My eyes flew to the double doors that Amber had stacked various pieces of furniture in front of. There was another bang, and a chair went skidding back from the room.
Unfortunately or fortunately, this building did not have a big glass window or any windows low enough to peer out of, so we couldn't see what was happening outside. The only existing windows were closer to the high ceilings than our heads. But if I had to guess, I bet it was a mob of drooling people waiting for us beyond that door.
"Tell me how I send away to find the souls and return them to their owners?" I asked out loud to the spirits.
"You can't send us away, not here in this world. You need to get us close enough to those creatures that you can see the features on their faces. There is not enough energy in the air here to bind us to you from a distance. We can't wander far without becoming lost from you, though we're tied directly to your soul; your soul is weak here in this world. The only reason we're still here is the binding weapon you hold in your hand. As long as it does not leave your solid flesh, we will remain with you."
"Well, how am I going to do that!?" I snapped. "I can't leave this building, and that was what I thought you could help me with!"
But then an idea occurred to me, no, my body couldn't leave this building, but... my soul perhaps could!
"Amber!" I called, who was now attempting to push the furniture back in place.
"Get over here and help me for the last time, please, or the only way this barricade is going to hold is if we both work on building it! " she replied through gritted teeth while she shoved another piece of furniture in front of the door.
"I do need you to stop what you're doing and come over here and stop my heart."
Amber turned towards me, her face a giant question mark. "What!?" she asked, "Why do you need me to do something like that!?"
"There's a possibility that some spirits that are attached to me can help me return those drooling people outside to normal," I explained. "But to do it, I need to be close to the original monsters that came from our world as much as I can. I obviously can't walk out of here and make it through the crowd outside alive, so I need you to stop my heart with a little zap of your lightning and then bring me back. That way, I can take these spirits with me as a ghost and avoid being killed.
"How long can you be dead for?" she asked, her expression shifting from confusion to concentration.
"Oh, how long?" I asked, a little surprised by how accepting she had been so quickly of my suicidal request. "I'm actually not sure. I know too long, and it'll take me at least a day to revive..."
"Okay, you are limited to five minutes; we don't have a day to wait, and who knows if you would even revive in that amount of time. How fast can spirits travel? I'm assuming you know."
I nodded; she was right. I hadn't just been sitting around in purgatory for 400 years waiting to get stronger. I had almost spent it learning. That and trying to avoid the boring talkers of purgatory.
"Really fast once they know where they're going."
"Good, and do you have a way of immediately locating your targets?"
"No, I don't," I answered honestly. "But I bet there's a way to tell them apart. There's something that makes the drooling people out there different from the soulless monsters of our world. They are far less mortal than their counterparts as you can see..."
"I haven't seen, but go on," Amber said abruptly, and I nodded.
"Well, I'm not sure how conscious you were on your trip here, but did you feel something yanking at something inside you?" I know I did and I think that was the universe yanking at our souls. But for some reason, us being half of this world and half of ours prevents it from being torn out of our chest. But those who have crossed over through the portals that are full blooded, they aren't so lucky. They get their souls ripped out, and it's done with such force that it leaves none of their souls remaining. Which means, those people out there, I think they might still have some of their souls within them since it wasn't the universe itself that yanked out their souls, but the much smaller force of the emptiness within the soulless monsters."
"So if you find a greater space where the soul is missing, you can find these things?"
"That's what I'm thinking, although I'm not the smartest, so my thoughts aren't always the greatest or even right."
"You know what. I think we all process our own sort of intelligence," Amber said, and picked up a chair and tossed it in front of the door. "Henry can see when things are wrong, and that is beyond his vision. He just knows when enemies are nearby and when they aren't. Mine is stealth, when to hide and when to make myself known. I think your intelligence is confined to that which is dead. And, you know more about these things than I do."
"I hope you're right. Man, I wish Henry's intelligence were when to attack and when not Henry's intelligence too. It would save us both a lot of stress if he would stop getting himself hurt."
"Hey," Amber put a hand on my arm, her voice growing soft. "He really loves you. You know that, right? He may act like a jerk sometimes, but you should've really seen him when you left for purgatory. He was so scared. I've never seen him that scared before. I just thought you should know that," she finished.
"Okay, well, I love him too," I said slowly, not sure how to respond. I wasn't sure how much Henry's love for me had to do with being stupid and getting himself hurt. It was his love for his own pride and his need to be such a macho man that did it mostly.
"Are you ready?" she asked.
I inhaled deeply in preparation and lay down on the wooden planks of the floor. I wrapped my arms around the channeling weapon and clung to it as life itself depended upon it. To say I was nervous would be an understatement. I was terrified. Although I may have sounded confident that I would be resurrected, I wasn't so sure if those same rules applied here as they did in the other world. I might actually be ending my own life right now.
"Alright," Amber said and knelt on the ground beside me, "Remember two minutes, and I'm going to bring you back."
I nodded before I added, "And then you are going to do it over and over again until I either get all those things or my body collapses.
"I'm not sure if I want to push it until your body collapses. You won't be any use to anybody then, and we need you," she said, looking down at me, her big brown eyes wide.
"We don't have a choice. If we can't get out, or these things get in, we are done for! That barricade isn't going to last forever."
"Okay," Amber said and touched an exposed part of the channeling weapon I was holding, and immediately recoiled her hand, yelping.
"It shocked me!" she said, her mouth falling open.
"That doesn't surprise me. When Henry touched a channeling weapon while we were over here for that year, it burned him. He said something about his element flaring up."
"Then why didn't your element flare up and hurt you!?" she asked, shaking out her hand before she opened and closed her fingers. Once she saw that everything was in working order, she rested it on her lap.
I shrugged my shoulders from the floor, "I guess death doesn't hurt as much as lightning does."
"Guess not, which makes sense. I guess you don't feel any pain when you die and you're gone. But being shocked by electricity, that's always going to suck."
"No, the dead don't feel physical pain, but your soul can feel something else. The pain of not being alive."
"Alright, ready? This is going to hurt," she said.
"Yes," I said and closed my eyes. I felt Amber place her hand on my chest, and suddenly an enormous amount of pain filled me. Sparks danced in front of my eyes, and I was standing over Amber and my body. The world around me seemed to be tinted gray, much like the gray of purgatory, and I wasn't alone. I could feel a presence behind me.
I quickly turned and saw that I had company, three to be exact.
They were black shapes with glowing white eyes, and I gasped, "Gods, when do you look like that!?" I asked, realizing they were the souls tied to me. They looked much like the creatures that Neeva had commanded long ago.
"Our appearance is a mystery to us," one of them replied softly in a low hiss so a voice.
"Okay, but I guess it's not important," I said, while quickly moving towards the wall. What's important is tracking down the soulless monsters from my world." I began to pass through the wall," I know you heard what Amber said to me, but-"
I stopped in mid-sentence. I was now outside and surrounded by drooling people, and indeed, I could feel the fragments of souls still deep within them. That wasn't what caught my attention. It was the giant black vortex swirling in the sky above me. Actually, there was no sky, just the vortex where the sky should've been. I'm not sure why I could only see it now, or if it had just now appeared.
"Oh, my gods!" I whispered weakly while my eyes remained glued to the thing in the sky. The size of it was paralyzing, and in the blink of an eye, it was suddenly gone.
It was then I saw something began to fall from the sky. It looked like someone had taken part of the vortex and had molded it into a ball.
I watched as the ball barreled straight in my direction and smashed into the pavement while it skidded across the road until it broke, and a shape came tumbling out.
I stared at the shape while it regained its footing, and I smiled. For once, things were about to get a lot easier for me.
"Mistress," one of the souls leaned down and whispered in my ears, "I sense a great many empty spaces nearby. It is surely the soulless."
"As do I," I said, "Ready?"