DARK SOULS (Dark Souls Series) (8 page)

Eye contact, I must make eye contact
, I thought as I stepped up silently beside her. She was still tightening the straps of the stroller on the toddler, making sure he’d be stuck for the long hall. Turning, I said to her, “Exhausting, isn’t it?”

She looked up, wary at first, then relaxed when she saw it was just a regular girl, a girl just like her. “You’re telling me. The ruckous a five-year-old can kick up, even strapped into a buggy.”

She had an accent, British I thought, or somewhere in the UK. To prove her point, the toddler let out a good screech, his face red and sweaty as he fought against his restraints and tried once again to regain freedom.

“I nannied one just like that once,” I lied, looking down at the child as fondly as I could. His screams were bursting my eardrums and making it really difficult.

“Yep, this little rugrat is a handful, but honestly, he’s not all bad.” She also looked down at him, but her fondness was real, even despite his hands reaching out to claw at her. “Are you still nannying?”

“Uh, no.” I saw the light was beginning to change, and she was already readying to cross the street. “Do you have any agencies I can go to?”

She looked over at me before crossing, nodding and smiling.

I took advantage of her gaze on mine, meeting her eyes and calling upon the little flame at the back of my head.

“
Turn around, go into the ice cream shop behind us, and buy the rugrat a cone.
”

In what I had come to expect, her pupils dilated immediately and her gaze became vacant, her lips slackening slightly.

“Yes, all right then,” she said, though her voice was noticeably flat. She didn’t look away from me.

She turned the stroller stiffly, the toddler suddenly going quiet, seeming to sense the change in his nanny. That, or he heard me say he was getting ice cream.  

I blinked, breaking our connection, curious to see if she would still go into the ice cream shop despite my lack of eye contact with her.

She blinked back at me, smiled politely, then continued over to the shop, the toddler happily gurgling all the way. I had a brief spurt of guilt over the fact that I was going to give that little terror a massive sugar high, but it was secondary compared to the major revelation I just had.

“Huh,” I said, unsure what to make of myself as I watched her leave.

I turned back around, wanting to try my newfound superpower out on someone else. That would make it four times of influencing someone for certain, meaning it had to be true. It just had to. As I crossed 3
^rd
Avenue, I felt the breeze on my face and my fingers started to chill with the cold. I took comfort in the coolness, knowing that these tangible feelings meant I wasn’t hallucinating. This was indeed happening.

My next subject was a guy a little older than me. He was sitting on a bench under the cover of a tree, facing the used bookstore that he must have just come out of, because he was reading a well-worn book, his nose practically touching the pages as he fanned them. All I could see was the top of his head covered with a mop disheveled brown hair.

“Excuse me?” I said as I approached him.

“Yes?” He said, without looking up.
Damn.

“Can I ask you a question?” I tried again.

“You just did,” he said, mumbling as he turned the page and still not looking up.

I frowned and continued to stare at him. His book had lowered slightly, and I saw that he was wearing black-framed glasses. I knew instantly that I had to keep trying. He had just unintentionally added to my experiment, because now I wanted to see if maybe glasses could act as a type of barrier to my mysterious superpower.

You couldn’t blame me. My mind was flying in all sorts of directions at this point.

“Hey, what’s your name?” I asked, trying a different tactic. Social queues would require him to look up at me and either tell me his name or see who it was that wanted to know, as any normal person would.

“None of your damn business,” he answered, again without looking up.

“Seriously?” I asked, almost stomping my foot to punctuate my frustration. I was just starting to get good at this!

To my surprise, he looked up at the change in my voice, out of curiosity maybe, or probably just extreme annoyance with me. I immediately recovered and took advantage, catching his eye and beginning to pull at the flame.

“What the—”

He immediately flew into action, springing up and flinging his book right at my face. It landed with a
thunk
, and I cried out in pain.

“Are you out of your
mind?
” he cried.

I was bent over in pain, cupping my nose. “That hurt!’ I cried back. “Why’d you do that? I just asked you a question!”

“Oh no you did not.”

He walked closer to me, possibly to intimidate, but I couldn’t be sure. I was still blinded with pain. The spine of the book had hit me
right
in the nose.

“You have got to be insane,” he said, bending closer to get a good look at me. “You can’t be doing that in such a public place! And with the Trine on the loose no less!”

“Huh?” I rose back up slowly, so I could be at his level and try to understand just what he was saying. “What are you talking about?”

His eyes narrowed as we both straightened at the same time. He was slightly taller than me. The top of my head reached his nose, so I was forced to look up to meet his gaze.  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said.

I decided to give up the act. He clearly knew something that I didn’t. “How—how did you know?”

His eyebrows rose at that. “You’ve really got to be kidding me. You’re a newbie? I’m not dealing with any newbie. If the Hunter gets you, it’s your own Sect’s fault for letting you out way too early. Try asking the Hunter for mercy before you cease to exist. Nice knowing you.”

He started to turn but I called out, “Wait! What’s going on? Please help me, I don’t know what’s going on...” I trailed off, my stomach clenching hard as I watched him go.

“Talk to a member of your Sect!” He called back over his shoulder. “I ain’t dealing with this shit. I can barely survive on my own.”

I shook my head back and forth, totally and utterly confused.

“At least tell me your name!” was all I could muster. I didn’t really know how to respond to his previous sentences. They sounded like words from the English language, but the way he was stringing those words together made absolutely no sense at all. 

“Derek. That’s what this host’s name is anyway, and because of your stupidity, I probably won’t have it much longer.”

I was surprised he even answered. Even though he only managed to confuse me even more, at least he gave me something to grasp onto.
Hunter. Sect. Host. Trine.

He also managed to convince me, if only a little, that I wasn’t alone in this.

There was at least one other person who was just as crazy as I was.

***

Once back in my apartment, after a particularly tough climb up the stairs, I dropped down onto my mattress, staring up at my dusty ceiling fan and wincing when I touched my fingers to my nose.  

Tired and confused, I let the twisting rhythm of the fan lull me into a state of complacency, a place where I didn’t have to think anymore or solve any supernatural problems that were sprouting up in my life lately. At around the hundredth spin, my eyes shuttered closed and I drifted off, praying for a deep, dreamless sleep.

It didn’t happen.

I slept fitfully, dreaming about lost souls and broken hearts, awakening only at the slam of the apartment door beside me, signaling my inconsiderate neighbor’s late night departure.

I pulled out of the sheets that had tangled around me in my sleep and headed over to the floor length mirror stuck on the back of my door to assess the damage that Derek’s book caused me.

It was what I expected. All swelling, all traces of any impact were gone. My ski-slope nose was completely back to normal, almost as if a strange guy had never lobbed a book at my face in alleged self-defense.

Something was happening with my body; it was just a matter of narrowing it down and figuring out just what, exactly, was occurring. My mind flashed with the words Derek had used. Certain key phrases that didn’t make sense to me right now, but maybe the trusty Internet could figure out for me.

I made my way to my desk tucked into the corner, just to the left of my clouded-over windows. I opened my clunky laptop in anticipation. Maybe I could get to the bottom of this sooner than I’d thought.

I started by typing out all the words Derek had used at once:
Trine Hunter Sect Host
, but that didn’t bring up anything relevant to my research. Everything from online gaming blogs to the “
Dallas
cast members” came up, the search engine flooding my monitor with irrelevant results.

Always up to a challenge, I rolled my shoulders back and readied myself
to continue jousting with the Internet. I decided to pair the words into categories, and when that didn’t work, I entered each term in separately.

Nothing. The search engine didn’t pull up anything useful to my cause. I clearly needed more information.

Hmm. Maybe what I was trying to discover went a lot deeper than what modern search engines could find.

Although I hadn’t really been to the New York Public Library, I figured that it shouldn’t be too difficult to try and find books on the topics I needed. I would have to go the day after tomorrow, because I was pulling long hours at the restaurant tomorrow, right after I finished my day shift at Cream of the Cup. But, with the next day off, I knew it wouldn’t be a problem. The only problem I’d have would be the waiting and the patience—neither of which I was really good at doing.

I closed my laptop and blew out a breath, my shoulders automatically lowering with my exhale. I hadn’t felt this tense for a long time, not since I was seven, and it was starting to get to me. Too bad I couldn’t play mind games with myself and forget everything that had happened in these past few days and return to normal Emily Chaucer.

But as much as I tried to focus on going back to sleep, on burying the consequences and ignoring the repercussions of failing to fix this, I couldn’t deny the growing fear that in truth, I was never going to be normal again.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I woke up feeling back to normal, with no residual dreams or worrisome feelings haunting me. But after my shower, I ran a comb through my wet hair and sighed when it got stuck in tangles. A glance in my bathroom mirror told me my regular, pale skin was back, too. Not a sparkle to be found in my dark blue eyes, either, not even after two cups of strong, black coffee. I felt a sense of relief at this, even though I hated my hair with a passion and couldn’t help but enjoy my mysterious physical transformation over the weekend.

My mind tricks weren’t working as well, either. I attempted the coffee ploy again on my usual bodega guy while buying a bagel, and while it worked and he sucked back a large iced coffee, it took a huge amount of effort on my part. My forehead actually broke out in a sweat when I tried to do it. I shrugged it off, not too concerned. Frankly, I didn’t really know what to do with that power, so it was probably better that it went away on its own. Then maybe, hopefully, I could just return to normal. Two days of being abnormal were enough for me.

Once I arrived at the coffee shop, I found Macy waiting at an empty table, her foot tapping impatiently as she scrolled through her phone.

“You ready for work?” she looked up and asked as I approached her, munching on my bagel.

My chewing slowed. I instantly became suspicious. Macy, while a great friend, was not known to come to my work solely to greet me at the start of my shifts. Not unless she was up to something.

 “Yep, sure am. But I guess Rob isn’t meeting you this morning,” I said, watching carefully for her reaction.

“Who? Rob Pearson? It was
one
night, dude.” She slapped me in the arm. “Stop bringing up my sexcapades!”

I sighed. It looked like Rob Morrow was still a figment of my imagination and that Macy still had no recollection of finding me on a rooftop Friday night.

“Never mind,” I said as I finished my bagel. “Why do you ask? Why are you so weirdly excited about my shift?”

She smiled. “Because I hear a certain handsome new boy will be joining us this morning.”

“Okay,” I said, unsure what to make of her scheming face.

“I might have texted a certain handsome new boy to come over here.” She smiled wider.

“What are you planning?”

She ignored me. “Stop fake-delaying. Go on!” she said, gesturing to the basement door.

When all I did was stare back, unamused, Macy playfully nudged me in the direction of the stairs. I relented, mostly because I was only able to take so much of her bony elbows digging into my side. I swatted her away.

“And why you get a bagel at a cheap food cart instead of the free pastries you get here, I’ll never know,” she called after me as I hip-bumped through the basement door. I waved my hand at her in response.

 As I stuffed my things into my locker, I tried to focus on the new autumn-inspired latte recipes instead of the clenching hunger pains in my stomach. The bagel wasn’t being received well, and I pressed a hand against my stomach as it growled. It felt like a cluster of balloons were blown up inside me before being popped, one by one, puncturing my stomach with each tear.  I took slow breaths, leaning my hands against the row of lockers and mentally pep-talking myself to get through today. Supernatural sickness or not, I still had rent to pay.

The now-familiar
zing
told me he was in the room before I fully ascended the stairs back into the café. Slowly, reluctantly, I pushed through the door as my eyes were pulled in his direction. He looked much the same as I remembered, except even better in daylight. His hair was slightly longer in the front, grazing the tops of his ears. I could tell he had already run his hands through it a few times this morning. His lips were as I remembered, pink and sculpted and perfect, and I had to force myself to look away as he headed over to Macy.