Dark Siren (20 page)

Isaac ran his hands through his hair. “Anthropologically speaking,” Isaac said, “Souls are eternal. They are like energy, which can neither be created nor destroyed. They have always existed—will always exist—in one form or another. Maybe the soul exists within you in its pure state, or maybe your internal energies have changed it, like a car consuming fuel.”

“So you don’t think that when I eat a soul, it’s gone forever?”

“I think you trap it within yourself, much like what you do with your camera. It exists apart from you and as a part of you. It sustains you and you sustain it.”

“I think so too… I mean, it’s what I believe. Otherwise I don’t think I would be able to live with myself, not after today.”

Alice caught Isaac staring at her with a smile on his lips, causing her cheeks to flush crimson.

“Your chest,” he said.

“What about it?” she asked.

“I saw some markings on it earlier… before you woke up. But they’re gone now.”

Alice stared at her chest and remembered how, last night, as the hunger came, her veins seemed to turn black like they were filled with ink. They weren’t there anymore. “Are you sure you saw them?”

“Not really, now that you mention it.”

“If you say you saw something, I believe you. It might have been a side effect of my… starvation.”

“Why have you starved yourself?”

“Truly?”

“Well, I don’t want you to lie to me.”

Alice sighed. “I didn’t mean to leave it so long,” she said. “Taking souls is dirty business. It changes you. You hear things and see things. They leave their impressions on you, and if the soul isn’t a pleasant one, it can really… it can really suck. I know, that doesn’t describe it, but it’s the best I can do.”

“I understand.”

“No. You don’t. I don’t want to sound melodramatic, I’m just telling you the truth. Feeding isn’t easy most of the time. Hell, not even some of the time. You just made it
look
easy with your magic.”

Isaac didn’t speak for a while. Maybe a minute. “How long can you go between feedings?”

Alice smiled and scoffed. “
Feedings
. Makes me sound like an animal.” She sighed again. “About a month. Sometimes longer if I don’t hunt as much. But I’ve been hunting since yesterday. Guess I burned myself out.”

“It’s ironic.”

“What is?”

“You’ve opened up about yourself more readily in the last ten minutes or so than you had during the last three months of our relationship.”

She swallowed hard, cold rushing through her. “I guess you’re right,” she said, for lack of a better response.

“Do you think you can do something for me?”

“That sounds ominous. What do you want?”

Isaac paused and considered her in the dimness of her bedroom. “Tell me why you left me.”

It was as if a pane of glass had been dropped from a tall height and shattered. The intimacy of the situation suddenly became suffocating. Alice had to stand or risk losing the ability to breathe.

“I don’t think that’s something we should talk about,” she said.

“You owe me,” Isaac said.

She whipped her head around and shot him a glance. “I owe you?” She did. She knew she did. But she didn’t want to owe him
this
.

“My payment for helping you,” he said.

Her heart was starting to race, and her chest was running hot. The hesitation was there; the defensiveness was there. She didn’t really want to answer the question. “Alright, what do you want?” she asked, backtracking their conversation.

“I want you to answer the question.”

“What question?”

“The one I just asked. You’re stalling.”

“I’m not stalling.”

“Then you’re refusing?”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t answer it.” She was being petty, and she
was
stalling, but it felt like the only thing she could do.

“Alice, it’s a simple question, but one that’s never left my mind. Help me be rid of it.”

Alice pressed her lips into a thin line and tucked her hair over her ear. “Do you really want to know the answer?”

“I do.”

“It might not be what you want to hear.”

She saw his Adam’s apple work, and then he nodded. “I want to hear it.”

Dammit,
she thought, cursing herself for allowing this moment of vulnerability, of weakness, because this, all that had happened here, was starting to look like one big mistake. She had tried to deflect his question, had tried to keep any intimacy at arm’s length, even though she had kissed him and let him take care of her like it was the most normal thing in the world. But talking to him about their relationship wouldn’t be comfortable.

At the same time, she did owe him. She
had
agreed on his fee when she hired his help, and if she didn’t respect his fee, why should anyone else respect hers?

Alice let a sigh slip from her lips. “Alright,” she said. “I’ll answer the question.”

“Go ahead,” Isaac said.

“You know how, in high school, they make you dissect frogs?”

“We don’t do that in England.”

“They do here. I felt like I was your frog.”

“You thought I wanted to dissect you? I feel like you’ve said this before.”

“If you had the chance, would you?”

“I’m sure you don’t mean in the literal sense.”

“Of course I don’t.”

“Good, in that case, no. I never wanted to dissect you.”

Alice brushed wet stray strands of hair over her ear. “I always felt like I was your experiment. You kept pushing me to develop my abilities, to explore what I had become. What had happened to me in the Reflection was… traumatic. I wanted to be rid of it. I wanted to be normal again, and I thought if I ignored it, it would go away, but you kept pushing.”

“You had just gone through a huge psychological trauma but refused to go and speak with a therapist. I was trying to help you through it.”

“Therapist? Who could I have spoken to about what happened to me? I would have been locked up in a loony bin.”

“Me. You could have spoken to me. Or, failing that, I told you I knew a Mage who could—”

“—I didn’t want
you
pushing me, Isaac, what makes you think I would have wanted another Mage poking around in my head?”

“Alice…” Isaac said, his voice taking a softer tone. “Everything I ever did, I only did it to try and help you.”

“Did you? Or did you want to further your own understanding of the universe? You told me a long time ago this was your one goal in life, if you did nothing else.”

“Perhaps, but
never
at your expense.”

“I wanted to believe that. I really did. But I also didn’t want anything to do with what had just happened to me. I didn’t want to think about the Reflection, about spirits or souls. I had hurt people, Isaac. I had stolen something that wasn’t mine and had gotten my partner killed. I can still hear him sometimes, you know. The way he screamed that night as the fire took him.”

Silence came suddenly, like a ceasefire during a battle. Where once had rung the booming sounds of cannons and the rattling of machinegun fire, now there was nothing; only dust and smoke, and the distant, rising cries of wounded soldiers. For Alice, these cries were rising from the back of her mind, the ghosts of every fight she had ever had with Isaac.

“I’m sorry,” Isaac said, bravely piercing through the silence. “I’m sorry for everything I ever did to drive you away. It was never my intention.”

“I know it wasn’t,” Alice said. “Let’s just… not complicate this, okay?”

“I don’t want to complicate it. I only wanted to know.”

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry too. I know I wasn’t easy to deal with.”

“Considering what you had gone through, you’re blameless. I’m the one at fault.”

“You weren’t always.”

Isaac didn’t immediately acknowledge what she had just said, but she didn’t have to wonder if he had heard her correctly or not. He had. He was just trying to figure out whether to press her or not. This was the way Isaac operated, and in the years they had spent apart, she didn’t think he had changed much, until he nodded and agreed to drop the issue.

“Thank you,” he said, “For answering my question.”

Alice gave him a short nod and stood, and Isaac stepped into the bathroom. She could still feel the tingles in her body, the butterflies, and the warmth of the clean soul tickling the inside of her chest. But there was something else, now; the hairs on the nape of her neck were standing on end. She realized she had felt this earlier, but had dismissed the feeling as a residual effect of her having consumed a soul.

She let her instincts guide her and floated to the kitchen. Her cat “Elvira” sat next to an empty food bowl, grooming while she waited for her
serf
to feed her. Elvira stood upright, stretched her back, yawned, and then sat with her tail curled around her paws, waiting expectantly, but Alice didn’t immediately feed her cat. The closet door drew her eye. Something about it was different.

The door was closed, the padlock still in place, but when she circled around the kitchen counter she noticed something wrong. A long, jagged line of split wood and cracked paint ran down the middle, making the door look as if it had been hit with a sledgehammer
from the inside
. Running her fingers along the seam allowed her to feel the residual energy of the impact, and she shuddered at the cold, clammy sensation.

The poltergeist. The gas mask man.
They really had teamed up.

“They tried to get out,” she said under her breath, not believing what she was seeing. There hadn’t been a single instance where she had captured a spirit and it
hadn’t
tried to get out of its prison, but none had ever gotten this close. None had ever escaped the interior wards, the layer of protection inside the chest itself. So how had the gas mask man done so much damage to the closet door?

There was only one explanation; it must have broken out of the chest.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Hermes' Mirror

Three in the afternoon had come and gone, though looking outside at the gray skyline you wouldn’t have been able to tell. When Isaac came strolling out of the bathroom, Alice was still standing in front of her closet door examining the damage. He considered her from the bedroom doorway, enjoying the sight of her, and the way her t-shirt stuck to the toned curves of her body. Then he approached where she stood studying a crack in the wood; a jagged seam which stretched right down the middle of the door, protruding outward as if something had struck it from the other side.

That hadn’t been there earlier.

As he approached, he spotted the camera on the floor with the Polaroid sticking out of the front slot. Alice hadn’t noticed it yet, so he picked the camera up, plucked the photo from off the floor, and took a look at it. The frame was empty. It showed the inside of the Cinema Royale’s lobby, but nothing else. There had to have been something else. Right? Why would she snap a shot of empty space?

“Was this broken when you got here?” Alice asked.

“It wasn’t,” Isaac said.

“You’re sure?”

“I was standing in front of it for a while. Yes. I’m sure.”

“I need to open it. If this has happened, then it means the wards are damaged and something has gotten
out
.”

Isaac came up beside Alice, looked at the door, and narrowed his eyes. “I don’t think opening it is the best idea,” he said. “There’s no telling what’ll happen if we do.”

“We’ll never know unless we try. If those wards are damaged, I need to fix them.”

Isaac stretched his hand and felt the door, listened to the wood, tasted the energy in the room beyond. “You’re right. The magic seal on this door is weak. “I can repair the seal on the door from the outside,” he said, “But we shouldn’t open it until then.”

Alice didn’t like this—didn’t like waiting, or not knowing—but she also didn’t have much of a choice. Sure, she could rip the door open and look right now, but what if the seal inside the Chest of Haunts really
was
broken and the closet door was the only thing standing between the things she had imprisoned and the free world?

“Dammit. You’re probably right,” she said. “Fuck.”

Isaac nodded, turned to her, and handed her the Polaroid. “Here. This was on the floor.”

Alice took it. When she saw the blank photograph, she cocked her head to the side. There was nothing on the picture, but Alice could hear something in the back of her mind. Song. A melody drifting on an evening breeze. The sound made her blood run cold.

“Alice?” he asked, “What is it?”

“I… don’t know.”

“Was there supposed to be something in this frame?”