Phantoms of the Otherworld (In Spiritu Et Veritate)

by Reed, Zoe

  Instead it just stood there, eyes locked onto him as he wailed. I stared in shock as moments later the man started to disintegrate, as if into thin air. Maybe Camille really did see a madman. His feet started to disappear first, dissolving from bottom to top into tiny particles like the ones in the air. Only, these particles didn’t float away. They flowed into the monster’s eyes, causing a dim glow. The more of the man that thing absorbed the brighter and brighter the holes in its skull got, until the man was completely gone. Then, as quickly as they’d brightened, the glow disappeared, and the thing gave a satisfied and sinister stretch of its neck.

  Now the monster did the same thing as the first time we saw it. It made for the portal. This time, however, it didn’t lumber over curiously. It dashed toward the thing, sprinting so hurriedly that it reached it in less than a second. The result was the same. That electric spark shot through it, and it stumbled back in writhing agony. Once it recovered it hollered irately, turning toward the nearest boulders and furiously smashing a handful of them to dust.

  Taking its rage out on the rocks seemed to calm the creature down, but despite my hopes that it would now roll itself into a ball of energy and leave, the thing turned back to the hill and began to peer into each of the crevices. It was still looking for us. When it came to our hole Camille’s grip tightened on my hand, causing me to realize for the first time that it was even being held. The thing lingered at our other hiding place, even stretching one of its long front limbs in it to feel for us. Then it moved on to the other ones, searching each one hastily. When it got to the last crevice at the end of the rock formation and hadn’t found us in any of the places it looked, it angrily swiped at a boulder, its claws making four deep gashes in the rock. Then, just like that, it took off.

  It was now that I finally started to put the pieces together and understand what was going on. Each time the portal opened it alerted the monster, that’s how it’d known to come looking for Camille and I. Whatever the vampires had done, I was pretty sure they’d made Camille the link for it. It had to devour her just like it did that man, and then it’d be able to get out. That’s why it kept looking for us.

  When I was calmed enough to even speak I still kept my voice at a whisper. “Camille,” I said, staring out into the light. “We are so screwed.”

  “I know,” she agreed, pushing herself up and disappearing into the darkness.

  Hearing her scoot to the entrance, I followed until we reached the outside, glad that once again the monster was long gone. My other half was already there, back from wherever it had found to hide and sitting outside our crevice, waiting. Camille made her way to the wolf and set her hand casually on top of its head, though I couldn’t be sure whether she was trying to comfort it or herself. My eyes scanned the smashed up boulders, taking in the damage the creature was capable of. Once my gaze landed on the portal curiosity got the best of me, and I strode over.

  From a distance the particles almost looked like a solid door-shaped wall with a slightly energetic glow. Up close, however, there was enough empty space throughout that I thought I might be able to stick my hand clear out the other side. That curious part of me wondered if it was only the monster that wasn’t able to get through, and I wanted to test it for myself. Without considering the risks I lifted my arm, slowly extending my hand toward the portal.

  “Don’t touch it!” Camille shouted as my hand came within millimeters of the portal.

  It startled me enough that I jumped back, and then I turned to give her a glare for scaring me. But once I turned I caught sight of a man crouched in the boulders behind her, looking like he was preparing to lunge at her. “Hey!” I yelled frantically, but it was too late.

  The man let out a furious holler as he leapt from the rocks. He came crashing down on Camille’s shoulders, sending them both tumbling across the dusty earth. I’d already sprung into action by the time they came to a stop, but so had the wolf. It reached them before I even got close, and it clamped down on the man’s arm with its jaws, giving him a hard tug and tossing him easily off of Camille. Once the man landed on his back the wolf pounced, pinning him to the ground with its muzzle only inches from his face, snarling ferociously enough to frighten even me. The assailant let out a muttered cry that sounded like ‘woah,’ and defensively covering his face with his arms he mumbled other incoherencies so rapidly it sounded like another language.

  Camille scrambled up from her spot on the ground and stormed over to the pair, with me close behind her. “Who are you?” she asked angrily, scowling down at the man under the wolf’s massive paws.

  “E-English,” he stuttered in relief as he recognized our words. Then he stumbled over a few words of his own before he found the ones he was looking for. “Don’t let it eat me!”

  In response to his pleas the wolf growled again, and the man whimpered in terror. “Then answer the question,” I commanded from my spot at Camille’s side, reluctant to call off the wolf yet because we didn’t know if this guy would try to attack again. “Who are you?”

  His frightfully wide eyes locked onto me, and behind the paleness in them I could tell he was struggling again to find the words. “My name is… Greg.”

  I glanced over at Camille to see if I could tell whether or not she wanted to let him go. So far it didn’t appear that she did. “Is this the guy that attacked you the other day?” I asked her. I knew she said he’d disappeared, but if disappearing didn’t mean you were gone forever, that was important information.

  She shook her head, but before she could say anything the man spoke again. “Please,” he begged. “I heard yelling before. I mistook you for the insane ones.”

  “Are there a lot of other people here?” Camille said, furrowing her eyebrows curiously.

  Greg gave the smallest shrug he could so he wouldn’t upset the wolf. “A few. We hide in the rocks. Most of them have been here so long they’ve gone mad.”

  Camille and I both looked at each other while we considered his claims. He looked borderline insane himself, but he also looked terrified of the wolf, and I doubted he’d try anything as long as it was here defending us. Camille simply shrugged, and so I tapped the wolf’s ribs with the back of my hand and motioned for it to get off of him. It sauntered to my side, still watching the man suspiciously, its lip curling every few seconds to show its long white fangs as a warning reminder. The man didn’t try to get off the ground once we’d set him free; he just sat up and brushed himself off, visibly making an effort not to make eye contact with the wolf. Eventually his gaze wandered up to Camille and I, and I wasn’t sure exactly where to go from here.

  “Who are you?” he asked after a minute of us staring at him. We both told him our names, and he smiled amicably, growing more comfortable as he decided we weren’t an immediate threat to him. “Pleasure to meet someone sane that hasn’t been devoured by those dreadful creatures.” His speaking seemed to be improving the more he said. Judging by the tattered look of his clothing it must have been a long time since he’d had to speak to anyone, maybe it took an effort to recall language.

  I was a little surprised to hear him say ‘creatures’ in the plural, but it made sense seeing as there’d been three streams of light that came out of the orb. “Three of them, right?” I clarified.

  Greg nodded, glancing wearily toward the entrance of our caved inlet. “Although I haven’t seen two of them recently.”

  From that I thought I was putting it all together. Why the vampires took three werewolves, and what happened to Lacey and Nathan. They’d been brought here too, and if that sinking feeling in my gut was accurate, they’d been devoured and the other two creatures had escaped through a portal. All the last one needed to do was find Camille, and it would be able to get out too. I just didn’t know what the vampires wanted these horrifying beasts for.

  Camille shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket. She had a worried look on her face like she was figuring it all out too. “How’d you get here? And when?”
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  “Well, I can’t say when I got here,” Greg started as he finally pushed himself off the ground. He brushed the dust off his pants and then set his hands against his thighs, staring blankly around like it was difficult for him to recall what happened. “I’m pretty sure I was walking home one night. Yeah, and there were a man and a woman. They were creepy looking, and they knocked me out and took me somewhere.”

  “The vampire kidnappings,” Camille whispered to me, and I nodded in agreement.

  Greg’s eyes widened at that. “Vampires?” After a thoughtful pause he looked away. “Vampires,” he repeated to himself, as if it made more sense. “When I woke up they were saying some weird stuff. Before I ended up here I’d think I was crazy, but I’m pretty sure it was magic.”

  Trying to piece together Greg’s story, I furrowed my eyebrows and glanced over at Camille. “You think they were testing the spell on humans first?”

  “Maybe,” she shrugged, and then looked at Greg. “Can you tell us anything else you remember?”

  “Feels like it’s been decades since I got here,” he said, tensing his bottom lip apologetically, “I don’t remember much at all, I’m sorry.” He was friendlier now that he was more at ease, and in a show of curiosity he extended a hand toward the wolf, studying it with awe. His fingers got within inches before the wolf snapped at him, and he pulled away with a gasp. “What breed is this canine? It’s the largest animal I’ve ever seen.” At his question he bent over to get eye level with the wolf, and it growled at him, clearly irritated by his examination.

  “Werewolf,” I told him, waiting for him to lose a couple fingers as he extended his hand toward it again.

  At my answer his eyes widened and he stumbled back, mumbling franticly, “Are you crazy! Get it away from me!”

  “It’s perfectly safe,” I said defensively, somewhat offended at his reaction to my other half.

  He took a couple more panicked breaths before calming down a little, and then he glanced back and forth between the wolf and I. “Are you sure?”

  “It won’t hurt you,” Camille told him with a chuckle. “I’m a werewolf too.”

  Despite his somewhat amusing reaction, I couldn’t get it out of my mind that he said he’d felt like he’d been here for decades. “Greg, what year were you born?” I asked.

  “Uh,” he mumbled thoughtfully, “Seventy something,” he answered, eyeing the wolf like he wanted to try touching it again.

  “Nineteen seventy something?” I clarified, wondering how he couldn’t remember a simple detail like the year he was born when he couldn’t have been here that long. He nodded. “Something doesn’t add up,” I told Camille, quietly enough that Greg wouldn’t hear.

  She passed a stealthily suspicious glance toward him. “What?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered, feeling a shiver travel up my spine. Though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it I knew something wasn’t right about this place. It made me uneasy, and all I could think was, someone please get us out.

  Abby watched as her father hastily worked over Kyla, occasionally glancing into one of his own spell books and then back at the werewolf. His thoughts were racing so rapidly it was hard for her to figure out exactly what he was doing and what his reasoning was, but at least she knew he was really trying. It had only been about forty-five minutes since the Phantoms had entered the werewolves, but for Abby that was forty-five minutes too long. She just hoped the amount of time they were unconscious didn’t make it harder to pull them out.

  With a warlock as a father, she’d learned some of the basics of magic. One of the important things she’d learned about any kind of out of body experience was how crucial it was for the subject to be grounded, or spiritually attached to his or her physical body. According to her father, he had no way of knowing whether Kyla was grounded or not, so he was working to get her back first so there was no chance of her being stuck once he pulled Camille out.

  Reaching into the black duffel bag he’d gotten from the car, her father pulled out the small silver bar with the different colored stones in it. The one that Harold had imagined giving to her. The golden wolf was lying on its side on the cot, and as her father set the bar on the side of Kyla’s chest just below her front limb, Abby heard Eli give a mental protest. It wasn’t just that the silver was touching Kyla, but it was also close to her heart, and he especially wasn’t comfortable with that.

  Eli went back and forth with it in his head for a minute before he finally said something. “Does that really need to be there?”

  “Yes,” Abby’s father said without looking up as he buried his nose in his book once more. “And it needs to be as close to her heart as possible.” Then he turned to face Eli with a serious expression, and about the most sympathetic one Abby had ever seen him give. “A little silver poisoning is worth it if we can get them out alive. I need it to help guide her back.”

  Abby heard Eli wish that her father would explain things as he was going along to help ease the werewolves’ minds, but she knew her father far too well to think it would happen. When he was as focused as he was now, Eli was lucky to even get a response. She could understand the wolves’ concerns. Her father had never been too friendly with them or willing to help, but now there were lives on the line, and she knew that nobody could be better or more trusted for the job. Even with all her worry about getting them out, she had tremendous faith in her father’s abilities.

  Another five minutes passed as Abby’s father poured over his book, then he walked over to the center of the warehouse where the Phantoms had first been released. After searching for a minute he picked up a large chunk of the glass orb that had shattered. Stretching the piece of glass as high as he could get it above his body he closed his eyes and began to mutter under his breath. It was always times like these, when her father was working magic, that Abby was fascinated to hear his thoughts. It was such a flow of vision and emotion and language that she could never quite understand what he was actually saying, but his thoughts were so rhythmic, so tranquil that she wondered how her father, who was such an uptight and often angry man, managed such serenity.

  As he held the piece of glass in his hands all the little shards that had scattered everywhere began to float silently into the air. It took a few minutes to gather what seemed to be the hundreds of tiny fragments that fit into the small orb, and each one hovered there until every single piece had been identified. Then each small bit of glass whizzed through the air to the one he was holding, and like a puzzle took its place until the whole orb had been put back together.

  He examined it closely after he was done, and then walked back to the cots and handed Abby the now perfect sphere. “Hold this for me.”

  She took it from him and turned it over in her hands. It was so smooth and flawless it was as if it had never been broken. There wasn’t a single scratch on it. Now her father moved back to Kyla, placing one hand over the silver bar on her chest and another on her head. Then he turned to the five werewolves, who had been standing anxiously nearby this whole time.

  “You’re not going to like this,” he started in the calmest voice he could, “I need you guys to leave. I don’t think the Phantom is connected to this one, but with the kind of connection these two have there’s no knowing for sure. I fixed the orb, but if the Phantom comes back with her, I want to make sure it has nowhere but the orb to go.”

  Hesitantly Eli and David stood, followed by the three wolves that hadn’t moved from their spots on the floor since all of this began.

  As they made their way to the door, David stopped. “Hold on just a second.” He jogged out the warehouse door, leaving the others behind to look after him curiously. A minute later he returned with a few articles of clothing in his hands and tossed them to Abby. “They might want those when they wake up.”

  With that the werewolves made their way out into the cold night. The way he’d said ‘when’ and not ‘if’ was mildly comforting – at least Abby wasn’t the only one who was
still hopeful. She set the clothes and the orb into a pile on the floor and stood across from her dad, whose mind was already starting to focus on the spell he’d need.

  “You ready?” he asked her, giving the most reassuring smile he could.

  She nodded. “Are you?”

  With a sigh, he nodded as well. “Let’s get them out of there.”

  I leaned my head against Camille’s shoulder as we sat propped against the boulders, and watched as the girl fondly stroked the hand I’d placed in her lap. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could watch the sun rise?” I asked and looked out over the dark sky and glowing ground. The longer we spent in this strange world the harder it had been getting for us to sleep.

  Camille nodded. “Any minute now.” A few more seconds passed and then the wasteland brightened, as if in the blink of an eye. Startled by the sudden light the wolf, which had been sleeping on the opposite side of Camille, picked its head up and looked around suspiciously. When it realized that it wasn’t in danger it dropped its head over Camille’s thigh and drifted back to sleep.

  Reminding myself that the wolf was me, I resisted the urge to give its head a jealous shove off of her, and instead poked it in the cheek. It gave a tired growl, but other than that it refused to even open an eye at me. When Camille chuckled at the exchange I pulled my head off of her shoulder to glare at her. “What are you laughing at?”

  “It’s so weird, you being jealous of yourself,” she told me, still laughing. “It’s like you have multiple personalities or something.”

  I just rolled my eyes at her, looking toward the open land to see if Greg was coming back yet. He’d walked off not long before this, just like he had plenty of times before, mumbling about needing to tend to his mother or some nonsense like that. I was practically one hundred percent sure there was nobody else here with him, but if he truly believed he’d been here for decades, then whatever insane thing he’d come up with for companionship had kept him sane enough that he hadn’t turned into a madman. The more we talked to him the more excited he seemed to get that there were people around that hadn’t been devoured yet. All he could talk about was how great it was that two of the creatures were gone, and all I could think about was where they were now and what kind of chaos we’d left behind.