Bewitched & Betrayed

Chapter 3

The corpse’s hand went limp, severing the link between us. The contact break was too quick, and the room spun around me, bringing a wave of disorienting nausea. I snatched my hand from the corpse’s grip and tried to remember how to breathe. I thought my lungs knew what to do, but apparently they didn’t. I was gasping, but I wasn’t getting any air. A dim corner of my mind calmly informed me that I was about to pass out, like I didn’t already know that.

Mychael’s arm went around my waist, lifted me off my feet, and carried me out into the hall. There was air in the hall, blessed air, cool and fresh, and best of all it didn’t smell like dead elf general. Mychael set me on my feet and I bent over, hands on my knees, gulping air in great heaping lungfuls.

Mychael kept his arm around my waist and put his other hand on my back, and I could feel the pull of his healer’s magic as he helped my lungs pull in air and blow it out. My head started to clear.

“She’ll be fine,” I dimly heard him tell the Guardians posted on either side of the door.

No doubt they thought that I was one of those women who couldn’t handle being in the same room with a dead body. I could deal with dead bodies just fine; it was the ones that grabbed me that I had a problem with.

A shudder ran through me, ending with a tingling on the back of my neck that felt like the featherlight touch of a certain goblin psycho.

“Well, that shot my . . . concentration . . . straight to hell,” I managed and went back to gulping air.

Mychael didn’t say, “I told you so,” but he didn’t have to and he knew it. A lot of people would have called what I’d done stupid and/or suicidal. I called it the risks of doing my job. A lot of people would call my job stupid and/or suicidal, too.

“You’re damned lucky he didn’t do more than taunt,” Mychael said.

I froze. “You heard him?” I said in mindspeak. There were a lot of things those two Guardians didn’t need to know.

“Yes,” Mychael responded. “The words were for you; the message was for me as well.”

The umi’atsu bond we had with Tam, or the other even more powerful link that only Mychael and I shared. One or both had let Mychael hear everything. Good. When a corpse grabbed your hand and a phantom goblin whispered sick nothings in your ear, it was good to have company.

“Ma’am?” came Vegard’s concerned voice from behind us.

“Fine . . . I’m fine.” I swallowed and stood up slowly. If I did it too fast, I’d be right back where I started from. I glanced up and down the hall. There was another pair of tense Guardians stationed by the stairs. Their keen eyes were focused on us, hands on sword hilts, and those hands and hilts were glowing with deadly spells at the ready. All they were waiting for was word from their paladin that there was something inside that containment room that needed killing.

What needed killing wasn’t in that room. I didn’t know where Sarad Nukpana was, and what I’d gotten from General Aratus hadn’t given me much of a clue.

Or who he was going after next.

Even with only four Guardians, the hall was way too crowded. To Mychael, they were his trusted men. To me, they would be witnesses to questions I needed to ask out loud, but didn’t want them to hear.

“Is there somewhere we can talk?” I asked him.

“My office.”

It was private, warded, and had a well-stocked liquor cabinet. I wanted all three.

“Perfect,” I told him. “I could use a—”

The bottom dropped out of the temperature, and bone-numbing cold flowed up through the stone floor. The long muscles of my legs convulsed with cold; the shock of it sent a spike of pain through my body.

I’d felt it before.

“Oh no,” I managed through chattering teeth.

Mychael knew what was here; he’d fought on enough battlefields, seen more than enough men die.

And knew that Death always sent Reapers to collect.

I’d never seen a Reaper, but I’d felt one before. I’d been attacked by one. In the pitch-dark tunnels under Mid, it had come for me and for once I’d been grateful for the dark. What I’d felt was horrifying enough without having to look at it, too. The Reaper had attacked me, but it had wanted to go through me to get to the souls the Saghred held prisoner, using me as a straw to slurp them up. The Reaper had come too close to getting what it came for, with my soul as a bonus. Reapers were indiscriminate diners. The dead, the dying, and those who shared their bodies or minds with more than one soul—we were all fair game to creatures who acted more like a pack of starving wolves than anything else. Prey was just food they hadn’t eaten yet.

I was most definitely prey.

“Vegard, get Raine out of here,” Mychael ordered. “In my office, behind the wards, and seal them.”

“Yes, sir.”

I didn’t move. I felt the cold flowing down the hall on one of the floors below, flowing away from us. “It’s not after me.” I focused my will and found them. “Two Reapers, one floor below.”

“The mage’s ghost,” Mychael growled.

Damn. The exorcist was working to separate it from the body it had possessed. One body, two souls, both weakened. Would the Reapers be able to tell which one belonged? Would they care?

A scream from below said they didn’t.

Mychael shouted commands and the Guardians stationed at the stairs charged down them, Mychael and Nachtmagus Kalta right behind them.

Vegard’s hand locked around my arm.

I didn’t have time for this, and neither did the man downstairs. “Vegard, let me go.” I tried to be reasonable, but I was prepared to be violent.

“Not this time, ma’am.” He’d been there for my first run-in with a Reaper. He knew how close I’d come then to being taken.

Shouting joined the screaming, and I felt more cold spots blooming below.

“There’s more coming,” I said urgently. “They’re outnumbered down there.” I could have done any number of things to get Vegard to let me go, but I was counting on his loyalty to Mychael, not to Mychael’s orders. If Mychael tried to stop those Reapers from feeding, they’d turn on him like a pack of wolves. “I can help him. I can sense Reapers, so I can probably see them.”

And probably no one else could. Just like the specters. I didn’t need to say it; Vegard knew it.

“Dammit,” he snarled, releasing my arm. “Not three feet from my side. Not. Three. Feet.”

We got downstairs and at first glance there were only four Guardians in the hall. I didn’t have to look much closer to see what else was there.

I could see them. Hellfire and damnation, I could actually see the things.

“Raine, get out of here!” Mychael shouted.

“I can see them,” I said. “And there aren’t two of them.” An insubstantial form slipped through the stone wall not ten feet from Mychael as if the wall wasn’t there. “Now there’re five.”

Nachtmagus Vidor Kalta stood utterly still in the middle of the hall, as if listening to something no one else could hear. “With more on the way.”

The terrified screaming continued from inside the containment room. It ended abruptly.

“Clear!” Mychael’s hands were glowing incandescent white, and I felt a tightly focused, controlled surge of power as he put his hands on the door.

And the door—four-inch-thick wood, banded with heavy iron—simply vanished.

I felt something cold closing in behind me and spun to face it. “Make that six.”

A Reaper floated there, mere steps away, watching me. At least I assumed it was watching me; the thing didn’t have any eyes.

An up-close look at a Reaper was something I never wanted.

Vegard took up a guard position in front of me, his glowing sword waving slowly back and forth. “Where is it?” He obviously couldn’t see it.

“Right in front of us.” I didn’t move; I didn’t want to give the thing any ideas.

Vegard’s pale blue eyes darted back and forth, seeing nothing, but alert to anything. “What’s it doing?”

“Waiting for something.” I knew we didn’t want to find out what that something was.

Reapers were only visible to the dead or dying. My connection to the Saghred made me a special case. The rock held thousands of disembodied souls that were not truly alive, not entirely dead. To Reapers, they were shining beacons, irresistible lures, prizes they had been created to capture. As the Saghred’s bond servant, souls could pass through me to the Saghred, so souls could pass out of me into a Reaper—and my own soul would probably be taken right along with them. Slurp. Gone. I didn’t know for sure, and I sure as hell didn’t want to find out.

I’d heard that if you saw a Reaper, you saw what you expected to see, what you thought the agents of Death would look like. Personally, I wanted to see little, fuzzy pink bunnies, but apparently my subconscious visualized tall, scary, and skeletal. My subconscious and I needed to have a long talk.

Roughly man height and shape, the Reaper had the translucence of a jellyfish, with filmy tendrils flowing gently around it like the ragged edges of a long, tattered robe. I knew from experience that those tendrils turned into constricting coils when they touched you. Yes, those tendrils could be soft and soothing, but a Reaper was also death in its purest form, eternal cold, and I do mean eternal. Its touch made you want that cold more than you’d ever wanted anything, to step into it with open arms, eager to embrace the darkness. Reapers used that lure to draw the souls of the wandering dead into themselves.

Like the souls in the Saghred.

I dimly heard Mychael and Vidor Kalta shouting orders.

The Reaper in front of me wasn’t getting any closer; it just hovered there. This many Reapers weren’t here to collect just one wayward specter. A few weeks ago when I’d escaped the Reaper in the tunnels under the island, I knew that it would be back, and when it came it would bring reinforcements.

Dad stood at the top of the stairs, not even twenty feet away.

“Run!” I screamed at him.

Dad knew the danger. From the expression on his face, he wasn’t running from anything.

Dammit.

Anyone who had died and been brought back to life was fair game for a Reaper. If you had only been dead a few minutes, you were still theirs. The young Guardian whose body my dad’s soul inhabited had died. As far as the Reapers were concerned, coming back to life was my dad’s problem, not theirs.

He ran toward me, darting around the Reaper. A tendril snapped out, lashing Dad across the back. His breath hissed out in pain, but he kept coming until he was at my side.

I couldn’t believe him. “Are you insane?”

He flashed a crooked smile. “I’ve heard that question a lot.”

To everyone watching, he was a twenty-year-old Guardian either brave or stupid enough to tangle with a Reaper. To me, he was a dad trying to protect his newly found daughter.

“I’ve dealt with them before.” His words came quickly and in near silence.

I caught a flash of another face under the young Guardian’s skin, that of Eamaliel Anguis, my dad. I knew it was an illusion—at least I thought it was. Dad’s elegantly pointed ears marked him as an elf, a beautiful pure-blooded high elf. His hair was silver, and his eyes were the gray of gathering storm clouds. Eyes identical to my own.

Eyes that could see the Reapers just as clearly as I could.

Sudden movement caught my attention. Vidor Kalta. I didn’t think he could see the Reapers, but he knew exactly where they were, surrounding us. Then he saw my dad and his black eyes widened in realization and disbelief.

Oh no. He knew.

The body that housed my dad’s soul had been murdered, dead for only a few minutes, but dead was dead and Kalta knew it.

The Reapers were coming out of the walls. I felt two of them rise from the floor behind us. Dad went back to back with me, his entire body suddenly aglow with the same incandescent white power that had covered Mychael’s hands.

He was going to fight.

“Tell me what to do,” I asked as my eyes tried to look everywhere at once. The Reapers were too damned fast.

“Tamp down that rock!” he growled. “They can’t eat what they can’t find.”

“I’m standing right here,” I snapped. “It’s not like I can—”

“Just do it. Leave the rest to me.”

“How are—”

Dad took my hand and his thoughts instantly passed to me.

My mouth fell open. “You’re kidding?”

“It’s worked before. Take care of the rock and leave the beasties to me.”

No doubt my dad had plenty of experience keeping Reapers away from the Saghred, nine hundred years’ worth. But as far as these Reapers were concerned, I was the Saghred.

And his idea of fighting them was to sing them a children’s song.

It was a nursery rhyme sung by children at bedtime to chase away things that hid in closets and under beds. Those were imaginary monsters; these were real.

These were hungry.

My dad, Eamaliel Anguis, was a master spellsinger. Arlyn Ravide, the young Guardian whose body his soul occupied, was not.

His first note confirmed that with sickening certainty.

Arlyn Ravide couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. The Reapers were getting closer but Arlyn’s off- key tenor kept right on singing. It wasn’t just awful to hear; it was going to get us killed.

Then magic spun from that note-cracking voice. He was doing more than singing the words; he was believing them, and that belief gave them life and substance, but most of all it gave them power, pitch be damned. I could feel it and so could the Reapers. This actually might work. Arlyn repeated the verse again, and then again, and each time the words took on a new certainty, a defiance. The Reapers didn’t back off, but they didn’t come any closer. At this point, I considered that a victory.

Until the souls inside the Saghred began to struggle.

“Stop them!”

Dad’s urgent plea came inside my head. I wanted to answer him, I wanted to stop the souls that were surging up inside of me, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t speak; I couldn’t breathe. The Saghred was in a guarded and warded chamber five floors below, yet I felt it as if I were holding it in my hands, feeling the souls writhe inside. Their terror was mine and so was their desperation.

One soul broke away, then another, and yet another, trembling with eagerness. They weren’t inside the Saghred.

They were inside of me.

Inside of me and struggling to get out, to go to the Reapers, to embrace and be embraced by Death. They wanted it with an intensity that stole my breath and froze my body. They were coming out; the Reapers were drawing them out.

Through me.

I gasped with shallow breaths, the shouts and screams of the men around me dying away until my own panting breath was all I heard. I looked down in horror as a twisting, curling ribbon of light as thick as my arm emerged from my chest, the cold vapor of a wraith, a captive soul that was captive no longer. In a flash of light it was gone, snatched by the nearest Reaper. Another wraith followed the first, then a third, and a fourth.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t scream, and I desperately needed to do both. I was blacking out. Pain dug with white- hot claws into the center of my chest. It felt like my insides were being ripped out, and I was helpless to stop it.

I raggedly dragged air into my lungs and screamed, an agonized wail of unbearable pain.

The wraiths inside of me stopped.

And the Reapers rushed us.

Vidor Kalta shouted something and ran forward, a spell spreading a black nimbus over his long- fingered hands like a shield. He used it like a battering ram between two Reapers. The things jerked away from him as if burned and he closed the distance to us. The nachtmagus turned his back to me, putting himself squarely between us and any Reaper who tried to get past him.

Vidor Kalta was defending us.

Three Reapers darted back and forth mere inches from the nachtmagus’s extended hands, looking for a weakness, determined to find a way to get past him. Kalta’s already pale face blanched further under the invisible onslaught, beads of sweat forming at his temples and running down his face, his breath harsh and ragged. He couldn’t hold on for much longer.

What felt like a whip made of ice lashed itself around my wrist, jerking my hand from Dad’s grasp. He disappeared into a knot of Reapers.

“No!” I screamed.

A roar tore its way out of my throat as I shielded myself and charged into the Reapers. Tendrils that a moment before had looked thin and filmy lashed at me like the stings of hundreds of jellyfish. My legs went numb with cold; coils whipped my throat, face, arms. One wrapped like a weighted chain around my waist and dragged me down. Coils of soul-numbing, burning cold grabbed at me, stabbing, slashing, looking for a weakness.

Finding a way in.

I screamed in terror and pain. I struggled to think, to fight back. I was covered in Reapers, panicking, their coils weaving their way around me like a shroud. I’d denied Death before; I would win again. My scream turned into a snarl, channeling my rage into a white- hot fury. I had to fight them; I had to get up. They would take me, and then they would take Dad.

A flash of impossibly bright light pierced the cold. An avenging angel, blazing with rage and savage strength, beautiful and deadly.

Mychael.

The coils and tendrils loosened, retracted. I could feel my legs and arms burning as if lashed with fiery whips.

A pair of arms wrapped around me, warm and strong. I blinked slowly, trying to focus. My vision cleared and I looked up into eyes younger than my own, but haunted with nine centuries of life.

I dimly felt my lips twitch in a smile. “Found you,” I croaked. My throat was raw from screaming.

Dad’s hands were cool on either side of my face. “Raine!” His shout came to me as if from the top of a deep well.

I dimly heard Mychael shouting commands, then he was by my side. He spoke quickly to someone I couldn’t see; his voice was forced calm, but his words had an urgency that scared me.

I looked down at myself.

My hands and arms were covered with red lashes. My shirt was in tatters; the raw welts slashed my chest, back, and legs. I tried to move and pain blazed from every burn as I fell into darkness.