A Bridge of Stars Read online

  Those poor ghosts, cooped up like animals in that ghastly realm. They were doomed to a fate that was probably worse than actual hell.

  We, on the other hand… We had jinn with us. We had fae. Both subtle species who could meet the ghouls on their own terms. I’d seen Sherus and his companion chop off ghouls’ heads before. Even if there were ghouls who remained in their home to keep watch, we could handle them, couldn’t we? We’d leave River and Jeramiah well away from the entrance, and leave a jinni to keep them safe.

  I didn’t know if such a large-scale evacuation of the ghouls would ever happen again in the future, or had ever happened in history for that matter. After being gifted this fae body, it felt like my responsibility to return for those poor souls we’d left behind.

  I surveyed the expectant faces around me. “Before I head back to The Shade, I have some unfinished business to see to. I am not insisting that any of you come with me, though I will appreciate all the help I can get.”

  River’s brows knotted in a frown. “What, Ben?”

  A trip down Nightmare Lane.

  * * *

  Everyone’s faces dropped as I explained what I wanted to do, but not one of them backed out. Not even Lucas.

  The jinn vanished us from the mountain peak and transported us to the bank of a swirling lake in the heart of a forest. In the center of the lake was the mouth of the whirlpool. I realized that this was the first time I’d actually seen its exterior. Each time I’d been flown in and out so quickly that I had not gotten a chance to take a proper look at it.

  We decided that Nuriya would hide somewhere safe in the forest with River and Jeramiah, because Nuriya was still the weakest of the jinn, being in recovery from that nasty poison bath Cyrus had given her. Once they were gone, the rest of us launched into the air and approached the vortex. We dove through the swirling waters and were soon enshrouded in darkness before being flung out into The Underworld’s all-too-familiar entrance cavern.

  A horrible sense of déjà vu rolled over me as I played over in my head all the desperate hours I’d spent in here, plotting to escape. But now I was back. Back with a vengeance.

  I soon spotted six ghouls, perched on some rocks near the entrance. Since we were in our subtle states, they hadn’t noticed us yet. Glancing back up at the entrance, I realized they had fixed the net over it, yet we had passed through without noticing. Perhaps the net was only effective with ghosts.

  We shot toward the winding canal and wound through it to the cavern that housed the main door to The Underworld. As we drifted through and began scoping out the chambers, it was clear that, although there were some ghouls floating around, none of them looked in any particular urgency to go anywhere, which in all likelihood meant these were the ghouls who had stayed behind, and most of the others had already left.

  We gathered together in a shadowy corner and formed a plan for how best to free the ghosts. We couldn’t risk getting them into hot water by allowing the ghouls to catch them out of their pools before they ever managed to escape the place.

  I suggested that the first thing we had to do was clear the exit. The net had to come down. I assigned the task to a group of five jinn, while the rest of us—armed with swords and spears provided by the jinn—began to approach the pools. Thankfully, there were currently no ghouls in the chamber we were in. Lucas, Marcilla and I dipped into the water of the same pool at once. We sank down and gazed around at the ghosts’ fearful faces. It did not help that we were fae—the very creatures who had kidnapped them here in the first place. Even those ghosts I recognized vaguely from my time here—and whom Marcilla must have known well—cowered away from us. It took all that we had to convince them we’d come to help them.

  “Ghouls!” Aisha’s voice echoed around the chamber from above.

  I glided to the surface and poked my head out to see five ghouls had just entered the chamber. They stopped short, shock flashing across their gaunt faces. Aisha and the jinn barely gave them a second’s warning. All five ghouls went slamming back against the wall, pinned there by the jinn’s magic. Then Aisha rushed over, her blade bared, and dismembered them one by one. As she turned to survey the rest of us, casually brushing aside a strand of hair from her face, she looked like she belonged in a video game.

  “Nothing to worry about,” she said to me, her tone almost chirpy. “We’ll keep watch.”

  Lucas, Marcilla and I sank into the pool again and I realized that some of the ghosts had also risen to the surface to watch the incident. Now that they had seen one of my companions slaughter those ghouls, it became a much easier task to win their trust and persuade them to come with us.

  Soon we had emptied the whole pool and lined them up in a huddle, surrounded by jinn for protection. I caught sight of Nolan and Chantel emerging from the pool next to us, followed by their own crowd of nervous ghosts. I looked toward our jinn. There seemed to be plenty with us to keep watch—especially with Aisha on the patrol—and we needed more help in gathering the ghosts. I picked out several from the crowd, and slowly but surely, we emptied every single pool.

  Safi, who had led the jinn who’d parted ways with us to destroy the net, had returned by now, confirming that the net was successfully removed and the ghoul guards all slain.

  “Take these ghosts,” I said to her. “Escort them through the exit, then return to us for the next batch. And hurry.”

  Safi nodded before beginning to work with her group to herd the ghosts away.

  We, too, needed to hurry.

  More ghouls ventured in to disturb us as we continued to move from chamber to chamber, hauling out as many ghosts as we could. But the jinn made sure they didn’t come near the ghosts, allowing us to focus on our task of gathering them. Our greatest resistance came from the ghosts themselves. We were moving so slowly due to our efforts to convince even the most stubborn ghosts we were here to help them that I feared we might not even be finished by the time the rest of the ghouls returned. We had to speed up, which—regrettably—meant that those who required persuasion and hesitated at risks started getting left behind.

  After emptying the upper levels, we began moving further down. These ghosts, as was to be expected, were ten times more difficult to get through to. Of all the pools, we only managed to salvage twelve ghosts. This number only dwindled further the lower we sank until we were plunged into black. I was sure we had reached the very bottom floor. The jinn had to spark up fires in their palms to give us light.

  “Would be a miracle if we rescued a single person from here,” Lucas murmured. His face looked strained as his eyes roamed the deathly-still ponds.

  As I looked at my uncle, I took a moment to appreciate the fact that he’d been willing to come down here to help us. After all those years of hell, he shouldn’t have wanted to come within a thousand miles of here.

  Then, as the jinn began to mutter about our job being done, a thought struck me. “Where is The Necropolis?”

  Lucas’s eyes widened. “Uh… further down still, I guess.”

  “You have never seen the place.”

  Lucas shook his head, shuddering slightly.

  “How do we know it even exists?” I asked.

  “It exists,” Marcilla spoke up, half scoffing. “Where else would the ghouls throw out the motionless ghosts?”

  I paused, running my tongue over my lower lip.

  “What are you thinking?” Aisha asked, scrutinizing my face as she leaned on her bloodied sword.

  “I’m thinking that we’re here now, and will likely—and hopefully—never be here again… I would like to see The Necropolis for myself.” If not now, I’d wonder for the rest of my life what it really was.

  “Are you serious?” Chantel gasped.

  I nodded grimly.

  “I’ll come with you,” Aisha offered.

  “I’ll come, too,” Horatio blurted, a little too quickly after Aisha. They slanted glances at each other at the same time, before meeting each other’s gaze and averting thei
r attention awkwardly.

  “And I… will not come with you this time,” Lucas said, grimacing. I certainly could not blame him for having drawn the line here.

  To my surprise, Nolan did put himself forward, much to his wife’s chagrin.

  When we had no more offers after his, I cleared my throat. “All right… Let’s do this.”

  Ben

  We sank through the floor—deeper than we’d ever sunk before—and passed through dozens of feet of solid rock. When we finally emerged on the other side, a faint moaning sound met my ears, like high wind against a loose window. Sprawling beneath us was a most bizarre sight. I had been expecting perhaps another chamber—an enormous one to house all the faded ghosts. Instead what I saw was a sea of graves spread out over rolling hills. Strangely, the ground was soil rather than the stone I’d been accustomed to in this place, and gaping dirt holes had been dug in front of each gravestone, none of them covered over. The ceiling was jagged with rocks, and now that I looked up at it, I realized the source of the pale blue light cast down over the landscape. Hordes of swarming glow worms. At least, I assumed they were glow worms. They were some type of insect and their bodies were luminous.

  “Whoa,” Nolan breathed.

  We lowered closer to the gravestones. They were all black and roughly cut, as if no thought had been put into them other than to mark where one grave ended and another started. And the holes themselves… I crept closer still and soon realized that they were not empty. They contained ghosts. I had not been able to spot them from afar, because they were cast in shadow; their forms no longer possessed even the slightest bit of aura. They were as dark as the soil that surrounded them.

  So this is what a dead ghost looks like. I was still trying to wrap my mind around the notion when Horatio whispered, “What is that sound?”

  Leaving the edge of the grave we had been staring down into, we rose up again, straining to make out where the noise was coming from. It sounded like it was drifting from the other side of the hills. We began flying toward it and the closer we got, the more I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was not howling wind—where would wind come from anyway in this place, genius?

  No. It sounded more like… some kind of ghastly singing. And it was getting louder.

  Aisha stopped short and pointed to a cluster of gravestones to our far right.

  “There,” she whispered.

  I held my breath as I spotted something moving. A tall, and oddly wide, figure was gliding in and out between the gravestones. My first assumption was that it was a ghoul, but its shape was all wrong. It looked almost… overweight. Of all the ghouls I’d had the misfortune of coming across, I’d never seen a single one that did not look painfully emaciated.

  “It’s a ghoul,” Horatio whispered, to my confusion.

  “What?” I breathed, straining my eyes.

  As the supposed ghoul drew nearer, I realized Horatio was right. It shared every other trait of a ghoul: skin so thin it revealed the cold blue veins beneath it; jagged, shark-like teeth; tufts of hair on a balding skull; glowing eyes; gnarled hands with sharp black nails. I could go on. This was a ghoul—an obese, female ghoul. And now that I looked closer still, I realized she was wearing something on her head. A tiara made of decayed teeth.

  “This must be the queen,” Horatio whispered.

  I had wondered about the hierarchy of ghouls, whether they even had one. Now I had my answer.

  The queen’s face was paunchy, rolls of fat hanging beneath her chin, as she bumped a heavy hand along the tops of the gravestones. She appeared to be wandering aimlessly, her jaws open as she continued to emit that hideous wailing sound. Even worse than my country singing.

  We hovered in the shadows, transfixed, even as she began to move closer to us. Then she halted and stooped to the ground. Craning my neck, I realized she was bending right over one of the graves. When she rose again, she was holding a dead ghost by the neck.

  What happened next was even creepier than her singing. Her jaws extended and her folds of belly flab shook as she inhaled deeply. The next thing I knew, she’d sucked the ghost’s head into her mouth, then the body, the legs, until the ghost was gone.

  What the…

  The queen belched, her cheeks bloating. I thought for a moment that she was going to throw up but then, opening her mouth again, she continued to inflict her singing on us.

  She’d just eaten a ghost.

  I looked to my companions, wondering if they had seen what I’d just seen; from the looks on their faces, they had.

  Did this queen live upstairs? Or was The Necropolis her quarters? Did she stay down here all day, snacking on ghosts, while her citizens kept the graves constantly refilled with new dead arrivals?

  “Why is she so stout?” Nolan whispered.

  Fair point. I would’ve thought that ghosts would make for rather a light diet.

  “Oh, ghosts can’t be all she consumes,” Horatio whispered. “I’m guessing she inhales them for their memories. Her actual diet must be just like the others’—real corpses… I think we should move,” he added tensely.

  He was right. She was nearing too close for comfort now.

  “Why should we move?” Aisha whispered, clutching the hilt of her sword.

  I should have seen it coming. Before any of us could stop her, she left our hiding place and shot toward the queen, wielding her blade.

  The queen’s whining morphed into a howl as she spotted the jinni. And then she disappeared before Aisha could reach her.

  Aisha cursed beneath her breath, returning to us. We gazed around the now deserted graveyard. The silence was far more chilling than the ghoul’s singing. We had no idea where she was.

  “Okay,” Nolan breathed. “I think we should leave.”

  “Agreed,” I muttered. It was pointless—and now potentially dangerous—to spend more time here. Besides, we’d seen all there was to see: a sprawling underground graveyard… a memory buffet.

  We made our way around a cluster of headstones before lifting into the air. We had almost reached the ceiling when Nolan yelped behind me. I whirled around to see the ghoul queen clutching Nolan by the throat. What had possessed him to remain in his physical form even as we traveled was beyond me. Her mustard eyes glowed maliciously as her black claws pressed against Nolan’s skin.

  Horatio and Aisha had already leapt forward before I could, but not before the queen had punctured Nolan’s throat—too deep, I feared. Before the jinn could catch her, she let go of Nolan and again vanished. Nolan, apparently unable to keep himself mid-air, went tumbling to the ground. I caught up with him just in time before his body made contact. My stomach tensed at the sight of his puncture wounds and how much blood was flowing from them.

  “Let’s get out of here!” I hissed.

  Before the invisible queen could attempt to launch another attack, the jinn transported us away. When we stopped moving, we were back in the dark chamber where we’d left the others.

  On seeing her husband, Chantel shrieked and hurried toward us. She took him from my hands and laid him down on the floor, gasping at his wounds.

  “It’s all right,” Horatio said, pushing her aside. “I can heal him.”

  Thank God for that. My gut had already been twisting up in knots at the thought of being responsible for his death. If I hadn’t suggested we go down there, Nolan never would have gone in a million years.

  Lucas and Marcilla approached me while Horatio bent over Nolan. But I was too tense to talk until Horatio had managed to stem the bleeding by some mysticism. Aisha in the meantime, recounted our brief foray downstairs.

  When Nolan eventually sat up, he was clutching his neck and wincing. He uttered what I was sure was a profanity in French. Then he fixed his eyes on me, shaking his head. “That was just… too much.”

  I agreed. The Necropolis and its repugnant overlady were a level of bizarre that sent even my inured mind into a tailspin.

  Some stones were best left unturned.
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  * * *

  The jinn returned us to the main entrance of The Underworld—the heavy oaken door. Here we found the group of jinn who’d been put in charge of transporting the remaining ghosts safely through the portal.

  “So are all the ghosts safe? Where did you put them?” I asked before they could bombard us with their own questions.

  “They’re safe,” Safi replied, looking relieved to see us. “We just took them out through the whirlpool. They did not wait around; they must have all cleared off by now.”

  “All right,” I said, breathing out. “Let’s leave.”

  We hurried to the main entrance chamber where the corpses of the guards floated in the water. I wondered if ghouls collected dead relics of their own kind… or even ate them. I wouldn’t put anything past these demons.

  Once we passed through the portal, it was a relief to soar out the other end. Sun shone down on us, hitting my skin and sending warmth rolling through my body. Crossing the lake, we touched down on the bank and began yelling for Jeramiah, River and Nuriya, wherever they’d been hiding. To my relief, nothing had gone wrong with them. Nuriya appeared with them after a minute; all three looked perfectly unruffled. I would have been interested to witness the conversation that had gone on between Jeramiah and River while I was gone; I was sure that she would have had a thing or two to say to him.

  River moved to me and pulled me close. “Glad you didn’t kill yourself again,” she murmured, pressing her lips to mine.

  “I’m glad too,” I said, before recounting what had happened to River and Nuriya, while Lucas conversed with his son.

  Once we were done with our explanations, we all exchanged glances. It was clear from everyone’s expressions that all we wanted now was rest. Peace. The Shade.

  Ben

  As we arrived outside our island’s boundary, warmth billowed in my heart. I was beaming from ear to ear. I was home. And hopefully, I’d never be forced to leave it again.