Aura’s brow furrowed in vague bemusement, as though she couldn’t quite make sense of the arrangement of Danny’s words. She didn’t need to ask the question which was written plainly across her face:
do the dead get ill? She certainly never had, unless you counted turning grey and losing one’s memories as a form of illness. Maybe it was. Hmm.
Forcing herself to set aside this intriguing possibility for the moment, she reached out and grasped the teenager’s hand firmly in her own. He hadn’t taken the hand she’d offered, which was normal; most living people had an understandable aversion to touching her. Without giving him time to reconsider the situation, she tugged decisively on his hand, making him jerk forwards. The hospital room vanished, replaced by an endless grey expanse. The rolling fog made it difficult to distinguish between the ground and the air, giving the place an almost two-dimensional feel which gave some people nausea. Normally Aura gave people a moment or two to recover before she dragged them here but right now time was of the essence.
“This is the Realm Between Realms,” she explained rather abruptly, banking on the assumption – the hope – that any friend of Thoth’s must be adaptable and have strong nerves. Usually she only brought people here when they died, to give them a neutral place to converse before she led them on to wherever they wanted to go. Unfortunately for Danny, this was also a quick place to get to when she needed to convey a message fast without being overheard. “Thoth asked me to get you. He’s down in the royal kennel with…” she hesitated briefly. A friend? A girlfriend? A random person he’d dumped half the ocean onto? “An injured girl, and a man who’s unconscious. Can you go discreetly, bring medical supplies?”
She waited only long enough for a quick agreement before reaching out and shoving his shoulder with a touch of impatience. Danny fell backwards, back into where his crumpled body was waiting for him in the Realm of the Living. Aura, who had remained in the Realm Between Realms, gripped her scythe with both hands and twisted it expertly. She leapt through the resultant portal, reappearing in a shadowy corner in the kennel.
Either Thoth had made an effort to get rid of some of the water or it had drained away of its own accord; where before she had to wade through a foot of it, now it had dropped to a few inches. The unconscious man had slipped and fallen back onto the hard floor, but as his mouth was still above the water level, the other two occupants of the room had elected to ignore him. Thoth had encased part of one of the girl’s arms and the wrist of his own right hand in ice, and seemed to be holding a block of ice to her ribcage. He glanced over his shoulder when Aura stepped out of the shadows, his face darkening a little.
“He’s coming,” Aura answered the unspoken question, resting her scythe against the wall. As soon as her fingers were no longer touching it, her floaty blue robes shifted back into the greyed-out tank top and shorts she’d been wearing on the day she died. “Is there anything – ”
“No,” Thoth answered brusquely, ending any hope of continued conversation.
Aura