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A soft snort had me opening one eye to find Grant with his hand over his mouth as if to muffle his laughter at my shoddy attempt.
Asshole.
I should have left him in the abyss.
He had a point, though.Hewasn’t doing this because he couldn’t. Because it wasn’t his sort of magic—it was mine.
So I stopped trying to copy anyone and focused only on my own feelings. Just like I was drawn toward the disturbance, to where I was pretty sure Lilith was, I could alsofeelthe mist.
I used powers that felt rusty and awkward but were stillthereto push that mist away, and when I opened my eyes?
It was gone…
Well, at least scattered in the area directly around us.
And I wished for a long moment that I hadn’t figured out how to do it. Spirits sat there, faded versions of what I saw on earth, and they wereallhorrible.
A man stood in front of a pool where a small body floated, a woman cowered, her back against a door someone banged again, a man held someone else at gunpoint. The memories all moved at once, like a hundred movies playing, and the sound of it all hit me in a wave.
The mist must have deadened it, insulated it, and now I was struck by the reality of this place.
It drove me to my knees, and I couldn’t block it out. I couldn’t ignore it. Even when I put my hands over my ears, it didn’t help. The sound wasn’t physical and bypassed my hands.
The mist floated in quickly, as if without me actively holding it back, it moved in to refill the space.
Not that I planned to clear it out again—ever.
The experience haunted me, and I was reminded of the lesson hell should have taught me.
Sometimes I really was better off not knowing.
When I opened my eyes, I found Grant before me. He didn’t touch me, staring at me as if he didn’t understand.
“Couldn’t you hear them?”
He shook his head. “I could hardly see anything, just a shimmer.” He pressed his lips together. “You could see the trapped spirits, couldn’t you?”
“And hear them,” I whispered. “There areso manyof them here, just stuck in their own hell.”
Hunter walked up. “Not hell. Even hell has an end when spirits die. Here, though? Everything loops. Just over and over again.”
“Can you see them?”
“Better than Grant, not as good as you, I’m sure.”
“Can we do anything?”
“Not really. Even if they could have been saved before, now? It’s too late. They aren’t really even here anymore, just echoes of who they were, like a video tape that was left playing.”
That made me feel better, then worse as I realized it meant they were gone. I was glad they weren’t necessarily suffering and aware, but saddened that there wasn’t a way to save them.
This entire place felt like an option for suffering, just a torture room large enough to fit countless victims.
“Why is this here?” I finally asked, frustration eating away at me. “Why is this place a thing? I don’t pretend to have all the answers, or to need them, but damn it,why?”
Kase crossed his arms, standing beside Troy as if to let the other two handle this. It was a good idea, since life and death metaphysical questions weren’t exactly his area of expertise.
Hunter shrugged. “There’s always balance. There’s life and death, two sides of the same coin. Mortality and immortality.”
