The Soul Trapper Read online

  Overwhelmed with emotion, I kiss her pointy knuckles. “I want you back, Lauren. I still love you.”

  She bursts out crying as if something inside her breaks loose from chains, and throws her arms around me. “After everything I’ve done to you, you can still say these words? Forgive me, Saph. Oh, God, please forgive me!”

  I stroke her hair with one hand and hold her tightly with my other arm. As we let go I realize it’s still outside, calm, and even suspiciously serene. Lauren and I approach the window, looking out into the night. A light goes up in the distance, then another and then another. In the growing light I recognize the serpent men standing on the fields, here and there dead Black Angels. And as a whole line of torches becomes visible from behind rocks, my smile broadens.

  “The town people turned against the black monks! Instead of going after Kieran they helped him.” As the torches approach I distinguish faces and voices, and I have a strong feeling the town people made the decision themselves, and Kieran’s influence wasn’t even necessary. They understood who the real enemy was. But Lauren isn’t as relieved as I am.

  “But what about Basarab?” she says. “With the powers you told me about, he could take over extremely strong creatures to defeat the Marquis. And if he doesn’t defeat him using one body, he can try over and over again using hundreds.”

  My smile might have just turned cunning, maybe even a shade bad. “Oh, well. I forgot to mention I have some talents of my own, and I went creative with them.”

  I turn around and point to the picture by the door, as anonymous as the man it represents—the picture of Billy Dean, in which his soul is now anchored. “Billy will never be able to leave his body again.”

  Lauren approaches the picture of Billy Dean. I can only see her back; her blood-red hair in a bun, her tall skinny frame clad in black leather as she strolls away from me. She keeps proud and straight perched on her stilettos, as if she’s demanding an explanation from Billy’s bespectacled, narrow face.

  “But how can this be?” she whispers, inspecting Billy’s painting. “He’s not one of the men who committed the crime against the Marquis and others like him.”

  “You know about that?”

  “I know about many things. Jeremy . . . Billy,” she corrects herself sourly, “sometimes talked after sex. He always stopped before his tongue rolled too much, but I got the essentials.”

  I nod to myself. “Billy discovered that Northville had been an anonymous resort where rich people acted out their inner demons for decades, and in time he discovered their dirtiest secrets. These people used Billy as a notary for bad business such as questionable adoptions and money laundry, especially since he seemed so easy to manipulate and to intimidate. He took advantage of that, one thing led to another, and within a few years he practically owned them. Billy has an incredibly high IQ, and he used his intelligence to get what he wanted. I’m sure he got himself introduced to the Marquis’s ‘makers,’ and got them to enhance him the way they’d enhanced other orphans, like the Marquis. That’s how he must have obtained his demon-like ability of taking possession of other people’s bodies, as incredible as that sounds. I think he found a way to engineer the black monks, too.”

  “Found a way,” Lauren repeats, still inspecting Billy’s painting closely, her hand tracing his nose and lips and chin. Her voice is full of hatred. “This man fucking possesses other people, Saphira. How can you simply put it like that—he found a way?”

  “I couldn’t really afford dropping on my butt and gaping at the idea,” I reply, throwing my hands in the air. “I had other priorities, I couldn’t stop to investigate the science behind the way. Lauren, I almost died almost every day these past few months. I saw the Marquis turning from a stunning young man into a slimy, huge serpent, I found out there are immortals out there, I discovered that my father was a murderer and a rapist, that an army of leper monks invaded Northville, and I got almost beaten to death in a lunatic asylum just to name a few of my troubles. I’m not even sure my brains are still inside my head.”

  A sound like canvas tearing interrupts my tirade, and my head snaps to the source of it. The Marquis’s painting is bleeding, his collar soaking with viscous red.

  “Kieran!” I haste toward the picture, grabbing the paintbrush and the crayons off the floor, and I start repairing feverishly.

  Another tearing sound in another canvas makes my eyes search desperately for the source until they fall on Billy’s picture that is bleeding as well.

  “They’re facing each other,” I shriek as Kieran takes more blows, his beautiful ivory face getting slash after slash as if Billy were attacking him with Wolverine-like claws. I’m aware of Lauren looking puzzled from my desperately moving hands as they work on Kieran to Billy’s painting that’s also getting wounds so ugly they seem inflicted with an axe. His flesh is split to the bone. It looks like the Serpent and the Slayer are literally killing each other. Neither is winning or losing, they’re chopping each other to pieces.

  I can barely keep up ‘repairing’ Kieran, and I don’t register when Lauren grabs the knives she’d meant to use on me just shortly before. I only spin round in dread when her outcry, vicious and full of hatred, rings in my ears. For an instant there I’m sure she’s attacking me, but no.

  With wide eyes I watch Lauren lunge to the picture of Billy Dean, the man who loved her his entire life, but who used her without scruples. She rams both knives exactly in the centre of his face, making blood surge as she pulls downward, cutting Ivan Basarab in half, and shredding him.

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  BLADES AND ROSES

  Ivan Basarab is dead. It becomes clear to me as the wounds in Kieran’s picture regenerate like slowly closing zippers. His reptilian powers of self-healing work freely, which means no one is attacking him anymore.

  The canvas of Basarab’s picture, on the other hand, is drenched in red, dripping thickly on the floor and on Lauren’s shoes. It’s dead quiet outside, as if the wind itself were holding its breath, and all I can hear is the beating of my own pulse in my ears. As the breeze makes it through the window again I release the air from my lungs and fall to my knees.

  “It’s finished,” I whisper, covering my face with palms full of colour.

  “What just happened?” Lauren says ghostly. I look up at her through the blurry veil of my tears. Intoxicated with hatred and seeing me hopelessly fighting to save Kieran, she did the only thing that was in her power—she stabbed and slit Basarab’s picture. The outcome is something neither of us expected, but synapses fast-wire in my brain, helping me put two and two together.

  “Normally it’s the pictures that work as doubles for the people,” I explain quietly, “taking all the blows and the harm. But it seems the energy you put into your attack combined with the energy I put into making the painting reversed effects.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” The turbid green of her eyes isn’t enough to camouflage her bewilderment this time.

  “It basically means that by killing the picture, you killed the man.” I can hardly believe it myself as I voice it. “Incredible . . .” Incredible what human emotion, intention and energy can do. “It was . . . teamwork.”

  A fat drop of red splashes the floor under the tripod holding Basarab’s picture, and the rusty smell of blood fills my nose, making me sick. The adrenaline has kept me unaware of the smell until now, but the relief that it’s all over brings back all my senses.

  Billy Dean—Ivan Basarab—has open wounds that reach his bones, open skin and muscle visible as if the canvas were made of flesh. My stomach can’t take the image, and I break down, crawling on all fours and struggling against the sickness.

  Lauren hurries to me, helps me up and out of the room, down the gloomy spiral stairs of the Dark Tower, leading me away from the horror. Even the spiders and insects seem to clear from the place as we descend.

  I feel so sick that I rely on Lauren completely. From the night she almost beat me to death at the asylu
m I know how strong she is despite the very few pounds of flesh that cover her bones, but the fact that she’s so fast and stable on her feet despite the stilettos and the tight leather outfit is baffling.

  As we emerge into the granite main corridor on the ground floor I manage to voice my thoughts, and Lauren admits she’s been training with Jeremy—probably while the Inspector was under Basarab’s possession—for months for this mission. In my head, I thank God her allegiances switched from Basarab to us, otherwise she would have easily killed me. In my stained canvas gown, barefoot and exhausted, I wouldn’t have posed much of a challenge.

  The manor is huge, hollow, quiet and dark, only our steps filling it like ghosts. Lauren leans me on a pillar by the main entrance in order to try and open the double doors, but even with all Jeremy’s training she’s not strong enough to pull aside the enormous bronze lock that traverses them. I should have thought about it, the thing is designed to withstand a whole crowd pushing to open the doors.

  We have to go down to the catacombs and use the opening that I discovered the night I first witnessed Kieran turn into a serpent. His men had replaced the glass I’d broken with a bulky bronze door, but I know the way to open it.

  Lauren and I emerge out onto the rocky fields. The sea is far, but the salty breeze carries drops from its raging crests. I close my eyes but open my arms and breathe in deeply, allowing the freshness of the night to fill my lungs.

  “It’s over. It’s really over.” Relief courses from head to feet, turning me soft.

  The horrors of these past months run before my mind’s eye and through my heart like they say things do a moment before you die. Before I first met Kieran at the Royale a felt eternity ago I was a pampered upper class girl secluded among her paintings, with little knowledge of the world out there. So much has changed since then. Right now I feel like I’ve just escaped execution after a long line of torments and tortures. My flesh aches and my soul barely made it, but I’m alive.

  A hand clasps my upper arm and pulls me behind a back dressed in dark fighting clothes. I recognize the leather expansible outfit the serpents wore when they left for battle, as well as Joyous’s locks. He hisses at Lauren, who retreats in a hunched, rather awkward-looking fighting position on her mosquito legs, knives ready to protect herself.

  “No, Joyous, wait,” I intervene, holding tightly to his arm and straining to make him listen. “She’s helped me back in the tower. She’s on our side now, and it was her who killed Basarab.”

  Joyous doesn’t react immediately, but keeps his body spanned towards Lauren while I keep holding tightly to his arm to prevent him from hurting her. He measures her from head to toes viciously, and finally addresses me, yet not taking his eyes off Lauren.

  “Maybe it was only an act she put on as she realized her people were losing.”

  “Her people were losing, but Kieran was dying. She saved him, Joyous!”

  He still doesn’t look convinced. After glancing from Joyous to me a few times Lauren gives a crooked, daring smile and drops her knives, lifting her hands in the air in a gesture of surrender. The expression on her face still retains a kind of mocking pride as serpent men emerge from the shadow, throw her down and tie her hands behind her back.

  “Treat her well until this is clarified,” Joyous orders. “Put her in a dungeon, but make sure she has comfort.”

  I want to intervene and plead that they don’t put her in a cell at all, but Joyous clasps my shoulders and makes me look at him. There’s something pained in the healer’s eerie honey-coloured eyes surrounded by dark circles.

  “I know you trust her, Saphira, but I can’t do the same, since....”

  He pauses, and my heart jumps. “Since what?” I clasp his wrists in anguish. “Don’t hesitate, Joyous, I beg of you!”

  He drops his voice as if to help keep us both calm. “There have been losses, Saphira.”

  “Losses, what losses? Oh, God, Jeanie!”

  “No.”

  My pulse seems to settle, but then the name hits me like an arrow in the breastbone. I run in the direction Joyous points me to.

  IT’S HEART-BREAKING, watching Zed bent over the bed where Yvette lies, her face like wax. I would have never imagined the head of security, the man I once nicknamed “Stone Face” expressing such intense hurt. His edgy features are distorted, his eyes scrunched shut as he bites his knuckles as if that helps him subdue the pain to a bearable level, hands clasping tightly to each other. So much death, so much pain.

  “It was Lauren Morris who killed her,” Joyous whispers in my ear. We’re standing in the doorstep of a small service hut adjacent to the manor. “She killed Yvette on her way to the tower, where she planned to do the same with you.”

  “But that’s not possible,” I babble among sobs, keeping as quiet as I can in order not to disturb Zed. “I saw the two of them fight each other before, Yvette was stronger than Lauren.”

  “Yes, but Lauren had a secret weapon—the truth about what happened when the black monks’ curse hit Zed, and his fingers drilled into Vivienne.”

  My head snaps to him. “Something happened then?”

  Joyous the Healer keeps looking at Zed as he talks, as if assessing the state of his friend’s health from a distance. “Vivienne and Zed connected on a very deep level. We still don’t understand exactly in what way, but we know the first thing Zed said when he opened his eyes—after you made the painting of him—was Vivienne’s name. The event had a powerful effect on Vivienne as well, an effect that might have gone as deep as her DNA. We don’t think what binds them is romantic in nature, we rather think it’s biological, but it’s still something we have yet to fully understand.”

  “Then how . . . why . . . how could Lauren use that as a weapon against Yvette?”

  “It was all in the way she put things. She made Yvette think Zed and Vivienne were now bound like star-crossed lovers who would only resist being together in order not to hurt her, and that weakened Yvette’s desire to live.”

  “Joyous, are you sure about this? How do you even know what was said between Lauren and Yvette?”

  His face takes on an infinitely sad expression, like that of a parent melting with pain as they see their child cry. “When Zed found Yvette she was still alive. She died in his arms, after she gave him her blessing to be with Vivienne.”

  Tears course down my face, bundling on the tip of my chin. This is a tragedy. I try to keep my crying inconspicuous, but I can’t bring myself to leave the hut, not wanting to miss the chance of helping Zed if he needs me in any way.

  Other serpent-men come in and out, pretending to have things to do in the hut in order to quietly check on Zed, then they leave just as quietly and grim-faced.

  I know the kind of pain that’s consuming him, and I know no one should approach him now. He needs to be with Yvette. Still, I can’t take my eyes and focus off them until Jeanie approaches and whispers between Joyous and me.

  “The town people got a priest for the dead. He’d start with Yvette now, so that her soul can be on its way. She’s the only human, the rest of the dead are black monks and serpents, and therefore he doesn’t consider matters as urgent for them.”

  I’m more than relieved that my sweet curly-headed, milky-skinned Jeanie is safe and sound, but all I feel capable of giving her is a slight nod. She looks devastated as well, and it has to do with Jeremy. I hear he’s not dead, though, and that moves him down on my list of priorities.

  Lauren is top of it right now. I need to talk to her. I already forgave her for many things, such as having sought and used every opportunity to hurt me all my life, for having destroyed my relationship with Jeremy right before our wedding, even for having tried to kill me, but I can’t forgive her for this cruelty. When asked whether she regretted having killed Yvette, only a few hours later in the dungeons, she says with a vicious grin that she doesn’t in the least.

  She says that Yvette was a plump middle-aged woman who embarrassed herself by pursuing a rel
ationship with a man much younger, not to mention outrageously more handsome. She also says that she’d merely cleared Zed’s future of what would have proven ballast that he respected too much to shake off. That he should actually be grateful to her. Her only regret is having tormented me the way she did, now realizing I’m the only innocent creature in this entire story. I can’t listen to any more of this. I turn on my heels and stomp out of the dungeons along with an escort of serpent-men.

  The serpents manage to keep Zed away from Lauren’s cell, since he would surely end her, and she stands under both my and Kieran’s protection for having made the decisive move in the fight between Kieran and Basarab. Hadn’t it been for her, my lover would now be dead, too. We have yet to see what to do about her.

  Joyous, Jeanie and a few serpent-men escort me to the study to see Kieran. Here he’s having his last meeting before he brings his business in Northville to a final close, they say. And right before we knock on the doors they open widely to let out a team of men in white medical clothes carrying away a screaming and raging Jeremy Simmons. They make for such a commotion, that we instinctively clear the way to the sides to let them pass, restricting our reactions to staring after them, trying to make sense of the picture.

  Jeremy’s bulk is useless against the expert arms of the very same men who’d broken my bones with jets of water at the asylum. All I can do is watch as they take him away. His maddened eyes latch on to me like I’m everything to him, his fingers splaying towards me like a man’s reaching for his only hope.

  “Saphira, listen to me!” His voice reminds me of the lamenting lunatics back at the asylum. “This wasn’t my fault, Saphira! This was not my fault! We are both victims, Saphira!”

  He keeps calling out my name as the men in white drag him away down the corridor, his screams fainter and fainter. A presence behind me makes me turn, and my eyes meet the beautiful face of Kieran Slate.