Chapter Twenty-Four
Twenty-Four
Ezra is vomiting again.
His retching is the first thing I hear when I return to my body, but I can barely process it. I’m shaking, every nerve ending on fire. I curl in on myself as though I can get away from the pain, but I know I just have to wait for it to pass.
This is what happens when you get pulled out of the Afterlife before you’re ready.
Ideally, you want to be back in the same place you arrived—in the same position as best as you can—when your Kykeon mist runs out so you’ll have a peaceful transition.
Otherwise, the process, well, hurts. This isn’t the first time I’ve been yanked back to my body, so I know what to expect.
I know it will pass. Ezra, on the other hand, does not.
He’s whimpering “kill me,” which, honestly, I feel is a bit dramatic. But to be fair, this process is extremely painful.
Painful enough I pass out.
When I come to, the pain has receded to low-level nausea and exhaustion. Tolliver is patting my brow with a cool cloth. I look over to the blue couch to find Ezra, who is white as a sheet.
“How you doing?” I prompt, words slightly slurred.
He looks at me like I’m speaking another language. “I hate you,” he says, voice strained. “What was that?”
“A hellhound.” I take the cloth from Tolliver and try to sit up. He has to help me a little, but I eventually make it.
If the hellhound in the Boston T had shot me instead of Pete, it would have sent me back to the Beforedeath, and I would have been writhing in pain when the Reapers came looking for the intruder.
But when it shot Infamous Pete instead, there was no body to send his soul back to.
He was Dead. Most people think the souls of the Dead just cease to exist when a hellhound reaps them, but I know what I saw.
It wasn’t destroyed. It turned into a ball of light and went… somewhere.
But never mind that just now. There shouldn’t have been a hellhound there at all. They tend to hang around liminal places where the Dead first arrive, finding souls with obols and ferrying them to the corresponding syndicate. They only really banish living people if they stumble across them.
This hellhound, however, was targeting us, almost like it was sent to catch us. Which makes no sense, because now we’re back in the Beforedeath with a translated journal. Other than the excruciating pain, this job was a success.
So why does it feel like we’re the ones who got played?
Tolliver hands me a mug shaped like a seahorse filled with steaming liquid, then offers one to Ezra. “This is a special potion I brew to help you feel better.”
I smirk into my cup. It’s basically just chamomile tea, but the placebo effect is real, and before long, Ezra is breathing normally and back to his much tanner skin shade.
“So, is this the second part of the con you all keep talking about?” he asks. “Going into the Afterlife?”
“Yeah,” I say. “But if we don’t get nabbed by a hellhound, the return is much gentler.”
“Good.” He takes a deep breath, then nods to himself. “I think I’d like to go back.”
Tolliver’s eyebrows shoot up. “Really?”
Ezra rubs his chin. “I don’t know why, but I feel…different. Like…shiny?”
“Oh.” I set down my mug. “Did we forget to tell you about the magic?”
Translating the grimoire is a long and arduous process.
I sit cross-legged on the wood floor of my living room with the codex and journal open in front of me, the others hovering over my shoulder.
Dictionaries and crumpled papers are strewn across the floor.
There’s a half-eaten box of pizza on the coffee table and several empty cans of energy drinks, which Crowlene is systematically piling in the fireplace.
We run into our first problem pretty quickly: Alice translated the journal into Latin, not English.
“We need to take a more structured approach,” Rook says, voice strained.
He’s leaning against the breakfast bar, but his posture is too stiff for it to look casual.
Ever since we started translating, his polite demeanor has started cracking.
He’s probably just impatient to get his sister back, but I can’t help but be suspicious of his every reaction.
What if the Cult of Hades is using him, just like the syndicates used Alice?
What if he’s just biding his time and plans to betray us at the earliest convenience?
“Who put you in charge of this?” Poppy snaps at him.
She’s not the only one with a short fuse right now. The longer we go without making progress, the thicker the tension gets.
Rook crosses his arms. “I can read in five languages, two of which are ancient languages, one of which is Latin.”
“Congrats?” Poppy says. “You’re not the only polyglot in the room. CJ knows Latin and Greek. I speak French and two different creoles. And Tolliver knows Japanese, which has a writing system similar to this. Even New Guy knows Spanish.”
Ezra looks up from where he has been trying (and failing) to sketch the symbols from the book. “And Ladino. Some Hebrew.” He looks to me expectantly.
I shake my head. “Oh, no, I just do accents.”
“And,” Poppy continues, “you knowing Latin hasn’t exactly helped us so far. There are more symbols in…Voynish or whatever than words in the Latin translation, but fewer symbols than letters. Figure that out, Smart Guy.”
“It’s shorthand,” Tolliver says without looking up from where he plays Mario Kart on the couch.
We all stare at him.
I crawl over to grab the Switch from his hands. “It’s what?”
Tolliver pouts for a moment, then shrugs. “When I had to learn to write with my left hand, my dad taught me Takusari. It’s a Japanese shorthand. I could write more with fewer strokes, so it was easier.” He leans forward and points to a line of the grimoire. “The symbols are sounds.”
We all stare blankly at him.
“Look,” he says, sliding off the couch to sit in front of the coffee table.
He pushes a few empty cans of Ghost Energy onto the floor and pulls a piece of paper in front of him. His hand curls in standard lefty formation as he scribbles two lines across the page.
He points to the top line. “This is written using kanji, where each symbol represents a word.”
There are five symbols written across the page. The first one looks really complicated.
“This is the same thing written in Takusari,” Tolliver says, pointing to the second line, which honestly looks like a few squiggles. “There are more characters, because they’re sounds. And if I wrote this in like, English, where all the symbols are letters, it would be even longer.”
“What does it say in English?” Poppy asks.
Tolliver’s eyes flick to me and he clears his throat. “Nothing.”
“It’s possible it’s shorthand,” Rook concedes.
Tolliver shrugs, then holds his hand out.
“Good job,” I say, giving him back the Switch.
After a little bit of analysis, we find that Tolliver is correct and the translation does in fact correspond with sounds. We’re able to come up with something of a cipher based on how much Alice was able to translate before the hellhound showed up.
Then we run into our second problem.
It turns out the codex won’t even let you copy it in another language.
Each time we try to write out our translations, our hands freeze up, just like Poppy’s did at the museum.
After some trial and error, we find we can get around this by translating in the margins of the codex itself, which, strangely, it allows.
As long as we’re using some of the special ink from CJ’s bookbinding kit.
We end up in a sort of assembly line. Poppy and I are good at translating from what we’ve dubbed Voynish into sounds, and then Rook and CJ are best at making sense of the sounds into Latin words.
Tolliver is oddly good at translating the Latin into English with the help of an old Latin dictionary of Rook’s.
We tried using Google Translate, but we couldn’t even type phrases from the codex into the computer, as I guess that counts as copying the manuscript and is against whatever spell protects it.
Ezra is keeping a spreadsheet that summarizes what we translate—when he’s not incessantly asking us when his magic is going to kick in, like it’s cold medicine.
Crowlene turns pages.
We translate just enough of each section to figure out if it’s the resurrection spell and then move on. It’s a pretty good system, but it still takes us longer than I’d like.
It’s not until the fifth day that we find what we’re looking for.
“This is…” Tolliver says slowly as he writes out his latest translation, sitting cross-legged and barefoot at the far end of the coffee table. “The sacred…rite…of resurrection…‘He who aspires’—”
“What?” Poppy squeals.
“Read that again,” I demand.
We all crowd around Tolliver. Even Crowlene looks interested, until her good eye pops out and I have to put it back in.
“It’s going to be a while, my dudes,” Tolliver says, not looking up from the codex.
We spend the next few hours playing Mario Kart, stress eating, and sneaking peeks over Tolliver’s shoulder.
Finally, he sits back, lays the pen down, and gives us all a wide grin. “Done!”
It’s a mad dash for the codex. Poppy gets there first and stands smugly, cradling the manuscript. She clears her throat.
“Please sit for a dramatic reading of…” She glances down at the page. “ ‘The Whisper of Bones.’ ”
“That’s a good name,” I say. Tolliver nods.
Poppy takes center stage in front of the fireplace.
A few years ago, she decided that spot has the best acoustics in the house because of the high ceiling and stone backdrop.
She squares her shoulders, clears her throat, and then begins her recitation in her most theatrical voice.
“ ‘This is the sacred rite of resurrection. He’—or she, or they—‘who aspires to raise the dead should know this rite is not for the fainthearted.’ ”
She looks at each of us in turn in with a faux warning glare.
“ ‘One soul, blessed with a mysterious gift that flows through the marrow, first must gather the due elements’—Jesus, that’s wordy, isn’t it?”