Chapter 25 Grim
I led Helena out of the Hallowed Halls and guided her through the Netherworld Forest.
As soon as we entered the murky woods, the faintest of auras appeared around her, a subtle luminescence that she didn’t seem to notice at all, even though it illuminated our path the way the soft glow of a lantern might.
I kept glancing her way, mystified and fascinated by the phenomenon, which I’d never observed in anyone before. Then again, no other living human had visited the Netherworld.
A thin and encompassing halo, the aura shifted hues, changing tones from pale pink to sky blue in a slow bleed, like the northern lights.
Maybe the colors reflected her mood?
Blue, I suspected, would be melancholy.
She stayed quiet as we walked together down the worn, gray, tunnellike alley between craggy trees, her gaze flitting here and there, scanning the tangled and vacant black-limbed branches, the formless gray skies, and our mist-shrouded surroundings.
She had no jokes now. Probably because I’d admonished her dark humor. But… I hadn’t meant to silence her.
Her normal chatter. Perhaps I could coax it—her—back out of hiding.
“I come and go from your world by way of Netherworld portals,” I told her, breaking the silence.
Normally, soundlessness never bothered me. Always, quietude had been my lone companion in these woods and in much of my work. But Helena’s sudden muteness needled me—tied my thoughts into knots of concern. For her…
The threat Cedric posed might have been neutralized for now, but ultimately, his removal from the equation only delayed the inevitable—an early exit from life that Helena was now acutely aware of.
The sands would run out for her soon—perhaps even within the day. Possibly within the hour…
That had to be a difficult truth to digest, so perhaps I was giving myself too much credit in thinking her uncharacteristic pensiveness could be owed to anything I had said.
Whatever the reason for her contemplativeness, I still didn’t want her to feel alone, even though in so many ways… she was.
Death was like that. I was there when it happened, yeah. But when the lights went out, it was still just you and yourself. At least, it was as far as I knew.
And this walk with me back to her world—how could it not, for her, feel like a trek to the gallows?
Then there was the matter of our impending reconnection.
Despite the heaviness of this pilgrimage, the anticipation for that delicious rejoining of our spirits buzzed in me—though it shouldn’t have.
Was she dreading it?
“Then once you’re through the portal,” she said, speaking up at last, “in this world or the other, mine, you just… swirly twirl wherever you want to go?”
I did a double take her way. Because… swirly twirl?
That wasn’t how I would have referred to my preferred method of travel, but Helena had her intrinsic view of things, and who was I to not let her have it? Aside from that, I wasn’t about to correct her by saying I “smoke-shifted” or “mist-moved”—both of which struck me as equally stupid sounding.
“More or less,” I muttered.
Helena kept her gaze downcast on the trail, and she took care to sidestep the knobby knees of tree roots that jutted up in her path.
“And you feel a tug,” she said, “when it’s… time for someone to die? You said before that… you didn’t come to find me right away because you didn’t feel the pull to get my soul.”
I slowed my walk as we neared the portal, which loomed ahead, an open mouth back to Helena’s realm, back to her life—which had no room in it for me.
“For the Fated,” I said, “the pull comes shortly before death. For all other souls, I feel the pull after.”
“Hmm,” she mused. “That’s interesting, don’t you think? That you’re called to the Fated just before death. I wonder why that is. Probably it’s got something to do with there being some kind of… schedule. Like, the Fated Souls have somewhere to be?”
I didn’t know for sure, but that had always been my assumption.
“Makes me feel important in a way,” Helena added, her chattiness revived. “Like a VIFS. As in a Very Important Fated S—”
“This time, it might be uncomfortable for you,” I blurted out. “More uncomfortable…”
Arriving at the open archway embedded in a freestanding stone wall, a seeming entrance to a missing castle courtyard, I stopped. Though the doorway framed more mist-shrouded trees, promising a continuation of our path, the facade was just that.
“ ‘It might,’ you said. What do you mean by ‘it’?”
What did she mean what did I mean? What else could I be talking about?
“My… influence,” I clarified, since she was apparently going to make me say it out loud.
She touched her heart. “You mean… when you reached into me like that. Like the claw on one of those teddy-picker arcade games. I’m pretty good at those, by the way. It’s all in the timing.”
She made her hand into a claw before she mimed snagging my heart. “You just line ’em up and then yoink!”
I just stared at her. Sometimes I couldn’t think of what to say back when I was with her.
She perplexed me. The way a searching bumblebee must perplex a drab and colorless mushroom.
“Also,” she said, “what you did. It wasn’t uncomfortable. At all.”
I turned toward her. Because what?
“It didn’t hurt,” she said. “It… was the opposite, in fact. Like a blast of air-conditioning on a hot day.”
She had seared me. Like a bolt of lightning to a frigid, dark wasteland that, before that instant, had never known either light or warmth.
My soul could have devoured hers whole, and this next taste of her was going to be brutal. But only because it was bound to be my last. And from then on, well, I’d know what hell was, wouldn’t I?
“Since you know it’s coming this time,” I said, “your soul will likely resist.”
She smirked, her inherent lightness reinfusing her mien as she put her hands on her hips. “How do you know?”
I fought the urge to tilt my head at her. The last thing I’d expected from her at this moment was playfulness. Or could the sudden shift in her demeanor be owed to… something else?
“I’ve had to loosen souls from bodies before,” I told her—a morbid truth, but a truth all the same. But then, weren’t all my truths morbid to some degree? Just like all of hers had some shade of light to them, like she truly happened to be a walking prism…
“You mean I’m not your first?” She offered me a small smile.
Fuck me. What?
No. She didn’t know what she was saying. I was reading into things. Because there was no way in Hades’s hot hell she was flirting with me. Salaciously flirting with me.
She didn’t know how what she’d said sounded. Or that my dirty mind apparently wanted to read into her words.
“Typically,” I said, speaking slow, trying not to seem taken off guard, even though I was, “forcible extraction is only required with reluctant souls. Those who do not wish to abandon their vessels.”
“There’s a choice?”
“No,” I said. “But I sometimes encounter… strong attachments. My scythe will always do the trick of severing ties, but souls can cling to their bodies, or even to objects and places. Since you are alive, though, your soul will likely attempt to defend itself.”
“It… didn’t before,” she offered.
“It had never been attacked before.”
“You weren’t attacking me,” she said.
“Your soul doesn’t know that.”
She shook her head at me, her hair shifting in a way that made me long to touch it. “What if… it does?”
What was her angle? Maybe she just needed to tease and make light of the situation to feel safer in my presence. Probably she was just stalling.
“It’ll only hurt for a moment,” I said. “Then you’ll fall unconscious again.”
“Wait,” she said, “then how am I going to get home?”
“The portal will take me straight into your apartment.”
“O-oh.” She blinked, a blush creeping up her cheeks, painting them the shade of hot-pink roses. “It’s… kind of a mess in there.”
“I promise I’ve seen worse.”
She gave a nervous laugh. “I bet you have, though I don’t think I want to know in what ways.”
She was right. She didn’t want to know.
Death could be quiet. It could be peaceful. But it could be many other things, too.
“You have to promise not to judge me,” she said. “My apartment isn’t huge. It’s just me, and I rarely have company.”
Outside of the pineapple.
“And lately,” she prattled on, “I’ve been kind of…
living out loud in there. But then, I guess it’s only fair I let you into my place after I went galivanting around in yours.
There is one thing I don’t understand, though.
Are you saying there are portals in and out of the Netherworld everywhere?
Like, apparently, my apartment and the Lyndon McDonald’s? ”
I gestured to the portal that waited for us. “The ones in the Netherworld are stationary and fixed, with one positioned at each of the four corners of this realm. When I’m in your world, however, I can access them at will from anywhere.”
“So that’s how we got out of the McDonald’s,” she said.
“Outsiders are forbidden to enter the Netherworld,” I explained.
“Transporting you here was… a last resort to keep you out of Cedric’s reach.
I had every intention of reporting myself to The Few after informing you of the finer details of the situation.
The only reason The Few have not automatically been alerted to your presence is because I…
smuggled you in by shifting your soul into my grip.
So they never received the alert that you were here.
That’s why I have to repeat the process on the way out. ”
“You camouflaged me,” she said, wringing the crossbody strap of her pumpkin purse with both hands.
“Makes sense this place would be high security. No wonder you guys don’t get any tourism down here.
Too bad.” She scanned our surroundings, shrugging.
“There’s plenty of space for a resort. Lots of misty woods for Halloween hiking.
And who wouldn’t want to visit the edge of death and meet Faust himself? ”
I snapped my head her way. “Who told you about Johann?”