The Garden of Death (5 page)

“Yes.” Abraham stood next to me, hands
behind his back looking down at his feet. I could tell the sight
before us was painful for him to look at. This was his life’s work.
Every single soul of every single Nephilim and Michaelite was
missing, leaving the room they once resided in plunged into an
eerie dullness.

Asher

“Rachael, I…” Lakyn tried to explain the
situation, but I could tell Eden’s mother didn’t want to hear any
of it. She rushed forward and stood by her daughter’s side.

“What happened?”

“She inhaled the toxins of the Death Blossom
in the Realm of Death. I couldn’t do anything, but watch,” I told
her. Rachael looked up at me, and I continued. “My soul… something
happened to my soul. We were running from some Hellhounds, and we
fell… I landed on top of Eden, and my Soul Sphere broke. I was
immediately transported back here.”

I didn’t want to tell anyone that Jazmine
was involved that she had created the Death Blossoms that caused
Eden to fall into this state. I was still trying to figure out
exactly what Jaz was myself. The last thing I needed was for Eden’s
parents to get Jazmine any more involved by bringing her in
there.

“Have you tried to get the antidote for the
Death Blossoms?”

“Yes. I found the antidote in the garden and
gave it to her,” Lakyn said, “but it hasn’t worked.”

“I also tried to heal her using my Trait,
but that hasn’t worked, either,” explains Lakyn.

“Has anyone examined her eyes?” My sister
said unexpectedly. Everyone turned to look at her.

“Her eyes?” Rachael asked.

“Yes. To see if she’s alert and only
sleeping, or… something more sinister.”

“I haven’t tried that yet.” Lakyn rushed
over to Eden’s head, but Rachael lifted a palm up to him. Lakyn
immediately halted and looked at Rachael’s palm like it was
dangerous. For all we knew, it could be. I didn’t exactly know what
her Trait was yet.

“No. I will.” Lakyn hesitantly nodded, and
Rachael stepped forward toward Eden. I stepped back a little and to
the other side of the table. Rachael stroked her daughter’s hair
first. She looked sad as she examined her. I knew how she was
feeling. The thing I wanted most right then was for Eden to open
her eyes and look at me and let me know she was okay. I would
settle for crawling up on the table and lying beside her, but I
couldn’t do that with her parents or my sister in the room. I would
have to make do with holding her hand while her mother examined her
eyes.

Rachael took a small torch off a table
behind her and slowly opened one of her eyelids. She turned the
flashlight on, and as soon as the beam of light hit one of Eden’s
irises, something moved and shied away from the light, like it was
afraid of it.

“What the heck was that?” I asked, jumping
back a bit.

“No! It can’t be!”

“What? What is it, Rach?” Lakyn asked,
stepping forward to examine Eden’s eyes. He took the flashlight and
shined it in, and the same thing happened, but then we all saw two
swimming shapes inside her eyes.

“I know why she’s unconscious,” gasped
Rachael, taking her daughter’s hand.

“Why? What were those things in her eye?” I
asked as I looked to each of them for answers frantically.

When Rachael looked at me, the expression on
her face was one of sadness but also fear. When she spoke, her
voice quivered.

“Souls. She has two souls inside of
her.”

Eden

“How could the Soul room be empty?” This was
not good. This was not good at all. I stepped forward into the
room, but Abraham was quick to grab me by the sleeve of my sweater
and dragged me backward.

“You can’t go in there!” he growled,
slamming his fist down on the control panel to close the door. The
door doesn’t close, however.

“Why not? I want to see the jars.”

“Why would you want to see the jars when you
can clearly see them from here? You know what has happened.” He
growled once more like a vicious beast and stomped away through the
library stacks.

“Geez. Something has your undies in a knot.
I was only trying to help,” I muttered.

“You have done enough!” I heard him reply
from somewhere in the darkness of the secret library.

I turned back around and faced the soul
room, pondering. Surely, all the souls, which had been contained in
this room, couldn’t have escaped and found their owners or bodies
and returned to them. Some of those people would have to be dead.
The thought made me cringe. What if there really were zombies
staggering around topside? I had to do
something.
I hated
sitting around on my arse and twiddling my thumbs. Torn between
stepping into the Soul Room and examining the empty Soul Jars, and
running back to the Earth Realm to investigate this zombie crisis,
I decided on the latter. I had no clue as to what the first thing
to do to fix the situation would be, but I guessed the first step
should be to witness the phenomenon in person. I took off down a
row of shelves in search of Abraham.

I found him flicking through one of his
hundreds of old dusty tomes about soul reaping. I craned my neck to
the side to try to read the title of the book he was holding.

“
What to Do When You Have Too Many Souls
to Reap
,” I read. “Seriously?” I asked, standing back up
straight.

“Yes. Seriously. Did I fail to mention we
have an epidemic on our hands?”

“Yeah, but what use is a stupid old
self-help book gonna do? We need to be out there,” I added,
gesturing toward the roof. “We need to be in the action,
experiencing it first hand, not reading about it.”

“Patience, sweetheart. I need to prepare.
You could be helping you know. It is your fault, after all.”

I couldn’t believe him. I crossed my arms.
“Excuse me? I didn’t choose to die. I tripped, destroyed Asher’s
Soul Sphere, and died inhaling those weird bright-colored flowers.
Sorry for the inconvenience.”

“Ugh. Teenagers!” In frustration, Abraham
slammed the book shut and fixed me with a glare. “Fine. Let’s go
out there among the throng of lost souls and undead Nephilim. Let’s
walk straight into the heart of the storm.”

I matched Abraham’s stance and stepped
closer. “Let’s.” We continued to have a staring match for a few
minutes. I waited for him to give in, and five minutes later, he
did. I stifled the urge to laugh victoriously. Even though I loved
teasing him, this was not the time. All I wanted to do was fix this
situation, which I had unleashed unto the world and to go home to
my Mum and my boyfriend. Abraham walked to the entrance of the
secret library and turned back to me.

“Coming?”

Without another word, I nodded and followed
him.

Asher

“Two souls?” I shrieked. “How could she have
two souls inside of her? How is that possible?” I asked. I was so
confused. Was this really the reason for Eden being unconscious and
not the Death Blossoms?

“Asher, calm down.” I felt my sister’s hand
on my arm, but shrugged it away.

“No, I will
not
calm down. That’s my
soul inside of her, isn’t it?”

“You tell me,” said Lakyn, leaning against
the wall, fixing me with his electric blue eyes. How could someone
have eyes so blue and so creepy at the same time? Oh, that’s right.
Eden does. On her, those eyes and that color were stunning and the
sexiest thing about her, but on her father, Lakyn, the leader of
the Lucifites, they were menacing, and they sent a shiver down my
spine. I looked back down at Eden and took her hand and squeezed a
little.

“I think so. I mean, I did fall on her when
she tripped trying to escape the Hellhounds. It’s possible my soul
could have gone into Eden’s body.”

“It’s the most logical explanation,” adds
Rachael.

Then Lakyn picked himself up off the wall as
if he were done being bored, and walked over to stand next to
Rachael. “So I think the next question on everyone’s lips, is how
do we get the boy’s soul out of her?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The only person who
had the ability to do that was lying in front of us unconscious. If
she were awake, I’m not even sure she could pull a soul out of her
own body.”

“Well, looks like we’re all in a bit of a
pickle then,” added Cecilia.

Eden

As soon as we stepped foot onto the ground
above the Realm of Death, outside the mausoleum entrance, I could
feel it in the air. You know that feeling in the air right before a
nasty storm? The calm before the storm, as they say? Well, that’s
what it felt like right then. I didn’t notice it before, because I
was too anxious to get down underground, but now I could feel it
all around, and it made my skin crawl.

“Do you feel that?”

“If you mean the feeling of turmoil and
death in the air, then yes. The scales have been unbalanced. The
Realms are unbalanced. We have to fix this and soon, before all
hell breaks loose, literally.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” I replied,
my breath shuddering.

We hopped onto the ferry and sailed back to
the mainland. When we reached the dock in London, and I stepped
out, that was when I saw it.

“People. There are…. Nephilim, Michaelites,
demons… other… things.” My mouth couldn’t form words as I stared at
the sight in front of me. Walking down the street in a washed out
state of their former selves, were people and Nephilim and God
knows what else, just walking with no destination in mind. No
destination that we knew of anyway.

“What’s going on, Abraham? What are they
doing?”

“This is not good. They’re the Lost Souls. A
normal Nephilim or Michaelite wouldn’t be able to see them, but
because…”

“Because we’ve touched death, we can,” I
finish for him.

“Exactly.” Abraham came to stand beside me.
I glanced over to him and saw he was just as stunned as I was.

“This has never happened before, has
it?”

“No. This is something new, something no one
has ever witnessed.” Then he turned to me and impaled me with his
icy look. It made me shiver. “It’s all because of you, because you
died.”

“Then… what can we do to fix it?”

Abraham hesitated and then turned back
toward the boat and grabbed a black duffle bag I hadn’t noticed
before.

“Abraham?” I didn’t like that he wasn’t
answering me. Silence meant something was wrong. Silence brought
fear. Then I realized why he wasn’t answering me. I let out an
audible gasp, shocked.

“We can’t fix it, can we?”

“We can,” he replied immediately. “But it’s
almost impossible.”

“Why? What do we have to do?”

“We have to find the Angel of Fate.”

“The Angel of Fate? Such a thing
exists?”

He stood up straight, slinging the duffle
over his shoulder, and he looked at me with a half smirk. “I exist,
don’t I?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Did you ever doubt I didn’t exist?”

“No.”

“Exactly. So the Angel of Fate exists.” He
started walking and didn’t tell me to follow, so I assumed that I
should anyway. I ran to catch up to his long stride.

“You’re about to say ‘but’, aren’t you?”

“How’d you know?”

“Call it a girl’s intuition. An Angel of
Fate exists, but…”

“But they haven’t existed for many
years.”

“How many years is that exactly?”

“One hundred years.”

“Great. So when will the next one be
available? Wait, why do they only exist every hundred years or
so?”

“They have to be elected or be born with the
Golden Thread of Fate.”

This was made my head spin. “What exactly is
the Golden Thread of Fate? I feel like I need to take notes or open
a textbook.”

“Sorry, I would’ve taught you this if we’d
had time. The Golden Thread of Fate occurs once in every three
generations.”

“And how can you tell whether a baby is born
with this thread? And what do you mean by thread? What does it look
like? Where does it occur in their body?”

“Whoa, ease up. You are even more annoying
ten years into the future than when you were a teenager.”

“Hey, mentally, I am still a sixteen year
old girl. Someone placed me in this dreamscape unwillingly. I
didn’t ask to be twenty-six years old.”

“I rest my case,” he said as he put his
hands up in surrender. It was then I noticed where we were
heading.

“Why are we walking into a cemetery?”

“We need to go to a place where there is
more death than anywhere else in the city, and the bodies are laid
to rest waiting to find their souls.”

“Right.” This was too much. I definitely
needed to start taking notes.

We walked deep into the heart of the
cemetery. The sky was getting darker now, which made the cemetery
even gloomier than it already was. I heard crows call out to other
crows, but no other birds were present. I should have been used to
death-related things and morbid details, but I didn’t think I ever
would. Abraham suddenly stopped walking, and I slammed into the
back of him.

“Why are we stopping?”

“We need to wait. I can sense new death.” He
stepped forward a few paces and stopped before a fresh grave that
looked to be only days old. “The body in this grave is going to
rise soon.”

“Wait, what? The whole body?”

“Yes. Their soul is missing. So when newly
dead bodies rise, they will walk around aimlessly in search of
their soul.”

“That’s what those bodies we saw before were
doing, weren’t they?”

“Correct.”

“And this happens to every single person who
dies? Their body just rises again a few days later and walks around
like a zombie?”

“Ugh, Eden, I told you before. There are no
such things as zombies.”

“But there are Angels of Fate, Grim Reapers,
Nephilim, and demons. Why couldn’t there be zombies?”