trying to set conditions before he speaks.”
“Conditions?” I replied, somewhat startled. Nothing good could come out of a ghoul setting the terms in a discussion such as this.
“I’d thought I’d allow him out of the box more often, going forward, in exchange for his cooperation. But he won’t have it,” Grandpa said, while the ghoul’s eyes darted from me to him and to Grandma and back. “He doesn’t want to be a prisoner anymore.”
Grandma Corrine grinned at Herbert. “You do realize I could just take you back to the Sanctuary and have you severely punished for this, right?”
The ghoul whispered his thread of unintelligible words, narrowing his beady eyes at her. Grandpa Ibrahim sighed. “He says they can do whatever they want to him. It’s better than being cooped up in that pencil box. Either way, unless he’s granted freedom, he won’t help us.”
“Then we’ll just get another ghoul to tell us,” Grandma shot back, standing firmly against the ghoul’s demand.
Herbert replied, and Grandpa translated. “He says every other ghoul will tell you the same thing. Reapers are quite aggressive when it comes to their existence and the secrecy surrounding it. Whatever is going on outside this castle, it’s not something the Reapers planned for, and they will have contingency plans in place to silence anyone whom they might identify as our source of information. No one must know, among those who are living, about Reapers and Death. It’s a rule set in stone. The ghouls are abominations, and they know that if they reveal the secrets of Reapers, they will be hunted even more.”
“Well, they’re already hunted, aren’t they? Pretty sure the Reapers don’t want them around, not after the mess so many of the ghouls made in previous years,” I said.
Herbert let out a long hiss, followed by more whispers. Grandpa Ibrahim pinched the bridge of his nose. “You’re not making this any easier, Herbert. Whatever happened to that tame ghoul you once were?” he asked, and Herbert’s reply made him scoff. “He says that even the tamest of ghouls will think twice before spilling the secrets of Reapers. At least if he’s free, he can evade them. If he’s captive anywhere, even in the Sanctuary, the Reapers will find him and destroy him. According to him, nothingness awaits. Ghouls don’t get to move on into the realm of the dead, whatever that may be. Therefore, despite his respect and affection toward me, Herbert will not cooperate unless he’s granted his freedom.”
That was a hard pill to swallow. Why would we let a ghoul loose? They ate people. They ate people’s souls, if given the chance, and if our theories about the fallen fae were correct, an entire buffet would await Herbert right here on Calliope, if we were to set him free. They couldn’t resist such a hunger, from what we’d learned after Taeral’s encounter with Yamani. All the fae we held in crystal casings, many of them my friends, would be vulnerable, their souls a feast for a free ghoul.
Then again, it also made sense to consider the possibility that Reapers might be around the fae sanctuaries—but was it a certain fact? Not for us, it wasn’t, and therefore not a good angle to gamble from. In other words, there was no good reason to cave to Herbert’s demand.
“This is the only way for us to find out anything about the Reapers and Death,” Grandma Corrine said to me. She didn’t like it any more than I did, but she seemed to be more in favor of releasing Herbert than I was.
“There are huge risks to letting him go,” I replied, then scowled at Herbert. I could feel him tinkering in my head again. Maybe the decades he’d spent in that pencil box had whittled away at his obedience and gentile nature. Maybe the Herbert we were dealing with now wasn’t the Herbert that Grandpa Ibrahim had worked with. Solitary confinement could easily mangle a mind, especially one as savage as a ghoul’s.
“Deaths of innocent people, for starters. Plus, based on what we know now, they’d also be a danger to any ghosts or wandering spirits,” Grandpa Ibrahim said.
“It seems we’re at an impasse,” Grandma replied. She raised an eyebrow at Herbert. “You disappoint me.”
The ghoul just shrugged. Those were the terms he’d set. No matter what we did, we wouldn’t be able to get him to tell us about Reapers and Death—unless we set him free. I understood our desperate need for information, since any