Carla had a feel for the pattern now. The rogue had isolated her, damaged some of her sense of self in her brain, then overlaid false memories of abuse and attempted murder. Then he showed her kindness and gave her a new identity as his girlfriend. With the damage and confusion in her brain, that identity was all she had to hold on to.
Pam went on in her monotone voice. “He showed me a picture of one of the men who was trying to kill me and told me his name was Sutton. Then he said I had to kill Sutton. He said I had to be clever and use the only talent I had—sex.”
Carla felt the waves of shame and terror Styx had forced her to experience. The weight of it pressed on her chest, making it hard to breathe. Flashes of light burst on the edges of her vision.
But the lights weren’t emanating from Pam; they were coming from somewhere else. She fought to keep control, something she’d never had to do before. Maybe she was too tired, or they’d been out of their bodies too long. Tightening her hand on Pam’s spirit, she struggled to keep her chakras open and maintain their connection.
Losing Pam now would cause her spirit to break from her body. In mortal terms, Pam would be in a coma. Carla had never, ever lost a patient. Forcing herself to sound calm, she said, “Pam, stay with me. Keep looking at me.”
Her eyes shifted away. “What is that? It’s bright and warm. It’s calling me …”
“No! Don’t look at it.” Another entity was on the astral plane, and struggling to get their attention. A soul? A demon? “We’re going to travel back, and you’re going to settle into your body.”
“I like it here. I felt awful there …”
She hadn’t considered this. She’d been so quick to want to see what had happened to cause the mortal to shoot Sutton, she hadn’t thought out Pam’s mental state. Since Pam had been asleep, Carla hadn’t talked to her to assess the danger. She struggled to block out everything but Pam and guiding her back to the physical plane. The snaps of light were drawing together into a single mass. Don’t look, she warned herself. “I’m going to help you with those feelings, I promise. Right now, I just want you to …”
The light burst over Carla, severing her connection to Pam and dragging her to some other place. A place filled with blood and screams.
No matter how far he went, it wasn’t far enough. Sutton had made a mile-wide sweep around his cabin.
No rogues.
But he knew the witch was in his cabin. He would always know when she was nearby—he’d touched her blood.
For two months now, he’d been trying to purge her from his body and mind. He’d touched her blood when he’d rescued her from the rogues, and now she was seductive poison to him. His body tightened with a blast of white-hot lust at just the thought of her. His skin burned to feel the cool power of her witch’s blood.
Her blood had killed his desire for other women, and saddled him with the dual cravings for sex and blood. The man in him wanted to make love to her, the curse wanted to cut her and bleed her to death. If that didn’t make a man insane, he didn’t know what would.
He stood on the rocks with his arms crossed and watched the powerful waves crash below him. The dawn hadn’t yet broken, but he could see perfectly well.
He could feel her in his cabin. His home. The place where he had always felt at peace. Alone in the middle of nature.
He’d been alone since he was seventeen.
He watched as another wave swelled and lifted higher and higher, then broke. Like the curse inside him that was swelling and unfurling more each day.
When would he break?
His uncle had been thirty-one when he broke. His dad had been thirty-seven when he knew he was on the verge of breaking and ended his own life in a fiery plane crash.
Sutton was thirty-two.
He closed his eyes, trying to draw in the tang of the ocean and wash out his memories.
Instead she filled his mind. Carla. Long white-blond hair, searing eyes with the colors of green, yellow, and brown, her incredible body … it was an unendurable torture to want her so badly and know he couldn’t have her.
He dreamed of making love to her, of bringing her to his bed, stripping her of her clothes, looking, touching, and tasting his fill. Then filling her with his cock, joining with her as deep as she could take him. Her sweet moans making his balls ache …
Then her screams ripped the dream into a nightmare. He saw the silver knife stabbing her, butchering her.
It was his knife, Sutton was sure of it. He was going rogue, inch by inch, day by day. The nightmare of killing her was becoming more frequent, more violent, until he’d awoken, covered in sweat and the gut-cramping fear that he’d killed her.
His dad had known when he’d broken, when the curse had him, and he’d done the right thing.
Sutton knew Carla was the witch who could break him.
How much longer before he broke completely? Not yet, not today, he decided. Not as long as he still cared that she was putting herself in danger from the rogues by hypnotizing the woman who’d shot him.
Not today, but tomorrow? He didn’t know.
Carla’s spirit slammed into her body, leaving her dizzy and nauseous. She looked at Pam’s slack face and the full impact hit her. “Oh God, I’ve lost her! I have to go back.”
“Wait, slow down. What happened?”
Carla turned to see that Darcy was next to her. She’d obviously moved to her side when Carla was on the astral plane with Pam. “I don’t know, exactly. Something else showed up on the astral plane. Then it dragged me into a vision and I lost my hold on Pam’s spirit.” Turning back to the figure on the bed, she added, “Now she’s in a coma while her spirit is wandering on the astral plane.”
“Was it a demon?” Axel asked sharply from Darcy’s other side.
Carla took a minute to breathe and pull herself together. “I don’t know. It didn’t feel like a demon. Whatever it was showed me a witch being murdered with a silver knife. I assumed it was a rogue killing her.” She turned to look at Darcy. “Maybe it was the soul of the witch trying to show me how she was killed. But the dead have never talked to me before.” It didn’t make sense.
Darcy’s cool fingers touched her arm. “What exactly did you see?”
She tried to get it right. “It was like I was inside the knife, stabbing her over and over. She kept screaming, the blood was splashing all over me …”
“Have you ever seen a soul on the astral plane before?”
Carla shook her head. “That’s not how the astral plane works, though. We were there to find out about Pam and why she shot Sutton. I was able to catch a few images that were manifested from Pam’s subconscious. But it’s rare to see something not of your choosing. It’s a spiritual plane, not physical.”
“Is it possible that the poor witch’s soul was so traumatized by her murder that she got stuck on the astral plane on her way to Summerland? And somehow she found you?”
She didn’t have an answer. “I have no idea, but I have to go back and find Pam. I can’t just leave her like this …” She waved her hand toward the bed.
Darcy said softly, “Do you think I could do it? Axel can help me.”
Carla shook her head. “She won’t recognize you, may not be able to hear you because you don’t have the connection to her spirit. I can’t believe I lost her.”
“It wasn’t your fault; something got in your way. We’ll find a way to fix this. But you can’t go back right now. You’re too upset and we don’t know what you encountered.”
Axel looked over Darcy’s head and said, “Did you find out anything about the rogue who messed with Pam? Is it brainwashing?”
She lifted her gaze to him, glad to have an answer to at least one question. “Yes.” She recounted Pam’s story about Styx brainwashing Pam into trying to kill Sutton.
“It’s the rogues, they’ve reorganized. Now they are using mortals in this war.” Axel’s voice was grim.
Carla knew the rogue’s goal was to kill all the witche
s. The demon, Asmodeus, had promised the rogues he’d grant them immortality once they’d done that. With their souls gone, the rogues were desperate to live forever so they wouldn’t spend eternity as formless, pain-racked shades walking the between-worlds. But now that the Wing Slayer Hunters were actively hunting and killing rogues to protect witches, the rogues had to get rid of them, too. “Whoever did it used his memory-shifting to destroy her memories of herself, then he forced new memories of people she’d thought she trusted beating her and trying to kill her. Once Pam’s self-identity was lost, the rogue began to reconstruct her into what he wanted. Normally, brainwashing takes significant time, but this was compressed into a week or two.”
Darcy and Axel looked troubled. Darcy asked, “Do you think they could do this with any mortal?”
Sadly, she answered, “No, but a young, still-impressionable woman, particularly if she wants to please the people in her life, is usually a good candidate.” The psyche was delicate, shaped by so many things, and more easily damaged than most people wanted to believe. She could help Pam, help her find her real memories, rediscover herself and then have enough confidence in herself to be less susceptible to outside influences. But first she had to reunite her spirit with her physical body.
Axel said, “The rogue must be tracking her.”
She shook her head. “The tracking works by marking the brain, and right now, Pam’s brain is off-line. He can’t track her.”
Axel lifted his hand and slid it up Darcy’s arm and under her hair, absently kneading her neck. “The rogue could have been tracking her before she went into the coma. We have to move her.”
There was no question about this. “She has to stay with me so I can work to get her back.”
“All right. We’ll move her to the safe house where you’re staying.”
Sutton was in his zone. He scanned in a picture of Pam, entered the pertinent facts like height, weight, hair and eye color, then wrote a program to crawl through police missing person reports. Then he hacked into the Department of Motor Vehicles, and used another program to find licenses that matched a woman with the first name of Pam or Pamela, last name Miller, and her approximate age and physical description.
He could hear the other hunters moving around the warehouse, the huge cavernous building Axel owned next to his club. Inside was a gym, a small sitting area with a refrigerator, a tattoo station, and a large pool table in the center of the room. The music was blaring and the men were talking, but his world was narrowed to his corner, the state-of-the-art computer station he’d designed. He glanced up at the wall of monitors above his workstation, which displayed feeds from the video cameras set up within the club.
He shifted his gaze to a screen that showed several angles of the outside of Dr. Carla Fisk’s house. He’d wired the security there himself, trusting her safety to no one else. The outside of the house was quiet. She was safe.
As long as she stayed away from him.
Another screen flashed a warning that the warehouse security was paused, and Sutton shifted his gaze to that monitor to see Axel coming in the back door. He rearmed the security system and cut the music in the warehouse.
Axel stopped by the pool table and said, “Given what’s happened, we have to take more seriously the fact that Brigg is missing.” He zeroed his gaze in on Linc. “That’s why I wanted you here. You might be a target, too. It’s not a secret that you and Brigg have the outline of your wings.”
Linc straddled a roller chair, his arms folded over the back of the seat. It looked casual, but his jaw was clenched tight. “If he was killed by some mortal chick controlled by rogues, wouldn’t they dump his body to show us that they killed him?”
Axel met the man’s gaze. “Not if he was the test to see if their brainwashing worked, and they have something bigger planned.” He added, “Starting now, we’re actively looking for Brigg. Fully winged or not, he’s one of ours. We’re going to hunt down rogues and find out what they know. But we have to prepare for the other outcome.”
“He’s not rogue,” Linc said. “He’d die before he let that happen.”
Key, known to the world as Kieran DeMicca, author of a dark comic book series, lifted his head from the drawing he was working on. At just over six feet, with spiky blond hair, a ladykiller smile, and a dragon tattooed on his muscular chest, he looked the least threatening of the men. More than one dead man had made the mistake of believing that. “What went down with Carla and Pam?”
Sutton watched Axel walk over to the fridge and grab a beer while explaining why Carla thought Pam was brainwashed by a man named Styx. Axel looked at him. “Got anything on a Styx?”
Sutton turned and opened his files on known rogues. He was building the most comprehensive database outside the Rogue Cadre. He ran a few searches, then said, “It doesn’t pop. Nothing on a Styx.”
Linc said, “Can’t the doctor get more from Pam?”
Axel told them about the interference on the astral plane, and that Pam was in a coma.
Sutton’s blood began to pound in his head, and he involuntarily turned to study the monitor that showed the outside of Carla’s house. Forcing himself to swivel back around in his chair, he felt the burn start under his skin. A voice in his head whispered, Carla’s yours. Go get her, before someone else does. His skin itched.
“Any leads on who Pam is?” Axel asked. “The rogues had to get her from someplace.”
“I’m running searches, but she’d have to be in the system somewhere to pop. The DMV search will only narrow it down to women her general size and description with a first name of Pam. It’ll take days to go through that. The missing persons police reports are our best bet. But if she’s from out of state, then I’ll have to widen the parameters.”
Key said, “Back to Styx. He probably gave Pam a fake name. Let’s look at this from another angle. Where did he take her? Where did he keep her while he screwed with her head repeatedly?”
“We’ve searched every place we can think of.” Phoenix Torq’s boots echoed on the cement of the warehouse as he paced by the pool table in the center of the cavernous room. Frustration flexed the wings of the phoenix tattooed on his massive biceps. Defeat was not in his vocabulary. In his hobby of hunting down human scum that preyed on women, he never gave up until he got his man. “Where is the Rogue Cadre’s new headquarters? Where’s Quinn Young?”
Ramsey Virtos stood with his legs spread, his hands folded behind his back, and his thunderbird tattoo hidden beneath his shirt. He studied the computer monitor with the grid he’d designed. The methodical search worked from the outsides of the city, from the ocean to the borders, inward. His military background had honed his precision. “Quinn Young has changed the battle plan. He found out that drawing us to them didn’t work.”
Sutton had to fight down the vivid memory of that night. The rogues had kidnapped Carla, along with Darcy’s cousin Joe and the woman he loved, Morgan. They took them to the rogue compound and sent a video to the Wing Slayer Hunters.
A taunt.
He could see Carla again, strapped down like a sacrifice on that steel table, naked and bleeding …
All to get to Darcy. Quinn Young had to kill off his witch-daughter and her soul-mirror mate. Ironically it had been Darcy who had arrived and saved the day with her magic. Which brought him back to Ram—the witch hunter was right. Young was smart and adaptable. “He’s trying another method of attack.”
“Using mortal women.” Phoenix’s disgust was clear in his tone.
Axel shoved away from the pool table he was leaning on. “He’s using the women to try to kill off the unbonded Wing Slayer Hunters, before you find your soul mirrors. These women can’t kill Darcy or me, we’re immortal.” He ran his hand through his dark hair.
Ram’s blue eyes were icy with controlled rage. “But Young does have the Immortal Death Dagger, the one thing that can kill the two of you. He’s out there somewhere, just waiting for his chance to do it.”
Phoenix
said, “They are killing witches, feeding their sick craving for the blood, right under our noses. Witches are still disappearing. Right now, they could be killing a witch who is one of our soul mirrors!” His fury pulsed in his voice.
Sutton knew they all feared they wouldn’t find their soul mirrors in time. But it was already too late for him. Every hour brought him closer to his breaking point. He stood up. “I’m going to my house. Maybe I’ll get lucky and a rogue will show up.” Killing would release some of his stress.
Axel met him at the door. “You have women friends. You need to go see one of them. You’re on the edge.”
He and Axel had been friends for years, ever since they’d met working for an elite security team for the club circuit. They’d both had the same goal: Never give in to the curse and kill a witch. Axel knew him better than anyone else, so he told him the truth. “Sex isn’t helping anymore, A.”
Axel put his hand on Sutton’s shoulder. “Give it another try. You just have to hang in there until you find your soul mirror.”
It was time they all started facing the truth. “Not all of us are going to find our soul mirror in time. I won’t turn, at least not if I can help it.” The rogues were trying to compel witch hunters to turn by blooding them, bringing them into contact with witch blood. “I’ll end it before I turn. But if the worst does happen, you made a vow.” All the Wing Slayer Hunters had made the vow when they tattooed the wings. They would fight the curse, but if one of them went rogue, the others would kill him.
Axel clenched his jaw, his fingers tightening on Sutton’s shoulder. “It won’t happen.”
“But if it does?” He needed to know that they would stop him if he reached the point of no return, stop him before he killed a witch and lost his soul. Dying wasn’t a big deal, but living as a soulless creature killing the very witches they had been created to protect … that was an abomination.
Spending an eternity as a pain-racked shade didn’t appeal to him much either. Axel narrowed his eyes. “I will honor the vow. We all will.”
Soul Magic Page 3