She jumped in surprise. Even the Empty Wind’s voice was louder here, the deep bass vibrating through her chest. When she nodded, his glowing eyes smiled. “This is my world,” he said, looking down at the circling spirits, who now appeared as little more than shadows on the field below. “Here,theyare the ghosts. We are what is real. Us, and them.”
He turned as he finished, dragging Marci with him as he came around to see—not the back of the cave where they’d been stuck for the last half of the night, but an endless, empty dark filled with an army of people Marci had never met. They were all different ages and ethnicities, but unlike the ghostly figures she’d seen in the Vann Jeger fight, all of these people wore modern clothing. They were also all dripping wet, and that was when Marci finally understood what she was looking at. These were the dead of Detroit, come to collect their due.
“Because of you,” the Empty Wind said, clutching her hand tighter. “They came for your promise. It’s because of you that I was able to bring them all here. Now, with your help, they will be answered at last.” He looked at her. “Are you ready?”
Marci opened her mouth to reply, but the words wouldn’t come. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t make a sound.
“Because you are not dead,” the Empty Wind explained. “Speak anyway. I can hear you.”
Like this?
She jumped at the sound of her own voice echoing inhishead, but the Empty Wind just laughed. “Like that,” he said, turning back to the cliff. “Just keep the magic flowing. I’ll do the rest.” He took a deep breath of the freezing wind. “Once more, are you ready?”
Marci tried to take a breath herself, but that didn’t work either. She really was the ghost in this place, but it didn’t seem to matter. The maelstrom of Reclamation Land’s magic was still there, pouring through her into her spirit. She gripped it tighter, answering the Empty Wind’s question with a burst of magic that made his whole body stiffen.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said, looking over his shoulder at the army behind them. “Come!” he shouted, raising his hand, which now gripped a spear. “It’s time to take back what she stole from us!”
Behind them, the wind picked up as the ghosts began to wail. The sound was so loud, even the endlessly circling spirits in the field below faltered, looking around for the source of the terrifying sound as the Empty Wind lowered his spear, his blue eyes narrowing to slits.
“Destroy it all.”
Wait!Marci cried, but it was far too late. The dead were already flooding past her, trampling the barrier that surrounded her mountain prison as they poured off the mountain and down into the valley below. And as she stood at the Empty Wind’s side, watching the beautiful spirits of nature flee for their lives before the wave of angry death she’d just helped unleash, Marci began to worry that she’d made the wrong decision.
Chapter 17
Like all of his clutch, Julius had grown up hearing stories of what was inside Reclamation Land. Most dragons painted it as a horrible place where Algonquin tortured their kind mercilessly, but privately, he’d always imagined it as a spirit safe haven crossed with an environmental clean-up project, hence the “reclamation” part. After Justin’s report, he still felt that was a pretty good assessment, and under different circumstances, he would have loved to see the endless forest and wild spirits his brother had described. Even in his panic over Marci and the inherent fear that came with charging into the heart of the enemy’s stronghold, part of him was still unaccountably excited to see something truly wondrous and magical that simply didn’t exist anywhere else in the world. But when Svena’s snowstorm faded, what he saw was nothing like he’d imagined.
“What the—”
As promised, Svena had dropped them at the edge of the ring of deep forest. According to Justin’s map, this meant they should have been just under the tree cover looking down on a field full of spirits and other wonders. But while the field and the trees were there, there were no spirits to be seen. Even the moon was hidden behind thick, black clouds hovering low above what appeared to be hundreds of thousands of human figures walking down a mountain.
“What isthat?” he cried, moving to the edge of the forest to get a better look. “I thought the only humans allowed in here were Algonquin’s mages. Who are all those people?”
“They’re not people,” Myron said, his voice shaking. “At least, not anymore.”
For a moment, Julius had no idea what the old mage was talking about. Then something cold passed through him, and he turned around to see that the people were here, too, walking through the dark woods silent as shadows, their semitransparent bodies blending into the dark in a way Julius had seen before.
“They’reghosts,” he said, his stomach knotting in a painful mix of fear and hope. “It’s gotta be Marci! This is what happened when she killed Vann Jeger.”
“I think you’re missing a couple of zeros off the end of that assessment,” Chelsie said quietly, gripping her sword. “This is orders of magnitude bigger than what she did before.”
“It’s working, though,” the general said, peering across the field. “Look down by the lake.”
Her eyes must have been insane. Even Julius couldn’t see that far in the dark, and he considered night vision to be one of his better draconic traits. If he squinted, though, he could just make out the faint glimmers of what he could only assume were spirits, all huddled in a line against the water as if they’d been driven up against it.
“It’s the power of the Merlin,” General Jackson said, her voice caught somewhere between fear and excitement.
“This isnotthe power of the Merlin,” Myron snapped, glaring at the silent ghosts. “This is an abomination. This isdeath.”
As much as he hated to admit it, Julius kind of agreed with him. He loved Marci to pieces, but her pact with Ghost had always made him uneasy precisely because it did things like this. Even the magic here reminded him of the deathly, heavy aura of the Pit where they’d fought Bixby. Just the memory was enough to raise the hairs on his neck, but while this place wasn’t quite as dirty feeling, it wasmuchcolder than the Pit had been. Colder than Svena’s ice storm, for that matter. Cold as the grave.
“Let’s just find her,” he muttered, wrapping his arms around his chest with a shiver.
“Shouldn’t be hard,” Raven said, fluttering up to perch on a branch above their heads. “All we have to do is follow the ghosts, and they’re all walking toward that hill in the middle there.”
“That’s not a hill,” Chelsie said quietly, her mouth compressing to a thin line. “I think we just found out what Algonquin did with all the dragon bodies left over from her head collection.”
Julius almost choked. He’d been so distracted by the fleeing spirits and the army of ghosts, he hadn’t paid much attention to the rest. Now that Chelsie had pointed it out, though, he didn’t know how he’d missed thepile of dragon corpsesstanding like a monument at the clearing’s center. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
