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“My robe doesn’t have any pockets.” Dax sighed, his shoulders slumping. “Looks like I’m about to get wet.”
Tomi turned in his seat, an eyebrow raised. “Can you…uh…breath underwater in your other form?”
“We’re about to find out.” Dax opened the door and pulled off his socks and shoes, then stripped down to his underwear.
“No bare ass on my seat!” Tomi barked.
Standing up, Dax stripped down to nothing, tossed his undies into the car, and flipped Tomi the bird before dashing off to the shoreline. At least he’d have dry clothes when he got back from his little expedition.
He stuck a toe into the water, then drew it back, shivering. Sighing, he decided to make the switch now. He didn’t perceive temperature in the same way with his other form. With an exhalation, he sloughed off his human form. As soon as the last remnant of living flesh disappeared, his black robe settled over his head and shoulders, draping him in darkness.
Water tugged at the hem of his robe as he waded into the shallows of Redemption Reservoir. Holding his breath as he sank up to his waist, he paused for a moment before forging on. The thread felt much stronger in this form. Too strong.
Something wasn’t right with the corpse.
He forged on, sinking over his head. Even though water filled the space inside his ribs, he felt no urge to inhale sharply to gasp in air. He relaxed, his clavicles and shoulder blades dropping.
Testing the strength of the thread, he tugged on it lightly then more firmly. It held. With a gentle push of his toes, he floated up and pulled himself along the thread, moving much quicker than trudging along the debris—natural and improperly disposed of garbage—silt, and rocks of the reservoir’s bottom.
If he’d had lungs, he’d have expelled air in a stream of bubbles as a white shape practically leapt out of the darkness. Stopping, he looked at it—hollow-eyed skull to hollow-eyed skull.
Whoever it had belonged to must have been down here for a long time to be so thoroughly stripped down to bare bone, though it appeared algae and other water weeds were enjoying the new surfaces to grow on.
Reaching out with his empty hand, he fumbled for the thread that had tied this person to life. Nothing remained except a defleshed skeleton and a thread cleanly shorn. Whoever had once inhabited this osseous cage had moved on to whatever afterlife it believed in. A quick tug of the first thread put him back on course.
By the time he found the end of the thread, the limited moonlight barely penetrated this deep. But Dax could still see the frozen expression of horror on the man’s face, captured in his final moment of life. However, unlike the last skeleton, this one was fully fleshed and still inhabited by its former denizen.
That’s why the thread felt a bit thicker than normal. It didn’t matter what this man had done in life, Dax doubted he deserved to be trapped inside his decaying corpse at the bottom of the dirty-watered reservoir.
Chapter Five
Staring into the vacant eyes of the cadaver, Dax tried to ignore the impermanent parts—the flesh—to focus on what was going on with the soul. The rigor of the terrified expression captured in its moment of death mirrored the feeling of the soul trapped in its body.
Dax had seen souls trapped in bodies before, recently too. Jason, his bartender who’d been murdered, had been trapped inside his body by the bullet meant for Dax. This felt different. There was a sense of stasis about this soul. This one felt trapped in an ongoing torment beyond just having not moved on.
Letting go of the life thread, Dax forced his feet down so he could slowly walk around the body without all the information the life thread wanted to spill into his head distracting him.
He made two passes before he stopped, a gossamer thread—nearly imperceptible—floated off in another direction. As he reached out to grasp it, he paused before actually making contact with his bony thumb and forefinger. A sinister power pulsed off the line.
Touching it lightly, he released it immediately and let his mind sort through the brief surge of information. He didn’t want to alert whoever or whatever was at the other end of the thread that it had been detected. Concentrating, he let his vision blur out.
That was it. Whatever was at the other end of the thread had the same feel and essence as the creature that had killed the man. And the energy pulsing along the thread, away from the body, painted a sick picture. The creature had linked itself to the man’s soul to feed on it.
If he didn’t do something about it, the soul would disappear entirely to power the creature, and it would never get a chance to move on to its next destination.
Dax had never weighed the souls of the departed. He’d never judged them. Never measured their deeds against their villainies. His task had been to sever the soul and help them move on. His position wasn’t to judge this man’s crimes. The man had clearly died perpetrating one, but he’d paid the price.
Reaching into the aether, Dax pulled out his scythe. He stepped away from the body and brought the scythe around in a powerful arc, slicing the gossamer line feeding the heinous creature.
A snap and a pulse of water pushed him back, blowing his robe out behind him. He laughed, his bottom jaw clacking against his top jaw. A few fish swam around inside his ribs.
Concentrating on the man’s life thread, he found it. The soul still hadn’t moved on. Whatever the creature did to the man had kept the soul firmly ensconced inside the body. No doubt it was a mechanism to allow it to return and continue its feast at its leisure if it were to be disturbed. And without knowledge of the beast, Dax had no idea if killing it would allow the soul to move on or if it would remain trapped for eternity until it eventually disintegrated into nothingness.
He nudged the body with the end of the scythe’s shaft and the body bobbed away before floating back as it reached the end of the chain tethering it to the cinder block holding it down. Stepping back and spinning around, he brought the scythe around and sheared through the man’s body, bisecting the chest and cutting the heart in two. The vibrations along the blade as the thread dragged over it, catching on a few nicks, told him he’d made contact.
And then it snapped. The soul would be free to move on.
The gentle current caught the sliced off top of the body and carried it away with a slight upward trajectory. Sometime in the next day or so, someone would find half a man floating on the surface. It would likely ruin their day, not to mention the day of whoever the man worked for. Dax didn’t mind that part a bit.
