I’d spent so many years making all the decisions on everything in my life that I’d forgotten that I didn’t have to. Not on this. I could discuss it with the rest of my team and get their input. How times had changed.
Miles caught my gaze and nodded. Showtime.
I picked the lock on the back door and crept inside the kitchen. Drawers were being opened and shut from deeper inside the house. I tiptoed to the living room/dining room which was sparsely furnished with a table, a sofa and a TV set. I’d bet this was another rental.
Keeping to the shadows, I made my way down the hallway to the master bedroom where Jonah threw clothes into suitcases. There was a suitcase sitting closed by the door. I tested its weight. It was heavy enough for my purposes, so I flung it at Jonah, knocking him facedown onto the bed. Pulling out magic suppressing cuffs, I pressed my knee into his back and wrenched his arm around his back.
He fought back with a crazed determination, but I was stronger.
Jonah twisted his head around and his eyes widened. “You. Did you kill Gunter somehow?”
I snapped the first cuff on him. “Just lucky.”
The air rent apart with a loud sucking noise. The room hung in two jagged pieces, separated by a chasm of swirling blues and purples.
The front door splintered with a loud crack, Miles yelling at his people to find me.
I struggled to clamp the second cuff on Jonah. I’d just snapped it around his wrist when I was sucked backwards into the chasm.
Jonah, meanwhile, seemed totally unaffected by the force that grabbed me and hauled me into the darkness.
The last thing I heard before everything went black was him saying, “Let’s see how your luck holds up now.”
Chapter 26
My eyes adjusted from pitch black to a dim gloom revealing that I stood on a faint dirt path in a desolate wasteland. I yawned, trying to pop my eardrums, but the silence that bore down on me like a physical force didn’t change, and when I licked my lips, I tasted dust.
I spun around, frantic to find that jagged seam and claw my way out like a zombie from a grave, but it was gone. In my panic, my foot slipped off the path.
A mass of smudgy black shadows rushed toward me. I bit back a scream, scrambling safely onto the trail.
The Repha’im hit some invisible shield on either side of me, battering up against it again and again.
Oh hell. The realization sank into me with an icy certainty.
Welcome to Sheol. Population: millions of Repha’im, and me, Ashira Cohen, one living human who needed an exit strategy stat.
The ring! I slid the wooden ring off its chain and onto my finger. Come on. I visualized the library as perfectly as I could, willing myself out of here, but I didn’t budge. The gold token didn’t work either.
I didn’t bother trying to attack the Repha’im. All of humanity’s dead against me? No, the best I could do was stay on this path that stretched out endlessly in either direction and pray the shield kept them from devouring me. Replacing the chain under my shirt, I started walking.
Dust clogged my nostrils and scratched the back of my throat. I squinted, blinking furiously, my eyes watering as a fine layer settled over me.
I’d been trudging along for some time when I tasted freezing cold water. The world blurred, the path disappearing in favor of a murky current rushing past. The mouthful became a lungful and I coughed, clawing at my throat and fighting against the unseen hands that held me down. My magic was too sluggish to send into my enemy.
I was pulled up for one blessed moment, just enough for a final gasp of air, the hair almost pulled from my scalp before I was shoved under again. Drowning sucked balls. Icy panic suffused me, every breath a choking inhale of more brackish water. I flailed my arms, thrashing to live but to no avail. Death claimed me.
I came to back on the path in Sheol, curled up in the fetal position and hyperventilating. Without sound. My shoulders were sore, and when I touched one with wrinkled blue prunes of fingers, it was bruised. Exactly where those hands had held me down.
What the fuck kind of hallucination had that been?
Masses of Repha’im continued to batter up against both sides of the invisible shield, hard enough to rattle the ground.
I broke into a sprint, hoping to outdistance them, but I ran out of steam before there was even a break in their number. Panting, I pressed a hand against the stitch in my side. Best to conserve my energy, though dehydration would probably kill me first.
If I couldn’t run to an exit, I’d have to think my way out. What did I know about Sheol? It was the land of death, silence, and forgetting. Break it down, Ash.
Death. I continued along the dirt track, walking with the best posture I’d ever had, not wanting any part of me to touch the spirits that were just inches away. They were a pulsing force waiting for a single misstep to land me in their clutches so they could suck out my life essence in a futile attempt to rejoin the land of the living. For a bunch of dead people, their eager anticipation rolled off them in giddy waves.
Full up on the death part.
Silence. I was good on that front, too. People bitched about all the noise we lived with on a daily basis, wishing they could get away to the woods or out on the water and have some peace and quiet. Except our world was never truly silent. There was the rush of wind in the leaves, the lapping of waves, a bird’s call.
This was true, pure silence and it terrified the shit out of me. With every passing second lacking
