Crossed
Authors: Eliza Crewe
CROSSED
ELIZA CREWE
The Soul-Eater Series
Book 3
e-Edition
Copyright © Eliza Crewe 2015
Cover art by Creative Paramita
e-Edition, License Notes
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This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events of localities is entirely coincidental.
In Loving Memory of Frank Palmer
Table of Contents
I’m blonde. No, I am not shitting you.
I shake my dripping hair and lean into the mirror. Not even a punky, Icelandic blonde. No, golden-retriever blonde. Strawberry blonde. Soccer-mom blonde.
And once my hair dries, the color will be even brighter. I shudder.
I never thought I’d say this, but thank God for the nearly-face-shattering kick I took in the last fight—the lingering bruise is the only thing saving me from looking like a total ass-kissing honor-roll student. I touch my puffy cheek gingerly. The bruise will only last a few more hours, but the silver lining of being on the losing side in a war is that there will definitely be opportunities for more.
The demons are still hunting me, so the Crusaders ordered the new hair color hoping that it will help with my disguise. I remarked that if our big defense is a $5.99 bottle of Nice ‘n Easy, we’re doomed.
Jo shrugged, helpfully pointed out we’re probably already doomed and shoved the box of dye into my chest, adding, “It can’t hurt.”
I look in the motel mirror. She’s so wrong.
Chi chooses that moment to stick his own blond (natural) head around the door of the bathroom. Depending on what he says, it might end up hurting him, too. Being a good friend, I try to warn him with a sour devil’s glare.
“Wow, Meda.”
My eyes narrow further.
“That’s . . . well.”
“‘Well’ what?” I growl.
“Perky.”
I hiss.
He opens his mouth, then thinks better of it. I can see the gears cranking behind his blue eyes. Sadly, he can’t resist. “Running for student body president?” he asks and I lunge.
He dodges out of the doorway, amazingly quick for someone as big as he is. My lunge turns into a dive. I tuck, roll and rotate so fast that I’m on him just as he’s bounding over the bed towards the door. I catch him around the waist, and we slam into the wall and come down on an end table. The lamp, metal and bolted down in a cheap place like this, folds under us like foil. Chi has arms like tree trunks and manages to hulk me on to my back as we roll off what remains of the table. He grins, but it doesn’t last long.
He yelps and releases my shoulders. He looks at me in horror. “Did you just
bite
me?”
It’s my turn to grin. He may be a gorilla but I’m still stronger, so I don’t need to fight dirty. I just like to.
I knee him—just narrowly missing his balls—and send him sailing over my head and into the wall. I flip and straddle him, then lean in until we’re nose to nose. My hands tighten on his windpipe. “Would the class president do this—“
The door bangs open with a blast of crisp autumn wind, and I turn to see Jo—as I straddle her boyfriend, my mouth inches from his.
“What are you doing?” Her curls stick out wildly making her look like some kind of cave woman. A pissed cave woman.
“Uhhhhh,” I offer articulately.
“Not you.” She switches her glare to Chi. “You were supposed to
get
her, not
kill
her.”
“Hey!” I squawk. “If anyone’s killing anyone, it’s me.”
Jo rolls her eyes. “Oh, who cares? Get up, we’ve got to go.”
I shove off Chi and climb to my feet. “Already?” I offer him a hand up only to let go when he’s halfway to his feet. He lands on his back with an
oof
.
I like to hold a grudge.
“Yeah,” Jo says. “And for good, so pack everything. We leave in fifteen.”
I wince. Ever since our school was blown up (again), we’ve been on the move. Turns out the attack on our school was part of a widespread assault, hitting Templar communities all over the country.
I snap up a tatty green canvas duffle I pretend I bought because it’s vintage, not because it was cheap. The indignity of fleeing, barefoot, taught me that the Sarge doesn’t mess around; when she says fifteen minutes, she means
fifteen
. I grab the grimoire I’d been studying and the laptop with all my mom’s videos, wrapping them in some clothes before shoving them in the bag. “Where to this time?”
“Maine,” Jo answers, grabbing her own stuff and jamming it into her bag. Chi ducks out to do the same.
“Maine? What’s in Maine?” I ask, but it’s with the interest of someone craning their neck to see a car wreck. I’m not really sure I want to know the answer—it’s easier to leap from the frying pan when you’re ignorant of the fire below.
When she doesn’t immediately answer, I turn. She chews her lip. “I don’t know.” Jo takes in my unhappy look. “Relax. Sarge promised they’d explain when we arrive.” Then she does a double take. “What on earth are you wearing?”
I look down. Demon-killing is tough on wardrobe, so there’s a lot of turnover. “A leotard. And leggings.” I flap my arms. “Total freedom of movement.”
“You look like a ballerina.”
“Yeah,” I agree enthusiastically, then curve my fingers into claws and drop my voice a few octaves. “The Ballerina of Death.”
She snorts. Her eyes go to my newly-dyed golden blonde hair. “Sure thing, Cupcake.”
I shake my wet head like a dog, spraying Jo as she squawks and ducks for cover.
After we pack, we meet the rest of our squad—the Reavers, we’ve been dubbed—in the parking lot in front of the hotel. Despite being autumn, the black asphalt radiates heat under the unforgiving afternoon sun. The Reavers are slow to put on their leather coats, leaving them tossed over the handlebars of their motorcycles until the last minute.
All except Sergeant Reinhardt, aka the Sarge, our squad leader, who somehow looks as cool as a cucumber in her long sleeved leather coat. Her rigid posture and disapproving stare suggests we’re late, even though we aren’t. She’s tall with frizzy grey hair and one sky-blue laser beam of an eye. The other has long been replaced with a twisted scar that pulls her face into a permanent snarl.
She can be such a tight ass, but it comes in handy sometimes. As part of my compromise with the Crusaders I agreed to let them possess me to use my amped-up magical powers until I learn to cast spells myself. I demanded to be in her squad as she’s the only one I trust to stay stolidly on her side of the mental line.
I, of course, don’t have the same compunction and poke around until she psychically punches me.
The eye, man. I need to know how she lost the eye.
I made the mistake once of asking one of my new squad mates how she lost it, but a funny thing happens once adults have decided you’re one of them, when you cross the invisible line from child to grown-up. Suddenly they swear, they bitch, they crack jokes, they lie about how people lost body parts. “She traded it for superpowers.” “She lost a bet.” “She got a BB gun for Christmas.”
“Melange, Beauregard, mount up,” Headmaster Reinhart barks, but softens it with a wink his wife can’t see. Married Crusaders are always in the same squad as they are magically bound and literally suffer if they’re separated too long. The Crusaders say it’s to foster family unity, but I think it’s because someone who marries a Crusader becomes a Crusader. The Powers That Be want you to think hard before you take the plunge. It gives new meaning to old adage “Wed in haste, repent at leisure.”
These last few months out from behind his desk have shrunk the Headmaster’s bowl full of jelly to a mere saucer, but he still looks like Santa gone bad—a full white beard and moustache, dressed all in the traditional black leather and denim of a biker. His twinkling eyes and constant good humor can melt even the Sarge’s sourest moods and, sure enough, whatever he just said has her twisting her lips in the Sarge’s version of a smile.
My gaze leaves them and finds Him. My one true love.
My heart gives a little squeeze at the sight of him. He leans nonchalantly in the parking lot, the long afternoon sun splashing his shadow on to the pavement, bigger, taller than the original. Enormous, like the space he fills in my heart.
It wasn’t love at first sight. Oh no, like all the best relationships it was slow and tempestuous. I thought he was too loud, too flashy. As for him, he was aloof.
But as we’ve been forced together these past months, in increasingly dangerous situations, we’ve come to appreciate each other’s finer points. We have realized how very much we have in common. Recklessness. A need for speed. A preference for speaking in growls and roars.
I move forward and stroke his shiny chrome fender. “Who’s a good boy? Are you my good boy?”
Jo makes a disgusted noise from where she stands next to her own motorcycle. “You’re ridiculous.”
“Now, Jo, jealousy is a sin.” Our gazes move to her little machine. While mine is a monstrous masterpiece that looks like flames should shoot out its tailpipe, hers is a tiny little thing made of plastic or polycarbonate or pixie dust. Jo’s damaged leg is strong enough that she doesn’t need to ride the embarrassment of a tricycle anymore, but the beasts that the rest of us drive are unduly taxing. In the shadow of my monster, hers looks like a toy.
“It’s just a motorcycle,” she snaps, grabbing her helmet and forcing it over her wild curls.
I reach out and cover the mirrors protruding from the sides of Bubba’s steering column. “Shhhh, shhh, don’t listen to her. She doesn’t mean it.”
“Miss Melange,” the Sarge bellows. “Are you going to ride that bike or make love to it?”
I look at her. “Both?”
“Oh for the love of—” She ends with a small headshake and turns away.
Rex, a short, muscular guy with an easy grin, walks his bike forward until he almost bumps me with his wheel. I suspect Rex isn’t his real name—it seems like the kind of overcompensate-y nickname chosen by people named Ulmer or Delmer.
“Don’t take it personally,” he says apologetically, but with a sparkle in his eye that makes me wary. “It’s a sensitive subject with her.”
“Motorcycle lovin’?”
“Yeah. Didn’t you know?” He points at his face. “It’s how she lost her eye.”
“I hate you.”
His barked laugh is cut off abruptly. An electrical ping ricochets along my nerve endings and I jerk involuntarily.
The Crusader’s emergency beacon. Someone nearby is in trouble.
The other Crusaders don’t react as strongly, though there’s an obvious change in the group’s mood.
“Rookie’s Sting,” Rex says, noting my reaction. “You’ll get used to it. Soon you’ll even like it.” He grins at my look of utter disbelief. It’s like sticking your finger in a damn electrical socket. “It’s the cue that you’re about to kick some demon ass.”
The Crusaders, as a whole, have only a passing acquaintance with sanity.
The characteristic banter of a group of people that is too long in its own company is replaced with tense, efficient movements. People straddle their bikes, double-check that their gear is strapped in place securely, pat their bodies for weapons.
“Change in plans,” the Sarge says unnecessarily, when she and Crusader Henries, our resident magical expert, return from communicating with Headquarters. “Shady Glen has been attacked.” Her words are terse and she meets no one’s eyes.
Shady Glen. One of the few Crusader communities left. Rex swears, and there are sick looks on the faces of the others assembled. Disguised as a hippie commune, Shady Glen is about twenty miles south of us. We’d just passed through there a few days ago.
Chi’s jaw is tensed, his mouth compressed in a thin line. He’s ready for a fight. Jo’s focus is entirely on the Sarge, waiting for more information.
She’s destined to be disappointed. The Sarge, known for her need-to-know mentality, says nothing else and swings a leg over her bike and kicks it to life. “Reavers move out!”
The ghosts let me know we’re close.
The first is a small, grey girl crouching on the side of the otherwise deserted lane. She digs through what looks to be a bowling bag, but stops to drift to her feet as we approach. When we get close enough for her to recognize us, she holds up a hand, silently pointing down the country road. We blast past.
On the other side of the road, a ghostly figure of a boy carries a backpack. He too lifts his hand to point.
The ghosts get denser, adults now mixed in among the children, until they line the lane leading to the Crusader community as thickly as the trees hanging over the gravel road. The enormity of our loss becomes more apparent and I understand the strained look on the Sarge’s face after she talked to headquarters.
This is not a rescue mission. It’s a recovery mission.
The others don’t know. My demonic heritage is what allows me to see the dead, heritage the rest of them don’t share. I look around and all I see on their faces is the feral excitement of attack dogs about to be unleashed.
We loop around the bend and the commune comes into sight, or what remains of it. We were just here and now it’s almost unrecognizable. The buildings we stayed in, the eating hall, the school, all have been destroyed. The trailers are ripped open, raw, torn edges of metal so bent out of shape they look more like giant, discarded sardine tins than homes.
And the bodies. Everywhere there are bodies.
I was warned. All the ghosts, I was warned, and still the sight of the piled corpses draws me up. They were taken unawares, that much is obvious; mixed in among the adults lie the small bodies of children who should have been in hiding. All Crusaders communities have some sort of safe room as it’s hard to escape with squalling, screaming, slow-moving tots. They never made it to theirs.