Soulcleaver Read online

  Soulcleaver

  The Dreamwalker Chronicles:

  Book Two

  Zile Elliven

  Copyright © 2019 Zile Elliven

  All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by electronic means without proof in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover design by Covered Creatively

  Editing by Gilly Wright

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Note from the author

  Maiden

  To Xander-bear and Gryphon-Kitten, for being total sweetie-pies when I said mommy needs to write.

  Chapter 1

  Marshall

  Five years ago

  “I can’t believe we’re getting away from this place for the next three months!” Adelle wrapped her arms around herself and spun in a circle. Marshall assumed she still had more energy to release when she grabbed his arm and started swinging him with her.

  He allowed it for three full turns before stopping her. “Okay, okay, enough! My clothes are all over the room now.”

  He had been in the middle of packing when Adelle burst in the door, raining her enthusiasm all over the place. When she seized his arm, he had been holding a small mountain of colorful shirts, now decorating every available surface of the room.

  He frowned at the mess.

  “Sorry, Mars, I’ll help you finish. Anything to get out of here quicker.” Adelle hated the heat, and southwest Texas in July had enough heat for three summers. “British Columbia is beautiful this time of year, and it’ll be nice to visit the lake house there, but I still wish we could spend summer break in the ’Scape.”

  “You know Nova would never last a day in the ’Scape; she has no magic to protect her. With her luck, she would get stuck as a tree or something.”

  “I know, I know, it’s just been so long since we spent any real time there. I could use a break from all of this normality.” She shuddered at the last word, as if it were a contagious disease.

  “It has been a while, hasn’t it?” Marshall sounded wistful. “I’ll make sure and get you a break while we’re up there. How does a week sound?”

  “It sounds like heaven.” A rapturous expression had just begun to settle on her face when practicality intruded. “What about you and Jack? Can we work out breaks for all of us? We should take turns.”

  “I don’t want to be away that long. And you can ask Jack, but he never seems to mind being out of the ’Scape, no matter how long.” It was a bit strange for a dreamwalker to not need the ’Scape. While it was true they could recharge from dreaming, most dreamwalkers started feeling antsy the longer they stayed in the Real.

  Visiting the Dreamscape was like coming home, and Marshall had been away for far too long. The last time he’d had a vacation there, he’d spent the time as an eagle soaring freely over colonies and wildlands. It had been very restful. Maybe he could manage a short stay. Even a day or an afternoon would be bliss.

  “He’s an odd one, our Jack.” His sister broke him out of his thoughts. “He goes for months at a time without a visit. If I tried that I would claw my skin off.” She scratched at her arms absently.

  Marshall pulled her hands away from their task and gave them a basket full of unmatched socks. “I haven’t packed any socks yet, match as many as you can.”

  Sorting through the pile, Adelle said, “You aren’t like Jack, though. You need this as badly as I do, maybe even more. The world won’t come to an end if you take a break.”

  Marshall muffled a sharp laugh, knowing she was serious. “The Praetor might disagree with you there.”

  “The Praetor would love to have you in the Dreamscape more, and you know it.” She tossed each sock bundle neatly into his open suitcase. “Though she would have half a dozen problems for you to solve the minute you came through the gate. Maybe you are better off here.” She frowned, her worry for him marring her perfect face. Marshall might be the team leader now, but Adelle never lost the drive to watch over her little brother.

  “Don’t worry about me, Adelle. Next time I go in for a debriefing, I’ll have the meeting take place in the ’Scape. I’ll have enough time for a quick recharge, but not enough time to get caught up in Guard politics.” Hopefully.

  “You’ve been doing that far too much lately,” she groused, but let it go.

  Marshall was closing his suitcase when Nova and Jack thundered up the stairs and spilled out into his room, falling over one another.

  “I beat you!” Nova was doubled over Jack’s back, panting.

  “I let you!” Jack struggled out from under her, striking a manly pose, then wilted. He just managed to wobble over to drape his long frame on Marshall’s bed, where he proceeded to look like a ragdoll missing its stuffing.

  “Sure you did, cupcake.” Nova grinned, exhausted, but triumphant.

  “Well, I was going to let you, but you were too damned fast.” He groaned into the bed but managed to shoot her the stink-eye through his shaggy, black hair.

  Adelle looked disgusted with both of them. “I think you’re both idiots for racing in this heat. Just looking at you two makes me want to climb inside the freezer.” She fanned herself with a photo she swiped from Marshall’s desk.

  Marshall took it from her hands and replaced it with an old flyer he didn’t care about. As he carefully smoothed the creases from the picture, Nova sidled up to him and snuggled up against his body, looking at the picture too. He noticed she’d been doing that a lot lately. It stirred up a cluster of flashing warning signs in his mind, which he tried his best to ignore. She was only a kid—he didn’t need to worry about that yet, did he?

  Still, he eased her arm away from his waist as casually as possible and created a little distance just in case. The last thing he needed was for his charge to develop a crush.

  “I remember this day,” Nova said, seemingly unaware she’d caused Marshall discomfort. “It was Testing Day. I was so mad I didn’t test positive for magic that I ran away.”

  Jack lifted his head off the bed. “You tried to run away but did a garbage job of it. We found you in five minutes, lurking in the garden out back.”

  “I wasn’t garbage at it, and I wasn’t lurking. If you’ll remember, I was trying to get you guys to come with me.” She smiled at the picture of the four of them coated in cotton candy. “It worked, too. I had so much fun at the carnival with you guys, I decided that running away for the afternoon was long enough.
”

  “Remember how Jack decided to stay and be an elephant trainer.” Adelle sat next to Jack and ruffled his hair.

  Marshall laughed. “I remember how he changed his mind right after he saw the trainer get pooped on.” Never in his life had he seen Jack look so horrified. Now that was a moment worth photographing.

  “It was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen,” Jack said, deadpanned.

  Nova went over and climbed on the bed, plopping herself down on Jack’s behind. “Oh, mighty dreamwalker, tamer of Nightmares, how could a normal creature defeat courage such as yours?” Nova tried to tickle him, but Jack rolled over, causing her to fall off the bed onto the rest of the clean laundry with a loud squawk of indignation.

  “The man got hit with at least twenty pounds of elephant crap. It knocked him unconscious!” Jack sat up and hugged Marshall’s pillow to his chest. “Nightmares I can take—the worst thing they can do is kill me. But unconscious on the floor covered in feces? I’d never get another date for as long as I lived.”

  Marshall helped Nova up off the floor and nudged her toward the door away from his mangled laundry basket. He gave Jack a dark look as he began meticulously refolding his clothes.

  Jack raised his eyebrows in alarm. Marshall had banned Jack from his room before for making a mess and wasn’t above doing it again. He had standards about how his space should look, and his friends were going to respect them if they wanted access to his bedroom. He hadn’t invited any of them here in the first place. If it were up to Marshall, they’d all hang out in the living room like normal people, but for some reason, his room continued to be where they inevitably ended up.

  Jack scrambled off the bed, sat down on the floor, put the basket in his lap, and started to repair it, managing to look nonchalant and guilty as hell at the same time.

  “Crap.” Nova dug around in her pockets. “I think I left my phone back at my house. I’d better go get it, you know how Mom gets if she can’t get ahold of me. I’ll be back in a few minutes, guys.”

  Once the sound of her footsteps faded down the stairs, Jack said, “She tried to ditch me again earlier. I’m pretty sure she is starting to suspect something.” His playful tone vanished. Jack was usually able to keep his good humor while switching from play mode to work mode. The fact he was being serious told Marshall that Jack was worried.

  “Maybe she just wanted some alone time,” Marshall suggested, but he knew Jack was right. Nova was growing up quickly—she was nearly sixteen—they’d have to tell her soon before she found out on her own.

  “Or she could be getting sick of your face. It happens you know.” Adelle winked at Jack and tossed a newly paired ball of socks into Marshall’s open suitcase.

  “Have you seen this thing lately?” He gestured to his face. “Because if you had, you’d know that to be a complete impossibility.”

  “Basket.” Marshall nodded to the forgotten project in Jack’s hands.

  Jack paled and went back to nudging the reeds back to their proper places. “Don’t just laugh this off, guys. Even if she isn’t on to us, I have a feeling the way we operate is going to change soon. She’s growing up after all. I mean, what are we going to do when she goes off to college? As chummy as we all are, it’s going to be impossible to be with her all the time without her noticing.” He looked from Marshall’s stony expression to Adelle’s carefully neutral one and sighed.

  “We don’t have time to get into this now. She’s going to be back in a few minutes, and this isn’t the ’Scape. We can’t hide conversations from her here.” Marshall was good at finding reasons not to talk about the Nova Situation, but his team was making it harder than normal for him today.

  Surprisingly, Adelle was the one to press the issue. “We’ll hear her coming long before she makes it to the stairs. Dainty, she isn’t. Marshall, I know you don’t want to hear this, but we need to tell her soon.” Her cool hazel eyes held his gaze calmly. Marshall recognized what she was doing. He couldn’t be swayed by loud voices and accusations, but calm, well-reasoned arguments were his downfall.

  “I . . .” He closed his eyes trying to avoid the truth for as long as he could. “Exactly which part of it are we supposed to tell her? The part where we aren’t who we pretend to be? The part where we are nearly ten times older than we look? Or maybe we should just focus on the part where we aren’t her friends, but her bodyguards?” His voice was cold and cruel, but the cruelty was pointed toward himself. He never wanted to hurt Nova, but it seemed inevitable at this point. He sat down heavily on the bed.

  “Marshall, love.” Adelle hurried to his side, sat down, and put her arms around him offering wordless comfort.

  Jack rose from the floor and came around the bed to sit on his other side and lean against him companionably. “She has to understand. I’ll bet she’ll even be flattered—she has the coolest guardian team in the Guard looking after her.”

  A loud strangled gasp cut through the air. “Guard . . . ?” Nova walked shakily around the corner and came through the door looking like someone dropped a log on her head. “Guardians? You guys are guardians?” She leaned against the doorframe and wrapped her arms around her stomach as if trying to keep her intestines inside.

  Chapter 2

  Marshall

  The whole team stared at her in shock. All three of them were frozen on the bed.

  Marshall recovered first. “Nova, we—”

  As if he hadn’t spoken, Nova continued. “I mean, I knew you all were hiding something, but I thought it might be a surprise for our vacation. How could I have guessed it would be something like this? Guardians . . .” She shivered, then looked even more horrorstruck than before as a thought occurred to her. “This is about my father, isn’t it? This is about Noah!”

  Nova had never mentioned her father in the ten years they had all known one another. By unspoken agreement, the rest of the group did the same. Not only from compassion, it had also been so Marshall had less to lie to her about.

  Adelle pulled away from her brother and stood up carefully, as if trying to calm an unstable animal. “Your mother came to the Guard for help when you were little. She had run out of resources and . . . Maybe you should ask her about that part. But the result was us being assigned to protect you from your father.”

  “Why would the Guard step in for a case of domestic abuse?” Nova stayed calm, but her voice wavered on the word abuse.

  Adelle’s eyes flashed to Marshall, wide and pleading for help—as the head of the team it was ultimately up to him to decide what to tell their young charge. He sighed in resignation. He’d waited too long, and now he had to pay the piper.

  “It wasn’t domestic abuse, Nova. Your mom didn’t want you to know the whole story until you were older.” His voice was as gentle as he could make it, though on the inside he was at war with himself. No kid should have to hear what he was going tell her. “She caught him experimenting on you when you were a baby.”

  “W . . . what?” She staggered back until she hit the bedroom wall, her face going from angry pink to a sickly white.

  “Your father was a very sick man. When Fumiko caught him, she took you and ran. She didn’t come to us right away, but once her resources dried up, she asked for our help in protecting you.” Marshall paused when Nova’s lower lip began to tremble. He could tell she wanted him to stop, but he knew it was better for everyone that he get it all out in the open, so he forged on. “We don’t know what he was trying to do to you. Your mother wouldn’t let us do any tests to find out. And since it was years after the fact, and you were a perfectly healthy little girl, we didn’t push.”

  “So you three just uprooted your lives to follow me around for the past ten years? How can you be my bodyguards? When I met you, you were all kids, like me.”

  “We Crafted our bodies.”

  Nova’s eyes widened, and from her expression, Marshall knew she must be remembering the time Adelle attempted to Craft a phone for Nova’s birthday and nearly died in the
process.

  So right about now, Nova must be wondering which one of them was powerful enough to effect such a powerful working.

  Dreamcrafting was one of the rarer magics in the dreamwalker arsenal. The crafter had to physically be in the Dreamscape in order to do it. They took their own essence and combined it with the raw magic of the ’Scape. It was a matter of will and magical ability. If the dreamcrafter could convince the ’Scape that the object was real, the object could be taken from the ’Scape into the Real.

  When Adelle had attempted to Craft her a phone, she’d managed to fully envision it enough to create its form in the ’Scape, but when she’d tried to use her essence to bring it through the gate into the Real, Adelle’s body had gone fuzzy around the edges, and she’d nearly unmade herself. It was the only time Marshall had ever been angry enough at his sister to threaten to kick her off the team.

  After a long moment, Nova asked the question Marshall had been hoping she wouldn’t ask. “Which one of you did it?”

  He considered putting her off, but both of his teammates gave each other a look and then pointed at Marshall. He braced himself, half expecting the same look of disappointment he got from everyone else about how he was clearly wasting his potential. Instead, Nova’s face crumbled, and he thought she was going to cry.

  “How could you just uproot your lives like that? To protect a little girl for so long . . . What must that have been like for you all? To pretend to care—” Her voice shook with emotion.

  Like a flipped switch, Marshall went from defensive to protective. He didn’t want her to feel for a single second that she wasn’t like family to them. “It wasn’t a pretense. I knew from the moment we met you were someone worth protecting. We all did.”

  “You’re a special girl, Nova.” Adelle walked to her side. “It’s been lovely to watch you grow up.” She tried to take Nova’s hand but was rebuffed.

  “Of course you’d say that. That’s what I would say if I were you. Anything to comfort the frightened child. That’s exactly how I must just seem to you. Like a child.” She paused as if a new thought occurred to her. “How old are you all?” Her face was shuttered, but the quaver in her voice belied exactly how important the answer was to her.