Chapter Twenty-Four
Nico
If Mayhem is right, and something about his explanation feels like it is, then she did something that seems even more impossible.
“I can find out if you want me to,” Mayhem offers, looking at me.
“What do you mean?” Hades asks with surprise.
I’ve spent enough time observing them to know that Mayhem is a lot more than he seems, but I have no idea where he’s going with this.
Mayhem looks around and lowers his voice even more, “I can check your soul and see if you died before you were supposed to.”
“That’s incredible,” Hades mutters in astonishment at Mayhem’s confession.
I hesitate, “Can you tell anything else? It’s not like reading my mind?”
There are things that I’ve been through that I don’t want to share.
Not even to find out if I’m supposed to be alive.
I look down at Farren in my arms and come to a startling realisation, I would do it for her. I would risk Mayhem seeing it all, risk changing his opinion of me, risk him looking at me with pity instead of respect, if it meant that she was safe.
Damn.
What the hell am I supposed to do with that?
I look back up at Mayhem just in time to see understanding cross his features.
“I can make sure that I only look for that specific thing. If I was looking at the whole of your soul, I would be able to see the damage left by certain things, but I wouldn’t be able to see what caused it.
However, I can make sure that I am only looking for whether you died before you were supposed to. ”
I’m not the only one who stares at him in pure shock.
That’s insane.
I know what Hades said about the warriors who guard the souls in Purgatory, but I don’t think that even they can pick and choose what they can see when they look at a soul.
Maybe I’m wrong though.
It’s certainly not my area of expertise.
My gaze connects with Rast, and what he says next surprises me despite the fact that I’ve been watching and listening to them for a while.
“I trust him,” Rast says. “If anyone can find out without seeing anything that you don’t want them to, then it's Mayhem.”
Mayhem grins, “Aw, Farren was right, you like us.”
Rast smirks, “You’re growing on me. I wouldn’t say that I like you.”
“Uh huh, you keep telling yourself that, mate,” Loki retorts, immediately looking completely gleeful at the prospect.
“We understand if you don’t want to risk it,” Kill surprises me by saying.
Storm nods, “Kill’s right. No one will hold it against you. We get it.”
My eyes travel over all of them, every single one of their expressions shows that they really do understand what I’m concerned about, and they really wouldn’t blame me or hold it against me if I didn’t agree to it.
I look down at Farren again.
She lets out the most enormous snore, and the contrast of the sound with the seriousness of our realisation has a shocked laugh bursting free it only takes moments before the others are all laughing along with me.
“I think it’s safe to say that Farren is recharging after she expended a lot of energy to bring Nico back, and that she should wake up when she’s back to full strength,” Hades says. There’s uncertainty in his tone though, that we all feel.
She'd better fucking wake up.
My eyebrows rise in reaction to my own thoughts. That was a shockingly strong reaction to have for someone who I hardly know.
Once the laughter has died down again, I look at Mayhem. “Alright, let’s see if I was supposed to die or not. I want to know if she’s going to be okay, and this is the best way to do it.”
Mayhem nods, “Okay. It should only take a few moments, and you probably won’t even realise what I’m doing.”
“Wait,” I say. “If that’s the case, then you could have just checked without me even knowing, so why would you ask now?”
Mayhem smirks, “Farren likes you, and she put in a hell of a lot of effort, risking her life in order to save you. That means that you’re most likely going to be sticking around for a while.
I like you. My instincts tell me that already.
Plus, your Rast’s best friend. I would never soul search someone without their permission if I actually care about how they feel about me. ”
“Aw, you like me,” Rast teases, flipping the script back at Mayhem and making him chuckle.
“Thank you,” I say to Mayhem.
He nods, “Ready?”
“Yes.”
I try not to tense, but it’s pretty impossible when I know that someone is looking at my fucking soul. That’s all kinds of crazy, and I thought I was getting pretty used to crazy by now.
Turns out I’m not.
“Your soul died before you were supposed to,” Mayhem says after a couple of moments. “Farren fixed the imbalance by bringing you back.”
Everyone stares at Farren and me in shock.
After a couple of moments, Loki shakes his head and throws his hands up in the air.
“What the hell? Mayhem dude, you’re insane, it’s impressive, and Farren.
Well, I suppose Farren is being Farren and doing things that she shouldn’t be able to do again.
” He looks at Hades, “Can you bring people back from the dead?”
Hades shakes his head, “No. Not even if they died too soon, there was nothing that I could do to fix it.”
“Huh,” Zev says. “Well, at least we have an answer to something, although I have no idea how Farren managed to do it, or what it means.”
“Is anyone else having a hard time processing this?” Rast asks as he stares at me.
“Probably not as much as you, but I think it’s safe to say that none of us know how to handle this newest development,” Khaos agrees.
Rast nods, “That’s actually really reassuring.”
“Before we move on, I need to explain a couple of things,” I say, the urgency to finally tell someone flooding me.
Storm nods, “Okay, one second.” He raises his voice and calls for Laikynn, who quickly appears again. Storm asks, “Laikynn, are we safe to stay here for a little bit longer?”
Laikynn nods, “Yes, we can keep you safe. We haven’t run into anything too concerning yet, anyway.”
“The important word in that sentence is yet,” Loki mutters drily.
Laikynn chooses to ignore him and starts to disappear into the darkness surrounding us.
Before he can go completely, I ask, “Can you warn us if anyone is in hearing distance of us? I don’t want what I have to say being overheard.”
“Yes, we can do that,” he replies, a curious lilt to his voice. “There is no one around for at least a few miles, you should be safe to discuss what you wish to. Since it’s sensitive information, I feel the need to remind you that we, of course, will be able to hear you.”
He said remind me like he’s already told me. It makes me think that he’s known that I have been with them.
I nod, “Yes, I have a feeling that what I wish to discuss with everyone, you already may be aware of.”
“Perhaps,” he replies and then disappears into the darkness fully this time.
“What’s going on?” Rast asks. He looks at Farren, “She’s going to be okay, right? You don’t know something since you were dead?”
“Those are two different questions. I have no idea if Farren is going to be okay, but Laikynn said that she would be, and she’s asleep and not dead right now, and she restored the balance, she didn’t throw the balance off by bringing me back, so that suggests that she will be okay.
As for your second question, it’s because I was dead that I know things that I shouldn’t. ”
“I feel like I’m definitely going to need a snack for this,” Zev mutters.
“Already on it,” Loki replies, handing him some jerky and keeping some for himself.
“You guys are emotionally eating now?” Khaos asks with his eyebrow raised.
“Damn straight we are,” Zev replies like it’s a no-brainer. He holds some out to Khaos, “You want some?”
Khaos hesitates for a second and then sighs, “Yeah, go on then.” He looks at me, “Alright, spill whatever fucked up thing we have to deal with now.”
“Hey, we don’t know for certain that it’s a fucked-up thing,” Rival says.
“It could be a good thing,” Loki says, sounding vaguely hopeful.
I wince.
Rival points at me, “Judging from his expression, it’s definitely not a good thing.”
Storm raises his eyebrow, “Well?”
“It’s not great, but it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise since you’ve already figured some stuff out,” I reply.
“It’s about the compound, isn’t it?” Rast asks, as always surprising me with how quickly he’s put two and two together.
I nod, “If we’re waiting here for a while, then there are things that you need to know.”
I go on to explain to Rast about the ritual they did, and that it never should have worked. There was no reason for it to work.
“Which means that someone or something that has a lot of fucking power and influence managed to interfere with it, to make it work without the compound leaders realising that they were interfering,” Rival summarises quickly.
“Exactly,” I reply. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and that’s the only logical, while admittedly improbable, thing that made sense to me.
“Why do I feel like that’s not everything?” Hades asks me astutely.
“Because it’s not,” I admit. I look at Rast, this is going to affect him more than the others. “We were lied to, like you always suspected. Everyone back at the compound is being lied to.”
Rast nods, “I’m not surprised, but I am going to need a little clarification.”
I look at the others, “So, I know that Rast has explained some things but hear me out for a moment. We grew up learning how the compounds came to be. The collapse and subsequent darkness didn’t happen a couple of years ago hell, it didn’t happen a couple of hundred years ago.
This has been our lives for a long, long time.
The compounds were formed by the survivors, right?
The natives of this realm. They grouped together, put up wards, kept these small pockets light and ran them like towns, with a few people in charge to make sure that everything ran smoothly, and then they exchanged and bargained between compounds, while making sure that any of the escaped prisoners were killed on sight. ”
“I don’t like where this is going,” Rast says, his fists clenching at his sides, and a heavy frown on his face.
“Me neither,” Reaper says, his arms crossed over his chest and looking as formidable as he is.
“They aren’t the citizens from this side of the realm,” I continue.
“The compounds were slowly and methodically overtaken by the escaped souls from the punishment side of the realm, and now every leader, every second, every commander, everyone you can think of who has a modicum of power in the compound is one of those escaped souls. That’s why we don’t see them that often when we leave the compounds, even though they are supposedly the second biggest threat that we face. They’re afraid of us.”
They stare at me.
I wait for them to put the pieces together, to realise just how monumental this is.
“The people in the darkness, the ones that we kill on sight, they’re the originals, they’re the natives of this realm, the ones who are supposed to be living and in charge of the realm. Instead they’ve been cast out and hunted,” Rast says, sounding utterly horrified and paling.
“Yes,” I admit.
I know what he’s going through, I went through the same thing when I realised.
“Fuck,” Kill curses. “Fry, Lock and the others, they aren’t the descendants of the escaped souls.”
“That’s why they didn’t feel like a threat to us,” Storm says.
“We are,” Rast says, paling. “We’re the descendants of the escaped souls.”
“How is it even possible?” Khaos asks. “Can souls procreate?”
I shrug. “Apparently. Although it’s the people in power who are the escaped souls, there are still a lot of the descendants of the natives that live within the compounds too.”
“I still don’t get how this could happen?” Loki says.
Surprisingly, Khaos is the one to answer, “It’s pretty simple when you get down to the bare bones of it.
They’re criminals, they’re the worst of the worst, but all it took were a few intelligent and strategic ones to put their minds together, and it would be easy to get the others to follow.
I’m sure not all of them did, and I’m sure that those ones were disposed of.
If one of these criminals offered protection or showed remorse to someone who was running a compound, then that’s all it would take to get their foot in the door.
Once they did, they could have easily spread like a poison.
Everyone was in a panic it would have been easy to prey on that vulnerability. ”