Only Echoes Remain Read online

  Kind of ironic that in my case those people aren’t too far wrong, huh?

  “Listen, guys,” I tried, holding up my hands in a placating gesture. “I don’t mind you looking, but I’m really not in the mood for a date right now. How about you give me your number, and I’ll call you later—“

  It wasn’t going to work; I could tell that by how they were looking at me. Not that I was especially worried; more than a few tough-guys had tried this, and the ones who were still alive tended to be a lot more polite these days when they passed me in the street. No, the problem was that Edna might get hurt in the scuffle, or she’d see me doing my thing and never want to speak to me again. Worst possibility would be a cop happening by and really stirring up some shit.

  “Come on, chica,” the extra-greasy guy on the left said with a smirk, reaching out to stroke my cheek with one finger. “A girl so out-and-out fine as you, we can’t leave out here with just this hag to protect you.” He leaned in close, and showed me a grin full of gold-capped teeth. “It’s not safe out here, if you know what I mean.”

  I only had a few seconds to decide how it was going to be; either I went with them and waited for some privacy to deal with things, I pulverized them right there out in the open, or…. I saw Tun’s head sticking out of the alley a half-block away, saw his ears perk as he took in what was happening, and I saw his fangs bared as he snarled and launched himself toward us as fast as he could go.

  Having him rip the men into bloody shreds wouldn’t have been the best possible outcome either, and I braced myself to just run away. They probably wouldn’t bother Edna if I wasn’t there, and….

  …And, I guess I don’t multi-task very well. So many things were happening at once that I didn’t notice it at first. Edna was ranting at the top of her quavering old voice, and digging through her cart for something to use as a weapon. One of the street toughs had stopped grinning, noticed the canine freight train rumbling towards him, and whipped out a long, cheap-looking knife. Me, I was still half-tangled up in my ridiculously-long coat; they hadn’t pulled it all the way off, it was hanging from my left arm and piled around my feet, so I wasn’t in good shape to take off running quite yet. In the middle of all that, the feelings of icy dread and grim foreboding completely failed to grab my attention.

  It wasn’t until a prickle started at my scalp, skittered all the way down to my toes, and then twisted my middle into a knot that I suddenly recognized it for what it was, and that left me with just enough time to say “Oh, no--,” before every bit of me turned to fire, light and pain.

  Even then, it might have been all right. The summoning wasn’t so strong that I couldn’t have refused it, all I needed was a few moments of peace and quiet so I could devote all my concentration to shutting out the call. Of course, that was when the guy with the knife looked back at his friends for some reassurance that they were going to help him with the very big, very angry dog, and he caught sight of me there, stiff as a board and with blue-white-violet light pouring out through my eyes and mouth. He reacted pretty much like everyone does when they suddenly come face-to-face with the supernatural; he rammed the knife into my stomach and ran like hell.

  It hurt quite a bit, and effectively kicked the legs right out from under my mental efforts to stay where I was. The fire inside me flared bright, running through every particle of my being, and I felt myself being sucked into the plane of magical energy that overlays the material one. Since my body got blown to bits and converted to manna as part of the process, my eyesight faded quickly. What I was left with was a fading vision of Edna staring in horror, Tun bounding up to stop in front of me with a ‘Woof?’ expression on his face, and the three tough-guys running away as fast as they could while simultaneously wetting themselves.

  Then it all fell away except for the pain.

  Isa’s cosmic, universal rule number three? Even if you’re having a really bad day, somebody summoning you will always make it worse.

  * * * * *

  The end of my mercifully-brief journey felt a lot like being flushed up a toilet; it was nasty, painful, and not anything you wanted to have happen to you more than once. I guess it was just my bad luck that this was the third time in the last ten years or so that I’d had to go through it. When I’d recovered enough to look around, however, I quickly realized that this was no place I had been before, and the asshole standing a few feet away was no one I’d ever met.

  “Excellent,” he intoned. Not ‘he said’; this guy spoke in a sort of super-deep, James Earl Jones voice that I knew couldn’t be real. “Remain on your knees, servant,” he rumbled on, a smug look on his young, acne-speckled face. “I shall now give you your instructions, which you will carry out perfectly and without delay. Afterwards, you will return here for further orders.”

  “Screw you,” I replied from where I knelt. My position had less to do with any subservience towards the guy and more to do with the aftereffects of my trip. The knife that was still sticking out of my midriff wasn’t helping any, either. Ignoring his look of blank confusion, I took hold of the handle and pulled it free with a grunt. Inky blackness spilled out of the wound like blood, only this stuff billowed like angry smoke for a few seconds until it dissipated into the air. With the knife removed the hole closed up quickly, and by the time I’d climbed to my feet there was only the cut in the fabric of my top to show it had ever happened.

  Meanwhile, the Gandalf wannabe had regained his composure, and was now waving his arms around in a series of gestures that would have gotten him laughed out of even the cheesiest Las Vegas magic act.

  “Spirit of darkness, creature of the void, hear me and do my bidding.” I squinted at him to see if he was joking, but no, he looked to be completely serious. “I have summoned you here for a task most dire; obey me and be rewarded, resist me and thou shalt suffer punishments beyond imagination!”

  I sighed. Sure, it would have been funny, except for the fact that he was right; he had summoned me here. Which meant that he had at least some power, and a fair idea as to what he was about. The elaborate series of glyphs chalked all around me on the hardwood floor certainly seemed to be well-done, and the circle within which I was penned felt very solid. I exerted myself a bit on the magical level, just to be sure, and got nowhere. So long as those designs remained unbroken, I wasn’t getting out unless he let me.

  “This task,” he continued, still in the uber-deep fake voice, “is the utter and complete destruction of my betrayer… Katie.” In the brief pause that ensued, I cleared my throat.

  “Ah, ‘Katie’?”

  He ignored me, moving instead to a smaller offshoot of the designs that held me. I saw that the tiny circle there held a couple of Polaroids, a tiny snipping of reddish hair, and a cheap, silvery ring. With a gesture and a few muttered words, he activated the runes surrounding those items, and I could suddenly feel the essence of the person in the pictures, the young woman from whom the hair had been clipped and the ring stolen; Katie, like he’d said.

  “You will find her,” he said, obviously building up to a big finish. “You will bind her, and torment her with all the hellish powers at your disposal, and then you will slay her in a manner so horrible that her very soul will shudder at the memory for all of eternity!” He shot me a look, and I nodded, humoring him. He smiled back in satisfaction, raised both hands, and called out loudly to the ceiling: “Then let it be done!”

  I felt the wave of compulsion brush against me, barely, and tried my best to look fierce, bloodthirsty, and most of all; compelled. Unfortunately for me, he didn’t seem to buy it.

  “You’re not under my control at all, are you?” he asked, this time in a very average tenor voice.

  “Sure I am,” I hastened to assure him. “Find Katie. Torture, then murder. Shuddering through eternity. Got it.” I prodded the invisible wall that surrounded me with an index finger and gave him my best helplessly-enthralled gaze. “Let me out now, master. The sooner I get started the sooner your betrayer will b
egin suffering most awe-inspiringly.”

  He eyed me for a minute, then shook his head and cursed under his breath. I kind of wanted to do the same, but it had been a long shot at best. Spirit handlers can tell if they’ve got control of a spirit being; there’s a kind of feedback, a resonance, and obviously he wasn’t feeling it from me. After a few moments he managed to work through both his frustration and his supply of swear words, and he stepped closer, being careful not to disturb any of the chalked lines on the floor.

  “You’re very powerful,” he observed.

  I looked back at him through the invisible barrier and smiled sweetly.

  “Maybe you’re just extremely lame.”

  He didn’t answer that one, just kept looking at me, so I returned the favor. He was a fairly skinny white guy, maybe eighteen or twenty years old but definitely not any older than that. Not good-looking and not ugly either, at least he wouldn’t be if his skin cleared up and he bothered to make the acquaintance of a shower. The room we were in looked like it was in a run-down house or apartment building. The paint on the walls was old and dirt-smudged, and there was serious water-damage to the ceiling in the far corner. The only furniture was a small, badly-worn couch, and a table that looked like it had been stolen from a school cafeteria. Books where piled everywhere; the old, dusty kind that some of the newbie Talented thought held the secrets of eternity and the like. There were also lots of papers, diagrams, and crystals; bits of chalk and terminally-chewed pencils… basic magician stuff. Something that stood out from the general clutter were the two dead chickens, fresh-killed by the look of them, soaking in their own blood within a broad earthenware bowl just outside my circle.

  I nodded to myself; killing animals and using their life-energy as a power boost for a spell or conjuration was a common practice, at least with mages who were either utterly unprincipled or minimally talented. From what I’d seen of this one, he fit both categories.

  “Isondra,” the young man announced abruptly, making me start with surprise. “Isa, for short.” He must have seen the dismay in my eyes, because he smiled slyly. “That’s right, isn’t it? The first part of your true name.”

  Okay, lack of raw power and lack of perceptive Talent aren’t always the same thing.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” I said, playing it as cool and casual as I could manage. “Not a big deal; the first part’s easy, it’s right there on the surface.” Giving him my most confident look I made a show of idly surveying my dainty little fingers. “I’ve got layers and layers, pee-wee. I hope you’ve got a few weeks handy, ‘cause that’s what it’ll take for you to even start making sense of me.” That, unfortunately, was a bit of an exaggeration. If he even halfway knew his stuff, the conjurer could probably figure me out in a few days, a week at the outside. Penned up as I was, there wasn’t much I could do about it, either.

  Oh, and in case you didn’t know, a spirit’s true name is its definition, it’s metaphysical barcode, every one unique, and theoretically only known to the spirit itself, and it’s creator, if it has one. The problem being, if another conjurer learns it, he gains an awfully strong hold on that being. Enough of one to let even a minor magician control a very powerful entity.

  And I guess there’s no point in denying it at this point; I am a spirit. Not a ‘demon’, though; as far as I know those don’t actually exist.

  He was still staring at me intently, and I felt entirely too much like someone with a stalker peering in through my bedroom window. Since my coat had made the trip with me, I went about picking it up off the floor, turning the sleeves right side-out again (they were hacked-off well above the cuffs, so that my shorter arms wouldn’t get lost in them), and slipping it back on. Rather than bother with trying to hide my hair again, I pulled it out from under the coat and let it hang down my back. Since I’m all magical and stuff, my inky mane tends to swirl around with even my smallest movement, or the slightest brush of moving air. It makes me feel a little self-conscious sometimes, kind of like a walking advertisement for super-expensive hair conditioner.

  “You’re really hot,” he observed with surprise, apparently noticing the obvious for the first time. “And your clothes aren’t part of you?”

  That last part wasn’t quite as stupid as it sounds, if you know anything about spirits.

  “No, I get to change ‘em,” I answered, deciding that giving him the silent treatment wouldn’t really give me an advantage. “Making the clothes a permanent part of the spirit during the Creation ritual is a mistake lots of conjurers make, though. The amateur ones, anyway.” He caught the significant look that accompanied that, and scowled.

  “Lots of attitude, too. We’ll have to work on that.” He stepped back to his messy worktable, located a heavily-decorated wand, and started waving it in my general direction. I felt the little jabs and jolts of his probes, but there wasn’t much I could do about it, so long as I was pinned there like a bug under a microscope.

  “I’m guessing your ‘work’ isn’t worth much,” I said, wincing a little inside when it came out a touch shrill and strained. Sure, I’m normally pretty confident, given that I’m strong, beautiful, immortal, etcetera…. I guess the grimness of the situation was starting to fray my nerves just a little. “After all, if you were any good at this stuff you would have created your own ‘creature of the void’ to do your bidding, instead of trying to kidnap and reprogram some poor spirit who was minding her own business and not bothering anyone.” I was hoping to distract him, maybe buy some time for things to turn around. I won’t say that I had a plan, exactly, because I don’t pretend to be any kind of genius tactician. Still, there was a chance that a certain something might—

  “Creating a spirit from scratch is not as easy as you make it out to be!” he snapped back at me. I raised an eyebrow, noting the sensitive nature of the nerve I’d struck.

  “It can’t be too hard,” I told him in a matter-of-fact tone. “Since a fourteen-year-old girl managed to create the infinite coolness that is me.” Waving a hand at his room full of magic junk, I gave him a look of disdain. “And she didn’t need any of this crap, either.” What with the way he was staring hate at me I figured I’d made a pretty good start at distracting him out of his analysis of my inner workings, only it turned out to be something short of a complete success.

  “She used a life to do it though, didn’t she?” he snapped back at me, and I felt my jaw tighten as I clenched my teeth. “Sure, the brat must have been some kind of prodigy, to do such great work with your basic matrix, but the power you have, and especially the personality….” He shook his head, took a deep breath, and regarded me with a somewhat calmer look in his eyes. “You’re almost a real person, nothing like any of the other spirits I’ve seen, even the high-order ones.” A few more passes with his wand, a far-away look on his face, and then he focused on me again. “Somehow you were imprinted with a human personality, weren’t you? And maybe a human life-force?” I winced, and he pressed eagerly on. “That’s it, isn’t it? There was a blood ritual, and you took the personality and the power of the victim! No wonder you’re so amazing!” He got a weird, somewhat awed look, then, and his voice dropped to a whisper. “Only fourteen, and she managed a human sacrifice? Wow, that is impressive.”

  As much as I didn’t want to give him more information than he already had, I just couldn’t let that slide.

  “No, you perv, she didn’t kill somebody to make me!” I let him see how much he disgusted me, not that he seemed to care all that much. “She conjured me because a mob was tearing her town apart, grabbing every Talented person they could find and beating them to death.” That kind of thing didn’t happen so often these days, and some people point at the lower hate-crime stats and call it a new era of ‘acceptance’ and ‘tolerance’. As for me, I think it’s mostly because the Talented have gotten a lot better at hiding, or at vaporizing anybody who tries to hurt them. I sighed, and spent a moment wishing that poor Isondra had been blessed with less Conjuring Talen
t and more of the blasting mojo. “Anyway, she was just finishing the ritual when they found her. We were still linked, the two of us, when they killed her, so I got a lot from her before she… moved on.”

  I looked across the room and saw that the bastard was actually taking notes as I spoke, scribbling away on a notepad and peering at me through a cheesy little glass orb. When he noticed my glare he gave me a smirk.

  “So you failed, huh? She made you to protect her, and before you could even start your new job you wound up unemployed.” He consulted his orb again, then went back to scribbling. “That must suck. Still, the power you got from her life-force, or maybe the metaphysical conditions at the time; something there changed you, made you a self-sustaining, self-aware entity.”