Chapter 27
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Ellery
Lifting my hands to the sky, I worked with the other amsirah to bring another tidal wave of rain. We were all exhausted, but our desperation to keep our home continued to fuel our abilities.
Together, we created a downpour before pushing it toward the fires with hurricane-force winds. The fire crackled, sizzled, and popped as trees crashed to the earth, the screams of the dying lessened, and smoke choked the air.
My eyes and throat burned from all the smoke I’d inhaled over the past hours. I no longer noticed the acrid scent clinging to me and the others.
The eyes of all those around me were swollen and bloodshot. Soot streaked their faces, and the falling ash had coated their hair. I couldn’t see myself, but I was certain I looked exactly like them.
Below, the last of the guards fell beneath the onslaught of the poltergeists and those bugs. The fire sizzled louder, and the flames leapt higher before dying back as smoke billowed toward us.
Because this fire had gotten so big, it took longer for us to eradicate the flames, and by the time the poltergeists reported the fire was out, the sun had risen high in the sky. By then, the bugs had retreated to whatever hell they’d emerged from to hopefully never be seen again.
“There’s soldiers still on the roads outside of the woods,” Farley grumbled.
As he shifted his blade back and forth between his hands, I ignored the blood dripping from it.
“They’re so close, but too far away,” another griped.
“Do you think they’ll enter the forest?” Ryker asked.
“No, they’re mindless drones, but not idiots,” Farley said. “Their commanders aren’t eager to send them in either.”
“Probably because they know we’d gut their sorry asses like the pigs they are,” another poltergeist snarled.
“How come you never attacked the nobles who traveled through the Revenant Woods before? You bothered some of the coaches but never went full on…” My voice trailed off as I tried to think of the word to describe it.
“Psycho?” Farley suggested.
“Yes, psycho fits perfectly.”
Farley grinned at me and puffed out his chest. The little, floating psycho was proud of being described as such. Shit kept getting crazier.
I rubbed my cheeks as my eyes burned from smoke and exhaustion. I needed a nap.
Farley stopped shifting his blade back and forth as he looked at the others. “I guess it was because we were never really organized before. We all did our own thing. I don’t think it ever occurred to me, or anyone else, to unite.
“I’ve harassed and attacked more than a few aristocrats traveling through here before, but we can’t do as much damage when there’s only one of us, and while I’ve had weapons before, I usually only had sticks or rocks.
That didn’t frighten them as much, and it didn’t kill them.
I mean, I still scared them, but they didn’t die like I prefer. ”
Great, so we’d united and weaponized them. And now we’d have to be careful not to piss them off; if they decided to turn on us, the Revenant Woods would become uninhabitable.
“I tended to stay away from the roads and aristocrats,” a female said. “Seeing those assholes only made me angrier.”
Many of the other poltergeists bobbed up and down as they nodded. “I like working together,” another said.
When Farley lifted his blade triumphantly in the air, blood dripped through him and onto the ground. “Strength in numbers!”
While the others all cheered, I resisted ripping their blades away. However, I suspected that even though they liked us and were helping us, they’d turn on us to keep them. I clasped my hands behind my back.
“I think,” Farley said as he lowered his blade, “that I also still felt suppressed and beaten down by them, even after death. I didn’t think there was much else we could do, and I certainly didn’t think we could destroy them, but we can.”
Behind him, the other poltergeists bobbed in agreement as Farley’s revelation caused a sharp pang to my heart. Not even death had freed him and the others from the oppression and loss that propelled them into the Revenant Woods, got them killed, and turned them into poltergeists.
“But now we know that we can fight back,” another poltergeist said. “And I mean really fight back, not just throw things at their carriages or try to scare them. We’ve created an army with you fucking breathers.”
My eyebrows rose at his assessment of us. They needed us to help make the nobles pay, especially since they couldn’t leave this forest, but I thought some of them would have preferred to change our breather status to non-breather.
We were going to have to be really careful around the poltergeists now.