Chapter 18
CHAPTER 18
Deacon
I f Jac could have punched a hole through the hull of Allegiant he would have, and it was not for a lack of trying as soon as we boarded. His hard, brutal blows echoed through the hall. I tried to stop him before he hurt himself, but every time I put my hands on him, he shook me off.
So, I let him work out his aggression as needed, and rejoined Drift. “Back to my father’s home, please, Drift.”
“Sarah?” he asked.
I shook my head, my stomach in knots. “It is more complicated than I had imagined.”
“But she’s alive, right?”
“Yes. Alive, but not alone.” I glanced out the cockpit windows to see the dozens of guards just waiting for us to try anything untoward so they could execute us at Rex’s decree. “We are persona non grata here. We must leave straight away.”
He nodded once and set a course for Halla and I returned to Jac.
I found him in a heap against the wall he’d been using as a punching bag. His hand was bloodied, and anguish filled his eyes as he looked up at me.
I sighed and asked, “Better?”
“Not even close,” he gritted out.
I helped him to his feet and escorted him to the infirmary. As I started to clean up and patch up his hand, I met his gaze and quietly asked, “What are we to do?”
“Go back to the manor,” he said, as if he had a death wish. “Get our asses handed to us.”
I chuckled, even though I knew our return for Sarah would likely end with us murdered. “That does not sound productive.”
“I want to fight Rex,” he growled, the sound filled with rage.
“You cannot fight him without harming Sarah,” I reminded him, trying to be the voice of reason.
He huffed. “I know. I’m not telling you what we should do. I’m just telling you what I want to do.”
“Understandable.” After cleaning his cuts, I dabbed the wound with a healing ointment. “However, there is another facet of this which troubles me.”
“What’s that?”
I hesitated, grabbing a roll of gauze before giving him my thoughts. “When Rex said we cannot kill him in a way that matters…I have a sneaking suspicion about that statement, and I can no longer keep it to myself.”
“Out with it.”
I finished wrapping the gauze around his hand and knuckles, then met his gaze. “What if Rex meant that if we kill him, there will always be a part of him that will live on in Sarah?”
“Fuck,” Jac hissed, his entire body tensing up all over again.
I voiced another concern. “I do not know whether Rex is using this time to retrieve his remnant, or—"
“Plant more of himself in her?” he asked incredulously.
I nodded, the thought eating me up inside. “Yes.”
Jac’s jaw clenched. “He would have to know that we would figure it out, right? He can’t be that arrogant to think he would sneak this under our radar, can he?”
“We have not yet successfully separated them,” I pointed out. “Who is to say we could do it after there was more of him in her?”
“Are you trying to get me to punch your hull again?” he asked in a tight voice. “Because this is a good way to do that.”
“I am not, Jac. I am—"
“Spinning out and panicking?” he guessed.
“Yes.” Guilt and regrets weighed heavy on my ghost. “And all of this is my own fault.”
He frowned at me. “What?”
“I should have…all those years ago, when I murdered Rex, I should have stalked his body here,” I said, having thought it a hundred different times. “I should have waited for his ghost to emerge and killed him again so he’d be gone for good. I should have—"
Jac kissed me to shut me up, so I let him.
“Stop that,” he gently chided, his good hand curled around the back of my neck as he looked into my eyes. “There is no way you could have known that any of this would happen years later, Deacon.”
I gave him a sad smile. “No, but I knew Rex was evil, and I should have eliminated the threat.”
Jac shook his head. “First of all, you didn’t murder Rex. You put down a rabid beast. Secondly, you are not an executioner. You are not the law. It was one thing to stop him from killing Ode when she was a defenseless little girl, it’s another to hunt someone’s ghost, like an actual murderer.”
His kind words were a mere balm on a mortal wound. It was sweet of him to say, but none of what he said felt like truth to me. “I do not deserve your kindness, Jac.”
“You deserve the world, Deacon,” he said in a harsh tone. “Don’t ever try to tell me otherwise.”
I smiled up at him, ready to change the subject. “You’re all bandaged up.”
“I didn’t feel a thing.” He looked down at his hand and marveled at my handiwork. “You have a good bedside manner.”
“I am sure Ode will have something to say about my skills.”
“She has something to say about everything,” he said as he smirked. He hopped off the exam table and said, “Let’s take a nap, while Drift drives.”
“Do you think you can sleep at a time like this?”
“Probably not. But I can try.”
So, try we did. But sleep alluded us both. It was midday when we arrived at my father’s home. No one was out front when we landed, but there were shouts in the backyard, causing us both concern. We ran to the sound, only to find everyone crowded around the vivector. A fight was displayed on the back of Father’s cottage. I groaned my disgust with the sport.
“It is not so bad,” father said.
I disagreed. “How can you watch that filth?”
“It is not to the death anymore, so I see it as a triumph of athletic endurance.” Father shrugged, then looked concerned. “Where is Sarah?”
Helios was not lying. If the fights are no longer to the death, then perhaps there is a part of Sarah in Rex. Something which softens him. Perhaps this is a good sign.
“It is a long story,” I told him. “Can you quiet that thing down? I want to tell everyone at once, so I do not have to rehash it all again.”
“Very well.” Father turned the volume down and gave me the floor.
I explained everything to our friends and family about the Rex and Sarah situation, including the remainder of the conduits who were still staying there in the conversation. “…so this is how things stand. I am not sure what our next steps will be, but I may need to call on some of you for assistance.”
“Of course, Son,” Father said. “What—"
Whatever he meant to say was cut off by a dull thud, followed by a grunt. We all heard it. I knew that grunt.
“Excuse me,” I said, and hunted Jac down, until I found him at a tree behind Sarah’s cottage.
Her backyard had yet to be cleared—Father wasn’t sure if she wanted it wide open or shady, so he had not asked anyone to remove the thick thatch of lemon oaks. Not a drop of sunshine reached the ground, and the trees were heavy with fruit. The air smelled lemony, and I would have smiled from it, had I not seen him.
Jac stood in the middle of the grove, both hands bloodied this time, punching the bark off a tree. “Stop it.”
“Can’t stop,” he said with a shake of his head. “Gotta train.”
“Train for what?”
He held the tree for stability and growled, “I’m going to go back to Faithless as a fighter. They have to let me in for that—I’m a returning champion. It’s in their bylaws. I’ll go back, win another fight, and the winners of the fights get to have supper with Rex. That’s also one of their rules. I’ll eat with the two of them and get close enough to figure out how to kill Rex without hurting Sarah. It’s the only way.” Then, he pounded on the tree some more.
“There might be another way, actually,” Omen said from behind us.
We turned to her. “What?”
Omen shifted on her feet. “You said that when you took Sarah to the temple, she refused to call her mother, which means, she didn’t even try to call her, right?”
I nodded. “But what does that have to do with anything?”
Omen hesitated a moment before sharing her thoughts. “It may have been because Rex knew that would be what would have kicked his remnant out of her.”
Confusion had me shaking my head. “Her mother might be the answer to all of this?”
“It’s a theory I’ve been working on. I went through the holy texts, line by line, and found references to family and bloodlines thousands of times. Mostly when speaking about ghosts in parts of the tome that I thought were literal, but Abyss said her reading of them was different. She believes the family and bloodlines references are there to reiterate how valuable both of those things are to ghosts. It’s the difference between—"
“Oh gods, Omen, please get to the point,” Jac blurted out impatiently. “Your sermon is going to put me to sleep.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “This is why we never would have worked. No intellectual curiosity.” She gave an annoyed sniff then focused on me. “The point is, if you can get her mother to her, then she could be the key to all of this like you said. But the problem is, now that we conduits are ghosts ourselves, none of us have the power or authority to call a ghost all the way from Earth to Halla like Sarah did.”
“I’m not hearing a workable plan yet,” Jac said, his tone vibrating with annoyance.
“No, but I was thinking,” she went on, “what if we could force Sarah’s mother to haunt her?”
I frowned at the suggestion. “Is that not the same thing as calling her?”
“Not really. Speaking to a ghost the way we are talking now, that takes a minimal amount of power here on Halla, but it takes loads of power to do it on Orhon, which is why the people needed conduits to do it in the first place,” she explained. “But, a ghost can be on Halla and still haunt people on Orhon, if they are thought of by enough people on Orhon.”
Jac narrowed his gaze on Omen. “So, you think if we called Sarah’s mother here, then she might be able to haunt Sarah?”
Omen nodded. “We would need an artifact they shared, something her mother gave her, perhaps, like a locket or some sort of—"
“There’s nothing,” I said, interrupting her. “Sarah has nothing from her old life on Earth.”
“Damn.” Omen’s lips pursed in disappointment. “I thought I was really onto something with this.”
I rubbed a hand along my jaw. “There has to be something else we can do, though.”
“There might be…” Omen hesitated a moment before continuing. “The other part of my plan, well, you’re not going to like it.”
“If it will save Sarah, we don’t care what it is,” Jac said. “What is it that you want to do?”
She blew out a breath. “I don’t want to get into it just yet. I don’t want to give you false hope. But if I can get what I need, it could turn all of this around.”
My mind ran wild with the possibilities. “Very well.”
“I need to check with a few of my contacts here, people who are not fans of conduits in general, so I’ll need to go alone to get what I need for this.”
“They don’t like conduits, but they like you ?” Jac asked incredulously.
She lifted her chin. “I can be charming when I want to be.”
“Since when?” he asked, though humor laced his tone.
She stuck her tongue out at him. “Charmed the pants off of you .”
I smiled at their banter and said, “I do not imagine that took much effort.”
Jac laughed in derision. “Hey! I’ll have you know, I am a happily united man. I have changed my ways, thank you both very much.”
“And I’ll make sure you stay that way,” Omen said, growing serious once more. “Give me a few days, and I should have what I need for this to work.”
“The sooner the better, Omen,” I pressed. “If you want Allegiant’s onworlder for your travels, she’s yours.”
She nodded. “I’ll take you up on that. Should shorten things by a day or so. I’ll pack my things and leave within the hour.”
“Thank you again, Omen,” Jac said.
“Of course. Anything for Sarah.”
Once she was gone, I turned to Jac. “Do you think her plan will work?”
“As much as Omen can be a sneak, I think she wants Sarah safe almost as much as we do. So if she thinks it will work, I have no reason to doubt it.”
“She thought the same of the magician.” I grimaced at how badly that had turned out for us.
“What happened with Tolkabern was not her fault,” Jac insisted.
“No, though an amulet to help us would have been nice,” I groused.
“Conduits don’t deal in amulets, Deacon. That’s magician shit and you know it.”
I sighed, conceding his point. “Perhaps if the conduits had not been so restrictive on what was acceptable and what was not, then we would not be in this mess in the first place.”
“You can’t think like that. It’s no more useful than blaming yourself for what happened with Rex.”
Even though I knew he was right, blame and regrets weighed heavily on me. “I do not seem to be able to help myself right now, Jac. I keep thinking of what could have been done differently in the past to change this present. It is hard to think of what I can do now instead.”
Jac hugged me, bloody hands and all. “I know you are frustrated. I am too. But with me going to the fighting pit—"
“You cannot do that again,” I insisted. “You almost died.”
He released me, his violet eyes meeting mine. “I did not almost die. I was barely wounded.”
I amended it to, “You could have died.”
He smirked. “You’re being ridiculous.”
“I am not ridiculous!” I said, stiffening at his criticism. “I am scared and worried and I hate feeling like this. I am scared—"
“You said that already.”
“That’s because I am twice as scared as I have ever been!” I yelled at him, my frustration and fears getting the best of me.
He hugged me again, but tighter this time. “It will be okay.”
I held him close. “You can’t know that. I can’t lose you. I can’t lose her. I can’t lose you because we’ve lost her. This is too much. All of it.”
“I know. I know.”
He patted my back until I calmed down, but it did not feel like enough. Nothing would be enough until Sarah was back with us, healthy and whole.
Jac said, “When Omen returns, she and I will go to the city. I’ll enter the fight, she can do whatever she is going to do. She’s not banned from Faithless any more than she already was, being a conduit and all that. We will get Sarah back, Deacon. I swear it.”
I swallowed hard, knowing he would not like what I planned to do. “I know we will get her back. Because I am going to do something very, very ill-advised.”