Rebirth (Lost Souls #1)

Chapter 7

D esperate for more knowledge, I go through as many of the books as humanly possible. Many of them turn out to be historical records of different countries, people, cultures, and languages. Some tell tales about great feats of heroism or tall tales about the many evils in the world. Others depict great horrors, ways of torture, and nightmarish events that seem too grotesque to be possible.

The books that are actual spell books end up being few and far between. The spells in them strike me as quite basic, and I don’t want to rehash the same ones over and over again. According to Sophia, our magic has limits. The more books that I go through, the more that I realize that these limits are not because of what we can do; they’re limits because of the limited information that is readily available to us. I’m surprised that she hasn’t come to the same conclusion, that she hasn’t attempted to break through these limits.

It takes a lot of trial and error. Even more spells literally backfire in my face, but I make progress. The first thing that I do is create myself a custom healing spell. Funny how trying it out the first time almost had me losing a hand. But it’s worth it once I do get it right. There is a clear difference from the spell that Sophia used on me, confirming my suspicion that custom spells are the way to go.

Urged on by this success, I continue to experiment, trying out all kinds of things that help me craft my own unique spells.

Eventually Sophia isn’t able to idly stand by and hold her tongue anymore. “Aeliana,” she says while we sit in the garden, my new name still sounding weird to me, “you have to stop. I have a bad feeling about this.”

“Why?”

“This thing that you are doing is changing you. It is feeding your anger, your hatred toward your husband. Nothing good can come of it.” She doesn’t bother to hide her disapproval, and part of me can’t help but respect her for that. It tells me that at least this friendship, or whatever this is, between us is real.

“Why should I care? It’s all that I have left to live for.”

“That cannot be true,” she says, gently touching my hand. “Despite being stuck here, there has to be more.”

“There isn’t,” I say, pulling my hand away from her. “Everything else that I had—that I was—Henry forfeited the moment he abandoned me.”

“Why should his actions matter so much to you? He was unworthy of you, yes, but that does not mean that you have to throw yourself away for him.”

“He is the one that threw me away. He'll have to deal with the consequences of that. If that ends up changing me, then that’s a price that I’m more than willing to pay. You might have given up, might have accepted your fate here, but I refuse to do so. I will leave, make Henry pay, and then I will take my life back. No matter what it costs me.”

“Even if it means forfeiting yourself completely to darkness?”

“Why not? I gave him everything, everything about me that was good and pure, and he utterly destroyed it. ”

Sophia looks at me in silence, shaking her head slightly. Her continued disapproval starts to get on my nerves, and I have to grit my teeth against snapping at her. “For Isra, it was insanity, and for you… this,” she says with a cock of her head, disgust clear in her words.

“Tell me, Sophia, what did it do for you?”

She flinches and, in that moment, I know that she is aware of how she herself has changed. She’s just afraid to say it out loud. When I first met her, she seemed so strong, so proud. She was someone to look up to. Those first impressions were nothing but a charade—I know that now.

“Hopelessness.” The admission is nothing more than a whisper. Her posture changes at this, her shoulders slumping inward ever so slightly. For the first time, she said it out loud. She made it real. “I used to be positive, always seeing things on the bright side, making the best out of whatever hand I was dealt. When I first awoke here, I was still like that. Hopeful, despite the burden of being alone, the burden of being the first one. Then I learned what had happened, and I just could not anymore.

“I only started to pick up the pieces when Isra arrived, figuring that I should be strong for her. In reality, I wanted to pretend to be strong in hopes that I would become strong. But after being here for as long as I have been, you come to see that it all means nothing.”

She takes a deep breath, her eyes locking with mine. “You think that you know despair, but the truth is that up until now, you have only had yourself to worry about. Wait until he comes for you.” Sophia slowly gets up and shows me a smile that I haven’t seen on her before. “The sights that he will show you.” She stares into the distance. “You know nothing.”

She leaves me with those words hanging between us, unaware that her warning does nothing to me. She’s under the impression that Henry’s matrimonial betrayal is all that’s happened to me, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much more. His betrayal was the catalyst that set something else into motion, and I will never forgive him for that.

Because of Henry, I know what men are capable of doing to and with a woman. I’ve seen it all. I’ve been through it all.

I take a few more moments with my hands between the blades of grass before I make to get up, but I'm barely back on my feet when something rustles beside me. Turning, I’m too slow to avoid Isra as she comes crashing into me. A bright flash of pain surges through me as something cuts through my skin. It clouds my mind for a fraction of a second, then it brings all of my pent-up anger and frustration together.

Isra comes at me a second time, a knife clasped firmly in her hand. A knife coated in my blood, red dripping down the gleaming blade. As she swings it at me, I jump away, but not fast enough to avoid a deep cut in my arm. It dazes me momentarily, needing a moment to breathe through the pain.

Isra circles back toward me with a vicious snarl on her lips, but this time I manage to send a spell her way. “Darbs ia i don butmoni parm zumvi cnila.” The magic spirals around her, seeping into her body and halting her in her tracks. I grab her arm and focus my magic on the point where we touch, swiftly breaking her bones. Isra screams in pain as the magic spirals around her and seeps into her body. Blood drips from her eyes and ears while she crashes onto her knees into the soil. I swipe the knife out of her hand and plant it in her stomach without batting an eye. Isra gawks at me, then she collapses as a puddle of blood forms around her.

“Hoping that this will kill you is probably going to be wishful thinking,” I snarl, panting from the exertion.

I yank the knife out of her stomach and wipe the blood on her vest. I decide to keep it in hopes that she won’t find a new one to try and use on me. It's probably more wishful thinking on my part, though. I don’t even understand what she was doing here or how she got away from him. Unless he let her? Isra’s eyes roll in the back of her head as I ponder over this.

A dizzy spell almost floors me then, making my legs tremble and reminding me of the fact that she did, in fact, get a blow in. Two even, both on the same arm, it seems. I hiss when I bend the arm in question to look at the deep cut that Isra left me with, accompanied by a puncture wound right below my shoulder. Then I realize that this might be a good opportunity to try something out.

I briefly glance back to where Isra still lies in the grass, unmoving yet still very much alive. Seeing how she just keeps coming for me, I don’t feel bad about leaving her behind in a puddle of her own blood.

It only takes a few moments to reach my room and to position myself in front of the standing mirror in the bathroom. Seeing how I’m already bleeding, it would be a shame to let the blood go to waste. I poke a finger in the wound on my arm and use it to draw a magic circle on the surface of the mirror. I speak the words of the spell, and the circle glows, greedily absorbing the blood in acceptance of my sacrifice.

My reflection fades, and in its place the mirror shows me the front door of my old home, surrounded by pitch-black darkness. I draw some more blood and layer a second circle on top of the fading first one. The next words make the blood turn black and scatter in a spiral pattern across the surface. I touch a single finger to it, and a shudder goes through the glass. Then it starts to ripple like water, and my finger, then my hand, passes through it.

I reach for the doorknob, my fingers flexing in front of me. Before I actually manage to get to the door, the glass around my arm starts to solidify again, pushing my hand back. It takes too much out of me to retract my arm in time before the glass turns completely solid again. Even though I’m disappointed that I wasn’t able to make any kind of contact, I’m pleased that I managed to partially pass through.

My wounded arm starts to feel numb, draining too much energy and making me wobble on my feet. “Aao ial pir gah baltoha comselh yolci luciftias bolp como bliort pamt.” Using my personal healing spell to patch myself up feels right in its own way.

As the cut starts to heal, the last of my strength leaves me. I stumble toward the bed, exhaustion starting to set in. The strain of all the magic that I’ve been using lately is catching up with me. My legs give out when I reach the bed, and sleep claims me as soon as my head touches the pillow.