Chapter 24 #2
He nods and leaves. A moment later he’s back with a small canvas bag, and he hands it to me with a careful sort of reverence. I take it and cradle it against my chest for a second, letting the weight of it settle, before I lift my gaze to the others.
“All right,” I say, softer now. “Let’s go.”
It is time to put my big girl pants on. What I am about to do is not made for an amateur.
It will take speed and grace, and an almost ridiculous amount of theatrical prowess.
I have to get outside and scatter my bones across the grounds before Rhea and her Grims catch on to what I am doing, and why.
Because the thing I said about purpose, about what it means to exist as a Grim Reaper, applies to Rhea too.
She is at full power, just like me. And I have every reason to believe she broke out of the cycle Death put her in.
She does not seem to be doing this to kill murderers so she can move on, not the way her friends do.
I think Rhea’s purpose is to help her friends move on.
That is what she said before, wasn’t it.
Ever since her death, she has been helping other victims wake up from the emotionless trance and find their core again.
I think that, in her mind, she was making them stronger.
But in reality, she was feeding the belief that without the death of their abusers, they would never be free.
And that is why, after I seal the hospital grounds, I need to talk to her. I need to try. If she understands the whole process, maybe she will understand me too.
We get to work. The boys handle the salt, their runes, and whatever else they have going on, while I turn into a superhero. I float up, drift to the far wall that separates the inside from the outside, and take a deep breath before slipping through.
Outside, at least a few dozen crows are waiting. The girls are definitely getting impatient with us, which is all the more reason to hurry the fuck up.
I fly fast, the wind screaming past my ears as the bag of bones bumps lightly against my hip. I dart over the hospital’s shadowed grounds, and the crows scatter when I pass, their wings slicing through the air like black ribbons. Each time I drop a bone, I lace it with my power.
One goes down by the gate. Another lands near the cracked asphalt path.
Two more hit the field where the ambulance shells still rest. When I loop over the roof and spot the Grim Reaper girls, I slow just a fraction and let myself smile.
You know, not to seem suspicious. Then I’m gone again, up and around, scattering the last bones in a sweeping arc that outlines the entire perimeter.
I’m almost finished. One more turn and the whole task will be done.
Then she’s there.
Rhea materializes in the air ahead of me, perfectly still, her hair fanning out behind her.
Power rolls off her in a steady wave that makes my stomach twist. I can tell this is a quiet cock-measuring contest to her, a way to show me she’s strong.
I do not think she means it cruelly, but she also does not feel as friendly as she did in the murder van.
“Hi, Skye,” she says. “What are you doing?”
I halt mid-flight, hovering a few feet away.
Time to act.
“Ah, you know. Trying to seal the hospital off in case the wraiths get out of the Skystones,” I say. “We should have done it before we left, but things were just so… hectic back then.”
Hectic is too weak a word, but fine. I’m not going to rehash the past. Rhea threatened to kill me, and that lives in its own category of memory. We’re past that now. Right?
I search her face, trying to figure out if she thinks so too, but I can’t read her reaction.
“Don’t you think that’s wishful thinking?” she asks. “Twelve wraiths are surely stronger than your wards.”
“Perhaps,” I admit. “But we would be fools not to try.”
I reach into my bag for the last bone, my skull, the same one Nathaniel carved once upon a time. I shift it to my grip and start to slip past her, eager to end this conversation and get on with it. The moment I move, her body glitches, and a second later she is standing directly in my path.
Not friendly. Definitely not friendly. That sharp, nasty energy is back in full force.
“We noticed you’re taking your time with the couple,” she says. “At first we thought you might need a moment to settle back in after everything you went through. But we don’t want to wait anymore.”
“Yeah, I totally get it,” I say, forcing brightness into my voice. “It must be exhausting, hovering so close to your goal. I’m sorry. This is literally the last thing I need to handle before we do it.”
“Is that so?”
“Yup.” I try to step around her again. I really need to end this. “Let me finish this quickly so you can be on your merry way to oblivion, okay?”
“Alex saw Cassian fill a tank with water not that long ago,” she says, cutting me off.
The air shifts. My pulse does something unpleasant.
“Oh yeah?” I say, keeping my tone light.
“He looked like he was about to kill them then and there.”
“Ah, I see.” I force a casual smile that I do not feel. “Well, you might not know it about Cassian, but he looks like he’s going to kill someone all the time. I’m sure he just wanted to get everything prepared ahead of time.”
Rhea smiles back, but it never reaches her eyes.
“You’re lying,” she says softly.
There’s no hesitation in her voice, only that eerie certainty that makes my skin prickle.
Her gaze pins me in place, sharp as a knife’s edge, and the air thickens until it hums with invisible pressure.
Even the crows around us go still. She’s trying to remind me who’s in charge again, and my pulse stutters in response.
“Come on, Rhea…”
“You told him not to kill them.” She tilts her head, and shadows ripple down her neck. “He was about to do it.”
So she isn’t buying my story for a second.
Fucking hell.
The crows begin to stir, their wings beating in a jagged rhythm, and the Grim girls waiting in the trees twitch like marionettes.
“How about you calm down, hm?” I try, forcing the words out like they might soothe her.
Nothing works.
Rhea’s power lashes forward like a whip, and I have to dart sideways to avoid it.
“Oh, fucking hell,” I curse. “You don’t understand. I need to do this!”
“Liar!” she screams, then lunges.
I twist away, barely dodging as her hand clips my shoulder.
The touch burns cold, searing through my incorporeal form.
Pain flares white and violent, like frostbite slicing through flame.
Unlike with things and people anchored to the corporeal world, I can’t reject her touch.
Rhea belongs to the in-between, and because I’m half-dead, I can’t fully adapt to the living plane.
No matter how hard I try, she will always be able to reach me.
So the only solution is to run.
I streak through the air like a comet, every gust cutting through me and every muscle screaming at me to move. Rhea’s shriek follows like a banshee’s wail, and if I didn’t know her, I would think she was a wraith.
Below, the girls in the trees react. Their heads snap up in unison, and their forms dissolve and reform in bursts of static. The crows scatter, then surge back together, thousands of them wheeling into a spiral so dense it could blot out the moon, if the moon were out.
I clutch the last bone to my chest. “Come on, come on…”
Rhea cuts me off. She flickers ahead in a blink, her hand shooting for my arm again. I twist in midair and we collide. For a heartbeat the world bends around us, two half-souls locked in a power struggle neither of us can fully win.
Because she cannot win, not now.
I am too strong for her.
Still, I do not want to fight her. I do not want to hurt her. I just want her to let me go.
“You want to cause us pain!” she yells, her voice layered with echoes, one angry, one desperate, one heartbreakingly human. “You want us to wait forever!”
“I’m trying to save you!” I shout back. “You don’t even know what you’re asking for!”
Her eyes flare silver. “Don’t tell me what I know!”
She lunges again and catches my wrist this time.
Her fingers are ice and iron as she drags me downward.
The crows dive in after her, black streaks tearing through the air like meteors, slamming into my aura and into her.
The air thickens until it feels like I am trying to breathe through velvet. My grip on the bone falters.
“No. No, no…”
Anything but this.
A crow slams into my face and disintegrates on contact. Another rakes across my back. Somewhere below, my guys are screaming from the ground, but they cannot even reach us. We are too far up in the air, and for the briefest moment, I feel like I overestimated my abilities.
What am I compared to multiple Grim Reapers?
But the truth is, I am a lot. I understand the source of Grim Reaper power, and they don’t.
I can do pretty much anything compared to them.
I am truly free.
I close my eyes and tap into my core. It lasts only a moment, but when I open them the change is already there. Out of the pale sky, a flock of my own crows floods the air, so black and so big that this time it’s Rhea’s turn to gasp in fear.
I take advantage of the moment, and I’m already falling. The world blinks in and out, reality, void, reality again. One heartbeat I’m midair, the next I’m over the gate, the next I’m above the cracked parking lot.
The last bone burns hot in my palm as I crash to my knees in the tall grass. The world still stutters around me, and through the blur I catch Cassian’s silhouette, his mouth moving as he shouts something I cannot hear.
I tighten my grip until the heat bites.
“Almost done,” I manage, and then I press the bone to the ground.
Magic erupts in a violent flare, threads of silver and black snapping through the field like lashes. My crows dive, colliding with the Grim Reapers’ flock in a maelstrom of feathers and screams, and I close my eyes as I let go.
The instant I release it, I feel everything answer.
Every bone I scattered ignites at once, linked through the pulse of my soul.
The hospital grounds blaze into a vast circle of black light, and the surge rips through me, through flesh and the memory of flesh, anchoring it all to me with ruthless certainty.
Then the shockwave hits. The air folds inward and drags the girls and their crows with it, tearing them from the field and ripping them out of my space. The force shoves them all the way back to the far end, right where the forest begins.
My hand trembles as I reach down to the grass. The bone beside me is nothing but ash now.
Footsteps pound behind me. Cassian first, fast and hard. Talon right after him, breathless. Nathaniel comes slower, his gaze sweeping the horizon like he expects the next attack to rise out of the dark.
It will not. I know it for a fact.
Cassian drops to his knees beside me and grips my shoulders. “Skye. Jesus. You’re bleeding.”
I glance down. Thin streaks of blood run from my wrists, tracing along my fingers. I did not even notice.
“It’s fine,” I murmur. “It’s already healing.” Before my eyes, the wounds stitch themselves shut, like they were never there at all.
For the first time in what feels like forever, the hospital grounds are quiet. I look at my boys, all three of them, and something in my chest loosens.
“It feels really fucking awesome to be this strong,” I say. It is the only comment I have in me.
All three of them burst into laughter, and I cannot help laughing too. For so long, they were the ones with the upper hand. Now the balance has shifted, and it feels almost unreal.
I’m fucking awesome. That’s it. It does not get cooler than that.
Bring those goddamn wraiths on. I have a feeling I will not even break a sweat when they come.