Chapter 47 Helena
Johann brought me a bejeweled, beautiful, and archaic-looking chalice from his chambers. He said he was told angels once drank a special and rare wine from it.
The silver goblet seemed a fitting vessel for my final drink if it indeed ended up costing me my life.
While Johann and Flora watched on, their expressions knit with anxiety, I approached the most ominous of the Basins.
Inside the vat, the smooth and shining blackness reflected my own wrought expression like a dark mirror.
I didn’t have time to waste. Grim needed me. And never once had he hesitated to appear at my side when fate tugged at his soul. Fate, in a way, was tugging at mine now, and Johann was right. Fate could be changed.
His had changed. So, from what I understood, had Flora’s. As had Cedric’s.
The Hallowed Halls—how often had they facilitated those changes?
I dipped the chalice into the vat, breaking the smooth surface tension. The slow and thick consistency of chocolate syrup, the liquid flowed into the chalice.
Though I wasn’t entirely sure how much I needed to imbibe, the information that Flora had shared about the effects of the potion eventually wearing off had me filling the cup to the brim.
I didn’t want to gamble on the idea I might run out of time before I could reach Grim.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” asked Flora, still in denial that this truly was our only course of action. My only course.
Instead of answering, I gripped the Basin with one hand, and steadying myself, I brought the goblet to my lips and started to gulp down the liquid.
Behind me, Flora gasped. Johann remained silent.
“Finish the drink, you’ll go in the sink,” urged Pluto.
I drank and drank, ignoring the taste as best as I could—though it wasn’t as bitter and vile as I’d been expecting. I’d braced myself for a muddy or even motor-oil flavor, but the waters of the Basin carried only the faint tang of fermented fruit and stale flowers.
Only after I finished the entirety of the chalice did I come up for air.
Dropping the goblet, which clanged on the marble floor, I gasped and coughed, bracing the back of my wrist to my nose as I slowly turned to face Johann and Flora.
Flora’s eyes darted as they mapped my face, her fingers tangled up together as if she felt desperate to do something. Johann’s expression remained both expectant and solemn, though he seemed to be holding his breath.
“The deed is done,” said Pluto, blinking as he ticked his head at me, seemingly curious as well over what would become of me now.
“How… do you feel?” Johann asked, his voice rasped and low, edged with dread.
I blinked at them, waiting to feel something—anything.
For several long moments, nothing happened—nothing outside of my stomach giving a noisy slurp.
But then a lightheadedness stole over me. Dizziness tugged at my awareness, and a strange wooziness encroached on my senses.
“Nothing’sss haappening-ah,” I said, my words slurring.
“Flora,” said Johann as the man shuffled to stand behind me. “Give her soul a little nudge, would you? I’ll catch her.”
Flora frowned but then determination overtook her expression. “If Grim asks, I never did this.”
The fairy padded up to me, and then lifting one hand, she gave my solar plexus a small shove.
I gasped, propelled backward from myself, light as a kite that had caught a breeze.
As I floated in reverse, my abandoned body collapsed—straight into Johann’s waiting arms.
“Pretty bird!” cried Pluto, the glow from my spirit casting him in a pale yellow light that highlighted the iridescent sapphire, teal, and garnet undertones of his ebony feathers.
Gently, even as he peered up at my spirit form, squinting against the strange golden light that continued to bloom around us, the old man guided my limp and unconscious form to the floor.
“Gods, Helena,” said Flora, her voice hushed and reverent as she shielded wide eyes from the light that radiated… from me?
Still suspended in midair, I peered from one arm to the other and then down at my legs, shocked at the way my transparent and translucent form, garbed in my work clothes—pencil skirt, flats, cardigan, and blouse—shone like a sunbeam.
My time to marvel at this strange spectacle, and to revel in this oddly euphoric sense of weightlessness and freedom, didn’t last, though.
Like a spreading shadow, an obsidian stain flowed down my arms, coating and cloaking my luminous form, hiding the light I exuded from view by sheathing it—and all of me—in a subduing layer of black. One that transformed me into a librarian-shaped wraith.
“What’s—?”
I didn’t get a chance to finish asking my question because something caught me from behind—a lashing whip of freezing ebony, thicker, darker, and more viscous than Grim’s smoke tendrils.
Another murky tentacle wrapped my leg. Two more caught me by the wrists.
Then everything zeroed down as I shrank into a tight ball of awareness. A sphere of darkness that, an instant later, got sucked into a devouring and all-encompassing pit of the same.