Bad Company (Seven Deadly Sins #1) ✅ Completed

Chapter Thirty-Two: Souls on a Shelf

As I walked by the shelves, one in particular seemed to draw my attention more than all the others. I moved to it – six small figurines were lined up like perfect little soldiers. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the pieces. One was a small handheld compact, the kind with fancy etching and scrollwork on the outside. Sitting right next to it was a small golden bull. Next to the bull there was a green, porcelain apple. After the apple, there was a large, silver ladle, like the kind you might find in a full size soup pot. Alongside the ladle, there was a small statue of a hobo sleeping on a park bench.

Dante appeared next to me. I hadn’t even heard him come inside, but since I was getting used to his ninja ways, I barely even jumped this time.  

“What are these?” I asked, noticing the last item on the shelf was a small statue of a screaming Medusa. It looked just like the one I’d seen the pretty girl carrying out of the store just a couple of days before. Good God, had it only been a few days since I’d seen her? It’d felt so much longer than that.

“It’s the same one,” Dante said, answering the real question that was on my mind. I was getting less surprised about his knack for doing things like that as well.

“Really? But I saw the girl leave with it.”

“Yes, and when she’d used it’s power to get what she wanted it came back here.”

“For what?”

“To wait.”

“I don’t understand,” I replied, shaking my head. This was still so crazy and hard to process, even though I knew it was all true. I'd seen too much to believe otherwise.

“These are souls, Eliza – six to be exact. The ones Celeste collected before you sucked her into the painting,” he answered, a little overly dramatic in my opinion.   

I looked over at him and sighed, “Are you ever going to let that go.”

Dante just frowned but didn’t say anything else about the Monet fiasco. It wasn't as if he was actually unhappy about where Aunt Celeste was now. He wasn't running around trying to get her out of that damn painting that was for sure.

I turned back to look at the everyday items on the shelf. “They don’t look like eternal souls. Shouldn’t they be glowing or something?”

"Why would they glow?" he asked, one eyebrown going up in mild curiosity.

"I don't know. Why wouldn't they?" I asked right back. Ok, so I didn't have any good reason for them to glow, but it sure seemed like eternal souls should glow, at least flicker a little bit.

“These objects are just vessels,” Dante explained.

“You mean like Gladware containers?”

He nodded, his eyes crinkling at the corners a tiny bit. Did he actually find something I said funny for once? “You could say that.”

"So, if there are souls in each of these things, are the people they used to belong to you know…dead?” I was still having a hard time with everything. I knew Aunt Celeste could act like an evil witch sometimes, but she really was an evil witch, and that was a little different than just acting like one.

She’d been preying on innocent kids for decades, tainting their eternal souls for Asher. For what? So she could live a little longer? And now thanks to me she could go on indefinitely inside that stupid haystack painting, never once being called to the carpet to answer for her sins?

Dante interrupted my internal flagellation, “Not yet.”

Wait. What was that? “Are you saying these people are still walking around without a soul? They can live like that?”  I didn’t think such a thing was even possible.