“There’s soldiers still on the roads outside of the woods,” Farley grumbled.
As he shifted his blade back and forth between his hands, I ignored the blood dripping from it.
“They’re so close, but too far away,” another griped.
“Do you think they’ll enter the forest?” Ryker asked.
“No, they’re mindless drones, but not idiots,” Farley said. “Their commanders aren’t eager to send them in either.”
“Probably because they know we’d gut their sorry asses like the pigs they are,” another poltergeist snarled.
“How come you never attacked the nobles who traveled through the Revenant Woods before? You bothered some of the coaches but never went full on…” My voice trailed off as I tried to think of the word to describe it.
“Psycho?” Farley suggested.
“Yes, psycho fits perfectly.”
Farley grinned at me and puffed out his chest. The little, floating psycho was proud of being described as such. Shit kept getting crazier.
I rubbed my cheeks as my eyes burned from smoke and exhaustion. I needed a nap.
Farley stopped shifting his blade back and forth as he looked at the others. “I guess it was because we were never really organized before. We all did our own thing. I don’t think it ever occurred to me, or anyone else, to unite.
“I’ve harassed and attacked more than a few aristocrats traveling through here before, but we can’t do as much damage when there’s only one of us, and while I’ve had weapons before,I usually only had sticks or rocks. That didn’t frighten them as much, and it didn’t kill them. I mean, I still scared them, but they didn’t die like I prefer.”
Great, so we’d united and weaponized them. And now we’d have to be careful not to piss them off; if they decided to turn on us, the Revenant Woods would become uninhabitable.
“I tended to stay away from the roads and aristocrats,” a female said. “Seeing those assholes only made me angrier.”
Many of the other poltergeists bobbed up and down as they nodded. “I like working together,” another said.
When Farley lifted his blade triumphantly in the air, blood dripped through him and onto the ground. “Strength in numbers!”
While the others all cheered, I resisted ripping their blades away. However, I suspected that even though they liked us and were helping us, they’d turn on us to keep them. I clasped my hands behind my back.
“I think,” Farley said as he lowered his blade, “that I also still felt suppressed and beaten down by them, even after death. I didn’t think there was much else we could do, and I certainly didn’t think we could destroy them, but we can.”
Behind him, the other poltergeists bobbed in agreement as Farley’s revelation caused a sharp pang to my heart. Not even death had freed him and the others from the oppression and loss that propelled them into the Revenant Woods, got them killed, and turned them into poltergeists.
“But now we know that we can fight back,” another poltergeist said. “And I meanreallyfight back, not just throw things at their carriages or try to scare them. We’ve created an army with you fucking breathers.”
My eyebrows rose at his assessment of us. They needed us to help make the nobles pay, especially since they couldn’t leavethis forest, but I thought some of them would have preferred to change our breather status to non-breather.
We were going to have to bereallycareful around the poltergeists now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Ellery
As the smoke dissipated,the stench of it remained, as did the charred remnants of the trees and bodies the fire devoured. Arms stretched through the smoke still hanging low over the ground; they looked to be pleading for someone to save them.
And through the hazy fog, ghosts were all starting to rise. The specters hovered over their bodies before floating aimlessly away.
But more than ghosts were rising, as a few poltergeists also emerged from the dead. They bobbed up and down, their red eyes gleaming as they stared at all of us before turning and zipping away into the forest.
Unlike the ghosts, who couldn’t communicate and seemed not to retain any knowledge of their former selves, but still resembled them, those poltergeists were sentient and aware of what created them.
“They could be an issue,” Ianto said.
