Total pages in book: 92
Estimated words: 87781 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 439(@200wpm)___ 351(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87781 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 439(@200wpm)___ 351(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
Screams fill the air, and I still have no idea what’s happening until suddenly, one of the skeletons goes flying over Death’s head and nearly lands on me. I stumble backward into Raila, who holds me up just in time for me to swing the sword across the skeleton’s head, severing it. It bounces, and I kick it backward like a soccer ball, Raila jumping out of the way. It screams down the tunnel as it goes.
“Good girl,” Death growls happily, and I feel a surge of pride and power flow through me.
“Send me another one!” I cry out. “I’ll take all these boney fuckers!”
I peer around Death to see the battle just as he slices a skeleton’s arm off with his sword while simultaneously grabbing another skeleton by the wrist.
That skeleton screams and then crumbles into a dusty pile of bones that seems to disappear before my eyes, and I realize what he’s doing. Just as I saw him do to Surma when he tried to attack me, Death’s hands have been bare, his gauntlets tucked into the back of his pants, and he’s sending the skeletons to Oblivion one by one, their swords and shields clattering to the ground when they disappear into dust.
But even though Death is making quick work of slicing off heads and limbs with his sword and grabbing bone with his bare hand, they never seem to stop coming, leaping over each other, climbing up the walls.
One falls on me again, and my sword strikes its sword, the collision sending a rattling shockwave through my body. He tries to again to stab me, and I block his move, feeling quick on my feet until I notice more of them crawling on the ceiling now. It’s so unfair they can defy gravity like that.
“Keep fighting them, Hanna!” Death yells at me, but now, I’m trying to fight two skeletons at once. Death quickly reaches behind with his hand, grabbing one of them by the back of the throat, and that skeleton cries as it turns to dust. I catch the hilt of its fallen sword, now having a sword in each hand, and take the opportunity to cut the other skeleton’s head off.
But still, they keep coming, an endless train of armed skeletons, and both Death and I do what we can to keep them under control, but I’m not sure how much longer I can keep this up.
Meanwhile, Raila is still chanting from behind me.
“Do you want a sword?” I yell back at her over my shoulder. Her chin is down, her hands together in what looks like prayer. “A little help would be nice!”
I am helping, Raila says, and then her head snaps up. They are here.
“Who are they?” I ask as a skeleton drops from the ceiling and nearly takes me out. I scurry out of the way, using the slope of the walls to propel off of so I go leaping through the air on top of the skeleton’s back, knocking him to the ground. I run the sword across his torso, severing him in two.
My relatives, Raila says.
“What the fuck is that?” Death asks.
My heart stills, and I look around Death to see what Raila means by relatives.
Eight long, black, giant legs appear at the end of the tunnel.
Chapter 6
Lovia
The Magician
“Are you alright?” the newly deceased Ethel Bagley asks me.
I’m staring at the snowy banks of the shore ahead and the lonely dock that juts out into the river. This is usually where I would leave Ethel and tell her to follow the guided path up through the hills and across the desert until she comes to the City of Death, a journey the dead usually make on their own.
But right now, I don’t trust Ethel to make it there alone. Not just because she’s cold, so cold that I had to give her my reindeer skins I have lining the boat’s benches, and not just because I don’t trust her not to wander off alone, but because the path seems insurmountable in this snowstorm.
More than that, I feel that something has fundamentally changed in this realm. I can’t shake the feeling that my father is dead. It’s something I should never have to worry about, and yet, it feels true in the heart of me, like the connection I have to him and the connection he has to Tuonela have been severed at the same time.
You’re being ridiculous, I tell myself. He’s the God of Death. He can’t die.
And yet, we can.
“Deer girl,” Ethel says, waving her hand, “you’re going to crash your boat.”
I look up in time to stick my oar out and slow the boat’s collision with the dock. Normally, the boat sails itself without input from me, but with everything feeling off, I’m not taking my chances.