Fractured Souls by Ava Marie Salinger

10

The sun was sinkingon the horizon when Cassius parked his Vincent Black Shadow outside Joyce Almeda’s cream-colored, Stick-style, three-story home. The house was located at the end of a cul-de-sac, with a metal fence separating it from the abandoned rail tracks that cut through the neighborhood.

Despite the area being one of the roughest in San Francisco, Cassius could tell the locals took pride in their properties from the pretty, painted clapboard exteriors and the neat front yards. He crossed the sidewalk and strolled past the brightly colored flowerbeds framing the path leading to Joyce’s porch steps, his mind full of what Morgan and his team had revealed to him earlier that day.

There had been nine human sacrifices to date, including the man who had been discovered in the sewers last night. This meant whoever was behind the black-magic rituals in San Francisco was killing an average of one person a week. Considering the time required to gather the necessary ingredients for such high-powered sorcery and for the person performing it to recover their strength after the considerable energy they would have had to expend for the ceremony, that kind of made sense.

The victims had nothing in common as far as the Argonaut Agency had discovered to date. They were of both sexes, with ages varying from twenty to fifty-four, and came from different backgrounds and socio-economic classes. They had never been in contact with one another and all of them had been discovered in the same state as the man Cassius had stumbled upon in the sewers, their flesh covered in runes and their bodies torn asunder.

The only trait they shared was that they were all ordinary humans. With only a tenth of the world population able to access the magic that lived in their soul cores, that put them in the majority of the city’s residents.

Cassius reached the porch and knocked on Joyce’s front door, a thoughtful frown on his face.

It could also mean having a normal soul is an important element of the ritual.

Something wriggled inside his jacket. The demon cat poked its head out the top.

Joyce had wanted to say a final goodbye to the creature, hence their visit. She had sounded more sad than shocked when Cassius had told her about its true identity over the phone that afternoon. He suspected the old lady wouldn’t have minded keeping the creature even if it meant making her ill.

“We won’t stay long,” Cassius told the demon cat. “And we should really come up with a name for you.”

The demon cat blinked at him before staring at the front door.

Cassius was about to knock again when the creature stiffened, ears rotating forward in sudden alertness. They both heard the weak cry that came from inside the house.

Alarm shot through Cassius. “Joyce!” He banged on the glass panel, rattling it. “Joyce, are you alright?!”

A door creaked open to Cassius’s right.

Joyce’s neighbor, a woman in her sixties, came out onto her front porch, her expression hesitant. Her face cleared when she saw Cassius.

“Oh. You’re that charming young man who visited Joyce yesterday.” She paused, her rheumy eyes growing troubled. “Is everything okay?”

“I don’t know.” Cassius swallowed, knowing the words were a lie the moment he uttered them. Something was very wrong. He couldn’t say why or how he sensed this, but he could feel it in his bones. A darkness that scratched at the very marrow of who he was. “She’s not answering the—”

A crash sounded at the side of the property. Cassius bolted to the railing and peered down the narrow alley separating the house from the fence and the rail tracks.

A man jumped out of a second-story window and landed on the grass, fragments of glass crunching beneath his boots.

“Hey!” Cassius shouted. “You there! Stop!”

The man frowned at Cassius over his shoulder before taking off in the direction of the rear yard. Cassius’s pulse spiked when he caught the whiff of black magic in the air.

It was the same scent he’d picked up in the sewers last night.

He retraced his steps, kicked down the front door, and barged inside the house, Joyce’s neighbor’s shocked shout following him. The demon cat leapt from his hold and rushed on ahead.

They found Joyce in the dining room. Blood was pooling rapidly beneath the old lady’s frail body where she lay on the floor, her chest shuddering with her rasping breaths. There was a deep depression in the middle of her breastbone.

“Joyce!”

Cassius dropped to his knees beside her and pressed down on her wound, his heart thundering with fear. The man who’d attacked Joyce had blasted her with a shot of black magic that had caved her flesh and bones, destroying most of the lung tissue beneath.

“Hang in there,” Cassius said grimly, his gaze on Joyce’s ashen face.

She clasped his arm with trembling fingers and nodded, her eyes opening briefly. A weak smile curved her lips. “You brought the cat.”

The demon cat crouched down next to Joyce’s head, its tail flicking agitatedly.

Cassius yanked his cell from the rear pocket of his jeans with a bloodied hand, dialed 911, and put it on speaker. He placed the phone on the ground and continued applying pressure to Joyce’s wound, the ringtone echoing with a macabre timbre around the room while hot blood seeped between his fingers and stained his skin.

“Joyce?!” someone mumbled behind him.

Cassius looked over his shoulder. Joyce’s neighbor had followed him inside the house.

“What’s your name?” he asked in a gentle voice despite the urgency coursing through him.

“Ines,” the woman whispered, her dark eyes locked unblinkingly on her bleeding neighbor.

“Ines, I need your help,” Cassius said firmly.

The woman nodded and came over, tears streaming down her face. The operator came online just as she knelt shakily beside him.

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“I am at the home of a woman called Joyce Almeda!” Cassius barked. “The address is 265 Libertine Street, in Mission District. She’s in her fifties and has been attacked by a black-magic user. She has an injury to her chest and is bleeding out fast. I’m gonna put you on to Joyce’s neighbor. Contact Morgan King at the Argonaut Agency and inform him of this call. Tell him Cassius Black wants him at this address ASAP!”

Cassius removed his jacket, folded it, and pressed it on Joyce’s wound.

“Take over,” he told Ines, placing her hands on top of the jacket. “Help is on the way.” He frowned at the cat. “Stay with them.”

The cat meowed.

Cassius rose and headed for the hallway, anger pulsing through him in thick waves. He paused on the threshold of the dining room and cast a final glance at Joyce before storming toward the back door.

He took to the sky the moment he cleared the rear porch, his gaze searching for Joyce’s attacker in the falling twilight even as he sent out a wave of his energy to pick up any magic in the area.

He can’t have gotten far!

A bitter scent teased his nostrils when he turned north.

There!

Cassius tucked his wings and dove.