The Soul Keepers Series, Book 1 Read online

  “What do you mean ‘what’s left’?” Rhett asked.

  Edith gave him a temperamental look, but Mak nodded for her to go ahead.

  “Everything’s been chaos,” Edith said. And as if to emphasize her point, there was another series of booms followed by the hollow pinging of cannonballs knocking against the ship’s hull. “We didn’t know what our orders were. Some of the crew tried to evacuate. Most stayed and fought.”

  It was only then that Rhett saw the piles of black ash that littered the floor around the entrance to the tunnel. Weapons gleamed out of the mounds, the remnants of syllektors that were no more.

  “What about Henry?” Basil asked. “Did he ever make it back down?”

  There was a long, uncomfortable silence among the syllektors who had emerged from the tunnel.

  “Not in one piece,” Edith said, her voice finally softening. “When we saw him, he was … a mess. Psychons followed him down. We held them off until we couldn’t anymore. Henry didn’t make it.” She lowered her gaze.

  “We lost Captain Trier, as well,” Mak said. “Did Henry tell you?”

  Edith nodded. “Yeah. That traitor is gonna get it if she crosses my path.”

  “She won’t be crossing anybody’s path anymore,” Basil murmured, looking down at his scythe.

  There was another pause.

  “So … wait,” Rhett said. Something concerning had crossed his mind. “If Trier and Henry have both been ghosted … who’s in charge now?”

  Mak and Edith exchanged a look and then Edith tilted her head at Basil.

  “He is,” she said.

  Rhett looked at her, looked at Basil. He chuckled. “No, seriously. Who’s the captain?”

  Mak let a subtle grin steal across her lips.

  “I’m afraid Edith’s right,” she said. “Basil was the second mate. His primary duties were to bring new syllektors on board. Like he did with you, with me. A lot of us.” She regarded Basil with a look of loving admiration. Edith was nodding in agreement. “But he was also in line to become captain.”

  “I just never thought it would come down to that,” Basil said in a hushed voice. He looked up at Rhett, at Mak, at the rest of the syllektors. “Damn,” he said. “Now I’ve got to be responsible and stuff, don’t I?”

  Edith and the other crew members behind her looked antsy, but Rhett and Mak grinned. It felt good to do it, despite the ever-growing tilt of the ship and the attack from the Cyclops and the psychons that were probably still lurking on board somewhere, preparing for their next assault.

  “If you’re done being impressed with yourself,” Edith said with an edge to her tone, “we have souls to protect.” Her eyes darted to the left. Rhett saw the quick flick of her irises. He also saw her hand squeezing in and out of a fist. She flicked her eyes again.

  It wasn’t long before Mak saw it, too. Rhett elbowed Basil softly, and he nodded in the direction of Edith’s eyes. It was a warning. She was trying to move their attention behind her, to the tunnel.

  Rhett took a quick inventory of the weapons that were lying among the piles of ash and spotted a decent-looking sword. He would have had more control with his own knuckle blade, but that was long gone. The sword would have to do.

  Edith stepped forward, flicking her eyes one last time. She leaned between Basil and Rhett and barely whispered.

  “They’re in the tunnel,” she said. “The rest of the crew are hostages. We were—”

  But she was cut off by the all-too-recognizable screech of a psychon, a noise that erupted from the deep black throat of the tunnel. There was a rush of movement from back there, and a wall of shadows moved quickly toward them.

  Rhett darted over to where the sword lay amid the other fallen syllektors. He grabbed the hilt and lifted it, testing the weight. Definitely more than he was capable of dealing with, but he had no time to shop for other options. He put himself flat up against the wall beside the tunnel entrance, holding the sword up in front of him. His breath fogged against the polished blade.

  A swarm of psychons burst out of the tunnel in a singular mass of bones and torn fabric. Rhett noticed something else with them, something big and muscular and clad in dark suspenders. Theo.

  But it wasn’t Theo. Not really. Because this version of Theo used a fist to crush the face of one of the syllektors who had left the tunnel with Edith. The syllektor stumbled backward, lost his footing on the stairs, and rolled down them. Then Theo knocked the hatchet out of the hand of another syllektor, bent, and wrapped his arms around her torso. Theo turned with the girl still struggling in his arms and looked right at Rhett. Theo’s eyes were gone, replaced by flat black emptiness and pinpricks of white.

  Theo hadn’t just been Treeny’s leverage to get off the bridge. He’d also been Urcena’s backup plan, another connection to try and destroy them with.

  As Rhett watched, the thing that looked like Theo squeezed the girl in his arms. The cords in Theo’s neck strained under his skin, the muscles in his arms warbled. There was a snapping sound, like a tree branch breaking, and then the syllektor girl sank to the floor, limp, her spine no longer in exactly the right place.

  After the psychons, more syllektors came running out of the tunnel in a panic—the hostages that Edith had mentioned. These ones were weaponless and scared. Most of them ran for the stairs, climbing over one another to move up the atrium and get away from the madness.

  “Get your asses back down here!” Edith hollered. She got the words out just before a psychon’s claw slid into her chest, almost calmly, without any hurry. She evaporated into a cloud of black dust.

  Basil and Mak had their hands full with two psychons of their own. Mak was fending one off with just her little hidden dagger. Basil was doing his best with a single scythe. The other syllektors who had weapons sparred with the psychons to the extent that they could. But the psychons towered over them and began to overtake them. There was a reason the syllektors chose to outrun the psychons instead of fight them, Rhett realized. This was it.

  “This is what happens when you defy me, Soul Keeper,” the Theo-thing said. The words came out in the same maddening tangle of voices, this time overlaid by Theo’s own New York accent.

  There was a psychon between Theo and Rhett. Rhett stepped up to it and swung at it with the sword. The psychon caught the first two swings with its claw, but Rhett faked to the left and came back in an arching swing to remove the psychon’s arm. It stepped back, squealing in pain. Rhett swung again, severing the top half of the psychon from the bottom half. Its ugly, muscle-strewn torso and skull fell to the floor, where it stared up at Rhett, motionless. When Rhett looked up again, Theo was barreling toward him.

  Rhett dove sideways and rolled. Theo, controlled now by an entity that typically presented itself as a frail, petite young girl, was clumsy. He toppled over the dispatched psychon and hit the floor with a hard thud.

  Rhett didn’t waste a second. He lunged, bringing the sword down in a tall arc, aiming for Theo’s chest. He had no intention of ghosting Theo. He just wanted to use the sword to pin Theo to the floor. He aimed as far away from the heart as he could.

  But Theo’s hands rose up to meet the sword. They clapped together on either side of the blade and held it where it was, halfway between Rhett and Theo.

  “You would destroy your friend?” the Theo-thing said.

  “Only if it meant destroying you,” Rhett grunted, pushing with all his strength—and there wasn’t much left—against the hilt of the sword. He was bluffing. Or trying to, anyway. Trying to get the advantage, to surprise the demon that now existed in Theo and set him free.

  “Then you are more foolish than I thought.”

  Theo’s hands moved a few inches, repositioning the sword, still with all of Rhett’s weight on it. Rhett didn’t have time to let up. Theo let go of the sword, and the blade fell straight down. It stabbed into Theo’s chest, right at his heart. The Theo-thing looked up at Rhett, laughing, and then disintegrated. The sword jutted out
of a huge mound of ash like a flag stuck into a hill of dirt. Rhett could only stare at it, consumed by shock.

  A moment later, Basil and Mak came up behind him and gripped his elbows.

  “C’mon, mate,” Basil said. “We have to go. We have to get to the steam room.”

  “There’s nothing you could have done,” Mak said. “That wasn’t Theo.” But she gave the pile of ash a weak, sick look anyway.

  FIFTEEN

  They went headlong into the shadows for the last time, leaving the battle behind them. They all knew the way.

  The Harbinger continued to sink. It tilted into the water, and everything inside the ship listed drastically. As Rhett and Mak and Basil ran down the tunnel, it became almost like running up a hill.

  Rhett had left the sword behind. He didn’t have the will to pick it back up again. It hadn’t been his weapon of choice to begin with. The image of Theo’s face breaking up into all those miniscule specks of dust wouldn’t leave him. Having the sword in his hand just would have made it worse.

  The end of the tunnel almost seemed to come to meet them. As did the two psychons that stood guard above the trapdoor.

  Mak didn’t stop. Even in the darkness, Rhett heard her drop and slide across the uneven wooden floor between the psychons’ legs. She threw the trapdoor open, and the faint blue light from the steam room illuminated the back of the tunnel just enough for Rhett and Basil to see what they were doing.

  Basil dug the end of his scythe into the first psychon’s hollow eye socket. Shards of bone and gristly tendrils of muscle flew. The blade cracked into the cavity of the skull, and black ooze came dripping out. The psychon dropped to its knees, then fell flat on its chest. In the next instant, Basil tossed the slime-covered scythe to Rhett. Rhett caught it, bent down below the swipe of the second psychon’s claws, and took off its legs below the knee. It fell, squirming, to the floor. Rhett inserted the blade into that one’s skull, too.

  Rhett held on to the scythe as he stepped down through the trapdoor and said, “This has an awesome swing to it.”

  “You have no idea,” Basil replied.

  Mak was already halfway down the ladder into the steam room when Rhett and Basil caught up to her. But by now the ladder had been angled to the point that it was almost like traversing a set of monkey bars. The ship was going down. Fast.

  From far-off, they could hear iron wrenching and twisting, the haunted moan of things bending out of place and being swallowed by the waves. There were more explosions, and the sound of the battle back in the atrium was growing. The psychons were pushing the syllektors back into the tunnel, making their last run to capture the souls.

  Inside the steam room, the walls groaned and cracked under the pressure of being forced out of true. The wood was old and weak. It wouldn’t stand up to the discord for very long.

  “How does this work?” Rhett asked. For the moment, he was able to put Theo out of his thoughts.

  Mak didn’t reply. Instead, she sidestepped over to the cube, its size making her look like a tiny action figure standing next to a huge toy chest. The tank gave off its ephemeral glow; the cloud of life lost pulsed behind its glass walls. Mak put her hand on the cube’s door, and for one horrible second, Rhett thought she was going to open it and let all the souls out. But this time, the door didn’t open.

  There was a sucking sound, like something being slurped up by a vacuum, and the extension tube that jutted out from the side of the cube and disappeared into the wall was suddenly emptied. All the souls that had been moving throughout the Harbinger, helping to give it power, were pulled back into the main tank. With a hiss, the extension tube detached itself from the tank. Now the cube was on its own. And so was the Harbinger.

  Along with the continued sounds of the ship struggling to keep itself afloat, there was a sound of engines and machines powering down, of propellers ceasing to spin and whole sections of lights going dark. The glass cube filled with souls was the Harbinger’s life support. And Mak had just pulled the plug.

  “Okay,” she said, stepping back. “The containment tank is secure. Even if there’s a breach in the circulation system somewhere else on the ship, the souls are safe. Nothing but a syllektor is getting in there now.”

  “You forget, love,” Basil said. “That she-devil back there can control syllektors. Look what she did to Theo.” He paused, looking away. “And Treeny.”

  Rhett was grateful to Basil for laying the blame on Urcena. Truly, that’s where it belonged. But that didn’t help with the guilt. From the look of it, Basil was dealing with some guilt of his own.

  “And what about the ship?” Rhett said. “We just cut the power when she needs it the most.”

  Mak only shook her head. “She’s going down anyway, Rhett.”

  As if to solidify her point, the floor beneath them shuddered and buckled. Splintered boards sprang free, flipping up like snapped bones and spinning into the air, showering the room with dust. The containment tank dropped about a foot into the floor with a teeth-rattling crunch.

  When everything settled, all three of them let out a breath.

  “Shit,” Rhett whispered.

  Above their heads, the battle raged on as if nothing had happened. Rhett could hear metal stabbing into bone and bone stabbing into flesh. Someone slammed the trapdoor shut. A second later, the door exploded inward. The dimly lit shape of a syllektor formed out of the shower of splinters. The syllektor, a guy with shoulder-length white hair, fell into the steam room. His body clanged against the nearly sideways ladder and fell some more, until he hit the damaged floor and broke through it, disappearing below.

  “If we’re getting the tank off the ship,” Rhett said, “we better do it now.”

  “Mak,” Basil said. “Go. Go.”

  Rhett and Basil took up positions on either side of her, almost as if they were out gathering a soul. In a way, they were. They were gathering all the souls.

  Mak placed her hand on the glass of the tank again, and the faint, foggy image of her handprint appeared on the smooth surface. Rhett had deposited enough souls into the cube now to know how cool that glass was, even without his senses. It wasn’t even really a sensation or a feeling. It was more like an assurance. An assurance that within that block of glass and steel, there were no hard edges or boiling rooms. That there was comfort in death.

  From this angle, there was a narrow gap where the trapdoor had been that Rhett could see through. He could see the fluttering cloaks of psychons and the winking blades of syllektors.

  “Whatever you’re doing, you need to do it n—” a voice up top started to yell before it was cut off.

  They waited.

  A few seconds later, Mak stepped back from the tank, looking at it, then looking at her hand. Confusion and panic were etched all over her face.

  “What’s wrong?” Basil said frantically.

  “It’s not working,” Mak replied. It sounded almost like a question.

  “What’s not working?” Rhett asked.

  “The fail-safe. It’s supposed to … to disappear. Go somewhere else.” She was still staring at her hand. “The way we do, when we go out to collect a soul. There’s supposed to be a door, and it’s supposed to disappear.”

  “So what’s wrong with it?” Rhett heard the edge in his own voice.

  “I don’t know!” She stepped up to the cube and planted her hand on it again. She waited. Then she stepped back, frustrated. Fury took over her face and she started banging on the glass with her fists, creating an odd bonging sound that echoed around the room. “Fucking piece of shit!” she screamed.

  Basil came up behind her and caught her by the wrists.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said, pulling her back gently. “It’s okay. We’ll figure something out.”

  Mak whirled around. “Figure what out? Huh? What are we going to figure out?” With a finger that was shaking just slightly, Mak pointed up at the trapdoor. “They’re coming. For this.” She moved the same finger so that it
was directed at the cube. “And we are not enough to stop that from happening.”

  She sank to the floor, surrounded by bent and twisted boards. The glow of the cube behind her stretched her shadow into a long, thin line.

  Another syllektor fell through the trapdoor but caught herself on the ladder. She continued to swing with a sword up through the hole, clashing with a psychon that fought to get through. The sword might have been the same one that had ghosted Theo, but Rhett couldn’t tell for sure.

  The Harbinger screamed and whined and tilted. Everything was turned now, leaning dangerously. In other parts of the ship, Rhett imagined furniture sliding across floors, knickknacks tumbling off shelves. He imagined the old wooden parts of the ship snapping apart just like the steam room was. He imagined the dark shape of the ship as it began to point upward out of the water, lights flickering, the surviving smokestack coughing up its last dark clouds, the kymaker and the Cyclops nearby, the storm hammering on around them all.

  It was a car wreck all over again, this one on a monstrous scale. This one concerning the lives—or afterlives—of thousands instead of just three.

  Because they were lives, even if they were lives that had ended. Their souls had continued to be, either as the glowing white cloud inside the cube or as syllektors. Life echoed on in those faint remains, doing good, being good. And they deserved better than this.

  Rhett looked down at the scythe that was still in his hand. His washed-out, scraped-up face looked back at him. He thought about the night of the crash, about the moment he swerved the car in front of the truck. He could clearly see Urcena in his memory now, standing in the middle of the road, her desperately evil glare connecting with his for just an instant. Of course he wouldn’t have remembered that, not after everything else—he had barely been able to remember his own name in those first moments after his death. He was angry now. So angry. But it was also a relief to know that his anger hadn’t killed him, or his parents, in the first place.