Reapers - Thirteen Brothers

XIX - Training

 

After unspoken objections from Rosario, who grudgingly left with Mei, Byron Flynn and Vladimir for a routine patrol in Centralia, the training commenced, leaving me wondering on Vincent’s whereabouts.

It wasn’t his sudden change of mind about giving me a chance to train that baffled me the most, but his condition that I should stick with him at all times despite the fact that he hated me so much.

“Why Centralia?” I asked Amyr as he led me to the right wing of the mansion, which was a little nicer compared to the left wing. “I mean, no one lives there. Why not patrol a more populated area like New York? More people probably die in there.”

Amyr kept walking. There weren’t as much doors in these parts. The corridors were easier to remember and it felt almost like being in a museum with all the full-sized human statues facing the high arched windows. The drapes were tied up to the sides, allowing sunlight through the glass panels.

“Hotspots,” he replied. “Most souls can find Gates or make their own. Our cabal has been patrolling this area since the nineteen-sixties. Some Gates don’t close after a crossover. Some even grow bigger with time and when that happens, a little of Nirvana’s pulling force seeps out of the Gate.”

“The sinkholes in Centralia, you mean they’re—“

“Gates, yeah,” he nodded as we took a right turn into a brightly lit hallway. “And a ton of them; making Centralia one of the biggest Hotspots in the world. Souls flock here to crossover. But for some of them, it would be too late.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, passing by a tall marble statue of a man clad in a flitting hooded cloak. He seemed extremely familiar; like I had seen him somewhere before. I paused to stare at the statue and noticed its resemblance with Vincent—wide gentle enigmatic eyes that had that constant brooding look, wavy hair, angular jawline and astonishingly faultless features.

When Amyr noticed that I was left behind, he jogged back to me. “That’s the Grandmaster—“

“Pilgrim Reaper…” I mumbled cutting him off, still unable to tear my gaze away from it.

“Let’s go,” Amyr practically hauled me away from the statue. “As I was saying, some Strays don’t make it to the Gates especially if they’d been around the Living for too long. Eventually, they go nuts and go bad. In worst cases, they rot and vanish. But with time, somehow, a few tainted Strays survive and adapt—able to linger with the Living. We call them wraiths.”

Upon hearing that, I placed a hand on my chest and felt my heart race to a full throttle. “So if my soul can’t crossover soon, is it possible that… that—“

“You might turn into one of them, yes,” he finished my sentence for me with a grim look on his eyes that disappeared as soon as it had come.

A shudder ran down my spine. I tried to perish the thought with my insides doing a slow roll. Even Byron Flynn thought I smelled like a wraith.

“Here we are,” Amyr finally stopped at the end of a very long hallway lined with several paintings of beautiful boys around teenage to mid-twenties, all of them with metallic pale eyes like gleaming pure silver. It occurred to me that I was looking at Vincent’s older brothers.

Finally, Amyr pushed open a brick-red set of wooden double doors leading to a vast expanse of a high ceilinged, windowless hall. The crude granite walls and flooring were bare and the air was incredibly humid and musty. The spacious room was practically empty except for a big wooden trunk which looked like it had been discarded there for ages.