I wipe my face with my sleeve and I sit there in the ruined town. My town. Surrounded by rubble, I can see silhouettes of the buildings still, standing tall like they used to. The Emerald Cask, bustling with people and music. My throat burns, like I just took shots with Jace.
I clutch the bear tighter in my hand as though someone’s going to rip it from my grasp. I can still see her smile, hear her giggle. I didn’t protect her.
I look up. There’s scratching in the distance. A lone fox stands near the edge of the woods. It looks at me, turning its head. I take a step forward, but my feet are stuck. I look down, the soles of my shoes are melting against the hot ground. Sizzling. When I look back up, the fox is gone. Instead, standing where it once stood is a person. He has dark hair that hides his eyes. I don’t recognize him. He starts coming toward me.
I look back down at my boots and try to slip them off, but something grabs my shoulder and yanks me backward. I fall hard, my head knocking against a brick just after I land. Wincing in pain, I shut my eyes and rub the back of my head.
‘Ya have a bravery I never had.’
Nannu. Her voice haunts me.
“I’m not brave,” I mumble, shaking my head.
“Ya are so brave, Artemis,” she tells me. It sounds like she’s standing right behind me.
My heart nearly stops. Her voice isn’t haunting me at all. Slowly, I force myself to turn around.
It can’t be.
But there she is, standing there. Nannu. I frown. I don’t understand how this is possible.
“How? I’m dreaming —” I have to be. I saw her die.
“Who cares if you are?” she asks, coming toward me. She doesn’t have her walking stick and when she gets closer, I realize her eyes are no longer white. As she gets closer, she gets younger. Her hair is frizzy, dark brown, darker than her skin.
She smiles. “It’s nice to see ya face.” She touches my cheek, running her palm against my face. Her hands are rough. “You can’t keep doing this, Artemis.”
“Doing what?” I swallow hard.
“Living in the past — living in ya head.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
Nannu pulls her hand away from my face. “Stop pushing everyone away,” she whispers.
“Nannu, I watched you die. How are you — how do you look like this? How are you alive?”
She takes my hand, and looks down at hers in mine, the blend of our skin. “I’m not,” she says, simply.
At her words, I look away, but only for a second. When I look back, she’s gone like she was never there. Her hand, no longer in mine, but still warm from her touch.
I clutch Zoirin’s bear tighter in my hand. Newacre begins to blur, something else taking its place. It’s dark, damp and dirty. Musty.
I can feel the material of the bear slipping through my fingers. It’s disappearing like smoke. I try to grab it but it escapes from me.
Chapter FIVE
beg for death
My eyelids flutter. The room is slowly coming into focus. I look up. The roof is caving in, held up by stacked bricks and concrete. I rub the side of my head.
“You’re having a rough time, aren’tcha.”
“Who are you?” I ask the voice. “Where am I?” I blink a few times, my sight is still blurring every now and then. I can’t see clearly.
“I hate to break the bad news to you, but you’re likely gonna be dinner.”
“What?”
“I dunno what broughtcha to this dump —” there’s something shifting around beside me, “— but you shouldn’t’ve ever come here. Real big mistake.”
“What are you talking about?”
Whoever’s talking isn’t making any sense to me. The more I struggle to see around me, my head seems to spin. “After they torched the Woodlands, it’s been crawling with ghouls. You should take it easy, the first few moments after waking are the hardest.”
“I saw Nannu,” I say, trying to sort through my memories.
“Was that the lady?”
“So that actually happened? It wasn’t in my head? You saw her too?”
“Oh, it was in your head.”
“What are you talking about? Wait — the first few minutes after what?”
She inhales deeply. I close my eyes.
“I did that. You seemed like you were gonna have a fit or something so I tried to ease it but I think I made it worse.”
“What?” I glance over. The woman making conversation has a scarf wrapped around her head, hiding her hair and most of her neck. She waves her fingers at me.
“I’m a genie, and you were poisoned by ghouls.”
I shake my head as I pull myself up from the ground and sit back against the wall. We’re both sitting in our own little iron cages, built from whatever scraps of Newacre someone managed to gather.
“If there are ghouls, why are we alive?”
“Cause they’re saving us for later. Like I said, this place is a dump. After they cleaned it out, they realized they were gonna be low on food so they started saving some.” She nods to the cage on the other side of me and I quickly turn away once I catch a glimpse of its containment.
There’s the remains of a body, with only parts of the flesh still attached to the bones.
“I hate dark creatures,” I mumble. I close my eyes again, hoping all of this is just another bad dream. I’ll wake in my bed and everything will be okay. Back at the cabin. Back to safety. I shouldn’t have left.
“Technically, I’m a dark creature.”
Genies weren’t necessarily dark, but their power did come from the dead.
“I hate you too, then.”
“Harsh.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Do what? I didn’t do anything.”
“The — why’d you make me see Nannu?”
“All I did was open up your mind. You did the rest, not me. I don’t know your life.”
“And you’re never gonna,” I say.
“Are you always so rude?”
“Are you always so nosy?” I ask, looking over at her again. Clenching my fists, I can almost feel the traces of the burnt material of Zoirin’s bear against my palm. The anger is rising. “So talkative? Do you ever shut up? Mind your own damn business and stay out of peoples heads?”
“Sorry, I just.” She chews on her bottom lip and looks away from me. “It’s been a while since I got to talk to someone. It gets lonely in here.”
“I don’t want to talk to you.”
“You don’t have to! I can —”
“I don’t want you to talk to me either.”
“Oh.”
Nestling against the wall, I’m surprised she quiets down quickly. She crosses her arms and keeps her focus away from me. I stare at the bars. It reminds me of being King Solomon’s prisoner. Being at his mercy. Being a pathetic, child of munfolk.
“Hey, you okay? You’re shaking.”
She nods to my fists. My hands are shaking, my knuckles are white. I release my hands, my nails have left marks in my palms. I didn’t even feel it.
“I’m fine.”
She scoffs and shakes her head. “You know, you remind me of the boy they all talk about. In their whispers. About the one who’s gonna come back.”
“Who?”
“The necromancer — hmm — Apollo, I think his name is.”
“You’re outta your mind.”
Apollo’s not going to come back.
“Yeah, I’ve been in here a little too long. A little delirious I guess. I’m starving.”
I run my hand along the ground, feeling for something sharp, whatever I can grab. My hand clasps around a broken metal rod. Staring at the tip, I close my eyes and scratch my wrist. I throw the rod to her.
“You didn’
t have to do that,” she says.
“Anything to make you shut up.”
“Sassy. You know, you’re gonna warm up to me sooner or later. I can sense it,” she says as she crawls over to the bar. “You’re going to like me.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
I look at her out of the corners of my eyes, as she licks the blood dripping down the side of the metal. She licks her finger and looks at me. I roll my eyes. “Hmm.”
“What?” I say, pressing my wrist to my shirt.
“Your blood, it, it smells interesting. But it’s probably just because I haven’t had any in a while. How did you know?”
“Know what?”
“About the blood?”
“You called yourself a ‘dark creature’. Which of them don’t feed on blood? Flesh?”
She crinkles her nose. “Never flesh, disgusting.” She shudders. “What do you think I am? A ghoul? Empusa? Disgusting.”
“They actually aren’t so bad,” I say. If all it takes to get rid of one is an insult, I think I’d rather deal with Empusae than anything else. “Empusa, I mean, if they don’t put you under their trance or whatever. To get rid of them, you just have to insult them.”
She sits up suddenly. “Wait.”
“Forget I said anything,” I say.
“No, you came across Empusae and you weren’t put under a trance? How did you manage that?”
“It wasn’t a choice,” I say. “Trust me, if it was, I wouldn’t have been protecting myself from it. I would have —” I inhale sharply. “Nevermind.”
“You have unusual desires, you know.”
“What are you talking about?”
She shrugs. “A lot of people want selfish things, selfish or materialistic. Love, lust. They want their fantasies fulfilled, but you…” She purses her lips together. “Security, stability. Loyalty, friendship, family — and you want to be okay. Not happy, but just okay.”
“There are people who would give anything to be just okay.”
“Why not want more?”
“Why be selfish for things we aren’t entitled to? I spent my whole childhood being selfish and you want to know what I learned? It isn’t about me. Life isn’t about being happy. It’s about surviving. I don’t need to be happy — happiness is a luxury. But I need to want to survive, and I need to be okay in order to do that. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be okay when you’re sick of being everything but.”
She doesn’t say anything and instead, out of the corners of my eyes, I can see her tapping her lips with her finger.
“You think you know everything, just because you can see someone’s desires, but you just proved you don’t know anything at all.”
“I’m trying to understand,” she says.
“Why? You’re food, and so am I. We were both dumb enough to get ourselves trapped in here so we have that in common, we don’t need to understand each other,” I say. Maybe a little more curtly than I meant to.
“I’m Nadia,” she says.
I didn’t realize until that point that I didn’t know her name. Not knowing her name made it easier to ignore the fact that she would be consumed by a ghoul. It dehumanized her. I was dehumanizing her.
“Art,” I say quietly.
“Art… Like short for Arthur?”
“Something like that. When do they come back?” I ask. “How long are they usually gone for?”
“It shouldn’t be long now. Why?” I’m clenching my fists again. “What are you going to do?”
I don’t know yet, so I don’t say anything. But what I do know, is I can feel the power surging through my veins. I can feel the generations before me, like they’re ready to be unleashed. I can feel it, and I don’t know what it means.
Only moments go by and the ghouls began to stagger in, just like she said they would. I recognize every face they wear. Ghouls. They take on the face of the last victim they fully consumed, and I can hardly stomach what I see. The people who are standing in front of me. It was like the way they rose from the rubble, coming after me. Faces I grew up knowing. People who were kind to me while I was young, and even when I was nearly an adult. They’re all dead now, walking around with unbalanced steps.
I can feel Nadia burning holes into the side of my head again with her stare. She’s covered her face now with her scarf, only her large hazel eyes exposed. She’s watching me, likely wondering what I’m about to do. Truthfully, I’m wondering the same. I don’t know how to defeat a ghoul, I’ve never faced one before and now I was stuffed into a room with nearly twelve of them.
I didn’t have Rhiannon to help me this time either. I want to kick myself for thinking I didn’t need her.
A young woman walks up to me, I recognize her. She’s one of Mr. Jameson’s — no, she’s not one of Mr. Jameson’s daughters. She’s just wearing her face. Laurel. The girl who bumped into Jace at his party in the Emerald Cask. Who blushed in his presence when he snaked his arm around her waist. Looking into her eyes, this wasn’t the same girl.
“I recognize you,” she says, tilting her head to the side. Her lips are dry, cracked and bloodstained. Stringy blonde hair falls in front of her face. “Maestri.”
I frown. Did they gain their memories too when they ate the bodies? I subtly shake the thought. I really don’t want to think about it.
“How’s Jace doing?” she asks me. “Did he finally realize you were holding him back? That you were nothing but dead weight for him to drag around?”
I reach for her and she strikes my arm with an iron rod.
“Not so fast.”
I look down, rubbing my skin as a welt starts to form. She smells the iron rod before plopping down on a burned, tattered armchair. She doesn’t move her eyes off of me. One of the other ghouls reaches into the cage beside mine and picks up an arm. He takes a bite out of the hand and looks at me, grinning with blackened blood coating his teeth and dripping from his mouth.
It’s Yael Tolstoy. I look away from him. He was two years younger than me. He often tried to hang out with Jace and I, but his mom deemed Jace to be a bad influence and didn’t want him around her son. She said I was okay, only when not around Jace, which I never thought was fair.
Now Yael was dead. They’re all dead. I slouch back in my cage, and Nadia scoots over toward me.
“What happened?” she asks.
I shake my head. “I can’t do it.”
“They aren’t the people you know, Arthur.”
Arthur. Am I really going to wear another mask?
“Actually, my name —”
The conversation between the ghouls cut me off before I can continue. They’re talking about him. My brother. Of him and the Grim Reaper.
Of a return like Nadia mentioned earlier.
But that’s not possible. The Grim Reaper is trapped. Then again, revenants and ghouls are all beings that should be extinct. I overheard David talking about it when I was little. I guess it wasn’t entirely true then. Just speculation.
“How long do you think it’s going to take?” one of the ghouls asks ghoul-Laurel, and she rolls her eyes before finally pulling her attention off of me.
“We were told to be patient. The Reawakener is being difficult again.”
“Drarkodon’s sure Apollo’ll be able to break him out of the cage?”
“You shouldn’t be doubting him, Osiris.” She raises her eyebrows and slowly shakes her head, disappointed in his words. “You know he doesn’t like that.”
“I’m sick of being patient, having to conserve food! Food in moderation.” He points at me. “He should have been eaten yesterday! Now he’s awake and he’ll struggle.”
“You can eat him later, I promise. We can poison him all over again.” She grabs his arm and pulls him down to her, running her fingers along his face before she looks at me. “I li
ke those freckles of his,” she says, and Osiris looks at me too. “We should keep sharing after, so you can wear him a little longer.” He grins as they look back at each other.
I want to throw up. I try to forget about what I just heard and focus on what they were saying about Apollo. Maybe I can get them to tell me a little more.
“Who’s the Reawakener?” I ask.
Every single one of the ghouls looks at me then.
“You dare speak to us about the necromancers!” The one wearing Laurel gets up suddenly and approaches my cage. Ghoul-Yael stops her before she gets too close.
“Easy, Tysinni,” he says, she rips her wrist free from his grasp as he turns to me. “Apollo,” he tells me. “The Reawakener is the Grim Reaper’s heir.”
“And he’s going to break the Reaper out of the cage?”
“That’s why we’re here.” He grins, his teeth are coated in black blood. “There were whispers throughout the Underworld. Come above while the sun still shines, grow in strength until what’s bound unbinds.”
“So there will be more of you?”
“Oh, kid, we’re only just the beginning. You munfolk will pay,” he says, before glancing at Nadia. “And you traitor scum. Every time the Midnight Strider docks, there’s hell to be unleashed.”
He thinks I’m munfolk.
He’s close enough now, I reach for my dagger but when I touch my side, I realize I don’t have it. I forgot to bring it. I was in such a hurry to leave, and too frustrated with the stockstill, that I completely spaced. Patting my pockets, my Thirondel charms are gone too. They searched me.
I slouch back into my cage as he walks away from us. Turning away from Nadia, I use one of the sheets on the floor as a pillow against the frame of my cage. I start picking at my scabs again. The cuts around my wrists were deep with prominent scars. The cuffs cutting into my skin hardly bothered me after a while when I was still in Mithlonde. What was left didn’t bother me now.
I know I shouldn’t be numb to pain, that it's worrisome and something that should bother me, but I have trouble caring.
“Art,” Nadia whispers, but I don’t turn to face her. She says my name a few more times before eventually giving up. I can’t save her. I can’t save anyone.
The Midnight Strider (The Chronomancer Chronicles Book 2) Page 6
