Soul Breaker

  And a key—the highlighted word—to unlock the gates of the Underworld and let the new souls in.

  Oh, my God. Jack Brendon and his naïve flock broke into the Etruscan Underworld to steal the key that locks its gates. And Calvin Kinsey, ignorant fool, gave that key to Cooper Lee.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  A year and a day could pass in the time I sit in despair on Cooper Lee’s floor. Head in my hand, I curse myself, over and over, for my unforgivable mistake. A mistake that has likely cost Cooper his life at this point. Fuck you, Kinsey. Fuck you!

  I should have treated anything acquired from Brendon or his accomplices as dangerous, on principle, instead of assuming that an innocuous-looking item, like a key, couldn’t be worth more than a quick glance. But when I first heard the word “treasure,” I pictured a literal treasure, a bucketful of gold trinkets, a chest full of gems, or a standard collector’s item, like a painting or sculpture. Something that would hold a high monetary value to standard human collectors. I imagined the buyer as a savvy, rich practitioner, fencing stolen supernatural goods for exorbitant prices on the high-end collectibles black market. That’s the scenario I conjured up in my thick skull, simple and stupid.

  It never crossed my mind that a rusting old key could be so important.

  Forget an elite team. I’m too dumb to be a DSI agent altogether.

  My fingers curl inward, tight around my cheekbones, and I squeeze until my head begins to ache. My healing shoulder throbs as well, where I wrenched it the wrong way at some point during the early stages of my breakdown. (Before I devolved into a rocking ball on the floor.) Chest heavy, I cannot breathe, and choked gasps lodge in my throat. I must be crying—my eyes burn—but the fabric of my glove absorbs the tears before they cascade down my cheeks.

  In the periphery of my mind, beyond the rush of despair, a logical voice informs me that a sobbing fit won’t improve the situation. But my memories are still cooling from my flashback to Mac’s death, and the fact that my brain keeps manufacturing images of Cooper’s headless body lying in a gutter somewhere isn’t helping either. The waves of dark emotion keep crashing into me, again and again, and as the minutes pass, no air in my lungs, I start to feel as if I’m drowning in an empty room.

  Then someone shakes my shoulder, my good shoulder, a gentle gesture, before deft fingers slide up my neck, into my hair. “Cal?” says a voice I recognize. Ella. “Can you hear me, Cal? Are you hurt?”

  With great effort, I peel my hand from my face and blink at the onslaught of light. Ella is crouched before me, one knee on the floor, an almost maternal expression of worry etched into her scarred face. “Hey, there. You okay? Any injuries? Other than the ones you already had?” Her voice is composed, unshakeable, even though she must be terrified by the state of Cooper’s house.

  Ella is smart enough to recognize the chilling signs I did when I entered earlier. She knows, perhaps better than I do, Cooper’s probable fate. Yet, instead of breaking down, she steels herself, constructs an impenetrable wall between her feelings and her actions. She reacts like a veteran of many wars, undaunted by even the most violent of events. Her years of experience take full form in front of me, and I feel ashamed in her presence. Like a child sitting in the shadow of a god, all my weaknesses laid bare.

  Once my hand is clear of my face, Ella’s own hands cup my cheeks, wipe away fresh tears. Either she doesn’t notice my embarrassment, cheeks flushed, or she’s too kind to let it show that she does. She rubs my face with her thumbs for the next few minutes, silent, and allows no sign of judgment or criticism to mar her soothing expression. Little by little, the sobs wracking my chest dissipate, and my lungs stop seizing, allowing me to breathe. My heart beats softer and slower against my ribcage, and the building pressure in my head diminishes, clearing the cloud of despair from the forefront of my mind.

  Ella’s smile widens. “There we go. Let yourself come out of it.”

  I swallow, throat raw, and rasp, “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” She takes my hand and tugs, coaxing me to my feet. “You’re not the first agent to have a panic attack, Cal, nor will you be the last. I had my fair share back when I first started, believe it or not. Every other case had me vomiting in the fifth-floor bathroom, after task meetings. There were times when I didn’t eat for days, I felt so sick.”

  When she catches what must be a skeptical expression on my face, she pats my cheek. “Cross my heart. It’s true. This is not an easy line of work, Cal. We have military vets who pass the academy with flying colors, only to quit from stress a few months into their initial assignments. You’re not weak. You’re not. Hell, you’ve made it through more in twenty-two years than most do in a lifetime.” She lets her hands drop to her side, no longer supporting me, to prove I can stand on my own two feet, even if I’m a little wobbly. Then she finishes with, “You’re a human being, just like the rest of us, and from time to time, you will stumble. What matters isn’t that you fall—it’s that you get back up and keep going.”

  With a shaky nod, I straighten my back and tug the wrinkles out of my coat. “Understood.”

  “So, ready to keep going?”

  I take a long, slow blink, exhaling at the same time. “Yes. I’m ready.”

  “Good.” She slaps my shoulder once, for good measure, and then switches from therapist mode to warrior mode in an instant, smile tossed somewhere into the abyss. “What happened here? Where’s Cooper? Were the two of you attacked by Charun?”

  “No.” Working the kinks out of my sore back, I bend down and retrieve the research book. “Cooper was already gone when I got here. I haven’t found his body yet, but, with the blood in the living room, I doubt he got far. We should probably search the surrounding neighborhood for him. I mean, for his body.”

  “No need,” Ella replies. “Delarosa’s already canvassing the area. He came with me. Riker’s here, too, on the front steps, taking some important call.”

  “Riker’s here?”

  “Yeah. Insisted on tagging along. As your captain, he’s obligated to worry about you.” She nudges my side with her elbow. “Anyway, we’ve got a few backup teams on standby as well, a few minutes out, if we need them.” Her eyebrow arches. “Do we need them?”

  “I don’t know. Charun’s already gone, and I doubt he’s lingering nearby.” I flip the book back to the page with the article on Vanth. “He finally got what he came for.”

  “What now?” She snatches the book from my hand and stares daggers into the page, speed-reading at a rate I didn’t know was possible for a human being. The second her gaze glides over the highlighted key, her shoulders tighten and she breathes out a low hiss. “Key. As in, the key you took from Jack Brendon during the raid?”

  “That’s my prevailing theory. They stole Vanth’s key, intending to sell it to this mysterious buyer. Then Charun, as the designated guardian of the Underworld, had himself summoned to Earth by his assistant, Tuchulcha, to retrieve said key for his Psychopomp partner, who needs it to control the gates.” I have the sudden urge to melt into the floorboards. “And then I, being the idiot I am, gave the key to the Etruscan Underworld to Cooper Lee.”

  I lift the fallen lamp from the dining room floor and set it on the nearest side table. The light bulb flickers, damaged in the fall. “I seriously fucked up, Ella. I really did. Charun saw me take the key from Jack Brendon in the park. That’s why he tried to off me even after he killed Brendon, because I inadvertently stole the ‘treasure’ he was hunting for. But the ICM guys drove him away from me before he could retrieve the key.” I sigh. “He must have ordered Tuchulcha, in spirit form, to follow me for the rest of the night, so he could try for the key again once he lost Marcus and company. However, when I finally left the office, Tuchulcha realized I no longer had the key in my possession. So he waited. Until Cooper left shortly after I did, with the key.”

  With still-trembling fingers, I switch off the busted lamp. “I did this to him, Ella. I got Cooper killed.”
>
  “Oh, don’t pull that shit with me.” Ella leans against the cockeyed dining room table and crosses her arms. “You are not in control of the entire freaking world, Cal. Not everything that happens is your fault. You gave Cooper the key under the assumption he’d hand it over to the analysts for evidence processing. You didn’t know he’d take it home with him.”

  “I get what you’re saying, Ella, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling guilty.”

  “I know.” She sets the book on the table and flips the cover closed with a thump, dust rising. “The human mind sucks like that.” She inhales through clenched teeth. “But regardless of fault, or lack thereof, you can’t let this drag you into the dirt, Cal. The worst thing you could do is let Cooper’s death end your career with DSI before it’s even begun. You have a lot of potential. To waste it would be a travesty. And to waste it in Cooper’s name would be an insult to his memory.”

  Steely eyes meet my own, daring me to contradict her. “Don’t forget: He chose to risk his life by joining DSI, same as the rest of us. Don’t offend his courage by pretending he was some helpless passerby who took a stray bullet. He may have been a scholar instead of a warrior, but that doesn’t make him any less brave. As DSI agents, we are all targets of dark and dangerous forces. Never forget that.”

  I open my mouth to reply, attempt to deny her irrefutable logic, but no sound emerges. Because some part of my brain knows it’s time to shut the fuck up. So I bow my head in assent instead and force the heavy weight of guilt off my chest. For the time being.

  Ella looks as if she wants to say something else, but before she can speak, Delarosa rushes into the living room, panting like he just ran a marathon. “I didn’t find him. Anywhere.” Both Ella and I tear our attention from each other and stare at him, dumbfounded. After catching his breath, hands on his knees, bent over, he continues, “I checked the surrounding six blocks, every direction. No body. Closest I found was a few smears of blood on the sidewalk near the entrance to that little playground three blocks east. Could have been Cooper’s blood. Could have been someone else’s.”

  A tense moment of thoughtful silence passes between the three of us.

  And then a thought strikes the center of my brain with so much force that I stumble back into the dining room table. Ella reaches out to steady me, but I bat her helping hands away and grab the discarded research book, flipping through it until I find the page about Vanth again. A dozen possibilities and probabilities zoom through my head, faster than I can follow with my conscious mind, until the most obvious answer in the world leaps out of my pile of mental options like a neon sign. Of fucking course!

  “He’s not dead,” I say. “Charun didn’t kill him. Charun took him.”

  Ella and Delarosa share a look that suggests they think I’ve lost a few screws.

  “It makes sense.” I slam the open book on the table. “Charun was after the key, but the key doesn’t belong to him. It belongs to his partner, Vanth.” My hand smacks the book, a resounding thump in the quiet house. “If somebody stole your most precious belonging, you’d probably want to exact vengeance yourself, right? But, according to this book, Vanth isn’t super violent—it’s not in her nature—so instead of her coming here to retrieve the key, Charun, being the muscle of the Etruscan Underworld, came instead. Because they figured that it might take quite a bit of bloodshed to get the key back.”

  I pause to take an excited breath. “Nevertheless, at the end of the day, Vanth still wants to exact justice with her own hands, not let Charun do it for her. So, let’s posit this: Before Charun left, Vanth asked him to bring her the person in possession of the key, so she could pass judgment on the ‘thief’ herself. That way, she could feel fully rectified.”

  I start to stumble over my words, speaking too quickly, so I force myself to slow down. “However, Charun didn’t know which of the thieves had the key, at first, so he started mowing his way through the list, one at a time, starting with Jason Franks. He didn’t find out who had the key until the boathouse incident, where he discovered it was in Jack Brendon’s possession. But, before he could take Brendon, I showed up to bother him again, and, through sheer dumb luck, managed to ‘steal’ the key from Brendon.”

  “And so,” Ella cuts in, “he killed Brendon, because Brendon no longer had the key but was still technically a guilty party. AKA, his life became expendable, like the other kids’ lives. As such, by default, you then became the ‘thief’ he needed to kidnap and deliver to Vanth, simply because you had the key in your hand. Because apparently Charun has a very loose understanding of what ‘thief’ means.” She cracks all the knuckles on her right fist at once, a passionate gesture. “But our ICM allies prevented him from snatching you at the time. And when the key next materialized, you no longer had it. Cooper had it—and so Cooper became the designated kidnap target, sort of the ‘final thief.’”

  Delarosa scratches his graying stubble. “Okay, let me see if I got this straight: Charun considers Cooper to be the ultimate responsible party for the theft of some kind of key, even though Cooper wasn’t involved in the Underworld heist? Because he considers any person who touches this special key to be a thief, and the person who currently has it to be the thief he needs to spirit off to the Underworld for retribution?”

  I nod. “That’s my theory. In which case…”

  “Cooper’s not dead yet.” Ella surveys the destroyed living room. “Charun incapacitated him, maybe seriously injured him, and then hauled him off.”

  “But,” Delarosa says, “Charun can’t leave Earth, can he? He can’t banish himself. He needs someone to send him back to the Eververse, the same way he had Tuchulcha summon him here.”

  Ella kicks a piece of splintered wood across the floor. “You’re right. So he must still be on Earth, with Cooper. He won’t be able to leave until Tuchulcha finds another vulnerable practitioner to possess. Which won’t be easy. Most of them have enough training to resist spirit possession, ICM members or not. Ally Johnston and Betty Smith were unfortunate exceptions.”

  “They weren’t the only ones,” a new, gruff voice breaks in. It’s Riker, standing in the threshold between the foyer and living room and leaning heavily on his cane. “I just got off the phone with Ramirez. This Tuchulcha character slipped through our defenses at the hospital. He took Veronica Adams and rode her body right out the front door roughly twenty minutes ago. On Charun’s orders, I assume.”

  “Damn it.” Delarosa growls under his breath, frustrated. “St. Joseph’s, right? That hospital is only six miles from…from Waverly College.”

  “Sir,” I say, stepping past Ella and Delarosa, “how many people do we have guarding the summoning circle in the woods outside the Hague dorm?”

  Riker checks out my disheveled appearance, tearstains and all, and clicks his tongue to convey some unspoken judgment. He replies, “Yesterday, I assigned five lower-level detectives to patrol the area directly around the circle, with two more as lookouts. Ramirez is updating them now on the latest developments.”

  Ella saunters up beside me, and her hand lands on my shoulder in solidarity, defending me against Riker once again. “That’s not going to be enough, Nick. We need to scramble all available agents, to hold Charun and Tuchulcha off long enough for us to retrieve Cooper. If Charun takes Cooper to the Eververse…that’s it. We’ll lose him. He’ll die. We can’t enter their realm, their home turf. We’d never stand a chance of winning a fight beyond the veil.”

  “I know,” Riker says, and I swear I catch the hint of a grin on his grumpy face. “That’s why I sent out an office-wide alert before I walked in the door. Now, if we’re done talking about this fiasco, then let’s get our asses in the car and go. It’s a twelve-minute drive to Waverly from here, and that’s if we don’t get stopped by a cop for going twenty miles over the speed limit.”

  Delarosa, Ella, and I all exchange glances, and I take a split second to wonder if I’ve caught my first solid glimpse of the real Riker, the one beneath t
he grief and pain. Then I’m rushing out the door, as fast as my injured ankle can take me, two steps behind Ella and Delarosa, two steps ahead of the captain who is a lot more than meets the eye. Thirty seconds later, we’re all piled into an office SUV, Delarosa at the wheel. He flips the key, puts the car into drive, and floors it before anyone has a chance to buckle up.

  As we’re peeling around the corner, the terrible driver mutters, “Do you guys realize that none of this shit would have happened if Charun had just asked us, or the ICM, for help in retrieving this stupid key?” Three wild, dangerous turns later, nobody has responded to his comment—we’re too busy holding on for our lives—so he adds, in an annoyed tone, “Eververse monsters, I swear. They are so fucking rude.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The SUV skids to a stop two spots down from where I parked my work car when this whole nightmare started a few days ago. Delarosa cuts the engine, and we all haul ass out of the vehicle, sprinting across the road and the lawn outside the Hague dorm, toward the shadowy patch of trees that hides a deadly magic secret. Despite his screwed-up leg, Riker is only half a step behind us, his jaw set tight to stop himself from crying out in pain. I’m not much better off, with my twisted ankle and healing shoulder; every step jars both injuries, jolts of fire zipping through my skin.

  As we near the tree line, a virtual army comes into view. Black-clothed forms pour into the woods from all directions, every available agent in the immediate vicinity of the campus. Among them, to my surprise, are our friends from the ICM. Marcus, Erica, and the other practitioners from the failed raid hang behind the wave of advancing agents, power walking their way through the trees. They appear to be discussing either DSI’s complete and utter incompetence or their lack of an adequate lunch, judging by the expressions of distaste and annoyance plastered on their faces. Except Erica. She does, at least, look mildly concerned about the situation at hand.