13

BODY AND SOUL

On the other side of town, Feral loped along the riverbank on four silent paws, led more by his keen wolf nose than by the last traces of twilight. The gurgling eddies of water that slopped through the reeds exhaled the froggy smells of algae and mud, tainted by the reek of car exhaust and motor oil from the teeming human population that sprawled out around him. Feral wasn’t particularly fond of this stretch of the river, but it allowed him to move unseen through the outskirts of the city.

He needed to stay hidden. Easier that way.

Nose to the ground, Feral followed the scent trail over the hard-packed earth of the unofficial walking path, sniffing past wildflowers, dead branches, bugs, discarded paper cups. Beside him, the water frothed between a pair of protruding boulders that broke the surface of the river.

She had come running through here earlier in the day, sweating, moving fast. Long strides. Not panicked. Measured. Steady. Just working out.

In the distance, tires shrieked. He lifted his furry head, ears turning to catch the echoes of cars on a nearby road.

But it was nothing. No danger.

He sprang back into motion, tongue lolling. He knew where she’d gone. Home. And he knew the way.

By the time he got there, the night was completely dark. But he could tell right away she wasn’t there. The tumbledown brick building was too dark, too still. But he sniffed around it all the same, just following her trail. Around the chain-link fence that left an unpleasant metallic tang in the back of his throat, and into the workout yard, all chalky-smelling broken concrete and sweat-stained iron dumbbells.

She’d come through here earlier, sweaty and spent from her run, and headed inside. But the candle-smoke-and-patchouli scent of the skinny little sorcerer she called her boyfriend, Salem, was nowhere to be found. So when she left here, she had left alone.

Good.

Feral left the yard behind and trotted downhill through the darkness, toward the river. Just out of sight of the house, there stood a cluster of short bristlecone pine trees, leaning together like gossipers. Their bushy dark green needles scratched along his fur, not unpleasantly, as he pushed his way into the hollow center.

Surrounded by fresh-smelling tree trunks, he sank down onto the soft bed of fallen needles and finally let go of his wolf form. Waves of emerald-green light rippled up his legs and over the length of his body. With it came the queasy disorientation of becoming human again. He waited it out. Breathing in, breathing out. Getting used to the change.

Now human, he no longer had his fur to keep him warm against the river’s chilly breeze. But for now, it felt refreshing.

He dug under the pine needles and pulled out his bag, a dirty black ballistic nylon carryall he’d had for years. Here in the city, he couldn’t go completely wild, like he could in the mountains. In this bag, he kept the absolute minimum number of possessions necessary to interact with the human world.

A shirt. Pants. Shoes. Toothbrush. And a phone.

Remembering once more how useful it was to have fingers, he turned on the phone, and a minute later, he texted Rane.

Hey. You busy?

Her reply was almost immediate: Working.

Not too busy to text him back, then. Good.

Smiling, he typed: Go for a night run?

It was deliberately vague. It could be interpreted either as a question (Did you?) or an invitation (Want to?).

The type of woman he usually went for would think that over, look at it from all angles. Try to pick apart the different layers of subtext. Try to glean exactly what he was saying.

But Rane was different. She didn’t get tripped up by subtleties. She simply reacted, on instinct. Said whatever was on her mind. Some people might call that impulsive. He called it instinct, and he admired that. He felt like they clicked, the two of them.

He was just waiting for her to figure that out, too. Maybe she would never get that far.

In that case, her friend Dru presented interesting possibilities. Definitely a lot going on behind those glasses, even more than she let on. Thing was, she already had a man. Greyson, that was his name. Feral got a dangerous vibe from him, a whiff of something dark and primordial. On one level, Feral was always up for a challenge. But on the other hand, Greyson struck him as the sort of guy you didn’t mess with. Not the type he’d expect a smart girl like Dru to hang around with. But people made all kinds of crazy choices in life.

Lord knew he’d made plenty of crazy choices of his own. Definitely the craziest one was Lucretia. She was one of the Harbingers, a tight-knit group of the most powerful sorcerers in the world. Most of them had vanished decades ago, leaving her solo. Lucretia had been practically twice his age, but for some reason that didn’t matter. Not with her.

She’d been the one who taught him the protean magic that made him a wolf. Unlocking those secrets had changed everything in his life. That kind of freedom had made her irresistible.

But it wasn’t just her insanely powerful magic that had attracted him. It wasn’t her looks or her no-nonsense command of every situation. The truth was that it was her eyes.

Haunted. Knowing. Obsessed. The kind of eyes that, in a single look, told him all about wounds that ran so deep inside her they would never heal.

He was always drawn to the troubled ones like her. He knew that, and he knew it was bad. For some reason, he wanted to take care of them. He had the feeling Dru was like that, with her demon-haunted Greyson. But that was her business.

Rane was different.

She wasn’t troubled by anything, not even after all she had seen. She didn’t play games. Didn’t try to manipulate him with that killer body of hers. Didn’t say the things she thought he wanted to hear.

She just spoke the truth, right off the top of her head, without any agenda. He had to respect that.

She lived in the moment, just like he did. She always threw herself into action at every opportunity. She never backed down. Same as him. And he had never met anyone else like that.

That was why he had no intention of letting her slip away, like Lucretia had. Rane was a keeper.

The phone chirped in his hand and lit up, startlingly loud and bright against the dark murmur of the river.

Dude, I’m WORKING.

He frowned at the phone. At first, her words sounded like a brush-off. But the one thing she had never pointed out, and still wasn’t saying now, was that she already had a man. Maybe because that man was a ticking time bomb, and had the bad habit of treating her like he didn’t care.

Bad for him, anyway. Good for Feral.

Right now, he was content to bide his time. He’d just be the workout buddy. The guy next door. The shoulder to cry on.

Sooner or later, it would dawn on her that he was always right there for her, and Salem wasn’t. He had a hunch that that day wasn’t far off. And his hunches were usually right.

Where you at? he texted.

This time, she replied right away. At the shop. Waiting for a stupid wraith. Sucks.

Time to be the shoulder to cry on. I bet. Want some help?

No, she texted.

He frowned. Not the answer he was hoping for. As he debated his next move, she texted again.

You ever fight a wraith?

He didn’t have anywhere near as much experience as she did with this type of thing. He was fairly new to the whole sorcerer world. But the more he learned about it, the more he wanted to go back to the mountains and run free.

Still. A man had to try.

He thought back to the many things Lucretia had told him in those long nights in the ghost town. Most of them had gone over his head, but he did remember something about wraiths.

You don’t want a wraith to touch you, he texted. Bad news.

Seriously. A long moment went by. Worse thing is this one casts magic.

He nodded, wondering if he should just call her. Maybe she could talk. He could let her hear just how much he wanted to see her.

Freaky, he wrote.

Sorcerer wraith? ??? D calls it Dispossessed.

Alarm bells went off in Feral’s head. He had heard the word dispossessed only once before, from Lucretia’s lips. Under the stars late one night, in one of those rare moments when she had let him in, really showed him a glimpse of the terrifying darkness that haunted her every waking moment.

She had whispered to him the truth about the other Harbingers. He had assumed they were all long dead, done in by their own dark magic or some ancient evil they had unearthed in the depths of the netherworld. But that wasn’t what had happened at all.

The Harbingers hadn’t died. But they weren’t exactly alive, either.

All of the Harbingers except for Lucretia had left their bodies in the netherworld, in a place called the Shining City. They had kept their magic powers and let their souls roam free through the darkness. They had become dispossessed, and that made them even more powerful than ever before.

And if Rane was facing one of them now, the rest of the Harbingers wouldn’t be far behind.

* * *

As the sky deepened into ever-darker shades of blue, Dru picked up the salt shaker full of moon dust and gripped it tightly, feeling the faceted glass sides warm against her skin. It didn’t seem like a formidable weapon against a dispossessed evil spirit that could drain your soul. It was too little and ordinary-looking to inspire confidence.

What if the books were wrong? What if moon dust didn’t even work on wraiths? What would they do then?

She tried to push those negative thoughts aside. They’d been through much tougher scrapes than this, and successfully fought the forces of darkness with much less.

Besides, with every passing minute, she became less certain that the wraith would even show up at all. Maybe Salem really had beaten that thing the night before, and it was gone for good. What a welcome surprise that would be.

Where was Salem, anyway? She wished he would just come back. But he had never been a team player, and he certainly wasn’t likely to become one now.

Eventually, darkness swallowed the world outside. It was officially nighttime. But the scariest thing she saw outside was a dirty brown camping van with a tire strapped to the roof and a grungy window-unit air conditioner poking out the back. She watched it creep past, one tail-light dim and purplish because it was mostly made out of tape. It turned the corner, and the street was empty.

She waited.

Nothing was happening. At all.

Daring to breathe a sigh of relief, Dru strolled through the shop, trying to shake off the tension that had gripped her for the last twenty-four hours. She found Greyson peering out the back windows, but apparently he hadn’t seen anything either.

Rane was busy texting on her phone.

Dru clapped her hands together. “Okay, people. We can all relax. There’s nothing—”

An uncomfortable vibration suddenly buzzed through her skull, stopping her short. It set her teeth on edge and filled her mouth with a harsh metallic taste. She tried to pin down exactly what it was, but it was like nothing she had ever experienced before. “What is that?”

Rane traded glances with Greyson. “What is what?”

“You guys don’t hear that? It’s like the whine of an old-style TV. But louder.” The vibration pounded up the back of her skull, like the first terrifying throbs of a migraine. But it wasn’t inside her body, she realized, it was somewhere inside the shop. But what was it?

Quickly, she headed up front and checked the golden cat’s eye crystal in its smelly little copper nest. It stared right back at her, a burning white slit that didn’t waver. It wasn’t reading anything. Or else it didn’t work after all.

Heartbeat racing, she set it down by the cash register and looked out the windows again, watching for any sign of movement, magical or otherwise. The street was empty. The neon sign of the twenty-four-hour liquor store next door lit up the front of the building in blue and red. A discarded fast-food cup lay on its side in the gutter.

The high-pitched vibration grew even sharper. Outwardly, everything looked perfectly normal, but it didn’t feel that way. The night air had shifted. It was nothing she could see or explain, but she could certainly feel it.

Greyson moved until he stood in front of her, putting himself between her and the front windows, as if to physically block any frontal assault from the street. His eyes burned like coals in a hot furnace as he scanned left and right. “Something dangerous is headed this way. Fast. We need to go.”

Dru’s blood ran cold. Somehow, the fact that everything looked so normal made this even more frightening. “Is it the wraith?”

“It’s different from last night.” He gave her a sharp look. “This is bigger.”

Rane marched past them, carrying her bright orange sledgehammer. “All right, it’s go time.” With one finger, she touched its shiny steel tip. With a scraping sound like a sword being drawn from the sheath, a metallic sheen spread down the length of her arm and across her entire body. A moment later, her entire body had transformed into shining steel. She hefted the hammer. “Just tell me where this thing is. I’m gonna crush it.” Her words echoed.

Greyson shook his head and looked straight at Dru. “We need to go. Right now.”

The forcefulness in his voice got through to her on an emotional level, and she felt herself nodding in agreement. Theoretically, the crystal shop was the safest place they could be. The store shelves were piled high with powerful crystals, magic potions, and protective charms. She had everything on hand she needed to handle any eventuality.

In addition, they had put several specifically anti-wraith defenses in place. In the back room, the apocalypse scroll was wrapped in a protective circle. They had more wraith-trapping circles painted around the front and back doors. Best of all, they were surrounded by a powerful crystal grid that protected them with an invisible magic shield. Short of someone dropping a bomb on the building, they were safe.

This was the absolute best place to be, she told herself. It had to be.

Just then, the air in the room rippled around her, like sunlight sparkling off of a windswept lake. An uncomfortable pressure filled the shop. Dru’s ears felt like they were about to pop.

A high keening sound came from all directions at once, so painfully loud that Dru had to press the heels of her hands into her ears. She struggled to find the cause. At first, she had no idea where it was coming from.

Then, as the noise grew deafening, she knew.

It was the protective crystal grid that surrounded the shop. An outside force was pressing against it from every direction. Squeezing it. Constricting it. Crushing it. Trying to break through.