The Soul Seeker

“Where is it?” My voice was the sound of grating metal, a timbre I had worked tirelessly to perfect over the past three years. And I think today, I just might have.

The man flailing beneath my cobalt-tipped grasp didn’t seem to appreciate the momentous occasion, his eyes jerking side to side as if he might find an escape. Cute, but pointless.

“I-I-I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he stammered like a drunkard. Fear could do that to a man, I’d discovered, make them trip over their words or lose them completely, among other things.

Right on cue, an acrid tang skewered the air, accompanied by the coral colour flushing across the liar’s cheeks. I sighed, eyeing the wet patch blossoming around his nether regions, another unfortunate side effect of my presence.

“Are you saying that my eyes deceived me? That there wasn’t a vial of shimmering purple liquid just there an hour ago?” I punctuated the word with a flick of my polished night-oak wand, aiming it at a flaking timber cabinet to his right, its glass a web of cracks that threatened to crumple under a heavy breath. It was no more dilapidated than any other of the failing shelves in this hovel, but it was the only one that was guarded with layers of enchantments.

The storekeeper’s yellowing eyes widened, realisation finally bonking him on his thick head. “That was your—

“Yes, you dimwit,” I snarled, trying to leash the anger that was about to turn rabid.

How he of all people had acquired the vial of my soul was almost as unexpected as how I had had lost it. Well, how it had been stolen from me.

“A-An agent came this morning. Said if I handed it over and told him where it came from, I’d be spared prison time.”

The dented metallic pendant light buzzed overhead like it was running on its last legs, spitting a shade of radioactive green light over us. I could see the veins marbling the bags beneath his eyes, the pores smattered across his skin like dimples. Of all the things, it was those imperfections that reminded me he was human, just as miserable and flawed as everyone else in this forsaken town.

“Did this agent have a name?” I got out cooly, a nice contrast to the heat burning through my already dwindling patience.

“Agent Fazir!”

The name sent a new ripple of anger through my veins. Freaking Agent Fazir, a silver-tongued serpent of a man who epitomised everything I loathed in this world: blind obedience, corruption, no regard for circumstance or hardship. He saw the world in absolutes, as black and white as the ink and parchment the constitution had been written. But I didn’t like his proximity, that the head of the Magical Crimes department was most likely still in Yema at the same time I was.

“And did Agent Fazir say why he needed it?”

“No. Only that it was government property.”

I tsked, disgusted, though hardly surprised. Of course, the government believed they had the right to one’s accidentally harvested soul. It wasn’t enough to siphon off a portion of everyone’s magic, magic which law claimed was owed to the government to stabilise infrastructure and cities. No, if their siphoner made an error, if they took more than their fair share, well that was just too bad. For my soul, my goodness, because when it came down to it, that’s what had been taken from me – a part of my humanity.

It was why my once olive fingers were now stained a striking shade of blue, creeping further and further towards my wrists with each passing month. Three years was too long to exist without a piece of your soul. I needed it back, to stop the creeping illness from spreading, from turning me into a creature I no longer recognised.

I finally loosened my iron grip on the man’s shirt, noting how I had permanently disfigured it. A twinge of guilt struck me like an arthritic joint on a winter morning, realising I had likely ruined one of his only semi-respectable shirts, if this shithole was anything to go by. But at least I hadn’t taken my frustrations out on his face.

My shadow magic bled into my eyes, swelling the onyx flecks with the coppery irises, as I lifted my wand to his wiry neck. “If you tell anyone I was here, your family is forfeit. That’s Casindra, Gilbert and Palios. Understood?” I didn’t mean it, not exactly. As broken and twisted as I may be, I had a line, one I crossed only for those deserving of my wrath.

My words had the desired effect, turning his already greenish pallor absolutely frog-like. “Y-Yes,” he whimpered, feet crashing onto the grimy stone floor with a dull thud.

“Good.” I withdrew my wand, sheathing it back into my waistband.

I pulled the hood of my emerald cloak over my head, letting it hang low across my dark brow as I exited the decrepit store, still fumbling with the matching silken gloves. They were taking some getting used to, but since the Magical Crimes department had put a bounty on my head after a particularly messy run-in with two of their agents earlier this month, I had little choice but to wear them, to conceal my damning fingers.

I set off down the winding gravel road, a certain seedy tavern in mind – The Arrow and Feather. It was where someone like Fazir would go, to toast himself for completing his mission, cementing another victory for the government – the “good guys.” I was ashamed to think that I had believed them to be so, that I had presented myself so willing to be siphoned, sapped of something that was inherently mine without being given a choice. But I wasn’t a naïve eighteen-year-old anymore, didn’t have the same glass-made innocence for the world to shatter. It was a lesson I should’ve learned earlier, before the siphoner, because my soul wasn’t the first irreplaceable thing to be taken from me.

Both my parents had perished in a bridge collapse on their way to work when I was six, the government blaming a reduction in the magic that had been pilfered during that month’s siphoning. Reports claimed the magic shortfall decreased the structural integrity of it and at least half of the roads that led to the glistening, wretched city. None of the wealthier factions had suffered any losses, the city and its surrounding districts the first to be reinforced with siphoned magic. If there was a shortage, it was the lower factions, the working class that suffered. That always suffered.

The evidence was in every crumpling stone edge and missing window of the buildings that flanked me, every swath of fabric rippling in the breeze with more holes in them then Swiss cheese. Even the rats looked hungry, far smaller than the city ones, with a diet of rags and dirt. Magic didn’t flow through towns like this, didn’t exist beyond the ideology that if you did the right thing, you would be looked after.

I bowed my head, eyes low to hide the venom I knew laced them. I was the hunted, the law breaker, the criminal, yet it wasn’t I who was cruel, unjust and destructive.

As I spied the wooden sign of the tavern, blowing in the breeze with a stiff creak, I crossed the street and slowed my pace. As hidden as my face was, I stood out like a busted thumb in my verdant, non-threadbare cloak and solitude. I stuck to the dark folds of the buildings as boots and callused soles scratched against the dry dirt. I knew they didn’t belong to Fazir, whose gait was marked by distinct, piercing clicks, courtesy of his black leather dress shoes that cost more than most here earned in two months.

I reached The Arrow and Feather without spying Fazir through one of the gods-knew-what streaked windows, peering around the corner to get a better look, when the nubbly point of a wand nudged against the small of my back. Trouble. “Going somewhere, witch?”

A current of darkness stirred beneath my skin as the barbed, arrogant tone of Agent Fazir dug its talons into me. “As a matter of fact, to find you.”

The wand pressed firmer into my vertebrae, and a satisfied chuckle left me before I could think better of it. Getting under the agent’s skin wasn’t always wise, but it was always enjoyable. He was so easily ruffled, like a chicken who had just seen a fox.

“Looks like another plan of yours has failed then.”

I ground my molars like a sword against a whetstone, trying to disintegrate the slew of abuse that formed along my tongue. “Just like it did back at the museum all those weeks ago?” I asked sardonically.

It hadn’t been my failures then, but his men’s, a coup to apprehend me gone awry. They had backed me into a corner, left me no clean exit points as they slung killing curses at me like confetti, so I had thrown them right back. Only, my aim was better.

He whirled on me then, body pressing into mine as he wrapped a suited arm around my neck in an uncontrolled inferno of rage. I ducked before he could clamp it down, having foreseen his sloppy retaliation to my words from a mile away. And now, as my blue tinged fist connected with his bulbous nose, while my other found my wand again, I was in control.

A quick freeze curse burst from my wand in an obsidian flash, burying into his stomach, and he dropped like a bag of liquorice. I kicked his wand away from him and stamped a booted foot against his throat, pulling his cloak away from his still torso with my wand. I fingered through the hidden pockets and compartments, looking for what was mine.

“I want my soul back.”

He smiled then, actually smiled, an awful thing that triggered no instinct to smile back, but to cower and hide.

“You would find that funny,” I muttered, digging my boot in deeper until his wheezed.

“You. Can’t ever. Get it. Back,” he rasped, the edge of his lip curling ominously on one side. “You haven’t figured it out yet, have you?”

My brows pulled together, tugged by an invisible thread stitched between them. “Figured what out?”

A pointed look towards my gloved hand. “What it is, why it’s spreading.”

I rolled my eyes. “I know what it is. It’s a side effect of having my damn soul ripped apart by your boss’s siphoner.” And it was spreading the longer it remained separated from me.

He shook his head against the tread of my boot, as much as my throttling pressure would allow, my curse already fading. “Is that what you’ve been telling yourself while you steal and harass and kill your way back to it?”

I dug my boot in deeper, coaxing a pained sound out of him. “It’s the truth,” I seethed, my insides knotting as I combed through the last pocket of his charcoal suit jacket. They untangled the moment I laid eyes on the vial of glittering violet, like stardust had fallen upon lavender and melted into liquid form. My soul.

I popped the cork stopper with my thumb and tipped my head back, the tepid contents cascading down my throat like runny honey. I closed my eyes, half expecting time to rewind, that I would open my eyes and find myself back in that clinical, stale room of my siphoning. For the siphoner, whose name I had later learned to be Halim, to never have made the life-altering error. I would never have hurt him, never have let the pain of my loss drive me to punish him. To kill him, had my soul been preserved.

When I opened my eyes, everything was the same. The gaping chasm in my chest was still there, just as vicious and raw and deep. The anger that neighboured it was still a living, writhing thing, coiled and ready to strike. I risked taking my eyes off Fazir to look at my hands, turning them over once, twice, finding they were still morbidly blue.

Nothing had changed.

“I-I don’t understand,” I spluttered like the man who had pissed his pants, my eyes darting between the supine agent’s as if they held the answers.

Fazir’s eyes were hard and cold, like granite given sentience. There was no warmth to be found in his voice either, only a vitriol that I had heard reflected in my own for the past three years.

“What happened to you was a mistake. A mistake made by a man who had just worked a twenty-hour shift, whose mother had just died only two days prior.”

What? No. Halim had been careless, lazy. He hadn’t so much as blinked or offered anything resembling an apology when he had pulled his wand away from my chest with more than my magic.

The agent continued. “The pain I’m told would have been excruciating, debilitating. But like any wound, the soul can heal.” He chuckled bitterly then, the effect like a cheese grater to my already frayed nerves. “At least, if you hadn’t slain the siphoner the next week, it would have had a chance. But you let the wound fester, infected it with your insecurities and hatred and anger.”

No. No. No! He couldn’t be right. I couldn’t have shredded my soul, prevented it from healing. Halim was responsible, or the government. They had stripped me of my goodness, had forced me to walk a path I never wanted to.

My heart thrashed so violently that I was sure the ossified bars of the ribbed cage holding it would bend. “No,” I managed, retreating from Fazir’s throat, wand downcast, body trembling as if a thousand volts ran through me.

But one word didn’t change anything. Nothing would.

“Yes. Every mistake you made, every wrong you committed, chipped away a little more of you. Those things cannot be undone, least of all with a vial of your soul.”

He couldn’t be right. He couldn’t. But a quiet, buried voice in the back of my head told me he was. My conscience, I realised all too late. It had been there all along, soul or no, whole or fractured, and I had ignored it.

“This is all my fault,” I breathed, finally realising that I had inflicted more damage upon my soul than anyone else ever could. That my soul was mine alone, as were my choices. And I had chosen to be a monster. I was a monster.