Dark Siren (19 page)

The Good Doctor rested a gloved hand on Isaac’s shoulder to help with the pain. The Guardian’s touch was like a buffer, protecting Isaac’s essence from being chewed at by the River Styx. Now able to concentrate, Isaac put his will into the effort of drawing a soul out of the water, and like sharks to blood, they came. They were faces first, but then the faces had hands, and those hands were clawing at Isaac, reaching, groping up his arm, pulling him in.

Isaac held on to a crook in the rock and grabbed hold of one cold, slippery hand and began to pull, but the weight was all wrong, like catching a boot on a fishing line. He realized then he was dragging others too. They were coming up and out of the water, attached to his hand, each wanting a piece of what this Mage was offering—freedom. Freedom from the River, from confusion, from whatever unknown fate awaited them at the end of the river.

“I command you to release me,” he said, throwing as much authority as he could into his own voice, but the souls in the River Styx only acknowledge one authority, and his name was Death.

He could hear them, now. The river itself was silent, a black, glossy snake sliding gracefully through a half-pipe, but the faces of disjointed souls were starting to bubble up and out of the water, screeching and screaming, desperate for life, for a second chance, for forgiveness. They were bees, and Isaac had just disturbed their hive.

In a single instant, he learned the identities of some of the people holding onto him. One was a pauper from India, dead at the hands of another beggar who killed him over a scrap of dirty chicken. Another was a prostitute who had been beaten to death by her pimp and had missed her chance for revenge when said pimp was gunned down in the street. A third, one of the loudest souls, was the soul of a stillborn child, oblivious to the fact it had been denied life.

This one
, he thought, and he gripped tightly to the soul of the child and pulled hard. His bangle came to life with a bright blue flash, and a pulse of necromantic energy surged outwardly through his left arm, expelling the unwanted hangers on and sending them hurtling and screaming back into the silky river. The souls quieted as they touched the water, landing without a splash. They didn’t fight to get back out, didn’t claw for the surface. Instead they surrendered to the River Styx, and continued on their journey.

Rising to his feet, Isaac turned his attention to what had once been the soul of a faceless, nameless child. The soul, which didn’t have a body of any kind, was a ball of light and smoke coiled around his now normal fingers, suffusing his hand with a cold, tingling sensation. There was something serene about this feeling. Isaac had been around spirits before, had handled their essence before, but this wasn’t the same thing. With this strange wisp of light and smoke attached to his hand, he felt connected to something primal and pure. A truth he had always known and would never know.

Was it any wonder, then, why souls were so frequently the currency demanded by infernal entities?

“We must return,” said the Good Doctor.

Isaac caught himself staring at the ball of light pulsing and coiling around his fingers, and started to think this was the only good thing left in the world. Maybe even in the whole universe. He wondered what he could do with such positive energy, what boon his magic would receive if he were to use it for his own ends. Or better still, if he were to bind it to his own soul. Would the Good Doctor allow this? He wasn’t taking anything away, after all, but adding to himself.

An explosion of thunder grumbled above with a roar loud enough to cause Isaac’s very chest to shake. He blinked, stared at his Guardian, and then up at the bile-colored sky—a gray mantle mottled with sick greens and yellows—and knew he had been noticed. Death had seen him, this
mortal,
pluck a soul from out of his river, and Death was coming.

“Yes,” Isaac said, his senses returning slowly, as if he had only woken up a moment ago. “We should leave. Take me back.”

Isaac closed his eyes and felt a hand rest lightly on his shoulder. He clasped his left hand to his magic bangle, felt the cold, tingly sensation of the soul in his possession, and willed it to remain with him as he returned to his own body, but in the darkness and silence of his own mind he could hear Death coming. No matter what image of Death one scribes to—maybe a bird with black wings or a floating skeleton with a cloak of shadows wrapped around its shoulders—the end result was the same.

When death comes you find yourself face to face with your own mortality, and in some quiet corner of your heart, you succumb to Death and wish for its dark embrace.

Isaac opened his eyes and he was in Alice’s bedroom again with his left hand clasped over the bangle on his right wrist, and a shimmering, cold light coiling happily around it. He had not physically transported himself to another realm, but had returned with a piece of it anyway. Much in the same way as he had tugged on the strings of probability to present him with a parking spot on the street, he had pulled on the strings of Death to provide him with a soul. And here it was.

Isaac released his magic bangle and the cloud of smoke and light began to rise, shining and winking, circling into and around its own body, and enjoying a taste of the real world. He didn’t know what would happen to it once Alice was finished consuming it—assuming this would even work—but he was curious to know. Whatever moral compunctions he may have had about offering a soul to be eaten, they weren’t loud enough to silence his thirst for knowledge.

Maybe it isn’t like that
, he thought, justifying what he was about to do. Then he began to speak an old incantation; one he had learned from a Voodoo priestess some years back. He spoke it in French and with conviction in his voice, urging the soul to detach from his own body and find Alice.

He circled the bed, continuing to speak to the soul wrapped around his fingers, and knelt beside Alice’s resting body. He became aware of sounds coming from the other room—thumps, crashes and bangs. Scratching. Howls. Voices. They were coming from the closet, he knew—the wails of dead, angry men, like the clamoring voices of prisoners in a maximum security cell block.

Out
, they said. They wanted to get out,
and for a moment Isaac was afraid they might get what they wanted. They were getting louder by the second, causing the very floorboards to tremble. It was as if the prisoners were stomping on the ground, the vibrations causing drawers and cupboards to open and close, causing doors to sway, and windows to rattle.

Isaac stretched his left hand above Alice’s face and gently pressed his fingers against her soft, cold lips. The shimmering cloud attached to his arm glided across the length of his arm, toward the fingers, and found Alice’s lips. He watched expectantly as her lips parted, and the shimmering light disappeared into the opening as if it had been breathed in a quick gasp. Just like that, the light was gone.

Voices filled the house, now. A cacophony of insults and taunts, cries of bastard and whore, and promises of pain beyond comprehension. He turned his gaze toward his Guardian, but the space it had a moment ago inhabited was empty. In fact, he wasn’t even sure he had seen his Guardian when he opened his eyes after having returned from the realm of souls.

When he turned to look at Alice again her eyes were wide open, her body glowed with blue light which seemed to come from within, and her chest was heaving in slow, deep breaths. He stood upright and backed away once more, and that was when he noticed her eyes flash blue. Shimmering lights began to dance above and around her body, and as her skin regained its color, her breathing seemed to become more natural and less forced.

Then Alice sat up, her eyes shining with the cold light of the stars, and said “Quiet.”

Isaac felt a ripple of power course through him, and in the wake of this single uttered word the prisoners in the house obeyed her command as if she was their prison warden. And, he supposed, she was. He was left with a ringing in his ears and a thumping heart, but he was fine, so was she, and the sounds, the voices, and the vibrations had settled to a complete stillness.

Alice, her eyes still glowing, her body pulsing with blue light, sat up on her knees and reached for Isaac’s hand. It was warm this time. She pulled him close, wrapped one hand around his neck, placed another on his cheek, and drew him in for a kiss. His lips parted for hers without needing to be asked. Though her mouth was warm, there was a kind of cool sensation which followed the moment of contact.

It was a kiss of light.

Isaac’s entire body froze for a moment, his eyes wide with surprise and disbelief, until he found himself. Plunging his hands into her hair, finding her tongue with his as the embers of a passion long thought forgotten resurfaced like the phoenix, bright and furious and flaming.

As they separated, both remained transfixed, staring into one another’s eyes. There was nothing else in the world. It was as if, in this moment of bliss, this interlude of passion, nothing mattered. Not Emily, not the shadow woman, not the spirits trapped behind protective wards in the other room. The world had melted away into background noise. The universe itself was nothing more than a stage which had been built solely for the purpose of supporting this single moment in time.

A perfect, pure moment existing outside any defined notions of what love or lust was.

Only it wasn’t perfect. The moment would end, time would continue, the world would turn once more, and they would realize too late the consequences of Isaac’s hubris.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

A Walk in the Past

Despite all of yesterday’s exhausting commotion, Alice hadn’t once thought she would find herself in Isaac Moreau’s care, yet here she was. She wondered if this said more about her than about Isaac, and then realized it didn’t much matter. When he brought her back from the place of numbness she had gone to, all she had wanted was a bath and something to eat.

And a kiss.
That kiss.

Her memory of it was fuzzy. She remembered waking up with a jolt and reaching for him as if he were a lifeline tossed into the dark and murky ocean she had been thrown into. He had saved her life, but it hadn’t been simple gratitude that brought the kiss on. There was something else there, of this she had no doubt, but the kiss wasn’t a topic for discussion.

They needed their minds focused on the matter at hand, and both of them had taken blows to the head.

“How are you feeling?” Isaac asked. He had run her a bath, made her something to eat, and they were sitting on the edge of her bed.

“Surprisingly good,” Alice said. “Tingly.” She rubbed her cheek with her hand.

“I think you got off easy, considering how I found you.”

“What happened to me?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “I came over and saw you on your bathroom floor.”

Her hand came up to her forehead and she gently padded an area she thought should have been tender, painful, but it wasn’t. Maybe she only did this because Isaac had a Band-Aid above his eyebrow.
Phantom pain
is what professionals called it. But she didn’t think this was the case. There was a faint memory there, and the remnants of a bruise.

“What do you remember?” Isaac asked.

“I knocked myself out,” she said, “I guess since you woke me up, and there’s only one way you could have done it, there’s no point hiding my reasons.”

“I don’t expect you to tell me everything,” Isaac said.

“But you want me to, and I don’t blame you. It’s who you are. How did you know what I needed to consume in order to survive?”

“Lucky guess,” Isaac said, the corner of his mouth tugging into a smile.

She frowned. “I know you better than that. How did you know? No one knows. I barely know.”

“I had help in figuring it out. It took some deduction, but I got there in the end.”

“I can feel it… the soul. It’s a child, isn’t it?” She was rubbing her breastbone, the part of her body which had been the epicenter of her inner radiance.

“It is,” Isaac said.

“I wish I knew if it was happy here.”

She didn’t know where Isaac had found a soul for her, but also didn’t care to ask. They had shared very little with each other about their magic, but she knew it had been magic that saved her. She knew he hadn’t gone out and run some kid down just to feed her. The energy within her chest, in her stomach, was like butterflies—not bees.

Still, Isaac was silent.

“You don’t think it is,” Alice said. “Happy, I mean.”

“It doesn’t matter what I think.”

“It does to me. Tell me what you think.”

Alice wasn’t sure if she was looking for comfort or absolution. Perhaps a little of both. She had been cursed with a need to consume souls ever since her egress from the Reflection, and had been able to subsist on the souls of criminals of the worst sort. She wasn’t Batman and didn’t fight crime by night—although, with all her training she could have—, but if given a choice on whose soul to consume, she would always prefer to condemn a person who was already rotten inside.

Never had she consumed a soul as pure as that of a child, even if the child had been cheated of its chance at life. Maybe the purity of the soul was what was making her feel less pain?