Unchosen (11 page)

Molly’s Reaper Diary

Let Go and Let Anubis

YOU’VE HEARD THE phrase that the more religious necromancers like to utter: Let go and let Anubis. Okay, sure. If Anubis is around, let him shoulder your grief and your death woes. But what if he’s not? What if he totally freaking disappears on you and you don’t know why, and you’re like, “WHERE ARE YOU, OH MIGHTY ANUBIS?”

Granted, as the daughter of Anubis, I should have a direct line. We share genetics, so it’s not like I’m some run-of-the-mill temple priest trading tithes for prayers.

The point is that you might not have god back-up when you go off into danger. You can’t rely on an immortal to show up and save your ass, even if you’re related to him. I give you this advice from experience.

So, it’s important to have a plan, to have a team, and to have a set of big, brass balls.

Clang, clang, babe.

“Evil wins when good reapers do nothing.”

~
Secret History of Reapers, Author Unknown

“Do not stand at my grave and weep,

I am not
there; I do not sleep”

~from the poem written by Mary Elizabeth Frye

Chapter 11

FOR WHATEVER REASON, Barbie had not informed everyone else about her find. In fact, she insisted that I not tell our other friends—at least not until we had talked face to face. Barbie seemed to have a lot more on her mind than some light reading about Anubis myths.

When Barbie arrived, I briefly introduced her to my grandparents, and then Barbie,
Ally, and I headed to the gymnasium. I figured it would be the safest place to talk as well as the easiest to keep a look-out for lurking grown-ups, especially since there was only one way in and out to the basement.

“Are you sure you want to have this conversation with your sister here?” Barbie sounded tense.

“Yeah,” I said. “She’s in.”

She rolled her eyes. “Anyone else you want to invite to the party?” she asked sarcastically.

“One more,” I said.

“You’re kidding.”

“What is
with
you?” I asked.

She pressed her lips together and shook her head. Her expression was a mixture of pissed-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 illustrations, 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 class, 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 space 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 gods needs souls, and the souls need gods,” 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 space. 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.”