Authors: Jocelynn Drake
“Nah,” he replied, turning his gaze back to me. “It’s like I said. Too angry. You go up there, you’re just going to get something thrown at your head.”
“What about over at Colonial Park?” Mira asked. Nate hesitated, looking down at the ground as a frown deepened on his young face. “It’s still on the tour and it would only take a few seconds,” Mira continued. “We just want to see if anyone will tell you what’s got them so upset.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Nate replied in a low voice, his gaze drifting back over toward Sorrel-Weed at the sound of approaching footsteps. “Why are you so interested anyway?”
“A girl was recently murdered and we’re looking into it,” I said, causing Nate’s gaze to snap back to me.
“And you think a ghost did it?” he demanded in hushed tones.
“No, but they may know who did,” Mira said, grabbing my arm and pulling me back onto the trolley. We resumed our seats as the rest of the tourists jumped onto the trolley.
Watch what you say!
Mira said in my brain as soon as we were settled.
He doesn’t know what I am, doesn’t know my place within Savannah. You may find this hard to believe, but there are some people who still think I’m a normal human being.
You’re right.
I snickered.
I do find it hard to believe. A human that believes another human can see and talk to ghosts?
Okay, so maybe he thinks I’m a slightly eccentric human, but still human.
I laughed softly as the trolley pulled away from the curb and Nate resumed his dark monologue about the city. Mira settled against me. Her hunger was still evident as it beat against me, but underlying that red haze was a feeling of contentment.
We trundled along for another few blocks before the trolley driver stopped next to the Colonial Park Cemetery. We got off the trolley and followed the rest of the tourist herd down the ornate brick sidewalk to the side of the cemetery so that everyone could stare through the iron bars at the thick blackness that blanketed the graves. Out of habit, I completed a quick scan of the region, sending my powers out from my body to sweep over the tombstones until they reached the opposite wall.
“Anything?” Mira whispered, undoubtedly feeling the wave of energy wash from me.
“Nothing.” And that’s what had me concerned. While it made perfect sense for the naturi to be trying to sabotage the nightwalkers through the murder of Abigail Bradford, it didn’t make any sense for the ghosts of Savannah to be upset by their presence.
We waited until Nate finished with his tale of duels and Civil War soldiers bunking down with the dead in the middle of winter before we approached him. Most of the tourists had begun to head back to the trolley while Nate stood at the fence, one hand gripping a black cast-iron bar.
“Nate?” Mira asked, laying a hand on his shoulder.
“There’s a couple out there. Slowly coming over to me. They’re…scared. Something has been hanging around the cemetery. Ghosts have disappeared.”
“Can they tell you what it is?”
“What’s happening?” Nate asked the darkness. “Who’s with you?”
We all waited in silence for nearly a minute before Nate finally frowned and shook his head as he turned away from the bars. “They don’t know. Something they’ve never seen before. It’s killing them, which doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know how you can kill a ghost, but they’re upset and keeping low.”
“Were they upset like this back in September?” I asked as we followed him back to the trolley.
“Nope,” he said, looking over his shoulder at me. “This only started in the past week or so.”
I turned to find Mira standing a few feet away from me, staring through the bars into the cemetery. Her voice was low, just above a whisper. I stared at her a moment, straining to hear what she was saying, when I realized she was singing. Walking over, I discovered that she was singing what sounded like a lullaby in Greek. Her right hand was continuously moving through the empty air as if she were petting something.
“Mira,” I said, trying to grab her attention.
The nightwalker looked down at the swath of air that her hand was moving through and she smiled before starting the lullaby over again, oblivious to the world around her.
“Mira!” I said a little louder as I grabbed her left arm. She jumped, her head snapping up as she stopped singing. She blinked and looked around as if she was seeing the cemetery for the first time. She then looked down at the open air where her right hand hovered, a look of confusion crossing her face.
“Where did she go?” she asked, looking around her.
“Who?”
“I—” Mira started, and then shook her head. I released her arm and took a step backward, giving her some room as I could once again feel a wave of cold energy washing off of her. She was using her powers as she possibly searched for something or worked some other kind of nightwalker magic. Pressing the fingers of her right hand to her forehead, Mira clenched her eyes shut and drew in a sharp intake of air through her nose. “It’s nothing. It was nothing.”
Mira turned and started to board the trolley, but I grabbed her arm, stopping her. “Do we need to talk to Nate anymore?”
“No,” she replied, arching one brow at me.
“Then let’s walk back to the car. I need to think,” I suggested. Mira simply nodded and took her foot off the first step of the trolley. She gave Nate a brief hug and then turned back toward the cemetery while I shook the ghost talker’s hand. He hadn’t provided us with much information, but it was enough to confirm a dark idea already implanted in my head.
Mira waited until the trolley had rumbled away and we had walked more than a block in silence before she finally spoke up. “You don’t think it’s the naturi, do you?” she ventured.
“If it was the naturi, the ghosts would have been upset back in September when the city was crawling with them. There are fewer naturi in the city now and yet the ghosts are upset. Something else has moved into the region.” I zipped my jacket up a little higher and shoved my hands into my pockets as we walked along the dark street back toward the riverfront.
“Do you also have a theory as to what?” Mira inquired.
I stared down at my companion in silence, knowing she wasn’t going to like what I had to say. I wasn’t particularly pleased with it myself. “Ghosts are nothing more than bodiless spirits. Souls,” I said slowly, but it was more than enough. Mira came to an abrupt halt just as we were about to cross an empty street and jerked her head up to look at me with wide, horror-filled eyes.
“You can’t possibly think…?” she gasped. “It’s impossible. How could a…a…a bori escape?” she said, whispering the last two words as if the mention of the creature would summon it to our side. A bori was the only creature dependent upon soul energy. It was using the ghosts in the city somehow.
“I don’t know. The naturi escaped,” I replied, taking a step to cross the street, which helped to jolt Mira from her own paralysis.
“But some naturi were already out, working to free the others. There are no other bori here. They were all caged centuries ago.”
I frowned at that bit of logic. “You can’t be sure of that,” I grumbled. “My mother found a way to make a deal with one of them after they had already been exiled.”
Mira plopped down on one of the benches near the center of Oglethorpe Square and put her head in her hands as she rested her elbows on her knees. “I can’t keep doing this, Danaus,” she moaned. “First it was you, then Jabari with the coven, and then it was Rowe and the rest of the naturi. Now, a bori? I can’t do this. I came to Savannah to escape the insanity that seemed to follow me throughout Europe. Now it seems to have followed me here.”
I stopped and knelt in front of Mira, wishing I could tell her that I thought I was wrong and that it was something less frightening. The bori were called the guardians of the soul, while the naturi were the guardians of the earth. The two races had been born to create a balance on the Earth, but from what I understood, the two seemed to be locked in a permanent power struggle over who truly ruled the Earth. Centuries ago, long before I was even born, the bori and the naturi were imprisoned in separate, alternate realities. For the most part, the naturi had succeeded in escaping from their cage this past fall and their now-queen Aurora was free. Though at least she had her own problems in the form of a younger sister who was attempting to wrest the crown from her.
A bori running loose in the world was an entirely darker matter that neither Mira nor I truly wanted to face. The bori were the creators of the nightwalker race, from what I understood, and had the same ability to control the nightwalkers the way the naturi could control the lycanthropes. Mira already had had to suffer the indignity of being controlled like a puppet by Jabari and me. She didn’t need to have a bori free in her domain as well.
Putting one hand on her knee, I placed my other hand under her chin and forced her to look up at me. “We’ll get through this,” I said firmly. “We’ve survived the naturi. We can survive a rogue bori.”
“You say rogue bori, but you don’t know,” Mira said grimly. “How do we fight a creature that can control us both?”
I flinched—the bori that had a hold on my soul had managed to take control of me when we were in Peru. Mira and another nightwalker named Stefan had cast a spell that killed a horde of naturi and captured their souls. The bori that held me reacted to the souls and appeared to feed off the energy, controlling me and forcing me to attack Mira.
“We’ll find a way.”
Mira frowned at me. She wrapped the fingers of her left hand around my hand, which was still beneath her chin. “I would never have expected you to be such an optimist.”
I smirked at my companion in this nightmare that never seemed to end. “Do we really have any other choice?”
“Not really,” she admitted.
Mira looked up over my right shoulder, squinting as she tried to focus on something. Then she suddenly lurched to her feet, nearly knocking me over in her haste. She took a couple steps forward as I rose to my feet. Her emotions pushed unbidden through me, filling me with fear and rage.
“Scan the area,” she ordered in a gruff voice. Her hands were held out to her sides, her fingers curled slightly as if she meant to summon up balls of fire at the first sign of trouble.
I sent my powers out from my body so that they flooded the park, and then farther away, covering several blocks. There was nothing out there. A scattering of nightwalkers and a couple of lycanthropes, but not the naturi I knew that she had me searching for. I reached out farther, covering the entire city, and to my surprise, there wasn’t a single naturi in the region.
“There’s nothing here,” I said, drawing my powers back into my body. They swept over Mira, pulling with them an unexpected cold chill, as if a part of her energy had mingled with my own.
“That’s impossible,” she replied, twisting around to pin me with a confused glare. She pointed toward a tree more than a hundred yards away, but I saw nothing there. “I saw one right there!”
“Was it Rowe?” I inquired, taking a couple steps toward her so that I was standing beside her. My eyes covered the entire region surrounding the tree, but nothing moved. The one-eyed naturi was the only one we had encountered that could magically pop in and out of an area. He had nearly captured Mira that way in London.
“No,” she whispered, turning her back on the tree and walking back over to the empty park bench she had been seated on only moments ago. I watched her shake her head as if to clear it while her slim shoulders slumped. Her fear had dissipated with the wind, but now a growing confusion ate away at her thoughts.
“Who was it? A naturi you’ve seen before?” I pressed. We needed to know if there was another naturi like Rowe, that could use magic to appear and disappear at will. This added a new element of danger to the naturi if there were more that could potentially grab the Fire Starter.
“It was nothing,” she muttered. “Just a trick of the shadows and the night.”
An uneasiness grew in the pit of my stomach and a frown pulled at the corners of my mouth. Nightwalkers had the best night vision possible, as far as I knew, and between the lamp and moonlight, the park wasn’t that particularly dark. How could Mira have mistaken a shadow for a naturi? Was this the same shadow she had seen outside the house of the First Communion? Or similar to the crying baby that she had heard at the conservatory? Something had potentially found a way to play with the nightwalker’s mind, making her more dangerous to those around her.
“Mira…” I started, but my voice trailed off. How was I supposed to tell her that I thought something was intentionally driving her crazy?
“It’s nothing, Danaus,” Mira said, turning to face me again. She resumed her walk through the park and I fell into step beside her, unable to tap down my growing concern for the nightwalker. “Our focus needs to be on finding a way to locate our killer,” Mira continued after we had walked a couple of blocks.
Between the Fire Starter and a nightwalker hunter with a bori-owned soul wandering around Savannah, I had little doubt that the bori would eventually come looking for us.
TWENTY-THREE
T
here were still a few more hours before sunrise when Mira dropped me off at the town house. She had muttered something about wanting to do some research. I said nothing as I got out of the car. The nightwalker had been through enough for one night. So had I. As I reached the top stair leading to the front porch, I turned and watched her drive off in her sleek car, disappearing into the thick shadows cast by the trees.
Instead of going into the house, I trudged back down the stairs. While it was late, I knew I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep anytime soon. Images of the naturi and the threat of the bori were dancing through my brain. In fact, that combination left me wondering if I would ever sleep again.
The naturi had become a threat bigger than I had ever anticipated. They had slaughtered dozens of humans since Rowe began his campaign last summer to free his wife-queen. From so many bodies, the chests had been ripped open and organs stolen for blood-magic spells woven to give the one-eyed naturi an edge when it came down to hunting Mira. At Machu Picchu, thirteen humans had been slaughtered to open the door between worlds—hearts stolen from innocent people.