by Bryan Cohen
Kable felt the pride of preparation go through him. He could’ve easily used his powers to steer all the questions to his strengths, but there was something he liked about studying his potential answers on the fly. For obvious reasons, this was a subject he’d thought about long and hard.
“The Free Ted Movement demonstrates what’s so great about democracy.” He took a pointed step toward the bearded man. “When someone comes up with a cause, the people can choose to support it.” Kable straightened his spine. “As President, I’ll make sure Ted and his team get their fair day in court. I’ll help their case reach the Supreme Court if necessary.” He pumped his fist. “Our government will not stand pat if these heroes have been wrongfully accused!”
The town hall attendees stood and clapped at that one, though they really weren’t supposed to do that until the end. Kable only had to mentally prod three stragglers in the back to make it a full standing ovation.
Two hours later, Kable sat in his dressing room with Terry. Like the meeting room, his quarters seemed to have been constructed in another age when people were smaller and comfort wasn't a top priority. The campaign manager was going over the itinerary for the next day or two, and Kable was smiling and nodding as he flipped through his phone messages. When Terry stopped speaking, Kable took his eyes off the screen and glanced up.
“Something wrong?”
Terry scratched at his neck. “Senator, I have to get something off my chest.”
Kable didn’t recognize the look on his friend’s face. There was anguish in it. And fear.
Kable gave Terry a puzzled glance. “Of course. You know you can tell me anything.”
Terry let out more breath than Kable knew a pair of lungs could hold. “I know we haven’t talked about it, but I actually remember the day of the rally. Sandra. The gun. The plan. I remember it all.”
Kable sighed. Terry had been one of the few people in this world he could count on.
“I see.” Kable considered how discretely he could dispose of Terry’s body. “That really is a shame.”
Terry raised his voice. “I don’t think you understand. I want to help.”
All thoughts of murder leapt out of Kable’s head. He flashed Terry a smile. “Terry. You sly dog.”
Terry didn’t meet Kable's gaze, but he did begin fishing through his briefcase. “When I signed up for this gig, I said I’d help you using whatever means necessary.” He pulled out a sealed manila envelope. The campaign manager’s hand shook slightly as he passed it over. “And I meant it.”
Kable grabbed the packet and opened it up. What he saw inside made him happier than any answer he’d given during the debate. He let out a deep breath. “It really is a pleasure working with you. You turn problems into solutions.”
Kable took one last look at the envelope’s contents. It was a series of satellite pictures. Each one took a different view of a country farm in the middle of nowhere.
Terry’s demeanor remained stoic. “Our sources say that they’ll all be back within the next 12 hours. Would you like me to handle it?”
Kable placed the photos back inside the envelope. “Actually, why don’t we do this together?” He felt joy tickle his insides. “After all, we do make one heck of a team.”
17
Erica’s original name was Cora. She was human through and through. At least, until the light souls chose her to become the living soul.
William wasn’t the most handsome and he didn’t have the greatest handle of the English language, despite being a native speaker. But she was his. They’d been betrothed for months, and she’d only become a living soul three weeks before the wedding date. Though she was torn, and her protector told her she was making a huge mistake, Cora decided to go through with the wedding.
Cora hadn’t detected anything different in William’s eyes when she walked to the altar. He looked as dopey and loving as ever. Shortly before they were to exchange rings, William removed a concealed blade from his pocket. Their friends and family gasped as the blood streamed down onto her dress. Instinct took over, and she kicked William hard in the chest. He slammed into the wall before he fled with the bloody knife in hand. When the adrenaline and endorphins had calmed for a moment, the panic hit her. She’d learned enough to know that William was dead, and that he’d been taken over by the enemy. Everything inside her crumbled, and she fought to keep the tears from mixing with the blood on her dress.
She passed by her parents at a full sprint, unaware that this would be the last time she’d see them. Cora pulled herself loose of the most restraining parts of her garb and pushed the front doors of the church open with her powers. She saw William on a distant rooftop and flew into the air after him. She gained a bit of ground on him with every rooftop leap.
He’s dead. My William is dead.
The tears in her eyes converted to anger. She vowed to kill him and run away from this place. Nobody would ever hurt the ones she loved again.
As she passed by the smithery, Cora floated a blade into the air. She gripped the hilt and screamed at William.
“Enough!” Her voice carried well on a quiet evening with little in the way of wind. “I won’t tire, and I won’t stop until you’re dead.” William turned and she glared at the bloody knife in his hands. “So you may as well face me.”
William grinned in a way that was completely unfamiliar to her. He looked confident and soulless.
“Cora, my love.” William’s voice cut deeper than any blade ever could. “Can’t our first fight come after the bedding?”
Cora’s heart broke as William came running toward her at top speed. He easily kicked away her half-hearted swing of the sword and tripped her. Her back slammed hard on the roof. William aimed his knife at her chest, but she rolled away before he could strike. As she stood up, William kicked the sword from her hands. The blade scattered away. Cora attempted to use her powers to bring it back to her hand, but William’s gaze blocked her abilities.
“You’re too weak.” William turned the knife in his hand. “After you die, I think the first person I kill will be your mother. She’ll make a great addition to the cause.”
Their fight seemed endless, until William took the upper hand and had his boot on Cora's throat.
“It was a losing battle, anyway.” William’s tone was practically jovial. “Soon enough, the dark souls will take everything. It’s simply our right.”
The words she uttered came out in a croak. “How about your right to die?”
Cora slammed her skull into William’s chin. While he didn’t release his grasp, it did cause him to briefly divert his eyes. It was more than enough time for Cora. With a single, powerful motion, she sent the blade shooting through the air behind them. It completely pierced William's back and cut into her own body. The sword had gone through both of their hearts. Her fiancé’s screams and a few flickers of blue light were the last things she remembered in her final moments as a human.
When her eyes opened, she was bewildered to see the bright light of the sky above. Cora felt at her chest, but it was free of the self-inflicted wound. She looked in every direction, but William was nowhere to be seen either. Cora assumed she’d landed herself in heaven. Or hell.
Both guesses were wrong. The steps she’d taken to kill William had been successful, but they’d had an effect on both worlds she couldn’t have anticipated. The mixing of dark soul and living soul blood had changed everything. Cora was no longer mortal. Henceforth, a part of her would be eternal, and her life would never be her own again.
“You okay?”
Erica leapt out of her head and back into the present. Redican was staring at her as the truck they’d borrowed kicked up pebbles along the dirt path.
“I said your name a few times. I wasn’t sure if you were awake or…."
Erica raised her eyebrows. “You can’t get rid of me that easily.”
Nobody can.
Redican smirked. “I’d never dream of it. I just wanted to let you kn
ow we were almost back.”
Erica nodded and looked back out the window. It was unlikely that Ted would end up like her, but the rules that governed all the realms were fluid. Her death had proven that. She just hoped that she’d be able to get to Ted in time before he encountered something that was just as irreversible.
18
Ted stared into the eyes of the General, or William as he wanted to be called. If there were differences between them, then they must have all been on the inside. His appearance aside, there were many questions he wanted to ask.
William looked down to the thousands of training troops. "Could you imagine all of them on Earth?" The General frowned. "It'd be a slaughter."
Ted's stomach twisted. "It sounds like that isn't what you want."
William took his eyes off the training and walked back toward the throne room. "It's a last-ditch option, Ted. This is what your protector and the light souls have driven us to."
Ted fumed a bit at hearing him talk of Erica that way, but there was something that held him back. The raiders in the village had been light souls, and they would've killed him if it weren't for Natalie. He'd been called a weapon and a pawn in this war. What if those terms had been accurate?
Ted followed closely beside the General. "The first dark soul I met killed my friend Sandra. He tried to kill me, too."
Their feet slapped against the stone as William nodded with contrition. "I'm sorry to hear that. Please don't blame us for everything we've done. We're like caged animals at this point, and we're fighting for our own survival." He sighed. "Just look at the conditions of that village you came from."
Ted knew that he and Natalie might have died in the middle of the desert without Razellia. While the whole trial thing was touch and go, Ted had a sneaking suspicion that the village would've been on their side after deflecting the light soul raid. The people in the village seemed to have nothing but each other, and yet the light souls attacked them.
Ted licked at his chapped lips. "It's not what I expected, that's for sure. But it doesn't justify murder."
William raised his eyebrows. "Nothing ever does. Though it seems to happen quite frequently… on both sides."
Ted let his eyes drift to the floor. While he could chalk all of his kills up to self-defense, it didn't mean his hands were free of blood.
William's guards opened the doors into the throne room. Since their absence, a table had been prepared with cooked meats and sweet pastries. He wondered if the flesh and blood version of the strange animal statues on the wall had made it into this meal. Their aroma made Ted realize just how hungry he was. He salivated and swallowed.
The General didn't seem to notice. "I've heard they have a saying on Earth. History is written by the victors. We didn't even come up with the terms light and dark." He gestured to one of the chairs beside the dinner table. "It's just like your ancestors labeled themselves the Allied Forces and their enemies the Axis of Evil during World War II." William lightly chuckled. "World War. How cute."
Ted sat down in front of what looked like a Thanksgiving turkey. It was larger and darker, but the smell brought him back to November. A man wearing a faded blue jumpsuit sliced off a few pieces of the bird and placed it on a plate with several pre-selected pastries. The food was calling to him, but Ted forced himself to remember where he was and who was feeding him.
"How do you know about Earth sayings and World War II?"
The General sat across from him, barely visible through the mounds of food that lay atop the table. When he cut off a piece of the bird and began chewing, Ted took his cue to do the same. It was savory and delicious.
William took a sip of a dark blue drink to wash down the food. "Watching your world isn't difficult, Ted." He looked toward the room's side door. His mind seemed a thousand miles away. "What's hard is watching our people suffer here when there's a solution at hand."
Ted had pulled off and eaten a chunk of a sticky pastry when he realized what the General meant.
He lifted his honey-free hand to rub at his mouth and chin. "Why don't you give the people what they need? You seem to be doing pretty well in your ivory tower."
William smiled. "Feeding and clothing hundreds of thousands of people is a lot harder than wining and dining one VIP." His grin faded. "We've had to close our doors to all but a few religious pilgrims. There are thousands of villages like the one you saw in the wastelands. The people there suffer in silence far beyond my protection."
Ted thought of Vella and wondered how many girls like her didn't have a superhero to swoop in and stop a gang of raiders.
"And you want to give them a ticket out. That's why you want to possess our dead."
The General held up two fingers. "Not all of them. Just enough to reduce our numbers. Fewer people to protect and mouths to feed. It'll keep our people safe. It'll keep them from starving."
Ted thought back to the vague explanations Erica had given him upon learning the origins of his powers. She said the dark souls wanted to take over the Earth and the light souls wouldn't let them. He'd believed it was nothing but a territorial power struggle all this time. Maybe it still was, but the possession of Earth's dead would at least keep dark souls like Razellia and Vella from starvation.
Ted's train of thought derailed when he remembered all the carnage the dark souls had caused. Aside from killing Sandra and Farraday, they'd destroyed Redican's home world and orphaned him. The dark souls had killed and turned a gatekeeper, and then paired her up with Kable during the deadly rally. What the General was saying and what Ted had seen didn't seem to add up.
Ted let his utensil clang against the plate. "If your motives are so altruistic, then why start a murder spree in Treasure? Why attack the mind-reader home world? Why make Adam an ally and attack hundreds of innocent people in the streets?"
Ted thought the General would show frustration or anger at his insolence. Instead, Ted's mirror image smiled and took another drink of the blue beverage. "War is a calculated game of chess, Ted. The light souls won't ever make concessions if they think we're too weak to fight back." He wiped his mouth on a napkin. "Besides, if it weren't for all that, I wouldn't have gotten this one-on-one with you." The General leaned in, as though his next sentence wouldn't be heard by the guards who blocked the exits. "You hold a lot more power in this conflict than you think."
Ted had been on a need-to-know basis for most of the last year. Erica had held him back from the books and other powers that were in reach. Obviously, one of the reasons was the insanity that befell Adam, but perhaps she and the light souls didn't want him going between worlds because of his influence.
Ted furrowed his brow. "You're saying that making a deal with me could end the war?"
The General let the question hang in the air as he pushed back his seat and walked to the other side. The man in the jumpsuit quickly and silently placed another chair beside Ted.
The General sat down, mimicking Ted's posture. "I am. It's an old law, but it's bound in spirit. The living soul is the arbiter of all the worlds. What he or she says goes."
Ted considered his options. He knew the basics of the thousand-plus-year conflict. People were dying on multiple worlds because of the war. He'd lost friends, and while he didn't want to think about it, he might lose more before the war was over. Unless, of course, it ended before he finished his dinner.
He looked straight ahead into the General's eyes. The powerful man with the teen veneer looked kind and forgiving.
He's a wolf in my clothing.
Ted stood up. "You made sure I was worlds away from Erica before you pitched me on this." He took a gulp from his cup of blue liquid, and the sugary concoction trickled down his throat. Ted put the goblet back down. "There's no way I'll agree to anything without seeing her."
The General took in and let out a deep breath. "So much for the easy way." William pushed back his chair and stood eye-to-eye with Ted. "You humans take too long to make decisions."
Ted lifted his chin. "
So says the General in the thousand-year war."
William turned with a flourish and headed back to his throne. As he sat, the shadow once again masked his features. "You've been on the outskirts of this entire conflict. You don't know what it's like to see your loved ones suffer." A flicker of light brought his sinister smile into view. "But you will. Very soon, in fact."
Maybe it was because a person who looked exactly like him uttered the words, but Ted was able to read between the lines with ease.
"Natalie." Ted's blood boiled. "What did you do to her?!"
The General gave a dismissive wave with his hand. "Guards. Take him to her." He leaned ever so slightly forward, bringing his eyes into the light. "Come back when you want to talk, hero."
Ted reached out with his powers; he wanted to rip the General's throat out. But with a host of dark souls around him, his efforts unsurprisingly had no effect. His heart expanded and retracted at a marathon pace as he was led from the room.
I shouldn't have let them take her. I'm going to kill him.
The guards guided Ted down multiple new corridors. None of the decorations and ancient stonework made much of an impact on him, as his rage kept his mind from doing any kind of sightseeing. When they opened the door to what looked like a dingy hotel room, Ted heard a low moan from inside. Before he could turn to scream at the guards, they shut and locked the door behind him.
Ted dashed across the room and turned white when he saw the trail of blood leading him on. It stopped at the base of a bed that Natalie lay upon. Bruises dotted her face and neck. While the shirt she wore covered most of her midsection, the small bit that was exposed revealed multiple shallow cuts, each of them several inches long. Natalie was awake, but it was difficult to tell with one of her eyes swollen shut.
She turned her body toward Ted with significant difficulty. "Great." Her voice was hollow. "I guess I got enough torture for two. This must be what pregnancy is like."