Lost Souls

Chapter 5

"I'd offer you a place to sleep, but I know ghosts don't do that," John said scratching his head.

"Are you staying here?" Bethany asked Esmeralda. "In town, I mean."

"I feel like I should," Esmeralda answered. John had just shown Rene out and was now leading Esmeralda and Bethany up the stairs of their home. "I don't think I could just leave you to deal with a demon."

Esmeralda wasn't sure what she could do to help exactly, but she wanted to be useful in some way. She certainly didn't want to run away.

"Back in Green Haven, your only concern was seeing your family and passing on to a better place," Bethany reminded her.

"I have this new physical body now," Esmeralda said. She wasn't sure how this came to be. But it was a complication. "I can't see them without them seeing me now." Esmeralda didn't want her family to see her and have old wounds open up. She wanted to see them and say goodbye more than anything but not at the expense of their sanity.

"Did we give you a physical form?" Bethany asked, looking at her brother.

"No idea," Esmeralda shrugged. "I did learn how to make myself visible before I went..." Esmeralda couldn't bring herself to finish the sentence. "But now I'm back and somehow people can touch me"

"That doesn't make sense," John said. "Our summoning you shouldn't have done that."

"Thank you for helping with that, by the way." Esmeralda was glad there was someone besides Delphine here for Bethany. Someone who was kind and helpful.

"Any excuse to practice magic," he said with a smile. "Practice good magic." He seemed to be correcting himself as his smile faded. His eyes began to droop as if he were retreating into his thoughts.

"Speaking of the summoning," Bethany said as she pushed open a door in the upstairs hallway. They found themselves in a room that was devoid of personality. The room only had a bed with a brown blanket and decorative pillows, a dark vanity with a clean mirror, and a sofa chair in the corner.

Bethany opened a small vanity drawer and pulled out a necklace. A silver chain with a pearl pendant decorated with a silver anchor. The necklace that Esmeralda's father gave her when she was little. The necklace an evil witch stole and bound her spirit to and used as a demented puppet string. The necklace that Esmeralda asked Bethany to hold onto after her family liberated her from that spell. Bethany was meant to give it back to Esmeralda's family once she passed on to a better afterlife. Looking at the necklace reminded Esmeralda that her soul has not found peace, even for a moment.

"You should have this back. We used it to focus the summoning spell," Bethany said, handing it over to her.

Esmeralda took the necklace in her hands and wished more than anything that she could see her father again. She pushed that thought out of her mind as she put it on.

"I still want to get this back to my family. And I still want to move on," Esmeralda said. "But I think I'm meant to help stop this demon somehow."

"Well, if that's your unfinished business," John began. "Is it possible we brought this thing here when we summoned you?"

"How could that be?" Bethany asked.

"I don't know," he answered. "But we were messing with Hell. Something that our spell books couldn't account for." Hell had been behind a closed one way cosmic door for centuries. Nothing could come out, only in. So summoning things from Hell was unheard of until recently when that door was blown wide open. So it would make sense for modern witches to not know how to handle it in their magic.

"So you think when we tried to summon her originally, we got this thing instead?" Bethany asked.

"That would match up," Esmeralda added. "You said you've been trying for a few months and Rene felt that thing for around the same time."

"We messed with something no one understands," John explained as he left the room. He reappears later holding an old brown book. It was thick and the pages were yellowed. The cover looked like it might have had words at one time but the leather was so old it was too hard to read. "We could have accidentally invited something else here and somehow given you a physical body while messing around with this stuff. What did you say this thing looked like?"

He opened the book and began to flip through its pages as Esmeralda and Bethany explained the monster's form and features.

"A Soul Eater," he sighed after finding a page. "Looks like one hasn't been seen in centuries and there isn't a whole lot of information on them. But they feed on ghosts."

"That sounds like what Rene was sensing," Bethany said.

"Well then there's a problem," John said, clenching his jaw. "Apparently the more ghosts it feeds on the stronger it gets. It will gain abilities, most of which are unknown. Due to the fact that one of these things hasn't been seen in forever. But the one ability that has been catalogued... it's not good."

"What is it?" Esmeralda was afraid to ask but she asked anyway.

"It will eventually gain the ability to go kill living humans," he said. "Not just kill them. It'll do the same thing it does to ghosts. Devour them. Erase them so there is nothing left and rob them of an afterlife."

"And I'm a town like this, with ghosts around every corner, it's like an all you can eat buffet."

"Well, shit," Esmeralda said, allowing her head to spin. How was she supposed to help stop something like that? Especially when she was the exact thing it wants to eat.