Chapter 52 Grim
While Helena’s soul fell straight back into her body, my smoky essence splattered against the cold stone floor, spreading out even as it regathered into my reaper form.
I lay face down on the floor, hood still thrown back, and I glowered into the black marble floor that reflected my human form. I pushed up, skeletal arms trembling, and I looked away from the man I had once been but could never be again, head twisting her way.
I waited, praying, hoping, desperate for her to awaken. To live.
Helena lay draped against Johann, who held her while Pluto, perched on his shoulder, cawed at The Few. Until Helena arched, taking a huge breath as that incredible soul of sun and light reconnected with and reanimated her physical vessel.
“Helena’s wellena!” cried Pluto.
In this form, I had no capacity to shed tears. Relief, powerful and potent, flooded me anyway, and I sagged, hanging my bony head.
At least she was okay.
The Few. They’d materialized—all of them except for Sir Black—as we’d descended.
I’d glimpsed Cedric among them, too.
And though I wasn’t foolish enough to believe they would not banish me back into the Black Basin or do something even worse with me now, I could at least take solace in the knowledge they would not condemn Helena.
Perhaps they would still try to take her life. Undoubtedly, they would let Cedric, who must be here to claim my role, do just that.
“Renwick Loxley,” said Sir White, that strange name I had, until now, forgotten was mine echoing through the chamber of the Basins.
“You have been found guilty of breaking your oath, betraying your sanctified station, grossly neglecting your duties, and egregiously tampering with the sacred order of the universe.”
He forgot kissing the most divine creature on the planet. But then, maybe that crime was lumped somewhere in that list of grievances—right along with my salacious interludes with that same stunning woman.
My bone arms still trembling with the effort, I rose, pushing onto my feet.
“You, The Few, have conspired against me,” I accused as I switched my gaze from figure to masked figure, my bravery bolstered by Helena’s—by Johann’s, too, who’d stood up to The Few well before I had.
“You provoked Helena’s interest in me, using her for your purpose.
You plotted with that vile wizard to corner and condemn me. ”
I extended a skeletal hand toward Cedric, pointing at him with a bone finger while, with my other hand, I summoned my scythe.
“Vile, am I?” asked Cedric in a cool voice, a single brow bobbing. “I would have thought at some point you’d recognize I’ve been trying to do you a favor.”
The Few surrounded me, Flora, Johann and Pluto, and Helena, who only now just began to regain her senses enough to sit up on her own and then, with Johann and Flora’s help, climb to her feet.
Across from me stood Sir White. Between him and the masked woman draped in crimson—Lady Red—smirked Cedric, his arms crossed as if he’d already won.
Which, perhaps, he had.
Behind me stood Lady Green in robes of deep emerald, her mask silver like Sir White’s. Beside her lurked Sir Blue, sapphire robes spilling down his tall form, glowing red eyes regarding me with what I could only assume was contempt.
“I will surrender my title,” I announced, “my scythe, and my claim to this position willingly, and face whatever punishment The Few would decree, but only if Helena’s soul be released from her role as a Fated.”
“You attempt to bargain in vain,” came Lady Green’s cool and sultry voice, its essence faintly warbled, as though funneled through water.
That weird hissing and clicking emanated from her, too, when she tilted her head at me.
“You no longer have any right to hold the station or power that will, in moments, be stripped from you anyway.”
“Then you deny it?” I gripped the staff of my scythe between both hands as I slid to stand before Helena and my friends—my family.
“That you are culpable, too? Guilty yourselves of orchestrating my downfall—and using a Fated to do it! Tell me, who among us has truly tampered with the ‘sacred order of the universe’?”
Darting forward, Helena rushed to stand at my back.
“Grim,” she whispered, clutching my robes as she pressed her forehead into my spine. “Don’t make them angry. Angrier…”
I ignored her. If I was going to save her this time—this last time—I had to.
“I accept my sentence,” I told The Few, shifting my focus between them, ignoring Cedric, who only held that infuriating smirk. “And my punishment—whatever it may be. But only if Helena is rewarded her life in exchange for being made your pawn.”
“This is a right injustice!” snapped Flora, who hurried to my side to shake a fist at Sir White. “Entrapment.”
“I agree that Grim cannot be held accountable,” said Johann, who stepped to my other side. “He, like Helena, was manipulated. By you, The Few. And for what reason? To install a new reaper? Why? Cedric… why?”
“Don’t worry, old man,” said Cedric. “Grim, or should I say Loxley, has had this coming for a while—and you and Flora know it.”
“You’ve betrayed one of our own!” Flora snapped at him. “And do you have mince for brains? If The Few sold out Grim, then it’ll only be a matter of time before you’re the one under the bus!”
“Grim might have taken an oath,” said Helena, stepping out from behind me.
I extended my free arm, holding her back—to keep her as safe as I could for the moment.
“But he never did anything wrong to land himself in this role. He’s not here because he’s serving a sentence or working toward redemption.
He took the oath willingly. It should count for something that…
that he is the only one among the occupants of the Hallowed Halls who hasn’t gotten his second chance. ”
I glanced her way, stunned. Because what she was saying… I wanted to believe it.
For so long, I’d blamed myself for abandoning Phineas. But in the Black Basin, Helena had made a point of how the alternative, the only other choice, would still have resulted in my nephew and me being torn apart.
I’d had no choice. The one I’d made… For me, it had been the only one.
I could regret the consequences without regretting the choice itself.
Helena had shown me that.
“How Grim came to be in his role is irrelevant,” said Sir White, lifting a silver-clawed hand at me, that palm open.
“It only matters to The Few that he broke that oath. We are in agreement, and our decision has been made. Renwick Loxley, you will now and forever be stripped of your title, your role, your scythe, and your place here in the Hallowed Halls.”
One after the other, Sir Blue, Lady Red, and Lady Green lifted their palms as well, aiming those gauntleted hands at me as colored light swirled in those palms, the energy building, brightening, intensifying.
“No!” shrieked Helena as she flung her arms around me, like that could stop the blast—or save me from the rays that hit me from all sides.
Somewhere, Pluto started cawing again, panicked cries echoing above the sudden roar in my ears as the four energies, white, red, blue, and green, dove into me, swept through me and then—as one—out of me.
The surge of power ripped free my robes, cloak, hood, scythe, and skeletal form, leaving me standing there in my human incarnation, garbed in boots, ripped jeans, leather jacket, and T-shirt.
The Few then shifted the aim of those hands and that energy toward Cedric, who welcomed the blast with open arms.
Gritting my teeth, I glared hatred at him as my former robes swathed him, fabric and mist dancing with the crackling green energy of his wizard’s magic as they enwrapped him.
He grinned, then laughed darkly as my scythe materialized in his grasp the moment he, like I had done so many times before, called the tool—the weapon—forth from the ether.
That laugh built in volume as green-tinted smoke enshrouded him, tattered robes flying out, his figure flickering between his human form and his new skeletal form.
Helena whimpered as she clung to me. Turning to her, I pulled her close, enfolding her in my arms. I squeezed her tight, all too cognizant of the fact that we were moments from—one way or another, or perhaps even all ways—being torn apart for good.
Cedric roared with laughter, the smoke of his own essence rising and winding about him, dancing with luminous, phosphorescent, poison-green magic that illuminated his now half-human, half-skeletal frame, transforming him into a terrifying figure with even more power than I had ever possessed.
While he reveled in his victory and this act of retribution, the first among the many he was now bound to claim and exact, the figures of The Few each contracted into colored orbs. One after the other, they shot back to their Basins, plunging into the waters—vanishing.
But where were they going?
That. It was a stupid question.
They were going back to their realms.
Because their work here was done.
My punishment? Helena’s fate?
The Few—it seemed—had seen fit to leave those items in the now-highly-capable hands of the world’s newest Grim Reaper.
A true pompous psycho.