Page 3 of Soulbound Shadows: Part 1

“I think perhaps my sister and I have some things to discuss in private,” Prim said to me. Her outline was getting more shimmery, as was her sister’s.

“Of course,” I said. “We can see ourselves out.”

They’d forgotten about us by the time we made it to the drawing room door. Marcus and I turned back to watch them. Marigold was sitting next to Primrose, and their heads were bent together as they talked in low tones. They began to shimmer more and more until they weren’t there at all.

I let out a breath. “Get some rest, girls,” I murmured to the empty air.

The house creaked around us. The curtains in the drawing room pulled themselves open, and the windows opened to air out the room. The breeze that blew in swept the leaves in the front hall into a tidy pile, and when I opened the front door, those leaves fluttered out alongside us.

The door closed itself politely behind us.

The outside of the house looked subtly different, as if it had straightened itself up a little. It was still in rough shape, its paint flaking, and woodwork battered, but I got the sense it was trying to make an effort now that it wasn’t being pulled in two directions by its owners anymore.

“Well, that was tidy,” Marcus said. “I do prefer it when we don’t have to… encourage them to leave.”

“Exorcism” was a loaded term in our line of work, and it was also something I preferred to avoid. Ectoplasm always went all over the place, and it was impossible to get out of clothing.

“We should let the client know,” I said. “And we should tell them to make sure someone gets that wallpaper out of the drawing room before anyone else moves in. I’m pretty sure it was made with arsenic.”

By the time I got home, it was almost two in the morning. All I wanted was to collapse into bed, but the residual energy from hauntings tended to hitch a ride in anyone nearby for a little while, and it always gave me weird dreams.

I groaned, rubbing a hand over my face. At least I could be comfortable while I waited out the effects. I unhooked my bra and tugged the straps off through my T-shirt sleeves and tossed it onto my sofa, which could be called “vintage” if you were polite, or “beat to shit” if you weren’t. I grabbed leftovers from the fridge—takeout from the Siren-Korean fusion place on the ground floor—and headed downstairs to my office.

I’d gotten the place for cheap. It was in a rough part of town—the former red-light district—and the landlord had delicately described it as having “a lot of personality”. With magic-imbued buildings, that was literal. The place had been a brothel for a long time, and whenever I had someone over it still perfumed the air and lit any candles it could find. It was a bit like having an overbearing relative who asked if you were dating every single person you mentioned, but I could deal with that if it meant having a niceish apartment in the same building as my office.

I kicked my feet up on the desk and dug into my noodles. They were spicy enough to make my eyes water, just the way I liked them. When I was halfway through the takeout container, there was a musical little ping from a small blue box on my desk. I slid open its drawer to reveal a neatly folded piece of parchment inside. The inbox was a neat little bit of enchantment that most offices in the city had. Modern technology could be a little iffy around magic, and it was hard to get centuries-old vampires to send an email.

The parchment was folded into tidy thirds, sealed by red wax with a crescent moon stamped into it. The wax broke with a satisfying crack when I opened the page. The writing was in a tidy copperplate hand in stark gray ink.

Ms. Summers,

The ascendancy array is being hunted. The artifact is still divided into its components, but if even one fragment of it falls into the wrong hands, it would be a formidable weapon. If all four pieces are united, they have the potential to cause irreparable damage to our world. It is of the utmost importance that you find it before anyone else does.

A friend

I flipped the page over. The back was blank, which meant it was only slightly less helpful than the front. I drummed my fingers on the desk, then got to my feet and began to pace around the office. My instincts were at war. Half of me was eager to jump into a new mystery, the other half certain it had to be a trap. I glared out the window for a moment, then bit out a curse and turned toward my bookshelf to grab every book I could find that might be relevant.

I needed to research.

2

GABRIEL

The club was thrumming with activity around me, full of dancing bodies and the scents of perfume, sweat, and liquor. As soon as my friends and I arrived, a table in a quiet corner miraculously opened up, and from it I had an excellent view of the dance floor. The place was styled as a speakeasy, which was an elegant way of making a basement sound more enticing. It was full of dark green tile and black leather, with twisting golden trees reaching up to the ceiling. Silver leaves gleamed in the dozens of lights that floated near the ceiling, pulsing in time to the music. Shimmering willow boughs cordoned off the shadowy alcoves. A few of the trees grew behind the bar, heavy with opalescent fruit. Each of those had a tap set into its trunk, and the nymphs who were bartending poured nectar and sap straight from them.

Next to me, two of my housemates were pressed close together. Lissa was short and curvy, with a sharp blonde bob she’d copied from a human lounge singer who’d come through Eldoria in the 1920s. Vic, on the other hand, was tall, lean, and hadn’t bothered to change his hairstyle since the eighteenth century, so it fell in chestnut waves over his shoulders. Despite how different they looked, they always seemed to complement each other, both in manner and in dress. Lissa’s nails were painted the same bright green as Vic’s eyes, and his shirt was the same dark red as her lipstick. He had an arm draped around her shoulders, not in a possessive way, but simply because he liked to touch her. If there were times where I was quietly, privately jealous of them, I refused to let anyone know about it.

“You two are revolting, I hope you know that,” Theo said, coming over from the bar with a tray in hand and a man trailing behind them. Theo was stocky and broad, built like a dockworker. They wore black nail polish, which somehow always seemed to be the exact same level of chipped, and a tight white T-shirt. The only change they’d made to their outfit before coming out tonight was swapping their jeans for a pair of identically tailored leather pants, and sticking a gray bandanna in their left back pocket.

At their comment, Lissa stuck her tongue out, and Vic grinned.

“We, um... we got the drinks,” said the man trailing behind Theo. Nathan was the youngest of us by several centuries, and we were still trying to convince him that, yes, we actually enjoyed his company, and no, he didn’t have to apologize all the time. He was the only one of the group who didn’t live in my house, partially because I suspected that if I asked him to move in, he would somehow have a heart attack, despite being, technically speaking, dead.

I took my glass from the tray and drank a long sip, letting the taste of the blood-spiked cocktail roll over my tongue. It was just sheep’s blood, but it satisfied the craving. I wiped a droplet of the drink from the side of the glass with my thumb and lapped it up idly.

The music changed to something filthy and undulating, and a cheer went up from the crowd. The floating lights shone over skin sparkling with sweat, scales, and glitter.

Lissa tapped her nails against the glossy wood of the table in time to the beat. “It’s been too long since we went out,” she said. “I blame you for it, Gabriel.”

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