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I had no idea if we were going to do this little sitting-on-the-floor thing for ten minutes or eight hours, and not knowing killed me.
I went to ask—as nicely as I could—how long this would take when her eyes snapped open.
The green was different—clouded, as though something else obscured it.
“What do you see?” Hunter asked.
She didn’t answer right away, her pupils locking on nothing, telling me she wasn’t seeing anything, at least not through her real eyes.
It reminded me of how Gran said I looked when I allowed spirits to speak through me, which was…unsettling.
“It’s empty.”
Hunter leaned forward but didn’t touch her. “What’s empty?”
Her eyebrows inched toward each other, as if she had to concentrate hard. “They aren’t here. The spirits, they’re not making it through to the afterworld.”
She blinked a few times, until the clouds in her eyes disappeared. When she finally seemed back to herself, she looked at Hunter. “You’re right. Spirits aren’t making it to the afterworld.”
“So where are they? Because they’re not in the living realm, and they’re not in the afterlife.”
Serrish looked exhausted as she sat there, as though what had seemed like a quick process had cost her greatly. “You all think yourselves so smart, but you understand so little.”
Hunter’s voice hardened. “So explain it, Serrish, because we came to you for answers. The spirts aren’t in either places, so where are they? And why?”
Serrish let out a long sigh, then held one hand up, her fist closed. A thin trail of fine sand poured from her, despite her not having actually picked up any. I wanted to ask how she’d done it, but no doubt I’d only receive annoyed looks in response to the question, so I stayed quiet.
“This is the normal flow of souls from the living realm to the afterlife. It is slow, steady, controlled. Even in times of crisis, when plagues or war increase that number…” She allowed more sand to pass, creating a larger stream, but still it piled into a neat cone on the ground. “It still remains stable. It has balance between the two amounts. This is how things should work. If something were to disrupt this, though,” She paused, and placed her free hand in the stream, catching the specks in her palm. The pile grew, filling her hand, but she didn’t stop. “It causes a break in the natural order, and this break isn’t always immediately obvious or dangerous. However, it creates an imbalance, and if someone were to use that.” She turned her hand over, allowing the large pile of sand that had accumulated in her palm to crash down onto the cone on the floor. Instead of settling in a predictable pattern, it knocked the sand down, flattening it, destroying the calm and steady rhythm.
“So they aren’t being stolen?”
“Individual sprits are useless. However, grouped together, they have power.Ifthis is what is planned, you don’t have much time. The world is a fickle place, and the areas between life and death, where such spirits travel and could be stored, are narrow. It wouldn’t take much to carry this out.”
“Why, though?” I asked. When she gave me a sharp look, as if I should know better than to speak, I continued. “Everyone lives in either the living world or the afterlife. Why break them?”
Serrish shrugged, the bones of her slim shoulders standing out. “People do terrible things for a few reasons. Some out of spite, some out of fear, some for power and some for pleasure. Without knowingwhohas done this, I can’t guess why. There are those, however, who are not so pleased with their place in this system, who feel the balance is anything but balanced, who crave more than they were given. They might be willing to destroy it all if they can’t have it.”
Lucifer.
A familiar tingle ran along my skin. I’d dealt with this damned shadow too many times, judging from how I could feel it before anyone else noticed it.
It stood behind Serrish, outside the circle, large and imposing and dark. Those twin flames flickered, but still it didn’t seem to see me.
Whether Serrish noticed it or just noticed me looking over her shoulder, she twisted and jumped to her feet.
At the same time Grant and Hunter saw it—at least it was something for once that others than just me could spot—and they pushed me backward.
“Stay in the circle,” Serrish snapped. Despite her small frame, she remained between the shadow and us. “You do not belong here,” she said.
The shadow drew back and struck out as it had in my dream, but it only struck the barrier of salt. It couldn’t seem to break through.
“This isn’t your realm,” Serrish said, holding her hands out, palms up. Green sparked from them, the same color as her eyes. “You have no power here, Morningstar.”
The name made me press against Hunter’s back, a shudder as if it were a name that shouldn’t be spoken nor heard.
In fact…the more I thought about it, the surer I was Serrish hadn’t exactly said that, as though my brain supplied a name it understood instead of whatever she used.
Even I knew, however, with my lack of formal religion, that Morningstar was another term for Lucifer.
