Page 133 of To Free a Soul
That was the weight of his silent stare.
His nose wrinkled, and he bared his sharp, shark-like fangs. “I told you to stop coming here,” he stated with a quiet growl.
She tilted her chin up. “It’s not like you can stop me.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Then, within the blink of an eye, he was... gone. He hadn’t twitched to move, hadn’t leapt to the side. Just vanished.
Floating in the air, Lindiwe searched her surroundings. She couldn’t see or hear him.He couldn’t have just disappeared.She drifted closer to the building.Where did he go?
Lindiwe searched in every direction and even hovered to a new location.Maybe I should stick to the shadows again.She hadn’t been in the village long, maybe an hour, so she hadn’t expected him to suddenly turn up.It usually takes him a few hours to get here once he’s been alerted.
It took him a while to run here on foot.
Wanting to make sure she couldn’t be followed, as she still had a few more Ghosts she knew she could collect here, she sunk within the random building below her. Then she passed through the walls, surprising Demons as she moved to the next building over and shrouded herself in shadows.
I should be able to collect a Ghost before he reaches me.So long as she stayed hidden until that very moment, she wouldn’t be caught.
It was difficult to do on the ground and in the shadows, so she found a secluded spot within the human items market.She’d already cleared out most of the meat market, but it also depended on whether the butcher touched the human’s corpse while she was near.
A scream caught her attention, and Lindiwe observed what had been touched and noted it. She waited until another spirit made itself known, then Lindiwe hovered out of the shadows with haste towards the first, using the second as a diversion.
Just as she went to touch a slipper on a table, a large hand wrapped around her forearm. It tugged her forward towards the assailant, with a semi-clawed hand coming down to strike her throat. She gasped, turned incorporeal, and gave her back to the crowd to face Jabez.
He didn’t sneer, didn’t grin, but his eyes were sharp and fierce.
And he hadn’t been there a second ago.
“Next time, I won’t miss,” he said, before instantly vanishing.
He actually disappeared!Her eyes widened as she floated back.What the fuck?! Since when can he do that?!
“Uh, Weldir. Something strange is happening.” She backed into the crowd to hide. “Jabez just disappeared into thin air.”
“Disappeared, how?”
“It’s called teleporting,” Jabez muttered low in her ghostly ear from behind.
She gasped and slapped her hand over her ear as she turned around. He was gone.
“It’s a new ability,” he said in her other ear. When she turned that way, he was no longer there. “It means wherever you go, I can follow, even if it’s to the ends of the Earth.”
Lindiwe spun, and he stared coldly down at her.
“Teleporting?” she asked... both of them.
“That is a very dangerous ability for its user, as it’s possible to migrate into a wall or another person. Only certain individuals can avoid that, and it requires practised skill.”
Jabez’s height had always been daunting for her as a human, but with his face shrouded in shadows, his red eyes seemed to gleam more than usual. “You won’t notice me, won’t see me, won’t hear me, until it’s too late.”
But I did sense it.Maybe she was just used to detecting magic so she could feel for Weldir’s mist when it was invisible, and in the process had trained herself to perceive magic. To sense when it was around her.When he first teleported behind me, my skin crawled like when the clouds charge right before lightning.
She backed up and then floated to the top of a roof. He teleported in behind her, likely wanting to flaunt this new ability to incite fear or wariness.
She hadn’t felt the charge, as she couldn’t perceive anything when incorporeal.
To test her theory, she became tangible, turned, and ran down the slope of the roof. She sensed a charge from her left and ducked to the right to avoid his fist. He frowned before chasing after her when she sprinted away.
