Chapter 7 Grim
Unfettered rage coursed through me as I stormed down the entrance corridor of the Hallowed Halls, Cedric’s sputtering, fritzing, and bucking soul clenched in my grip.
On either side of me, the Soul Flames snuffed themselves as I passed, as if wanting to avoid catching my eye and thus my ire.
I’d never minded the dark, though. And Cedric’s smarmy soul, kicking and screaming as it sizzled and sparked in my fist, provided enough pale green light to illuminate the grim trek to the Basins anyway.
I’d warned him, hadn’t I? I’d told him to stay out of my business.
And what had he been doing at the library anyway if he hadn’t somehow followed me there?
I wasn’t naive enough to buy for one second that asking him would get me any truthful answer. Aside from that, he was beyond the point of interrogating now, wasn’t he? At least for the time being.
If I released my hold on his soul, he’d fly straight back to his useless carcass, which would reanimate and do more stupid shit to piss me off.
“Grim?” Johann asked as I thundered into the Basins. Glancing up from his scribbling, he lowered his spectacles to take in my state, no doubt also noting the unwieldy soul I carted.
Pluto gave a hoarse caw and took flight from his perch on the ledge of the Black Basin, which he sometimes stared into for hours. He circled above us, frightened—marking my volcanic mood even before Johann.
“Grim Grim! Watch out for him!”
Normally, I stored souls in my hourglass as I collected them. I had no need to stow this one. Aside from having zero intention of hoarding it for any length of time, my plans for it amounted to the immediate sort.
“Grim,” Johann tried again, a note of alarm rising in his aged voice as he set down his quill, eyes widening on me when I approached the Black Basin. “What are you doing? What—who is that?”
I didn’t answer the old man. I didn’t have to. This was none of his business.
Above us, Pluto continued to caw as he flew panicked laps around the room.
“Grim, stop!” Johann commanded as he scuttled down from his scribe’s desk, the yellow beret Flora had brought him from Paris tumbling to the floor in his haste.
Again, I ignored the doctor, making a beeline for that onyx vat that I would, despite the sour-lime hue of Cedric’s serpent’s soul, force him into.
But then, moving with far more speed than I would have thought him capable of, Johann slid to a halt in front of me, spreading his arms wide like some deranged referee calling a foul.
“Is that Cedric?” he demanded, and I gritted my teeth. The soul—it must have spoken its name to him. Something I couldn’t have prevented even if I had besmirched my hourglass by stuffing the oily son of a bitch inside.
“Grim,” said Johann, his expression darkening, “whatever has happened, I must insist that you release Cedric this instant. Like you, like me, he is a tenant of the Hallowed Halls, and a member of our order.”
The fuck he was.
“Move,” I commanded, “or I will make you move.”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” blustered Johann, his hands going to his hips. “You will, instead, unhand Cedric and let him go to find his body. And you’ll do that for the benefit of all of us. Including yourself.”
“He interfered with my work.”
Johann’s scowl deepened, and he thrust a knotted, crooked finger toward the Black Basin. “You know as well as I do that Basin is going to kick Cedric back out no sooner than you send him in.”
“Fine,” I snarled, “then Green it is.”
I pivoted away from the old man and stalked toward the glowing Green Basin with its swirling vortex. But with slippers squeaking against the polished ebony floor, Johann managed to skitter in front of me a second time, walking backward until his spine collided with the Basin.
“The same thing will happen with this one and you know it,” Johann cautioned, actually shaking a finger at me.
“His soul is cursed, and sooner or later it will come spitting right back out—just like the last time you threw him in there. As is true of the rest of us, Cedric’s not going anywhere, Grim, and the last thing any of us need, including you, is for another of The Few to come poking about in the Hallowed Halls.
Lady Green was quite cross the last time, you’ll recall.
Especially since The Few are the ones who cleared Cedric to take asylum here. Are you listening to me, Grim?”
I growled low, the tightness of my obsidian soul, which had coiled around all my bones, giving by a fraction of a centimeter.
Green had admonished me not to submit Cedric’s soul a second time…
I’d once dunked him in the Red Basin, too—which he’d actually stayed in for half a day.
I’d never been angry enough—at least not until now—to kill him myself. Or set my sights on tossing him into the Black.
But Johann was right.
Like a bad case of toxic mold, no matter what, Cedric would just come back.
Maybe Johann sensed my reluctance to release Cedric despite his admittedly apt and reasonable warnings, because he continued his tirade.
“I don’t know what Cedric’s done to anger you this time, but I can gather he pressed one hell of a button.
If you want him to press it again only harder, by all means, shove him into one of the Basins or try bottling him for a decade.
It’s not going to work, and it’ll just make whatever this is festering between you two all the more unmanageable. ”
“Stuffing him in a bottle isn’t a bad fucking idea!” I bellowed, wrenching that wretched soul tighter in my fist as if I could squeeze the arrogance out of it, my arm tremoring with the effort to deal a hearty dose of pain Cedric wouldn’t—couldn’t—feel in this form anyway.
“Let him go, Grim,” said Johann. “I will talk to him.”
“That never does any good!”
“I said, let him go,” Johann insisted, starting to shout now himself. “Let him go, and I swear I will take personal responsibility for him from this point forward.”
Personal responsibility. What did that even mean?
Johann was stuck here. Just like me. Just like Flora. Just like fucking Cedric.
Our lack of personal responsibility was why we were here.
“I’m tired of you always covering his ass,” I snapped even as, whirling away from Johann, I pitched Cedric’s godforsaken spirit toward the hall I’d just traversed.
Loosed, the sphere sparked and sputtered—perhaps spouting a barrage of curse words only Johann could hear before the foul thing pinballed down the hall and zipped out of sight, zooming off to reconnect with the physical form it was forever shackled to, a mangy dog in search of its miscreant master.
“Grim.”
I veered on Johann. “What!”
Pluto soared down toward us, and with a flutter of ebony wings, he lighted on Johann’s shoulder.
“Grim Grim,” the bird said, as though sounding an alarm, his feathers bristling. “Grim is grim.”
Even though my rage had now shifted toward Johann, the old man’s scowl softened, wiry eyebrows coming together with concern, the collection of deep lines on his weathered face multiplying.
“Pluto’s right,” Johann said. “This isn’t like you.”
He waited a beat, pale gray eyes searching the darkness of my hood for the face—the soul—he wouldn’t find because I kept it hidden. From everyone. Including and maybe even especially him.
“This is exactly like me,” I argued. “And Cedric’s had this coming.”
“This,” echoed Johann, his volume dropping. “Don’t tell me you killed him.”
That, I didn’t answer. And maybe it messed with me—a little—that I didn’t feel even a twinge of shame that reproving tone might have otherwise evoked in me.
Cedric had crossed a line, and Johann had no right to be pissed, shocked, or whatever that I’d finally answered that asshole’s special brand of chaos with my own.
With a small shake of his head, a flash of fear-mixed wonder in his eyes, Johann spoke again.
“I’ll admit that, so long as you’ve served in this role, I’ve never seen you this angry. Not even at Cedric. For that reason alone, I can only assume his transgression was a grave one. That said, I’ll remind you why each of us, including Cedric, is here.”
I wasn’t the one who forgot.
“Save the lecture,” I barked, turning away. “I know why we’re here.”
“We dabbled in deeds that cannot be undone,” he called after me, his voice echoing through the domed chamber, his words—his worry—rankling me to the core. “Trifled with forces forbidden. Our fates, we each sealed them with our own wills.”
“Your point?” I hurled the question at him from over one shoulder.
“My point,” he snapped, his own temper flaring now, “is to remind you how these roles that keep us from much worse fates do not protect us from repeating the transgressions that landed us here in the first place. Or the resulting consequences it’s doubtful we’ll escape a second time.”
“It’s up to me if I want to take my chances.”
Now I was just being obstinate. Taking my frustrations out on Johann instead of Cedric, even if the old man had just stopped me from raining trouble—more trouble—down on all of us.
With a huff and a dismissive wave, like shouting at me was akin to shouting at a wall, he spun away, grumbling to himself in German as he tromped back toward his desk, though Pluto turned on his shoulder to keep me in his beady, blinky sight.
“Frightful fight,” said the bird. “Cedric is deadric. Point to Grim. Don’t cross him again.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself. And how was it that the fucking bird got the picture?
I continued my own march toward the exit—because I still had souls to gather.
What was more, because I’d needed to detour to the library, I was late—and behind.
More souls than just the librarian’s had called to me in the time it had taken me to get her off the elevator. And then Cedric’s interloping had complicated everything.
And his presence near the librarian, the fact that he’d searched the demolished elevator for evidence of her death—that alone suggested he knew more than he ought to about the soul I’d failed to deliver.
Perhaps he even knew it was her…
That thought. It summoned that tight inner discomfort back to my soul, which gathered itself behind my sternum, a makeshift heart wrenched in the fist of fear.
The emotion had returned, as black, uncomfortable, and uninvited as before.
And what did it say that my thoughts of the librarian had done a quicker and better job of summoning it than Johann’s sage—if annoying—cautioning?
It’s only because of the Black Basin.
That’s what I told myself as I exited the Hallowed Halls for the Netherworld Forest. Endless blue-gray—almost teal—mist curled through rows of ancient trees. Their leafless limbs dripped moss, their thick trunks lashed by vines, their roots sprawling like a graveyard of petrified pythons.
I walked among their ranks, heading down the worn path toward the freestanding stone doorway—the portal.
It would take me out of the silence of this mid-region and back to the roaring world of the living. A place to which I’d once belonged, even if I couldn’t recall a single hour of the time, the years, I’d spent there. Or even my name—my real name.
That I’d shed with my skin, my self. Right along with the answer to what I’d done to land myself here in the first place.
And I liked it that way.
Another reason why I was going to have to figure this shit out with the librarian.
Only now, apparently, I was going to have to do that before Cedric could interfere a second time.
The alternative certainly didn’t bode well for me.
Or for her…