Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson #13)(90)

The Soul Taker laughed inside my head.

I wanted to shake my head to rid myself of its laughter, but I couldn’t take my gaze off Wulfe. I’d seen him fight. I needed to see when he decided to come at me before he moved. The clothing he wore obscured my usual cues—I couldn’t tell when his shoulders tightened, and it was going to be hard to see his weight shift. And, of course, I couldn’t watch his eyes.

I still didn’t know why the Soul Taker had stopped to talk to me. But I knew it couldn’t last. This encounter would turn to blood soon enough. That was the purpose of the Soul Taker—to take souls.

I had better than a decade of martial arts training under my sensei and three years of daily sparring with Adam. I was pretty handy in a fight with someone vaguely in my weight and ability class. Wulfe was a vampire who had been fighting with a blade since sometime before the Renaissance.

I was, I thought, a little faster than he was in the same way I was a little faster than most of the werewolves—not enough to be a significant advantage. I was also smaller and not nearly as strong.

If I had to depend upon my katana to save me, I was doomed.

“Why me?” I asked, to see if I could keep it talking. If the Soul Taker was feeling chatty, maybe I could figure out a way to survive. I’d already learned that if Wulfe could see, then someone might be able to wrench him free of the Soul Taker. Not likely to be useful until he’d fed enough to regenerate his eyes—which wasn’t going to happen in the next few minutes.

“I don’t seem to be in your usual category of victim,” I said, when it did not reply.

Sacrifice, it corrected me. The echoes of its voice made me understand that my death would serve a greater purpose. That I should feel joy as the blood of my body pooled on the ground and the magic of my death and my soul linked with those who had gone before. I even gained an understanding of the depth of that phrase “those who had gone before.”

Souls caught together and stretching through time, still as connected to the Soul Taker as they had been on the day of their death. And the Soul Taker perceived them all individually in the same thorough and extensive way that I had tasted Aubrey Worth’s soul. Not quite the same way. I was sad that Aubrey had died; the Soul Taker felt nothing. No. Not nothing. Satisfaction.

“So many people,” I said involuntarily, their numbers pressing upon me like a great weight.

To release my lord into the world requires the sacrifice of many, it said.

I understood that as the years had passed, the definition of the kind of sacrifice who could be brought into the magical web this thing was creating had narrowed. The web had taken on the characteristics of the sacrifices before and become less elastic in what it could accept. Many had died uselessly before the Soul Taker had understood that it needed to refine its hunt.

Magic ability, but not too much, nor with too much training. Magic ability still malleable, able to be shaped.

I understood that as it touched me when I’d destroyed the spider-creature’s web, it had been able to see further through me than it usually could before it made a sacrifice of someone. I’d exposed my soul (yes, that had really been a stupid thing to do, I decided; next time I’d throw a chair or something), allowing the Soul Taker to perceive that I was connected to a spark of divine that might be the single power needed to make the spell work.

Coyote’s daughter, it had called me the first time I’d seen it.

But it wasn’t just Coyote. It was the wolves of our pack—and I had a moment to think that it was a very good thing that we’d broken from Bran, or it could have taken every werewolf Bran was connected to, assuming Bran wouldn’t be able to stop it. It was the seethe through my blood tie with Stefan, who was tied to all the vampires in the seethe, to his maker and her maker before her. To Bonarata and everyone he was tied to.

Bonarata was in control of all the vampires in Europe and, Marsilia had told Adam, most of the vampires in the US. He and his vampires in turn controlled thousands of humans by blood bonds.

The Soul Taker understood souls, and apparently all of the blood ties that connected wolf to wolf and vampire to vampire were soul bonds.

I really, really should have just thrown a chair.

“But you have Wulfe already,” I protested out loud.

Vampires are dead. They cannot be sacrifices.

For an instant I understood, really understood, what that meant—that they were missing the magic that defines life—but there were too many things getting shoved into my head, and I didn’t try to keep that one. The Soul Taker needed a living conduit into the vampires’ web of blood bonds, and for some reason—

Coyote, among other things, was a guide for the dead. I tried very hard not to let the Soul Taker see that thought.

—for reasons, my bond with Stefan would work, when other bonds with other living things did not.

I understood that my death, by means other than the Soul Taker’s blade, was the only way to prevent the Soul Taker from doing as it wished. Right now, there was no feasible way for me to do that in such a way that the Soul Taker could not take a final blow before I died by other means.

By sacrificing you, I finish my task, the Soul Taker said.

“I see,” I said, my mouth dry.

So why was Wulfe just standing there? Why didn’t the Soul Taker have him kill me this minute? Why was it talking to me?

How would it be, I thought, to have existed all those years—and I knew that it was old in the same way that I understood Aubrey Worth’s life. How would it be to have had a single task for all those years, and then come to an end of it? What would happen to it? Would it cease to exist?