We have to get her out!”
Whenever I tried to get close to the house, I could hear Atlas growling. He knew I was out here, and he knew every time I took a single step. He couldn’t see me, but his Bounty Reaper senses were remarkably sharp. He could smell me. He could sense me. And we had absolutely no smart way of getting to Nethissis without Atlas gobbling her up the moment we got there.
Even using the ghouls as a diversion wasn’t adequate. Petra was cunning enough to see such a move coming, especially since she had her telepathic connection to Atlas, who must’ve picked up the creatures’ scent by now.
“We need to level the playing field,” I said. “Petra thinks she’s got us in a pinch, and it’s not right. I doubt we’ll lose our shot at finding the Master of Darkness if we just show her we’re not going to be pushed around. The Darklings have had secret dominion over Visio for far too long. They’re not going to simply relinquish it now that we’re here. On the contrary, they’ll fight hard to keep it. So it really doesn’t matter how many of us Petra sees coming.”
Sidyan stared at me for a while. Next to him, Rudolph and Maya sat quietly, gently nudging each other. I could tell they were afraid, but there wasn’t much I could do to soothe them at this point. Their feelings mattered, but saving Nethissis and screwing the Darklings over was the priority—at least for me.
“It’s better to regret something we did rather than something we didn’t do,” Lumi added, watching Sidyan with a half-smile.
“Is that something the Word told you?” Sidyan replied, giving her a sideways glance. “The Word, which, by the way, hasn’t given you a single hint as to how to handle this?”
“No, that’s something experience has taught me. I’ve had a little over ten thousand years of that one lying around. I figured it was time to use it,” Lumi said. “Listen, as long as we deliver the desired result, I doubt Death will be too miffed about how we got there. Right now, we’ve got a doozy of a situation on our hands. Nethi is in trouble, and Petra is calling the shots. We have to change that.”
Sidyan let out a deep sigh. It felt like a pained surrender, but it was a surrender nonetheless. “Okay. Okay. It’s done, you’re right. So Kelara and the First Tenners with her know about us and about what we’re trying to do here. We know she’s going to try and convince them to help us. What are the odds they’ll actually do it?”
Gazing back at the house for a moment, I could see Atlas in the window looking down at Nethissis. Scanning past the walls and the furniture, I also caught a glimpse of Tudyk and Moore. They sat at a table, motionless and looking genuinely scared. Their mother wasn’t around to see them; otherwise, I was certain she would’ve had a word to say about it—not that she’d ever admit she’d dragged them into this way too early. Simmon and Aganon were walking back to the house, talking to each other as they went. They seemed pleased with themselves, but the people they passed were utterly terrified beneath their plastic smiles.
The Darklings had brought terror to Laramis. They were cocky and arrogant, and they had too much power. The balance was in desperate need of a serious scale-tipping, and we were the only ones around with the ability to actually do something about it. Death’s limits were shortsighted, to say the least. She wasn’t here. She couldn’t see what we were witnessing. I doubted she was even capable of feeling any sympathy for these people. They were all tiny smudges on the wider fabric of life, with which she had very little to do.
“I don’t know,” I ultimately said. “All I can say is we can hope for the best. Maybe the universe will respond.”
“Or maybe we’ll respond. There’s no point in a middleman here,” Kelara replied, scaring the living daylights out of all of us.
I turned around in the blink of an eye, startled to see her standing before us. She was joined by Soul, Phantom, Widow, Night, and Morning. I recognized the last two from their descriptions, since I’d never met them before.
Rudolph and Maya vanished, the air vaguely shimmering where they’d stood. I felt sorry for them, but I wasn’t exactly worried. Kelara had agreed that