Broken Souls (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 2) (40 page)

He called to the mist.

* * *

Disoriented, Mara felt as if she had been pulled out of a vat of mud. She felt drained and dirty. Shaking her head, she saw Ping stagger toward her and put his head next to hers. They leaned into each other to stay standing and to maintain their balance.

“Ping? I’m so sorry. I don’t understand why I would do those things to you,” she said, tears pooling in her eyes.

He looked upward at the looming cloud. “Later. Right now, we’ve got to get out of here. You seemed to have been able to cast off the darkling wraith, but it still appears to be present.”

“Mara!” Abby yelled from the back of the roof.

Mara turned and panic melted across her features. To Ping, she said, “You’ve got to get her out of here. Go.” She pushed him toward her friend.

Ping staggered a few steps and turned back. “You should not—” A look of alarm crossed his features, and his gaze looked past Mara.

Turning to look over her shoulder, she saw Suter with his arms raised and the black mist of the darkling wraith pouring into his eyes. The cloud above her had almost dissipated.

Yelling at Ping, she said, “Get Abby out of here. I’ll deal with Prado.”

Mara turned and limped toward the front of the roof. Six feet away from Suter, she raised her hands in front of her.

Suter’s eyes had gone black, and he smiled. “It would have been so much easier if you would have simply submitted and joined us,” he said in the lisping baritone that a few minutes ago had come out of her. “These little trap doors you have laid are simply delaying the inevitable. You can’t keep hiding and twisting events forever, you know.”

“Get out of here, or I’ll—”

“You’ll what? Kill this body, this innocent man?”

“You shouldn’t be so sure of yourself. I’m beginning to think he’s not so innocent, and I’ve killed him before.” Mara narrowed her eyes.

Suter exploded into a shower of pixels. As they fell away, a leather-bound book suspended among them, fell to the ground with a soft
thud
. Mara bent over to pick it up. Opening the front cover, she read her own handwriting,
The Chronicle of Continuity
.

“Mara!” Ping screamed. He stood at the back of the roof, next to the ladder and next to Abby, who was now suspended a couple feet in the air with a stream of black mist pouring into her eyes from a cloud above.

Mara dropped the book and ran toward them, raising a hand, trying to focus on doing something, anything. But nothing came. She looked at her arm and saw it flicker.
Not now
. Time slowed as she ran and saw the last of the mist disappear into Abby. She fell to the ground onto her knees next to where Ping stood, her head bent down loosely between her shoulders, her hair covering her features.

Skidding to a stop, Mara asked, “Abby? Talk to me.”

Her friend turned her head up, her eyes now black, and she smiled. “This one will do,” she said in Prado’s lisping baritone.

Abby grabbed Ping’s leg, and he gasped. He shook and turned red.

“I’m going to roast me some dragon meat,” Abby said with a smile.

Ping’s skin emitted smoke and blisters rose on his face and hands. Steam came out of his mouth as he tried to breathe.

“Stop! What do you want? Leave him alone,” Mara said.

“So accommodating, dude,” Abby said in her own voice, then back to the baritone. “We like this one. She has spunk.”

Ping’s eyes began to bulge.

“Stop hurting him. Leave Abby and come back to me. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“Too late for that. You seem to have acquired the ability to cast me off. I’m not sure we could ever be joined, but this one, she fits like a glove, like we were meant to be,” Abby said. “Open the Chronicle.”

Mara looked down at the book in her hands, a questioning look in her eyes.

“You’ve made that one fairly useless. The one in your pocket, the Gateway to Creation, open it.”

“What for?” Mara asked.

“You’ve so much knowledge and so little understanding.” Abby stood and ran her hand up from Ping’s leg along his side to his chest. “So you can save your friend’s life. Hurry, you don’t have much time.”

Ping spasmed, and his features swelled.

Mara slid the copper medallion out of her pocket and held it up. “Let him go first,” she said.

“Not likely. Open it.”

She raised the medallion, palm up, and it floated into the air and spun. It took on the familiar blue glow of molten mercury and exploded into the large transparent bubble that filled itself with lines and nodes. The three of them stood in the center of it.

Abby placed a hand on Ping’s back and shoved him forward. He staggered toward the front of the building and out of the perimeter of the bubble. Mara chased after him, catching up to him and grabbing an elbow. The Chronicle continued to float in the air at the center of the bubble, surrounding Abby and the thing that possessed her.

She smiled and held up her arms. “Now the gathering can be complete.”

She reached out and grasped the floating blue orb.

Black wisps flew from the nodes, each emitting a cry of pain and sorrow as they flew into Abby’s eyes. As they touched her, a ghost image, another Abby appeared along the static wall of the bubble, rapidly showing a different version of Abby, some with long hair, some short, others with dark hair or strange features, some not even human at all, but all were Abby. And all were gathering into the body that stood in the center of the bubble.

Once it stopped, Abby inhaled deeply and closed her eyes. Slowly she opened them again, and they remained black, but now the irises were blood red, and the pupils were dull yellow.

“It is done,” Abby said. “The gathering is complete. The Battle for Existence shall commence.”

Mara sat on the ground holding onto Ping. Tears rolled down her cheeks. “Abby! Come back. Let her go!”

“Sorry, dude, you should not have stopped being my friend.”

“I have never stopped being your friend.”

“We are going to be so much more than that now, Mara. Together, we are going to shape the ages, to mold existence. The only question left is, in whose image, yours or mine?’’

She tightened her grip on the Chronicle, lifting the glowing orb high above her head. She laughed as it turned from brilliant blue to a radiant black. Darkness spread from the orb through the lines and to the nodes. The static that formed the bubble turned to gray and flickered, like an old black-and-white television set. Slowly it collapsed in on itself and disappeared, taking Abby with it.

A black wisp of smoke floated in its wake and a quiet whisper rode the air around it. “Now it begins.” It was Abby’s voice.

Mara pounded on the back door of the shop in frustration as she realized she didn’t have the keys with her. Either she had left them inside or had lost them up on the roof. She turned to run around the block to get help for Ping who remained on the roof. He was having trouble breathing, and his eyes had swollen shut. After taking a couple steps down the alley, she heard the door open. A tiny head covered in auburn hair poked out below the doorknob.

“Morning, Mar-ree. Did you shine last night?” Hannah said.

Mara paused and turned. “That was you. You cast off the darkling wraith, didn’t you?”

“What?”

She looked at Mara as if she were crazy, the corner of her mouth turned downward and an eyebrow arched upward. The expression quickly melted away but lasted long enough to fill Mara with a sense of déjà vu.

“Can we go get some breakfast? I’m hungry.”

“In a little bit. Mr. Ping is hurt, and I need to get him down off the roof. Then I need to go out front and get one of the paramedics there to come help him.” Mara waved her hand toward the inside of the shop, and they went inside.

She leaned into the office, grabbed a key from a hook on the wall, walked over and sat down in one of the resin chairs around the tiny break table outside the office door. “I’m sort of going to trade places with Mr. Ping. There will be a flash of light, and I’ll disappear, but he’ll appear here in my place. It’s nothing that you should be afraid of, okay?”

“I’m not afraid,” Hannah said.

“It might be a good idea for you not to tell people what you see here.”

“I know.”

Mara closed her eyes and crinkled her features in concentration. At first, she flickered for a moment, then a flash of light enveloped her, and she disappeared.

Hannah giggled, clapped and said, “Magic Mar-ree.”

Another flash of light filled the chair and when it winked out, Ping sat there, his features distorted by swelling and blisters. Sweat ran down his face, and tremors shook his frame. He wheezed each time he inhaled.

Hannah raised a tiny hand to her mouth and walked up to him. “Mr. Ping, are you hurting?”

Ping cocked his head, turning blindly to the sound of Hannah’s voice. He tried to open his eyes, but his eyelids were too puffy. “Mara?” he asked through stiff cracked lips.

“No, it’s Hannah.” She sidled up to him and put her hands on the arm of the chair. “Does it hurt?”

“It only hurts a little bit,” Ping said. “Where’s Mara?”

“She traded places with you.” Hannah reached up and placed her hands gently on Ping’s cheeks. He twitched his head backward as he felt a slight shock run through them. “All better,” she said.

“It might be best if you didn’t touch me,” Ping said. “I wouldn’t want you to get messy.”

“You need to pretend now,” Hannah said.

“What?”

“Pretend that you are all better, that the hurts are gone away.”

“I would love to pretend that the hurts are gone away.”

“Do it. It will make you better.”

Ping’s head lolled backward. With no working features to look like he was concentrating, it was the best he could do to pretend to be pretending.
The child must be traumatized by the sight of me and wants me to get well. If it were only that simple
. A vision of himself did appear in his mind’s eye, and he did appear well.

A tingling ran through his body. Starting at his feet, he felt a coolness run through his skin. He exhaled with the relief of it, and his breath left him smoothly, quietly. He felt his skin tighten, and the pressure on his face abated. Working the muscles of his jaws, he realized that there was no pain, no pull of dry, cracked skin. He opened his eyes, and the little girl next to him smiled and clapped her hands.

“All better. Can we go get breakfast now?” she said.

After a quick rattle of a key, the back door swung open, and Mara came in. After tugging the door closed, she turned to face them. “What happened to you?” Mara said, wide-eyed, looking down at Ping.

He held up his arms and examined himself. “It appears this little girl is a healer,” he said.

“Nuh-uh, that’s wrong,” Hannah said.

Mara approached and sat down in the chair across from Ping, examining his newly healed face. “Did she touch your face and say something to you?”

“Yes. She touched my cheeks and said ‘all better’ and then told me I had to pretend to be well. Then I was.”

Mara crouched down in front of the little girl, “Hannah, what did you do to Mr. Ping?”

She shrugged and said, “I made it so he could be all better.”

“But you didn’t make him better yourself?”

She shook her head.

“Did you make me shine last night?” Mara asked.

“Nuh-uh. I made it so you could shine, but you shined. Not me.”

Mara looked up to Ping with a questioning look.

“It’s
tempary
,” Hannah said.

“You mean
temporary
?” Ping asked, and she nodded. He shrugged and wiped his brow. “It appears she has the ability to give people abilities.”

“So how did you know that I would need to shine last night?”

“You told me to. Before you sent me here.” Hannah wrapped her hands around Mara’s neck and hugged her. “Can we go get breakfast now? I want banana pancakes.”

A muffled crash of glass came from the front of the shop through the brick wall Mara had placed over the entryway, followed by the sounds of someone pushing debris from their path. A loud
thump
sent a subtle shiver through the floor as that someone stepped inside through the shattered display window. Crunching footsteps made their way over broken glass toward the back of the shop.

“Where did this wall come from? Mara? Are you guys back there?” Sam called. “Mom is trying to find some place to park the car, but she couldn’t get within four blocks of this place with all the ambulances and fire trucks out there. Sheesh, what a mess.”

Mara glanced at the wall, and it blurred, broke up into tiny translucent cubes and tumbled away into nothingness.

Hannah clapped and said, “Magic Mar-ree.”

Ping leaned forward with a smile and said, “Actually it’s called metaphysics.”

“
Phetamysics
,” she repeated.

“I suppose we can let it go this one time,” he said.

Sam stepped into the entryway leading to the back room. Mara and Ping sat at the resin break table with a little girl standing next to them. They all watched him approach. The little girl looked upward, her eyes wide with expectation.
Like a kid on Christmas morning
. She danced in place, a momentary little jig, and bounded toward him, throwing her arms around his legs, burying her face in them. Looking down surprised, Sam maintained his balance by placing a hand on the wall behind him. He looked at Mara with a wide-eyed “What is this?” expression.

Hannah pulled back, still holding onto his pants legs and looked up into his eyes with a brilliant smile. “Hi, Daddy!” she said.

Author’s Note

Thanks so much for taking the time to read
Broken Souls
. I hope you enjoyed it. If you find yourself with a few free minutes, please consider writing a short, honest review of the book on Amazon. It not only helps other readers discover the book, but gives visibility to a new writer.

Thanks again.

_______

The Chronicles of Mara Lantern
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