Suddenly, I was standing in front of the dam in my soul. I felt anger envelop me; I wasn’t just going to kill this fucker. I was going to make him wish he was never born. Cracks began spreading throughout the dam, and the red power it contained flooded into me. I felt the evil energy invade every cell in my body. I opened my eyes and looked at Artemis. He jumped in surprise spotting my glowing red eyes, but he managed to keep a grip on Cassie and keep his sword aimed at her jugular. I could see his soul now: it was ugly and twisted, common traits amongst murderers, but I also saw something else. He was wearing a necklace tucked into his shirt I hadn’t seen before; it was silver with a clear gem in on a pendulant. Inside the gem was a human soul in agony banging on the surface of the gem trying to get out. That’s where their power was coming from; souls don’t only give off arcane energy, they are arcane energy. Somehow, this Athena had captured human souls and turned them into batteries so these assholes could play dress up as spellswords.
With the demonic power flowing through me, my speed had increased by an order of magnitude at least. Judging by his buddies, that would be more than fast enough. I ran straight toward Artemis, and he clearly wasn’t expecting it. He hesitated for half of a second and started to cut Cassie’s throat, but I was already there. In a single motion, I pulled Cassie away from his grasp, kicked him in the stomach, summoned my blade, and as he began to fly backward from the kick, I slashed, feeling almost no resistance. His body slammed against the side of the building; his head didn’t. It fell to the ground and bounced. I never needed to know that heads bounce, but apparently, that’s a thing. “I’m not a wizard,” I whispered.
I turned my demonic gaze toward Cassie; I had the almost uncontrollable urge to keep going. To slice her into pieces and find another victim. I closed my eyes and took deep breaths. “Dante, take my hand,” Cassie said. She must have known what was happening to me. I dropped the sword, and it vanished once again. I took her hand in mine my eyes still closed shut, and I squeezed. She squeezed back. I could feel the anger subsiding, so I imagined healing the cracks in the dam closing that evil power off from me. My heart sank as I regained… myself. I was an inch away from murdering Cassie. Cassie! One of the only people on this planet I cared about. I began rapidly sucking air in and started to become dizzy.
{I will never use your power again!} I screamed at the demon inside my head. {NEVER!!} I meant it; I vowed right then to keep that fucking monster chained in my mind for the rest of my life.
I had restrained the demon when Cassie shouted, “Dante!” and pushed me to the ground. I opened my eyes just in time to see her pull a 9mm gun out of her waistband and fire it three times. Ok, I don’t know shit about guns, so maybe it wasn’t a 9mm, but it looked like a generic handgun: it was black and L-shaped. What else do you need to know?
I jumped to my feet and looked behind me. Ares had pulled himself out of the hole and still had his hand outstretched toward us. An orange sigil vanished as he fell to the ground. I walked over to him and carefully pushed him onto his back. There were three holes in his chest and a gallon of blood pouring out.
“I didn’t know you could do that,” I said impressed.
Cassie shrugged, “My dad took me hunting a lot.”
“Your mother was a Wiccan, and your dad was a hunter?” I asked inquisitively.
“Hence the divorce,” she replied.
I took the necklaces off of our friends and searched them. Apollo and Artemis were clean, but Ares had a scroll in his pocket. It was similar to the scrolls I kept in my car, but it looked older; it was made of some kind of animal skin and frayed on the edges. Before I could see what it was, I heard sirens coming this way. There’s very little crime in my town aside from DUIs and the occasional drug bust; because of that, response times are terrible, but a magic fight and gun shots is going to bring cops anywhere.
“There are two dead bodies here and giant holes in the parking lot in my store! What are we going to do?” Cassie whaled.
“Get inside and open the store. Tell them you were in the back doing inventory and were listening to music and heard nothing. I’ll take care of everything else.” I replied.
“What? That’s not going to work; they’ll be here in a minute or two!”
“GO!” I shouted. I hated shouting at Cassie, but I needed her to go now. “And give me your gun.” She put the safety on and tossed it to me, running inside. I collected Apollo, throwing him into the back seat of my car, and I put his compatriots in the trunk. I also picked up the bullet casings and jumped into my car. I almost drove away before I realized there was still a shit ton of blood all over the parking lot. Maybe the police would accept the mystery of huge chunks of concrete missing, but they certainly would not accept that blood appeared here. I sighed and lifted my hand, a red sigil appearing, and all of the blood, every single drop collected itself into a spherical ball that hovered in front of my hand. I clenched my fist, and the liquid evaporated in an instant. Technically, that was illegal hemomancy, but I wasn’t going to arrest myself, and there was no one else to do it.
I finally drove away toward home and passed two police cruisers going the opposite way. Luckily, they didn’t pay any attention to me. By the time I made it to my house, it had started to rain. I made sure no one was watching and drug Artemis into my house and upstairs into my spare bedroom. I’m a single guy: I have two pieces of furniture, my bed and a couch. I would have loved to tie this asshole to a chair, but I didn’t have a chair… or rope. I could have tied him up with dental floss, but I used the kind where there was an inch long piece of floss attached to a plastic dinosaur, so that was off the table too. I eventually decided I would just stand over him imposingly until he woke up. I got bored after an hour and started shaking him.
“Huh?” he asked groggily.
“Hey there. Remember me? I’m the one that slammed your head against the ground,” I reminded him helpfully.
“Argh!” he screamed as he lifted his hand against me, but no sigil appeared. I slammed my foot down on his hand and twisted my ankle grinding his fingers into the ground. “Ahhh shit!” he screamed. I kicked him lightly in the stomach.
“Shut the fuck up,” I said as I kneeled in front of him. “You’re going to tell me everything, and you’re going to do it quietly. I wouldn’t want to upset my neighbors. That might make me do something crazy like slit your throat,” I said summoning my sword as a bit of show and tell.
“Wh-where’s my brother?” he choked out tightly holding his injured hand.
“Well, he tried to kill my friend, and that made me angry. I’m afraid I had to cut his head off,” I replied. I was actually sickened at the thought of Artemis’s headless body, but I didn’t want him to know that.
He looked up at me with hate in his eyes and said, “You’re going to regret telling me that.”
“Maybe,” I said standing back up, “But not tonight. You seem like a pretty typical low-life; how did you get mixed up in magic?”
“Bruno err Ares,” he replied. “He came to me and my brother and asked if we were tired of getting fucked. He said he had a way for us to become gods.”
“Do you feel like a god?” I asked coldly.
“I will as soon as I get my necklace back!” he spat.
“This necklace?” I smiled as let my sword fade, retrieved the jewelry from my pocket, and dangled it in front of his face. He lunged at it, and with a single finger, I shot him with a bolt of electricity with a voltage comparable to a taser.
“Ughh!” he shouted as he collapsed to the ground again.
“I’m afraid you won’t be getting this back,” I spat and crushed the gem. I hadn’t planned on doing that, but I just wanted to watch his face as it happened. It lived up to my expectations; his face went from shock to despair.
“Nooo! What have you done?” he cried. He literally cried; his face was stained with tears. Then something happened that I didn’t expect: the soul that was trapped in the pendant became visible. He was a middle-aged man, and he looked like he was starving. He was naked and all of his ribs were visible; in fact, he looked like a skeleton with transparent skin stretched over him. Artemis looked at him with bewilderment.
“Yooooou willllll payyyyyyy,” the spirit whispered in a haunting voice (pun intended.) Then, it began to change: its bones starting shifting and bending while also becoming less translucent. After a few seconds, it looked something like Golem from The Lord of the Rings but with tusks and claws. It had become a goblin in front of my eyes. I don’t know how long it had been trapped in the gem being fed on and abused, but apparently, it was enough to lose any humanity he once had. The monster leapt at Artemis, its clawed outstretched; I considered stopping it, but I felt it wasn’t my place. He… it had earned revenge. Its claws tore into his torso, and before he could scream, it had ripped its throat out. I sighed deeply as the goblin continued ripping into Artemis’s corpse. I felt sorry for the spirit, but it wasn’t sentient anymore; it was a savage beast, and it no longer retained its motivation. It would attack any person it saw; I resummoned my sword as I came up behind it and stabbed it through the chest. It didn’t make a sound or even twitch; it just vanished into thin air. I didn’t kill it; there are very few ways to permanently destroy a soul. It would reappear in the In Between after it managed to reform.
I had a lot of problems: there was a body torn to shreds in my house, its blood spreading all over my carpet, I had two more bodies in the trunk of my car, and oh yeah, there’s a psychotic necromancer that will probably come after me herself next, and I had no way of finding her. First thing’s first: I needed to get rid of these bodies. I’d broken the law once already, why not do it again? I took a deep breath and stood up straight. It was the first time adrenaline stopped flowing through my veins in hours, and I noticed something. I had aches and pains all throughout my body; every muscle in my body was in agony, and I was sweating profusely.
{How many times do I have to tell you to fuck off?} I thought as loudly as I could. Controlling the volume of your thoughts is pretty tricky, but I had gotten good at it at that point.
“So you can turn me into a killing machine?” I said aloud.
{I don’t need your help!} I spat in my head. I knew one day this would happen: I’d have to be a spellsword again, and junkies aren’t qualified. One of the things Kaine taught us at The Krymmeno was alchemy: the ability to brew magic potions which can produce a wide variety of effects. However, alchemy was never my forte; it can be powerful, but it takes days, sometimes weeks of preparation, and when a monster is eating ten mortals a day, every second counts. That didn’t mean I had forgotten everything though; I walked downstairs, moved my TV out of the way revealing a small door leading to a storage space under the stairs. I opened it and retrieved a corked glass test tube filled to the brim with a clear liquid. I stashed it in my back pocket and went upstairs; there was a desk built into the wall in my bedroom. I opened the third drawer of four, stuck my hand as far back as it could go, and reached up. Taped to the bottom of the above drawer was a plastic bag filled with Vicodin. With shaking hands, I retrieved the bag and beheld my prize: there were roughly forty pills in the bag. I took a deep breath preparing myself for what I had to do. I went to the bathroom and flushed all of my remaining pills but one. The liquid in my back pocket was a magical substance called an essence potion: if two objects are placed within it, it boils them down to a single essence that they both share according to the will of the brewer. I couldn’t quit opiates cold turkey and survive Athena – at least not without selling the rest of my soul; I also couldn’t beat her faded out of my mind. I needed something new: a substance that would keep the withdrawals at bay without getting me high.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
I lit a candle with a spell and held the test tube over it. I added the remaining Vicodin to the glass and bit my thumb between my canine teeth, opening a small cut. Carefully, I added a drop of my blood into the glass. The blood and the pill had one thing in common: pain. Blood is a result of pain, and Vicodin is used to treat it; if I carefully focused my will, I could create a substance that would remove any intoxicating effect the opiate had leaving a liquid a single drop of which would leave me pain free for hours. I took a deep breath and touched the test tube adding a bit of arcane energy to it to facilitate the transformation. Instantly, the liquid began to boil while the pill disintegrated and the blood diffused throughout. The liquid congealed into an opaque white, viscous substance, and the surface of the liquid calmed. With shaky hands, I took dropper from my medicine cabinet and measured out a small drop, about a milliliter of the liquid, and dropped it into my mouth. I took a deep breath and waited. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi... After so many Mississippis I lost count, relief started washing over me. My heartbeat slowed, the sweating subsided, and I stopped shaking. The pain and uncomfortability that had permeated my whole being stopped, and yet my head was clear. I lacked the feeling that everything was in its perfect place, that some puzzle piece that was missing in me had been filled. I desperately missed that feeling, but its absence meant the potion worked.
{You live rent free in my soul; the least you can do is leave me alone,} I thought at the creature. Surprisingly, it didn’t reply.
I finished what I had to do: I used hemomancy to destroy every cell of all three of the bodies. A drop of blood is a very powerful weapon to use against someone provided you’re willing to cast blood magic; however, a soul acts as an automatic defense system against such magic. There are very, very few practitioners that could destroy the entire body of someone who’s alive but a corpse? Corpses are easy; with just a drop of blood, I ground each body up into a gross, chunky liquid which then vaporized into nothing. It smelled awful and made me feel like a serial killer or something, but it had to be done. I also took their clothes and the gun casings a few hundred yards into the woods behind my house and burned them with a fire so hot it obliterated every trace of them. There’s no way anyone could link me to their deaths; all that was left was to find Athena… or wait for her to find me.
I put food out for Numpy, got in my car, and headed back toward Strange Attractions; I had left Cassie there without transportation. When I came within eyesight of the shop, there weren’t any cop cars that I could see, but I circled around a few times to be sure. Once I was certain it was only Cassie there, I parked and walked into the store and straight into a raised shotgun.
“Easy there killer,” I said with a smirk desperately trying to hide the fact I had almost shit my pants.
“Sorry, Dante,” she said lowering the gun and placing it on the counter. “I wasn’t sure if they might come back.” Her voice was resolute but still quivering.
“What did the cops say?” I asked.
“Not much. They asked if I heard anything, and when I said no, they pointed out the holes in the parking lot. I acted shocked and angry, and I guess it worked because they left,” she said with a sigh.
“Did they even try to figure out how it happened?” I said furrowing my brow.
“Nope. They just said it must have been kids playing around. I’m not sure how kids could have displaced and then destroyed hundreds of pounds of cement, but I don’t think they really cared,” she chuckled. That was surprising, but it was a good thing. I told her how our attackers had been using human souls to power their spells and how when I released one of the souls it had killed the survivor.
“What about the other two necklaces?” Cassie asked in horror.
“I still have them,” I said getting them out of my pocket and placing them on the counter.
She picked one up and looked closely at it, in particular the gem at the center of the pendant. “I don’t see anything; I’m not sure what I thought I’d see, but it looks like any other rock,” she muttered half to herself and half to me.
I took the necklace from her and looked at the gem myself. “I can’t see anything either. If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can feel energy coming off of it, but without the demon’s vision, I would have never realized what it was.”
“We should free them,” she stated. It was a statement; there was no debating this. Freeing them was the right thing to do, and she couldn’t be convinced otherwise.
“I agree, but we have to be careful. The last soul transformed into a goblin the moment it was free.” She looked at me quizzically, so I expanded, “A goblin is what happens to a human soul doesn’t pass on to the next world and devolves into a violent monster. If we shatter these gems, it’s very likely the first thing they do is try to kill us, and god forbid they get away attacking people at random.”
“I know what a goblin is Dante.” She frowned and thought about it before continuing, “Where’s my handgun?”
“Uhh, here,” I said pulling it out of my waistband and handing it to her.
She lifted the gun and held it at an empty space to the side of me, clicking the safety off and ensuring it was loaded. “Shatter one right here. If it attacks, I’ll blast it before anything can happen.”
“Ok… I’d stick with the shotgun though” I said shrugging. She turned the safety back on and shoved the gun in her waistband and retrieved the shotgun. I threw the necklace as hard as I could roughly in front of where she pointed the gun. It bounced off the ground without breaking.
“Well, that was anticlimactic,” she teased me. I glared at her and sent a small bolt of lightning right at the gem, and it exploded in hundreds of little shards. A monster appeared in front of us; it was emaciated and hunched over; its head was bald with eyes that were at the very edge of its forehead. Its entire face was devoted to a giant mouth that stretched all away around its head: there was about half an inch between one end of its mouth and the other. It turned toward Cassie and screeched right as her shotgun barked ripping it to pieces that vanished into nothingness.
“Was that more to your taste?” I teased her though my own heart was beating fast.
She looked at me grimly and said, “It’s sad. That used to be a person, and she never asked to be drained dry by some piece of shit looking for power!”
“Whoooah!” I interjected. “I didn’t know you cursed!”
“It just pisses me off that someone could be willing to do that to another person,” she replied as the anger drained from her.
Staring into her big brown eyes, I replied coldly, “They won’t do it to anyone else ever again.”
She nodded at me, “Free the other one.” I grabbed the other necklace out of my pocket and threw it on the ground. This time, the crystal shattered, and a young girl, maybe 10 or 11 appeared. She was translucent wearing what looked like a nightgown. She was unable to stand or even sit up, so she lied on the ground on her back gasping for breath.
“Hey,” I said gently. She tried to pull away from me, but she didn’t have the strength. “It’s ok! It’s ok. We’re not going to hurt you.” She paused her struggling.
“We’re the ones that freed you,” Cassie added. I tried to console her by touching her hand, but my hand went straight through hers. I closed my eyes in frustration and anger. “What’s your name?” Cassie asked.
“J-J-Jasmine,” she croaked.
“Hey Jasmine. We took you away from the bad men; they won’t be able to hurt you anymore,” Cassie said reassuringly.
“Th-th-th-thank you,” Jasmine squeaked out.
“Is there anything we can do for you?” Cassie asked.
“They told me I was dead. It’s true; isn’t it? I’m not hungry or thirsty even though I haven’t had anything in days,” Jasmine uttered. She sounded like she was coming to terms with her situation, and my heart was breaking. What kind of a world is it where a little girl can die at all much less be tortured afterword for days on end.
Cassie looked at the little girl with tears streaming down her face. “It is true,” she responded. “You are dead. I’m sorry to ask you to do this, but we want to make sure what happened to you never happens to anyone else ever again. Do you remember anything?”
“I was walking home from school… when a man in a big truck drove by and asked if I wanted to pet a puppy. I wanted to see the puppy, but the man was old and dirty. I said no and tried to keep walking, but he drove up on the sidewalk blocking my path. Another man that looked just like the first one jumped out of the back of the truck. He must have been hiding because I didn’t see him before. He grabbed me and threw me into the truck; I tried to scream but they put duck tape on my mouth,” she said crying. By the way, I know it’s duct tape, but she said duck.
She paused for a moment, but Cassie prodded her along, “That must have been horrible; I’m so sorry that happened to you. I know this is hard, but we need to know what happened next.”
“Th-th-they took me to another man. He was dirty too, and they were all stinky. He had a big rolled up piece of construction paper or something like that. It had symbols all over it.”
“Did it look like this?” I asked showing her the scroll I retrieved from Ares.
“Yeah, that’s it!” Jasmine shrieked. “The new man touched it, and we all went… somewhere different. Somewhere with a grey sun and grey skies. We were on a cliff overlooking a grey sea with thousands of boats on it.”
I turned to Cassie and said, “The In Between.” She nodded at me.
Jasmine continued, “They took me to a bad woman. She had red hair, and a mean smile. Then... they did something to me. I don’t know what, but everything went black. When I woke up, I was trapped, and… it hurt. It hurt so much.” She had curled up into a ball at this point. “I guess that’s when I died,” she barely audibly bawled.
I closed my eyes and clenched my fists; I felt rage coursing through me, and I wanted to kill this Athena bitch. I vowed to myself right then that I would do just that. No matter what happened to me, she would die.
“Shhh, it’s ok. You can go to a place where there’s no more pain, no despair. A place where you’ll forget all about this and know only joy,” I whispered to Jasmine.
“H-h-how do I get there?” she asked, pausing her tears.
“Close your eyes,” I said quietly. After she did it, I continued, “Do you feel a little tug pulling you somewhere?” She looked like she was going to shake her head, so I proceeded, “It may be subtle, but if you be still, you should feel it.”
Jasmine was quiet for several minutes. Cassie and I looked at each other, but I held up my hand to shush her. Finally, Jasmine’s eyes shot open, and she almost sounded like a happy little girl when she screamed, “I feel something!”
“That’s great,” I said with a smile. “Now, just let it pull you wherever it takes you.” She nodded enthusiastically and closed her eyes again. A few seconds later, she got dimmer and dimmer until she disappeared completely.
Cassie and I shared a knowing look. We both knew Jasmine was on her way to heaven; I’ll be the first to admit the gods fucked up the world when they made it, but at least children go to heaven.
Cassie and I were quiet for several minutes; she cried silently while I stared at my hands. Were my hands always this big? I really needed to cut my fingernails; just kidding, I’m lazy: I bite them off. After a while she said, “Let me see the scroll.” I showed it to her. Cassie knows sigils better than I do; as a spellsword, I pretty much only knew battle oriented sigils. I could also track people with their hair or blood and create defensive sigils, but generally, The Krymmeno only taught us spells that could locate, kill, or prevent ourselves from being killed.
“It’s a teleporting spell just like Jasmine said. It’s very, very complicated though; it has some intruder protection,” Cassie said thinking to herself aloud.
That was bad news. “Intruder protection?” I asked concerned.
“Yes, but it’s so complex, I can’t figure out what exactly will set it off nor what it will do if it’s activated,” she responded.
“Well, I guess I’ll figure it out once I go through,” I said sighing.
“No, we’ll figure it out,” she said adamantly.
I knew this was coming: she would want to come with me to find Athena. “No offense Cassie, but how are you going to help me in the In Between against a powerful necromancer?” I asked her.
She turned very quickly reaching her hand into her waistband, pulled her hand out with her index finger extended and her thumb at a right angle, and pointed at my forehead. “Bang,” she said with a smile. That was surprising; I probably could have reacted quickly enough if I had considered her a danger, but I had to admit, that was impressive. “Don’t even try to talk me out of it,” she cut me off. “Those bastards came to my store; they were going to kidnap me, not to mention what that monster did to that poor little girl. I’m coming with you, and that’s it!”
That was hard to argue against, and I had to admit, it would be nice to have someone to watch my back. Afterall, I had never done a mission alone before.
“Fine,” I said as I sighed deeply. She ran into the back room and returned with a duffle bag.
“Let’s go,” she stated resolutely.
“Ok, let’s go.” She took my hand, and I touched the scroll with my other hand pumping pneuma into it. A portal with its brightly colored aurora border opened, and we were sucked into it: into the In Between.