Chapter 41

The buildings crumbled. Turned to dust. Then even the dust vanished.

I stopped falling. The waste.

The rider bellowed in rage. I thought its earlier attacks had been vicious, now they turned into an onslaught. I was too weak to fight back.

Then a shimmery form flickered somewhere in my peripheral and a ghost dove through the rider, taking a piece of the creature with it.

The rider howled. He grabbed for the offending ghost. Two more dive-bombed him. Then another ghost appeared. The rider lashed out at random, but the ghosts were quick, flitting away while another hit the rider from a different direction.

“Up you go,” Roy said, as arms lifted me by the armpits.

“You got the ghosts.”

“Hey, it was my job, right boss?” He smiled and shoved his thick glasses farther up his nose. “You don’t look so good.”

I looked down at myself. Neither the soul nor the psyche can bleed, but it could show tears. He was right. I looked bad.

“Well, you going to join the buffet?” he asked. Then he darted forward, taking his own chunk of the rider.

It had shrunk in size, its darkness thinning. I couldn’t quite see through it, but at the rate the ghosts were stealing away chunks of it, I’d be able to soon. I hated the idea of that thing’s sludgelike energy in me, but I reached out anyway, drawing hard. A thick funnel of energy shot from it to me and the rider screamed. He shrank. I, on the other hand, felt more steady on my feet, if a little greasy from the energy’s source. Reaching out, I drew more energy.

“Alex.”

I paused. I knew that voice. I couldn’t remember why. But I knew it.

“Alex, are you out there?”

It was a female voice. Somewhere far away a woman with red curls and blazing green eyes stood, straddling an enormous chasm.

Rianna.

I looked around. I was in the waste. No grave witch was supposed to reach the waste, and I couldn’t feel the land of the living.

“Alex, if you can hear me, you need to get back to your body. Now. Your collector caught a part of your soul and is holding it in your body, but you need to come back.”

My body. Where was it?

“Roy? How do I get out of here?”

The ghost looked over at me, stopping midattack. “You go up.”

Up?

I looked around. There, right behind me, was a thin silver thread that shimmered like a soul. My soul.

It led up, and up.

Arms grabbed mine. “Come on, Alex,” Roy said, pulling me. “Time for you to get out of here.”

He pulled again and the wastes changed. He wasn’t the only ghost with me either. A dozen hands grabbed at me, pushing and pulling me toward the surface. The farther I traveled the more the world around me rematerialized. Dust turned to crumbled ruins, and then to dilapidated buildings. But the farther I got, the thinner the thread became.

I’m running out of time.

The ghosts pulled harder and the landscape smeared past me as I sped along, following the thinning thread. Then I hit the chasm. A chasm I was on the wrong side of.

“This is the end of the line for us,” James Kingly’s ghost said.

I looked out across the impossibly large chasm. How was I supposed to cross that abyss? In my hand, the thread tethering my soul to my body thinned.

I was a grave witch. I’d bridged this gap hundreds of times. I could do it. Normally I opened myself to the grave. But I was already immersed in the grave and the land of the dead. Instead I opened myself to life.

Warmth rushed into me, color flooding the world.

“No you don’t,” the rider screamed in my mind. Something with claws grabbed hold of me as I crossed.

I gasped, lungs burning as if I hadn’t taken a breath in a long time. I opened my eyes, my real eyes, to Death’s concerned face, his hand planted firmly in my chest.

“I thought I’d lost you,” he whispered.

“It’s not over.” My voice broke in my too dry throat. I swallowed and looked around. Something was missing.

Crap. “Get the circles up.” The yell was more of a croak than words, but circles in purple and red popped up around me.

Just in time.

I arched my back as the rider moved through me. It had ridden me across, but it couldn’t take my body. It hurt, not in a physical way—it was too drained for that, but it ripped at my psyche to get through.

I tried to scramble to my feet, failed, and Death pulled me up. Held me there when I would have fallen.

“The box? Where is the box?” My gaze shot around the circle and I spotted it several yards away. I scrambled for it and nearly collapsed. Again it was Death who kept me upright. He reached for it and horror appeared on his face as his fingers slid through it.

I collapsed beside it because standing was too hard. The first two glyphs still glowed faintly blue. My throat didn’t want to cooperate, but I got out the name of the third and pressed my still bloody finger against the box, tracing the faint glyph. Magic ripped through my raw psyche.

The rider stalked along the opposite edge of the circle, looking for a weakness or a hole it could exploit. I aimed the opening of the box at it and named the final glyph, tracing its form.

I felt more than saw my skin heat and glow as Faerie’s magic filled me. A whirlwind caught the rider, dragging it toward the box. It struggled, its dark form twisting and fighting the pull.

It lost.

The whirlwind sucked it into the box and the lid snapped shut. I flipped the lock. Relief washed over me, mixed hard with exhaustion and I leaned against Death. “It’s over now.”

The circles dropped, my friends running forward.

Caleb hauled me to my feet, clearly unaware I was already in good hands. Holly threw her arms around me.

“I thought you were dead,” she whispered, hugging me tight.

I handed off the box to Rianna. “Somewhere in that castle is a secure place to store this, right?”

She smiled, her eyes full of relief. She tucked the spear in the crook of her arm so she could hold the box with both hands. “I’m sure we can find somewhere.”

Death stepped back as my friends crowded around me. I twisted, reaching for him.

“Don’t go. I need you.”

He stared at me for a long moment, and I was sure at any second he’d vanish and I wouldn’t see him again. Then he stepped forward, swept me into his arms, and kissed me.

“Uh, is it just me,” Briar said somewhere behind me. “Or is she floating and glowing? Humans don’t glow.”

She’ll definitely put this in her report. I didn’t know if it would negate my OMIH license, and in that moment, I didn’t care. We were all alive, the rider was trapped, Tamara would be safe, and Death didn’t forfeit his soul.

We won.