Death is My Frenemy Rewritten (Book 3 of the Rewritten Death Chronicles)

Chapter 11: Psychopomp

"What the hell?" I raged. "You tricked me!"

"I offered to take you back," he said with a shrug. "Now three days have passed, and you have not found the Angel of Death's corpse. I'm afraid I must collect what is due to me. You."

"You're supposed to be neutral," Ace seethed. "Faith is human. She belongs in the mortal world!"

"She can breathe in the Unknown," Charon said. "I watched her heal herself with my own eyes." He turned his head to the side. "And perhaps," he whispered eerily to himself, "she has the power to reverse my situation..."

"Reverse what situation?" I asked, incredibly freaked out by this creature.

Charon turned back to us, his eyes darker. "I have been trapped here for over a hundred years. I am immortal, but even the Unknown has its grip on me." He lifted up his sleeve, his skin partially reflective. "Without the river Styx power, I will become just like them. The Forsaken that haunt this realm."

"You want to leave, then?" Ace asked. "I'll free you, but only if you break this ridiculous deal with Faith." My stomach felt cold at Ace's clear desperateness. He was afraid of Charon.

"Leave?" Charon pushed down his sleeve. "I don't want to leave. I want to stay. Down in the Underworld, I was a slave to the river Styx. Here, I am adored."

I thought of the Three Crawlers, how they'd tried to help me in a dream. I'd seen their faces in the reflection of water and knew they were human once. "They don't adore you," I said with disgust. "They're afraid of you."

"Well, they should be," Charon said bitterly. "Who do you think keeps their lost souls here?" Lightning struck the sky in shockwaves, casting over Charon's beautiful face and flashing it momentarily to that of a skeleton with a haggard grey cloak.

Ace grabbed me fast. Blackness plunged around us, a sharp whistling sounding very frightening silence. I could feel Ace's hand on my arm, but I couldn't see him, and I just kept falling. Suddenly it felt like my body was vacuumed into one direction, a force purging me out in an explosion of light and sound, and I was back in the forest where I first landed in this hell.

I went airborne, my body taking another beating as I slid across cold, wet leaves.

I looked up around the ground, realizing I'd been tossed right back into the Unknown's eerie never-ending forest. The distant howl of monsters made me lift myself up fast from the bed of damp leaves, my chest heaving fast. "Fuck!" I shouted.

Sound crackled as Ace tossed a little ways ahead of me. He gave loud curse and rolled over onto his back with a groan. Half his face was covered in mud and his suit was absolutely ruined.

"Before you say anything about my shady deal with yet another skeleton guy," I panted out. "Let the record show, I did almost find Death's corpse because of it."

Ace tilted his head down at himself. "My suit," he said miserably. He grabbed his cane on the ground with a tight knuckled fist and stood, shaking a leaf off the lapel of his jacket. "What a putain! His power suppressed my magic, but I felt a brief crack in his hold on me and took it. He is not as strong as he could be."

Monstrous howls sounded again in the distance. We both snapped his head toward the noise.

"Shit." Ace slid out his pocket watch and glanced at it, before stuffing it back into his pocket. "Let's try this again, ma chère." He touched my arm, his eyes glowing briefly, but nothing happened. He threw his hand out in anger and a blast of wind tossed a whirl of wet leaves from the ground. "The bastard is jamming my magic."