Between the Shadow and the Soul (25 page)

There were so many dead things around her. Fifty or more. Maybe if she focused long enough, she could figure out their exact number. She started reaching for each of them, one after the other. It was a blurry presence, no, more like an absence – like a black hole yearning to be filled with whatever was taken.

“Nela!” Darko shook her and she snapped back into the presence, sucking in a deep breath. She hadn’t even realized she’d stopped breathing.

A rustling came from the wooden casket to their feet, then it stopped.

“What did you do?” Darko asked. “When you had your eyes closed, something strange was going on. The air changed, as if it was charged with static.”

“I don’t know,” Nela admitted quietly, her eyes frozen on the coffin.

“Try to focus on the dog this time, okay?”

Was Darko nervous? His face didn’t give anything away, but his voice had betrayed him. “Okay,” she said as she knelt beside the coffin and put her hands on it. The wood was cold and dank, and earth stuck to her palms.

“Don’t you think it would help if we opened the lid?”

“No!” She swallowed. “Let me try it like this first.” She pleaded him with her eyes, and eventually he shrugged and settled on the ground beside her. She tried to ignore the draw from all around her, the silent begging, and stared at the smooth wood of the coffin. A soft tug came from inside and if she concentrated hard enough, she could feel a thread between herself and the carcass. In her mind she imagined wrapping her hands around the thread as if she was taking the dead dog on a leash. She imagined tugging on it, drawing whatever called out to her back to the void that needed to be filled.

Suddenly the coffin shook and a soft whine sounded inside. Nela snatched her hands back, her eyes flying open. The sounds grew louder and the dog was struggling in its prison. Her imaginary grip on the leash had slipped but she searched for it until she finally found it and grabbed it.

‘
Calm down, Roy
,’ she thought. Nothing happened. The whines turned to growls
. ‘Calm down!’,
she ordered firmly. The growls quieted and the coffin stopped moving.

“Is it dead?”

“It’s always been dead,” Nela said, trying not to let her control on the dog slip. “It’s under my control.”

Darko looked satisfied. He reached for the lid. Nela stopped him. “What are you doing?”

“We need to find out how strong your control is and we can’t do that with the dog stuck in the coffin.”

Slowly Nela withdrew her hands. She pressed her lips together when Darko removed the lid. Inside lay something that looked like a white shag carpet. It was thin, its fur clotted and tinged brownish in places. Its eyes were missing and the nose was rotten away. Nela had to swallow down bile.

“Try to make it stand up,” Darko said calmly. He didn’t seem disturbed in the least. Maybe the word for his Master made him deal with dead things all the time. Why couldn’t she be as unfazed as he was? She was a necromancer; shouldn’t it come naturally to her? Shouldn’t she feel at ease around decaying things?

Nela glared at him, but he didn’t notice, too absorbed by the dead animal lying in front of them. She imagined tightening her hold on her invisible leash and searched for some kind of response from the dog, some sign for a presence. ‘Stand up,’ she ordered when there was nothing. Something pushed back in response. She tightened her focus and then slowly, shakily the small dog struggled to its feet. She shuddered when the empty eye sockets focused on her, the small body trembling, looking almost eager for her next order.

Darko clapped his hand. “Amazing. You did it!”

“It’s only one dog, and only a small one.”

“Then lets get another and see if you can control two. This time we’ll take the big black dog.”

Before Nela could protest, he rose to his feet and headed for the other grave. Nela slowly straightened and followed him. He’d already started digging when she arrived. Something shuffled behind her. She peered over her shoulder and found Roy a few steps behind her, his body shaken by tremors. At least, he wasn’t yowling like the cat had done, but something about his silent, obedient presence made Nela inexplicably sad.

She turned away and watched how Darko revealed a much bigger coffin. This one looked cheaper, not real wood, but some kind of cardboard that was disguised as wood. The lower part of it had broken away.

Her eyes found the dates on the gravestone below the name Balou. The Rottweiler had been buried more than six months ago. Nela took a step back when Darko bent over the opening he’d created. He cursed. “I can’t lift it. The coffin falls apart whenever I touch it. You’ll have to raise it like that. You could make it work its way out of its grave.”

Nela tried to ignore the shuffling behind her. It sounded as if Roy was scratching the pavement. She tried to get a feeling for the black dog. There was a gentle tug from his direction, but she wasn’t sure how to keep her grip on Roy while also reaching out for Balou. When she felt the draw from Balou again, she tugged but the presence resisted. She jerked once more.

The coffin cracked and the lid fell in as a black shape struggled inside. It thrashed around itself, growling and barking.

“Nela,” Darko began, his voice alarmed.

Roy sat unmoving behind her, but the black dog shook off the remains of its coffin and climbed out. Its fur was missing in patches, revealing leathery skin and bones. Its teeth were revealed in a permanent snarl. It shook violently as it got to its feet. Darko raised the shovel and stood protectively beside her. “I don’t know if I can attack it with magic. Your magic wraps around it like a cocoon.”

“I can control it,” Nela said with more confidence than she felt. She reached for it but it kept advancing and growling. One of its hind legs gave away with every step. The invisible thread connecting Nela and the dog seemed to be whirling around her, always out of reach. She put her connection to Roy to the back of her mind and focused all of her energy on the flailing leash and then she grabbed onto it in her mind and tugged sharply. ‘Sit down’, she ordered. Her muscles tensed from strain and her eyes began to water because she didn’t dare to blink, not wanting to break eye-contact. Though she wasn’t even sure if the dog could even see her since it didn’t have its eyes.

“Sit down!” she screamed aloud when the creature had almost reached them. It twitched and sank down onto its haunches. Darko lowered the shovel with a relieved laugh. Now that she had a firm grip on both dogs, she didn’t need to focus quite as much on either of them. It seemed subduing them was the biggest challenge.

“Now order them both to do something.”

“Lie down,” Nela said, though she was sure that thinking the words would have been enough. Both dogs obediently lowered themselves to the ground.

Relief flooded Nela. Maybe their plan could really succeed. They still had some time to practice. If she gave it her all, then they could make it.

“Is it different to control a fresher carcass?”

Nela tried to find a difference between the two dogs but apart from the fact that the Rottweiler had been harder to control there was nothing, and that could be explained by its bigger size or maybe it had simply been more headstrong in its life. The cat on the other hand had been a real mess. Was that because it had been fresh? “I don’t think so.”

“Good because I think we’ll need to find newly dead dogs for our plan. The older corpses are in too bad shape. They’d probably fall apart if they tried to attack the Brotherhood guards.”

“But where are we going to get so many fresh dead dogs? I doubt the vet you broke into will have so many of them.”

Darko stared into space. “I’ll ask Mikael. That guy can get you anything.”

“But he won’t kill any dogs for us. Promise me.”

“I’ll tell him, don’t worry. We have two weeks. I’m sure that’s enough time for Mikael to collect dog bodies and store them in a freezer somewhere until we need them.”

“Don’t you think the freezer might cause some damage?”

“Maybe to their brain, but we don’t need that. And they’re dead anyway and we’ll return them to death once we’re done, so no harm done.”

Nela glanced at the two half-decayed dogs lying on the pathway, waiting for her orders. She felt bad for using dead bodies like that. It was wrong, but she had to save her mother. That was the most important thing. “We should ask him tonight,” she said. The sooner the better.

“No, first we need to train a bit more. We have to find out how many dogs you can control.”

“We can’t dig out dozens of coffins. Let’s do one more and then we can train some more when Mikael’s brought us the dead dogs we need. We’ll tell him we need them a day or two before my mother’s staking.”

“We can’t reveal why we need them, but we’ll tell him that we need them in twelve days. That gives us a day of practice with fresh bodies without them decaying too much. But we’ll have to figure out a place where we can do that.”

Nela couldn’t believe how much her life had changed in the last few months. Sometimes she wished for the mostly worry-free days before her Binding ceremony. But another part of her was eager for her newly discovered powers and for the chance to try them out. “Okay, let’s do that. But when we’re done we’ll have to return the dogs to their graves, so their owners don’t find out.”

Darko gave her a disbelieving look.

“And it might look suspicious if someone finds several disturbed graves,” she added.

“Okay, we’ll do it your way,” he said. He kissed her briefly before he moved on to the next grave where a German Shepherd was buried. Nela grabbed her own shovel to help him digging.

***

Two hours later, they returned Roy’s grave to its original state. Nela set the candle down and released a breath. She was sweaty and tired. It was almost three in the morning and they’d spent the last twenty minutes putting the three dogs back into their graves and shoveling the dirt into the holes to cover up the broken coffins. But that wasn’t even why she was feeling so bone tired. The time she’d spent ordering the three dead dogs around and trying to keep them under control while Darko tried to distract her weighed much heavier on her.

“This was great,” Darko said, wrapping an arm around her as they stared down at the last grave they’d restored.

“It’s always much harder to return them to death than to raise them. I wonder why.”

“I guess all living things ultimately want to be alive.”

“But they aren’t exactly alive when I raise them. They are something else, something unnatural.” Goose-bumps erupted on her skin when she remembered her connection to the corpses, the void that had called out to her, the dark despair.

Darko rubbed her arm. “It’s not important. As long as you manage to raise them and keep them under control, everything will be fine. We don’t need them to be returned to their dead state for our plan to work.” He searched her face. “Or are you worried that you won’t be able to control so many dogs when you’re under pressure? You’ll be stressed and scared.”

“No,” she said hastily, worried he’d change his mind about their plan if she told him the truth. She was worried about losing control. Tonight she’d managed to order around three dogs, but on the day of her mother’s staking there would be at least five, hopefully closer to ten bodies, and somehow she had a feeling that freshly dead bodies would be much harder to control. If the incident with the cat repeated itself, they’d all be doomed.

Chapter 29

I
t was a beautiful day. The sun was shining, only a few white clouds drifted across the sky, and it was reasonably warm for a June day in Germany. But Nela felt cold and she couldn’t stop shivering. She knew she needed to get a grip on herself. It was the day of her mother’s burning. She hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours and her body made her pay for it now.

How was she supposed to focus on controlling eight dead dogs when she felt as if her head was filled with cotton candy?

She shook herself like the huge Great Dane had done when she’d raised it for the first time yesterday morning. She’d had only yesterday to practice with the dead dogs. Mikael had been a day late delivering them since he’d run into problems with the last two dogs. Nela hadn’t asked what that meant. She was worried that he’d had to resort to killing them in order to get the eight dogs to them. She hadn’t told Darko that it took almost all she had to control the eight dogs; especially the Great Dane and a huge shaggy beast gave her a headache. They tried to break through her control and it scared her. What if they actually turned on her and Darko while they were trying to save her mother?

No. She couldn’t allow herself to think that way. If she let worries eat away at her mind, then she’d be too distracted to be vigilant. Nela glanced at the glass building of the Witch Tower again. The two guards inside hadn’t moved yet. It was still almost fifty minutes to go before her mother was supposed to burn at the stake, but she’d thought they’d leave the Witch Tower early to make sure they were on time. The ride would be only ten minutes but maybe they needed to prepare her mother. She’d heard that convicts were expected to do a confession in a church of their choice before.

Darko squeezed her hand and she took a calming breath. Her anxiety had only gotten worse on their way to the Witch Tower. They’d walked past the Cologne Cathedral on her request and had seen the pyre already in place with hundreds of spectators gathering around. People eager to see her mother burn alive. Anger flared in Nela, hot and red, and one of the dogs that they’d hidden in a rental truck parked behind them let out a yowl.

She pushed her emotions down and let her eyes wander back to the Witch Tower. She and Darko were in a side street, hidden from view by a house, but Nela had a clear view of the prison. The doors that connected the medieval part of the tower with the modern glass building slid open.

Nela tensed. One of her hands went to the long hunting knife hidden in a halter under her jeans jacket. She wasn’t sure how good she was with it, but she knew she wouldn’t hesitate to use it against the men who were going to lead her mother to a painful death.

Two guards, Nela’s mother in their middle, stepped through the door and into the glass building. Nela felt for her connection to the dogs. It was solid, even though two of them squirmed a bit in her hold. Everything would be alright, she tried to tell herself.

Darko released her hand, then grabbed her face and gave her a fierce kiss. “Be careful. I can’t lose you.” A look of astonishment, then despair flashed across his face before he turned back to the Witch Tower.

Nela was too overwhelmed to react to his words. She watched how the glass doors of the tower glided open.

‘
Come here
,’ she ordered the dogs in her mind. One after the other they piled out of the open truck and gathered behind her and Darko. They didn’t pant or waggle their tales, they simply stared at her, ready to do her bidding.

Nela noticed movement around the corner of the Witch Tower. More guards? That would complicate things for them. This
had
to work.

Her mother, small and pale, stepped outside, her arms gripped tightly by the two guards who were leading her toward a black Audi stationwagon.

Suddenly her father stormed around the corner, dressed in black from head to toe, a look of determination on his face. But he wasn’t alone. There were several men and women with him. People that Nela had never seen before. That could only mean they were humans. For a moment she was too stunned to think, or even act. Darko, too, seemed paralyzed at her side.

“Wicca,” he murmured.

And then Nela caught sight of the sign of Wicca on the wrists of the humans at her father’s side. How did he even know them? And what was he doing here?

She shook off her shock when she finally realized that her father was trying to free her mother. How could she have been so wrong about him?

The guards had almost reached the car. If they managed to push her mother inside, their chances of rescuing her would be close to zero.

‘Attack!’, she ordered in her mind, putting all of her focus on the two guards holding her mother. Her chest tightened as she watched the dead dogs barrel past her and heading for their victims. She assured herself of her hold on the dogs once more before she, too, ran toward the scene, Darko hot on her heals. She pulled out her knife just as her father collided with one of the guards. The Wicca members overpowered the second, but half a dozen other guards were already rushing out of the Witch Tower to aid their colleagues. They’d probably already sent off a danger signal and more Brotherhood guards and police would be on the way soon.

The Wicca members were attacking the guards with guns and knives, and they seemed to know what they were doing, but the guards must have been wearing bullet proof vests because the shots didn’t fell them. Nela could hardly make out her father in the mess and she wouldn’t have known who was the enemy if the guards weren’t wearing their stupid frocks. Her father was still struggling with a guard on the ground; the man was choking him. Shots rang out over and over again, and two more guards joined the fight. The first dog reached the fighters and attacked one of the new guards, ripping at his arm and dragging him to the ground.

Nela focused on the Great Dane and sent it toward the guard attacking her father. After a moment of resistance, the huge dog pounced on the man and pulled him off Nela’s father. He didn’t get up at first, his face red, and chest heaving. Then his face turned and their gazes met. She hoped he could see that she was sorry for what she’d said to him. She wished he’d told her about his plan. He nodded as if he understood, fear in his eyes. After a moment, his gaze darted away toward Nela’s mother who was kneeling beside the passenger door of the car, looking confused and weak.

Nela knew she had to reach her, but there were so many people around. She stumbled into the fight, slipping past the battling group and trying to avoid the shots still being fired. Darko fought side by side with a middle-aged man who wielded a knife as if it was a fly flap. She left them behind and barely avoided a fist heading toward her head. A guard she remembered from her visit to the tower stood in her way, his nose bleeding, and his hands clenched. At least, he was weaponless.

Behind him she saw her father helping her weak mother to her feet. He was trying to get her away from the fighting but in their backs was the car and all around them the Brotherhood, dogs and Wicca members. He had to take the car. Even if it had a GPS transmitter, it would at least get them away from here.

The guard swung a fist at her again and swayed, but he kept advancing. She reached out in her mind and called for help. A moment later, the black shaggy dog attacked the man. She heard the ripping of something and didn’t dare look what it was. Barks and yelps and screams and whines and shots rang in her ears and she felt her hold on the eight dogs slipping.

Another shot rang out. Nela’s eyes snapped up, only to watch her father getting hit in the shoulder and falling to the ground with her mother. He grabbed his arm, face contorted with pain. Her mother knelt beside him, trying to get him back to his feet. But she could barely stand on her own. Nela began running in their direction, her heart hammering in her throat. She had to reach them. Behind her another whine sounded and she felt the dog slip from her grip. She didn’t care. She didn’t have the energy to return it to her hold. Seven were difficult enough to control.

Blood coated the ground around her feet but she had only eyes for her parents. They were all that mattered. The Great Dane stumbled into her path, teeth bared. “Go away!” she screamed but it pulled against her hold, and then it, too, left her control. It snarled and was about to pounce her. She focused on it, tried to find the spark she’d given it and then she imagined snuffing it out. Her body convulsed from strain but the dog dropped on the ground, returned to death.

Nela staggered past it, her eyes finding her parents once more. Somehow they’d managed to pull each other to their feet. A guard appeared a few feet beside them after disabling two of her dogs, and pointed his gun at her father’s head. Nela parted her lips to scream but the man pulled the trigger and her father’s head was flung back. He tumbled to the ground and lay still, red blooming on the concrete around him. Her mother stood leaning against the car, her eyes wide in horror.

Nela was still too far away, a group of two Wicca members and one guard in her way, when her father’s killer pointed the gun at her mother. Her breath stuttered in her throat. No! She felt for the dogs. She still had five in her control and she set them all on the man. Fury was choking her. Two dogs rushed past her, their bodies brushing her legs as if they were seeking her closeness, and three others came from other directions and they thrust themselves at the man. Sirens sounded in the distance – more guards and police.

She looked away from the man buried under the dead dogs, instead she focused on her mother who had spotted her and was watching her with a hopeless expression, tears streaming down her thin face.

That face became all Nela could see. She needed to get to her mother and get them away. Sharp pain sliced through her leg and she lost her balance, arms flung out to absorb the impact. She breathed harshly through her nose, her face inches from the ground. Her calf was bleeding and the fabric of her jeans around the bullet hole was turning red far too quickly. Her stomach turned at the smell of blood all around her and she threw up. She heaved herself to one knee, her vision turning black from pain for a moment. There was a rushing in her ears.

When she opened her eyes, the blue signal lights of police cars flashed in her peripheral vision. Most of the Wicca members had either fled or were dead on the ground, lying in their own blood. Dog carcasses and dead guards lay among them. In death they were all equal.

Nela knew she couldn’t stay where she was. Her eyes returned to the spot where her mother had been but she was gone. Panic clutched her as her gaze swiveled over the bodies. But there were too many of them on the ground, many of them mangled beyond recognition – her doing. A new wave of sickness washed over her but her stomach was empty. Where was her mother?

“Mom?” she called desperately, not caring that she drew attention to herself. She’d come here to save her mother and probably lost both of her parents. What did it matter if the Brotherhood caught her now?

More guards were jumping out of black Brotherhood limousines, but she still couldn’t see her mother.

“Mom?” she screamed. Suddenly Darko was in front of her and wrenched her to her feet. Distantly she registered a sharp pain in her calf but then it disappeared behind a haze of shock. “Stop screaming,” he whispered harshly.

Nela fought against his grip. “I need to find my mother!”

“It’s too late. Come now!”

Too late. Her eyes found her father once more with his eyes wide open. She let Darko drag her away from the scene, toward the alley they’d hidden in. From the corner of her eye, she could see members of the Brotherhood already heading their way, brandishing guns. A bullet hit the house inches above their heads.

The moment they turned the corner, Darko wrapped his arms tightly around Nela, but to her it felt as if a layer of rubber foam was between them. Their surroundings turned murky as Darko drew the shadows toward them; they came much quicker than before. In a blink they’d gathered around their bodies and lifted them from this dimension. Four guards stormed into the alley but Nela and Darko were already beyond their reach and seconds later gone altogether from their view.

For the first time, Nela could feel the shadows as if they were living, breathing things. They were snatching at her, curious, eager, hungry. Not her clothes, or skin, but at something inside her, some darkness that hadn’t been there before and that attracted them to her. As if suddenly she was more like them. Her head spun and she clutched at Darko for something to hold onto. She was falling and nothing could stop her. His lips moved but his words were swallowed by the shadows and part of her wished they could swallow her too, and take her to wherever they existed.

They appeared in Darko’s cold living room. Nela quivered uncontrollably, her teeth clicking together, rattling in her head. Darko led her toward the sofa before heading to his stove and lighting a fire. He came up to her again and watched her. There were dark stains on his black jeans and his hands were scraped and bloody as well. Her eyes darted to her own clothes. A few red stains dotted her jeans. Before her eyes the red seamed to spread like paint on wet paper – like the pool of blood under her father’s head.

Her throat constricted and she couldn’t breathe. There was only red. So much of it. She gasped. Darko squatted in front of her and put a hand on her chest. “Breathe,” he whispered. She focused on his eyes but it took her brain a moment to catch up and to stop showing her an ocean of red. Distantly she wondered when the tears would come. She’d cried a lot in the last few months, but now her tear ducts refused their work.