piece of intel could help us prepare a better strategy to reach out to Death, who was literally the only entity that had the power required to rise against the Hermessi. The stakes were sky high.
But I was conflicted.
A troubling boom tore through the sky outside. We all rushed to the window. Grandpa Ibrahim pulled the curtains back, and we watched a chunky ball of fire hurling toward… Stonewall. “Oh, boy,” I gasped.
A low rumble tickled my ear. I slowly turned my head to find Herbert hunched down behind Grandma and me, watching the fireball with sparkling interest. His leathery lips stretched, revealing the fangs that could easily tear through my flesh.
“There’s a soul in that fire,” Grandpa Ibrahim said. “Herbert can see it.”
That just rendered us speechless, as the blazing meteor shot down and crashed somewhere dangerously close to Stonewall. My heart contracted painfully. I worried about the Bajangs that lived in that place. The low-magnitude earthquake that followed told me that the force of the impact had been considerable, to say the least.
I couldn’t see most of Stonewall from here, but it didn’t take an expert to realize that a burning object that size could easily destroy at least one or two of the villages that had developed at the citadel’s base.
“I think our conversation with Herbert will have to wait,” Grandpa Ibrahim said, peeling his eyes away from the black smoke thread that rose from where the fireball had crashed, just beneath the horizon’s slightly arched line.
Herbert whispered something, but Grandpa snapped his finger and muttered the spell that made the ghoul lose his physical form. He dissipated into gray mist before the pencil box sucked him back in. The lid snapped shut, though I could still feel his irritation from inside. It scratched at my brain.
“He is not happy,” I replied, squirming from the mental discomfort.
“Whatever happened in Stonewall just now takes precedence,” Grandpa Ibrahim said.
“We should go there,” Grandma agreed.
I was more than ready. Any agreement with Herbert would go on the back burner until we figured out what was going down in Stonewall. We had to be there and get those creatures to safety. My only hope was that there would be no severe injuries. The last thing Calliope needed was a devastating rock from the sky.
Harper
From the moment we’d pierced Calliope’s atmosphere, I knew we’d be in for a rough ride and an even more difficult landing. I also became aware of the fact that everyone would see us coming down from the skies. Ramin had had to manifest into his full fire form in order to breach the planet’s protective atmospheric layer.
I’d felt every particle of cold air brushing past us. Every gust of wind and the tickle of every cloud we swooshed past. The descent had been brutal and intense, but it was nothing compared to the crash itself. Ramin had done his best to avoid populated areas, and he was also aware that we needed to land somewhere close enough to Luceria and Mount Zur. We didn’t want to spend much time making our way to either of the locations—Ramin was an outside Hermessi, and we weren’t sure how many of Calliope’s elementals were still on the rebels’ side.
The impact almost disintegrated us both. Or at least, that’s how I felt it.
Without a body, however, the sensation of pain was superficial and short-lived, merely an echo of what the real deal would’ve been like. We burned hot, two in one, as we recovered from the fall. We didn’t even see the size of the crater we’d made until we both came to our senses. Rising from the charred ground, we glanced around—one soul, hidden inside the fiery manifestation of Neraka’s Hermessi.
The crater was huge, about a mile in diameter, and perfectly polished and black, shaped like a salad bowl. We were at the bottom, looking up. Above, the sky was a pristine and familiar blue, with streaks of clouds that would soon be whisked away by the afternoon winds. I loved being in the sunlight, and I’d forgotten how much I’d missed it. Of course, this was only a moment. Soon enough, I would hopefully find my way back to my body and return to my life as a vampire—while secretly hoping that, once this whole Hermessi problem was out of the way, Amal and Amane would go back to studying Derek’s blood and figure out a way to make all vampires into day-walkers.
In the meantime, I settled for our