Captured Souls
Captured Souls
Part Ten of "North of Midnight," a Spell Weaver Novella
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Where we left off: The ghosts of the murdered security guards succeeded in taking over Jimmie’s doppelganger before its mind was fully formed. However, the long-missing Janice returned and used magic to extract the souls of Alexandra and her new friends from their bodies.
I opened my eyes. At least, that’s what I thought I was doing. My complete numbness and the fact that I was seeing only magically rather than physically told me that I was no longer in my body. Janice had succeeded this time.
I was floating in a dark void, though I glowed slightly. So did everyone around me. Not only were Jimmy, Lucas, Khalid, and Umbra with me, but so were a disoriented Antonio, as well as the two missing Ladies of the Lake.
Janice—or whoever was possessing her—had captured a lot of souls.
“How did this happen?” asked Viviane. She squinted at us as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
“We had a fighting chance until Janice sucked out our souls,” said Khalid. “Where are we now?”
“Most likely, the same place we’d be if we were dead but had not yet moved on,” said Carrie Winn, scowling at the darkness as if she could scare it away. “The only reason we aren’t dead is that they need our living bodies to create doppelgangers.”
“Since you’re still here, I’m assuming we’re being held here by magic,” said Lucas.
“Powerful magic,” replied Viviane. “Vanora and I—oh, I mean—”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I figured out Carrie Winn’s real name is Vanora. I don’t know what the big secret is, but that’s not important right now.”
“Agreed,” said Vanora, who sounded remarkably like her normal, businesslike self. “In any case, Viviane and I have spent a long time trying to free ourselves from this place, but so far, we haven’t succeeded in breaking the spell.”
I concentrated as hard as I could, but I couldn’t see anything other than darkness. Our surroundings baffled even my magically enhanced vision.
“This situation seems tailor-made for Umbra’s shadow travel abilities,” said Jimmie.
“Except that there is no real shadow here,” said Umbra.
“Exactly!” said Vanora. “The darkness is just our souls’ way of processing being outside our bodies. That’s also why we see physical bodies when we look at each other. We can even perform what seem like physical actions. Our souls take what would be incomprehensible to our minds and translates it into something we can understand.”
“That’s all very interesting,” said Khalid, sounding bored. “But how do we get out of here?”
“Well, with all of you present, we have more power to work with,” said Viviane. “Speaking of which, Alexandra, Antonio, you both seem to have quite a bit more magical energy than when we last saw you.”
“Huh?” said Antonio, making a face that reminded me more of a cartoon character than a real person.
“Uh, we used Tal’s experiment to amplify—” began Jimmie.
“You did what?” asked Vanora. For a moment, her eyes glowed more brightly—and more angrily—than the rest of her.
“Antonio was dying,” said Lucas. “His physical body has a faerie death curse in it—and vampire blood. We didn’t have access to anyone who could cast spells, healing or otherwise. We hoped—”
“That one of them might be a healer?” asked Vanora, each word sharp as a razor. “Much more likely, they’d both die or be permanently injured.”
“I volunteered,” I said. “As did Antonio. And while he didn’t become a healer, he does have magic that helped save the rest of us.”
Antonio looked at me as if he could just barely recognize me. I would have worried he’d suffered brain damage, except for the fact that he was no longer interacting with his brain. Whatever trauma he’d suffered was more than just physical. Being drawn out of his body certainly hadn’t helped.
If Vanora had been a judge, her expression would have suggested that she was ready to condemn us to death. However, Viviane raised a restraining hand.
“It doesn’t sound as if they had much choice. And though Antonio doesn’t seem quite himself, we can probably fix him—assuming we live that long. Let’s focus on getting back to our bodies. Every minute we stay here is another minute our respective doppelgangers can feed on us.”
“I can’t cast spells, but I have experienced death. Maybe that could help somehow,” said Jimmie.
“Maybe,” said Vanora, sounding doubtful. “But the problem is really one of raw power. We need to break the spell that holds us back. With that gone, we can use the natural bond we have with our bodies to return to them. The question is, do we have enough power to do that?”
“All we can do is try,” said Viviane. “Assuming our power sharing still works under our…current circumstances.”
“It should,” said Vanora. “Without our bodies, we can’t cast spells that will affect the physical world. But the power sharing links are mental connections, not physical ones. They should still work.”
“Can…can I help” asked Antonio. His eyes looked unfocused.
“Hmmm, love magic—powerful love magic,” said Vanora. “That’s potent against evil. But are you in good enough shape to do something with it?”
Antonio just stared back. I wasn’t sure he was in good enough shape to tie his shoes, let alone be the focus of complicated magic.
“Maybe if you guided him,” said Lucas. “When we were fighting earlier, he showed instinctive awareness of how to use his magic, at least to some extent. He shielded us against powerful attacks—without having been trained to do it.”
“It’s worth a try,” said Vanora. “We should have Lucas dance up some extra magic for us to maximize our chances.”
I looked at Lucas and raised an eyebrow. “You can ‘dance up’ magic?”
He smiled. “It’s part of my connection with Chango, who is, among other things, the orisha of dance. Though I can’t cast spells myself, I can generate raw magic which we then redistribute through power sharing. Does dancing work without a body, though?”
“Remember, your mind thinks you still have a body,” said Viviane. “Just do what you would normally do. It should work.”
Much to my surprise, Lucas spun into an elaborate dance routine. We were all essentially floating, yet he seemed to move along a nonexistent floor. As he danced, his eyes became blank, and his movements became less refined, more primal as the continued. Traces of fire and lightning sparked from him. I was sure I could see a kind of glowing mist, which must have been the accumulating magic, floating all around him, gradually obscuring him.
“Much better show than we get when he’s only physical,” said Khalid.
“I can feel the power,” said Vanora, who glowed more brightly. So did Viviane. “Let’s try again.”
I couldn’t tell exactly what the two casters were doing, but I could see mist, similar to what Lucas was generated but wetter looking, radiating out from them as they shaped the raw magic into a Lady-of-the-Lake spell.
By looking through the mist, I could finally see the barrier around us—or what my soul was interpreting as a barrier, anyway. It was somehow darker than even the blackness around us. But in it were flecks of gray the same shade as the magic used by Janice and the fake Dracula.
“Join us, Antonio,” said Viviane. “Follow our lead.”
Antonio did his best. The mist stayed watery but brightened noticeably. Somehow, he added what power he could to it. But the barrier seemed unaffected.
“This isn’t working,” said Vanora after a few minutes. “Either we still don’t have enough power, or we aren’t using it correctly.”
“Fix me,” said Antonio. “Maybe then I can do better.”
“We could heal your physical body—if we were in our own,” said Viviane. “We could also deal with certain kinds of mental conditions. But what happened to you is outside our experience. I’m sure we can help you,” she added in response to Antonio’s downcast expression. “But we’d need to study the problem first. And our current situation is not…ideal.”
Antonio turned and shuffled away from us. I was pretty sure he didn’t want us to see him crying, or doing whatever our souls were interpreting as crying, anyway. I longed to go and comfort him, but I had the feeling he wouldn’t welcome any more attention right now.
I could hear him sobbing. I had to struggle not to race after him and throw my arms around him.
Damn. My love for him might not be real—but it felt like the real thing. Just the thought of him made my heart beat faster. Every sob made my heart feel as if it was breaking. I ached to hold him in my arms, to kiss away his pain—and mine.
“There has to be some way out of this!” said Khalid, looking around as if he expected the answer to print itself across the barrier.
“What kind of magic is this?” asked Viviane. “How much did the rest of you learn after our souls were taken?”
“The Dracula imposter and Janice both have the ability to extract souls from their bodies,” said Jimmie.
“Dracula has also claimed repeatedly to be able to eat souls, though he has yet to do it,” said Lucas.
“Allah would never allow such a thing!” said Khalid.
“Everything we know about the soul suggests it is indestructible,” said Vanora. “The threat was probably just a scare tactic. But even the ability to remove a soul without killing the body and then imprison that soul in this way is rare. I would have said it was impossible. But here we are.” She waved her arms at our surroundings, betraying frustration her face and tone of voice had managed to hide.
“I recall something from my studies,” said Jimmie slowly. “I spent a lot of time reading about death after my resurrection. There is a being who claimed to be able to eat souls and probably could have imprisoned them. He was once worshipped by the Yakuts as a kind of death god. The name is something like Arson-Dulai if I recall correctly.”
I knew I’d never heard the name before, but it sent cold chills through me, anyway. “What does he look like?”
Jimmie looked in my direction and raised an eyebrow. “Descriptions vary, but he is often portrayed wearing black robes and looking as if his own flesh has been carved from shadow. He is sometimes also portrayed holding a skull or something equally morbid.”
I shuddered. “I saw someone who looked like that on the battlefield during the attack on Awen.”
Vanora also focused on me. “You’re sure?”
“As sure as I can be.”
“The beings who claimed to be gods are all locked up on their own planes, right?” asked Khalid.
“Yes,” said Viviane, “but as you know, it is possible to visit those planes. We’ve been on Olympus ourselves.”
So many stories! I wondered if I’d live long enough to hear them all. No, what I really wondered was if I’d live long enough to hear any of them.
“So someone who figured out how to reach the plane where the old Yakut gods are might conceivably have met this Arson-Dulai?” asked Jimmie. “Maybe gotten some pointers on magic or even a powerful artifact?”
“Possibly,” said Vanora. “He’s the kind of entity it would be highly risky to visit, particularly uninvited. But in theory, yes, something like that might have happened.”
“That doesn’t explain Arson-Dulai seemingly appearing on this plane, though,” said Jimmie.
“Unless that was a doppelganger of Arson-Dulai,” I said without thinking. Apparently, my new magic was going to keep using me as a mouthpiece whenever it felt like it.
“Impossible,” said Vanora.
“How do we know what’s possible?” asked Umbra. “Yesterday, we would all have said doppelgangers didn’t exist.”
“Given the nature of the way the planes are locked, I doubt someone could bring a doppelganger back here,” said Jimmie.
“Unless it wasn’t fully formed yet,” said Viviane. “Possibly, it would have been able to pass through the protections that would have kept the real Arson-Dulai locked away.”
“But once the doppelganger was on a different plane, it would have lost contact with its original,” said Vanora, who seemed to be more receptive to the idea now. “It couldn’t have completed the process. But that may have been part of the plan all along. The real Arson-Dulai would never have participated in a ritual that would lead to his own destruction. But he might have consented to the creation of a partial duplicate.”
“We’ve seen that partial duplicates don’t function as well as the originals,” said Umbra. “Presumably, Doppelganger Dulai is closer to finished than any of ours were during our last confrontation. Even so, spells cast by an incomplete copy should have more flaws than normal, yes?”
“We’ve been trying to break the spell in its entirety,” said Vanora. “But if we could find a weak spot and focus our energy there, we might very well be able to break free.”
“There’s not a moment to lose!” said Viviane. “It might take a while to find a flaw—if there is one.”
To search out the flaw, Viviane and Vanora organized vision sharing. We had different ways of perceiving magic and worked at different power levels. But through the connections among us, we were all able to perceive the barrier with the highest possible level of accuracy.
Even so, the process was slow going. If there were flaws that might be exploited, it would take a long time to find them. Even though the barrier appeared to confine us in a relatively small space, reference to physical concepts like distance and area might be misleading here. If I stared at the barrier too much, it seemed to stretch out into infinity.
“Use me,” said Antonio, who had walked back without my noticing. “There must be some way I can help.”
His eyes looked red—crying red, not vampire red—and there was something so desperate in his expression that the ache to put my arms around him felt like torture. I had to give in to its compelling force.
I took a step in his direction, but abruptly, a door formed in the barrier. It swung wide as all of us gaped at it, too shocked to move. Through it stepped the dark figure I had seen on the battlefield—Arson-Dulai’s doppelganger.
“I came to show you…how I eat souls,” he said in a voice like bone scraping against stone.
Viviane and Vanora conjured a barrier of swirling water around us. Its sound—like waves crashing on the shore—suggested its currents flowed more strongly than they appeared. Arson-Dulai raised the skull over his head, and something that must have been akin to the cold of the grave collided with the water. It froze solid in seconds, causing both of the Ladies of the Lake to stagger. Then the ice cracked so rapidly that they whole barrier shattered, showering us with ice fragments.
Antonio had frozen—not from cold, but, judging by his expression, from sheer terror. His mouth had stretched wide in a silent scream.
I could feel fear, too. Its suddenness suggested it had to be the product of Arson-Dulai’s magic, but knowing that didn’t help me shake off the sensations involved. My heart felt as if it would burst. My blood raced through my veins as if it were pure adrenaline.
We had no weapons, and the Ladies of the Lake, stunned or frozen like Antonio, seemed incapable of trying more magic. Arson-Dulai flowed forward, like fog pushed through a graveyard by a high wind.
Without Khalid’s arrows and Jimmie’s sword, the only thing that seemed likely to stop the ancient death god was love. I had to reach Antonio. But the short distance between us seemed like a a chasm I could never cross. Arson-Dulai was distorting our senses somehow, disrupting the reality our souls had created for us.
But if that reality could be reshaped by his magic, could we reshape it ourselves?
My thoughts were dissolving in the waves of fear that kept washing over me. I managed to hold onto only one thought—get to Antonio.
Arson-Dulai had wreaked havoc on the illusion of physical reality around us, but maybe our psychic links remained intact if we could resist total panic long enough to use them.
“Antonio! Antonio!”
Only dead silence answered me. I could no longer see Antonio or anyone else. It was as if the surrounding blackness had swallowed me completely.
Had Arson-Dulai already eaten my soul?
“Antonio! I’m dying!”
I tried to imagine what it had been like to have Antonio in my arms, how it had felt to have his lips pressed against mine. If I could visualize the experience clearly enough, perhaps I could make it real. And if he were that close to me—
“Stop it!” whispered a voice in my ear—Arson Dulai’s voice.
The void around me seemed otherwise soundless, but I opened my mouth and screamed as loudly as I could. When my cry made no sound, I tried our psychic connection one last time.
“Goodbye,” was all I could say before I felt icy fingers on my throat.
“You cannot eat me,” I said soundlessly as the pressure on my throat increased. The fingers were bony as well as cold—
A burst of light cut through the darkness—Antonio’s light.
Arson-Dulai was nowhere near me. Instead, he stood about where he had been, holding the skull over his head. The way he had twisted our reality faded rapidly in the compelling brightness.
I looked over at Antonio. He shined as brilliantly as the sun. But his eyes! His eyes had gone blood-red—vampire red. Did I see fangs in his mouth?
He had broken himself out of Arson-Dulai’s grasp. He had done it for me. I knew that as certainly as he had told me.
But how much had it cost him to do so?
I felt fear greater than anything Arson-Dulai’s feeble conjuring had invoked as I read the truth in Antonio’s eyes.
He was gone. He was gone, and it was all my fault.
“North of Midnight” is related to the Spell Weaver series. (Chronologically, the action falls between Books Six and Seven.)
