Embraced By Darkness (Riley Jenson Guardian 5)

"Not just any human, but one possessed by the spirit who's tearing the women apart." I paused, and looked at him. "How the hell did you get past the threshold?"

"Got Mary to invite me." He studied the man for a minute. "You've beaten him up a bit, haven't you?"

"Had to. The spirit gives inhuman strength, and he almost got the better - " I stopped as the man lurched into a kneeling position.

"It's going to keep that man moving until it kills him." I looked at Jack. "Can you force it out of his mind?"

"I do that and the soul will escape. We have no way of containing it."

"We have no way of containing it in the body, either. At least this way well save one life."

"At the cost of others, perhaps." He held up a hand to forestall my protest. "I'll try. At the very least, it may give me some hint of what we're actually dealing with."

Power touched the air, a tingly, spidery flare of electricity that flowed like wildfire through the air. Its touch had the tiny hairs along my arms and the back of my neck standing upright, but its effect was more dramatic on our target.

He screamed, a high, furious sound, and began to fight, throwing himself left and right, as if trying to rid himself of a physical touch.

Black smoke began to pull free of the husband, curling back in on itself, becoming more solid but still resembling nothing human. I shivered.

"What?" Jack said.

"The soul is retreating."

"I can't see it."

"You can't see souls."

"Unfortunately."

I flicked him a glance. "There's nothing unfortunate about it, trust me."

He gave me a wry sort of smile, though his attention was still on the husband. "We've had this argument before."

"Yeah, and your reasons for thinking it's fantastic still suck."

The soul had pulled almost all the way out of the flesh. The feel of him, so thick with evil and the need to destroy, crawled across my senses.

This soul wasn't sane.

Not now, and probably not in life.

If it had ever actually lived, that was.

I rubbed my arms, smearing blood up my forearm from the cut on my palm.

"What is it doing?" Jack asked, as sweat began to bead his bald cranium and forehead.

"Nothing." There seemed to be a slight pulsating through its opaque form, as if a heart beat deep within the darkness. But I felt no sense of energy, no gathering of power that had been so event in the other souls who'd talked to me.

For that, I could only be grateful. There was nothing this hateful soul could say that I'd really want to hear.

"So it's just sitting there, above the man's body?"

"Yeah."

"Want to try talking to it?"

"I have a feeling opening my shields to this thing could be a very bad idea."