Rogue Souls Page 2

  Callie curled her fingers toward her palms. Steam hissed out from the edges of her squeezed fists as though she were crafting a custom lava rock within them. The temptation to try to knock out one of the old man’s gold teeth burned almost as hot as the fire in her fists. He’d been offering her the same advice for the last three days.

  “Care to tell me how to do that exactly?” she asked.

  He did not. He shoved the open jar closer to her. The skin on either side of her hand began to blacken. Callie had been through this before. It would heal quickly. Her brain did not care for facts now; it cared that her skin was visibly charring. She began edging backward. The Charmer followed her. Mint mingled with musk in the air between them.

  The last time Callie’s hands had charred, she’d seared the flesh off another woman, but had felt no pain herself. As the Charmer edged toward her now, though, the flames contained in her clenched fists grew hotter and the sharp snap of million rubber bands cut into her mind. She sucked in a breath, but it only urged the pain to build like bumblebee stingers wedging themselves beneath her skin. She opened her right hand. Angry red welts began to rise, and then they burst open. Blood trickled down the edge of her pinkie finger and dripped onto the polished tile floor.

  The Charmer moved closer again.

  Callie’s right shoulder hit the wall.

  Nowhere to run.

  Her employer simply moved the jar closer to her oozing, flaming flesh. Fear lanced her, and she doubled over. Her instinct was to make herself small enough to hide from the roiling waves of pain crashing against her mind and thrusting fists upward into her stomach. She screamed loud enough to rattle her ears and raze her throat. She called for him to stop, but her cry was an unintelligible keen.

  The ground shook or maybe Callie was simply hyperventilating.

  “What the fuck are you doing to her?” Even over her cries she’d recognize that tone of gravel spit into a bonfire. Derek.

  A flash of gold glinted before Callie’s gaze, and the pain disappeared. Not dulled. Not faded. Disappeared. Immediately. She sucked in short, panicked breaths, and reminded herself she would be fine. Magic was scary, but it hadn’t ever damaged her physically.

  It also hadn’t been painful before. She’d never needed to scream and go full-on fetal position as a result.

  Callie ignored the jar the Charmer still held. Her entire right hand and much of the left looked like spent charcoal briquettes and she wasn’t about to look away until she saw them healed completely. Derek huffed and grunted at her side, but otherwise the tiled workroom in the back of the Soul Charmer’s seedy downtown storefront remained quiet. Her pulse pounded in her ears, and with each bu-bump the ashy flakes softened and lightened. Eventually her flesh was unmarred again other than the jagged scar near her elbow from an unfortunate incident with a summertime slide when she was eight.

  “What was the point of that?” she asked when she was finally healed. Her voice was pure hangover rasp.

  “You wanted to learn.” The Soul Charmer rotated the opaque jar left and right as though he could still see the white wisps beneath the shiny lid.

  “I wanted you to teach me,” she corrected.

  “Apprenticeships are about hands-on learning. Either you have the ability, or you don’t.” The Charmer shot a derisive glance Derek’s way, but Callie’s partner—with his lack of magical ability—just ground his teeth harder.

  He continued under his breath, “I’m starting to think I was wrong about you.”

  Callie wanted him to be wrong about her. She didn’t want to spend her nights next to his slimy ass. She didn’t want to frequent drug dens. She didn’t want to help criminals cover their crimes through the use of rented souls. She knew from personal experience the way the borrowed soul affected the body. The way it blurred fingerprints and muddied DNA. Mob boss Ford had seen to that. Now she regularly saw his goons and men like them. She pulled the rented souls out of their bodies after they’d tainted and stained them with sin and corruption. She’d spent years getting out of her mom’s con-artist shadow and scraping her addict brother off various floors. She was only here because of them. She was here because she’d saved Josh with a rented soul. She was here because the Soul Charmer had changed her.

  Well, she told herself those were her only reasons. It was easier to blame loyalty or family to make bad decisions look inevitable. A tiny part of her had liked being able to protect herself with the magic. The thought was a pinprick of light in the dark recesses of her mind, the kind she could only see when her thoughts cleared moments before falling asleep. She’d demanded this apprenticeship if the Charmer wouldn’t take his magic back. If he were going to use her, she’d use him right back.

  She’d regretted the decision before she’d screamed in agony. Now she was in full-on, fuck-this-place-and-this-job-and-that-asshole-with-his-jars-and-his-shiny-fucking-teeth.

  “Shoving souls at me and changing whatever magic surrounds us in here—” he still refused to tell her what he’d done to the backroom, but the energy was obvious “—so that it hurts and then not telling me what I’m supposed to do isn’t teaching. Fuck, Charmer, I could learn that same way on my own.”

  His crazy old man cackle sputtered into a hacking cough.

  “She tell a joke?” Derek’s tone was even. He’d been aligned with the Soul Charmer for a lot longer than Callie. The edges of Derek’s ears were red, but otherwise his emotional shield was solid.

  The Charmer wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “She’s learning the way I did. Sink or swim.”

  “I thought you taught yourself.”

  “Exactly.”

  Callie rubbed her hands together, pleased to confirm sensation was normal. Her irritation spilled forward, but she didn’t meet the Charmer’s gaze. “Either teach me how to use the magic or I’m done.”

  “We both know you wouldn’t run, Calliope. My magic is in you. I’d find you.”

  She believed him. That was the problem. No leverage. She said nothing, because he was right. She was stuck with his magic. She was stuck without the skills to contain it. She was about to be stuck working for him solo.

  Fucking.

  Stuck.

  The Soul Charmer turned and shuffled across the tile floor, and around to a back wall lined with honeyed wooden shelving. He replaced the jar in its spot and turned it so the label faced outward. Without looking at either his employee or his apprentice, he said, “We can try something else next time, but you need to practice control. Figure it out.”

  Figure it out? Callie bit back the urge to roll her eyes. Story of her fucking life.

  “Until I—” she swallowed her irritation and her worry “—figure it out, I need Derek with me on retrievals. Not everyone is going to give it up without a threat of muscle.”

  The Charmer didn’t even bother turning around. “You’ll get used to it.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  He whirled on her. “You know my business is more than this.” He gestured between the two of them. The simple action twisted violent from the power in the room and the sharpness of his words.

  “I get it.” She held her own hand up in supplication. It didn’t gather the energy in the room, so she continued, “I’m not sure I’m ready for solo stuff yet.”

  Understatement.

  The Charmer harrumphed but didn’t disagree.

  “I’m going to help her when I can either way, boss,” Derek said. He was already edging Callie toward the door.

  He was reading this room better than she was, which was exactly why she needed him at her side if she was going to keep repossessing souls and doing this magic shit. Derek led the way to the back exit, as though he knew she didn’t want to risk running into a customer. She pushed herself through the first doorway. It had heavy magical wards that always left her feeling slicked with grease and gasping for breath. Like being birthed from the Charmer’s workspace. The ick factor was worth it to be done with the Charmer for the night.
r />   “Want me to make you dinner tonight?” Derek asked her as they edged down the hallway.

  “All I have is bread, I think.”

  “Nah, you’ve got cheese, too.”

  “Are you making me a sandwich?”

  “You don’t know how impressive my grilled cheese sandwiches are.”

  Callie slammed her palm into the push bar on the door. “I guess you’re going to have to—” her words were lost, swallowed by the scene in the alley.

  A dead body blocked her path.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The kid was sixteen or seventeen but lying there disjointed and lifeless on the craggy concrete he looked younger. His dark hair was smooshed to one side, slicked with something even darker like he’d slapped a spot with motor oil. His eyes were open, but unseeing. The milky white haze around his irises indicated he’d be a soul renter from a distance, but Callie was wedged in the doorway and close enough to the body for the lingering magic to press against her.

  Ice crystals formed a lattice across her fingernails; the dark blue she’d painted them shifted into the smoky grey of the clouds before the first snowfall. Her hands only went icy when she was near someone who had used a rented soul before. The Cortean Church and the Soul Charmer might say the rented soul was the only one bearing consequences, but that wasn’t the truth. Tiny fragments of the host’s soul were snipped away with each interaction, and Callie could feel it even in this teenager at her feet.

  “Tell me the Charmer wouldn’t rent to a kid,” Callie asked Derek over her shoulder, her voice barely a whisper.

  “Cash is cash.” His words were casual, but his voice shook. They were looking at the same horror. They were seeing the same teenager staring at them through glassy eyes. They were both faced with the reality of dealing with it.

  Callie’s hands began to ache from the cold, but she couldn’t back away from the boy. His cheeks still held color. His throat held more as a trio of vivid, red gashes opened the right side. Callie’s gut bottomed out and shifted like it might flip. She’d worked in a hospital and bore the iron stomach that went along with a medical gig. It wasn’t the blood or the torn flesh offering the mule-kick to the belly. No, she had a damn good idea what she was looking at, and that was the problem.

  “But Tess is gone,” she said.

  Derek’s hands were light on Callie’s shoulders as he edged around her. He leaned over the corpse, and then agreed, “Doesn’t make sense.”

  Tess had the ability to take people’s souls. She’d been after only those that belonged to the Soul Charmer, but Callie had seen the three-strike mark before. Those who had refused to give Tess their rented soul wore those same hatch marks as a scar of the forced extraction. It was the sign of a stolen soul. Callie didn’t need the Soul Charmer and his shitty mentorship to make that clear to her. The problem was Callie and Derek had delivered Tess to the Charmer. Tess was gone. The Soul Charmer had believed he had more enemies, more people wanting to steal his magic and steamroll his business. It’s why Callie was infused with magic. The thing was, this didn’t look quite the same as what Tess had done. Callie squeezed her hands into fists and would swear they crackled like ice cubes dropped into a glass of tap water. She ignored the freezing sensation and studied the clean edges of each wound. Clean. She shook her head. Such a poor way to describe the pink fileted skin. That was it, though.

  “These are from a knife,” she told Derek.

  He grunted one of his non-committal huffs, and she knew him well enough now not to take it personally.

  “Tess used her fingernails or something else more dull. She raked the skin. This . . . this is precise. Someone meant to damage this kid,” she continued like his response had propelled the conversation.

  “If they’re dropping a dead kid at our doorstep, this was planned.” Derek was right, but Callie really wished he wasn’t.

  She glanced toward one entrance of the alley and then the other, but they were alone. “Why would someone want to murder a kid, though?” She wished she were still young enough to wonder why anyone contemplated murder.

  “Got your attention, didn’t it?”

  The freezing cold encapsulating Callie’s hands began to dissipate. She hadn’t moved. The soft pink of the boy’s cheeks began to dull, too. Whatever was left of him was gone, and now only the oozing knife wounds could maintain their vibrancy. The proof of his murder, of what had been done, couldn’t flee as quickly as this teenager could rise to Heaven. Callie liked to mock the phrase and the Church’s reliance on it. It’s what sent people to guys like the Soul Charmer who would take all their money and promise them a sin-filled loophole. However, in that moment, she prayed it was real. She prayed this kid found peace.

  Derek knelt next to the body. “Ford’s the knife guy.”

  Fuck wasn’t that the truth? “Why would he . . .”

  He shot her a look that said both that she should know better (and she did) and that it could be dangerous to have this discussion here.

  “Right,” she said

  “We need to move him and tell the boss.”

  Callie squeezed her eyes shut. She did not want to go talk to the Soul Charmer again. It wasn’t only the trial by literal fire; it was also that he was goddamn scary when you gave him bad news.

  “Why do we need to move him? Shouldn’t we call the cops?” As soon as the words left her mouth she recognized how dumb they were. Weeks ago, she’d broken into a police substation and stolen files. She was certain there was a bigger charge than burglary when it was stealing from the cops. She did not need to be talking to them, and none of the Charmer’s crew needed Gem City PD anywhere near the soul rental shop.

  Before Derek could explain, she added, “Do you need help moving him?”

  He gave her the most genuine smile; the kind that made his eyes warm and her chest fill with light. “You’re not going to touch him. I’ll take care of this. Go back inside.”

  Callie wasn’t a coward, but it was purely her pride and ego that kept her from asking Derek to be the one to tell the Soul Charmer about the dead kid door drop. “Okay. I’ll go break the news.”

  She thought she’d infused the words with confidence. She’d been faking it for years. But Derek focused on her like he could see the little secrets and tiny fears she lined her ribcage with. He rose, walked to her, and wrapped his arms around her. She buried her face in his jacket and pulled in a deep breath of the leather, clean soap, and Derek. She was quickly associating the scent with comfort, which should have scared her more than saying a few words to her soul magic boss.

  She squeezed him back for a brief moment, and then pulled away. “I’ll go tell him,” she repeated.

  He nodded, and then turned back to his task with the teenager.

  The Soul Charmer had told her someone was after him. He’d said they were after his souls. He’d said he’d need her.

  Now she had to tell him he was right about the first one, and probably the second. The pompous asshole was going to revel in it, but Callie was clinging to hope he wasn’t correct about her.

  Finding one corpse was one too many, and if someone was ballsy enough to start dropping dead people at the shop’s door, this could only be the beginning.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Disposing of a body took a damn long time.

  This was Callie’s first foray into the world of illegal removal of corpses, but she had—incorrectly—thought it would be faster than calling the cops. When the police came for a body there was crime scene tape and chalk outlines, people to question, photos snapped, and hours upon hours of note taking and waiting around for a coroner to take the person away.

  Callie had waited inside the Soul Charmer’s shop while he and Derek had decided where to dump the kid with the shitty luck to be used as a threat to the main man in Gem City who wielded soul magic. Derek wanted her inside for her safety. The Charmer only cared about managing information she had access to. Either way, it was better than looking at a dead teenager.
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  The Soul Charmer returned inside alone. It was hours until Derek returned. Hours spent answering her boss’s questions. The same questions. Repeatedly.

  Did you recognize him?

  No. Each time he asked, Callie bit the urge to ask him if he did. That tang of magic came from somewhere, and she sure wasn’t slipping sixteen-year-olds second souls.

  Was there anyone in the alley?

  No, again. Or if there had been, she had been too focused on the horror closest to her feet. She assumed Derek would have run after anyone nearby, though. He had a knack for keeping his eyes on the edges of any space he entered. He had practice. Callie was new to the clandestine craziness. It was probably for the best that she wasn’t adapting quickly. People shouldn’t be comfortable with criminal shit.

  What did the slices look like again?

  Heartbreakingly bloody and raw. The urge to sob beat steady against her sternum, but letting it free would only complicate matters. Where was Derek? He could divert the Charmer and spare her a few private moments to freak the fuck out. Oh, right, he was busy relocating a corpse to a place where the police could find him in a couple days, and not link him back here, to the Charmer, to her.

  By the fifth or sixth go-round of these questions—she’d lost count—the Charmer’s tone had become harsher, but his focus then turned to his wares. He carefully selected jars from his soul shelves. The black jars took on an even darker tone behind his pale, bony fingers.

  She sucked in a deep breath, drawing side-eyed disdain from her vicious companion as he carefully set three jars onto his massive Oak desk.

  Did you feel the magic coming off “the boy?”

  The tone of this question changed each time the Charmer asked it, to the point Callie was now certain he thought she could make the ice crystals on her hands form at will.

  “I didn’t just feel the cold, Charmer. Ice formed on my nails.” She held her hands aloft as though he could see the echoes of the magic there. His derisive snort suggested he could not.