Soul Breaker

by Clara Coulson

  Navarro plucks a penlight from his pocket and clicks it on. “Well, luckily, despite what you feel, you’re in pretty good shape. A couple of bruised ribs and that one laceration on your neck are the worst of it, besides the injuries you already had.” He shines the penlight in my eyes, and I recoil, gasping, because it feels like he shoved a torch into my corneas. “Hm, some sensitivity there. You have a migraine?”

  “Something close to it.”

  “Let me know if that doesn’t ease up.” He turns the light off and drops it back into his coat pocket. “I ran about twenty-five different scans of your entire body, using every piece of tech I have on hand, and I didn’t see anything seriously wrong. But the effects of the Eververse on the human body are not well studied, seeing as most people who go there don’t come back.” He hangs my chart on the end of the bed, then crosses his arms and gives me a hard look. “I would advise you to take it slow, Kinsey, stick to desk duty for a while, but since that advice had no effect last time, I’m going to write you a prescription for some pain meds and put you on mandatory medical leave for a week.”

  “But—”

  His look morphs into a full-on glare. “I’m your doctor. You do what I say. Or else.”

  I swallow my rebuttal. “Yes, sir.”

  He holds his glare for a moment longer, until he’s convinced my answer was honest, and then he nods. “I’ll write up your discharge for you, so you can leave when you feel well enough to go home. I recommend you rest, relax, and eat well to get your strength back. Come see me for a follow-up in three or four days. Unless you start feeling worse. Then come immediately.” Another look.

  “Yes, Doc.”

  “Good.” He moves toward the curtain, tugging a wrinkle out of his coat. “Once I get your ass out of here, I’ll only have one patient left to care for. It’s been a hectic few days for me, let me tell you, between that park raid and the battle in the woods. Had to call up every DSI doctor and surgeon on the roster to handle the influx. What a mess. There were a few times I thought—”

  “Wait,” I blurt out, “who’s the other patient? Cooper Lee?”

  Navarro halts his retreat and gives me a thin-lipped smile. “Indeed. The other miracle survivor from your Eververse jaunt.”

  “Is he okay?” Fear spikes in my chest, a physical weight. “Is his arm okay? It was so broken and burned, I was afraid…”

  “Whoa, now! Calm down.” Navarro says, as the heart monitor to my left starts beeping. “Cooper Lee is all right, as far as I know. A surgeon fixed his radius, no problems there, and a burn specialist, another DSI practitioner, did some work on his wrist.” He raises a hand to silence me before I vomit out more panicked words. “Not going to lie to you, Cal—Cooper will have some fairly extensive scars when all is said and done, but the specialist, Kate Lancing, assured me he’ll regain full functionality and won’t have any lingering pain after the rehab. She’s very good. I promise.”

  I rub my bruised face with my one good hand and sigh. “Is he awake?”

  Navarro shakes his head. “No. He was in surgery for several hours, under anesthesia, and he was already unconscious when he came in. Though he didn’t appear to have a head injury of any kind…”

  “It was Tuchulcha,” I murmur.

  “What?” Navarro’s eyebrows spring up.

  “The fire spirit, Tuchulcha. He used a spell to make Cooper fall asleep.” It only occurs to me after the words leave my mouth that Navarro has no idea Tuchulcha was helping me in the end, so his horrified reaction, complete with a loud gasp, makes perfect sense. Before he rushes out of my space to go check on Cooper and call a sleeping spell specialist, I add, “It was to help Cooper, not hurt him.”

  Navarro skids to a stop in front of the curtain. “Come again?”

  “It’s a long story. But the spell wasn’t malicious. Cooper was in pain, so Tuchulcha used a spell to help him fall asleep.” I shrug one shoulder. “I don’t know how long it was supposed to last…”

  Someone on the other side of the infirmary calls out “Hello?” in a weak, wavering voice.

  And I’ll be damned if it isn’t Cooper Lee.

  I reach over the side of my bed, press the switch for the railing and lower it, then swing my legs off the mattress and use my IV stand to haul myself up. Navarro, who’s itching to run to Cooper’s side, takes a professional moment to disconnect me from all the equipment I was wired to and shut everything down. Then, with him leading me by the hand to keep me steady, we trek across the wide infirmary room toward the only blue curtain still drawn. When we reach it, Navarro tugs it open, revealing the frail, pale form of Cooper Lee lying on the bed inside.

  Cooper blinks up at us blearily for a second before recognition fills his expression. “Cal? Dr. Navarro?”

  Navarro sighs in relief. “Yes, Cooper. That’s right.” He moves closer and starts to run through all the same checks he gave me a minute ago. “Do you know where you are?”

  “The infirmary?” Cooper says, uncertain. “Am I really here? I thought…”

  I have no idea how much Cooper remembers from his ordeal, given that Charun’s hammer blow knocked him for a loop when it broke his arm. Since he took a more direct hit to the arm than I did in the Memorial Garden, the spell on the hammer must have scrambled his brain with overwhelming false pain signals, to the point where he was incapacitated. He never seemed to be completely awake, in the woods or in the Underworld, but he wasn’t completely unconscious either until Tuchulcha spelled him asleep as we were leaving. There may be snippets of Charun, of Vanth, of Aita—God forbid—that he remembers. Or perhaps he only remembers glimpses of the Underworld itself. The craggy cliffs. The starless sky.

  For his sake, I hope it’s the latter.

  I sink into a visitor’s chair next to his bed, while Navarro is doing his work, and take Cooper’s good hand into my own. “You’re back on Earth, Cooper. They didn’t get you.”

  “They didn’t?” Cooper’s watery blue eyes shed a few confused tears, and he sniffles. “I thought for sure…I thought they were going to kill me, Cal. I remember a woman with a sword, and she was mad at me, and she called me a thief, and she said she was going to execute me for my crimes, and I was…” He chokes on his words. “I was so scared. I didn’t know what was going on.”

  Navarro shoots me a questioning glance as he’s pressing the stethoscope to Cooper’s chest, but I ignore it. I squeeze Cooper’s hand harder and lean close to him. “Oh, Cooper. I’ll be honest with you. All that stuff did happen. That key I gave you the other night, to hand over to evidence—turns out it was the key to the gates of the goddamn Underworld. That’s what Brendon and the other kids stole in their heist. And my ignorant ass gave it to you, and because you had it, Charun and Tuchulcha took you to the Underworld, so that Vanth could execute you as a thief.”

  Navarro gapes at me in unadulterated horror, while Cooper’s confusion begins to dissolve.

  The battered archivist says, “The key. Yeah. I remember now. I took it home with me to…oh.” He clenches his eyes shut and fidgets in his bed. “Fuck. I took it home because it looked weirdly familiar, and, right before I fell asleep, I figured out why: it resembled something I’d read about earlier in the day, in the book. So I got up, opened the book, found the article on Vanth, and…I realized what the key really was about thirty seconds before that big blue monster walked into my house.”

  Cooper stares at his injured arm, wrapped in a mountain of gauze, and tears start pouring down his face. “Stupid. I’m so stupid.”

  “No, Cooper.” I grab a tissue from the box on his nightstand and start dabbing at his cheeks. “I’m the stupid one. I gave you the key, assuming it wasn’t dangerous. A good detective would have known better than to make an assumption like that.”

  Cooper tugs the tissue out of my hand and continues wiping his own face. “Yeah, but I told you I’d hand it in for evidence, and I didn’t. I shouldn’t have—”

  Navarro clears his throat. “While this blam
e game is certainly fun to listen to, I’m sure if you look at the running tally, you can agree that what happened, however it happened, either paid for or canceled out any and all mistakes you two made during this case. So, I would advise you to drop the back-and-forth guilt trips. Because they’re not going to help you heal any faster.” He grabs Cooper’s chart from the end of the bed and scribbles a few notes on it.

  “What happened…?” Cooper mutters, echoing Navarro. “Wait, what did happen? Why did those Etruscan monsters not kill me? How did I get out of the Underworld?”

  Before I can gloss over the question with a non-answer, Navarro replies, “Kinsey went into the Eververse and brought you back.”

  Cooper’s jaw drops open, and the look he gives me implies he thinks I’m an angel with golden, fluffy wings who descended from heaven in a shower of trumpet music. (I want to punch Navarro for that—the last thing I need from Cooper is hero worship.) “Cal, you…”

  “Don’t thank me, Cooper.” My voice grows rough. “Please. It’s my fault you ended up in the Underworld in the first place. Don’t thank me for rectifying a mistake that almost cost you everything.”

  “Huh? But Cal…” Cooper’s starry-eyed expression sours, and he gawks at me for a silent minute. Then his face turns pink as he sputters out an incomprehensible string of words that almost has me worried he’s on the verge of a seizure. Then he snaps, huffing, puffing like he wants to blow the DSI building down, throws his crumpled tissue in my face as hard as he can, and shouts across the infirmary, “Calvin Kinsey, you’re an idiot!”

  Navarro, wide-eyed, sits Cooper’s chart back in its spot and creeps out of the bed space, closing the curtain behind him and leaving me alone with the infuriated archivist. Cooper drills his harshest glower into my face, and he would cross his arms if one of them wasn’t wrapped in a bandage the width of a cinderblock. I open my mouth to speak, but he shushes me with an angry, pointing index finger, an inch too close to my eye for comfort. For a few seconds, he remains silent, breathing hard, before he finds his voice again.

  “So help me God,” says Cooper Lee, “if you ever try to apologize for saving my life again, I’ll beat you over the head with the heaviest book I can find. I don’t care how much you want to stupidly blame yourself for events beyond your control, Cal, don’t you ever apologize for risking your own life to save mine. Or anyone else’s, for that matter. Don’t apologize for being a hero. Don’t apologize for saving the world. And don’t, for a moment, think you have the right to apologize for not saving everyone and everything all the time.”

  His words sink slowly into my stubborn skin, but I do absorb them, even if I won’t admit it for a long time to come. “Okay. Okay, I won’t apologize.”

  “Good,” he sighs out. “Now that we’ve cleared that up, let me say this: thank you for saving my life, Cal Kinsey.” He waves his finger in front of my nose. “What do you say in response?”

  “Uh, you’re welcome?”

  “There we go!” He lets a tired laugh slip past his lips. “You got it. And now I say: Since you’re such a brave, valiant knight, coming to my rescue in the Eververse and all, I think you also have a right to stop by my house for food whenever you want. Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. Breakfast for dinner. You name it. It’s yours. I can cook anything.”

  I join him in his laughter, despite my best efforts. “So that’s my reward for saving a life? Good home cooking?”

  Cooper snorts. “Unless you want me to design you an iPhone app. Because those are the only two things I’m good at, other than research. And I can’t give you anything with research, except knowledge, and that’s a really boring present unless we’re on a case. And I think I’m done with this whole me-at-the-task-room-table, direct-involvement-in-murder-cases thing for, you know, at least a couple weeks.”

  We look into each other’s eyes for a second, quiet, and then we burst into a fit of giggles. And then we both say Ow because our bodies feel like they just came out from under the business end of a steamroller.

  “I mean it, Cal. Thanks.” Cooper wipes a stray tear from his cheek. “I can’t believe you went into the Eververse to save me. I can’t believe you got out of there, with me, alive. I don’t think anyone at DSI’s ever been to the Eververse before. We might be the first two agents to survive the other side.” He lightly punches my arm. “That’s a cool distinction, huh?”

  “Yeah.” I punch him back. “It is.”

  Navarro pokes his head inside the curtain. “I don’t mean to break up this touching moment, but I feel like I should tell you, Kinsey: There’s a task room meeting going on upstairs. Everyone and their mother is there, including Commissioner Bollinger, to discuss the case wrap. Since you’re up, I thought you might want to stop by.” His tone sharpens. “Before you head home for medical leave.”

  “Right.” I tug at my IV line. “I have some explaining to do.”

  “To put it mildly,” Navarro quips. “I’ll help you get that needle out. And I’ll grab a spare uniform for you from the back room.”

  “Thanks.” I turn to Cooper Lee again. “Are you okay with me leaving? Or do you want me to stay?”

  Cooper smiles at me, bright and true and happy, and it might be the greatest thing I’ve seen in the two years since Mac died. He pokes my chin with his finger and replies, “Of course you should go. You have an epic hero tale to tell! Breaking into the Etruscan Underworld to rescue a kidnapped fellow agent?” He shakes his head. “Man, that’s the kind of stuff they’ll write into the books one day. Mark my words. You’re going to be so famous, Cal.” His gentle hand pushes me toward the curtain—

  “One day, Calvin Kinsey, everybody will know your name.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  After six hours of recounting my “epic hero tale” to the DSI commissioner, my captain, a bunch of other captains, and more gawping agents than I can count with all my fingers and toes, I finally hop out of my truck in front of my apartment building and head inside. Only to find a witch waiting at my front door with a mysterious backpack.

  As I approach, Erica the witch cocks an eyebrow and says, “Heard a rumor you came back from the dead, hot Crow. Glad to see it was true.” Her gaze roves over my entire body, black and blue from head to toe. “Though I have to admit you look more like a zombie right now than a breathing human being.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it.” I hobble up to the door and tug my key out of my pocket. “You should see the cut on my neck—eighteen stitches—where the less ugly guardian of the Underworld almost took my head off with a sword.”

  Erica gives me a sideways glance. “Sounds like a fascinating story, Crow. You going to let me in, so we can chat about it over a nice drink, or are you planning to make me stand in your hall all night long?”

  “As much as I would like to treat myself to some good booze, witch”—I unlock the door and turn the knob—“I don’t have any at the moment. Haven’t been to the grocery store, what with all these Eververse monsters running around.”

  “Well, then, Cal Kinsey, I guess it’s your lucky day.” Erica slides the backpack off her shoulder and unzips it, revealing a bottle of wine and a few glasses to match. How she didn’t break those fragile glasses by stuffing them into a flimsy bag, I’ll never know. Must be a magic quirk.

  “Okay, that is a little enticing.” I push the door open and gesture for her to enter. “I guess I’ll let you in this time.”

  She slinks by me, donning a wicked smirk, and I follow her into my apartment.

  For the record, we don’t have sex. This time.

  Erica pops the wine cork, fills the two glasses, and we sit on my living room couch, discussing my trip to the Eververse. She’s never been there herself, but she knows a few wizards and witches who’ve dared to venture past the veil and lived to tell the tale. She describes to me a few of the places they’ve visited and the types of creatures they’ve encountered on their journeys. She listens with great interest as I describe, in return, the imposing beauty and p
rowess of Vanth, the terrifying shadowed form of Aita, lurking beyond the gates, the true nature of Tuchulcha the fire spirit and his creepy head of snakes.

  We speak for hours on end, until I start to run out of steam.

  Erica plucks the empty wine glass from my hand. “Think it might be night-night time for you, Cal. You’re barely sitting up.”

  I lean back into my comfy couch cushion, closing my eyes, and reply, “I don’t disagree with you, but we do have a bit more to talk about.”

  “Oh, like what?” She sets both glasses on my coffee table.

  “Like our relationship.” I peek at her with one eye. “And if we have one.”

  “Figured that was going to come up.” Erica stretches her arms until her joints pop, chuckling. “Going to be frank with you, Crow. I’m not up for any romance right now. Got burned on a long-term relationship last year, and I’m not back in that playing field yet. But if you want to stop by my house every now and then for a fun night, I wouldn’t mind. I’m not against a friends-with-benefits situation.”

  I open my other eye and stare at her, then sigh in relief. I was worried this would get awkward, but she’s driving in the direction I wanted her to go. I wonder if it’s because she’s already guessed my feelings, or if her own match up with mine by coincidence. Either way… “Yeah. Yeah, I’d like that. I’m not up for a serious relationship either. I mean, hell, I almost got myself killed the other day—who knows what else DSI will throw my way? I can’t be thinking about marriage and kids and all that. Not now. Maybe not ever.” I shrug. “But I can certainly think about sex. They can’t take that away from a guy.”

  Erica grins. “No, they can’t. Tell you what. I’ll give you my number. Text me when you’re feeling lonely, and I’ll do the same.”

  I match her grin. “Sounds good to me.”

  We exchange phones, type in our numbers, say our goodbyes for the evening, and then Erica packs up her things to leave. As she’s slinging her pack over her shoulder, she catches me off guard with a quick kiss to the corner of my lips. At my surprised expression, she says, “That’s for not getting your dumb self killed by jumping into the Eververse. I would have been really bummed to lose your fine ass so soon.” She smacks my cheeks with both her hands and rises from the couch, heading toward the hall.