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I spotted it when I looked at Troy, at Grant. With the others, I saw them as shells. Even Hunter and Kase, who had no souls as mortals did, still appeared to me as a casing. Inside Hunter I could see the twisting smoke and hellfire of his true form, and inside Kase—darkness.
Grant and Troy, who still retained spirits as I knew them, had a shimmering of their soul wrapped inside their outer form.
Lilith, though?
I pushed myself to my feet, forcing my body to move even when I didn’t want to. I went closer to her, narrowing my eyes as I tried to figure out why she was different.
She had no shell.
The edges of her energy were soft, as if bleeding out, held together by something that wasn’t a form like the others.
“What is she?”
My father didn’t answer. He approached, circling around her. “Something unique, as you are.”
I recalled Gran telling me the same, and it being about as useful.
Still, I studied her, seeing how her spirit—if it could be called that—was held in place by something that was not a body.
“So you can’t do anything because of this?”
He nodded. “Reapers interact with spirits in the living and the dead realms. We are the ultimate control over spirits, the shepherds of them.”
“So why not her?”
He didn’t answer me.Go figure.
I again looked at her, then reached out to touch her. My fingers grazed her arm, the first time I’d touched her, and somethingwrongcoursed through me.
It wasn’t the sensation of a spirit, or even that horrible sharp feeling of a poltergeist, but something worse.
Something untethered and twisted and old.
I jerked backward and shook my hand as if I could fling the sensation off. “What is that?”
He let out a sigh—it seemed that parental disappointment was a universal constant. “You have so much to learn and so little time to do it in.”
“Maybe you should have gifted me with a reaper how-to guidebook for my last birthday instead of, well, nothing.”
He moved away from her and cast his hand out, parting the mist. “Look.”
I followed him into the newly cleared space, suddenly surrounded by the spirits trapped there, repeating their misery.
The sounds still hit me, but something muted it. Maybe it was my father? Maybe it was wherever or however we were walking around, disconnected from the world?
He stopped before one, a man I recognized. The one who had abused me… He didn’t see me in his loop, however. He saw himself, at the top of those stairs, and the reaper coming for him.
A deep anger inside me erupted at the reality that he was my horror, but I wasn’t his. He might be stuck here, but he thought only of himself, nothing of what he’d done to others. He was as selfish in death as he’d been in life.
I wasn’t sorry he’d ended up here.
I nodded at the man. “You did this, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, thanks. I’ll sleep better knowing the bastard is here.”
My father didn’t smile, didn’t show any reaction to the praise. Then again, maybe I just couldn’t read reapers…
