by Lucy Auburn
The unicorn is supposedly capable of controlling people with emotions. Like some kind of a mastermind, but with happiness and joy and lust. It caused wars in its time on Earth, and lured maidens to dangerous places to use them as human sacrifice.
So, hopefully that's not what this is. Especially since I'm no maiden—just ask the four demons I lost my virginity to. Given my options, I guess I don't really have much else of a choice. And at least the unicorn's emotional whatever-it-is made the poltergeist's nightmare of despair go away.
I follow the damned thing, glowing white butt, twitching tail, and all. It has silver horseshoes and smells like daffodils. A goddamned unicorn, I swear to fuck. It's so ridiculously cheesy and mythical. I wonder if it shits and farts like horses do. Maybe rainbows and butterflies come out of its butt.
The unicorn stops, looks back at me, and makes a very displeased face. It stomps a rear hoof and twitches its tail. I swear, it's almost like the thing has been listening in on my thoughts—and maybe it has been. It is an all-powerful glowing-white virgin girl's fantasy, after all.
On its internal prompting, I walk up next to the unicorn's front legs and rest my hand across its... hump? Withers? Shoulder blades? That thing in the horse behind their neck. Whatever. It walks forward now that I'm up here next to it, apparently self-conscious about all my staring at its butt and thinking about its poop.
I hope my guys are okay.
They don't have immortal unicorn spirits to guide them through the poltergeist's nightmare, after all. If they're unlucky, they've got the dragon or the mermaid guiding them. Those two were the worst.
Soon enough, we reach a path in the darkness. Then, in the distance, a gate—and beyond it, a door. There's something stirring about the door, like it holds secrets or promises. As I get closer, the unicorn falling back behind me, it lights up with this glowing white warmth.
"Through here?" I look back, and the unicorn nods its head, stomping a hoof. "Okay. I hope you're not like, tricking me or something. Unicorns don't eat human flesh, do they? I mean, I'm pretty sure we're in the spirit realm, so I'm not flesh, but—"
The thing makes a low, threatening sound. Then it lowers its head, the shiny incandescence of its horn pointed towards me, and bunches up its muscles.
"Okay, I'm going! Don't shish-ka-bob me. I swear, you're very ill-tempered for a mythical creature featured on Lisa Frank notebooks."
Grabbing the door handle, I swing it wide and take a step forward before the unicorn can decide that I'd be better off with a big ol' hole in my middle. I don't know how much of the stuff that happens in the spirit realm is permanent, but I'm not going to test it out.
A thought wiggles in the back of my mind, though, and I stop before I step through completely. Turning back to the unicorn, I ask it, "Why aren't you in the Great Beyond? You know, the whole reason why you volunteered to die in the first place."
The thing swings its head, looking deep into the darkness.
I stare in the direction that it's looking.
And get the sense that something is deeply, terribly wrong. It may be dead, and its spirit may have gone deep inside the spirit realm, to the very verge of the afterlife, but the unicorn hasn't been able to cross over. Not yet. Because there's a disturbance that's been keeping it here.
"I'll figure it out," I tell the thing. "If I can, that is. I mean, I'm new to this shit. But I'll try. You should get to frolic in fields of daisies with other unicorns, after all. Or whatever it is that you do."
The unicorn stares at me with impossibly deep eyes. I wonder if it's thinking about what a dumbass I am. It probably regrets ever letting me into its coffin to release its spirit. Or maybe I'm just projecting all my fears and anxieties onto a shimmery horse with a weird glowing horn.
As I walk through the door, I cross my fingers that I'm not about to find myself face-to-face with the sphinx or the mermaid. I definitely am not in the mood to face down the dragon, either. Thankfully, though, the only thing waiting for me on the other side of the door is a white light, followed by the vertigo-like sensation of suddenly being back in my own body, in the mortal realm, in the midst of the fight.
It's like waking up from a very bad dream upside down in your bed with nausea and a sweaty back, only ten times worse. My eyes take a moment to adjust to the light, and my fingers have pinpricks of sensation in them. Time has passed here, even though my body barely moved.
I'm still holding the knife that I used to carve Gaugin's rune into the Manslayer's skin and force his soul back into his body.
But the knife, instead of being pressed up against his shoulder, is slicing through ropes. The Manslayer somehow wriggled underneath my stock still hand to get himself out of his sticky situation. He's not looking at me, so I don't move my head at all, instead flicking my eyes around me as subtly as possible to take inventory of the current situation.
My quartet is completely frozen. Each of their faces is slack and expressionless, their eyes focused far away. Around us, like some kind of a dark fog or a strange dome, the poltergeist's presence hangs heavy in the air. He's suffocating and terrible, just like I remembered, and most definitely not inside the Manslayer's body.
Which is when I realize that there's one more mark I need to make on the rune to complete the spell: the mark that locks it all into place. I've called the soul here, urged it towards its original body, but until I've slashed through the curling inner part of the rune with my phoenix fire knife, it'll be like we didn't do anything at all. The battle will be lost, and the Manslayer, if he continues to untie himself like this, will escape (mostly) intact, despite the necromantic energy I drained from his body.
I can't let that happen. Especially if his next move, after freeing himself, is killing my guys and taking Gaugin's bracelet back from me. The power is too much for an evil son of a bitch like him to be allowed to have.
So I need to act fast, and think faster. The slash—it's all I need to finish up with my knife, but I doubt he'll hold still. And he's managed to wriggle out of the guys' grips, since they're all being held hostage by the poltergeist's dark energy, which no doubt dragged their spirits down into its dark corner of the spirit realm just like it did to me just now.
The poltergeist's presence is heavy in the air. It's hard to move my hands, hard to think. But the monster's shoulder is close, and he's wriggling around to try to slice the ropes off his upper arms. If I can just... move a little... that way... no, over here...
He's so focused on the tip of the knife and the ropes that he doesn't notice me moving at first. But then his eyes flick up to my face, and I momentarily panic, trying to force my facial expression into the slack-jawed one on my quartet's faces.
"Keep her further under, will you?" He says off-handedly to his evil, untethered soul. "I swear I saw her blink just a second ago. The last thing we need is for one of these troublemakers to get loose before I'm free."
There's a stirring in the air. I get the sense that the poltergeist is saying something back, but if so, it's not in any language that I can understand.
The Manslayer frowns. His eyes flit back up to my face. At this point, I'm starting to feel more than a little tense. And the urge to sneeze is overwhelming. I don't think it's a real urge, but there it is anyway, pushing up against my nose. It must be some psychosomatic totally imagined bullshit.
"I'll give you one of them later," the Manslayer says to the poltergeist, sounding more than a little annoyed. "You can't eat their insides now. It'll take them from their stupor and give them a chance to finish their little spell. We can't have that. Now, as for the girl..."
His focus on the poltergeist distracts him for a moment, and he shifts. I see my one and only opportunity and take it without even thinking. Lunging forward, I slash across the rune with my knife, aiming for the curling spot in the middle.
Three things happen all at once.
Flesh sizzles beneath my knife's tip.
The poltergeist howls and trashes, knocking branch
es from trees and kicking up a foul-smelling wind.
And the Manslayer puts his one free hand around my throat, squeezing tight, his grip strong despite his recent regeneration.
His grasp makes me light-headed as he restricts the blood flow to my head. While the guys are starting to stir, just barely, and the rune is closed, I can feel the tension in the air. The howling rises to a terrible, ear-piercing scream, then silences all at once as the poltergeist dives inside its master's body against its will.
Soul and flesh, one again.
It should have made him back into a man.
But this man's soul has been divorced from his body for far too long, trained to do cruel and terrible things, made mad because it is never allowed rest or peace in the Great Beyond. His eyes, those dark and soulless eyes, only seem even darker now that his soul is back in his body. And the necromantic energy that kept him alive for so long still flows through his veins, weakened but not destroyed by my earlier spell.
The moment is now. Someone has to slay him. Diving to pick up Ezra's partially melted sword, I hold it in two hands, remembering everything I've learned in Weapons Combat and at my demons' side. Stance sure, I put all my weight and strength into the single blow of the blade as I swing it towards the monster's tied-up body.
He shouts out, "You don't have to do thi—"
I cut his head off, severing it completely at the base of his neck. It shocks me how quickly the Hell-forged blade slices through tendon, muscle, and bone. Killing someone should feel harder than this, but in the case of the soulless monster, I find I don't really regret a single thing as his eyes slide closed and his body slumps over to the side.
Gaugin's bracelet warms at my elbow. I wonder which circle of Hell the man formerly known as Frederich will be spending his eternity in. Or if—and the thought makes me shudder—he'll be given a deal: Purgatory, and time spent serving Hell as one of its demons, in exchange for a contract that may or may not cleanse his sins.
A man as terrible as this one couldn't possibly wash the blood away. I think. Then again, I have no idea what my guys did that got them in Purgatory, and neither do they. For all I know they were just as bad as the Manslayer.
Somehow, though, I doubt it.
Overhead, the sky clears. The sun gently shines down on us—and the carnage of the no-longer-sleepy Danish village. I drop the sword, watching the blood puddle around the beast's body, feeling tired and angry, at myself and at the world.
Blinking, standing, stretching, the guys arrange themselves beside me, and we stare at the body together.
"That was... a little nuts." Ezra rubs the back of his neck. "Did everyone else get frozen and start seeing things? Crazy things. Like..."
His voice trails off, and his green eyes are somewhat haunted. Reaching out, I squeeze his arm and tell him, "It's over now. But I saw stuff too. Mostly darkness. I think it was just the poltergeist fucking with us. When I came out of it, you four were all frozen and seemed like you weren't here at all. As if you'd been hypnotized."
Lynx murmurs, "Something like that. I saw things too."
"I saw this old lady get chopped to pieces," Mateo says, bouncing a grenade in his hand as casually as if it were a rock and not an incendiary device. "She kept talking to me in Spanish and saying... well. She was calling me Alejandro and saying all this stuff about how much she loved me and not to blame myself. But this machete kept cutting her into pieces. And I swear for a moment..." He shakes himself, like he's shaking off the hallucination, the old woman, all of it. "It seemed familiar. That was probably just the freaky ghost though, fucking with my mind."
"It wouldn't be hard to fuck with your mind," Sebastian says drolly. "There's not much in there."
The teasing is normal, exactly as expected, but something about Sebastian's tone of voice seems... off. His blue eyes are distant—even more so than normal. And it's not because of the dead body with its head chopped off on the ground in front of us. It's not even the fact that we came so close to really losing this time, or the innocent lives that were lost because of what we did in the first place.
No, Sebastian is haunted by something. Just like Mateo, I'm betting it's something he saw when the poltergeist had a hold of him. There's an expression on his face that he only gets when he's keeping something from me. I wish I didn't know what it looks like, but I've come to know my guys in our time together, and I can read him better now than ever before.
"Was there a unicorn in any of your visions?" I ask the guys lightly, hoping to get them to open up. "Or maybe you saw a strange older woman get brutally murdered, like Mateo."
"It wasn't just that she was murdered," Mateo says, sounding uncharacteristically emotional, even as he tosses the grenade up and down like a nervous tic. "It was that I knew it was my fault. There was no doubt in my mind that machete was tearing her into pieces because of me."
"Accountability? That's new, coming from you."
Scowling, Mateo whirls on Sebastian and clutches the grenade tightly, like he's thinking about lobbing it in the other demon's general direction. "What about you, what did you see? Because I doubt it was all rainbows and butterflies. I told you mine, you tell me yours."
"That's not how it works."
They glare at each other, practically growling like a couple of hormonal werewolves. Just when I feel like I'm about to have to break up an absurd and unnecessary fight, Lynx steps in.
"I saw a building go up in flames." His voice is calm, clear, but there's some unspoken emotion underneath it. "Like you, Mateo, somehow I knew it was my fault. Not just because there was a match in my hand, still lit. And..." There's a moment of silence. "There were people in the building. People who died because of me. Maybe because I wanted to kill them."
Because his expression is so heavy, his voice so full of emotion, I tell Lynx, "It wasn't real."
"Are you sure of that?" He asks it simply, his hands loose at his sides, looking at me askance. "Because I'm pretty sure it wasn't a hallucination. It was a memory."
Chapter 8
Our conversation in the village stays with me the whole helicopter ride back to the closest city, and again the whole flight overseas. My mind keeps running over and over everything. Thankfully our private jet, charted just for us by Headmaster Towers and the mages, is quiet enough to allow for thinking. Among the top of my thoughts is: how in the world did anyone let this happen? Especially the mages, who should've known better. Especially me, after every lesson I thought I'd learned about evil and betrayal.
There was a cleanup in the little village. The bodies... I didn't want to, but I had to count them before I left. Eight dead. More than should've died today, but fewer than I feared. Apparently someone shouted out a warning after the first death, and almost everyone got out in time to avoid the Manslayer's wrath. He wasn't very well-versed in modern planes, trains, or automobiles, so I guess we have that to be thankful for, if nothing else.
Most of the village got out safely.
Not all of them.
And I know, without self-pity but just with a simple kind of certainty, that it was all my fault. I'm the one who let the monster loose from his cage. I had a choice, and I picked power and the unknown over safety and the knowable. Those innocent deaths are on my hands.
If there were any justice in the world, I'd stand trial in front of some sort of judge and jury. But because there isn't, my recklessness—justified or not—got all those people killed, and no one will ever know. The mage council will make sure of it. The cleaners who showed up to handle it seemed unfazed by the entire thing.
I'll have nightmares about the blood, the guilt, my part in all of it, but a member of the mage council showed up herself to thank me for making the bracelet whole again, her eyes on my elbow as she invited me to visit their esteemed post-graduate academy for further training and study after Headmaster Towers is done with me.
I have the feeling that if Towers weren't a mage herself, who has dealt with the council previously, the mage
might've tried to pluck the bracelet from my elbow right then and there. It would've been a mistake—between my power and my quartet, I'm sure I could've made it troublesome for her. Besides, the stupid thing is bonded to my bloodline, wretched as that blood is.
It won't come off even when I dig my fingernails beneath it and tug.
And despite its immense power, I want it off. All it makes me feel is guilt and shame. Like my demons with their hallucinations, or memories, or whatever they are. I feel responsible for every single death that happened in that village.
Eyeing the guys as our plane nears the gate we'll take to get back on campus, I wonder what the poltergeist showed each of them. Lynx saw a fire he thinks he started. Mateo saw a woman be brutally murdered. If they really are memories, maybe they have something to do with the contract that has them bound to Hell.
I freed the immortals from their prisons, and killed the Manslayer, because I wanted to be able to free my guys as well. I thought the bracelet would let me do that. Until I found out from the only known untethered demon, Malavic, that the supposed way to free a demon is for them to die and come back with their bodies and memories intact. It's a riddle, or a trick—that sort of thing isn't possible. If he really did pull it off like he claimed, there's no way we'll be able to pull it off too.
Unless.
There's something I don't know.
Something the bracelet might help me accomplish—along with some research and my ever-present friends.
That's assuming, of course, that the Phoenix Academy campus is still standing when we arrive.
We arrive on the east cost, somewhere between here and there, at a secret second gate into Phoenix Academy near a small veterinarian's office and an ice cream shop. It's faster for us to go through here than to fly all the way back to San Diego and head to the Indian grocery store, but the gate strictly opens on the inside, which means settling into chairs on the outside patio of the ice cream shop and waiting for someone to show up.