my direction when I’d first crossed over. Something like that was unusual, and unusual went hand-in-hand with Mae. So it made sense, at least to me, to follow it. I just hoped I wouldn’t get frostbite or something. Hell, I didn’t even know if that was possible.
“You headin’ to the Whispers? Goin’ to make a deal with the big man?” a new voice asked. It was soft and curious, not the jabbing harassment like the others I’d encountered so far.
I turned and looked at the spirit. A young woman stood there watching me with wide eyes while her arms were folded across her chest in a way that made it look like she was trying to hug herself more than anything else. She couldn’t have been older than twenty when she’d died. The gaping wound on her throat was a dead giveaway, no pun intended, for the cause of death. Poor thing had been murdered.
“What’s the Whispers?” I asked, though I didn’t stop moving. Spirits had a tendency to congregate around the living when they stood still in deadside.
She trailed after me as she spoke. “The center. Where the big man rules. Where deals are made. Where everyone bends the knee eventually.” Her word choice had me looking at her and raising an eyebrow. “What? I liked Game of Thrones.”
“Who is the big man?” I asked as I ducked under a tree branch that was low hanging.
She floated through it as she replied, “He’s the controller. He says he’ll set us free. Let us go back to the land of the living, no more purgatory, but only if we help him.”
I had a sickening feeling that the big man was in fact the darkness, which was the same as saying he was the Headless Horseman. How did a creature of legend, or what the Wardwells claimed to be a god, have one foot deadside? I knew the Headless Horseman was a formidable being, but if he had spirits at his side as well as fucking zombies and who knew what else, then we were in over our heads.
The foliage seemed to thin out as I got closer to what had to be the epicenter of the cold. I was shaking from it and knew I would only be able to stand it for a minute, two at the most. I’d have to hope that I kept my fingers and toes, because I had no idea if I could get frostbite when I was deadside or not.
“Be careful. You don’t look like the type to bend the knee, and if he catches you and you don’t, then he’ll kill you. Like perma-dead kind of kill you.” Her voice was a low whisper, so I slowed my pace, figuring if the spirit was whispering, then I had to be close enough for her to be worried.
I peered through the branches of the tree in front of me, seeing the clearing before I stepped into it. A few spirits turned to look at me, but none seemed to care what I was doing there. Most of the spirits that were around—there were a shit load, more than I’d ever seen in one place before—just stared at the building in front of me that looked like it was in the center of the clearing.
The whole thing looked like it had been worn away with time. The corners of walls were chipping, paint had peeled off in places, bricks were crumbling. The scariest part was that for a building that was in the mortal world to appear deadside, there had to be enough trauma, death, and anguish built up inside it that it manifested. It had to be one of the most horrific places on earth. It had to have a history of death and torture. It made my gut churn just looking at it.
Were these spirits ones that had been drawn to the area by the Headless Horseman? Or were they the spirits attached to the building itself, the ones who’d lost their lives inside? I didn’t know and had no way of finding out without drawing attention to myself, which I wasn’t about to do.
Suddenly, a flash of darkness appeared, and it felt like someone had just shut off all the lights before daylight—if you could call whatever this was on the deadside daylight—seeped back in. Everything appeared in gray tones, which wasn’t super unusual for the deadside but still made me uncomfortable. I strained my eyes to make out anything that might