A Shade of Vampire 77 A Fate of Time - Bella Forrest Page 0,34

We were Reapers. What was there to worry about? "What happened to you?" he asked one of them.

The spirit wailed and slashed out. Her claws cut through Nightmare's tunic. He winced from pain. He’d gotten slightly hurt.

"Holy crap," I croaked. "How… How is that possible?!"

Drawing my scythe, I knew now that there was a fight coming. But I couldn't process how it had come to pass, in the first place. Spirits couldn't hurt us… so how had they managed to cut Nightmare?

"Oh, snap," he said, moving back to us. "Sis, we've got a problem."

"I see it now," Dream replied, worriedly glancing around as the spirits got closer, hungry for something that they didn't even know they wanted. These weren't mere ghosts. They could hurt Reapers, and they were supposed to have been so rare that their collective presence here boggled our minds. "These are specters."

"How can this be?" I whispered, breaking into a cold sweat. "We've yet to ascertain how specters are made, to begin with. I have never come across one myself, but I've heard stories from other Reapers."

"Ah. I should apologize on behalf of the First Ten, then," Dream replied. "We kind of made them."

"What?!"

I stared at her, feeling my eyes bulging with disbelief. I knew of Reapers who'd come across specters, many years ago. Legends among us had hinted at the specters being rare spirits who'd been left on their own for too long. Not all ghosts could turn into them. We'd always assumed it depended on what type of creature they'd been prior to dying. Some souls simply carried more power than others.

Specters were so scarce that we didn't even have enough data to compile an accurate profile. They couldn't be pinned down or talked to. All they knew was violence, until they were kissed by the Reaper's blade. Only then could they move on. Theirs was a tale of tragedy. Therefore, how did the First Ten fit into this?

"You need to explain," I said, waving my scythe out to keep an angry specter away for a few more seconds. The rest of them were getting restless, a tad too eager to slice through us.

"Specters are the only ghosts that can wound a Reaper," Dream replied. "Their spirit essence is powerful enough to—"

"I know that! Get to the part where you made them!" I snapped.

Nightmare cut one of the specters down, and it vanished in a flash of sparks. The scythe of a Reaper meant the end. In our case, that meant a boatload of Reaping, for there were hundreds gathered around us, and more coming in from all directions. This was unprecedented.

"A specter does not form on its own. We discovered this a long time ago," Dream said. "A Reaper can put something of their own inside a spirit. A thread of garment. A little gemstone. Even a strand of hair. The ghost absorbs it. Without reaping, it all just festers until it devolves into a specter."

"So the First Ten are responsible for specters…" I repeated, trying to wrap my head around the concept, to understand the reasoning behind it.

The twins nodded. "We used them to play around sometimes. We didn't share the information with the other Reapers, though. We didn't want anyone else trying it," Nightmare said.

"As if that's a good excuse!" I replied. "Hold on, so… the specters my fellow Reapers came across belonged to one or more of you?!"

They nodded again, looking like children I'd just caught stealing from the cookie jar. This simply reinforced my already negative opinion about the First Ten as a unit.

"We can't really control them," Dream said. "Most of the time, we just let them loose to piss another First Tenner off. Sometimes, the specters got away before we could reap them. They're abnormally agile."

"You are insane!" I shouted.

"Yeah, I know, we're not perfect, Miss Judgy!" Nightmare replied. "But we've got a problem here! There are too many of them! I think the Spirit Bender made them to keep us from getting to Time Master!"

Holy smokes.

As the bigger picture cleared, the entire chain of events leading up to this point began to sound like a carefully thought-out plan which the Spirit Bender had been working on for a very long time.

He'd helped Brendel steal Thieron, for sure. He'd definitely helped her bypass GASP on a few crucial matters, and he'd even assisted with her healing after Taeral had first cut her down with an incomplete Thieron.

To make matters worse, Spirit had also messed with Death—it was the