Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson 13)

I had to assume that my opponent knew exactly where I was. Maybe Wulfe had some of that specialized equipment Adam had talked about. Maybe vampires didn’t need any light at all in order to see. Either way, standing around waiting to be attacked when he could see me and I couldn’t see him seemed stupid.

I bolted out of the bathroom, finding the doorway by memory. My shoulder caught something that yielded like flesh, but not hard enough to do more than send me sideways for a step until I caught my balance. I didn’t let the brief misstep slow me down much.

I had assumed that the lights had gone out all over the house, but the light edging the bottom of the bedroom door said differently. My attacker had shut the door, trapping us inside, and turned off the lights just in this suite. The light under the door was not enough to penetrate the darkness, even for someone like me who could see in the night. But it gave me a goal.

The bedroom was very sparsely furnished, and everything was pushed up against the walls—there was nothing to trip me up as I sprinted to the door. But it was a huge room, maybe twenty feet by thirty feet that I was crossing on a diagonal.

Wulfe chased me. I couldn’t hear him, couldn’t smell him, but I could feel the floorboards move under my feet. And I knew that he was just behind me.

I slapped my hand on the switch, illuminating the room once more, and bounced off the wall like a swimmer on a turn. When speed is your only superpower, you learn to keep moving. This time I ran toward where I’d heard the sounds of breathing. Toward Warren.

Behind me something hit the door hard—as if to slam it shut when I’d never tried to open it. That sound told me I’d done the right thing by going for the switch instead of the door. I hadn’t considered escape with Warren apparently incapacitated, but it was nice to know that the morally reprehensible choice would not have worked anyway.

Warren was collapsed on the floor not far from the bed; his body was totally lax, a little too much like a corpse. I reminded myself fiercely that I could hear him breathing. I couldn’t stop and didn’t want to lead Wulfe to him, so I kept going.

Abruptly the whole room was filled with magic so dense that I coughed as my throat buzzed with it and I tripped. I rolled when I hit the floor and came back to my feet. Something had been shielding itself but had decided to come out of hiding, and it tasted like darkness.

“Olly olly oxen free,” I said.

I’d stopped in the middle of the circular rug that had been centered in the empty space between the bed and the door. It was as good a place to begin as any. And it put me between Warren and Wulfe. Warren and the Harvester.

He stood next to the door, the rough-bladed sickle in his left hand. He made no move to turn the lights off again. As if that had been a joke that had run its course and didn’t need to be revisited.

He was, as he had been on the roof of my house and in the movie, clothed in ragged dark brown robes that resembled monk’s robes and a sort of hooded cloak. But this time there was no darkness obscuring Wulfe’s face.

Even so, the Harvester didn’t look quite as much like Wulfe as he had last night on the roof of my house. His body language was hunched in a way that reminded me of the broken creature I’d seen in Stefan’s memories. Wulfe’s face was drawn, hollowed, as if he had neither fed nor rested in days, and it was missing a couple of important parts.

No wonder the darkness hadn’t bothered him.

“Bonarata have something against eyes?” I asked, holding the katana defensively in front of my body and wishing for the cutlass that I’d trained with until it was nearly a part of my body. The katana was similar, but its weight and balance were off enough that I had to think about what I wanted it to do.

I wondered what Wulfe was waiting for.

His robes moved, as if touched by a ripple of wind, but the air in the room was stagnant. When the Harvester spoke, no words passed through Wulfe’s lips.

My servant does not need eyes, the Soul Taker said in my head.

It was the same way Adam and I could talk to each other. Having this thing do it felt like a violation. A corruption.

But I set aside my revulsion to be dealt with at some later date and considered its words. I thought of Marsilia’s thick veil, of the way that she hadn’t really met anyone’s gaze. The glint of something I’d seen behind her veil could have been open wounds. I thought of Stefan. In one of the communications we’d had, he’d been missing his eyes, too, hadn’t he?

Eyes let your enemies see into you.

The second time I felt the Soul Taker speak in my head, I realized I’d gotten it a little wrong. Adam spoke to me through our mating bond. The Soul Taker spoke through a different bond, one that was stronger than I’d realized.

I wondered why it had stopped to talk. But no matter how horrible having that thing talk to me, inside of me, was, the longer I kept it engaged, the better the chance that Adam would come looking for me.

It wasn’t just words filling my head, either. I received concepts, dozens of them, one on top of the other. I understood that the sickle’s realm was one of souls. I understood the truth in the belief that eyes were the gateway to the soul. At some fundamental level I also gained an understanding of why vampires could freeze their prey with their gaze. I knew if Wulfe still had his eyes, someone like Marsilia could have saved him from serving as the sickle’s vessel.

All of that in less than the tick of a clock.

I understood that Bonarata had tortured Stefan, Marsilia, and Wulfe. He had given Wulfe to the Soul Taker—but prepared the other two vampires to be wielders should they be needed. Bonarata thought he’d taken their eyes because he’d wanted to. He did not understand the necessity.

“Does Bonarata know that you make some of his decisions for him?” I asked out loud.

The Soul Taker laughed inside my head.

I wanted to shake my head to rid myself of its laughter, but I couldn’t take my gaze off Wulfe. I’d seen him fight. I needed to see when he decided to come at me before he moved. The clothing he wore obscured my usual cues—I couldn’t tell when his shoulders tightened, and it was going to be hard to see his weight shift. And, of course, I couldn’t watch his eyes.