Sebastian

Abigail looked at Sebastian. “Is there someplace we could make a call?” she asked.

He nodded, pointing at the door, he motioned right, “Second door on the left,” he said.

Abbie nodded, then looked at Angelica. The pair exited the room. The brunette, Marissa leaned back in her chair, elbows on the armrest, hands together, fingers interlocked. She bore a friendly smile on her face.

The meeting with Abigail had left Sebastian unnerved, the cubes clinking in his glass as he raised the scotch to his mouth. He had been around magic in some way or another for most of his life and had never before witness such a raw demonstration power. The brown haired woman Marissa had stripped him of all of his protective wards and reduced him to the size of a mouse without so much as blinking an eye. There was a pistol in the top drawer of his desk. He considered it for a split second, thought better of it. Setting the glass down, he smiled back, a nervous expression. “Are you from the area?” he asked.

She arched an eyebrow. “I have a residence in the city,” she replied. “Nothing quite so, ostentatious as all this,” she added, separating her hands.

He nodded.

“You seem a little, nervous shall we say?” she asked.

He laughed. “More than little. There is no shame in admitting I am utterly and completely out of my depth here. Had someone told me that a young woman such as yourself might unman me without a thought, I would have called them mad. I have seen a fair number of inexplicable things in my life, but never have I seen power used as easily or as effortlessly as you did,” he confessed, feeling no shame at deferring to her superior mastery of the power.

She chuckled softly. “A lifetime of practice,” she replied, bringing her hands back together.

He laughed, “To my eyes, I doubt there would be thirty candles on your next birthday cake,” he said.

She smiled. “You made an assumption of my abilities based on what you saw, do not make the same mistake again,” she cautioned.

He nodded and cleared his throat. “What do you do in the city?” he asked, trying to prevent an awkward silence by filling it with more idle banter.

“Couples therapy, of a sort,” she replied. “Helping redefine boundaries and priorities for husbands experiencing, shall we say, distance in their appreciation of their significant others.”

“Oh,” he acknowledged, nodding his head.

“What is you do when you’re not masterminding a secret international organization?” she asked, turning the questions back on to him.

“Hardly a mastermind, with everyone else gone, it just sort of fell on my shoulders by default,” he replied. “I was content to sit on a beach in Chetumal drinking scotch and unearthing Mayan treasures.”

She smiled. “Sometimes we a thrust into situations or circumstances beyond our control,” she sympathized, eyes sparkling.

Grabbing his glass off his desk, “I’ll drink to that,” he said, elevating the glass toward her before bringing it to his lips and draining it.

The two blonde women returned.

“Everything okay?” Angelica asked, looking from Sebastian to Marissa.

“We were just bonding,” answered the brunette, smile etched on comely her face.

Angelica looked to Sebastian, saying, “I need to know more about this book. This woman you mentioned, who is she, where can she be reached and did she have access to it?”

He nodded. “I can try to set something up, Vivienne and I go back,” he said.

“Good. I would like to ask her some questions. I also want to know about the woman who appeared in place of Arthur Thelwell, what can you tell me of her?”

“When Arthur let it be known he would not be swayed in his pursuit of performing the ritual, I assigned a man to him, a very capable man in most any situation, Oleg Grigori. When Oleg phoned in to report his findinds, he said when he inspected the ritual site, there was no trace of Arthur, just shredded clothes consistent with Arthur’s. In his place there was a nude girl, young, teens, early twenties, long dark hair, strange, that was his word, strange yellow eyes-“

“Did you say yellow eyes?” interrupted Marissa, expression serious, an intensity in her eyes as she leaned forward.

Sebastian recoiled slightly and nodded. “That’s what Oleg said. ‘Strange yellow eyes.’ Does that mean something?” he asked, curious at the sudden change in her disposition.

Marissa knew her two companions were young and inexperienced and maybe wouldn’t understand the significance of Sebastian’s statements about the eye color of the woman who had appeared, but she knew. Yellow eyes on a hominid were very specific to only one type of being in creation, a voracious creature called a Soulreaper, also called a Harvester.

Angelica looked in askance to Marissa, a puzzled expression on her flawless face,

Marissa shook her head, a quick motion from side to side. “Not here,” she said, rising from her chair.

“Is the team bringing her in in some type of danger?” Sebastian asked, pulling out his cell phone and frowning. “They are overdo to report in by almost an hour,” he said as the women were leaving the room.

“It is not for me to say at this moment,” Marissa replied curtly from the door. “I want to know where that team is, and every other possible thing you know relating to Arthur Thelwell’s mysterious disappearance,” she commanded, her tone brooking no compromise.

He nodded meekly.

Taking out her cell phone, Marissa called up the contact for Hildegarde and looked at it a moment. For all the world to see, Hildegarde Helvet was nothing more than the very efficient personal assistant to Clarissa Heller of Heller international. What all but a very select few knew was that Clarissa Heller was the physical incarnation of the Dark Goddess herself, one of twelve extremely powerful divine entities who collectively created the Covenant or Divine Contract. The Covenant provided very specific rules and guidelines for comportment for beings of power interacting with lesser beings gifted with free will. The Covenant was structures in such a way that even the deities themselves were bound to it. Transgressions against the Covenant were dealt with strictly and harshly by the twelve. The only being seemingly exempted from the rigid laws of the Covenant was Chaos himself, who more oft than not took the form of an adolescent boy delighting in making mischief.

Soulreapers were throwback types of beings, lurking deep in the shadowy recesses of an earlier more primordial time, when the universe was young, hot and predatory. They were harbingers of death, destruction, and mayhem. Years gone by, The Goddess of Death, called the Pale Queen, cursed all Soulreapers to have golden yellow eyes so that all would know their true nature, so that all might recognize them no matter the face they wore.

The appearances of Soulreapers on this world were few and far between, no more than a dozen instances in last several thousands of years. How humankind stumbled upon the power to summon such creatures has remained a lingering mystery. Frenzied creatures upon arrival, wreaking havoc, most were destroyed or banished back to whence they came, but once in memory has a Soulreaper been subdued and salvaged, the savage beast yoked in, only once.

Marissa touched the phone icon.

“Yes?” answered Hilde.

“I have reason to believe these fools may have unleashed a Soulreaper on the world,” Marissa said, tone calm despite the concern she felt.

In her home on the opposite side of the continent, Hilde leaned back on her couch, running her free hand over her forehead and through her honey colored hair, her yellow eyes glowed menacingly.