Soul Merchant (Isabella Hush Series Book 5)

by Thea Atkinson

  He didn't exactly sound opposed to the idea, but the disbelief in his voice made me want to squirm. Mostly because it was a stark reminder of the near-miss I'd had with the chupacabra shape-shifter, who wanted to use power of the Lilith Stone to increase his own.

  "Think about it," I said, trying to convince him without sounding too eager. "The problem is if I die, my bond takes me straight back to Hell. If I can't die, problem solved."

  He gave me a wistful smile. "While there's nothing I'd like more than to have an eternity's worth of your sassy tongue, I'm not so sure the human part of you would want that."

  I canted my head at him, examining his face. There was something more to it that he wasn't admitting.

  "You don't want me to be immortal, do you?"

  He leaned back on the sofa. "You didn't want immortality when you had the chance, Kitten."

  "But I'm not the same anymore. How can I hold myself to an impossibility? Do you want me to go to Hell, Maddox?"

  There are times when you're talking to someone that their every expression rides their faces like costume. If their angry, their face grows red and tight. If they are determined, their jaw clenches. When Maddox spoke next, his voice was low. His expression gave away nothing. But the words themselves were so sincere that I was struck by the fierceness of them.

  "I told you before," he said. "I would brave Lucifer's realm myself to free you from there if I had to."

  "Then why not avoid it altogether? Why not just put our efforts into finding your father and the stone and re-igniting the bond?"

  He held my hands. "Don't get me wrong, the thought of you dying does fill my heart with a dread I can't shake, but you don't know what you're asking. It's not just a bond you'll have with the stone. Don't you see what I am? Don't you realize the burden it is?"

  I shrugged off his hands, annoyed with his reasoning because it was useless.

  "Some burden celibacy is," I snorted. "I'm not getting any anyway. The only man I've wanted in years is as cold as a..."

  "Not cold," he said, pinching my chin between his fingers and thumb and forcing me to look him in the eye with an aggressiveness that would have made my belly ache with longing any other time.

  "You're in my veins, Isabella. It's like my own blood has been siphoned off and replaced with the spirit of you. You're all I think about. You think it's easy for me to want you and not be able to have you? You think the gate I put in your basement is just so you can portal into work?"

  He pulled me toward him so that his lips were against my cheek and his voice and breath cascaded over the shell of my ear.

  "No," he whispered. "It's so you can come to me. It's so I can have you near me, so I can pretend I'm a man and not just a mindless monster who executes even worse monsters or lets them barter with far worse monsters."

  I was about to tell him he wasn't a monster. That even when I'd had my soul that I didn't think he was only good for killing worse things than whatever it was that he was. But he got up and brushed past me, striding across the room toward the stairs where both of our cats had reappeared and sat looking down at us.

  He wouldn't look at me and I had the feeling he wasn't happy about his own admission.

  "All of that is true," he said. "But you're right when you say I don't want you to become immortal." He did turn then and his hands were clenched into fists at his side. "I like you the way you are," he said. "I'm afraid of what will happen if you become immortal without that thing that makes you, well, you. What if you don't get that back? What if you become immortal without any feeling in you?"

  His words took me by surprise but he wasn't finished. Not by a long shot.

  "You're a conduit to the stone, Isabella," he said. "It tried to bond to you once. I don't know if it will again, and if it does try, what will happen when it reaches out to the magic in you and finds nothing."

  I sucked in a breath.

  "It was too easy," I murmured to myself, thinking about the ease with which Kerri was able to transfer the magic back through the ferryman. It was because there was nothing to grab onto, just carrier magic. No Isabella mojo. Just the nasty-assed vampire energy suffering beneath the coma of a necromancer.

  I wanted to laugh at my naivete but I couldn't even fake the humor.

  "I'd love to have an eternity with you," Maddox said, as though I hadn't spoken. "But I won't risk you harm to get it. We need another way."

  Now who was being naive, I wondered as I pushed to my feet.

  "What way, Maddox?" I said. "It was obvious all along that Kerri wouldn't be able to retrieve what I was losing. Everyone kept saying it. You said it."

  "Said what?"

  "I was leaking." I kicked at the floor. "I mean, if I was leaking where in the hell was I going anyway?"

  I huffed and decided to drown my misery in a bowl of ice cream. I headed to the fridge.

  "I'm so screwed."

  Doubly screwed apparently, because the freezer was empty of anything but a freezer burnt pack of ground beef. I slammed the door shut and leaned with my back against it.

  "So screwed."

  It was overreaction, and I knew it, but somehow the thought that I was out of ice cream seemed the worst thing at that moment.

  "You take things for granted," I said. "Ice cream. Chips. Souls."

  I slammed my fists behind me on the fridge door. "And then they're gone and you're left staring into the abyss of chip-lessness."

  "We'll fix it." He plucked his kitten from the stairs and while it hissed at him, she let him smooth her into a ball of fluff that he tucked in the crook of his arms.

  "What did Adair want from you anyway?" I demanded. "Seemed like an awful big secret."

  He shrugged. "The same thing he's wanted for a thousand years. The same thing I refuse to let him have."

  I raised my eyebrows to indicate I knew he was hedging and I wasn't going to let it slide.

  He sighed. "He wanted something of Tamar's," he said.

  "Tamar?"

  "My sister."

  That was news. First I find out he had a brother, now a sister? I might have felt put out if there was a spirit inside me to care.

  "Well aren't you just the mystery man," I said. "You hiding a love child in your past somewhere too?"

  "I'm celibate," he said because of course, the man had no sense of humor unless he was the one cracking the joke.

  "Duh," I said, waving a tired hand at him. "So tell me about your sister."

  He shook his head. "No."

  No. No explanation, no sorry for his bluntness. The man had to have a skeleton in that closet somewhere.

  "That's all I get? A no?"

  The kitten reached up a paw to bat at the finger he was waving over her face. I sighed and went to the cupboard. He'd been worried about it eating. I couldn't fix my soul, but I could feed a cat. I busied myself opening a tin of flaked tuna and dumped it into a fresh bowl from the cupboard. Maddox watched me until I plopped the bowl on the floor. He bent to shoo the kitten toward the bowl.

  She resisted, of course. And I sank down onto the floor again and stared at the bowl. I caught sight of his knees when he crouched in front of me.

  "If it makes you feel any better," he said. "Adair should have known better than ask. He probably wouldn't have except he saw he could take advantage of my concern for you."

  "I don't know if I can feel anything," I said. "But it's nice to know you're willing to lay the blame on me."

  "That's not what I was doing."

  I shrugged. Tomato. Tomahto.

  "Well," I said. "At least tell me what he wanted. Surely that won't crack that vault you have stuffed up your butt."

  He grimaced at me, obviously not caring for the humor. It was enough to push him to his feet and he headed back to grapple the kitten and wrangle her toward the bowl.

  "Nothing much," he said, finally dumping the fish onto the floor where she finally sniffed at it. "A small amulet."

  The silence after this proclamation was so
heavy that I thought he had disappeared into some new portal. I rolled my head on my shoulders so I could see him better, hoping it was at least one that would vibrate the shit out of his ass and leave him unsatisfied.

  He was halted in the middle of the living room. Meaty calloused hands were kneading the back of his neck the way someone does when they know they've done something stupid.

  Or illegal.

  "Maddox?" I said. "What sort of amulet was it?"

  "Sweet gods," he said and swung his gaze to mine. His brow was furrowed

  "You said you were leaking," he said. "You said, and I quote, 'If I was leaking, where in the hell was I going?'"

  I crossed one arm over the other. "You got an answer for that big boy? Because unless you do, I'm not impressed with your long memory."

  He closed the distance between us with deliberation and so quickly I cringed against the fridge out of long-ingrained habit and cell memory. Shades of Scottie and Alvin and a lifetime of cringing.

  "How do you say it?" he said. "Oh, fuck me?"

  I wavered my hand in the air to indicate he was close. The inflection could use some work but the sentiment was there.

  "Kitten," he murmured. "You didn't go anywhere."

  He crouched in front of me again and placed his palm against my solar plexus as he said this, and the heat of him swept over me in a shiver of warmth so delicious I hadn't realized how cold I was until he'd touched me.

  "You didn't go anywhere," he repeated. "You. Your soul. It didn't go anywhere."

  I blinked at him, trying so hard to follow his train of thought because though he was speaking English, he was making zero sense.

  He must have read the confusion in my face because he expanded on the thought.

  "Your soul was clinging to you, Isabella. All that time. And he saw it."

  "Who saw it?"

  "That wily bastard who deals in souls for a living. Who dunked himself in hellfire so he could see them, sense them, and taste them."

  He grabbed my hand and pulled me with him toward the basement.

  "Where are we going?"

  "Back to the bazaar to see a man who caught sight of an untethered soul ripe for the taking."

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  THE PUSSY GATE VIBRATED us into his office in record time. I didn't have the heart to comment on the frustration of it because Maddox wasn't speaking by the time we got to my basement. His jaw was set in a grim line that made even his collarbone tense looking. I tried multiple times to get him to talk but all he did was stride to the door of his office and pull his mace from its hook.

  "Bit of overkill, or what?" I said as I rushed along behind him. He either expected me to stay put or to follow him, but he wasn't indicating one way or the other what he wanted.

  So I followed him. I wasn't worried, mind you, but for the big man to shoulder his mace, it had to be bad. And I wanted ringside seats.

  Besides. If it netted me a soul, then how could it be all bad?

  The bazaar was in its gloaming time. The stalls were shutting down and the creatures, witches, vampires, and whatever else spent their shop time in the piazza were disappearing one by one. Some of them spilled into shadows on the cobblestones as I'd guessed from earlier.

  "This is the tamer part, right?" I said to break the awful silence. "Are there humans selling things here?"

  He grunted but didn't answer. His strides had picked up. I knew it was a long walk to Adair's and I didn't want to get caught falling too far behind. I had to pick up my pace and grab hold of the hem of his shirt to keep him from out-pacing me altogether.

  "You're going too fast."

  "It'll be midnight soon," he said. "I don't have time to wait for you. Keep up or go back home."

  That stung. Enough that I shut up. Instead of walking, I jogged to keep up and I was winded by the time we got to Adair's. The moon was full as it hung over the alley. It looked drunk, sagging into the clouds that were doing their best to cover its shame.

  "Bastard," he muttered to himself. "I should have known. By god, I should have known."

  He fiddled with the lock and when it didn't release as quickly as he wanted, he started kicking the door with force. When that didn't do anything, he started heaving the mace at it until it splintered.

  I stood back, swallowing down gobs of fear and thought how the most primal feelings—lust, fear, hunger—were baked into the cake of humanity. No need for a soul to feel those. I almost wished I couldn't as I watched him barrel through the splintered door and disappear into the tower.

  I hesitated, wringing my hands.

  His hand poked through the destroyed doorway.

  "Don't make me carry you," he said from inside.

  It took all of one second for me to decide to follow.

  The shop looked nothing like it had. Gone was the counter. The walls were empty. In its place was a long corridor leading to a spiral staircase that Maddox was already climbing by double treads at a time.

  I ran up behind him. I thought I could make out chanting. The air felt like I'd stepped into one of those balls that make your hair stand up.

  "Maddox," I whispered. "What's going on?"

  The soles of his shoes scuffed the last stair and he disappeared above me. I came out in a room lit by candles that smelled of beeswax. Another fragrance carried on the air currents to me. I wanted to call it myrrh or frankincense but I didn't know either of the aromas to name them.

  I did know the other smells though.

  Brimstone. Sulfur. Smoke.

  And on the underbelly of those noxious fumes, I caught lavender and lemon.

  Maddox's gasp was the thing that alerted me to halt, frozen, behind him. The room was open concept. Rafters spanned the ceiling. A fireplace hunkered down on one wall with a dirt floor level hearth. This place was old. Older than Renaissance buildings or Medieval castles. I had the feeling I wasn't so much in the bazaar anymore, but on a ley-line to another dimension.

  Copper bowls like I'd seen in Kerri's shop were littered on their sides around the room. Quicksilver made a narrow river as it spilled from a wooden bowl and ran its way toward a glyph drawn in the dirt.

  It was the symbols painted on the wall in blood that made me really start to worry for my welfare. Through all the strange markings, I could see my name at intermittent places, one letter at a time, each surrounded by ever more esoteric looking glyphs.

  The room had a heavy sense of purpose despite the chaos of upended bowls and aromas. Whatever magic was afoot, I knew it had to do with me, and that kicked up my survival instinct. My fight or flight response went into overdrive. Unable to do either, I just stood there and trembled.

  But it was the man who worried me the most. Just beyond Maddox, he knelt in the middle of a painted salt circle sprinkled with what had to be human blood, judging by the naked woman lying crookedly in the corner with her throat cut.

  I gagged and shoved my fist into my mouth to keep from making a noise. Even as I did so, I realized I wasn't horrified, just sickened, and part of me was happy not to have to feel the compassion of a dead person on my conscience.

  It shouldn't have mattered if I made a noise or not. Whatever was happening, it didn't look like anyone could stop it now. A filmy sort of barrier encased Adair and the circle. Although, if I was honest with myself, I had no idea how I knew it was Adair at all. The man I'd met earlier wasn't present at all in the circle. In his stead knelt a man who was bald and handsome. The mottling was gone from his bronze skin.

  But I knew him just the same.

  I reached out to touch Maddox's back. I felt as though I was going to lift off the floor, and I needed the grounding.

  "What is he doing?" I whispered, not really wanting the answer.

  Adair clutched a chunk of something as he chanted and as Maddox called his name, he swiveled his gaze toward us, his expression lost to whatever magic he was conjuring. He lifted the stone in his hand

  "Don't do this," Maddox said.

  Som
ething crackled out of the fireplace like a bolt of lightning at his voice. It sizzled around Adair, seaming a line through the candlelit room the way a fault-line looks in rock. When I looked down, I saw the same pattern had etched itself into the floor.

  "Adair."

  The soul merchant swung his gaze toward us. A worried wrinkle split his brow.

  "You brought her," he said. "You shouldn't have done that."

  No sooner had he spoke when the magic swirling above him grabbed the stone out of his hand and lifted it high in the air. It spun in place dizzyingly, not quite level at first, then spiraling like a top as it gained momentum.

  "I'm begging you, Adair," Maddox said, creeping forward now by inches. The ball of his mace hung a few inches from his fist as he held tight to both handle and chain. "Please don't do this."

  Adair sent a scalding look at Maddox. "You think I wouldn't know the taint of my own magic?" he accused. "You think I wouldn't sense this girl is connected to my stone?"

  "I gave you the amulet," Maddox said, ignoring the comment. "You've wanted it for hundreds of years. Let it be enough."

  "You told me to find a way to bring her home," he said, and I thought there was a sob in his voice that couldn't quite break through the fury. "Well, I found a way. This is it."

  "Not like this, Adair. She wouldn't want it like this."

  "You said you would get her out. You promised."

  "Look at yourself, Adair. Look what you've become. Do you think she would love you like this? She who spent each of her hard-earned long lives warring with creatures like you are now?"

  A sob escaped Adair, one that carried a gob of spit and tears.

  "So you'd save your lover, but you won't save mine," he said, pointing at me. "What makes her worth more?"

  Maddox shook his head, seeming to know there was no good answer for the question, while I found myself wondering what horror Adair was planning to bring into this world.

  Adair's lip curled with revulsion as he looked at me.

  "The ferryman and its fare only wounded her soul. Punctured the film that keeps it host-bound. Whatever the vampire took, it was a small amount, just enough to activate the stone's magic. The rest, all that lovely potential rest swirled around her unbound."