Dark Siren (18 page)

The elevator stopped and the metal grating opened to a tiny nook with a door inside of it. The Good Doctor was there, too, standing beside the door. Isaac stretched his hand out to his Guardian and opened his palm. “Give it to me,” he said, and the Guardian opened his black-gloved hand and released a lock of dark hair into Isaac’s palm. The bangle on his arm had been glowing brightly until this point, but now it dimmed slowly to inertness.

“Stay with me,” Isaac said, “If there’s trouble on the other side, I want to be ready.”

“As you wish,” his Guardian said. Just as Isaac’s hand closed around the doorknob, a sudden thought struck him.

What if she’s okay?

He couldn’t believe he hadn’t truly considered this until now. His gut instincts had drawn him out of his house and sent him racing across town. Yet, not once had his logical mind challenged this urge. If Alice wasn’t in trouble and he came bursting into her house, then what? What would she think of him? Nothing she probably didn’t already think about him, he guessed. Neurotic, excitable, and paranoid.

But he had gotten through last night without making a mess of things, and showing up like this now could destroy whatever semblance of a friendship they were regaining.

No,
he thought,
I’m doing the right thing,
and he proceeded to rap on the door three times. The skin around his knuckles tightened, and prickles raced all the way up his arm. He knocked again, but nothing happened. He didn’t hear a sound, didn’t see feet shuffling beneath the door, and didn’t notice a change in the light coming out of the peephole.

Isaac pressed his right palm flat against the keyhole, visualized the mechanism unlocking in his mind, and his bangle began to glow. A second later, the door made a
clack
sound. When he turned the knob, the door swung open, whining on its hinges. He paused for a moment, staring at the loft unfolding before him. It was a wide open space filled with all manner of decorations and trinkets.

In the living room, he spotted a large L-shaped couch in front of a sixty-inch TV screen. A clean, shiny, powerful looking desktop PC was sitting on a desk under one of the far windows. A number of signed, framed posters of dead rock stars hung on the walls. On shelves mounted around the room there were rows upon rows of comic books, graphic novels, and paperbacks. In one corner of the room, Isaac spotted several different styles of electric guitars, as well as one acoustic guitar, and a bass guitar.

It was what he couldn’t see with his own eyes that struck him the hardest.

This place was heavy with death of the worst kind—unquiet death. The sensation was akin to walking into a meat locker where slabs of meat hung from great big hooks on the ceiling. But it was worse than that, too. The slabs of meat weren’t animals, but ghosts, and somewhere in here was a bomb that could go off at any moment and bring those dead husks back to life.

Isaac crossed the threshold into the living room and called for Alice, but she didn’t respond. He walked around the sofa and accidentally kicked something as he went. Alice’s backpack. It was open, and her camera—the one she had used the night before—was here too, sitting quietly on the floor with a Polaroid sitting nearby.

He heard a thump, causing his heart to leap into his throat.
Someone’s in the house
, he thought. Somehow his mind jumping to
intruder
instead of
Alice
, and he immediately threw his defenses up. The loft seemed to almost contract into itself, becoming claustrophobic in its proportions. Then he heard a scattering sound, and Isaac saw a cat dash out of the kitchen and down the hall. He exhaled and allowed himself a moment to regain his composure, but then he heard a loud
bang
which made his heart jump again. When Isaac turned his eyes toward the source—the closet door—it made a second
bang
which rattled the padlock. Someone had slammed at it from the
inside
, but the door was sealed shut.

“Ignore it,” said the Good Doctor from across the room. “You know what’s in there.”

“I… don’t…” Isaac said, “I don’t know what’s back there.”

“Do not concern yourself with the energies behind that door. Check the bedroom. Check the bathroom.”

Isaac blinked, fighting away the urge to unlock the padlock and peer into the closet. Instead he dashed across the living room in three hard strides, and nearly skidded on the hardwood floor when he reached the bathroom door. He flicked on the light, and there she was, splayed out on the bathroom floor and covered in nothing but a towel.

He came up beside her, knelt by her head, and checked her pulse. Her skin was cold—deathly cold—but she was
alive
. “Alice,” he said, tapping her face, “Alice, can you hear me?” But she wouldn’t respond.
Why is she so cold?
He thought as he picked her up in his arms, fastened the towel around her body, and carried her to where her bedroom was.

When he saw her in natural light, he noticed the yellow and purple bruising above her right eye.

It seemed that in the years since their relationship, Alice hadn’t changed a bit. Her naturally thin, pointed features were more refined, and her skin had a sleek, smooth complexion. Even with her eyes closed, there was a kind of secret wisdom about her. But the bruise on her right eyebrow made Isaac’s stomach go cold. It looked painful, a sky of yellow clouds streaked with purple and red. He checked her pulse again, steady but faint, and then frowned.

“Alice,” he said, gently tapping her cold cheek again. “Alice, wake up.”

Alice didn’t stir. Instead she lay still, her face pale, her lips blue, eyes unmoving. Yet, she had a pulse.

“Doctor,” he said, “I need your help,” and the room filled with the presence of the plague doctor, the smell of honey and cinnamon mingling with the scent of rotting skin. “What’s wrong with her?”

“She is dying.”

“Dying?” The word hit him like a punch to the stomach. A wave of cold washed over him, as if someone had spilled a bucket of icy water over his head. “Why? She was fine last night.”

“Overexertion, exhaustion, and starvation. She will not respond to conventional medicine, will not get better with rest, and will not wake up to eat.”

Isaac tapped Alice’s cheek again, but it was a vain gesture. “What do I do?” he asked the Good Doctor, though his eyes never left Alice’s face.

“She must feed if she is to awaken.”

“Feed? You just said she wouldn’t eat.”

“You have the answer to that question already. Allow your mind a moment of clarity and think, Isaac.”

Isaac pushed his long hair out of his face, and pressed his lips together.
I have the answer,
he thought, and he must have. The Good Doctor was only able to answer questions Isaac already knew the answer to, no matter how deep the answer may have been buried in his subconscious—though if the doctor could make Isaac find the answer himself, all the better. His Guardian was, first and foremost, a teacher. But this answer wasn’t buried, it rested on the surface of his mind and, like a piece of driftwood washing in on the tide, it was coming to him.

The camera, her ability to capture the essence of a spirit in a Polaroid, her affinity with dead energies. She wasn’t a Necromancer, not like Isaac at any rate. She didn’t have a Guardian, had never crossed the Tempest, and hadn’t so much as smelled the source of pure magic—though maybe she had. But she did perform magical feats, and this meant she needed to pay for the privilege just like everyone else.

“Souls,” he said, a word which came swimming to the forefront of his mind. “She needs to eat souls.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The River

Isaac stood and took a step away from the bed on which Alice, the
soul eater,
slept her death-sleep. The words rang in his mind like cannon fire in a tunnel, and yet he needed to hear them repeated over and over until the message sank in.
Soul eater. Soul eater.
It wasn’t so much the shock of the revelation, nor the surprise. He had, in some ways, suspected Alice had been hiding something like this. But to have it confirmed—
she eats souls
—shook something loose inside of Isaac, something vital.

Everybody pays for magic; no one ever gets power for free
. This Isaac understood as one of the fundamental laws of the universe. Yet when he thought of Alice and her supernatural abilities, he had never considered what terrible price she may be paying. Now that he was forced to consider it, he found himself despairing at how steep the price of her magic was.

“You are not in danger,” said the Good Doctor. “She cannot have your soul so long as I exist.”

Part of Isaac tingled with relief, the other with dread. When the feelings met in the middle, he started to shake. On one hand, Isaac’s soul was safe, but he knew this much already. Isaac was a being possessed of two halves of a soul: one half had been given to him at birth, the other half had existed inside the Good Doctor. For how long this half of a soul had existed, nobody knew. But as long as Isaac’s Guardian remained intact, his soul was safe.

On the other hand, his Guardian would never allow Isaac to give away his soul, or even a portion of it, to help someone else.

“I can’t help her,” Isaac said as more a statement than a question, “I can’t give her a piece of me.”

“You cannot. I will not allow it. But you
can
help her.”

Isaac turned to look at his Guardian. “How?” he asked.

“Find another soul,” said the Good Doctor.

Another soul
, Isaac thought. His neck suddenly became tight, and when he tried to swallow it was like choking down sandpaper. He looked around the room, stupidly, as if he thought he was going to find a soul floating nearby, waiting to be consumed. What his eyes rested upon instead was his Guardian, staring at him from behind a long beak, its eyes as black as pools of onyx. It gestured with its head, a simple nod, and Isaac understood what he had to do.

He removed his blazer and hung it on the door. With a squeeze of his right hand, the magic bangle on his wrist began to glow a light shade of blue. What he was about to do was considered an act of hubris by his peers, but Alice needed help. To hell with the rules, to hell with his peers, and to hell with morality. He would not let Alice suffer another moment, not if he could help. And he could.

He was a Mage, and he could do
any-damn-thing
.

“I need you,” he said to his Guardian, and the Guardian nodded again, indicating its readiness.

Isaac closed his eyes and began breathing deeply. Years of practice and mental discipline—yoga, meditation, studying for hours on end—allowed him to clear his mind of all thought and distraction, leaving it an empty canvas, and Isaac the painter. He clasped his left hand around his magic bangle and the blackness in his mind took shape. Distant hills and mountains began to manifest out of smoke. The ground beneath his feet had felt light a moment ago, but was slowly starting to become firm. The air smelled of damp stone, stagnant water, and embalming fluid.

When he opened his eyes again he was no longer in Alice’s bedroom, but standing in a barren, blasted landscape at the foot of a black mountain so tall it seemed to disappear into clouds the color of bile. A clammy wind whipped at his face, dragging his hair in all directions and filling his nostrils with the stench of death and decay. Thunder rolled in the distance, grumbling high overhead and getting louder with each passing second, as if the gods themselves were angry at Isaac’s trespassing.

It was the lapping of water which drew Isaac’s attention. He spun on his heel, marched toward the stony edge of a dark river, and knelt by the embankment. The water was murky and difficult to see through, but beneath the surface he saw what looked like round white plates floating listlessly downstream. When he stretched his fingers toward the water, one of the pale plates began to rise and take shape. It wasn’t a plate at all, but a human face.

Being in the water hadn’t seemed to cause the face to bloat, hadn’t disfigured it in any way. In fact, the water had perfectly preserved the likeness of the last person this soul had inhabited before having found its way to the River Styx. Isaac had only to turn his face up and scan the surface of the quiet black river to see that it was endless.

He knew it started from a point somewhere at the top of that mountain, but where it opened—if indeed it opened at all—he couldn’t see. Inside the river itself, floating gently along with the current, Isaac saw more white shapes—maybe hundreds of thousands of them. When he pulled his hand away from the water, the face dipped back down into semi-obscurity.

“We must hurry,” the Good Doctor said. “Death will not take kindly to this intrusion.”

“He’ll take even less kindly to what I’m about to do.”

Isaac dipped his fingers into the water. Knives of ice jumped suddenly from the water to his fingertips, and then all the way into his heart. Isaac grimaced and shuddered from the pain, gasping for air as if the wind had been knocked out of him. Not wanting to be deterred, he plunged his hand deeper into the water, fighting the pain, and noticed how the river’s gentle current had started to peel the flesh off his fingers and hand. But he was numb to the sensation his brain should have been receiving. Instead of physical pain, he felt a sharp throb in his in his heart. It was an internal, almost spiritual sensation, and a truly discomforting one, at that.