France. Until then, we’ll manage. Beggar magic’s not my top skill, but I can throw a fireball or two when the occasion calls for it.”

  Up ahead, the turnoff for the community is marked by a large, glitzy sign, promising exclusive amenities and premium living. Ten feet behind the sign is a guard’s post, and I can make out the indistinct form of a man lounging in the booth, waiting for any number of Aurora’s well-off socialites to drive up to the closed gates in their fancy, foreign cars. Past the gates, the two-story roofs of custom-styled McMansions peek out above a line of tasteful “privacy” trees. Evergreens. Hiding the activity of the rich and powerful all year round.

  As we close in on the gates, I clear my throat and ask, “So, did you get a chance to rest at all after your return trip?” I don’t want to say anything rude, but Ella’s appearance is a bit tousled. Her hair has suffered repeated contact with a plane seat cushion, spiked up in some places, oddly flat in others. Her makeup, what little she wears, is smudged around her eyes, and there’s a patch on her cheek where she rubbed the foundation off at some point, a shade lighter than the rest of her skin. Her uniform, while fresh, is rumpled, with large creases in the places you typically fold it, indicating it hasn’t been out of her suitcase for long.

  Ella reaches across the seat and pinches my arm playfully. “Like you can’t tell. I stopped by the office on my way from the airport to say hi to the boss man—it was supposed to be a surprise, me coming back early—only for Mr. Grumpy Face to throw a file at me and tell me to get to work.” She blows a stray strand of hair off her forehead. “That man needs a vacation.”

  A snort catches in my throat, and Ella throws up an eyebrow. “Sorry,” I say. “You called him Mr. Grumpy Face. I, uh, might have him listed as Captain Grumpy Pants in my phone.”

  Ella stares at me for a moment, brows furrowed, before she bursts out laughing. “Great minds think alike, huh?” She claps me on the shoulder. “We should conspire to send him to Hawaii for a week, under the guise of a case. Force him to chill the hell out. What do you think?”

  “I think he would murder us in our sleep.”

  “Nah.” She waves her injured hand in the air. “He wouldn’t go that far. He’d probably put us on desk duty for a month.”

  “Pretty sure that’d be a worse punishment.” I hit the turn signal switch, and the little green left arrow pops up on the dashboard. My foot eases off the accelerator. “Considering how messy Riker’s desk is.”

  Ella’s smile fades—I said something wrong—and I curse under my breath. She leans back against the seat and casts her gaze out the windshield, toward the entrance of Highwood Glen, now thirty seconds off. “He hasn’t always been so messy. Nick used to be pretty neat, organized. And by ‘pretty,’ I mean almost anal about it. Everything had to be in its proper place. So the fact he’s let himself go like that…” She rubs the spot on her cheek where her makeup is missing. A tic.

  “Well,” she continues, “I guess we’ll know when gets through the grief from Norman’s death. He’ll start cleaning his desk off.” A humorless laugh. “That idiot, acting like the damn cave-in was his fault.”

  I slow the car to a crawl and pull into the entrance, heading for the guard’s post. At the same time, I try to formulate the right words for this conversation, about a topic, an event, a tragedy, over which I had no authority, in which I played no part. What do you say to someone who lost a comrade in arms, about the captain who blames himself for that loss? With a subtle headshake, I swallow and reply, “The curse of leadership, I guess. The weight of your team’s success—or failure—rests on your shoulders. And so, when things go south, you…”

  “I understand his feelings,” she says. “Really I do. I caught a glimpse of Norm’s body, too. We all feel like we failed, the whole team. But Nick is the only one who let his emotions get the best of him. To the point where he removed himself from the mission. Injured or not, he should have stuck with us in France until we cleaned up the bulk of the mess. A captain doesn’t get to mope. Especially an elite captain.”

  Ella smacks her cheeks. “For the longest time, I thought Nick’s spotless record was a sign of good leadership. He never failed. At anything.” She sighs. “In hindsight, though, that’s more a pitfall than a plus. You need to be familiar with failure in order to overcome it. Else, you might keep stumbling from a single blow. An endless cycle of self-defeat. Nick let Norman’s death pull the rug out from under his confidence, completely, and now I’m worried he won’t allow himself to get it back.”

  I pull the car up to the guard’s post and stop, rolling my window down to speak with the man in the booth. But the guy isn’t paying attention. He’s on his phone, chatting away, making dinner plans or taking down a grocery list or discussing this week’s celebrity social disaster or something else irrelevant to the job he’s supposed to be doing. With a grunt, I reach out the window and rap my knuckles on the glass, startling the guy. He partially jumps out of his seat at the sound, and then swivels the chair around to get a better look at me. He holds the phone away from his face, frowns as he recognizes my clothing. The second time today he’s seen the Kooks ask for entry.

  Meanwhile, Ella keeps talking. “When I finally have a chance to get a good night’s sleep and put my game face on, I’m going to kick Nick’s ass into gear again. You watch. I’ll get him up and running like the well-oiled machine he’s supposed to be, and if he tries to fight me on it, I’ll show him what a master of hand-to-hand combat can really do.”

  I unclip my badge from my belt and hold it up for the guard to see while I say to Ella, “That sounds like an excellent plan to me. Just make sure you tell me when you’re going to do it, so I can get out of the country before the Riker bomb explodes.” Waving my badge back and forth, I motion for the guard to open the gates.

  Ella chuckles. “Oh, it’ll be a battle, for sure, but I think cowering under your desk should cover it.”

  The guard finally gets the picture and hits the button to allow us access. The massive golden gates swing open, revealing the freshly paved road that cuts through the Highwood Glen community. I take my foot off the brake, give a mock salute to the guard, and let the car roll forward into what is framed as a paradise but reads more like a fancy prison. Too many rules. Too many manners. Too much meaningless etiquette to suit my taste.

  As the car is passing through the gates, I say, “At least that battle is in the future. Here and now, we have to deal with Franks’ parents. Which, given the locale, will likely consist of two well-dressed middle-aged people, sitting on antique furniture, making demands and deriding us for not having psychic powers and tracking down their son’s killer in five minutes or less.”

  Ella nudges me with an elbow. “With a sourpuss attitude like that, you better let me do the talking, kiddo. Don’t want you to—”

  “Attention all units!” shouts a voice from the space between us, and we glance down at the police radio underneath the central console. It’s been passing low static for our entire drive, eerily quiet for a day in Aurora. Until now. The dispatcher says, “We have a 10-31 in progress at Green Lake Technical College, 942 Harbor Lane. A bystander reported that a man wielding a hammer attacked a student and pursued her into the Winston Reed Memorial Garden. All available units requested on scene.”

  The dispatcher repeats the message, but Ella and I are no longer listening. We’re both looking at the file in the back seat, remembering Jason Franks’ head, destroyed by what I theorized was a large, powerful hammer. College student. Hammer attack. In progress.

  Ella catches my eye and asks, “You don’t think…?”

  “It can’t be a coincidence.”

  “Green Lake is three miles down the road.” She grips her seatbelt and flashes a wary grin. “How fast can you get us there?”

  I slam my foot on the
brake, put the car in reverse, and reply, “Fast enough.”

  Chapter Nine

  The car blows into the parking lot nearest to the Memorial Garden and screeches to a halt, half in, half out of a handicapped spot. I shut the car off, unclip my seatbelt, and jump out, slamming the door shut behind me. Ella is three steps ahead, one hand on her gun holster, the other ready to call up her beggar magic. Ahead of us, at the garden entrance, two police cruisers with flashing lights have pulled onto the grassy lawn, and a group of cops, guns drawn, are waiting at the garden’s entrance and intermittently speaking into the radios clipped to their shirts.

  One of them spots us and yells, “Stop! There’s a dangerous—!” He cuts himself off when Ella glares at him with an intensity that suggests she’ll slit his throat if he doesn’t get the hell out of our way. He backs into the hood of his car and makes a hissing noise, alerting the rest of his friends. A couple of them open their mouths to protest our approach, but the instant they register that Ella’s on a warpath, they stand down and let us pass unhindered.

  We enter the garden. It’s a sprawling, eight-acre maze of tall bushes, squat trees, and flowers on the cusp of death as the breath of fall rolls in. The first leg of the garden is a small courtyard area with four outlets that boasts a huge stone fountain, complete with cherub carvings, but missing the water that makes it a pretty fixture in the spring and summer. The bed of the fountain is dry, filled with leaves. And, if I’m not mistaken, splattered with the blood of some bludgeoning victim.

  What a good sign.

  At least we know we’re heading in the right direction.

  Ella takes one look at the fountain and tracks the blood trail to the easternmost outlet, where the red droplets on the sidewalk were smeared and smudged as someone’s feet struggled to keep them upright during their attempt to escape. Ella pulls her gun out of its holster and orders, “Keep close to me. And stay alert.” Then she dashes into the maze.

  I follow.

  Leafy walls rise on either side of us, blocking our view of the rest of the garden. The blood trail continues down the concrete, turns left, then right, then left again, becomes wider and thicker and darker as we head down a shallow hill toward another circular courtyard area, this time with an apple tree instead of a fountain at its center. It’s there, at the base of the tree, that we find the victim. A young woman.

  At least, I guess she’s young. A student. Because there’s not enough left of her head to get a straight ID. Her body is twisted and broken, bones shattered under the skin of her arms and legs. Her forearms are practically mush, a soup of blood and bone shards and torn muscle strips, and I realize they must be defensive wounds. The girl put her hands over her head in a vain attempt to protect her skull from the hammer, but the attacker kept hitting and hitting and hitting until there wasn’t enough left of the arms to stop him from making contact with her fragile skull.

  Chunks of her brain cling to the tree trunk behind where her head once was, the neck below the mess a bloody stump, like Jason Franks’. And above the remnants of her brain is a message in blood. Written in the same mysterious language I have yet to identify. A message, I imagine, that explains or attempts to justify killing a person in such a terrible way.

  The same vicious monster from the Waverly murder. It’s here, in this garden, with us.

  Ella stomps her boot on the ground and swears. “We’ve got to take this beast down, Cal. Before this happens to anyone else.” She scans the two forks in the path leading out of the courtyard area, searching for a clue to where the creature went after it finished its job. I follow her across the grass, to the point where the path splits, gripping my own gun tightly in my right hand. Behind us, an army of sirens draw closer to the entrance of the maze, the reinforcements called by the cops waiting out front. Before us, a low wind groans through the paths of the garden maze.

  “There!” Ella shouts and points. To a flash of movement fifty feet down the left-side trail. A person cuts across the path from an adjoining branch to reach a narrow, winding walkway. The figure is too far away for us to define as more than vaguely humanoid, but, surrounded by the dull browns of autumn, the bright, liquid red showered on the person’s clothing tells us everything we need to know. Ella darts forward, screaming, “Let’s go!”

  I make to follow her, gun at the ready…but then I notice something. Movement down the other trail. I stop short, grabbing the head of a tall angel statue to keep my balance, and survey the right-hand path one more time. And that’s when I see it.

  It. Not he. Not she. A thing.

  A hulking creature with indeterminate features rises from where it was hiding behind a thick bush, turns around, and continues down the path, away from me. At its side, from a kind of belt, hangs a humongous weapon. A long, thin grip. A rectangular, metallic head. A hammer.

  Understanding dawns. The person Ella spotted was the summoner, the sorcerer. This thing is the Eververse creature he summoned. They’re both here. The master and the slave. The controller and the beast that wears the reins. The vengeful killer with a hit list and the deadly tool he has chosen to use to scratch the names off the paper.

  The sorcerer is dangerous, for sure, skilled and sly, but the monster may have already received more orders. More kill orders.

  I peer down the left-hand path again to find Ella has already turned onto the walkway where the sorcerer vanished a moment ago. If I follow her, I’ll lose the creature. If I lose the creature, it might take another victim. But if I leave Ella without backup—she’s already injured—she could end up dead at the hands of dark and powerful magic.

  Fuck. This is why you’re supposed to have a whole team during combat situations. At least four people, not two.

  I bite down on my gloved knuckle and hold back a string of swears in every language I learned at the academy. Because I already know the “correct” decision. Ella is a trained fighter. The students here at Green Lake are not. Ella might be injured (or worse). A vulnerable student will be.

  I push away from the statue of a sad, weeping angle and follow the creature deeper into the maze.

  In contrast to the sorcerer, the monster moves slowly. Whether because its size hampers its speed…or because it doesn’t feel the need to run. Within five seconds of each other, we reach yet another clearing in the maze, a plain patch of grass encircled by blue flowers, about twenty feet in diameter. Enough space for a fight, but not enough for a solid retreat. If I need to flee, I’ll have to pick one of the two, narrow exit trails or vault over the leafy, ten-foot-high garden walls that encircle the clearing.

  As I close the gap, I whisper the mental command, Build, to draw the energy in the air around me into all my beggar rings, while I flick the safety off the gun in my hand. Bullets are generally effective against supernatural creatures, unless, like ghosts, they’re incorporeal. But this creature, I can see, is dense as a rock, muscles like hydraulic pumps, the strength of a fearsome predator under its skin.

  Its blue skin.

  The closer I get, the more its features reconcile in my sight—into what I can only describe as hell’s best grotesque. The creature is two heads taller than me and as wide as your average bodybuilder, with wrinkled, dry, thin blue skin stretched over its muscles like plastic wrap. Bulging veins distort its limbs, like snakes writhing atop its bones, and every movement underneath the tattered robe it wears could be described as slithering.

  I slide to a stop on the damp grass, point my gun at center mass, and shout, “Hey!”

  The creature lands heavily on its left foot, its clawed foot, stands still for three and a half seconds, and then turns around to face the little Crow half its size. (If that.) A bulky hand drifts toward the hammer at its side, the hammer covered in a fresh sheen of blood.

  My stomach churns, bile rising in my throat, when I get a load of its face. Dear God.

  Its nose is long and hooked and crooked. It has tusks like a boar. Its ears are pointed, elf-like, but shriveled, as if burned by acid.
Its hair is dark and coarse, a mop of fraying rope, hanging over its face and neck, blending with a dirty beard. Eyes the size of golf balls, fire burning at their cores, lock onto the boy standing before it, beneath it, and when it grins, its cold breath wafts my way, the scent of death. Old death. Infinite death.

  It’s a demon. It has to be. Somebody summoned a monster from hell.

  It makes a sound deep in its throat, gruff and hoarse. And I recognize, belatedly, standing there, shaking in my boots, that the creature is laughing at me. Because I look terrified. I am terrified. Slack jaw. Wide eyes. Gun trembling in my grip.

  No textbook or lesson or anecdote from an experienced teacher could prepare you to come face to face with something as utterly disgusting and horrifying as the thing I’m facing now. I have never been this scared in my entire life. Not even the night Mac died.

  There will be nightmares later.

  If I live.

  I raise my shaking gun toward the monster’s face and say, in a tone less than convincing, “Drop the hammer, you ugly fuck!” But the beast only laughs harder and pulls the mighty hammer from the belt strap. It points the head of the hammer at my face, and unless I’m imagining things in my stupor of fear, it winks at me. Like this entire scenario, gore and all, is a joke. Like murdering two college kids is the mark of an average day, and not the sign of a tragedy in progress. This thing, it doesn’t care about taking life. Life has no more value to the monster than a penny to the rich.

  A spark of fury zips through my veins, down my arms, into my fingertips. I point my gun at the bulbous gap between the monster’s eyes. And pull the trigger. One. Twice. Three times.

  The bullets hit home. The monster reels back, dark, slimy blood spraying from its face, dribbling down its cheeks, sticking to the hairs of its wiry beard. It stumbles two steps away from me, crushing a row of flowers, and the head of the hammer drops forward, hits the ground with a thump so hard I feel the vibrations under my feet.