“Last time you two met, we didn’t even have Arwen. Not to mention such a spunky granddaughter,” Grandma Corrine chimed in, visibly amused. Her expression changed for a moment, as Herbert sets his sights on her next. Grandpa was right: as soon as I rejected that nagging feeling, it went away. This was as close to a trained ghoul as anyone would ever get. These were primal creatures, curious and deceitful, and there was only so much control one could exert on them in exchange for good behavior. The witches’ rough punishments made sense for those who didn’t obey.
Herbert, or any other ghoul, for that matter, was basically like a shark or a tiger on a leash. There were limits to the control one could put on them. Their nature would never truly vanish.
“He’s a little out of it,” Grandpa said. “He’s adjusting to this new time, to the idea that he’s been locked up for so long. I’ll have to reward him later with some fresh meat.”
In part, I realized that ghouls and the Eritopian shape-shifters were physically similar. The same tall and wiry frame, ashen skin, and killer instincts. Only, the ghouls could make themselves disappear, moving between the planes of the living and the dead as they wished. In that sense, I had a feeling they were one level over the jinni and the fae, whose invisibility abilities were slightly more physical, tied to the world of the living. Speaking of, it had been a while since I’d seen Serena’s “pets,” the four shape-shifters that Viola had tamed during the war with Azazel. I made a mental note to ask about them the next time I saw her.
“So, what, we give him a few minutes to take it all in?” Grandma replied, offering Herbert a most sympathetic smile. “I’m sorry you were in that box for all these years, Herbert. It’s just that… we don’t really use ghouls in the Sanctuary anymore, but we don’t let them loose, either. I hope you’ll forgive us.”
Herbert whispered something and glanced at Grandpa Ibrahim, who, in return, gave him a brief nod. “I promise you, I won’t keep you locked in there for years on end ever again,” he said. I understood that the ghoul was genuinely upset and worried he’d be pencil-boxed once more, after we’d finished this uncanny meeting.
They exchanged a few more ghoulish words, and it seemed like a rather heated conversation. It wasn’t often that I saw Grandpa Ibrahim’s temple vein swell like that. I had a feeling this wasn’t going in the desired direction.
“What’s wrong?” Grandma asked, frowning.
“I want him to tell us about Reapers and Death,” Grandpa said. “He seemed surprised to learn that we know about them, but he’s trying to set conditions before he speaks.”
“Conditions?” I replied, somewhat startled. Nothing good could come out of a ghoul setting the terms in a discussion such as this.
“I’d thought I’d allow him out of the box more often, going forward, in exchange for his cooperation. But he won’t have it,” Grandpa said, while the ghoul’s eyes darted from me to him and to Grandma and back. “He doesn’t want to be a prisoner anymore.”
Grandma Corrine grinned at Herbert. “You do realize I could just take you back to the Sanctuary and have you severely punished for this, right?”
The ghoul whispered his thread of unintelligible words, narrowing his beady eyes at her. Grandpa Ibrahim sighed. “He says they can do whatever they want to him. It’s better than being cooped up in that pencil box. Either way, unless he’s granted freedom, he won’t help us.”
“Then we’ll just get another ghoul to tell us,” Grandma shot back, standing firmly against the ghoul’s demand.
Herbert replied, and Grandpa translated. “He says every other ghoul will tell you the same thing. Reapers are quite aggressive when it comes to their existence and the secrecy surrounding it. Whatever is going on outside this castle, it’s not something the Reapers planned for, and they will have contingency plans in place to silence anyone whom they might identify as our source of information. No one must know, among those who are living, about Reapers and Death. It’s a rule set in stone. The ghouls are abominations, and they know that if they reveal the secrets of Reapers, they will be hunted even more.”
“Well, they’re already hunted, aren’t they? Pretty sure the Reapers don’t want them around, not after the mess so many of the ghouls made in previous years,” I said.
Herbert let out a long hiss, followed by more whispers. Grandpa Ibrahim pinched the bridge of his nose. “You’re not making this any easier, Herbert. Whatever happened to that tame ghoul you once were?” he asked, and Herbert’s reply made him scoff. “He says that even the tamest of ghouls will think twice before spilling the secrets of Reapers. At least if he’s free, he can evade them. If he’s captive anywhere, even in the Sanctuary, the Reapers will find him and destroy him. According to him, nothingness awaits. Ghouls don’t get to move on into the realm of the dead, whatever that may be. Therefore, despite his respect and affection toward me, Herbert will not cooperate unless he’s granted his freedom.”
That was a hard pill to swallow. Why would we let a ghoul loose? They ate people. They ate people’s souls, if given the chance, and if our theories about the fallen fae were correct, an entire buffet would await Herbert right here on Calliope, if we were to set him free. They couldn’t resist such a hunger, from what we’d learned after Taeral’s encounter with Yamani. All the fae we held in crystal casings, many of them my friends, would be vulnerable, their souls a feast for a free ghoul.
Then again, it also made sense to consider the possibility that Reapers might be around the fae sanctuaries—but was it a certain fact? Not for us, it wasn’t, and therefore not a good angle to gamble from. In other words, there was no good reason to cave to Herbert’s demand.
“This is the only way for us to find out anything about the Reapers and Death,” Grandma Corrine said to me. She didn’t like it any more than I did, but she seemed to be more in favor of releasing Herbert than I was.
“There are huge risks to letting him go,” I replied, then scowled at Herbert. I could feel him tinkering in my head again. Maybe the decades he’d spent in that pencil box had whittled away at his obedience and gentile nature. Maybe the Herbert we were dealing with now wasn’t the Herbert that Grandpa Ibrahim had worked with. Solitary confinement could easily mangle a mind, especially one as savage as a ghoul’s.
“Deaths of innocent people, for starters. Plus, based on what we know now, they’d also be a danger to any ghosts or wandering spirits,” Grandpa Ibrahim said.
“It seems we’re at an impasse,” Grandma replied. She raised an eyebrow at Herbert. “You disappoint me.”
The ghoul just shrugged. Those were the terms he’d set. No matter what we did, we wouldn’t be able to get him to tell us about Reapers and Death—unless we set him free. I understood our desperate need for information, since any piece of intel could help us prepare a better strategy to reach out to Death, who was literally the only entity that had the power required to rise against the Hermessi. The stakes were sky high.
But I was conflicted.
A troubling boom tore through the sky outside. We all rushed to the window. Grandpa Ibrahim pulled the curtains back, and we watched a chunky ball of fire hurling toward… Stonewall. “Oh, boy,” I gasped.
A low rumble tickled my ear. I slowly turned my head to find Herbert hunched down behind Grandma and me, watching the fireball with sparkling interest. His leathery lips stretched, revealing the fangs that could easily tear through my flesh.
“There’s a soul in that fire,” Grandpa Ibrahim said. “Herbert can see it.”
That just rendered us speechless, as the blazing meteor shot down and crashed somewhere dangerously close to Stonewall. My heart contracted painfully. I worried about the Bajangs that lived in that place. The low-magnitude earthquake that followed told me that the force of the impact had been considerable, to say the least.
I couldn’t see most of Stonewall from here, but it didn’t take an expert to realize that a burning object that size could easily destroy at least one or two of the villages that had developed at the citadel’s base.
“I think our conversation with Herbert will have to wait,” Grandpa Ibrahim said, peeling his eyes away from the black smoke thread that rose from where the fireball had crashed, just beneath the horizon’s slightly arched line.
Herbert whispered something, but Grandpa snapped his finger and muttered the spell that made the ghoul lose his physical form. He dissipated into gray mist before the pencil box sucked him back in. The lid snapped shut, though I could still feel his irritation from inside. It scratched at my brain.
“He is not happy,” I replied, squirming from the mental discomfort.
“Whatever happened in Stonewall just now takes precedence,” Grandpa Ibrahim said.
“We should go there,” Grandma agreed.
I was more than ready. Any agreement with Herbert would go on the back burner until we figured out what was going down in Stonewall. We had to be there and get those creatures to safety. My only hope was that there would be no severe injuries. The last thing Calliope needed was a devastating rock from the sky.
Harper
From the moment we’d pierced Calliope’s atmosphere, I knew we’d be in for a rough ride and an even more difficult landing. I also became aware of the fact that everyone would see us coming down from the skies. Ramin had had to manifest into his full fire form in order to breach the planet’s protective atmospheric layer.
I’d felt every particle of cold air brushing past us. Every gust of wind and the tickle of every cloud we swooshed past. The descent had been brutal and intense, but it was nothing compared to the crash itself. Ramin had done his best to avoid populated areas, and he was also aware that we needed to land somewhere close enough to Luceria and Mount Zur. We didn’t want to spend much time making our way to either of the locations—Ramin was an outside Hermessi, and we weren’t sure how many of Calliope’s elementals were still on the rebels’ side.
The impact almost disintegrated us both. Or at least, that’s how I felt it.
