Soul Guard (Elemental Book 5) (29 page)

*          *          *

I woke feeling a lack of space. When I opened my
eyes, it was pitch black, so I felt around. It took a few minutes to figure out
why there was wood on all sides of me.

I was in a coffin!

Knowing that I had limited air, I forced myself to be
calm and breathe slowly. Fortunately, it was a fair sized coffin. I took off my
shirt and ripped it into three pieces. Two of the pieces went around my hands
and the third went over my mouth and nose like a bandana. Then I pulled my
knees up to my chest and kicked upward with all my strength. Dirt showered down
and the creaks told me I was close to cracking it.

“Shit!” I had hoped I wasn’t actually buried. Still,
that was the whole point of destroying my shirt. Dirt weighed a lot. If it were
wet and lightly packed, it would be easier to move, but not to “swim through.”
Either way, if it was more than three feet deep, I was definitely screwed. On
the other hand, dying in a coffin was not on my list of acceptable ways to go.

I pulled my knees up again, angled my back, sucked in
a deep breath, and kicked. The wood snapped and dirt spilled in. I rolled over
and pushed upward. Dirt immediately took up every inch of my space, but I only
had a little air in my lungs, so I had to be calm.

Thank God I never took up smoking
.

I pushed up as the dirt came down. It wasn’t
compacted. Unfortunately, no matter how many inches I managed to maneuver
through, I wasn’t fast enough. My hands broke free and I felt the air, but the
dirt was not as easy to climb through as I had hoped.

Just when my lungs were starting to burn, I felt
something above me. I felt… fur. Henry was digging me out. His paws made short
work of clearing my head, and then he shifted into his person form and helped
me climb out. When I was lying on my stomach beside the grave, panting
desperately, I saw Langril sitting beside another hole. He was sweating and
breathing heavily.

I took the cloth off my face. “I get Henry, but how
did you get out so quickly?”

He waved his hand nonchalantly. “I’ve been buried
lots of times.”

I rolled over onto my back and sat up. “Thanks,
Henry. How is anyone supposed to get out of the coffins?” We were outside at
night with no moon or stars. Although it was dark, it wasn’t as dark as the
coffin was. All around me were neat rows of unmarked tombstones

“They’re vampires, so they’re strong,” Henry said.

I figured it was actually to encourage them to just
go back to sleep. “What if Vincent is here?”

“Well, you’ve better start digging,” Langril said.

“He’s already found his way out,” Henry argued,
pointing to a hole ten rows down. “I caught his scent as I was searching for
yours. Is Darwin okay?”

“We got him and Jameson out just fine. Did you accept
the familiar bond with Langril?”

He nodded. “My jaguar was more out of control than I
had ever seen him. I’m sorry for biting you.” He grimaced at the gory mess that
was my shoulder.

“I think the boiler room cauterized it. Besides, I’ve
definitely had worse. Do you think Nightshade will come home early from her
honeymoon to do her burning oil thing?”

“I think Watson would become your mortal enemy if she
did.”

I stood and a number of my bones and joints cracked
with protest. “I’m getting too old for---” Langril cleared his throat loudly.
“Sorry, gramps. Let’s go find Vincent.”

Langril was always a fun professor who regularly
teased his students, so I wasn’t surprised to see the humor on his face. “I
guess you have lost all respect for me?” he asked, standing.

“On the contrary. Henry accepted you as
his
wizard. That makes you part of the pack and I trust Henry. You can expect a lot
of teasing, especially from Darwin.”

Henry shifted again to track Vincent easier and we
wandered around the graveyard for about ten minutes before Langril held out a
potion bottle. “You should take this,” he said.

“What is it?”

“A healing potion. That’s probably going to get
infected if you don’t.”

I was covered in sweat, mud, and blood, as well as
missing my shirt. “We might need it for something else.”

“I have another one.”

So I drank it. It was horrible, as potions usually
are. The only flavor I could identify was spinach. We continued wandering and,
after a couple minutes, my shoulder stopped hurting. “Hang on, how come Henry
can shift if there’s no magic?” Despite what I told him, I didn’t feel great
about the lack of magic any more than he did.

Langril frowned thoughtfully. “It must have something
to do with his magic coming from his genetics, but I can’t say that I know. I
tried repeatedly to use magic and was unsuccessful.”

Neither of us saw the danger before it was too late.
One second, the air was clear and the next, we were surrounded by fog that was
so thick I couldn’t see Langril. I could, however, hear Henry snarling and
growling. “What’s going on?” I called.

“Devon?” I heard Vincent’s hopeful voice.

“Yes, I’m here!”

Langril suddenly appeared at my side and shoved me
out of the way of a rampaging vampire. Like a cross between a rabid dog and a
zombie, the vampire relentlessly tried to bite and scratch Langril. To my
surprise, the old wizard had enough skill in hand-to-hand combat to avoid
injury. With a well-timed kick to the knees, Langril managed to get enough
space between them to draw his sword. When he stabbed the sword into the
vampire’s chest and the vampire then bit him on the shoulder, I drew my gun.

The vampire let Langril go for just a second to lunge
at me, still with Langril’s sword in his chest. Calmly, I shoved the muzzle of
my gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger. The vampire burst into ash, the
fog instantly evaporated, and I was able to see four more vampires surrounding
Vincent, Henry, Langril, and me. All of the vampires looked stunned and
confused. I wasn’t one to waste an opportunity, so I aimed my gun at the next
closest vampire and shot him. A split second after he burst into ash, the
remaining three vanished.

Suddenly, I was certain where we were, why we
couldn’t use magic, and how to get out. “I guess I taught them what death is.
Now it’s time to get out of here.”

“That’s your ‘I have a plan’ voice,” Henry said.

“Yes, it is. In fact, I have several plans.” I handed
my gun to Langril. “Shoot me.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’ve figured this place out. The prison feeds on
blood, but it’s also feeding us fear. I am ninety-five percent sure we are all
asleep. Every level in here is actually a little bit deeper level of sleep. I
think they use blood like Dothra uses souls. It explains why they would feed
off the older vampires; the older the vampire, the stronger their magic. Now,
Joseph Sanders told me that if we die in our sleep, we die in real life,
whereas my mother said we wake up. Let’s see who was correct.”

“Ninety-five isn’t a hundred percent,” Vincent said.

“I try not to be a hundred percent sure about
anything.”

“I don’t like this. Henry, tell him he’s being an
idiot,” Vincent demanded.

Henry studied my expression. “I thought there was
something seriously off about this place since I arrived and I trust Devon’s
instincts. Besides, I have a son waiting for me at home and I’m not going to
wait around here until I rot.”

“Then at least let me go first,” Vincent said.

“You don’t have the instincts. I’m going to wake up
and find you guys. Don’t kill each other; I’ll wake you up.”

“What do we do if this is real?”

“Then I will find a necromancer to communicate with
the living and have Hunt or someone get you guys out of here. Shoot me before I
change my mind.”

Langril aimed the gun at my face. “Do you want to
close your eyes?”

“Nope.” I always kind of expected a bullet to the
face was how I would go out. Fortunately, I was ninety-five percent sure this
wouldn’t kill me and one hundred percent sure I would prefer death over being
here for the rest of my life. If all else failed and the bullet really would
kill me, Rocky would appear to stop it.

He pulled the trigger. I expected pain. Even if it was
just a dream, I still expected it to hurt. Instead, I opened my eyes.

It was dark, but not pitch
black. I felt sluggish as I looked down at myself. There were straps over my
chest, my knees, and my wrists, all pinning me to a sort of vertical bed. There
were also two tubes sticking out of my chest; one full of blood and one full of
a blue liquid. My clothes were exactly as they had been when I walked through
the door, except that the top buttons on my shirt were undone for the tube
placement. “Rocky.” I meant to say it mentally, but it came out of my mouth. My
voice was dry and weak, which suggested I had been strapped here for days
rather than hours.

I closed my eyes to focus on the connection and
instantly felt myself slipping back under. I opened my eyes and shook myself as
best as I could. It didn’t do much good. I had to get the blue tube out of me
and shake off the lethargy. With my eyes wide open, I pulled on the connection.
My eyes slipped closed and I couldn’t get them to open again.

Then I felt a sharp pain in my chest, which gave me
enough of a jolt to open my eyes. Rocky was right in front of me and had torn
the tubes from me with her sharp claws. “Ouch.”

If she could have rolled her eyes, she would have.
With one sharp talon, she snapped each of my restraints, then pressed her paw
against my chest to pin me up when I started to fall.

“I’m okay.” I tested the strength in my legs for a
moment before nodding. Rocky let me go.

I looked around. I had been one of about fifty
vampire strapped to that wall. It was a circular room with a seven-foot
ceiling. In the middle of the room was a set of metal stairs leading down and
one leading up. I went to the stairs and looked up and down. There were ten
more floors below and at least twenty above. I turned back to Rocky, but she
was gone.

How am I supposed to find Henry, Vincent, and
Langril
? My instincts didn’t tell me one way or the other, so I figured two
of them were in one direction and one was in the other. I went down a level and
spent a couple of minutes searching the faces. Hoping I could find Langril
using his red ball, I reached into my pocket… and felt something much harder
and smoother. It was the glass sphere Hunt gave me.

Despite the fact that I planned to use it to save
Astrid, it was encouraging to have. On the next floor, I found Vincent. First,
I gently pulled the blue and red tubes from his chest and then pressed his
shirt to the wound. The tubes had suction cups on the ends instead of needles,
but both were dripping with liquid and they left inch-wide, bloody welts on his
skin.

After a couple of minutes, he started to stir. “Devon?”
he asked, struggling to open his eyes. His voice was barely a whisper.

“I’m here.” At least my voice was back to normal. He
hadn’t used his in months, though. “We’re alive. We need to get Henry and
Langril. Let me know when you think you can stand.

He opened his eyes, looked around, and flexed his
fingers. “How long have we been here?”

“Well, you and Langril have been here for months.” He
tried to reach for the straps, so I unbuckled them. When I undid the one around
his chest, I had to steady him while he got strength back in them. “I’m sorry I
didn’t come for you sooner. Krechea disguised himself as you and---”

“It’s okay. You shouldn’t have come at all; you could
have been trapped there forever. If I were your father, I would ground you
until you were eighty.”

“I think you lose grounding privileges when the son
moves into his own house.”

“Not when it comes to wizards. Let’s go find your
little friends.”

He was a lot friendlier when we were alone, as if he
just forgot that he wasn’t my father. We went to the stairs and I helped him
down. While I wanted to tell him Hunt lied to him, I had to ease into it. “I
know about the potion Hunt gave you to make you unable to have kids.”

He tripped and I had to struggle to get him back on
his feet. “Why would he tell you that?”

“Because I needed to know why you were so certain you
weren’t my father. He said you regret it.”

“I don’t.”

Alright, I didn’t need a beating heart in my chest
anyway. “In your letter, you said---”

“I know what I said. I should have been your father
and raised you with love and acceptance. Instead, I made a coward’s choice.
When I first found out your mother was pregnant, I regretted it so much I
couldn’t eat for days. I lost your mother and Star because of that damn key,
and then to have missed out on raising you… I thought I would regret it for the
rest of my life. Then I saw you that day in the council room, ready to make a
name for yourself in the paranormal world.”

“And
that
made you change your mind?”

“No; I thought you were a complete mess and I
regretted it even more. Then I got to know you and I realized you were one of
the most well-adjusted people in the entire paranormal world.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. We’re all scarred, yet you turned out very
well in comparison. I realized I made the right choice, because you did great
in spite of John and Joseph, whereas you might not have with me.”

“A lot of that was Astrid.”

“Who you wouldn’t have had if you were my son.”

“My mother is at the castle.”

His face blanched. “I can’t see her. She doesn’t even
remember me. I always made sure she was asleep when I visited her at the
hospital.”

“You were there?”

“Of course I was! I loved her. Astrid visited her as
well, also when Maria was asleep. She wanted to grow up to be a doctor in order
to heal your mother. I explained that it would be a bad idea to be around so
much blood.”

“I didn’t even know you knew her.”

“So many people loved you and would do anything to
protect you. I know you grew up thinking you were an outcast, but the problem
was that you grew up in the wrong world.”

“Earth?”

“Yes,” he teased.

I knew he meant the paranormal community. To be
perfectly honest, I didn’t know that the paranormal world would have been any
better for me. I belonged in it now, but I had no idea who I would have been
had I grown up in it.

At that point, I spotted Henry and pointed him out to
Vincent. I was worried when I approached him because his eyes were open.
“Henry?” I asked. “Can you hear me?” He didn’t respond. “I think he’s asleep
with his eyes open.” Henry slowly blinked, making no further sign of awareness.
I pulled the tubes off him and undid the strap on his left wrist.

“What took you so long?” he asked, suddenly and with
complete clarity. He used his free hand to unstrap himself the rest of the way.

“There are over a thousand vampires in here!”

“I found Keigan,” Vincent said from the opposite side
of the room.

The reason I hadn’t recognized the wizard on the
first glance was because he was quite different. His clothes were torn and his
body was bruised and bloodied just like in the prison, except there was also a
long cut from his forehead all the way across the left side of his face and to
his throat. He didn’t have that in the prison. “What happened to him?”

 “When we arrived, the vampires didn’t immediately
imprison us; they wanted to interrogate us about the tower. Keigan felt guilty
for getting the doors mixed up and antagonized them intentionally to get the
attention off me.”

“We can use our magic now, right? We can get back to
the tower?”

“Yes, but we had better hold our breath.”

“I didn’t close the door behind me.”

“Well, that is unfortunate. Be ready to hold your
breath twice. I’ll take Keigan and you take Henry. Don’t let him go, no matter
what, until you are both on Earth and dry. Once we go through, I’ll shut the
door. I’ll be a minute or so behind you.

“Alright. See you on the other side. Henry, take a
deep breath. There doesn’t seem to be a shadow pass on this side and the tower
is submerged. Take off your over shirt.” He did without arguing. Knowing we had
no room for mistakes, I grasped Henry’s right arm with my left hand and used
the shirt to tie us together.

“Hopefully there won’t be anything terribly monstrous
in the water that we may have to swim from.”

“That’s okay; it’s pitch black, so we wouldn’t be
able to see it anyway.”

Henry and I both inhaled and I focused on my symbol.
As soon as the blackness cut off the rest of the world, I felt us back in the
cold water. Unfortunately, I had no damn clue where the tower was.

Rough stone and sharp talons wrapped around my
forearm. Opening myself up to her presence, I knew it was Rocky. The sudden
motion of water told me she was flapping her wings, yet I knew she had to be
using magic in addition to that, because the last time I checked, rocks sank in
water. At least, that was how it worked on Earth. I let her guide us for a
moment, felt the change in magic, and for an instant, I could breathe.

Then we were submerged once more and Rocky released
me. Without letting myself worry, I focused on my symbol again. In a few
seconds that felt like minutes, we were in the shadow pass. This time, I
concentrated on being home. I concentrated on the castle, Darwin, Remington, my
mother, and especially my bed. We walked for about five minutes in silence
before the darkness fell away and we were in our room.

Darwin and Scott were there, and neither of them
looked at their best. Darwin had circles under his eyes and Scott’s face was
all blotchy like he had been crying. They both stared at us in shock, obviously
afraid to touch us. Still without saying a word, I untied the shirt and sat
heavily in my chair.

“Daddy, what happened?” Scott asked, trying to act
calm.

“It’s a long story that I’ll tell you soon.”

“Are you hurt?”

“Just a little tired.”

“You smell different. Are you sure you’re not the bad
man trying to look like you?”

Henry almost looked brokenhearted. “That’s really
your dad, buddy, and I think he needs a hug,” I said. “He worked very hard and
fought a lot of monsters to get home to you.” Scott hesitated for half a second
before hugging the stuffing out of his father. Darwin, on the other hand,
punched me as hard as he could in the chest. I certainly felt it, but he was
clearly never taught how to hit someone. He gasped, groaned, and moaned, holding
his hand like he broke it. “What did you do that for? Henry and I got back
safe, minus a bit of blood.”

His eyes widened and he forgot about the pain in his
hand. “You’re hurt? I’ll get Dr. Martin.”

“No, we’re fine. Tell me why you’re upset.”

“Why am I upset? Why am I upset?! You were gone for
two weeks!” He grabbed an old copy of the student handbook and smacked me over
the head with it. “Two weeks! I had to explain to Scott why his father wasn’t
home yet for two weeks! He was frantic!”

Then, as if someone popped the air out of him, he
just slumped into his chair and put his head down on his arm.

“Sorry we worried you, Darwin. What happened with the
shadow man?”

“I told Hunt that he was disguised as Vincent, but he
hasn’t been seen since. Hunt has some questions about it, but everyone has been
alerted of the situation.”

“Vincent and Langril should be here by now.”

“Well, Langril was unconscious when we left. Maybe
that’s slowing them down,” Henry suggested.

Before I could say anything, darkness surrounded me
and I felt a strange tugging sensation throughout my entire body…

Then I was right back on a round platform over a
river of lava. “You’re fucking kidding me! I got out all by myself and you
don’t have the right to do this!”

Janus appeared in front of me, just standing in thin
air. Neither face looked pleased. “You cannot escape the penance,” the younger
face said.

“I know, I know. There’s always a price for magic. I
have a plan. If I give the key to someone I know who will protect it, will that
absolve me so I wouldn’t have to make the sacrifice?”

“You would die.”

“But suppose I didn’t die. Would I be exonerated?”

“Yes.”

“Give me twenty-four hours. I’ll give the key to
someone who will take much better care of it than me.”

“Why would we do this for you?”

“The elementals are all about balance. Are the gods?”

“Of course. That is why you must make a sacrifice to
be one of the guardians of the tower. We do not choose what is most precious to
you.”

“I want to even the playing field.”

Both faces pondered this. “We will humor you,” the
younger face said.

“You have twenty-four hours to pass the key to
someone else or you will live out the rest of your life here.”

I was suddenly back in my room and nobody looked as
if anything strange had happened. I stood. “Let me know when they get here. I’m
going to go make a deal with a demon.”

“What?” Darwin asked.

“Janus is going to trap me in the prison of Kadin for
the rest of eternity if I don’t pass my key onto someone else.”

“But you would die!”

“Hence the deal with the demon.”

Understanding dawned on his face. “Oh. Go on, then.
We’ll let Langril and Vincent know.”

I knew he would get it. Right before leaving, I
stopped, pulled the red ball out of my pocket, and tossed it to Henry. He
caught it easily. “Protect this with… Langril’s life.”

*          *          *

Ten minutes later, I was standing at Heather’s door.
I raised my hand to knock.

“Come in,” she said before my hand even touched the
wood.

I opened the door. “You are definitely your father’s
daughter.” She was sitting on her bed, reading a novel, dressed in a pink
t-shirt and superman boy shorts.

“Did you bring him back?”

“Vincent is bringing him. He’ll be back any minute.
Can you prove that you’re you and not the shadow man in disguise?”