“That’s some dangerous thinking,” someone said in my mind. Opening my eyes, I found that somehow I was still in the tranquility of my mind, in the stillness of this lake and whiteness of the sky above.
“Dangerous thinking,” I echoed, my voice sounding as if it were underwater.
“Dangerous, yes,” the voice said again. I didn’t turn my head to look for the voice. I knew it was all around me. Like the air, the voice vibrated in the space my eyes could not see, but I could feel it against my skin, like sharp nails grazing against my skin.
“Why?”
“Because, we are not all the same,” it responded, the whiteness and tranquility of my mind unwavering.
“How you choose to look at it,” I breathed.
“It does not matter how you choose to look at it. We are not all the same,” the voice said evenly.
“Why do you choose to believe that?”
“Because that is the way it is.”
“Why is it like that?”
“Because that is how it is.”
“Does it have to be that way.”
“Maybe it does. Maybe it does not, but this is how it is.”
“But is that really how it is?”
“Why do you choose to believe otherwise?” the voice countered, an edge of agitation creeping in.
“Why should I not?”
“Because it is not true.”
“By what means?”
“The means of the Ways.”
“The Ways do not entail just one way of existing.”
“And how would you know that?” the voice asked, still growing agitated. The sky above me began to change color. I forced myself to remain aloof and calm, indifferent to the possibility of what could happen next. I was in a very delicate position, and I knew this, because it wasn’t just me who was in the place of serenity and calm, this whiteness of oblivion. I had somehow managed to bring the others with me in this place. When I opened my eyes, it was nothing but the clear manifestation of what I had envisioned in mind. Besides me, Bond and Jo floated peacefully in a trance. Azazel, Eleanor, and Agatha were not too far off, floating in a similar tranquility.
“Because I exist,” I answered simply as the sky above began to blacken on the horizon, showing the separation of my calm lake from the once ambivalent sky.
“Your existence was a mistake,” the voice said in a stony voice.
“And yet, here I am, still existing, still floating along, still denying your interpretation of the Ways,” I countered, allowing myself to sink beneath the surface of my lake.
“I will not let you ruin the course of my reality,” the voice suddenly bellowed as a giant hand plunged from the sky above.
“You ruined your own reality when you decided to kill me,” I whispered, falling back into my body. There were two hands on either side of my head, and the painful tingling was searing all around my neck, going wild and cutting into my skin. I didn’t move, but instead said, “Evelyn, let them go.”
“Jeez, you make me sick,” she snapped from behind me, her voice sounding exactly like that in my dream, but she didn’t sound like herself. She sounded old and distorted and gravelly and angry. “Quit with your self-righteous bullshit.”
“Ama?” Jo asked beside me, her voice quivering. Unable to turn my head, I could feel her and Bond’s panic spiking beside me like angry, frantic bees.
“It’s okay,” I murmured to them.
“Don’t lie to them,” Evelyn said in a cold, stoic voice. Bond let out a strained groan, and I could almost feel the pain slowly moving through his back beside me.
I took a deep breath, trying to keep my panic at bay as Eleanor and Agatha came to in the other room.
“I see what you’re doing, Azazel,” Evelyn murmured, leaning down to speak directly into my ear. “Make them calm so your little angel doesn’t get wind of what’s happening.”
I didn’t say anything, but instead weighed the gravity of the situation. Azazel already knew what was happening. She had chosen to fall into the tranquility to calm her own demons. As soon as Evelyn had intruded on that, she felt it, just as I did. Even in the cabin, I could feel her unease and caution. She knew someone was here that shouldn’t be, and she knew that I was in danger. If I moved even an inch, she would snap my neck in an instant.
“Pacify them, now,” she growled. Closing my eyes, I took a deep trembling breath. Pacification. This wasn’t a gift that belonged to anyone. Rather it was just influencing their emotions with my own. That was Terrance’s. Even when he’d been alive, he’d had a hard time controlling this gift, and I hardly even knew what I was doing.
“Now,” she snarled. Flinching, I took another deep breath, trying to calm myself down. Serenity wasn’t easily finding me, but whatever I managed to touch, I grasped onto and forced that tranquility back in the room, forcing it on Azazel. She was reluctantly fighting, listening more to her instincts, but I covered her with the emotion, trying to push through a particular
thought.
“Danger. Submit. Please.”
“Good,” Evelyn breathed behind me, and then Jo let out a similar strained groan, and I bit down hard on my lip. Evelyn removed her hands from either side of my head, and she moved around to crouch in front of me. From behind her, two long, black tendrils came to circle back and behind Bond and Jo. The tendrils were long and scaly, glistening faintly and menacing. Glancing back, I could see the tips of the tendrils pointing out of Jo and Bond’s stomachs. Swallowing, I looked back at Evelyn in horror, not quite understanding what I was seeing. She was there in front of me, looking as she had just hours ago. Dyed black hair, sharp, pale features, piercing black eyes. In retrospect, she really did look the role of a villain, but I made friends out of bad guys. That was me, hanging out with the people that didn’t want to fit in, because if I belonged anywhere, it was outside of everything, with everyone else who didn’t quite fit in. How could she do this to me?
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Evelyn said. She shook out her face, as if trying to get hair out of her face, but as she did, her features began to turn gaunt and gray, her skin stretched over her bones, just as I had seen her in my house that night. Blinking, her eyes took on a sickly yellow color, black where the white should have been, and her hair was thin and falling out now.
“Well, actually, hold on,” she said, standing and shaking her body out. As she moved, the skin seemed to loosen around her bones, and then it sloughed off her body easily, the hair falling away and revealing pale, black-veined skin. The skin that fell off lay in a messy, oily heap on the ground, and a rancid stench wafted up from off of it. I stifled a gag that arose in the back of my throat, and looked back up at the creature standing before me. Her body was almost entirely skin and bone, the skin clinging desperately to the bones and even opening into ugly, pulsing sores in some areas. She had no genitals, or any distinguishing features that would allow me to call her her.
“Pythius,” I said in a horrified whisper as the silhouette of an ugly, disjointed and mangled figure came to my mind from a dream a long time ago.
“What?” it asked, looking down at me with sunken eyes. Its voice was strange, sounding both shrill and light and brassy and dark. Had I heard the voice any other day, I wouldn’t have been able to tell if it was male or female. Then it crouched back in front of me, said, “Oh, you said my name? Huh, it’s been such a long time since I’ve heard it. Do you remember me now? Have I finally been carved into your soul?
“Do you recognize me now?” it said, its face morphing into warm skin, green eyes, red curly hair. This was Alison, Madison’s best friend, and there was a sad, brief jolt that ran through me from a lifetime ago.
“Or how about now?” it asked, its face morphing again to pale cream skin, straight nose, thin lips, curly black hair. Eli, Donovan’s best friend.
“Why?” I asked, my heart breaking from lifetimes of betrayals.
“Why?” it asked, a bark of laughter escaping its lips as the skin fell off to reveal the same, gaunt, gray, veiny face. “Because I hate you, Azazel. I loathe you. If I could spend every day of my life killing you again and again and again, it wouldn’t be enough to satisfy the hatred and contempt I have for you.”
“But I’m not Azazel,” I whispered, shrinking under the stark and blatant abhorrence radiating from this creature.
“You can feel what I’m feeling, right? From . . . who was it? Was it Zlata? She could feel how I felt. You can, too, now. You can feel every bit of my hatred for you, can’t you, Azazel?”
Pythius said in an almost hungrily growling tone, ignoring my question. I just stared, wide eyed, trying not to let my fear overtake me as each of the deaths I’d lived flashed before my eyes. This one, he had been behind every single one of them. He had been the direct cause of every premature death I suffered, and he hadn’t always been clean about them. I remembered a particularly gruesome death as Abigail, whose hair had gotten caught in the tires of the motorcycle her boyfriend, Jordan—Pythius—had been riding.
“Can’t you, Azazel?” he repeated in the same tone, and Jo let out a yelp. Glancing at her quickly, I could see the end of its tail plunging deeper into her back and pulling further out through her stomach.
“Yes! Yes!” I yelped. “I got it from Zlata, and I can feel how much you hate me!”
“Ah, there we go. Isn’t it so nice when we cooperate?” he asked, still stabbing deeper into her body.
“What do you want?” I snapped helplessly, the hate rolling off of his body like acid on my skin.
“What do I want?” he asked, sitting back on his heels and looking up. “Wow, where do I begin? You kind of took everything from me, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t do that!”
“Yeah, yeah you did. I don’t know, maybe I can blame ole Razzy for this, your little soulmate, but I can’t exactly make him suffer like I can with you,” it shrugged.
“Please, what do you want?” I cried out, the panic creeping up and out of my stomach. Beneath me, the carpet began to soak through with the blood that steadily leaked from Jo and Bond, and I could only imagine how much longer they had before their blood loos grew to be too much.
Pythius sighed, shaking his head and said, “You’re not making this any fun.”
“Fun?”
“Yeah, fun,” he challenged. I didn’t say anything, not knowing what to say, and he sat back, thinking. “You took away the one thing I actually enjoy about this life, you know that?”
Not moving his head, he looked at me with those yellow eyes, and I shook my head vigorously.
“Since I’m stuck here, on this stupid world, surrounded by all these disgusting humans, the only thing I actually take delight in anymore is that sweet, sweet satisfaction of the look that comes over your face when I finally get to kill you.”
“What?” I breathed.
“Yeah, you know the look, don’t you? That one, the one where you go ‘oh my gosh, how could you’!”
“You mean . . . the look of betrayal,” I swallowed, my mouth drying.
“Yeah, that one,” he chuckled, but then his face dropped almost instantly, and he said, “You took that away from me.”
“Was I supposed to pretend you were still my friend after you didn’t come out to save me?” I asked skeptically.
“You could have humored me at least,” he shrugged. “Give me a reason to enjoy the effort I put into you this time around.”
“Oh, screw you!” I yelled, a quip of fire exploding in me.
“Ah, watch it,” Pythius said in a warning tone, and Bond groaned beside me. I looked helplessly at them, and they both looked at me, pain evident on their faces as sweat dripped down their faces. They were both pale beside me, and I knew there wasn’t much time before one of them gave out.
“Please, stop hurting them. I’ll do whatever you want,” I begged, the fire dying down quickly.
“You can’t really give me what I want now, so I guess I’ll do the next best thing,” he sighed, standing. As he rose, so did Bond and Jo, and they both let out strangled cries of pain.
“And trust me, if you try anything, I will know, and this will be a lot worse for them.”
“Please, what do you want me to do?” I asked, tears pooling in my eyes. He gestured to the door where Agatha, Eleanor and Azazel were. “That prophet over there. Make her see what’s going to happen.”
“Wh-what?” I stammered. “How am I supposed to do that.”
“You remember Donovan. His little gift. Push it on her,” he shrugged. “Now.”
I scrambled up and ran to the door, threw it open. Agatha and Eleanor were sitting huddled around Azazel on the bed. Eleanor and Agatha both had blank expressions on their face, and Azazel stared with an unreadable expression, her hands on either of their backs. Her emotions were unreadable. She had shut herself off from me, and I wasn’t in any mood to try to read them. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking or how she was feeling. She just looked back at the ground and I went to sit in front of Agatha. Azazel made no move or motion as I took Agatha’s face in my hands to look at me.
“What’s going on?” she asked in a dull, low tone, as if she were in a trance.
“We’re going to look at something, and it might be really bad, but I need you to be strong,” I said, taking her hands in mine.
“Okay,” she murmured, closing her eyes. I glanced back up at Azazel, and she was looking at me then. Her expression was blank, but her eyes were staring straight at me. In an instant, the words Pythius and I had exchanged seemed to slip from my mind, and Azazel’s face changed mildly, some sort of understanding from her. Looking back at Agatha, I closed my eyes and forced myself to breathe evenly, to keep my panic at bay and keep myself calm. It was much harder keeping my thoughts at bay and my fear in check.
Jo and Bond were bleeding out.
There was a demon holding them hostage.
The demon had been one of my good friends, and though he hadn’t had the chance to kill me, I still felt that betrayal deep inside me like a cold, heavy rock in my stomach. Concentration was near impossible, and I sat there with my hands clenched around Agatha’s for a few minutes, just trying to calm myself down, but all I managed to do was crush her hands in mine.
“That hurts,” she said after a couple of moments.
“Oh, oh, I’m sorry,” I said, my hands flinching around hers.
“What’s taking so long?” Evelyn’s voice called from outside. Flinching again, I said nothing, but instead forced myself to loosen my hold on her hands and release the tension in my shoulders.
“I’m not getting anything,” Agatha said, her eyes still closed.
“It’s okay, that’s my fault. You will in a second,” I said back, trying to keep my mind still as I remembered what she’d said before, when I had seen all of the memories. I felt myself; I paid attention to the sensation of my feet, my socks, my pants, my legs, my arms in my shirt, the wing on my back. That was a strange sensation, feeling it there in the first place. I could feel almost every individual feather, where it connected to my flesh, and as I concentrated on finding myself, I found the sensation of Agatha’s skin on mine, her hand in mine, and I found that I was also feeling Eleanor’s, and I was feeling my wing—Azazel’s wing– on the other side of my back.
Breathing slowly, I allowed Azazel to guide me with her mind as she gently pushed me on, guiding me to the harbor of the Ways. I could almost feel myself drifting on a wave as the world, behind my eyes, exploded into light, and quickly died down to something more intricate and abstract. The world, the Ways of the world and all the intricate vibrations, all seen and unseen, felt and unfelt, heard and unheard; I allowed myself to fall into the entirety of the Ways, and I pushed myself delicately past. Everything was connected. Everything was one. One thing led to another, which led to another, which continued to lead into everything else. Each vibration moved something else, whether it was here in the present, or further on in the future, and even the vibrations of the past continued to echo on through existence, endlessly.
I followed the vibrations of the Ways to a place that wasn’t here, careful to keep my concentration true but aloof. Agatha’s hands were soft. It didn’t seem she’d seen a day of hard labor ever. I let the sensation of her hands keep me grounded in the present as I followed the Ways further into the world, further into time and down the line. This gift—the gift I got from Donovan—was strange. He had seen the future in detailed glimpses as the end products of all these lines and vibrations creating the events that unfolded. In my mind, it seemed that someone, something opened a hole in the idea of reality to allow me to walk through to the building blocks of eternity. I was walking along a tunnel that had no walls. The Ways, the vibrations that coordinated everything, were pale, like stars in the distance, but I could almost touch them. I could feel them on my skin, like spider’s silk, and they spanned out everywhere. I didn’t know how I knew where to go, but I only came to find what was in Agatha’s mind.
Her image manifested before me slowly as I concentrated on finding the thing, whatever it was Pythius wanted. She appeared slowly, a mass of fine silken threads carefully taking shape and bending around the presence that was her. I watched curiously as her shape was made certain through the delicate movement of the Ways. There was the feeling of someone watching me from overhead, but I paid it no mind as I returned to my search. The Ways that ran through Agatha were a shimmering white, but one shimmered a deep violet, and I followed that to the body of another person, and another, and another, and another. I don’t know how long I was there, or how long I followed this violet thread, but time was meaningless when you could see the Ways. All that mattered was following a single Way until you found what you were looking for. When I reached the end of it, it wasn’t a single string that had an end, but instead, it ended back with Agatha. Still feeling the softness of her hand in mine, I raised my other to just barely graze the violet thread, and it glowed faintly before sending a single pulse that ran the length of the thread. It ran through all the people I’d seen, creating a long, intricate loop, before shooting out from a thread I hadn’t noticed and then coming back to slam back into Agatha, and she gasped in front of me, startling me out of my trance.
My eyes shot open, and I jumped back, crashing into the wall behind me from the reflexive beat of my newfound wing. Azazel’s wing flexed instinctively as Agatha fell back against the bed, her body shaking uncontrollably and seizing. Eleanor was motionless, still caught in whatever trance Azazel had put her in. Azazel remained still, relaxing her wing and staring off emotionlessly, and I scrambled to Agatha, trying to hold her relatively still, until her seizing stopped, and her eyes fluttered closed.
Gently, I slapped her face and called quietly, “Agatha, are you okay?” I shook her gently, and after another second, she mumbled something, her eyes rolling back into place. I slapped her softly, and she mumbled a little louder. “Agatha, what are you saying?”
“Triplets . . . Triplets,” she whispered, as she looked past me. “Triplets.”
“Triplets?” I whispered, looking down at her. “What do you mean?”
“Triplets . . . Clouds . . . Clouds. . .”
“What, the triplets are in the clouds?” I asked quietly, “Do you mean Sol, Selin, and Aion?” I asked, the memories snapping into place.
“Cloud Dome!” she screamed, her eyes suddenly focusing on me. “I know what they’re doing, I know what they’re doing!”
“What do you mean?” I asked quickly. “What did you see?”
“The Triplets! They know where they are, and they’re trying to corrupt them,” she said in a panicked, frightened voice. “You have to stop them!”
“Who? What is going on? What do you mean?”
“You have to stop them!”
“Who?” I yelled in her face. She opened her mouth to speak, but Evelyn—Pythius—answered for her.
“Us,” he said, stepping calmly into the room. I whipped around to stare at them and saw his two tendrils were still outside, still holding onto Bond and Jo, and now a third was extending out from his lower back and reaching over to me. I flinched upon seeing it, but realized quickly he wasn’t aiming for me. Agatha let out a strangled cry then, and I thought I could hear the sound of air escaping from her neck. My heart sank. Slowly, I turned to look down at Agatha.
She was looking back up with me with fearful, panicked eyes, and she glanced down to her neck. A small black dagger poked out from one side of her neck, and was out a second later, her blood spraying against my face. Letting out a shriek, three things happened all at once. The first was that Azazel was up and lunging at Pythius. The second was that he dropped Bond and Jo outside, and the third was me blacking out.
Not even a whole minute into my blackout, Azazel’s voice rang out to me.
“Get up. We have work to do,” Azazel’s voice yelled to me in the darkness, and then I felt her hand grabbing hold of my wrist, and I felt her pulling me out from the darkness, as if I’d been pulled from a silent lake. I came to, snapping back into consciousness in my own body, and Azazel was before me, holding off several of Pythius’ tendrils with her spear and wing.
“Go to your friends,” Azazel barked at me, dropping her spear for a quarter of a second to grab two of the tendrils and flinging Pythius behind her and further into the room.
“Holy shit!” I yelled, the whole room rustling with the force of the movement. “Agatha!” I cried, tasting her blood on my lips. “What about Agatha?”
“Eleanor has her,” she called, lunging at Pythius and crashing through the window.
“Okay, okay,” I breathed, wiping the blood from my face and sprinting out of the door. Jo was hunched over Bond, one hand pressed to her stomach, the other pressed to stomach, the blood spilling helplessly through her fingers. She was panting lightly, and I could see through the hair that hung in front of her face that she was pale and sweaty. I darted over to them and replaced her hand over his wound. Bond was still and breathing fast, just like Jo. His eyes were fluttering, but he wasn’t saying anything. Jo rocked back to sit down, but ended up falling backwards, and I scrambled over to her.
I hovered over her for a second, my hands unmoving and just above her body. I didn’t know what to do, or what could be done. The hole that she was holding on her stomach went clean through to her back, and I could see she was still bleeding, as was Bond. They didn’t have much time. There was a growing puddle beneath both him and her, and the first thing I thought to do was to put them side by side so I at least didn’t have to keep moving between the two of them. She groaned quietly as I moved her, and I whispered hastily, “Sh, sh, it’s gonna be fine, you’re gonna be fine.”
“And here we were, thinking we’d lose you,” she mumbled with a bitter chuckle.
“Sh, no one is losing anyone,” I said back quickly, frozen again. I ripped off the hoodie Bond was wearing and tore at the sleeve. It came away quickly and I jammed into onto Jo’s wound. She let out a cry, and I forced myself to hold onto my concentration as I ripped off another piece of the hoodie and pushed it against Bond’s wound. He was slowly growing cold and I started to panic. He would go into shock soon if he already hadn’t, and there wasn’t anything I could do after that happened. Jo didn’t have much longer, either. They’d both already lost a lot of blood, and I feared that even if by some miracle the bleeding would stop, neither of them would have enough blood in their bodies to survive.
“God, what do I do?” I asked myself as my hands quivered, holding down their wounds. Neither had stopped bleeding, and the makeshift rag was already soaked through. “What do I do, what do I do?”
An ominous howl echoed throughout the cabin from outside, and there was loud and violent thud that hit one side. Jo’s hand reached for my sleeve, and she whispered, “You have to let us go.”
“Shut up,” I said, putting her hand back on her wound, but her strength was nearly gone, and she was floating in and out of consciousness.
“What do I do?” I yelled in frustration, putting my head on Bond’s chest. There was a distant chuckling in my head, and it asked sarcastically, “Do you really think there’s anything you can do here?”
My head snapped up as I looked around for the source of the voice, and it went on, “You can either watch them die, or run away. Those are your only choices.”
Then I realized it was Pythius, and somehow he had gotten into my head. Tears burned in my eyes as I watched Jo and Bond bleed out, the helplessness palpable and painful. In the background of my thoughts, Pythius was tormenting me, taunting me.
“Your helplessness will have to do. Seethe and understand that this is all your fault,” he said bitterly. Was there really nothing I could do? Was there absolutely nothing I could do for them? Was I going to watch my best friends die right here?
“Are you okay with that?” someone else asked. I looked up to see Madison sitting cross legged on the floor adjacent to me. She was leaning on one leg, her head in one hand, and she was staring at me with an intense scrutiny. “Are you going to take that?”
Standing beside her was a tall man with dark skin, darker than my father’s, and beside him was a woman with long, full dreadlocks. Her face was smooth and serene. Her cheekbones high and her lips full, and she had a knowing look in her eyes. She stood with her hands folded, and she repeated, “Are you okay with that?”
“No!” I yelled, “No, I am not!”
“Then let me help you, Amor,” she said, suddenly appearing beside me and putting her hand over mine. “Breathe with me, Amor.”
Yaya Howard. She had been a psychic when alive, but her gift was more in healing the sick and wounded, and here she was now, offering me her kindness. She was my only option, and I had no choice but to take it. I wasn’t about to let my friends die here like this. I closed my eyes in concentration, trying to find the sound of her breath. It took me a second, but I found her, felt her breaths in my chest like my own, and she spoke to me softly, “This gift is not yours, but it is one I will share with you. Let me step into this vessel.”
“Okay,” I breathed, my hand loosening its grip on the bloody rags, and it was as if gravity didn’t exist, because I was floating away from myself now, floating away into a place I’d known once before in my life. Someone grabbed my wrist gently, and I opened my eyes to see Madison holding me down.
“Whoa there, girl. Can’t just drift off out there,” she said, gesturing to the place behind me with her eyes. She pulled me down to stand beside her. Once my feet touched the ground it was as if gravity came rushing back. Madison steadied me as I stumbled.
We were still in the cabin, sitting around my body and Jo’s and Bond’s, but it wasn’t me in my body. The place behind me was the rest of the cabin, but something told me the place I was in now, this place where Madison and Donovan freely existed, wasn’t the same place I was able to just wander in my body.
“What is . . . going on?” I asked slowly, watching Yaya in my body. I wasn’t necessarily seeing my body; rather I was seeing hers with the wing attached to her back, and she sat huddled over Bond, whispering something. “What is she doing?”
“We are . . . all still trying to figure that out,” Madison answered back, glancing up at Donovan. “You’re an intellectual. What do you think is happening?”
Donovan blew out from his mouth, staring at Yaya absently, then he looked at me and said, “I’m assuming that when you finally got around to seeing and meeting Azazel. You did something else that I don’t think any of us could have done. We all assumed that as soon as we met her, then the wing would just, you know, come. Like, sprout out and everything, but it didn’t.”
“Yeah, she kind of almost killed me before it came out,” I said scratching my head as I watched Yaya work whatever magic she had up her sleeves.
“We saw that,” Donovan murmured.
“We felt it,” Madison huffed. “That bitch is crazy.”
“Right?” I asked, looking at her with wide, understanding eyes.
“Whether the bitch is crazy or not, isn’t relevant,” Donovan cut in.
“C’mon, you have to admit. She’s crazy,” Madison said.
“Of course she is. How many times did she kill me before that monster out there finally did it?” he asked, looking up.
“I don’t know. I was born after you,” she shrugged.
“Like, seven times,” he shrugged. “Something like that.”
“Yeah, she got me ten,” she said nonchalantly.
“If this is a pissing contest, she actually almost killed me,” I cut in.
“Good thing it’s not a pissing contest,” Donovan said with a gentle eye roll. “Anyway, you did something that none of us got to do. Aside from actually getting the wing out, you saw everyone’s life, and somehow living through all of their lives, you got most of our gifts. I guess you can use them, and now you can communicate with us more easily.”
“Yeah, what’s up with that?” I asked curiously. “No one else needed to step into my body to work their magic.”
“It might have to do with the efficiency of the gift,” Donovan offered, looking at me. “If this was magic, or whatever you want to call it, you’d need some serious control to get it done, don’t you think? I mean, look, they’ve got holes in their gut.”
“You think so?” I asked, my eyes drifting back to Jo and Bond. I was shocked to see that what had previously been a life-ending wound, was now little more than peeled skin on their stomachs, the flesh still knitting itself back together. “Is it weird when I use your gifts?”
“It’s like you’re taking my hand and writing with it,” Madison offered, staring absently at Yaya. “It’s weird, but it’s not like we can stop you. Not that any of us really want to.”
“Do you think the wing has something to do with this?” I offered. “I mean, who was it, Alan’s? The gift that let him know when he was about to get hurt? It never felt like that or that accurately.”
“Maybe. The wrong could be enhancing the gifts,” he said slowly, rubbing his chin. He shrugged easily and followed, “But I’m no expert . . . us, I guess. It could be anything.”
“Or with your gift? Did you see that place? What was that place?”
“When you showed Agatha the vision?” he asked, glancing down at me.
“Yeah. What was up with that? That’s not what you saw before, right?”
“That wasn’t my gift. That was Hala’s gift.”
“Who’s Hala?” I asked curiously, sifting through my seemingly endless memories. After coming up short, I looked up at him and he said, “She was the other one who got this far. She lived and died in the early 1900’s. She was a lot like you actually, but she could see the Ways.”
“The Ways?”
“Yeah. The Ways of the world, the Ways of the universe. Everything is made up of them. They run through people and things and extends far out into the future. The place they exist doesn’t have a concept of time, so however long you were there for, seemed like less than a second here, even on this plane,” she answered, gesturing around.
“What do you mean, ‘this plane’?”
“Jeez, Ama, really?” she snapped, looking up at me.
“I’m still alive, all this information hasn’t just suddenly hit me,” I grumbled at her.
“What she means, Ama, is that we’re in the spirit world, kind of. It’s a place that kind of sits on top of the real world. You notice how it’s quieter here?” Donovan asked, and I sat still for a moment, listening. Aside from the commotion that carried on relentlessly outside, I didn’t hear anything. It was as if there was wax stuffed in my ears. It was almost eerily quiet. If I dropped a pebble outside, it would echo throughout the whole world.
“Why is that?”
“Sensation is a living thing. Since we’re dead, those senses don’t come with us. We can only hear each other because we’re . . . it’s like we’re talking to ourselves, if that makes sense. We’re all connected through Azazel, and because of that connection, we can talk to each other,” Donovan said carefully.
“I’m not dead, right?”
“No, no. You and Yaya just switched places,” he said reassuringly.
“Can that just happen? Like, can any of you do it?”
“I think we need your consent to do it,” Madison mumbled, still staring at Yaya. “Oh, look, she’s doing something.” Donovan and I both looked up to see Yaya kneeling between Bond and Jo, and she spoke quietly into her hands. Quivering slightly, she slowly opened her hands and spread her arms wide as she tilted her head back. Her eyes were rolled back and her quiet chanting grew hasty and insistent, and then it got louder and louder until she was almost screaming the words. She was speaking in a different language, probably from her home. I didn’t recognize it. She started clapping her hands together at first in a random pattern, but then it slowly fell into a rhythm, and then she screeched at the top of her lungs and slammed her head to the ground, one hand on Jo, the other on Bond.
As soon as her head touched the ground, Jo and Bond both shot up, startled and breathing hard. The color had returned to their faces, and they were looking around, very confused. Yaya swayed back on her heels, breathing hard, and I saw that both of her nostrils were leaking blood, and she wiped it away with a tired smile.
Jo said something, but she sounded very far and distant, and I looked at Donovan, confused. He said, “Because she can hear it, we can kind of hear it, too, but that’s really as good as it’s going to get.”
“Are there, like, other ghosts here?” I asked, looking around slowly.
“Yeah, but we don’t interact with each other. We can’t really. It’s really strange here. When we get here, or when other people get here, they’re alone in this place.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like . . . we wall walk into this room, and we’re all here, but we can’t see each other. We think we’re the only ones here,” Madison shrugged quietly, still watching Yaya as she spoke to Jo and Bond.
“How do you know they exist then?”
“Abigail can see them, so we can kind of see them, too. It’s unsettling,” Donovan responded.
“Can you actually see the future?” I asked, still trying to tie everything together.
Donovan looked at me, then looked up at the ceiling, then answered, “Kind of. It’s like I can see where the threads are going in the next few moments, and that kind of forms a picture for me to see. How you see the threads and how you interpret them is all up to you, though. It’s like a landscape; it depends on which angle you’re looking from.”
“Huh,” I murmured to myself, thinking about the information he’d just given me, then,
“Where is everyone else anyway?” I asked, looking around.
“They’re probably where they felt the most comfortable when they were alive. We don’t travel in a pack,” Madison said, standing up. “You should probably get back in your body.”
“Why?”
“Azazel’s about to smash through the window,” Donovan said, and without warning, Madison grabbed me by the back of neck, tripped my feet from beneath me, and slammed me into Yaya. I fell forward from the force of the movement, and then the sound of Azazel crashing through the window came to my ears a second later. My back throbbed painfully and my side was now bleeding, and I looked up just in time to see her lunging back through the window.
“Are you guys okay?” I asked breathlessly, glancing between the two of them. They looked back at me bewildered.
“Are you okay?” Bond asked as I clutched my side.
“Fine, fine,” I heaved, forcing myself to sit up. “We should get out of here.”
I forced myself to rock back on my heels, but I ended up falling backward as the pain shot through my side. Another pain pierced right through my shoulder, and I could feel the blood dripping down my arm.
“Ama, what’s going on?” Jo asked as she crawled to me.
“I don’t know, man. I think she just got hit in the shoulder,” I groaned, laying on my side.
“God, this hurts.”
“C’mon, help me get her up,” Jo said to Bond. Carefully, they wrapped their arms around my torso and hoisted me up, and I groaned softly. The wounds tingled gently on my body, and I could feel the skin and muscle knitting itself back together. Azazel came crashing back through another window. Jo and Bond wasted no time and hurried me to the front door, my back bruising and healing, mimicking the same blows Azazel took. Behind us, Azazel scrambled to her feet, and I could hear Pythius coming in through the window. I glanced back just in time to see him send one of those tendrils slashing through the air and attempt to strike us. In an instant, I dropped my weight, and Jo and Bond fell to the ground with me as that tail burst through the door we were facing.
“No one is going anywhere,” Pythius said venomously.
“No, you are going straight to Hell,” Azazel growled, taking a stance as the room seemed silenced. She spoke in a low tone, low enough for only me to hear, “Get you and your companions out of here.”