15 #2
“Oh, who do we have here? Would you perhaps be a fan of mine?” His grip didn’t falter on the woman.
She was far too young for him to have known her in life, yet her body shrank into itself, tears trailing down her cheeks, and her eyes flickered with recognition that wasn’t hers.
It was as if she wasn’t remembering—she was reliving.
A fragment of someone else’s terror, perhaps one of his victims, threaded into her mind, forcing her to carry a past she’d never lived.
My magic flared at the sight of danger, churning inside me as my death energy coiled in my trembling palm.
This criminal wasn’t just some angry phantom, he was a serial killer, linked to the murders of thirteen women in the Boston area during the sixties.
And now, this psychopath was under the control of the Syndicate.
Panic flared through my bones. My magic responded instinctively.
The threads of death and life inside me flared, pulsating with tension, urging me to act.
The actions of the female at the assisted living facility were warped by the veil, but this man had crossed over fully aware of what he was doing and he wouldn’t be easy to send back.
I welcomed its guidance, offering my body as a conduit for the energy reaching out to the phantom before me.
It burst out of my hand, a dark, shadowy magic intertwined with a bright glow that rocked me off balance.
Albert jumped fast, but not fast enough as the attack clipped his right shoulder.
Fury ignited behind his eyes as he grabbed my collar and slammed me against the brick wall.
Stars danced in my vision, blackness creeping around the edges.
“I … I can help you.” I choked out, his forearm crushing my windpipe and closing off my air. “Don’t … do this.”
He cackled at my feeble attempt to get him to surrender.
“Why wouldn’t I do this? Each soul I torment makes me more powerful.
Every ounce of fear I taste, every memory I corrupt …
it's like living again, but better. I get to rewrite the past, replay it perfectly. And each time, I grow stronger, sharper, hungrier. Let’s see what delicious memories you can serve up for me. ”
He leaned in, his cold breath brushing against my face as he pressed his arm into me harder, the fingertips of his other hand digging into the side of my head.
Silver runes glistened in the overhead light and worry captivated me, wondering how the Syndicate had forced a phantom under their control so quickly …
or perhaps he had always been under the Syndicate’s thumb.
Albert’s magic invaded its way through my mind, pulling up some of my most terrifying and intimate memories. The night Ren broke into our home, watching my mother wither away in the nursing home, Alex and I breaking through the veil, Caspian’s death.
“Oh, what’s this I see?”
He locked onto Caspian, and a sharp pain speared through my skull as something shifted inside my mind.
Images bled into the edges of my vision, faint and distorted at first, like a dream I couldn't quite grasp.
A voice echoed somewhere in the distance, muffled beneath layers of static.
I instinctively followed it, drawn deeper as the memory took hold.
The world around me dissolved. Suddenly, I was staring down at a gleaming stainless-steel counter. A sketch lay across its surface, the paper smudged with ink and worn from handling. The details were so vivid I could make out every crease and fingerprint pressed into it.
Except I wasn't the one looking at it. Someone else was. I could feel their hands resting on the edge of the counter. Hear the steady rhythm of their breathing. Sense emotions that didn't belong to me humming beneath the surface of the memory.
I wasn't watching the past. I was inside it, replaying a memory through the eyes of a dead phantom who had lived over a hundred years.
“Caspian,” came a familiar voice from the other side of the table, and my heart jolted.
When he looked up, I saw an ogre with deep blue eyes, gray skin, and metal gauntlets on his wrists.
It was Gray, Caspian’s right-hand man. “You know this is insane, right? You’re risking the entire safety of the city for your selfish needs. ”
The sketch showed concentric circles overlapping, etched with sigils that I didn’t recognize and runes that were unfamiliar to me, but were second nature to Caspian. In the center was an empty space, as if an integral part of the spell array was missing.
“S-stop!” I stammered, fighting back with all my might.
The vision of Caspian’s past flickered as I fought against it, knowing that whatever Albert was after, I couldn’t let him get to it.
I wrapped my hand around his wrist and released my magic.
Dark veins blossomed beneath his skin, spreading farther than they ever had before.
A chill ran through me as I realized I hadn't been the one guiding them.
I caught a flash of silver in my veins, racing down the top of my hand.
The magic lingered even as I forced it to let go.
Panicking and stunned, I froze just long enough for Albert to snatch an ornamental vase from a side table and hurl it at me.
The porcelain smashed against my head with a jarring crack, pain exploding across my skull.
I collapsed onto the floor with a heavy thud.
Everything went red around the edges, and for a moment, the world seemed to tilt.
Just like that, my fight was about to end, and I was going to become the fourteenth victim of the Boston Strangler.
Blood dripped down my eyebrow, stinging as it ran into my eye. I blinked through the haze, struggling to hold on to consciousness, feeling the faint presence of Caspian’s magic still alive in me, a fragile tether between life and death that was encouraging me not to give up.