I walked all over the camp and stopped only to peek in various hospital tents, where I finally found Henry, with his eyes closed tightly in sleep, while an IV dripping with purple liquid snaked its way beneath his skin. This was becoming an all too familiar routine to me as I walked over to him and planted a light kiss on his cheek.
My next mission was to find Arnold, and when I eventually found him, he was crouched down on the ground a "safe" distance away from the portal. When I got closer to him, I saw his hands were dug deep into the soil, and the blue lighting of the portal crackled ominously behind him. Beside him stood two menacing figures. Upon my approach, they both turned to me, their eyes glowing an eerie hot white in the darkness. I realized that they were clay dolls like I had seen before back in that dreaded school. Their brownish-gray cracked skins were barely visible under the weak moonlight."
"Hello, Violet," Arnold said in his monotone voice.
"Hello, Arnold," I said and stopped before I got anywhere closer to him.
"One day, you will help me make a child. I just realized it."
"Excuse me?" I asked.
"Yes, excuse me?" Henry said beside me, and my eyes shifted to the right to see that Henry was standing beside me. I looked at him, startled. Where had he come from? I hadn't even heard him join us. It was like he had appeared out of nowhere.
"Don't worry," Arnold said, his eyes shifted behind the thick lenses of his glasses to Henry. "I won't make her my wife, I'll just take our child."
I shivered at the thought of just...ew, but I had way more important things to worry about. "Okay, well, I'm not even sure if you are even old enough to understand the dragons and the sea monsters, but that's not going to happen with you or you. But I do need something from you, but first," I shifted my body so I was now half facing Henry.
"Why are you out of bed, and what's this about you having magic exhaustion!? I thought that you were just heading back to the battle to "pick people up"?
Henry shook his head at me, "I don't remember, but what does it matter? What matters is that you aren't going anywhere, at least not until I am healed enough to go with you."
"I can't wait that long, and go back and stick that IV in your arm. When are you going to take a break from not resting and nearly killing yourself?"
"As soon as you take a break from being stupid and reckless !" he retorted, then inhaled deeply. "You need rest more than I; you just raised an army of the dead."
"I can't rest! But you can." I turned towards Arnold, "Anyways, I need you to come over with me to your world and kill some soulless monsters with me. I have a feeling you can. I'm not sure why, though, but an angle hinted that I would have to bring something inhuman over to fight monsters currently terrorizing your world, and you're pretty good at making inhuman things."
"So there are zombies over there eating people?" Arnold asked, pulled his hand out of the mud, and that's when a clay arm shot out of the earth and began clawing its way to the surface. I watched in morbid fascination, while an entire clay man slowly formed from the earth and emerged to stand beside the other two clay men with glowing white eyes.
"Yeah, sure, whatever you call them," I replied.
"Well, I guess it would be cool to kill zombies, but I don't really want to save the people they would eat. It would be interesting to watch them all get devoured bit by bit. But if my future bride wants me to go over and kill the zombies, I will do it for you."
"Sure," I said, deciding to go along with this weird bride thing to get out of him what I wanted, "you can think of this as an early wedding present to me."
"Early wedding present, fairy ass," Henry muttered under his breath.
"Okay, I will do it then, if this is what you want." Arnold said, "But first, lend my soldiers some of your powers so we can give death to beings that cannot die."
"Wait a minute," I said and held up my pointer finger to him. "You want me to lend you my powers?"
Yeah, that so wasn't happening! It was already kind of unnerving that he had the power to make life out of things that weren't alive. He was truly crazy if he thought that I was going to give him the power to bring back the dead! I had just heard him say it would be interesting to watch monsters kill the people of his own world! Dude had messed up ideas of entertainment, and I wasn't going to give him the ability to create his own source of it.
I turned to where I thought Henry was, only to find he was no longer standing there, "Henry!?" I called, turning around in a circle and looking every which way to see if my eyes could spot him, but it was like he had dissolved into thin air.
I turned back to Arnold, "Did you see where he went!?" I asked him.
Arnold shook his head, his brown loose curls moving with the motion, "No, but I bet it was back to his body. Unlike you and your father, my teacher, I can't see the spirits of the dead, but I can see the spirits of the still living better than even you. He was..." Arnold's dull brown eyes traveled up to the sky, and he began to pat the side of his leg. He seemed to be at a loss for words, "having an out of body experience," he finally said.
"So he's alive!?" I asked.
He nodded, and I let out a small breath in relief.
"Didn't you see his spirit still had eyes? Didn't you ever hear the expression the eyes are the windows to the soul on earth? Well, I think of it this way, when the spirit leaves the body, they must leave through an opening, and therefore they shatter their eyes in order to escape outside because glass is easy to break. Eyes are a figurative window. At least that's what your dad told me."
I stood in shocked silence. The reason that the ghosts I saw didn't have eyes now made sense to me, well, kind of. There was a similar saying in our world, too. It went something like the eyes are the looking-glass to the underworld in which the soul turns in endless cycles. But why didn't my dad tell me that?
"He spent more time with Neeva than you did," the voice in my head whispered bitterly into my ear.
Yeah, not sure how I remembered that right away, but it took me forever to remember how I had killed the zombie back in the other world.
"I sense another living spirit, but this one is attached to a body," Arnold said suddenly in that same monotone voice, "I think you'd better show yourself or my toy soldiers with show you to me."
I turned around just in time to see Amber emerging from the shadows, only a couple of feet away from me. Her brown hair was in a tight bun, and she wore a full black leather skin-hugging dress. I hadn't even seen her there, but I had seen her use the same trick before. I wondered how long she had been there and how much she had heard.
"Henry is down for the count right now, again because he decided to play hero again, he's so reckless," she shook her head, "But if he woke up and found that you had gone to some dangerous place without him, he would be so pixed off. But lucky for him and you, Henry and I are at the same skill level when it comes to fighting. And I'm even better than him because I actually put a lot more thought into my battle strategies than he does."
"You can't come up with," Arnold said, suddenly causing both Amber and me to jerk our heads towards him.
"Yes, she can, "I answered, before turning back to her. But first, you've got to show me some channeling weapons.
"Channeling weapons?" she asked, "Oh, so we can harness our magic in the other world?" and when she noticed the confused look on my face, "I was spying on Greta? Remember? She knew it, so therefore I do too."
"Right," I said, "I'm a little curious how Greta was able to find that out."
"I'm not sure, I just gather the information, not how the other side came by it."
"Okay, just lead me to where we can get channeling weapons, and we are going to need a lot of them," I said before looking back at Arnold. "Make as many of those clay soldiers as possible!" I called before I turned and left before Arnold could say anything else.
Five minutes later, we were standing beside a pile of dead capital soldiers' bodies. They could've only been dead for less than a couple of hours, but already they reeked of decay, and little pixie men and women buzzed around them.
"Hold your breath," Amber said, and bent down beside the bodies and reached her hand into the pile.
I wrinkled my nose, "Good idea, Amber, but I think I have a better way," I said and gestured towards the bodies who immediately began to climb to their feet."
Amber let out a small yelp and fell backward, and there were a couple more screams behind me, and I turned to see a cluster of children standing behind us. Their face had gone a bone white color. When they saw me looking at them, they promptly turned and scattered into the night.
"A little warning!" Amber barked and stood, and dusted herself.
I gave her a sheepish smile, "Sorry, old old habits. Now grab as many channeling weapons as possible, the more the better."
She grumbled to herself while she slowly circled the bodies, plucking channeling from belts and other items from the places they had been burrowed deeply within now dead flesh.
I followed her lead until we were both standing under the moonlight, holding a blood-stained macabre bouquet of sharp metal in my arms. Amber held a similar trophy in her arms. I waved my hand, and the bodies collapsed back onto the ground.
We began to walk back towards the spot where we had left Arnold, but our walking became hurried when the sounds of fighting filled the air.