Unchosen. Part 13

She pressed her lips together and shook her head. Her expression was a mixture of p.i.s.sed-off and worried.

I tapped my ring. I needed to make a scythe-to-scythe call to Rath. I wasn't sure how this communication thing worked. "Hey ... uh, Rath? Can you meet me at my grandparents? Skip the front door, okay? We're in the gymnasium."

Ally blinked at me. "What are you doing?"

"I'm making a call," I said. "Sorta." I put my mouth close to the ring. "Hey, are you there? It's-"

"I'm here."

Ally and I both yelped and whirled. Barbie turned more slowly, clutching the thin gold book against her chest. She gave Rath the stink-eye.

Rath looked at my sister and Barbie, and then at me. "You rang, brown eyes?"

I glanced at my reaper token. "I can't believe that worked."

"Who are you?" asked Barbie.

"This is Rath," I said to Barbie. "He's ... er, my independent studies instructor."

Rath quirked one eyebrow, but said nothing about my introduction. Well, what did he want me to say? Hey, meet my dead reaper boyfriend?

Yeesh.

"How did you get down here so fast?" asked Ally.

Rath offered a shrug.

"We were facing the entrance," said Ally, undeterred by his lack of response. "You appeared behind us."

"You're aces at observation, kid," said Barbie. "You wanna know who Mr. Hottie is?" She pointed at him accusingly. "He's a reaper."

Ally gasped. Rath and I looked at each other.

"Why do you think that?" I was shocked that Barbie had figured out that Rath was a reaper. How would she know that? He looked and acted human. (Okay, except for that sudden appearance trick.) Most people accepted that he was a regular dude.

"I'm not stupid," said Barbie. "I'm your friend, Mol. I mean, you've been ditching everyone for a long time now. I'm sorry about your pops, and what happened in Vegas. But, c'mon! You're friends with a reaper?"

"Well, she's being trained by one," Ally pointed out.

"We're friends," I said, and I sounded defensive. I glanced at Rath and saw his smirk. I resisted the urge to smack him.

"You gotta come clean," Barbie said. "So, talk already."

The idea of spilling secrets to at least one of my friends made me feel both relieved and anxious. Trust was a tricky thing.

"Go get the box, Ally," I said. "Then I'll tell you guys everything."

Once Ally returned with the box that held my mother's secrets, we all sat down on the work-out mats. We formed a circle, and I realized that while the people sitting with me knew parts of the story, this would be the first time they would know the whole story.

I started with the night of my sixteenth birthday party and kept going until the day of the Zomporium fire. I didn't leave anything out-well, except for my as-yet-defined relationship with Rath. And yeah, I left out all the kissing parts. Ahem.

My throat was sore after talking for so long, and after I finally shut my trap, the silence felt heavy-like someone had thrown a woolen blanket over all of us.

Barbie spoke first. "You think Henry wanted you to find the book because it might help your Aunt Lelia?"

"I don't know. Like I said, he can't talk about my mother or my aunt. So, I think this book has something to do with whatever happened sixteen years ago."

Barbie slid the book into the middle of our circle, and opened it. "I've looked at it several times since I found it. But there are a couple of missing pages."

Ally and I shared a look. Then my little sister opened the box and pulled out the torn pages. "Here," she handed them to Barbie. "See if these match."

Barbie smoothed out the pages and inserted them into the book. We all leaned forward to study the ripped edges.

They fit almost perfectly.

"Did you find personal notes written on the other pages?" I asked.

Barbie shook her head.

I studied the book. I expected it to look somewhat fantastical ... but other than the gold embossed cover, and the colored ill.u.s.trations, it looked like a regular book. As far as I could tell, there was nothing magical or mystical about Anubis and The Seventh Warrior. "Where did you find it?" I asked Barbie.

"In the librarian's desk."

"What?" My surprise was quickly followed by outrage. "That cow! She's been treating me like a thief and liar-and she's the thief and liar. Why would she steal this book?"

"Technically, she hid the book," said Ally. She looked at Barbie with something akin to admiration. "How did you get hold of it?"

Barbie shrugged. "I've learned several useful skills."

Not all of them on the up-and-up, apparently-especially if one of her skills included swiping a book from right under the librarian's hooked nose.

"You know how to pick locks," said Ally approvingly.

"Why did you snoop around in the librarian's desk?" asked Rath.

"Mystery novels."

We all stared at Barbie.

"What? I'm allowed to have a hobby." Barbie cleared her throat. "In a lot of mysteries, the person who finds the body or calls the cops is usually considered a suspect. Sometimes, the killer brings attention to the corpse because he-or she-thinks it'll keep suspicion away. After Autumn's ghosts had scoured the school looking in walls and floors, and Trina's rare book dealer had never heard of Anubis and The Seventh Warrior, and Daniel is a useless tool ... I decided the librarian did it." Barbie lifted a hand and started counting her fingers as she made her points. "She reported the book missing. She was the last one to see it. And she tried to deflect attention away from her by acting suspicious of Molly."

"That's actually kinda brilliant," I said.

"Thank you," said Barbie. "I thought so, too. Especially after I discovered it tucked away in the back of the desk drawer."

"Why would she take it?" asked Ally.

Because she knew it was important. A memory flickered-the conversation with Dr. Mayfair. Hmm. She had seemed nervous. I couldn't help but think she'd been trying to tell me something, without actually telling me anything. Wait. Did that make sense? Did the teachers at the Academy have secrets, the kind of secrets that might blow the lid off the Academy or even the Nekros Society? Dr. Mayfair had been quite clear about her advice: pay attention to details. She had said that advice would help me in cla.s.s, and in life. Was something going on at the Academy, something that involved the teachers ... and she wanted me to know? Or maybe it was the opposite. She wanted me to stop trying to discover the truth. I was finding out that everyone had secrets. Whatever Dr. Mayfair was trying to convey might not be related to the whole Set thing-or it might be the key to it all. Argh! How was I supposed to know?

Rath drew the book closer and leaned down to study the pages. "Was the point to find the book so we'd know about the missing pages? Or was the point to find it intact and discover the spell?"

"All we can do is work with the information we have. We'll figure out the rest later," said Ally. "We've found the book and the spell." She looked at me. "What do we do now?"

I wasn't sure how to answer the question, but Barbie saved me from having to say anything leader-ish.

"Maybe we begin with your Aunt Lelia," Barbie said. "She knows what happened to her, and she knows what's coming. She can answer our questions."

I shook my head. "How are we supposed to get her here? The last time she showed up to warn me, she was barely able to manifest. And it seem like she was in a lot of pain, too." I sighed. "I wish there was a way to break the bond between her and Set."

"I'm sorry, brown eyes," said Rath. "No matter what angle I take, my research leads to the same answer: To free your aunt, we need a sheut heka."

"Good luck finding one of those," said Ally." Then she frowned. "How come you can't do it? Isn't a reaper supposed to have all the necro powers?"

"We do, sure, but it's really just one power designed to keep the soul in a single unit. It's a blended ability, not five separate ones. Our job is to escort the soul. We are only supposed to be the bridge between this life and the next."

"What about the ka?" asked Ally. "That's a part of the soul, and it goes into the zombie for re-animation."

"Yeah," I said slowly. I knew that I had messed up Rick's transition to the afterlife because I separated his soul (accidentally!) and ended up squishing three-fifths of it back into his body. It took the power of Maat to combine all the parts again and allow Rick to move on. "What happens to those souls that don't have all the parts?"

Rath was silent, his gaze on the book. I got the distinct impression he did not want to answer my question. His hands, which had been cupping his knees, tightened into fists. "A soul must be entirely whole if it is to be judged, or to enter the next plane of existence. Souls with missing parts cannot go to the underworld, or to the heavens, or into the chambers of Maat."

Ally looked horrified. She blinked rapidly, her eyes looking cartoonishly wide behind her spectacles. "Where do they go?"

"They go ... uh, I guess you'd say they're stored," said Ralph. "Some people call it limbo. It's basically a s.p.a.ce in-between the planes of existence."

"You're saying that zombie souls just float around in some non-place," said Barbie. "Is it painful for them? Or do they even have a consciousness?"

Rath looked uncomfortable. "I don't know."

"There are millions of zombies," said Ally. "That's a lot of souls to be crammed into limbo. What happens to a zombie soul if it gets laid to rest-or killed?"

There was no point in correcting Ally's word choices. She had this wacky belief system about zombies being more than just walking corpses. She had spent almost all of her fourteen years researching every aspect of zombiehood, and believed zombies had personalities, morals, and choices. She thought zombies deserved to have civil rights, like humans. Even though I accepted that zombies were dead and they couldn't feel pain or emotion, I was still horrified by the thought that all those souls were stuck in limbo.

"To answer your question, Ally," said Rath carefully. He looked as though he'd rather fall onto rusty spikes than talk about the zombie afterlife. "If the ka is released from the zombie, it can often rejoin its soul and move into the next realm. If that soul has spent a considerable amount of time in limbo, it's often allowed to move into Elysium without having to submit to judgment."

I'd been around Rath long enough to know when he was hiding information. In fact, he seemed to keep a lot of secrets. He wasn't a talker. That was more my thing.

"You said the G.o.ds needs souls, and the souls need G.o.ds," I said. "If that's true, then what is the point of limbo?"

"You're not gonna like the answer."

"Tell me anyway."

Rath sighed. "Okay, brown eyes. It's important to keep the balance between the natural and the supernatural. If it tilts too much to one side ... boom! We all go. But, you see, limbo is a finite s.p.a.ce. It gets crowded. The truth is that zombies don't die naturally. They have to be de-animated or beheaded to release the ka. It's like a magnet-instantly reuniting with its soul."

"Then it's healed and gets outta of limbo," I said. "But there're still a lot of zombie souls floating around in there."

"Yeah," said Ally. "If zombies stay in the human world for generations, what does that mean for their eternal souls?" asked Ally.

Barbie nodded. "We have zombies at our house that have been in the family since medieval times."

"Limbo is off-limits to anything or anyone else. The only way to get in there is to be a wounded soul," said Rath. "Souls are cosmic energy, and not even limbo can hold unlimited power. Every five thousand years, a portal opens into limbo, and lasts about a day. Set was the first one to figure out that the G.o.ds could slip into limbo-and use the lost souls to super-charge."

I frowned. "Super-charge?"

Ally gasped, and pressed her hands against her mouth. Barbie looked p.i.s.sed. What? Yeesh! What had I missed?

"You mean it's like a buffet?" accused Barbie. "The G.o.ds go in there and eat souls like they're all-you-can-eat crab legs?"

My gorge rose, and a pit opened wide in my stomach. What a terrible, terrible thing to know. Had Anubis indulged in this ravaging of human souls to give himself a boost of G.o.dly power? The whole thing sickened me.

"That's one way to look at it, Barbie," said Rath. "That's how Set started the war with Anubis. He got into limbo, pumped up his power with human souls, and then managed to recruit a lot of reapers to his cause."

This part I knew about. Even my aunt, Anput, had been swayed by her uncle. She'd been the ultimate betrayer of her brother. What was she now? Truly repentant? Or angling for another way to screw over Anubis and get her own powers amped up?

"All those people ... all those zombies," said Ally softly. She looked up, her face pale and her lips trembling. "We're all the walking dead. We're just ... microwaveable meals."

"The G.o.ds don't want to eat you," said Rath.

"Set does," said Barbie. "I've read enough history and mythology to know he doesn't like humans. He's a total a.s.shole."

While Ally, Rath, and Barbie debated the appet.i.te and motives of the G.o.ds, I thought about Set. And then there was my dream/nightmare/portent ... oh, s.h.i.t. Oh, s.h.i.t. My heart started to thud.

Set had been in the pit of the Underworld for a long time. Sure, he'd always planned to escape ... but that escape had picked up some urgency. He needed souls to get enough power to bust out, but to defeat Anubis and destroy humans he'd need those souls in limbo.

All of them.

"We are so screwed," I said. I swallowed the knot in my throat, and tried to keep the tremble out of my voice. "Set's going to escape."

Molly's Reaper Diary.

Secrets, Lies, and Alibis.

LIFE IS MESSY. It's not like I ever tried to put my life into boxes. I know some people do that-they try to make sense of everything by organizing thoughts and actions into categories that they can put on mental shelves. I don't think you can organize life. Life has too much uncertainty to be controlled even on the most basic of levels. And that's life, and not death. Death is, like, triple the chaos of life. At least from the reaper perspective.

The point is that sometimes you think you have it all figured out (you don't ... welcome to maturity ... yeah, it sucks). You have a plan, or a plotted course, or a line on a map that ends in a little "x" for your destination. Then WHAM! Life punches you in the face.

We don't always get choices. Or when we do get choices, it's deciding between what's bad and what's worse. I'm not trying to freak you out. However, you need to understand and be prepared to make difficult decisions. You may get hurt, and you may hurt others.

At the end of the day, you have to do what's best, what's right, even if it costs you everything.

"Good and evil are woven together and where the edges meet, there is only gray. Even good people are capable of heinous acts. Be warned: For those souls that dwell too long in life's gray, the judgment of Maat awaits."

~Secret History of Reapers, Author Unknown.

"I never judge my friends. You are who you are. Love is not earned, d.a.m.n it. It's a gift."

~Georgia Treese, author of Don't Pee on My Roses.