Rise Read online

  Ekkehardt was burning. His skin, his intestines, even his hair. Had one of the candles caught on his sleeve or— or—

  The shriek that filled the air didn’t come from him. He looked up through blood-blistered eyes at Zven, sitting upright and screaming the most inhuman way he had ever heard. He knew the expression blood-curdling was meant to be figurative, but what he could see by candle light actually seemed to make his blood thicken and stop in his veins.

  “Zven?”

  Ekkehardt coughed and threw up more blood.

  Zven dragged what nails he had left down his face, pulling flesh off like milk skin with a fork. The flame started in the middle of his stomach, right where the sigil was, and expanded in the span of a heartbeat until his body was fully engulfed. It rose up in the same shape as the mirages, hovering over the body for two breaths before it went out. Zven’s body crumpled into an indistinguishable pile of ash.

  “No… No, no, no, no, no.”

  Ekkehardt wiped his face with the back of his hand and crawled to the pile. No, this wasn’t right. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. He’d brought Zven back. He was supposed to be alive, not— not this. He couldn’t be gone. There had to be something left, anything. Some piece of him, of his clothes, of bone. Regular fire didn’t just disintegrate bodies like this.

  But there was nothing left.

  Nothing left at all.

  15

  What the hell happened to you?”

  It wasn't the most sympathetic thing Jakob could have opened with, but given the circumstances, Ekkehardt couldn't hold it against him.

  He didn't remember coming home last night. He didn't remember anything after Zven’s body burst into flames, but he had somehow gotten home and collapsed in the middle of the living room. He was still curled up on the floor. It was cold and hard and only made the pain worse. Every inch of his body ached. He felt like he'd been shot again, only everywhere instead of just his chest.

  “Are you on acid or something?” Jakob demanded. “Are you doing acid? You're doing acid. What the fuck, Ekkehardt!”

  “Don't yell at him,” Liese said.

  “’Don't yell at him?’ He's covered in blood! We thought he was dead. How am I not supposed to yell?”

  Jakob was right.

  He hadn't noticed it at first, still only semi-conscious, but Jakob was right. It matted into his hair and clothes, and the taste of it lingered in his mouth.

  Liese helped him to his feet. Dizziness overcame him, and he had to hold onto her for support.

  “What is that smell? God, did you sleep in a trash can? And is that— Is that a fingernail?”

  She reached up and touched something that was sticking out of his face, but quickly pulled her hand back.

  It was a nail. His nail, Ekkehardt realized as he yanked it from his cheek. The one on his index was missing. Not just that one. Most of his nails on both his hands were gone, and his fingertips were raw as though he'd tried to claw his way out of something. As his vision focused, he saw what must have been the real reason Jakob thought he was on drugs.

  All over the floor and walls were the bloody sigils from Nina's journal. He looked back down at his fingertips. How hard would he have had to drag his fingers against the wall to ruin his hands this way?

  “I don't remember doing this,” he whispered.

  He didn't remember doing any of this, but he must have. Who else would it have been? Liese? Jakob? Frau Epps down the street?

  “Did you kill somebody?” Jakob demanded.

  “Jakob! Of course he didn't.” Though despite her words, Liese didn't seem entirely convinced. She glanced back at him. “Right?”

  “I don't know,” he admitted. His voice cracked, and his throat felt full of glass. “I don't think so.”

  “Oh, he doesn't think so! Then where the hell did all this blood come from?”

  He looked down at himself to see how bad the damage was. He'd never bandaged his arm, and it showed. Most of the blood was on his left side where his arm had been pressed. It had seeped all the way to the middle of his shirt. He hadn't realized it would bleed so much. The wound must have been reopened again and again through the night for there to be this much. There was some on his jeans, mostly from the torn areas in his knees. He couldn't see his own face but he could feel something dry and caked on that cracked when he spoke.

  “It's mine.”

  “What?”

  Ekkehardt wasn't sure which of them spoke first.

  “The blood. It's mine.”

  He pushed his sleeve up, wincing as it dragged over his skin, to show them the—

  Scar?

  “What are we looking at?” Liese asked.

  “I don't understand,” Ekkehardt said, mostly to himself.

  There was no open wound. There wasn't even a scab. The sigil had healed over as if it had been made years ago instead of hours. It was even more faded than the lines he'd cut to get the blood he needed for the ritual.

  “Did you try to kill yourself?”

  Jakob's voice echoed off the walls.

  “What? No! I—” He had tried bringing his dead boyfriend back to life. Jesus Christ, he couldn't tell them that. What the hell was he thinking? The truth was worse. “I had a really bad acid trip. It was stupid, and it won't happen again.”

  Why did he feel like he was about to be sent to his room to think about what he’d done?

  Jakob and Liese both sighed and exchanged looks.

  “Go get cleaned up,” Jakob said. “We'll start cleaning up in here.”

  Ekkehardt knew he should have offered to at least help, but just standing took every bit of energy he had. Liese helped him to the bathroom mostly, Ekkehardt suspected, so he wouldn't trail blood against the wall.

  “We'll be right down the hall,” she said.

  Despite her reassuring smile, there was unease in her eyes. She didn't want to leave him alone.

  “I'll be fine.”

  He wasn't sure he believed it, either.

  The hot water felt so unbelievably nice on his skin. He didn’t think he would ever appreciate being clean as much as he did that first night at home after he’d been shot, but this was a whole other story. God, it was such a relief to watch the water run down the drain, washing all the blood and dirt and evidence of last night down with it. Closing his eyes, he could almost imagine that it hadn’t actually happened. That it was all just an awful nightmare. That he hadn’t dug up his dead boyfriend and watched his body burst into flames.

  But as he opened his eyes and stared down at the old-looking scar in his arm, he had to face the truth of it. It had happened. All of it had happened. It hadn’t worked, and now there was no chance of ever bringing Zven back. He wouldn’t even be able to give him a proper funeral now.

  He slumped down against the shower wall and hung his head in his hands as the spray cooled beyond comfort. What had he done? He had desecrated a body. There was no mythos in which Zven’s spirit would be able to rest now. He’d made everything so much worse now, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it, not when the last pages of Nina’s journal were missing and—

  Ekkehardt’s head snapped up.

  Nina’s journal. He didn’t remember grabbing it from the grave. Never mind everything else he must have left, he needed that journal! Her name was in it. It could be traced back to him. If anybody besides himself found it—

  He shut the water off and clambered out of the tub, yanking his towel off the rack. He pushed his way out of the bathroom, still dripping wet, and paced to his bedroom, leaving a soapy trail in his wake. Clothes, he needed clothes. He needed to get dressed so he could— There was no way Liese would let him use her car again, and he didn’t think either of them would let him out if they could stop him. There was always the window. It was only a one-story house, going out the window was trivial. He tossed his towel onto his desk right next to Nina’s journal and turned to his dresser, fumbling through the drawers for something to—


  ‘Wait a goddamn fucking second.’

  Nina’s notebook?

  What was it doing on his desk? He— Had he brought it in? No, it would have been covered in blood, and he hadn’t made it this far last night. It must have been Jakob or Liese. Maybe he’d left it in the car, or they’d found it in the living room.

  Except there wasn’t a drop of blood on it. He’d been soaked after cutting himself. There was no way it was this clean.

  He flipped through it, not entirely sure what he was expecting to see, but aside from being dirty, there was nothing out of the ordinary about it. Well, nothing besides what was already out of the ordinary about it. He looked up and turned around, leaning back against his desk. An irrational part of him had hoped the missing pages would somehow miraculously reappear. They didn’t. But something did appear in front of him.

  The mirages were back. Two, three… five of them were in his room, hovering and floating around like half-filled helium balloons.

  “Zven?” he asked with irrational hope.

  Zven was gone. He had watched Zven disappear. He wasn’t here anymore.

  Still, he watched each spirit move intently. The one closest to him shifted, but it hardly seemed like a response. He sat down on his bed with a shuddery sigh, clutching Nina’s journal as if it would disappear at any moment. For all he knew, it could. It had appeared randomly, hadn't it? Who was to say it wouldn't disappear the same way, too?

  16

  There was fire in his dreams. It surrounded him, swallowed him, and he couldn't even scream.

  It was the same thing every night. Zven would be in front of him, blood seeping into his clothes from the wounds spread across his chest and stomach. The red spots would grow until they met and stained his entire shirt. He would start to scream and scream and scream and the blood would be replaced with fire. Ekkehardt would try to reach out, only to find himself frozen as the flames rose and filled the empty space they were in.

  And then he would wake up, covered in sweat and screaming Zven’s name. The first few nights, Liese and Jakob would rush in to make sure he was okay. They didn’t check in on him anymore. It should have bothered him, but it was a relief.

  He wasn’t alone when he woke up tonight, though. There was something on top of him, weighing down on his chest and stomach, pressing down on his throat. He gasped and thrashed against it.

  His room was hot. So hot. So hot, he couldn’t breathe.

  Someone’s hands were grabbing, tugging at him. Not tugging, yanking. Pulling. He opened his eyes. He was still dreaming. The fire was still there, eating his curtains and creeping across his carpet. He could barely see the flames through the thick, black smoke. It was like a blanket. Maybe that was where the expression came from. Blanket of smoke.

  “Ekkehardt! Ekkehardt, for the love of God, wake up!” Jakob screamed.

  Jakob had never been in his dream before. And he’d never actually felt the heat. It was… It was…

  “Ekkehardt!”

  He jerked upright, inhaling a lungful of black smoke and regretting it immediately. He choked. His eyes burned and watered and if not for Jakob dragging him out of his room, he probably would have walked right into the wall. Actually, he would have still been in bed. In the same bed that was currently being swallowed by flames.

  There was a shape in the middle of the fire. A person.

  “Zven!”

  It came out as a cough. If Jakob understood him, or even heard him, he didn’t say anything. He was too busy pulling Ekkehardt out of the house and dumping him unceremoniously on the lawn. Who knew he was so strong? And who knew grass could feel so good? And air! Clean air. He took breath after breath until he was nearly hyperventilating. There were Feuerwehr putting out the fire that only seemed to be in his bedroom. It was difficult to see the dark blue uniforms against the night sky.

  Fire escaped through the blown-out window. For a brief moment, it came together in a cohesive shape, a very familiar cohesive shape.

  “Zven,” he whispered.

  “Zven’s gone,” Jakob said, lying back on the grass.

  Liese was across the street, screaming that she didn’t know this was going to happen.

  “He did this,” Ekkehardt said between coughs.

  “Ekkehardt. Zven is gone,” Jakob reminded him.

  “He tried to kill me.”

  Jakob rolled over to face him. Ekkehardt was still staring at the spot where Zven had formed. Even if it had only been for a few seconds…

  “The hell are you talking about? At the Wall?”

  Oh, crap, he knew? Of course he knew. Did anybody believe it was nothing more than a coincidence they were both shot on the same night? Probably not.

  “Right now. He did this.”

  Jakob groaned and rolled back onto the grass, coughing.

  “You’re oxygen deprived. Your brain is making shit up.”

  “You saw that, though, didn’t you? The fire out the window, what it did.”

  “It’s called backdraught. What are you trying to say, that Zven started that fire? What, he’s setting fires from the other side? Come on, Ekkehardt.”

  Ekkehardt shook his head. His next words were cut off by the smoke he tried to force out of his lungs.

  Zven tried to kill him. He could have killed all of them. Ekkehardt wasn’t going to let it happen again. He just had to figure out what to do about it.

  * * *

  Liese walked through what was left of Ekkehardt’s room with her hand on the wall. Jakob and Ekkehardt watched from the doorway. The damage was mostly superficial. As superficial as a fire could be. The curtains and the carpet and most of his bed were destroyed, but the structural integrity of the wall was intact. Still, Ekkehardt was sleeping on the couch. The room still reeked of smoke. Most of the house did, actually, but not as much as his room.

  “What are you looking for?” Ekkehardt asked.

  “You were right,” she said quietly. “There was nothing here.”

  “What do you mean, ‘nothing?’”

  “She means that Zven didn’t start the fire,” Jakob clarified.

  “She just said I was right.”

  “Well— Liese, help me out here.”

  Liese stopped walking and looked back at them. Her expression was hard. It made Ekkehardt uneasy. There was nothing she could say that he wanted to hear, was there?

  “When I say there’s nothing here, I mean that it’s as if this room doesn’t exist. There’s nothing here. I feel like I’m blindfolded in a dark room in the middle of the night at the bottom of the ocean.”

  Jakob and Ekkehardt exchanged confused looks. It was nice to see Jakob didn’t understand what the hell she was talking about any more than Ekkehardt did.

  “This means spirits,” she said.

  Jakob laughed.

  “This means you’re both insane,” he said

  Liese gave him a stern look, and he held his hands up in apology.

  “Like I said, I think Ekkehardt is right. Zven was a pyromancer. He was a witch who could create and control fire.”

  “Are we forgetting the part where Zven is dead? Dead men can’t set fires,” Jakob pointed out. “Unless we’re suggesting that his… spirit did this? Come on. How would something like that even happen?”

  “Actually…” Ekkehardt cleared his throat. “That— That might be my fault. I—” He let out a shaky breath. He didn’t like the way they were looking at him, like he was out of his mind. He knew damn well that he was, but they didn’t need to confirm it. “He was going to go with or without me. But I didn’t even try to stop him or save him. I didn’t… even try.”

  “None of this was your fault,” Jakob assured, resting a comforting hand on his shoulder and squeezing.

  “I know.” He didn’t. “But what was I supposed to do? Just let him… be dead?”

  Liese’s expression went from serious to sympathetic to concerned to horrified, while Jakob was stuck at confused. The unease moved to full discomfort
.

  “Ekkehardt. What did you do?” she demanded.

  “I—”

  “What did you do?”

  “I tried to bring him back!”

  “You idiot!”

  She crossed the room in three long strides and slapped him, hard, across the face. He stumbled back, but she grabbed him to hold him upright, and she slapped him again for good measure. His face stung hard enough to bring tears to his eyes. The inside of his cheek scraped against his teeth. He could taste blood on the edge of his tongue. Jesus Christ, since when could she hit so damn hard?

  Jakob tried to pry her off him with little success.

  “Liese, that’s enough.”

  “You absolute fucking moron! You thought you could play God? With our friend? How could you do this to him?”

  “I— I didn’t mean— I thought I could fix this.”

  It came out as a question. Ekkehardt wondered now how he ever could have thought he could fix anything.

  She stepped back and pushed her hands through her hair with a frustrated scream. Wait, did she know anything about this? About spirits and— and— and what he’d done? Oh, God, why hadn’t he talked to her first? He should have talked to her first, she was a Seer, of course she knew all about these sorts of things. If he hadn’t been so desperate, if he’d just thought this through—

  There had to be a way to fix this. There had to be something he could do. He could fix this, he could—

  Wasn’t that train of thought exactly how he’d gotten into this mess in the first place?

  “Where did you even figure out how to do something like that?” Liese demanded.

  “My aunt’s journal. She— She did it with…” Except Ekkehardt didn’t know if she’d really done it, did he? All he knew was that she’d planned on trying it. Whether she actually had or not… He had no idea. “What did I do? I mean— What happened when I…”

  He trailed off. She knew what he did, he didn’t need to repeat it.

  “As soon as a spirit leaves a body, it fragments. When you try to bring it back, you bring back fragments.” She paused between the last three words for emphasis. “You can’t bring back a complete spirit. Spirits are not people. The soul is what keeps us running, but it isn’t us. Without brains, souls are… raw energy. Dead souls are imprints of their final moments.” She turned to Jakob. “My aunt sees spirits. She’s an expert.”