The Soul Keepers Series, Book 1 Read online

  Mak struggled with the door. Basil tried to help her. The psychon came down the steps toward them, its skull face looking eager and hungry. Behind it: more psychons, their limbs and claws flailing in a mass of bone and muscle.

  Basil wrenched the door open, flooding the stairwell with hot, red light. Rhett followed him and Mak through it, just as the psychon stepped onto the landing. They fell in a heap together on the other side. Mak jumped up, Rhett with her, and the two of them slammed the heavy iron door shut. They spun the turnstile in the center of the door until it wouldn’t turn any more. From the other side, the psychons banged and scratched and wailed.

  Rhett and Mak stepped back, eyeing the door, making sure it was going to hold.

  After a moment, Mak adjusted herself, checking her hip to make sure the lantern was still there. It was, dangling without so much as a spark within its case.

  “I think they’re stuck. For now,” she said.

  Basil was still lying on his back on the floor.

  “They could have at least had the common courtesy to call ahead first,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

  Mak helped him up.

  They were in a long, high-ceilinged room lined with huge furnaces that cast the red glow out of their vents and windows. Behind the furnaces, giant pistons slammed up and down, puffing out steam. The whole room was loud and chaotic with the sounds of working machinery.

  Rhett leaned into Mak.

  “This wasn’t what I meant when I asked you if that led to the steam room,” he mumbled.

  She shrugged. “I said ‘sort of,’ didn’t I?” She pointed down at the end of the room. “There,” she said. “That’ll take us back up to the main part of the ship and back to the Column from below. From there we just have to get to the steam room.”

  “What are we supposed to do when we get there?” Rhett asked. “Make our last stand? We almost got torn apart back there.”

  “There’s a fail-safe,” she replied.

  “A fail-safe?”

  “There’s a mechanism that gets the containment tank off the Harbinger in the event that she’s under attack,” Basil explained. “It’s impenetrable if you’re not a syllektor. So the safest place for it to be is as far away from the ship as possible.”

  “Especially now,” Mak said, shooting a glance at Rhett.

  They were almost at the other end of the room, leaving the hiss and thump of the pistons behind as well as the horde of psychons still trying to get through the door from the stairwell.

  Rhett nodded. He understood what Mak was saying.

  “If Urcena gets her hands on Rhett and the souls at the same time,” Mak continued, “we have no idea what she could do.”

  “Soul Keeper.”

  The voice. From behind him. From all around him. From inside him. It exploded out from within his mind. Her voice and hundreds of others, like a grenade going off right in the center of his brain. Rhett fell to his knees. On either side of him, Mak and Basil did the same, covering their ears, trying to block her out.

  He looked over his shoulder.

  She was there, standing in the middle of the corridor, with the red glow of the furnaces around her, dripping water onto the hot floor and receiving wafts of steam in return. Her matted hair, her hospital gown, her dead, black eyes with those pinpoints of white in the middle.

  And then he saw Treeny, cowering in the space between two of the hulking furnaces, her arms wrapped around her knees, her glasses askew on her nose. Tears ran down her face.

  “It is time,” Urcena said, her voice blasting into Rhett’s head. “You will come with me.”

  For the first time, Rhett fought through the agony of having the she-thing twisting around inside his mind and spoke to her.

  “Why?” he said. His voice sounded feeble even to him. “What do you want with me?”

  “You have no idea what you’re capable of,” she replied, and Rhett doubled over under the force of her speech. She took a step toward them, cocking her head to the side. “You have no idea what kind of power you hold.” She came closer.

  Rhett struggled to speak, and when he did, the words were little more than ragged whispers. “You’re right. I don’t. But why would I allow you to control a part of me that I don’t even understand yet?”

  Urcena stopped short. Her eyes widened, and the tiny white specks of her pupils seemed to almost completely disappear.

  “Do you defy me, Soul Keeper?” she said, and even though the thing that looked like a girl was whispering, the other voices still boomed between Rhett’s ears. “Do you defy me as you defied your parents?”

  Those words broke through the pain in Rhett’s head like an ice pick. He looked up, staring into the black abyss of Urcena’s eyes. He understood why they had seemed so familiar back on the Golden Gate Bridge.

  “You were there,” he said. The images of that night—the night that Rhett perished along with his parents—came into focus behind his eyes. He could see the road and how empty it was. But the road hadn’t been empty, not entirely. “You were standing in the road.”

  Urcena’s face curled into an awful grin.

  “Your power was wasted in life,” she said. “I could not wait around for you to die on your own.”

  “You did this to me,” Rhett said, the realization crashing down within his heart. “You did this to my parents.”

  Basil was moving beside him, reaching up to his shoulder, where his scythes jutted from their sheaths.

  “You used me against my parents just like you used Treeny against us,” Rhett went on. He glanced at Treeny, shaking and crying in the unsettled light of the furnaces’ flames. She was just as scared and angry and vulnerable as Rhett had been. He hadn’t killed his parents at all. And Treeny hadn’t ghosted the captain. It was the she-thing. All of it. He saw Treeny’s mouth moving and at the same time heard Urcena’s raging voice.

  “Do not look at her!” she snapped. “Look here. To me. To your destiny.”

  At the same moment that Basil was getting his grip on the scythe, Rhett was understanding Treeny’s part in all this. She wasn’t Urcena’s assassin or her errand girl or her messenger. She was the conduit through which Urcena was able to manifest herself. She needed Treeny, to enter this world from wherever it was that she came from. That was why Rhett had heard the dripping water inside the Harbinger—in his room, in the halls of the crew quarters. Urcena had been there all along—with Treeny. She’d been with him from the very beginning.

  “We’re going to destroy you,” Rhett said. Even to his own ears, his voice sounded viciously calm.

  Rhett saw the blur of Basil’s arm straightening out and the blur of the scythe leaving his hand, spinning in the air toward Urcena. She didn’t look afraid. In fact, the touch of another sinister grin winked at the corner of her lips. And Rhett knew why. Even if the scythe hit her, it wouldn’t do any damage. If they wanted to do that, they’d have to destroy …

  From her spot between the furnaces, Treeny stood and ran. She dove in the air, screaming. She put herself between Basil’s scythe and Urcena.

  The scythe buried itself in Treeny’s chest. She hit the floor and lay there for a moment, a look of pure relief spreading across her face. And then she crumbled into black ash, the shape of her falling apart into a pile of dust with the handle of the scythe protruding from it.

  But Urcena remained, her face wild with rage. She stared at Basil, then fixed her eyes on Rhett again. She opened her mouth and screamed. The sound should have broken them all, but it was barely as potent as her whispers. With her connection to them gone, Urcena was stuttering in and out of reality.

  Her scream tore through the compartment. Several furnaces crumpled in on themselves like balls of tinfoil. A piston broke free of its arm, vomiting steam and punching a hole in the wall, where it got stuck and began to whine, the pressure building. Flames erupted from the collapsed furnaces, filling the room with wavering heat.

  Rhett stepped back, pulling at Basil, wh
o pulled at Mak. Together, they backed away.

  Urcena screamed. She let her fury ignite the compartment as it fell apart around her. Behind her, the psychons had folded the door in. Their arms and faces thrashed in the narrow hole they’d made, trying to get through. Urcena was their queen. They would continue trying to serve her, even if it meant being incinerated.

  As Urcena continued to fade, the image of her body flashing and sputtering, the three syllektors stepped slowly through the door that they’d been trying to reach. The she-thing’s halting effect on them had dwindled along with her presence in their world. Fire filled the compartment, and at the far end, Rhett could see the cloaks of the psychons catching some of the flames. They screamed right along with their queen.

  “YOU HAVE NOT ESCAPED ME, SOUL KEEPER!” Urcena roared, her voice more thing now than she. “YOU HAVE NOT ESCAPED ME!”

  And then Mak sealed the door to the compartment, locking the inferno on the other side.

  * * *

  More running. More stairs.

  “Didn’t anybody think to put a damn elevator in this thing?” Rhett asked, running up a flight of steps behind the other two. He was trying to put the image of Urcena out of his mind—Urcena back in the furnace room, Urcena on the road the night of his death. He’d be lucky if he never saw that horrible face ever again. He didn’t think that would be the case, though. They may have weakened her connection to them by ghosting Treeny, but they hadn’t gotten rid of her completely. He could feel it.

  They came to a long hallway, brightly lit with fluorescents, nothing but dull gray metal.

  “This will take us back to the Column,” Mak said, an undeniable touch of relief in her voice.

  They jogged down the hall. Rhett was unnerved by the quiet. He saw Basil give Mak a concerned glance. Rhett wanted to know why the hallway was deserted. Where was everybody?

  “Guys—” was all Rhett got out before the wall and the floor behind him exploded inward. He heard ripping metal and gushing water. Something caught him, pulling him off his feet and slamming him hard into the wall. He was able to half turn. There were white sprays of water pouring in through a hole that was probably big enough to fit a minivan. The hallway was already filling up with dark water. Hiding out within the white froth of the incoming sea, Rhett saw the kymaker’s tentacle—a smaller one but with the same basic anatomy, gross crab legs included.

  The tentacle knocked into him again, shoving him into the wall. He heard a dull smack as his head collided with the solidity of it. The creeping crab legs on the underside of the tentacle reached for him, grabbed his leg, and pulled him in. There was already at least two feet of water flooding the hallway. Rhett went down and under.

  He was caught in a swarm of bubbles. The noise of the rushing water was muffled into a quiet, steady roar. He tried to focus on the fluorescent bars on the ceiling, but they began to flicker and go out. He reached for his knuckle blade and found only an empty holster. He didn’t know when he’d lost it—probably back up on the upper deck, when the bridge tower had collapsed. One of the tentacle’s circles of slender legs had Rhett now. He could feel the rounded points of the legs as they crept across him, pulling him closer. They would get a good hold on him and then the tentacle would pull him back out of the ship and deposit him right into the toothy hole of the angry beast. Who knew if it would destroy his heart right away? He might have to wait around while the monster’s teeth slashed into every other part of him, breaking him down, digesting him. It could take hours.

  At least there would be no pain if he didn’t want there to be. There was no pain now, even in his body’s mangled state—broken ribs, damaged lungs, waterlogged and covered in scrapes and bruises. He felt none of it. And that, at least, was a blessing.

  Rhett struggled against the kymaker’s tentacle legs. His feet found something that was mostly solid but had a little give to it, something almost like rubber. He realized it was the tentacle itself. Using it for leverage, he tried to pull free of the reaching legs and only succeeded in getting himself wrapped tighter in their rigid grasp. While his body was content to just float there, Rhett’s brain was screaming, Breathe, damn it! Breathe!

  He shut his eyes and prepared to inhale. He didn’t know what was going to happen when the water flooded his lungs. Would it be the same as the smoke? Would he just keep going without the oxygen? Or would he sink, lost in a comatose state, left to lay at the bottom of the sea forever? That didn’t sound so bad, actually.

  But then something swiped through the water nearby, and he felt the squeeze of the legs loosen a bit. Another swipe. The tentacle squirmed and jerked. It knocked into Rhett again, only this time it flung him away. The crab legs released him, and he broke the surface, heaving in a deep breath.

  He got to his feet just in time to see the tentacle squirm back out of the hole it had made, leaving behind a dozen or so of its spindly legs. They floated at the surface of the rising water, writhing on their own. Mak stood with Basil’s remaining scythe in her hand, watching them. Basil was holding on to her belt and now let go. He’d been holding on to her in case they needed to make a quick escape, Rhett presumed. But still, they’d stayed. They’d saved him.

  “Thanks,” he said lamely.

  “Don’t mention it,” Basil replied. “No, really. Don’t mention it. That thing gives me the willies.” He shivered dramatically.

  The water was up to their elbows now and still pouring in. They sloshed the rest of the way down the hall. There was a flight of six or seven steps at the end. They crawled up them, pulling themselves out of the water.

  “Because we weren’t wet enough already, right?” Rhett said, shaking his arms out.

  The water gurgled up the steps behind them.

  “We have to seal this compartment,” Mak said. She was wringing out a mass of her dark hair. “The engine room that we came from is compromised. It might have already blown more pistons, which means it’s probably taking on water, too.”

  She pulled open another bulkhead door at the top of the steps, with the water lapping at their heels again already. When they were through, she pushed the door closed and spun the turnstile. Rhett helped her twist it until it wouldn’t budge another inch.

  When he turned around to get his bearings, he was glad to see that they had finally reached the bottom of the atrium and the winding staircase that made up the Column.

  Down here, the banister was all flaking, rusted wrought iron, and the steps were some kind of marble. Rhett looked up and saw the familiar spiral of blue light and metal. At the top, though, the ceiling had come falling in. Some of the lights sparked, and it looked like there might be a fire burning. Everything else was twisted metal. When Rhett stepped forward to get a better look, he kicked something that clanged across the floor. He looked down and saw scattered pieces of debris that had fallen all the way from the top.

  “Where is everybody?” Rhett asked, the question he’d wanted to ask way back before the kymaker struck again.

  “Might have abandoned ship,” Basil suggested.

  “I don’t think anybody would have done that without the captain’s order,” Mak said, nudging a sharp dagger of metal with the toe of her boot.

  “Maybe Henry gave the order,” Rhett said. He hadn’t known Henry for very long, but even as he said the words, he knew they weren’t true.

  Mak shook her head. “Henry’s skittish, but he’s a fighter. He wouldn’t have run away.” She took her eyes off the debris and looked up through the atrium at the destruction. “Let’s get up there,” she said after a pause.

  Before they could take to the stairs, something back in the direction they had come from exploded. The ship lurched and immediately began to list slightly. They now stood on an angle. Rhett gripped the banister to hold his balance, and he exchanged nervous glances with the other two.

  More steps. Rhett decided that the Harbinger had to be at least 50 percent stairs. These ones, at least, were familiar.

  They came to th
e steam-room deck and stared down the long tunnel that eventually devolved from sleek steel to rotted wood, with the steam room tucked under the trapdoor at the end. Now all the lights in the tunnel were out. Not even the torches at the very end were lit. The walls and floor and ceiling faded away into blackness after only a couple of feet. From far back in the cavernous hole, Rhett heard movement.

  “Someone’s in there,” he whispered out of the corner of his mouth to the other two.

  They both nodded. Basil slipped his scythe into his hand while Mak reached down, maneuvering around the lantern that was still miraculously attached to her empty sheath strap, and rolled up her pant leg. She pulled a dagger out of a smaller sheath on her ankle. Rhett gave her a look. She shrugged. All Rhett could do was stand there with his fists clenched, feeling stupid and defenseless.

  In the tunnel, shadows began to take shape. There were several of them, spanning the width of the darkened corridor. They moved closer, trudging forward with purpose. It wasn’t until their faces started to become visible that Rhett realized the shadows were too short and humanlike to be psychons. They were crew members, syllektors.

  All three of them relaxed.

  “Mak!” the one in front called. She was a tough-looking woman who appeared to be in her thirties. There was no way of telling how long she had actually been on the Harbinger, of course. She had short, reddish hair and a mammoth battle-ax that came up to her shoulders when she propped it on the floor. It reminded Rhett of Theo, and he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that he might never see the big lug again. “Damn, it’s good to see you,” the redheaded woman said. “And Basil, too!” She sauntered up, followed by a group of five or six other syllektors. They were all armed, and they all looked shaken.

  “Edith,” Mak said. She gripped the redheaded woman’s hand for a moment. “Where’s the rest of the crew?”

  The woman—Edith—cocked her head back toward the tunnel. “What’s left is back there. The tunnel’s the best place to try to bottleneck the bastards and keep an eye on the steam room at the same time.” She sounded casual, but there was something stiff in her voice that Rhett didn’t like.