I squeezed my eyes closed and fisted my hands while they traded theories and observations, yet none of them mentioned the obvious elephant in the room. I could tell them what happened; I just needed to be brave. It had been a hot minute since I’d performed a retro read, since the dead that showed up these days came with their stories intact. But not these—there was no soul residue left. It was as if they’d been torn from their bodies.
I dropped to my knees and grabbed the nearest arm.
“Cora, no,” my father snapped.
Too late.
My vision tunneled, and my power grappled with the echo of death that should be here. All living things left a residue, but this was equivalent to being bleached.Where are you?I poked at the darkness, and eventually it poked back. I grabbed it and yanked.
My grandmother’s face snapped into view, but I was no longer in the room of death. I was in an unfamiliar room with rows and rows of tall shelves. Eloise smirked at something in herhand. “Another for my collection,” she muttered. “You had no purpose in life, but in death you shall be a part of the new age.”
Give me a break. This was like Evil Overlord 101.
A golden tendril twisted and swelled around her finger, and I felt the push against the veil as Heaven and Hell bent to look at the sins of the recently deceased. I inched closer, not sure if I was in the past or the present. Eloise didn’t react though, so whichever it was, I was still hidden in a dimension she couldn’t pierce.
She chuckled as the tendril tried to lift from her finger. “Sorry, but the afterlife you deserve is right here.” She twirled the shimmering strand around before stuffing it inside a small glass jar and popping a cork in the top. It shivered and slammed against the glass.
My breath caught in my throat. She wouldn’t dare.
Of course she would.
She was coming up against the barriers of the veil and needed the souls to continue to power her uprising. Lucifer and Abaddon wouldn’t tolerate her, so she was orchestrating deaths and plucking the souls as they took their last breaths.
“What have you done?” I whispered.
It wasn’t just a crime against humanity; it was a crime against the fabric of the universe. She was playing God, and the power Donn had fed her corrupted her soul. It was eating her from the inside out.
My gaze lifted and tracked the hundreds of trapped souls. How long had she been doing this? My chest tightened. I needed Donn to remove his power from her, to strip her defenses so I could fix this crime.
Sadness rippled across the room as the souls pleaded for release. They were confused, in pain, and lost. Death was a single journey, the only one we had to perform alone. Stoppingit wasn’t just messing with the natural order; it was fucking with fate and destiny, two gods you never crossed.
Oh, Grandmother, I hope you know what you’ve unleashed in your single-minded mission to rule the world.
Eloise smiled and tapped her fingernail on the glass, taunting the trapped soul. The prisoners pressed forward.
I swallowed.
She might have harvested souls, pure and tainted alike. But this was warping them into something terrifying that she had no hope of controlling.
I squeezed my eyes closed and let go of the death echo.
Hudson’s face was the first I saw leaning over me. “You good?”
“Sugar,” I croaked.
Rebecca shoved a juice box at me. Where did she find that? Oh, we were back in my apartment. I snatched it and gulped down the syrupy liquid while taking the opportunity to look around. Oh, goodie, the gang was all here, and my angelic family members had stayed for the show.
Abbadon glared at me. “You need to listen, Daughter.”
I leaned back and grumbled under my breath.
“What was that?” Lucifer snapped.
“I said, spare me the warnings and fatherly care. You are a day short and a dollar late. But you two need to listen up, because I have some answers while you didn’t even notice there was a problem.”
“Oof, schooled by your child,” Dave said.
“Tell us then,” Lucifer said. “Dazzle us with your knowledge.”
