“We could teleport out of here,” Taeral suggested.
“Surely. But don’t you want to find out what they can do?” Eira asked him. “If ghosts cannot be seen, and yet they’re visible, doesn’t this prove there’s a strange phenomenon manifesting here?”
“By the same logic, if ghosts can’t normally touch us… these ones might be able to,” Raphael replied, his tone pitchier than usual.
One of the spirits came forward—a large daemon with a long black mane and golden rings jingling around his thick neck. He first reached Raphael, who dry-swallowed, his claws extending as he assumed a defensive pose. “I guess I’m about to test your theory, Eira. Though, let it be known, for the record, that I am not okay with this.”
The daemon spirit sneered at him, breathing heavily. We were ready to touch one another and link with Taeral at a moment’s notice, but Eira was right. If the ghosts had this ability here, we needed to know.
“Are you going to keep sizing me up or are you going to attack?” Raphael asked the increasingly angry daemon.
“I’m just sorry I can’t eat you,” the daemon replied and lunged at Raphael. The Perfect slashed at him with his claws, but they went through, as if he were fighting a body of water. The daemon, on the other hand, was able to draw blood from Raphael, cutting across his torso.
Lumi’s arm shot out, intense blue light bursting from the palm of her hand. It was bright and powerful enough to temporarily blind the aggressive spirit, but the other ghosts came charging at us, snarling and roaring. Horror paralyzed me, as we all understood that reaching that waterfall building would not be as easy as we’d thought.
“Link hands!” Taeral shouted.
We did. I found Eva’s hand, and Fallon caught mine. As the army of spirits jumped at us from all directions—poof! We were gone. I relished the temporary sense of weightlessness, before we reappeared on top of a cliff. The palace was about fifty miles away now, and the woods were silent.
I let a sigh tumble out of me, without letting go of Eva’s hand.
A stream flowed to our left, snaking toward the edge of the cliff. It went down in a thin curtain of clear water, and I could hear the river below swelling. The wind rushed past us, rattling the trees and making them whisper. Lanterns lit precise paths through the forest—and they all seemed to be leading in the same direction: the palace we couldn’t so easily reach ourselves.
“Well, that was weird,” Raphael grumbled. Nethissis pulled a piece of white fabric from her backpack and handed it to him.
“Put pressure on that cut while you heal,” she said.
Lucky for him, his Perfect biology seemed to work fast. A minute later, the cut across his chest was no longer bleeding.
“How is this possible?” Fallon asked, understandably befuddled. “How in the world is any of this possible?!”
He was met with awkward silence, as none of us were able to immediately formulate a reasonable explanation. All we could do was stare out at the sea of green stretching between the cliff and the palace, while the flickering lights kept teasing us from inside.
Taeral pressed a hand against his chest. “It’s almost calling to me. It’s so difficult to explain.”
“It’s calling to you, but the ghosts surrounding it are trying to kill you… kill us,” Acantha replied. She looked at Lumi. “What do you think?”
Lumi exhaled sharply, equally perplexed. “I… I have no idea.”
“Whatever this is, we obviously need to get past it,” Eva said firmly. “I did not come all the way here to have the door slammed in my face.”
Once again, I found myself speechless before this creature. Even with all the potentially deadly dollops of weird that Mortis was chucking at us, she was still determined to move forward, to find Death, and to get her to help.
In that instant, before I could even open my mouth and say anything worth hearing, a little voice in my head made it clear that, should we survive this whole Hermessi debacle somehow, I would definitely have to make this relationship of ours a priority—I had real feelings for this girl, unlike the different trysts from my past. And my heart, ever the troublemaker, seemed to agree, jumping like a maniac despite the troubles lurking around us.
Taeral
I ran a hand through my hair, my gaze wandering to one of the lantern paths that led to the waterfall palace. The pull was real; I could feel it. The farther I got from that place, the harder I longed to be closer to it.
The team kept bouncing theories and ideas off one another, but I only half listened. Whispers trickled out from the woods, telling me to get closer. To jump off this cliff and make my way up one of the lantern paths and knock on Death’s door, for she may welcome me with arms wide open. My stomach was in knots, and it hurt to even think about what I would do once I found Death. It was as if my body was registering something that my mind, bent by these whispers, couldn’t—if Death herself were to welcome me, it could very well mean the end of the road for me.
“You can hear something, right?” Eira asked me, standing by my side. She’d been quiet for the past couple of minutes, but I’d sensed her presence, like a sunbeam keeping me warm, when all I got from that waterfall palace were jolts of ice right through my heart.
“Yeah, but it’s hard to find the right words to describe it,” I said slowly.
“Is it saying something to you? Or is it just this weird pull?”
“I think both. I can’t make out the words, but I understand them anyway,” I explained. “It’s telling me to come closer.”
“But the ghosts and the Reapers are telling us to stay away,” she said, wearing a bitter smile. “This is quite the existential conundrum, isn’t it? Go in and die. Stay back and live. But, if we don’t go in, we die anyway, because the Hermessi will kill us all.”
“Not you, though.” I chuckled, reminding her of what she really was.
She gave me a pained look. “I don’t care about what happens to me. I wouldn’t want to live in a world that hasn’t got any of you people in it.”
“I’ll be honest, it’s good to have us all back together,” Raphael said, drawing my focus away from the waterfall palace. “Yeah, we’re in quite a pinch, but at least we have more hands on deck.”
“That being said, we need an entry strategy,” Lumi replied. “We’re not dealing with just Reapers anymore. It seems like, the closer we get to that building, the more aggressive the defenses become.”
“Perfectly illustrated by killer ghosts, which is a term I never thought I’d have to say out loud, beyond the realm of comic books,” Amelia said.
“Let’s think about it this way,” Riza chimed in. “As you advanced toward the palace, without even knowing it was there, for that matter, the Reapers started to appear, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“And they warned you. First just this Baethal fella, then the three of them. They were even close to attacking you, when Lumi’s Word outburst scared them off. And we can all agree that there’s a risk of them coming back to warn us some more, right?”
“Yes,” Lumi agreed.