Dweller on the Threshold (20 page)

“I’m assuming you mean the person carrying the soul that left the trail of wicked karma.”

He smirked. “The host, she explained, was about to be a person of light. He was going to change the world—teach people to love again.”

I held up my hand again. Cleared my throat. A headache was starting to beat right behind my left eye. “So, let me get this part straight. Someone who spent many lives being very, very bad was now going to be very, very good?”

“Someone more than very, very good. If he wasn’t, his dweller wouldn’t have amassed that quickly or viciously.”

“Okay, hold on a minute.” The pain in my head increased, so I ripped off the hat—it was barely on, anyway. We’d knocked it around and half my hair was down my back. I finger-brushed my hair to remove the tangles. “This person was like a spiritual leader—like Gandhi—and he had the karma from all his past lives gathering up on him. For what?”

When he didn’t answer, I stopped running my fingers through my hair and looked at him. He was watching my movements with complete fascination. Feeling heat creep up the back of my neck, I folded my hands in my lap. “So why does this dweller want to stop his host?”

He cleared his throat. “It ceases to exist if the host crosses that last stage of enlightenment. Like any creature, it wants to live. But it cannot be allowed to live.”

“Isn’t it alive now? Isn’t it stealing the souls?”

“I believe it steals the souls for power. Maybe with enough power, it can cross into our realm—maybe merge with its host. But even before that happens, it will have enough power to create havoc. It’s already sending Dweller Demons. It could even open up the dimensions so other things can cross over.”

“How did you stop it before?”

Nikolos kept his gaze steady on me, but something moved behind his eyes, something so painful I felt it brush over me in a black, strangling wave. Regret. It was regret—the kind that ate away at a person’s sanity. “What did you do?” I whispered.

“I killed the host before the Dweller gathered enough power.”

Whoa. I swallowed the heavy lump that had instantly lodged in my throat then finished the water left in the bottle.

“Back then,” he continued, “we didn’t understand what we were facing. We only knew what the gods had told me. A gathering of darkness attached to a host. Take away the life of the host and the creature dies.”

There was more. I knew it. The implications of such a decision dropped a heavy stone in my gut. What if that host had been here to change the world? Make it a better place? What had it been like to end the life of an innocent, possibly great person?

Nikolos was nodding. “I see it in your expression.”

“See what?”

“What I’ve faced every moment of my life since then.”

I closed my eyes. To live endlessly knowing that your actions changed the course of humanity. To understand now that you halted something that might have stopped a war, or rid the world of hatred and prejudice. Opening my eyes, I stared at him, wanting to crawl inside his heart and soul and offer comfort. To ease his self-loathing. Words wouldn’t help. Telling him that he hadn’t known better wouldn’t help.

Not to this man. A man whose pain had gone on for so long. Century after century. I couldn’t begin to imagine. That kind of guilt and regret on top of the weight of all those souls and no spirit guides to ease the burden.

And would I have to do the same in order to get my sister’s soul back?

My palms started sweating so I rubbed them on my jeans. “You say he’s gathering souls for power?”

“Souls are the source of all. They are the oldest living entities—they hold all the memories, magic and power. With enough of them, the Dweller could work a spell and break through a portal. It’s what he was doing in the past.”

“Breaking through a portal like the one in your hallway?” I waited to see if my knowledge shocked him, but he merely grinned.

“The one you were trying to destroy?”

I knew about portals. Knew that they were openings to other worlds and that unless they were guarded, they could unleash all sorts of nasty things into our dimension. “You’re a guardian.” It wasn’t a question. “I thought only necromancers could be guardians.”

“Usually. I’ve been around long enough to gather significant knowledge of magic. My specialty is wards.”

“So this thing is gathering enough souls to build the kind of power to break through a portal.”

“And he needs a spell. An ancient spell.”

The book. The damned spell book.

Nikolos nodded like he’d read my mind. “He’ll keep sending creatures for that book.” He stood suddenly. “It will take me a day to situate things here and pack what we’ll need.”

“We?”

He pointed to the wall of images. “I know more about this than you could possibly imagine. I followed this soul through many lifetimes.”

I curled my fingers into a fist. “All of these famous killers were incarnations of this one soul? Hitler?”

“He was one, yes. I thought the one before him was H. H. Holmes, but his death was after Hitler’s. Before that it was one of the Harp brothers in the seventeen hundreds. It went into a woman in the sixteen hundreds—Marie de Brinvilliers. She liked poison. Killed her family and quite a few more in the hospital where she worked. I lost him in the fifteen hundreds. I was following the Werewolf Killer, but I was mistaken.”

I pointed to a crude drawing of a very familiar face. “Vlad Dracul?”

“Most definitely.” Nikolos moved farther back in his time line, pointed to a map of Scotland. “Ever hear of Christie Cleek?”

“The cannibal story? I thought that was a myth.” I swallowed, my throat so dry I didn’t even ask—I just opened the refrigerator and grabbed another bottled water. “You’ve been following all these monsters for all this time. How can you be—” I broke off because I was going to say sane, but that was just plain rude. “So, who was it in the twelve hundreds? Genghis Khan?”

He shook his head. “Close. It was actually someone in his army who lived beyond his death in twelve twenty-seven.”

I hugged my arms to my chest. “How did you know it was him?”

“I can feel it. The person carrying the soul makes your skin crawl.”

“Or it would if this Dweller was
actually
inside. If it isn’t now, how will we know now since the host will be a good person?”

He closed his eyes. “Simple—he will inspire you in ways you cannot imagine. He—or possibly she—will make you want to wrap him up and keep everything bad in the world away from him. And he will be heavily guarded by powerful spirits.”

I wondered if he’d known the host he killed personally. It couldn’t have been a big society—so more than likely he had. My heart thudded painfully in my chest. “So, you knew what had happened to Elsa before you went to the hospital?”

He clenched his hands until I could see his knuckles whiten. “I’ve known for weeks. I’ve been waiting my entire life for this—following all his incarnations. There were a few times I thought he’d gathered the power, times when the darkness reached such unimaginable levels, it was impossible to keep up. During the crusades and the time of Khan. I felt the presence during both times, fought in those wars myself. To this day, I don’t know why he didn’t pass through then. Maybe it was the book. I don’t know. I know only one thing for sure.”

“And that is?”

“I’m here to meet him again. It can be the only reason why I’m still here. Why I walk this earth after watching everyone I’ve loved wither and die.”

Chapter Ten

We watched each other for several long, intense seconds. Ragged emotions clawed my throat. I focused on his nose, which only looked slightly swollen, before glancing at my knuckles to find his blood on me—dark and smudged over the new bruises forming. My belly flip-flopped. I looked up to meet his gaze. “How do you know my sister, Nikolos?”

He took a step closer and I had to tilt my head back. Black eyes narrowed, and again I felt that odd connection to him. My heartbeat sped up as heat flooded the entire lower half of my body.

He lifted my hand, rubbed his thumb over my sore knuckles. “I won’t hurt you.”

“I didn’t ask that.” My words felt like anchors in my chest. I had to pull them through the thick and fast breaths taking up all the space.

“Your heart is beating a mile a minute.” He let go of my hand and stepped back.

Not far enough. I could still feel the heat of his body. Twenty-eight years old and my only experience with sex had been a basketball player who couldn’t handle the fact I was stronger than him. Somehow, I knew
this
man wouldn’t care if it turned out I was. Why that made me uncharacteristically giddy was anyone’s guess. Maybe my hormones were out of whack or something.

Or maybe it was just him.

I certainly hadn’t reacted to anyone like this before.

Nikolos picked up the bloody towel and threw it into the trash can. “I met your sister here. She’s a customer.”

“Do you visit all your customers when they end up in the hospital?”

“Elsa is also a friend.”

“Does she know about you? How old you are?”

“No.” He gestured to the walls around us. “She hasn’t seen this room either. She wouldn’t understand.”

“You don’t give her enough credit.” I walked around him to an old, grainy newspaper drawing of Marie de Brinvilliers. “I’ve seen these kinds of things on my sister’s office walls, Nikolos. She spends most of her life tracking psychopaths.”

His footsteps were loud on the tile as he moved beside me. “Yet this would have made her suspicious of me and I didn’t want that.” Again with the unpracticed half-smile that so quickly disappeared. “I don’t have many friends.”

That was something we shared in common. Our gazes clashed. He had the most penetrating, black stare. It never wavered.

He wanted me.

I could feel it in the deepest part of myself. An answering need burned steady there as well. He wanted to put those big hands on me. I wanted that pretty badly, myself. And I didn’t even trust the man. There were still too many unanswered questions.

I looked away and cleared my throat. “Phro told me you come from Crete.”

“Phro?”

“Aphrodite.”

“Do you know why you travel with a goddess?”

“Do you always answer with questions?” I crossed my arms. “Aphrodite has been with me since I was nine years old. Neither of us knows why I can see her. She stays with me because I’m the only person who can.”

Well, I
was
.

He didn’t answer for several seconds. “I don’t find it easy to talk of my home.”

“The destruction of Crete is one of the world’s biggest mysteries. No one knows whether the Mycenaeans killed off your people or the eruption of a volcano did.”

“Neither. It wasn’t called Crete then either.”

“Really? What was it?”

“Aegenia. We called my home Aegenia for the sea that surrounded it.” He crossed his arms and leaned on the wall. “Mycenaeans were a problem, yes. The volcano was the final tool of destruction, yes. But the Dweller destroyed Aegenia.”

I frowned, looked around again, my gut clenching. “You’re saying this Dweller”—I pointed at the wall—“the one sending out these demons—the one who has my sister’s soul… you’re saying he caused what happened on Cr—Aegenia?”

He nodded slowly.

“So this time… what? He’s amassed enough power to do that again? You think he can cause the destruction of what? Florida?”

“What he could… no—will—do this time around will cover more than merely our state.” Nikolos took a clean towel from a drawer and wet it before coming toward me. Once again, he lifted my hand, only this time he cleaned off the blood. “Haven’t you felt something different in the air? Something that crawls along your skin? Haven’t you noticed that more and more magical beings are coming out into the open?”

I had noticed. My opportunities for tracking the beings had been coming more and more often—for months, in fact. “Tell me,” I whispered, watching him stroke the white towel over my hand. “What did he do to your world, Nikolos?”

He stepped back. I watched his throat move as he swallowed. “The Dweller made my people turn against each other. He filled them with fear and madness until they slaughtered each other. Village after village.”

I remembered Phro’s story of Nikolos. Either the gods had gotten it wrong or he was a damned good liar. I waited, watching his beautiful dark skin go pale as memories swam through his eyes.

“In the midst of the killing, he ripped open the very fabric that separates our worlds. Other things escaped, but the magic—it spilled, spilled onto the earth hot and heavy and too fast. She blew.”

“She? Do you mean the earth? Like, a volcano? The one on a separate island?”

“It was the Dweller. He caused the volcano to blow.”

A cold shiver sputtered down my back. “How did you survive? And why?”

He didn’t answer—just looked around the room. I followed his gaze but quickly looked back at him, wanting to catch any bit of expression that might hint at a lie. Instead, I saw such raw regret it dug into my gut like claws. He’d spent centuries trying to right this. “It doesn’t sound like it was your fault,” I whispered.