Unturned- The Complete Series

by Rob Cornell

  As I stood by my mother's grave, the sun warmed my scalp. But when I called on Urvasi, a chill ran through my whole body. Once more, when I turned around, there she stood. She was wearing a light blue sari again. She wore a golden pin in her hair in the shape of a lily, and her eyes shone with concern, as if she knew why I'd come.

  I didn't give her a chance to ask and immediately told her what had happened.

  She eyed me for a moment, lines of worry in her face. Then she shook her head. “Why have you come to me?”

  “I came to you for help.” I thought it was obvious.

  “You expect my help with that tooth?” She sighed, and seemed to deflate where she stood. “I'm afraid I cannot do that.”

  “Look, this is not about revenge anymore. I need to find Odi. I need to find my apprentice.”

  I could tell by her expression that no matter what I said, she wasn't going to help me. She didn't say anything, though.

  I took a step toward her. “You say you can't help. What you mean is that you won't help, right?”

  She held out her hands and shrugged. “Can't or won't, the truth remains the same.”

  “So you don't give a damn what happens to my apprentice? Should I expect you won't give a damn about me either? If I'm in trouble?”

  “You don't understand.”

  “You're damn right. And you're not helping me understand one bit.”

  She looked down as if she couldn't bear to look me in the eyes. “I'm sorry.”

  “Sorry? My apprentice is kidnapped, you have the power to help, but you won't. And you're sorry?”

  She clutched her hands in front of her. Then she finally had the guts to look me in the eye. Her gaze was so intense, I flinched.

  “Have you not wondered why I only appear to you here? At your mother's grave?”

  Of course I had, but I didn't see what that had to do with anything right now. “So what?”

  “I have limitations, Sebastian.” She seemed to steel herself. She straightened her back, lifted her chin, then nodded shortly. “I am bound to this place when I am on the mortal plane.”

  The words she said technically formed a sentence in English, but I didn't understand it. And the more I danced with her riddles, the longer the Maidens had to work out a plan for using Odi against me. “I don't care where you're from, who you are, or what you are. I know you’re a sorceress and a damn powerful one. As far as I'm concerned, that's all I need to know.”

  I took another step toward her. I could feel my anger hot in my veins, which reminded me of the infection that had so recently boiled through me. For some reason, that made me even angrier.

  “Please,” I said. “Help me.”

  “You are not listening.” She held her hands out to either side of her. “You have never seen me beyond this place,” she said. “Because I cannot leave here. You wondered why your mother never told you about me. It is because she was forbidden to speak of me. I'm an outcast, Sebastian. I was banished to a realm in between by the Ministry.”

  I gaped at her a moment, my mouth hanging open, my brain rifling through her words to make some sense of them. Banished?

  “What could you have possibly done to get banished?”

  She frowned. “That is my business. Not yours.”

  I would have argued the point, but if my mom trusted her, maybe I could give her a chance, too.

  “Your mother and I were great friends,” she continued. “A long time ago. But my being an outcast meant that Ministry law said I do not exist.”

  “Then how did my mom communicate with you, to tell you to take over as my mentor? If she wasn't allowed to.”

  “The law prevented her, but that didn't stop your mother. She was able to create a conduit, a gap between worlds, mine and hers. The kind of magic the Ministry may have executed her for had they learned of it.”

  Now I knew where I got my rebellious streak from. Thanks, Mom.

  “When she asked me to take over for her and your father, she moved the conduit to this plot so that if she died, I would be here when you visited.”

  She had thought of everything. And it pained me to think that she had to make this kind of arrangement, because she knew her life was in danger.

  “So you can't leave the cemetery?”

  “I can't stray very far from this plot,” she said. “Not on your plane at least. But where I took you before? The room without doors? That's my home now.”

  I wrinkled my brow. “Just that one room?”

  She shrugged one shoulder. “It's a little more complicated than that. But essentially, yes. That one room is my cell.”

  A shudder ran through me. I couldn't imagine being exiled to a magical prison that existed in a single room. Although, for a prison, it had been a pretty nice room.

  “Well, if you can't help me, the Maidens have won.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  I crossed my arms. “I'm listening.”

  “You have it within yourself to find them,” she said. “If they have a piece of your soul, you need only find your soul.”

  I laughed. “If it were that easy, I would've done it a long time ago.”

  “Before now you did not know the art of acceptance.”

  Oh, not the acceptance thing again. Granted, it had performed a miracle by helping me get rid of the vampire infection. But I couldn't see how it would help me now.

  Urvasi seemed to know my thoughts. “You trusted me before. Trust me again now.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “Your soul is part of you. Just like your blood. And who controls you?”

  I nodded. “Okay. Yeah. I control myself.”

  “So if you control yourself, and you accept that control, you can find yourself.”

  It sounded like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, even for a pair of sorcerers. But I had trusted her before, and she sure as hell had delivered.

  “What do I have to do?”

  She held out her hand. “Come home with me.”

  I smiled, and it felt genuine, even with all the hell raining down around me. “Lead the way,” I said.

  I took her hand, and together we traveled to her prison.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The room was different this time. No pillows or rack of staffs, and it actually had furniture. A two-seater wicker couch with plush cushions sat in the center of the room. Various paintings adorned the walls, most of them with an Indian flair. Several of them featured the goddess Kali in various poses. The only thing the same as the other room was the silver sword hanging on the wall. I wasn't sure what someone in a prison, especially a one-room prison, would need with a sword. But who was I to judge?

  Urvasi gestured toward the couch for me to sit. The cushion was kind of thin, and I could feel the wicker creak underneath me. Urvasi sat next to me and folded her hands in her lap.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “Now you focus. First, study your body. Search every inch of your physicality. When you have become whole with yourself, when you feel every part of yourself, you will also feel what is missing.”

  She stared intently at me. “This can mean many things. All of us are missing something. Sometimes several somethings. You may discover it isn't just a piece of your soul that has left you.”

  I didn't know what that really meant, but I didn't ask her to elaborate. I didn't want to waste any time. I wanted to find the Maidens before they could try to get at me.

  I laid my hands flat on my lap and closed my eyes. I tried to find the same center I'd had when focusing on the infection inside of me. I did as Urvasi said, flowing my consciousness throughout my body, noticing every inch of my skin, every bone, every nerve ending. You think you know how your body feels, until you pay attention to it in minute detail. I found aches and itches I hadn't even known I'd had. I noticed emptiness in my stomach and realized I hadn't eaten in too long. I also sensed the heat that coursed through me, and had been coursing through me seemingly forever. I had gained som
e calm when Urvasi taught me acceptance. But it hadn't obliterated my rage like I'd thought. A part of me still wanted to murder every Maiden of Shadow on Earth.

  I didn't fight that rage. Urvasi wanted me to notice every part of myself, and I felt that that included my rage, that it included every bit of my emotions. This wasn't just about my body, this was about my entire existence.

  I took a deep long breath and held it for a couple of seconds. My body hummed like an electrical transformer powering a city block. I had reached a point where I knew what every part of me was feeling in that moment, all the way to every hair on every inch of my skin. I could actually feel my organs the same way I could feel with my hands, touching the bones and juices within my body. My breath tasted like sand. My eyes throbbed in their sockets. I could even smell my sweat.

  But now came the next step, the step I was uncertain about, the step that would determine if this worked.

  I tried to feel my soul, starting with the part still within me. Since I had no idea what a soul felt like, I didn't know what I was looking for. I didn't know if I would recognize it if I found it. But as I drifted deeper into my trance, I touched something that buzzed like pure energy, and I knew right away that I had reached my soul.

  I felt every twitch of my muscles around my mouth as I smiled.

  Gotcha.

  For a moment, I reveled in the energy of my soul, but then something turned inside me, something my soul brought to my attention. A gap. Full of nothing but sorrow and the image of my dead mother. I felt my tear ducts fill, then leak, felt the tickle of each tear as it ran down my cheek.

  It was obvious that I would find this emptiness. Urvasi had warned me that it probably wasn't just my soul missing.

  Then I felt that emptiness expanding. I thought of my father. I even thought of Toft Kitchens, and that moment when he told me he would need to sacrifice himself, and that I would have to be the one to kill him, all for the fate of a bunch of mortals an old vampire like him shouldn't have even cared about. Then I found another emptiness inside me. It was an emptiness that represented all I thought I knew, and how I hardly knew anything. I was part of Detroit's paranormal community, but that didn't make me anything close to an expert.

  The last bit of emptiness I felt made me shiver. It was that feeling I used to have whenever I'd been with Fiona, before she had betrayed me. I had locked myself up in all the troubles of my present so that I hadn't even realized how much I missed this part of my past.

  My instinct was to fight this memory. But I knew better. I couldn't fight it. It wouldn't do any good. Instead, I had to accept it, much as I hated to.

  As I let myself float within all this emptiness, I reached out beyond myself.

  Like an out of body experience, I felt something tug at my consciousness and draw me out of Urvasi's prison and back into my own world. Instead of showing up at the cemetery, I found my astral body standing in front of what looked like an abandoned hospital. On the building's brick face a series of metal letters read, “Warren Psychiatric Center.”

  Was this the Maidens' new hideout? What an apt choice.

  I floated through the front door, through narrow hallways with cracked tile floors, past rooms with broken down beds and old, thin dirty mattresses. I could smell the dust in the air and the damp stickiness of rotten things. Candles on either side of the hall, like runway lights, provided the only illumination.

  I felt a force tugging at me, drawing me deeper into the hospital. I knew it was my soul. I floated down a hallway and then around a corner. Down a bit, on the right-hand side, was a nurses' station enclosed in thick glass, clearly meant to keep the patients out. Across from the station was a pair of double doors. One of the doors was hanging loose, while the other was closed tight. I heard screaming inside.

  And I recognized the voice.

  I hurried down the hall and into the room. It was a common room that looked a lot like the recreation room Mom had spent so much time in at the nursing home. At the far end of the room I saw Odi, wrists shackled with chains that hung from the metal rafters above the drop ceiling. He was naked from the waist up. The light from the circle of candles surrounding him made the shadows squirm over his skin, and reminded me of the shadows that had chased me through the streets of Corktown.

  The shackles were clearly made of silver. Where they touched his skin around his wrists, the skin burned and hissed, steam coming off of them. He was also drenched, his red hair dripping, his body glistening with moisture. His wet skin steamed and sizzled, too. Didn't take a genius to realize he was covered in holy water.

  Standing next to him was a woman with mousy brown hair who looked to be in her mid-50s. Her attention was on Odi, but I could see enough of her face, and she looked terribly familiar. It only took me a couple of seconds, then I realized that she looked like an older version of Wendy, one of the Maidens who had helped me defeat Goulet, and had died in the process.

  This had to be her mother.

  As his skin burned, Odi threw his head back and the pained cries that came from his mouth turned the skin on my physical body to gooseflesh.

  The woman had a small smirk on her face. She held a mason jar full of clear liquid. Another empty jar stood on the floor at her feet. Droplets of water littered the dirty tiles.

  Odi's screams slowly tapered as the holy water's effects eased. He looked at the witch with red eyes, but not the glowing red typical of vampires—he still maintained his human glamour—but the red-lined eyes of a torture victim.

  “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “Because I enjoy hurting what Sebastian Light cares for,” she said. “And because your screams fill me with power.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about. I'd never heard of screams powering a witch. Maybe in some kind of ritual, in the middle of the casting. But I figured she was speaking metaphorically. Still not exactly comforting.

  The witch splashed some more water at Odi's face. He jerked against the chains as he screamed again. Pieces of his flesh burned away, revealing some bone underneath.

  Now his fangs came out. His eyes began to glow. He went from looking like a scared teenager to a vicious demon. Flames engulfed his hands, but with his arms hanging over his head and shackled, he couldn't throw anything at the witch.

  The witch sneered and tossed more water on him.

  The flames died instantly as the pain of his burning skin cut Odi off from his power.

  That was probably the real reason for the torture. As long as they kept him in constant pain, he wouldn't have a chance to use his magic against them. Smart. They didn't underestimate him, even though he was so new to practicing sorcery.

  I wanted to rush at the witch and claw her face off. But I was currently little more than a ghost in this place. I had to get back to my body. Yet there was one more thing left to do.

  I had to find my soul.

  I didn't have to look far. In fact, my soul had drawn me to this room because it was within this room. I just hadn't noticed because I'd been so focused on Odi and the witch.

  An alter was put together on one of the few circular tables left behind from when the hospital was still occupied. Burning candles around a small human skull sat in the center. And there, directly behind the skull, a crystal jar filled with a green glow.

  My soul.

  I clenched my astral fists and felt my real fists clenching, too, fingernails biting into my palms. Trying to set aside Odi's screams for the moment—which was nearly impossible—I approached the altar. I reached out to the container and tried to touch it. My hand passed through the crystal, and I could feel it, my soul. It vibrated within me like a struck tuning fork. The vibration rang in my ears. For a brief moment I felt whole again, as if my soul had reentered my body to join the rest of it, where it belonged.

  The sensation didn't last, though. It disappeared the moment I pulled my hand away.

  The only way to truly get my soul back was to find this hospital and take it.

/>   Thinking that I might be able to track down the rest of the witches and see what they were up to, I drifted out of the common room and tried to continue down the hall, and came to an abrupt halt. The force of my soul tugged me back toward it as if it held a leash tight around my neck. It seemed my astral body was bound by my soul's location. Fine. Time to do this for real.

  I took a deep breath and opened my eyes. I was back in Urvasi's door-less prison, sitting in the very same place I had been. Yet I still had a sense that I had traveled far, and that I'd been away for a long time.

  Urvasi studied me. “Did you find what you needed?”

  I nodded. “I touched my soul. And I'd like to do it again.”

  Like, right now.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The hospital was isolated enough that no one saw me pull around back. The witches must have braced the doors from the inside somehow, because when I pulled on the handle something rattled and the door held fast.

  Fine. I had my own way of opening doors.

  I gathered my power and used it to control the air. I threw a hammering gust at the front door and it cracked inward, splitting down the middle. A two-by-four threaded through the handles on the inside snapped as well. With another quick gust, I blew the broken door the rest of the way in.

  I walked over the debris as if it wasn't even there. In fact, nothing else was there—I was alone, the world around me nothing but a faint blur, my entire focus on one place.

  Just like in my vision, two lines of burning candles along the floor illuminated the hallway with flickering light.

  I followed the same candlelit path I had floated through in my astral body, around the corner, down toward the enclosed nurses' station, and to the pair of double doors that led to the recreation room. I yanked open the door that was loose on its hinges with enough force to pull it free. It slammed to the floor with an echoing crash. Inside, I saw Odi hanging there just like I had in my vision, in the center of a circle of large candles. The holy water had dried, but had left behind hideous scars that would probably take a while to heal, even for a vampire. Damage from holy water tended to slow down their normally quick healing.