Page 30 of A Soul’s Awakening

Another body was lying beside the mailroom, a pile of letters scattered beside her. This one was a phantom, and while no silver chains seemed to bind her, she had somehow been subdued, knocked unconscious. I didn’t dare wake any of them.

My magic stirred low, tight and restless, tugging at the edges of my senses, warning me that something was wrong while instinctively bringing me toward the danger that awaited me. I removed my heavy winter coat and left the two women behind, creeping down the hallway until I reached the stairs.

By the base of the main staircase, a woman crouched on the floor, hands pressed to her temples, rocking slightly beside a bag of groceries that had spilled at her feet. Her eyes darted around wildly, pupils dilated, lips moving in frantic, broken murmurs. My stomach twisted. The threads of her fear, and something darker, were reaching out, brushing against mine. My magic hummed louder now, coiling like a spring, begging me to intervene before it tightened around her completely.

“Are you okay?” I knelt down beside her, tenderly touching her shoulder.

She looked up at me with a maniacal smile, her hands cupping my face as she said, “I knew you’d come.”

The woman was clearly confused, maybe stuck in a trance, because I was sure we had never met before. Regardless, I wasn’t going to let her continue suffering.

But with my next step forward, I halted. Descending the stairs, a scraggly man wearing a pair of simple slacks and a button-down emerged from the shadows. His thin, wax-like face flickered subtly with a ghostly aura. He didn’t speak and didn’t need to. The tension in the air was enough to make his presence feel wrong.

I pressed myself into the narrow space between the stairs and the wall, hiding behind a potted plant and praying the angle would conceal me from the man gliding down. He crouched beside the young female. His voice was soft, almost soothing, but every word pressed into the woman’s mind like ice.

“Hello, there. I’m Albert. I work here in maintenance. There have been reports of flickering lights in many of the apartments. Won’t you let me into yours so I can fix them?” He gently ran his fingers down her cheek, lingering his touch on her delicate neck.

My brain went into overdrive, scouring the knowledge I’d kept stored of Salem’s history. Since I often came across ghosts from the past, I’d read almost every book and watched countless documentaries about notable figures in the area. He could have been a random person, but the immense magical power radiating from him told me otherwise.

And as he wrapped his slender fingers around the young woman’s neck, realization snapped into place. The location … the name … his unassuming presence that was anything but …

“The Boston Strangler,” I whispered out loud, my heart thumping wildly in my chest. I realized my mistake too late as Albert whipped around, facing me with predatory eyes.

Like Orren, silver runes flashed across his arms.

“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.