A white sheet of paper was pasted to the wall by the booth. The words Blood Drive were written in bold red ink.
Yeah, this was one of the off-the-grid stations. The place people would get off if they wanted to avoid paying for a trip, so I was surprised to see so many suits. Uri and I stuck out like a sore thumb in our casual gear. Dean had loaned the celestial a leather jacket with a fur collar. It looked good on him.
He led the way, and I followed him past the pointless barrier and left into a tiled tunnel decorated with old posters sitting behind glass. Several Blood Drive posters were pasted to the glass, obscuring the original advertisements.
A woman sat on the ground clutching a baby to her chest, her dark eyes pits of sorrow in her face. I could see the tile through her barely corporeal form.
A ghost.
She held out her ghost baby like an offering.
I faltered. “Uri…”
His jaw tightened. “They slip through the cracks sometimes,” he said. “The ones who die alone. The ones without someone to care. Not every soul finds its way to a Soul Savers, and not every soul is picked up by a reaper.”
“Well this one will be.” My hand tingled as my scythe signaled its appearance.
Uri gently gripped my elbow. “You can’t. Not now. Not until we’ve finished in Purgatory.”
Shit. Of course. If I took her now, she’d be ejected into the ether with the other souls I intended to save and… An awful thought occurred to me. How could I have missed it. “Uri, what happens to all the souls now? Cassius said they used the voralexes to siphon the souls from our scythes and convert them into energy, but did they also need the voralexes to recycle them?”
He looked momentarily stunned. “I don’t know.” He frowned. “If the Beyond was still recycling souls then it means that the natural reproduction of souls isn’t enough to maintain a human population.”
And with the voralexes gone, humanity would eventually die out anyway. Fuck. “I’ll need to speak to Cassius about this. We need a solution and fast. A power source for the Beyond won’t be enough.”
“Please…..” The ghost’s lament, finally verbalized, reached my ears. “Peace…”
“I’ll be back for you and your baby. I promise.”
She slumped back against the tile as if spent, and her dark gaze glazed over.
We passed several more spirits trapped here in the underground. Not the usual alert ghosts—the ones who’d been given purpose by Soul Savers. Not the registered ones, but the ones that had slipped through the cracks. You could tell the difference by the despair in their eyes, by the slow, sluggish way they moved. They were remnants. They were lost. We stood on the platform with a few other people waiting for the train.
“Why hasn’t Mal done something about them? Surely, he would have seen them.”
“Mal carries the malignant. If he’d reaped these souls, they would have been torn to shreds by the horrors he carries.”
“No. I don’t buy it. He could have picked them up after a drop-off.”
Uri sighed. “I don’t know, Fee.”
I couldn’t believe my Mal would be so callous. I’d need to speak to Dayna about this. I’d need to speak to Mal’s team.
The train whooshed through the tunnel and came to a shuddering stop in front of us. The doors opened slowly, as if fighting some inner battle, and we slipped on board.
The last time I’d been on a train it had been with Conah. It seemed like a lifetime ago. Uriel didn’t bother taking a seat; he remained close to the doors and grabbed hold of a rail.
“We won’t be on for long,” he explained.
I joined him as the door closed. “When was the last time you were here?”
“A few years ago,” he said. “I was in the neighborhood and Mal convinced me it would be fun.”
“And was it?”
He snorted and raised a brow.
“Yeah, he hates it.”
“I know that now,” Uri said.
Mal and his twisted sense of humor. God, I missed him.
“It will be okay,” Uri said. “We will figure this out.”
“We need to. We don’t have a choice.”
The train came to a halt and people brushed past us. The doors closed and we were off again.
“Next stop,” Uri said.
The train wobbled slightly from side to side and I planted my feet wider to keep my balance, gripping the pole, my hand beneath Uri’s.
He smelled of Grayson’s body wash and nostalgia washed over me. What if we failed? What if everything we knew came to an end? No, I couldn’t think like that. I needed to stay positive. We all did.
The train came to a halt and the doors slid open.
“You ready?” Uri asked. “We’re here.”
There was nothing but a derelict-looking platform beyond the doors. “Here?”
He held out his hand and I took it, wincing as a small electric shock passed between us.
Together we stepped through the doors. The gray platform melted away, and crimson heat took its place. We landed on black, rocky terrain. The air stung my lungs and bit at my eyes.
Purgatory.
Uriel coughed. “It takes a minute to adjust to the atmosphere if your body isn’t accustomed to it.”
I blinked back tears. Yeah, he had that right. It felt like my lungs were being roasted. Gah, like I was a forty-cigarettes-a-day kinda gal.
But increment by increment the burn subsided, and I could see clearly again.
The vista was distant crimson and obsidian mountains and a landscape of twisted, black tree trunks with spindly branches reaching for a swirling, fiery sky. This was what I’d pictured when people had talked about hell.
Mal came here all the time.
This was his place.
God, I felt sorry for him.
A wail drifted on the hot breeze. “What was that?”
Uriel squeezed my hand, and I realized he had never let go. “Let’s not wait to find out.”
He tugged me across the rocky ground.
“I thought malignant couldn’t hurt you?”
“I never said they couldn’t hurt us. I said I couldn’t be corrupted and taken over, my body used to do ill, and while you wield the scythe, neither can you. Malachi is a regular, he reeks of this place and so they let him pass unharmed, but you and I, we’re fresh meat to be played with. They will prod and probe and take a bite if given half the chance, and we can’t even distract them with a gift of fresh malignant souls to play with.”
Shit. We picked up the pace. “It would help if we knew where the Edge was.”
“We’ll find it. Just keep your eyes open and reach out with your senses.”
The wails were growing louder, eerier, closer. Crap.
We jogged into the twisted tree grove where the air was even thicker, moving like molasses in and out of my lungs. God I was going to be sick.
“No stopping.” Uriel pulled me along, scanning the terrain for any sign of this magical place called the Edge—this prison for the remnants of the purest souls.
I caught a shimmer at the corner of my eye, but when I turned my head it was gone. “This way!” I tugged Uriel in the direction where the shimmer had been. A flicker to the left.
“Over here.” Uriel had us alter trajectory.