my actions. Even so, I’d been able to convince Seeley to intervene and save my friends from his psycho colleague, Yamani. Therefore, I wasn’t entirely useless.
But I had a new target, now. I had to find a way to tell Zeriel, my parents, or anyone who’d be able to listen about everything I’d learned. I needed them to know that we were all still here, and that we were scared and lonely and in no way ready or willing to die. That we needed them to fight for us. To save us.
“How about this Reaper business, huh?” my dad asked no one in particular, his gaze settled on my glowing body. His grief was mine, too, but I had to give him credit: he didn’t show it as much as, say, my mother or Zeriel. My dad was the stern type who kept his emotions for private moments. This wasn’t one of them. Besides, what good would it do if he’d started pulling his hair out right here? I figured he was wise enough to suspect that I might still be able to at least hear him, somehow, and the last thing he wanted was to fuel my overblown angst—without even knowing it.
“What do you mean?” Zeriel replied, slightly overcharged. He’d been like this since I’d first fallen from Vikkal’s cut-and-spell trick—calm, for the most part, but always treading on the edge. My ethereal fingers were itching to touch him, but I doubted he’d feel anything. I couldn’t feel the floor I was standing on, barefoot.
“I just mean Reapers… the fact that they exist. That they do what they do, and not a single one of us knew about them until one revealed himself to us, with foul intentions.”
“Something tells me that Yamani fellow was a horrible exception,” Mom cut in, one hand resting on the crystal casing, just above my head. It was as close as she could get to touching me, and I wanted nothing more than to feel her warmth on my skin.
“Even so, you’ll have to forgive me, I’m still wrapping my head around the entire Reaper concept. All my life, I’d thought we just live and… well, die. That we’re concentrated energy that just moves on. Then, I remember the likes of Sherus, who once worked with ghouls and gave him souls,” Dad said, shaking his head slowly. “Death was something distant and mysterious. Knowing now that it functions on order and tasks, much like our world of the living… I don’t know. I’m baffled.”
“You and me both.” Zeriel sighed. “It’s even more astonishing to learn that, much like the Exiled Maras and the daemons of Neraka, Reapers could be seduced by the power of our souls. That they could feed on them. Destroy them…”
“But there are immediate repercussions for the Reapers, at least,” Dad mused, scratching his pale stubble. He’d rarely allowed himself to go unshaven for more than a day, yet, since my falling, the rough, grain-colored shadow on his jaw and chin had become a regular sight. “They become ghouls.”
“And they just get hungrier for souls,” Zeriel replied.
“True. But they’re no longer Reapers. Imagine being one, eating souls and getting away with it for centuries, if not millennia, on end,” Mom said, then shuddered at the thought. “Frankly, the existence of Reapers and their descent into ghouls isn’t even what scares me the most. It just answers some questions I’ve had since I was a child. No, what truly terrifies me is the fact that Death is an entity, that she orders these Reapers around, that she once stopped the first Hermessi ritual, and now, she’s holed up on this Mortis planet, somewhere… who knows where… while my daughter is languishing away in this…” She knocked on the crystal casing. “This thing.”
Tears streamed down her cheeks. I could almost feel them, hot and burning with sorrow, tickling my skin. How unfair that my own parents had to witness my slow descent into death, long before their time came to even get close to the grand finale, so to speak.
Dad put an arm around her shoulders and held her close. He kissed her temple, closing his eyes for a moment, as if to stop his own tears from falling. “Our girl is a fighter,” he declared quietly. “She’s opposing this. I know she is.”
Zeriel couldn’t help but chuckle. “Vesta will probably flip off a Reaper before he takes her away.”
“I can agree with him,” Seeley muttered, clearly amused.
Even I was smiling, though I