Soul Breaker

by Clara Coulson

  I peer up at the dark, empty sky of the Underworld, wishing there were stars to see, the vastness of a universe to witness one last time in the moment of my death. Then I let my eyes slip closed, let a whisper pass my lips. The final words I will say with a beating heart: “I’m sorry, Mac.”

  Vanth swings the sword. It sails down, down, down with a whistling sound, the opening notes of a dirge, and I sense the blade as it nears me, feel the flight of air before the sharpened edge, the rush of ancient power thrumming through the metal in the milliseconds before it splits my skin and—

  The sword hits my neck.

  My world explodes.

  I am standing in a lake, water to my knees. I am standing in the snow, buried to my waist. I am standing in a field, amidst the corpses of the slain. I am standing in a thousand places in the world at once.

  I am lying in my bed, beside someone I cannot see. I am lying on the beach, bleeding from wounds I do not have. I am lying on the grass, reaching for stars I cannot touch. I am lying in a thousand places in the world at once.

  I am listening to a song on the radio. I am listening to the swell of a classic orchestra. I am listening to a speech by a man I have not met. I am listening to a thousand sounds in the world at once.

  In a fraction of a second, I experience a life. A billion and one memories. A billion sights and sounds. A billion chaotic events crashing into me, through me, draining into the well of my screaming soul. An ocean of emotion, thought, and feeling I cannot process, cannot handle, cannot escape. It drowns me, over and over, this life I have lived yet not lived, this world I have seen but not seen, and I feel my body tear to pieces, beaten by the brutal waves, only to be reconstructed, fresh and new and raw, until the waters of eternity slam into me again and—

  “Stop.”

  A single word. Whispered by a form in shadow. Who stands beyond the golden gates.

  Vanth stops. Mid-swing. As if she collides with a solid wall. The edge of her blade eats into my neck less than a quarter of an inch. Blood flows from the wound, like a stream and not a river, enough to stain my uniform, to quench the dusty ground beneath my knees, but not enough to kill me, to bleed me dry, to drain my veins of life. Vanth, without a moment’s hesitation, slips the blade from the laceration in my skin with a practiced hand, to avoid severing the major vessels and assuring my quick death.

  The woman, with her dripping sword, whirls around to face Aita. “My King? What is your will?”

  Aita’s eyes flare up brighter, illuminating the nose and cheeks of a figure less human than Charun or Tuchulcha. A figure whose true appearance, I know in my heart, would drive a human mad if he was to witness the full breadth of its indescribable horror. The voice of the king of the Underworld booms out of an unseen mouth again, and this time, he uses the same spell as Vanth, to allow me to understand his words. “My will is leniency for the brave young warrior.”

  Vanth opens her mouth, as if to protest, then thinks better of it. She peers down at me with her discerning gaze, from my neck to her bloodied sword to my neck again. I’m shaking like a leaf, so hard I almost topple over, and tears stream from my eyes, so hot they burn. I can barely form a coherent thought in the wake of the onslaught of visions, jumbled beyond recognition, firmly lodged in a corner of my mind I fear to ever tread again.

  What I just witnessed was not meant for the living.

  And yet, I’m still alive.

  I’ve got a funny feeling this will have repercussions later.

  Vanth plunges her sword into the dirt again and appeals to her king. “You believe his punishment fair as it stands?”

  “I do,” Aita replies, his voice thrumming through my bones, ten thousand volts a word. He addresses me directly for the first time, and it’s like his attention is a physical thing, the way I feel it land on me, a solid weight that compresses my bruised and battered skin. “Boy warrior, I admire your unwavering courage, your honesty, your willingness to sacrifice yourself for what you believe is right. Despite your claims of guilt, I clearly see you are no villain, that you hold no ill designs for my realm. Unlike those who strode through my gates without permission and snatched from my Lady Vanth her precious key.”

  The gates, as if on cue, begin to rattle and clank, but I don’t see his fingers touch them. They move on their own.

  Aita continues, “I have no desire to take the life of a valiant, honest man. As such, if my Lady Vanth and my Lord Charun agree that proper justice has been wrought on those who trespassed through the gates, who stole the key from our realm, then it is my will, warrior, to absolve you of any further responsibility.” His glowing gaze leaves my trembling body and returns to Vanth. “My Lady, what is your will?”

  Vanth observes her bloody sword, my bloody neck, and Cooper, who’s hunched in a spasm-wracked fetal position. Her fingers tighten around the hilt of her weapon, and an exasperated flash of fury warps her beautiful face, but then it passes, and she releases the sword altogether. It stands upright, point buried deep in the earth. Vanth sighs and says, “I admit I would have liked the chance to fulfill our vengeance with my own hand, my King. However, I too believe the young warrior is no villain in his heart, and though he may, by technicality, be the final thief who took my key, he is not like those who trespassed here to steal it in the first place. As long as Charun, too, is satisfied with the justice he dispensed, then I agree we should allow the warrior to keep his life.”

  So it all comes down to Charun in the end. Charun, whom I injured, taunted, and humiliated at various times over the past few days. The urge to pee my pants assaults me again, as I turn my head on my bleeding neck toward the ugly blue beast left to decide my fate.

  Charun eyes me as he swings his hammer around and around in the air, as if the motion of his weapon helps him think through difficult problems. He doesn’t respond to Vanth for almost five straight minutes, and each second that ticks by puts me more and more on edge, makes my heart beat faster, erratic, sets my brain on a collision course with another meltdown. It isn’t until he finally answers, with the edge of amusement on his tongue, that I realize he made his decision before the question was even asked. He spent all that time “thinking” just to agitate me.

  What a dick.

  Charun uses the same translation spell the others have clamped onto my head, and my dizziness increases tenfold when he starts to speak to Vanth. “Tuchulcha and I killed most of the thieves, and those who still breathe will suffer greatly for the rest of their lives. There is little else I could do that would be considered justified, so I believe my job on Earth is done, now that we have retrieved the key.” It was weird enough to see a big blue monster speak in a language I didn’t understand. Hearing Charun’s gruff voice speak English is downright bizarre, and my headache amplifies into migraine territory. Although, I can’t say I object to what he says, especially when he adds, “While I consider the young warrior a nuisance, I, too, believe he does not wish to threaten our realm. I think we can release him with no consequence.”

  Vanth nods in deference to her brother’s words and then to Aita. The King of the Underworld, satisfied, says, “Very well. We will send the warrior and his charge back to their realm. Tuchulcha, please escort them home.”

  The fire spirit, who’s been squatting near one of the sheer cliffs at the edge of the courtyard since the proceedings began, rises. “Yes, my King Aita.” He approaches me, bends over, and offers one of his pink, squishy hands. At first, I’m so far out of it that I don’t understand the gesture, but then Vanth, looking on, coughs to spur me into action. With great effort, I manage to pull my basic human interaction skills out of my whirlpool of a mind, and I take the spirit’s hand, let him help me to my shaky feet.

  Once I’m standing, Vanth appears to lose interest in me. She yanks her sword from the ground, then tugs something out of a pouch hidden in the folds of her skirt. The object is blurred in my sight, an indistinct shape I can’t identify, but as Vanth walks away from me toward the locked gates of th
e Underworld, I realize the small object must be the key.

  And that’s when I figure out what the key is doing, why I can’t pinpoint its appearance—it’s rapidly switching between numerous shapes, every type of key that has ever existed. The key is in a state of constant flux, meant to represent the lives of all the shades that could walk through the gates. When Brendon brought the key through the portal, it lost its purpose, no longer in the vicinity of the gates, so it stopped fluctuating and picked a random appearance. The Victorian-era key.

  Tuchulcha leans close to me, too close with his hissing snake hair, and mutters, “We should leave now, warrior. Lady Vanth will open the gates soon, and all manner of dangerous creatures will emerge from beyond, including King Aita himself. His very form, witnessed through mortal eyes, would likely kill you on the spot. So let us not dawdle.” He releases my hand and shuffles over to Cooper, scooping the archivist into his arms. Back by my side a moment later, he nods toward the path we traversed on our way here. “We will return the way we came. I will open the portal for you in the same place, so that you may pass into the same Earth location you left, the woodlands.”

  He nudges me with his elbow, urging me to turn around, tear my transfixed gaze off the scene of two demons and a mighty god. It’s hard. Partially because I’m afraid this is all a figment of my imagination, that, in reality, my severed head is lying on the ground somewhere, with my body slumped nearby, that I am dead and this happy-happy ending is nothing but a fantasy created by my oxygen-starved brain as it decays. Partially because I’m in the presence of beings from myth and legend, and for the first time since I joined DSI, I truly understand, with damning depth, the reality of what I’m up against as a human with a foot in the supernatural world.

  At last, though, I manage to look away, put Charun and Vanth and Aita behind me, literally and figuratively. I hobble back down the road that leads to one of many possible afterlives, the final fields of rest and peace for a long-extinct society. And when we reach the end of this road, I stand beside a spirit who could roast me alive with the barest hint of effort, who carries in his arms with ease the little archivist I nearly lost my head to protect.

  But then, Cooper almost lost his head for the crime of eager inquisitiveness.

  Curiosity killed the cat…

  …and satisfaction brought it back.

  I guess I’ll have to wait and see if Cooper is “satisfied” by this outcome.

  In the fire spirit’s arms, the half-conscious Cooper spasms again and accidentally jerks his injured arm. He cries out, a weak, breathy sound. Tuchulcha glances down at him and whispers a string of words I can’t decipher, something in Etruscan he won’t translate. A faint aura grows around his strange, disfigured body, and then it disconnects from him and wraps itself around Cooper like a blanket. Cooper immediately stops crying and falls into a deeper sleep. Tuchulcha nods and says, “I am afraid I cannot heal him. That is not in my power. But he should rest without pain for several hours.”

  “Uh, thanks,” I stammer out.

  Tuchulcha holds Cooper’s unconscious body out to me, and I take him in a bridal carry, one arm under his knees, another at his waist. Cooper’s head sags into my chest, pressed against my bloody coat, and his ruined arm sits at an awkward angle on his abdomen. This close to him, I can see the tip of his broken radius poking out through the torn skin near his elbow. Worse, I realize the burn on his wrist has eaten through both skin and muscle. Cooper will be plagued by this experience for a long, long time. All because I handed him that stupid key, because I was too lazy to take it to evidence myself.

  It’s always the little choices, isn’t it, that sneak up on you with the big damn consequences?

  Adjusting Cooper in my arms, I look at Tuchulcha’s grotesque form again. One tinny voice in my head tells me I should be furious with him, for hurting Cooper so badly, for blowing up that boathouse with all those terrified, stupid kids inside. But my rational voice, awoken from its slumber for the first time since I crossed the veil, reminds me that Cooper is only alive because Tuchulcha advocated for my exchange plea. If he had refused me, booted my ass back to Earth…I banish my budding anger for this ancient creature, stomp out the cinders and douse them with ice.

  Sometimes, you have to let it go.

  I say to him, “I’m ready. Open the portal.”

  Tuchulcha gives me what could be a smile with his shiny black beak and replies, “Farewell, young warrior. And please, for your own sake, do not tread this path again. There are better roads for you to follow, better futures, better ends, both on Earth and in other realms.”

  As he tops off his cryptic message with a nod of respect, he reaches out with two fingers and tears a new hole in space and time. I peer through the portal at the indistinct shapes on the other side I know to be the trees in the woods surrounding the clearing, but I don’t move, immediately, to exit. Instead, I ask Tuchulcha something that’s been bothering me since the moment I found Vanth’s marked page on the book in Cooper’s house: “Tell me, why would someone want the key to the Etruscan Underworld? What could they do with it, except open or close the gates?”

  Tuchulcha is silent for a long, uncomfortable moment, and then he says something that chills me to my weary bones: “I am sorry, warrior, but I do not know.”

  A moment later, with a whispered goodbye, I turn on my heels, away from the Underworld I never want to see again, and march back through the portal to Earth. It feels like moving through a silky curtain, fabric kissing skin, and then my feet touch down on the damp soil of the clearing, my nose inhales the scents of lingering smoke and autumn pine, my lungs breathe in cool air, crisp and soothing in my throat, and my eyes, strained from all I witnessed in the Eververse, blink rapidly, as if clearing dust. And it’s like passing through the veil zaps the last of my energy, too, because I stumble and fall on my ass, taking Cooper’s body with me.

  About the same time my butt hits the ground, my ears, dazed from the experience of Aita’s voice, pick up the chorus of footsteps heading my way. When I glance up from the charred grass of the clearing, I find eight guns pointed at my face, plus ten sets of beggar rings, three swords, a couple of knives, and to my astonishment, an RPG launcher someone must have requisitioned from DSI’s advanced weapons armory. A croak of surprise breaks through my clenched teeth, and I raise one of my hands from Cooper in surrender.

  “Um,” I say, “hey guys.”

  All the DSI agents, faces shadowed by the sinking sun, slowly lower their weapons in uncertainty and disbelief. A few quiet, tense seconds pass by, before one of them steps forward from the crowd and into a beam of orange sunlight, revealing herself as Ella Dean. “Holy hell,” she mutters. “Cal?”

  “Hey, Ella.” I use my surrender hand to give her a little wave. “How’s it hanging?”

  Unfortunately, before she can respond with what I know would be a fascinating answer...

  …I faint.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The infirmary isn’t my least favorite place to wake up, but it is pretty low on the list, right beneath a ditch on the side of the road and right above a coffin. The reason I’m not too fond of coming around on thin white sheets, head pressed into a flat pillow, dressed in nothing but a medical gown open at the ass end, is that it tends to involve pain. A whole heaping helping of aches, all over my body. And today’s experience fulfills my expectations to a T.

  First, I notice the pounding headache. It’s not in my forehead, where my headaches usually are, but spread across my entire skull, a deep, persistent throbbing. When I sit up, it feels like my head is an hourglass full of sand, empty at the top, and the act of moving forty-five degrees flips it over and causes my brain to start spilling into my chest cavity. I wobble, almost fall back on the pillow, and have to use the bed railing to stay upright.

  The second thing I notice is my sling, or, well, a new sling in place of the old one. My shoulder hurts as well, and I remember that I wrenched it the wrong way more than a few t
imes during the final battle with my buddy Charun. I’m hoping I didn’t deal any permanent damage to the joint, or to any of the surrounding muscles, by stressing it too soon after the dislocation.

  Last (but not least), I notice the sharp sting in my neck, when I turn my head in an attempt to peer through the slit in the blue curtain surrounding my bed. I bring my free hand up to feel a thick gauze bandage covering the side of my neck, a few inches above my shoulder, and I remember then that Vanth almost took my head off with her sword. I wonder if the cut needed stitches, if I’ll end up with a scar, if I’ll have a reminder, in plain sight, of my sheer dumb luck forever. Vanth, had she been angry enough at me, could and would have completed that swing.

  Aita asked her to let me go. He didn’t force her to. She could have made a different choice.

  She—

  The curtain draws back, and Dr. Navarro steps into my space. He’s staring at my chart when he enters and doesn’t realize I’m awake until he pulls a syringe out of his pocket and reaches for my IV line. When he spots me staring at him, he drops the syringe onto the edge of my bed, and his eyes bug out. “Kinsey, you’re up.”

  “Looks that way.” My voice is scratchy, throat dry as sandpaper. “What’s with the wide-eyed shock? Was I in a coma or something?”

  Navarro recovers, slips the syringe back into his pocket, and moves closer to check my vitals. “No coma, but we weren’t sure what happened to you in…you know, in the Eververse. You’ve been out for over twenty-four hours, despite my best attempts to rouse you, so we were a bit worried you wouldn’t wake up.” He takes my pulse, then uses his stethoscope to listen to my heart and lungs. “But everything looks and sounds good. How do you feel?”

  “Like I got hit by a tractor-trailer going fifty-five, but the driver didn’t think that was enough punishment on its own, so he backed up, slowly crushing me with all eighteen wheels, and then ran over me full speed again.” I suck in a shallow breath and release it as a sigh. “And that’s almost an understatement, to be honest.”