A Soul Unchained by Alex Rivers

Author:Alex Rivers [Rivers, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-01-04T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Two

I couldn’t stay still.

At first, after the mind-meld, I could hardly walk straight. Sinead had led me to the car, driving us off to her apartment, helping me up the stairs. But after the initial shock wore off, I found myself pacing back and forth, my body demanding movement. I was brimming with nervous energy, desperate for space and air. Sinead’s apartment was tiny, claustrophobic. It was made even smaller by the boxes of books lying everywhere.

“You can help me with signing these books,” Sinead said. “But you have to get Hugh’s signature just right. The H is really long, like everything else Hugh has.”

“Not now.”

“It was innuendo,” she clarified. “Because he has a really long—”

“I got it, Sinead.”

“Dong.”

I loved Sinead, but she could sometimes drive me to an uncontrollable rage. “I’m taking Magnus for a walk.”

Magnus, for his part, was excited. He did that dance thing—where he hopped in circles, then tried to stand still for me to attach the leash, but then couldn’t bear it and started hopping again—delaying the trip endlessly. Finally I managed it, and we went out for a walk.

It turned out to be quite a long walk.

I still had the S’lzaar memories, at least the ones I had glimpsed while we were connected. But without access to its mind, it was hard to parse these memories, to make sense out of them. The swarm didn’t see and hear and feel things the way another living being would. Instead, each of the insects would experience something, and part of what it experienced, a thought fragment, would make its way to the swarm’s collective mind. There it merged with hundreds of similar fragments to make a strange, multi-faceted memory.

Add that to the fact that the swarm’s entire psyche was nothing close to mine. It didn’t perceive feelings, or time, or space similarly. We had no shared language or morality.

But I didn’t really need to understand the memories. I just needed details.

The shadow world really was a sort of prison. I didn’t know who the wardens were, but the prisoners were all various demons, and as I’d already surmised, they fed on human emotions.

But they fed in the shadow world, even though there were no humans there. I had felt it. The memory of sustenance, leaking from the tunnel walls. Perhaps it was some sort of fungi that grew on the walls, somehow replacing the need for emotions?

There were a lot of them. More than I’d thought. The tunnels in the shadow world were teeming with the creatures. And the core lay beyond them.

Now that time had propelled me further from the mind-meld, I couldn’t be sure of what I’d seen in the core. I had only glimpsed it for a second, from that strange faceted vision of the S’lzaar insects. Was there a strange bright light? A sense of purity? In any event, the S’lzaar knew what it was: a human soul. It had to be Danielle’s soul.

Getting to the core through the tunnel labyrinth, brimming with demons, felt nearly impossible.

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