Capitulum XXVII

J ust after 11:30, I slipped out of my dorm and hurried to the

Advanced Transparency room to wait and see if everyone else had shown up when I told them to.

"Guys?" I hissed.

"What's the magic word?" Arlie whispered in my ear.

"We didn't come up with a magic word."

"Congrats, you got the magic word right."

She snickered, and I rolled my eyes, even though she couldn't see me.

"Everyone else?"

Blair and Connie both made sounds to notify me of their presence. When I'd warned everyone of my plan, I'd given Blair the coordinates to study, as he was the only one of the group who had any hope of understanding what they meant.

Together, we slunk through the throughline, finding ourselves inside an old house crowded with books.

"This must be Professor Arnold's house," Arlie whispered.

Blair appeared in front of us in stage 3 Transparency. "Follow me. The next throughline is just outside."

We walked through the walls and ended up in the middle of a sleeting rain we couldn't feel.

Stopping in the street, I looked down at my feet to see the reflection of the water passing right through me as it made its way down the hill.

"Over here," Blair said again, and I looked up to see a shadow by a stop sign at the end of the block.

We spent the next few minutes flip-flopping between the two worlds, traveling to another nearby spot, and then moving through to the next until we were suddenly standing on the outskirts of Last Hope.

My body recognized it before my mind did, tensing up like it was preparing to fight. I heard a gasp, assuming it was my own, but it wasn't.

Looking over my shoulder, I found a full corporeal Connie gripping her heart like she was afraid it would stop.

"See anything you recognize?"

She shook her head.

"Then, what's with the theatrics?"

She blinked at me. "It smells the same."

"What?" Arlie asked, popping up next to her. "It's the mortal world. It doesn't smell like anything."

I stopped to take in the air, realizing it did have a smell. It had just been so normal to me it hadn't registered until Connie had said something.

"That's not..." I began, but she could see the recognition on my face.

"Sulfur and blood and soil."

I nodded.

"Yeah, what the fuck?" Blair asked, sniffing around. "How can it smell?"

Arlie grimaced. "This is how it smelled all the time?"

"You get used to it when you never leave." I turned my attention to Connie. "What about you, Con? Is that all you recognize?"

"We didn't have structures like this when I was alive." She took another step back toward the tree line but paused. "I think we should leave."

I nodded. "You go. I'll catch up."

"What?" she asked, eyes growing wet and round. "No, we all need to go."

I turned toward town and began walking. "I'm not leaving until I see my daughter."

"Daughter?" Connie asked.

"You guys can go back if you want," I continued, not giving them an opportunity to stop me. "I'll be right behind you."

"This is not what we came here to do, Agnes," Arlie hissed after me.

I wove between the darkened trailers, heading toward the small chapel on the far side of town. It was the only building with bright orange windows, illuminating the white clapboard building from within with the congregation for midnight mass.

I approached slowly, pushing through the wall and standing in the back as the bowed heads came into view.

It was unnerving how normal everything was, as if I could look into the audience and see myself falling asleep against my fist in the back row. Instead, it was Cass, with Betty's sleeping head in his lap.

She seemed fine. Normal. Healthy. But my relief soured when I looked at Cass, who was staring blankly ahead at the muffled sermon. The way they both sat there, normal, unchanged, made me feel as though I'd never existed. In a way, to Betty, that might as well have been the case.

Compelled despite my better judgment, I moved through the room and sat on the pew on the other side of Betty's curled feet.

I stared, desperate to reach out and touch her, but then I remembered Professor Arnold's words — the soul rots.

I didn't know what that meant, but it wasn't something I was willing to subject her to. Instead, I satiated myself by running a single finger along the thick rubber sole of her shoe, which had a faded cartoon race car on it.

She must have felt the brush because she curled her leg tighter against herself, eyes still closed. Cass glanced at her before his gaze slid lazily back to the front.

His scars didn't seem much more healed than they'd been in the summer. As if on cue, he scratched at the mottled flesh like it irritated him. That's what I was seeing, the same scabs being ripped open over and over like a nervous tick, never given enough time to properly heal.

I wished it had even made him less handsome. But his features, which had always balanced somewhere precariously between soft and angular, still practically glowed in the warm church light. The only real change was his pale eyes were now shadowed and half-lidded, and he'd gotten lazy keeping up with his wispy, boyish facial hair.

Impulsively, I reached out toward his face, wondering what would happen if I were to simply brush him. Would it feel like a cold chill? Like someone walking over his grave?

Just as my hand was a millimeter from tickling the gentle curve of his cheek, he jumped, head swinging toward me.

But it wasn't me startling him.

The earth was shaking.

Voices rose in the congregation as everyone looked around at each other for reassurance. While the earthquakes were common, they were often dangerous enough to keep the townspeople from being too nonchalant.

Connie, Arlie, and Blair were standing along the back wall.

I tried to make myself visible to them without spooking the mortals, and it worked because they motioned for me to follow.

I was about to rise to my feet when all the light bulbs in the sconces burst one after the other down the wall, making everyone scramble in surprise. I had to pause, realizing I couldn't touch anybody, so I couldn't go through the center aisle.

I turned to see if I could go the other way when I realized someone was looking at me.

Cass was still in his seat, trying to rouse Betty and wrap her in his jacket to carry outside. But her eyes were on me, unflinchingly, like she sensed I was there. Her expression did not give any hints as to whether she recognized me, much less was scared or happy. It was almost just like she was taking in my presence, trying to decide what to do with it.

I was so startled I nearly didn't move out of the way fast enough to avoid Cass running headfirst into me. I'd almost forgotten I could go through the furniture to traverse the crowd and reach everyone just as the glass of the windows shattered.

"What are you guys doing here?" I asked.

"Something is wrong," Connie said, face pale.

I was tempted to brush the quake off as a normal occurrence, but since I was experiencing it posthumously, I could feel it. The air pressure was changing, tightening my chest.

Surely, that was not the result of a common seismic disturbance.

Hurrying outside, everyone broke into a run, sprinting for the trees. The sonic reverb made my limbs numb as I fought to maintain pace with the group.

Stacy's foot brace was already working its magic, but it could only do so much as I gritted my teeth against the pressure building up around my body.

The quakes hadn't even felt that way when I was alive, which meant whatever was shaking Last Hope was doing so from this side of the veil, not the mortal one.

We ran straight for the throughline. I tried to yell for everyone to slow down for me, but that's when the air filled with a loud, droning noise, drowning out my words.

At the edge of the trees, I collapsed into the throughline behind everyone else.

Reentering purgatory felt like a bubble popping between my ears. We all collapsed onto the mossy ground, gasping for air, as my ears rang.

"What the hell was that?" Arlie panted once our senses returned. "That sure as fuck wasn't a regular earthquake."

"Do you think we caused it?" Connie asked, staring off into space. "It would be a rather odd coincidence otherwise."

The beast's words from last year swam through my mind as I pushed my way into a sitting position.

You're cursed. Something is waiting for you in Last Hope.

"It couldn't have been me," I finally added, voice still muffled. "I've been there by myself before, and nothing like that has ever happened."

"Regardless," Arlie said, eyeing Connie in the darkness. "We got the answer we were looking for."