Excerpt: Elemental Soul

Book 5

His dreams, when he had them, came with fire. Scorching heat that burned away flesh and muscle as it tore hungrily into the bone. He cried out as he attempted again and again to break free, suspended two hundred feet in the air above a pit that led to who knows where.

What he could see was the devastated temple of a Faerie queen’s quest for power. Chunks of obsidian and stone littered the once polished floors. Cracks broke open along what had once been pathways for the denizens of the Winter court to flock to their queen and genuflect at her feet. Decaying bodies of the less fortunate lay in small piles where the usurpers lit them on fire. The stench of their smoldering bodies made the air unbreathable.

But what he fought to escape for wasn’t his freedom, but to save the still figure lying prone on the altar below him. Pale skin, thick dark hair that flowed around her beautiful face. Even from this height, his Drachen sight showed him the woman he loved and he screamed for her to open her eyes.

SAMANTHA!!

The usurpers wore robes of pristine white and bore iridescent wings upon their shoulders. They kept their faces hooded, hidden from him as they spoke in a language so ancient even he couldn’t remember it.

He cursed and fought the chains that held him when he saw them touch his love. They removed her shirt and exposed the disk-shaped scar on her chest, what Sam believed was the mark of her Arcane.

Their chanting rose into the smoky, cracked ceiling of the palace ruins as one of them raised a dagger in the air, then plunged the glittering steel into the scar itself.

Sam screamed.

“Sam!” Crwys shot up in bed, the sheets sticking to his chest and arms. He twisted and kicked as he fought to free himself from them; still half believing they were the chains of his captor in the Obsidian Palace.

He stumbled against the wall near the window of Sam’s bedroom and stared out the window, over the roof of the building next to Bell, Book and Candle. Blinking, he focused on the tourists crowding the French Quarter, body against body, one shrill cry of laughter stacking atop another on the eve of St. Patrick’s Day.

It was still dark outside and he heard the toll of distant thunder, not that the revelers would let a little thing like rain dampen their enjoyment. He rubbed his eyes as the last of the dream faded and he straightened up. A thin layer of sweat covered his body, making his pajama bottoms stick to his bare skin.

He turned back to the bed to make sure Sam was there, and not being killed by strange winged creatures in the palace ruins. Being the practical man that he was, he expected to see her in bed, her mouth open and lightly snoring. Something he loved the sound of.

But the lights from Bourbon Street didn’t reveal Sam’s shadow. They showed him an empty bed.

He checked the other side of the bed to make sure she hadn’t fallen out of the bed. Sam had done that several times while battling her own nightmare demons.

When Crwys saw she wasn’t there, he hurried out of the bedroom and checked the bathroom. “Sam?”

Empty.

He checked the couch, and then the kitchen. He saw her bag on the kitchen table where she’d left it, along with her pistol, her boots and his old jacket.

The keys to her Jeep hung by the door downstairs, so he stepped outside on the iron veranda. If there was one thing he appreciated most about the veranda, it was its iron. It made him feel a bit more secure against Faeries scaling the wall to drag him back to Alfheim.

It seemed silly to him—to fear something like that. In all of his long life, he’d never feared anything, save the loneliness he’d felt when his mother committed suicide and took his sister with her. The rejection of his people when he was blamed for the near destruction of an entire realm of existence.

When Brendi held him and he’d believed himself lost and alone—the thought of never seeing Sam again terrified him. He would never allow himself to be taken from her again. And he would kill whoever took her from him.

Which brought him back to puzzling where Sam was. Whether or not she understood the implications, he, as a Drachen, had bonded with her, as closely as he could without her finishing it. That meant he could feel her nearby. She wasn’t far. But he couldn’t sense how she felt.

He came back in from the veranda and slipped on a pair of flip-flops and an old Star Wars t-shirt before he went downstairs into the magic shop’s break room.  The lights were on, which made him think she’d come through here. “Sam?”

Still no answer. He checked her office. Empty.

He checked the electric kettle on the counter to see if maybe she’d made herself a cup of tea. It was cold to the touch.

With growing anxiety, Crwys stepped into the retail front and flipped on the lights. Nothing. The shades he’d installed were down. The door securely locked.

“Sam? Where are you?” he said this with a bit more volume and force.

A thud made him turn back to the break room. He ran back and stopped by the table. “Sam?”

He heard another thud and it came from the direction of the basement. He hadn’t been in that part of the building since before Brendi took Medbh’s essence, and now that he knew the old Faerie Queen was alive and kicking inside a Kachina doll, he’d actually forgotten about the basement.

Crwys hadn’t brought his gun down the steps with him, thinking he’d run into Sam. Now he wondered if Sam had come down here, thinking she heard something while he was buried in his nightmare, and they were holding her against her will?

Or worse.

The or worse set his temper on fire and he felt his internal heat ignite as he ran to the steps heading down.

The basement was small, and given the city’s close proximity to the water table, it smelled of mildew and dampness. Two things he did not enjoy.

Crwys took light steps down the stairs so as not to alert whoever was there to his presence, hoping they hadn’t heard him calling out for Sam before.

The door was open a crack and light filtered out from inside. Somebody was in the basement. If it was a burglar, he’d make quick work of them. If it was Sam, and he scared her, well, he was sure he could turn her frown upside down pretty easily.

Slipping into cop mode, he pressed his back against the wall as he moved his right shoulder to the open door and leaned to his right to look through the crack.

He couldn’t see anything, but he could hear much better. Another thud put him on guard as he gently, slowly pushed the door wider so he could slip inside.

The basement was made up of two larger rooms and a tiny room—if you could call a ten by fifteen space a larger room. The first room had metal shelves stacked with a lot of boxes full of weird and cursed objects Sam and her coven had appropriated over the years. Nothing looked out of place there as he looked to his right to see the end of the room and the hot water heater.

To the left was the door into the other large room, and inside of that room was a smaller space, a five by five room with a lock. And inside of that smaller room was the safe where Sam once kept Medbh’s head.

The door between the two rooms stood wide open, so when he peered around to look inside, his stomach twisted into a tight knot.

Sam was inside, still dressed in the short shorts and t-shirt she went to bed in. She’d pulled her hair up into a ponytail and her hands and bare feet were covered in…mud?

Crwys quietly moved into the room behind her and his jaw dropped when he realized Sam was bricklaying. She had the door to the safe room closed and was in the process of bricking up the door. She’d pulled a wheelbarrow of bricks into the room—where she got them from or how she got them into the basement, he had no idea. On her left was a large tub filled with wet mortar. She had a trowel in one hand and was slapping a layer of the gray stuff on top of a layer of bricks. She’d already built the wall up to her thighs.

“Sam?” Crwys’s voice sounded loud to him in the room. “What’re you doing?”

Sam stopped immediately, the trowel up in her right hand, a brick in her left. She didn’t turn to face him. He expected her to say something or give him any kind of explanation for whatever the hell it was she was doing.

He waited a few seconds before he said, “Hey, look at me. What are you doing? You realize it’s like four in the morning? Why are you bricking up the safe?” Crwys looked at the sloppy splatters of mortar on the concrete floor. “And how did you get this stuff down here?”

“Go back to bed.”

Something about her voice alarmed him. It wasn’t what she said, but the flat way she said it. His internal flame was still ignited; something about this whole scene didn’t feel…right. “I’m not going back to bed without you. Tell me why you’re bricking up the safe.”

She moved her head and her ponytail swung back and forth, but she still didn’t face him. “I am…protecting you.”

“Me? What, are you sealing the Arrow of Artemis away?” The thought that his lover had gone through all this trouble to prevent anyone else from shoving that infernal thing into his heart was flattering—but it didn’t ring true.

Sam didn’t move. She didn’t move at all.

The hairs on Crwys’s forearms rose as he sensed something very, very wrong. He stepped into the room behind her and put his hand on her shoulder. Her muscles tensed under his fingers.

As a fighter, he’d learned to read the body language of his adversaries. Though in the past century he knew he’d grown soft and a bit slower in his reactions. But he was still observant and it was that eye for detail that helped him be a good detective.

And it was that eye that caught Sam’s intended action before she made it. Crwys jumped back as she whirled to her right with the edge of the trowel held up and sideways. She moved fast—faster than he knew she was capable of. And if he hadn’t reacted before the strike, she could have sliced his throat wide open with the tool.

Crwys slammed his back into the side wall of the room as his foot tripped over a few stray bricks. He hadn’t realized they were there. As he regained his balance, she came at him again, but this time with the brick in her other hand and swung it at his head.

He ducked and waited until she’d exposed her side as she finished the swing, then he pushed back up and tackled her. The two of them fell away from the piles of bricks—with Crwys making sure Sam didn’t land on any of the sharp edges as he pinned her onto her back.

She fought him. Hard. He grabbed both wrists and silently apologized as he pinched her wrists hard enough to make her let go of the brick and trowel. Once they clattered to the floor, Crwys took a good look at Sam’s face—

Her eyes were closed. Her expression a mask of what she looked like when she slept. Had…had she attacked him like this? Was she actually asleep?

“Sam, look at me. Wake up!”

His gaze moved down to her chest as something dark spread along the gray material of her Club Hell t-shirt. He watched in horror as he recognized it as blood.

Releasing her hands, he yanked her t-shirt down and gasped when he saw a gaping hole in her chest where the Arcane mark had once been. It looked like someone had carved it out of her flesh and exposed the muscle and rib bones beneath.

“Dear God,” he hissed at the destruction. “Who…who did this to you? Sam—we’ve got to get you to a hospital. You’re bleeding everywhere—”

Her eyes still closed, she moved her right hand around his and slammed her left palm over his eyes. “Forget.”

And he did.

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