Page 11 of Keeper of All

The door opened silently, not a squeak, moan or groan. He flicked the light switch on the wall by the entrance, his fingertips buzzing. He inhaled sharply the damp scent he remembered from last time. Except there was another smell, a stronger one… decay. He’d smelled it often enough to know it was that of someone dying.

He froze where he was, his eyes narrowing on the long passageway in front of him. Seeing nothing, he carefully removed the pack from his back and lowered it soundlessly to the ground.

Scanning continually, he crept down the passageway, alert and feeling like he was heading to the edge of a massive cliff about to free fall without a parachute. It was unnerving him in ways that made it hard to concentrate on finding what was setting off all the alarm bells inside him. It was more than one thing. This he understood down to the very fiber of himself. Un-fucking-nerving!

He scanned the empty shelves and got a feeling of grief so profound he came to a shuddering stop, the sweat of his skin turning to shards of icy dread.

“You came,” a whispery voice murmured behind him.

Ekon spun around in a fast blur. His vision wavered once more. Hair whipped into his face, obscuring his view for a brief moment. He reached out to hold on to the closest shelf and got a bolt of electricity up his arm which glowed like a blub being switched on. “Fuck!” he exclaimed, snatching back his hand.

“You have nothing to fear… the magic won’t harm you,” the man said in a thready voice.

Blinking, Ekon stared at the tiny… man?

He couldn’t have been more than five feet in height and weighed less than a small child he was so thin. Thin enough that if he turned sideways, he would disappear. His hair was longer than Ekon's and pure white, flowing over rail thin shoulders. He was dressed in a lavender robe that made his pale skin appear gray. It could also have been because the dude looked like a strong wind would blow him apart.

He seemed diminished somehow, and for an unknown reason this increased Ekon’s growing sense of dread. “Who are you?”

His head titled to the side in a regal move. “The original keeper of all.” His voice was a little stronger, but not by much. He lifted a boney finger pointing to the empty shelves. “They took a part of me.” The words were weighed with sadness.

Ekon frowned and took a step toward the man, unsure what that meant. Did he see these records as his? Is that what a ‘keeper of all’ is? “There are lots of records here, why would they matter?”

Sorrow, the man wore it like a cloak around him. “They all matter, as you will come to understand.”

“Stop with the cryptic crap. You’ve been plaguing my dreams—it is you, right?” He wanted clarity, despite knowing it was. Everything about this man tugged at that feeling he’d sensed growing inside him. The expansion felt inevitable as he held watery blue eyes. “What are you?” Maybe it was more important to discover that?

“I am eternal fae,” he simply said, like it answered all the questions running through Ekon’s mind.

“If you’re eternal fae, then why do you look like you’re dying?” It came out harsher than he intended, but the sense of urgency was back when the fae seemed to waver in front of Ekon’s gaze.

“The records and lost souls,” he whispered, his hand floated like a cloud of dust.

Shit.

“What does that mean?” he asked, stepping closer, heart thudding painfully hard, peering closer, convinced he could see through the fae.

“You are the keeper of all, my son, you must now hold the burden.”

The words floated as if part of the air surrounding Ekon as he dove forward to catch what became a cloud of ashes. His fingers moved through what had once been the fae, and Ekon’s eyes rolled into his skull, his vision turning white before becoming a kaleidoscope of colors.

“What the fuck did you do?” a voice growled, sending Ekon’s already overloaded system into chaos. His gaze clashed with fathomless pools of black, and his body readied itself.

Before he could process who this man—panther was—the surrounding ash cloud coated his exposed skin and sank into him, becoming part of him. His mind became a blur of visions. A reel of images of the records filling the vast space—and it was much bigger than the eye could see—until there came devastation from what was taken. It weighed heavily on Ekon, pressing so hard that he lost the ability to breathe. He clawed at his throat, struggling to get to the surface, to find himself before the world turned black and he tumbled into the darkness—lost.

Chapter Six

Mao

“Fuck me with a feather duster.” Mao leaped forward, managing to catch the slender-looking man in his arms before the guy face-planted onto the floor, his body covered in some sort of dust, which Mao would swear had been a person—a small person, but a person nonetheless—just seconds before his brain, body, and soul were hit with so many differing sensations. It was going to take a minute for him to work through them.

The need to get outside was overwhelming. The bunker stunk of old papers and that musty smell from old libraries, and that was without the scent of decay that lingered in the air.

Hefting the young man into his arms, holding him against his chest, Mao carefully carried him out of the door and into the forest.

Where to go? Where to go? It was tempting to head straight back to his car. Clearly Mao’s plans had changed in some way, and for him, that meant he needed the space to regroup, think, and then work on Plan B—whatever that looked like.

Mao hadn’t moved more than about a hundred feet from the bunker when he felt a change in the air—as though a storm cloud was coming even when there wasn’t a gray cloud in sight above the canopy of trees. Worse, the young man in his arms whimpered and grimaced, his body twitching as though he was in pain.