The Soul Keepers Series, Book 1 Page 15

  “I’ve never felt it this strong before,” Rhett said to her, trying to comfort himself as much as he was trying to distract her.

  She only nodded under her curtain of red bangs.

  “It’s freaky, isn’t it?” she said.

  She had that right. After what happened in San Francisco, anything out of the ordinary was cause for alarm. But as Rhett looked around at his team and the other two that were apparently joining them—fifteen syllektors all told—he realized that this wasn’t really out of the ordinary at all. Mass casualties, Mak had said. Rhett was surprised that even though he had seen this kind of thing before, had even been a part of it before, it still unsettled him.

  But he didn’t have time to dwell on it—the push was insistent. It was impatient. If he didn’t get downstairs right away, he had a feeling that his body would eventually be carried there by invisible hands that would simply toss him through the correct door.

  They got moving.

  “Anybody else have a bad feeling?” Basil asked as they descended the stairs.

  Nobody responded, and that was answer enough.

  * * *

  Rhett headed up the oversize group as they went into the room, and he didn’t even need to stop and think about which door they needed. The push was all but carrying him toward it. It was gray wood, slightly crooked in its frame. Even though all the doors in the room looked pretty much the same at first, Rhett had learned that some of them were older than others and some of them were made out of different types of wood. This one appeared to have both of those anomalies.

  He opened the door to an inferno.

  Rhett was flung back by a blast of heat and flames, a fireball that erupted out of the open door, reaching up toward the high ceiling of the room. Everybody jumped backward, ducking their heads to avoid the blast.

  Basil, Mak, Treeny, and Theo helped Rhett to his feet, their faces as concerned as he felt. When he was standing again, he could see the source of the fireball—a living hell caught within the frame of the door.

  There was a short hallway with cheap plastered walls and checkered linoleum that cut off at a stairwell. A dark, splintered banister followed the stairs up and down, and another hallway extended away from the stairwell on the other side. There were apartment doors lining both hallways, and all of them were spewing flames, lashing orange tongues that swiped at the hot, empty air, looking for something to scald. Clouds of black, acrid smoke roiled along the ceiling, flickering with the lights of a fire alarm that was still giving off a faint, tinny whine. It looked as if the building had consumed a lightning storm.

  People ran in and out of the doors, up and down the stairs, frantic, smudged with soot and struggling to breathe. Rhett could hear panicked screaming and banging from somewhere. He stood frozen, watching the chaos unfold.

  Someone grabbed his arm.

  Mak leaned in close and said, “We have to get in there. Now. Before that place sets the whole ship on fire.”

  She was right, of course. Because even as the three teams of syllektors stood there watching, flames were still licking at the edges of the doorway that led back to the Harbinger. If they left the door open much longer, the fire would find its way onto the ship.

  Rhett took an unsure step toward the door and then stopped.

  In the stairwell at the end of the hall, a flaming hunk of debris went roaring past, falling through the opening. Rhett heard it collide with the bottom of the building in a crash of shattering wood and angry fire. The entire building was ablaze.

  Rhett turned back to Mak. Was she really expecting him to lead all these syllektors into that mess? She was the leader of their team. She should be the one to lead this group. He would follow her in, if that was the call she made. But he had no intention of following the push to his ghosting with everyone else in tow.

  And for the briefest of seconds, Mak looked just as unsure as he was. Her eyes shifted from the engulfing flames in the apartment building to the calm, smooth floor beneath her. After the smallest of hesitations, though, her resolve hardened across her face.

  Mak moved past Rhett and took a stance in front of the open door, ripples of heat wobbling through the air around her head.

  “Okay,” she called to the group. “Everyone goes in. Everyone comes out. No unnecessary risks. No heroes. Got it?” The group—including Rhett—gave her their acknowledgment. “You find a thread, and you follow it. You get a soul, and you haul ass back to this door.” She pointed behind her, where the flames were already dancing near the spot where the Harbinger ended and the apartment building began.

  “What about the fire?” the man in the baseball cap asked.

  “We’re not all going to find another door out of there,” Mak replied. “We leave this one open.” She hesitated again. “For as long as we can.”

  The group of syllektors didn’t look happy, but they did look determined. Basil, Theo, and Treeny exchanged a look with Rhett, who only tipped his head.

  “Together,” he said.

  Then he nodded at Mak, who nodded in return before turning and running through the door. The fire rippled around her, like flickering orange hands trying to grab at her skin, and she was gone.

  Rhett took a deep breath, gathering his courage, and followed her.

  As soon as he was through, he could feel the heat and smoke weakening his body. He couldn’t actually feel it in his nerves, but his movements became sluggish, his body’s responses to his brain delayed. And he began to cough involuntarily. Up ahead, from within the haze of smoke that was getting thicker by the second, he could hear Mak doing the same thing. The fire was killing their bodies.

  He made his way to the stairwell, giving himself over to the push, letting it guide him. When he got to the banister, he understood what Mak had meant by “find a thread.” The push was nudging him in several different directions at once, its lure moving both up and down the stairs and also curling around the open stairwell to the hallway on the other side.

  He could just barely see Mak over there, her machete ready at her side as she stepped into one of the apartments. There was a window at the end of that hallway that was blackened by the smoke, letting in just a hint of pale sunlight.

  Behind and around Rhett, the other syllektors were falling into the building, following the various threads of the push to different floors. Looking down through the opening of the stairs, Rhett could see at least three more floors below him and six or seven above him. Who knew how many people were still trapped in here with them, doomed to let the flames win?

  Basil sidled up next to him, a scythe in each hand reflecting the unruly firelight in their polished steel curves.

  “Hell of a way to spend an afternoon, eh?” he said. And then he took off down the stairs. Rhett wanted to call after him, tell him to be careful. But after the Golden Gate Bridge, he knew he didn’t have to give that warning. To anyone on his team, at least.

  Rhett shook his head and mind back into focus and began climbing the stairs.

  Flames crawled up the walls, reaching for him. Smoke poured down his throat, and his lungs continued to reject it, sending it back out in heaving, crippling hacks. More flaming debris came crumbling from the ceiling, and he could hear it crashing from other parts of the building. The whole place was ready to buckle.

  He climbed one flight, and even through the growl of the fire he could hear the murmuring of syllektors gathering souls. The push nudged him up even farther. He climbed two more flights to a spot where the smoke was unbearably thick, the flames just warbling flickers hidden by shadows. Glowing embers swirled around Rhett, landing on his clothes and singeing holes into them, into him. If he turned his senses on now, he’d feel the tiny stabs of heat across his flesh.

  The push guided him down the hall, where the only things that were truly visible were the growing glow of the fire and the ugly pattern of the floor. He let it keep him on track, even as he heard other syllektors barreling up the steps behind him, moving upward still. />
  Rhett came to the apartment at the end of the hall, on the left. The door was open, and inside he could hear the taunting crackle of more flames, like mad laughter. Through the haze, he could make out the shapes of furniture—a couch along one wall, a coffee table, an abandoned easy chair—but they were all just mounds of darkness in the gloom. In one wall, there was a cutout that led to a little kitchenette. The fire had found its way in there, and Rhett could see the jagged angles of flame snapping at the air.

  He stepped farther into the apartment, letting the push point him where he needed to go—past the living room furniture and the kitchen, to the alcove where, on the left, there was a bathroom. It had its light on, the porcelain still weirdly white and glistening, as if untouched by fire or smoke, and on the right, there was a bedroom.

  There were no lights on in there. No fire. And if there was a window, it must have been covered by curtains. Just outside the door, there was an oxygen tank laying on its side, with a clear tube circling across the carpet, disappearing into the bedroom. Whoever lived here could never even have tried to escape the fire, because they probably never left their apartment in the first place.

  Rhett was reminded yet again of just how unfair death could be.

  He traced the tube from the oxygen tank with his eyes, moving to go into the bedroom. As soon as he had this soul, he could get back downstairs, make sure everyone else was on their way back to the Harbinger, and get the hell out of here. The thin, clear tube slipped into smoky blackness, laying on the carpet for a few inches and then twisting upward … to a pair of withered feet that dangled off the floor.

  Rhett realized that he had been holding his breath, trying to fend off the smoke as best he could. But now he let it go, gasping at the sight of a massive, hulking shadow that filled up most of the bedroom doorway. It had arms that reached out and held the body of an elderly man—the owner of the oxygen tank—who was unconscious, limp in the shadow’s grip, clutched by hands that were mostly bone and shreds of muscle.

  At the sound of Rhett’s gasp, it turned, still holding the old man, and glowered at Rhett through the wafting smoke with its mostly empty eye sockets and forever grin.

  The psychon didn’t seem bothered by Rhett’s presence. In fact, it seemed to want him to watch as it pulled in a deep breath of smoke-tainted air. From the old man’s mouth, a thin wisp of white smoke unfurled, dancing in the air between his mouth and the psychon’s.

  “NO!” Rhett yelled, and lunged at the psychon. He pulled his knuckle blade from its holster, gripping it as tightly as he could, and swung with it.

  The psychon dropped the old man’s body, his soul now detached, and came at Rhett with a powerful backhand that carved a clear space through the swirling haze. Rhett ducked, dodging the swipe by just an inch, and lurched upward with his blade. He sank it into the psychon, cutting through its cloak and what little flesh there was hanging from the bones of its chest. It let out an ear-shattering scream.

  Rhett yanked the blade out from between the psychon’s ribs, but as he did so, the psychon slammed its other fist into him. He came off his feet and flew into the pristine bathroom, smashing into the vanity, cracking it, breaking a pipe open and sending a shower of water arching above his head.

  Through the doorway, Rhett could see the psychon step up to the old man’s soul, still hovering in the air, twisting and fluttering. The psychon stuck one of its knobby fingers into the white smoke of the soul and twirled it in the air. Something began to happen to the soul—it darkened, turning from white to an unhealthy-looking brown, mingling with the actual smoke that was still filling up the cramped apartment. The psychon kept twirling its finger, letting the soul wrap around it like a piece of fabric.

  Rhett pulled himself to his feet, ready for another attack. He spread his legs, remembering that first day of training—and all the other days since—with Basil in the ring. He sprung forward …

  … and without even a glance, the psychon turned and hit him with another devastating backhand. Now Rhett was launched into the living room, slamming into the coffee table. It snapped in two beneath him.

  The psychon let out a deep, satisfying grumble, almost like a laugh but ten times as horrifying. It took a step toward Rhett, the ragged ends of its cloak waving around its ankles. It still had the soul caught around its finger, and the soul was getting even darker, withering like the petals of a flower, changing from brown to black and somehow getting thicker, denser.

  Rhett watched, helpless, as the soul that had once been weightless and pure now turned into thick, goopy black sludge. It dripped into the psychon’s waiting hand, pooling there like oil. And, with another one of those disturbing chuckles, the psychon buried its face in its hands, slurping up the sludge as if it were soup.

  It devoured the old man’s soul.

  There was only one thing for Rhett to do: run.

  He clambered to his feet and left the psychon behind in the apartment. But even as he darted back out into the hall, knuckle blade still clutched in his hand, he heard the psychon rush across the living room after him.

  Of course there were more. Rhett came running back out to the stairwell and was met by the sounds of screeching psychons, clanging metal blades, and yells from the syllektors, trying to communicate, trying to fight back.

  The flames were worse than ever, wrapped around parts of the banister, consuming entire walls. Flaming beams cracked and broke apart, falling through the drywall of the ceiling and landing wherever they may. The whole world was smoke and fire and raining embers.

  Rhett needed to find his team.

  But first, the scratch-thump-scratch of the psychon’s boney feet running up behind him. Rhett waited until the sound was right on top of him, then dropped to his knees, spun, and plunged the four deadly-sharp points of his blade into the psychon’s gut. He used the creature’s momentum to heave it upward. For a moment Rhett could sense its massive weight on top of him, threatening to crush him, but then he gave one last shove with one hand still holding the knuckle blade buried in the psychon’s stomach and the other flat against its chest. He threw the psychon across the open, empty stairwell. It flailed in midair before colliding with the banister on the other side, which was coated in angry red fire.

  The banister fell apart, but the psychon’s cloak ignited immediately, and the flames spread across the fabric as if it were made of gasoline. When the psychon rose to its feet again, it was wearing a cloak made entirely of fire. It began to squeal and flail, dropping to the ground again and rolling. Its bones turned black as they burned.

  Rhett didn’t wait around to see if the psychon was going to survive—he flew back down the stairs, to the floor just below. There were three more psychons down here, each of them caught in battle with a different syllektor. One of them was Theo.

  He was doing his thing with a psychon that was bigger than even he was. Theo deflected swing after swing from the psychon with his ax, holding it high up on its neck—there was little room for fighting in such a cramped space. Theo’s broad shoulders slammed against the narrow walls of the hallway, his ax carving gouges into the already disintegrating plaster, as the psychon continued its advance, pushing Theo farther and farther down into the throat of the hall. Rhett could see a tight knot of smoke billowing back there—more fire.

  As Rhett descended the last couple of steps to where one of the other syllektors—the woman with the short blond hair—was doing her best to fend off her own psychon attack, Mak was coming up them.

  The psychon spotted Rhett immediately, but it never saw Mak coming.

  She came off the steps, swinging her machete upward, her face a raging mask. The blade swept through one of the psychon’s arms like a knife passing through water. The psychon let out a screech of pain that echoed up and down the stairwell, stumbling back from the blond syllektor. Rhett stepped up to it as it stepped past him, falling against the stairs that he’d just come down. He went in for an uppercut with his knuckle blade, colliding with the
underside of the psychon’s grotesque jaw. Its remaining arm and legs spasmed briefly and then it was still.

  “Do you have one?” Mak was asking the woman as Rhett stepped away from the psychon, his blade covered in the black goop of its blood.

  The blonde nodded.

  “Then get back to the ship,” Mak said. “Now.”

  The woman looked back at the other two battles that were still going on nearby. Theo continued to spar with his psychon, not backing down. The other syllektor—the lanky guy with the blacked-out tattoos, Rhett realized, the one who’d called out to Mak on Rhett’s very first day of collecting souls—wasn’t holding up as well.

  But the blonde did as Mak said, turning to go down the stairs to where the door back to the Harbinger was waiting.

  “And Gwen?” Mak said. She had her hand in the crook of the woman’s elbow, holding her in place. “Make sure Captain Trier is aware of what’s going on. Get as many people on that door as you can. We can’t let a single psychon through. You keep it open until everyone from the other teams is back on board.”

  “What about you?” Gwen asked.

  Mak glanced at Rhett. Her eyes were bloodshot and her face was streaked with dark smudges of soot, but she looked more sure of herself than she had at any point during the last few weeks. Rhett gave her a quick nod.

  “We’ll do what we have to,” Mak said to Gwen, and then let her go.

  Gwen didn’t wait. She ran back down the stairs, carrying her soul with her, to the protection of the Harbinger.

  Beneath and above them, the structure burned, the sounds of collapsing walls and beams filling the air.

  “Where’s Treeny?” Rhett asked. He and Mak made their way around the opening of the stairwell to where the tattooed guy was starting to lose his position, falling back, blocking the psychon’s claws with a short dagger.

  “On the ship,” Mak replied. “Basil?”

  “Haven’t seen him.”

  “Don’t get your panties all in a bunch!” came Basil’s voice from behind them.