Chương 47: Chapter 46 - Judgment

"The demon gave me the imp to experiment with," Northrop said. Northrop and I were outside, sitting on Conrad's bench. I could feel the sun on my face. It was warm and beautiful. I could see the light playing over the early leaves and pine needles. Kappa was hopping around the clearing in front of us, trying to catch who-knows-what—maybe the sunshine—and acting the happiest I'd seen him since he'd eaten that dragonfly.

After my wild sprint down the road, followed by sneaking in and out of the mansion, I was too exhausted to hop around like Kappa, but I felt content in a subdued, somber kind of way. The somberness was fitting, considering what we were talking about.

"I had collected so many bodies by then, it didn't occur to me to wonder how valuable it was." Northrop ran his rotting finger along the edge of his journal.

"One more small body. Tossed to me indifferently. So unimportant, no favor was needed in return." Even after Northrop had declared Kappa to be Savior of the World, I was inclined to be wary of him, but everything about the way he spoke, from his tone to his body language, convinced me that he was being honest. There was no hint of sarcasm or condescension—nothing but a quiet voice pouring out his unfiltered thoughts. Listening to someone who'd let down their guard made it hard to keep my own walls up.

Northrop raised his face to the sky and chuckled.

"God, I was a fool."

"How so?" I asked. My voice was quiet too. We'll blame it on the mood.

"I was used to ignoring Torr rules," Northrop explained.

"I had dismissed most of them as unnecessary. It was easy to dismiss one more—don't work with demons. I assumed that it had been established to protect the weaker magicians or prevent the demons from making too many deals." He shook his head.

"Demons can't be trusted unless there's a knife at their throats." I squirmed as I thought about Abraxas watching my face as we spoke. Northrop went on, "Infernal bodies aren't made of the same matter ours are. They're made of concentrated spiritual material. Or something related to it. By working with the imp, I would be able to see—to touch —spiritual matter. I could study it. With time and persistence, I thought I could learn to manipulate our spiritual matter with natural magic.

I lost sight of the fact that, long before that, I would've shown Ambrose how natural magic could affect infernals, including whether or not they could be raised from the dead with their minds and magic intact."

"Do they want to know that?" I asked.

"I suspect they're desperate to know it." Northrop leaned back on the bench.

"Most infernals, and demons especially, are long-lived species, and they're deeply selfish." He paused and looked at me with a gruesome wry smile that was easy to see thanks to all that sunshine.

"More selfish than humans," he added, "hard to believe, though it might be." I gave him a faint smile while keeping my yuk face to myself. Northrop looked forward again.

"Nothing is more important to them than their own lives, so they avoid direct conflict and war at all costs. Most of their more ambitious plans involving this realm had to be abandoned." He paused, then added, "But what if death wasn't the end for them? There would be no reason to hold back." Despite all the sunshine, a chill came over me. It felt like I was back in the null space.

"Could they use your knowledge?" I asked. Northrop sighed and tapped a mostly intact finger on the cover of his journal.

"We don't know how easy it is for them, but we do know that demons can adapt our knowledge for their use." I nodded. It was a visual cue that I was at least attempting to take in everything he'd told me. But there was so much information! And it was so much bigger than I understood! It felt gummy in my head—gummy and…grim.

"And this demon—Ambrose?" I said.

"He saw that he could use me, and he did. I was, frankly, pathetically grateful to have someone to talk to about my work.

'Ego,' some would say. I would've gifted him the information without a second thought."

"When did you start to think that he was trying to use you?" Northrop didn't answer. As his hesitation stretched into a silence, I glanced at him. It was hard to tell with his face, but I thought I saw a small scowl tugging down the edges of his mouth. But he didn't look frustrated. He looked thoughtful, and, maybe, a little sad. He lowered his eyes to the journal in his hands.

"My soul is tethered to my body. When I died, I couldn't move on. I was stuck, alone, in the passages for over a hundred years. That gave me a lot of time to think, and I realized the significance of what I'd done."

"So you don't, like, know any of this? You don't know, for sure, that's what Ambrose was after?"

"The risk was real, Emerra, even if the threat didn't materialize." A weight settled high in my chest. It felt like a quiet growl—the kind of noise that Conrad might make—but it didn't have enough energy to crawl out of my throat. I tried to figure out what it meant, but all I could get was a sense of frustration. I stared into the distance. The risk was real, even if the threat didn't materialize. What a line. I probably needed at least twenty more IQ points to begin to understand it. The risk was real.

His thoughtlessness was a fact. His conceit had been established— The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. I found myself saying, "When you said, 'the worst of it,' that's what you meant, isn't it? Working on that demon—""Imp," he corrected me.

"Working on that imp was your biggest mistake." He nodded.

"Did you ever stop thinking about it?" I asked. He let out a grunt and went to pinch the bridge of his nose, but he drew his hand back when his finger bone touched his face.

"And here I damn myself. But you will have the truth." He turned to me.

"I didn't start thinking about it until eighteen years ago. Before then I was filled with nothing but resentment and rage. Then loneliness. My self-pity became sorrow, and that was when I was able to start thinking about it."

"But once you realized—""Once I realized, I lived in terror. I tried to assure myself that nothing had happened, and that nothing might ever happen, but there was always the horrible feeling of uncertainty. And guilt." Eighteen years. That was a long time to be in pain. I took a deep breath, raised my eyes to the sky, swung my legs, and knocked the soles of my shoes together."'Lived in terror.'" I sounded like a philosophical parrot.

"Don't you mean, you 'failed to die in terror?'" Northrop stared at me, then his shoulders shook and two or three huffs of laughter escaped his nose.

"Shall we use that phrase then?" he asked.

"I think it's fitting." I pointed at him.

"You, sir, have failed to die."

"That is an apt judgment."

"It wasn't really living—not, you know, technically."

"True, but it was the time I came alive to myself. I wouldn't trade it for anything." I resisted the urge to sigh. There I was— trying to lighten the mood, and Northrop kept dragging it back to all the serious stuff. Everything was so deep. I felt like I was treading water in the middle of the ocean while trying desperately to avoid thinking about how far down the sea bed was. I braced myself for a dive.

"Do Big Jacky and Darius know about this?" I asked.

"No, and, Emerra, I must ask you not to tell them." My shoulders stiffened, and I stopped swinging my legs.

"Why?"

"Jack Noctis is a man of extremes. There were only two beings at fault for what happened—me and the demon Ambrose. Before Noctis even knew about the imp, he murdered me without giving me a chance to defend my actions. If he learns about the imp, there's no telling what he'd do to hunt down and punish Ambrose."

"You're trying to protect the demon who used you?"

"I'm trying to protect the innocent. Jack Noctis cannot be trusted with this." A feeling of frustration rose in my stomach and started to burble. I disliked the idea that I was supposed to keep secrets from Big Jacky, but I hated that someone thought he would kill innocent people. Big Jacky wasn't like that. For the embodiment of death, it was actually weird how many people he didn't kill. He seemed to make a point of it.

All my experience led me to believe that he was more likely to refuse to act than to do something useful—like snap his fingers to vaporize a villain. But he had killed Northrop. And Northrop was looking me in the eyes and warning me that Jack Noctis was dangerous. My brain registered pain. I looked down and saw that my hands had come together in my lap and I was grinding three of my fingers together with my other hand. I had to force myself to let go.

"Emerra?" Northrop said.

"I can't make any promises," I mumbled.

"But—" I raised my voice: "Jack Noctis is my friend." I added in another mumble, "I have to think about this." Northrop drew in a lungful of air that he didn't need. That was his only response. Feeling more than a little bitter about the position he'd put me in, I said, "Why did you tell me all this anyway? —this whole confession. You didn't have to."

"I suppose…that I wanted you to know. I hoped that you might understand." He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his legs. The journal hung in his hands.

"There will be a judgment drawn over me for this, and when they judge me, in their vehemence and ignorance, I wanted to know that I had been judged first by you." Oh, wow. And I thought that I'd been uncomfortable before! Red flags were swinging around my head like it was a revolutionary barricade.

"I'm not going to judge you," I said nice and loud. Northrop must have heard my panic. No surprise, considering the crap-job I was doing to hide it. When he looked at me, an amused, slightly imperious expression came over his face—came over his whole body. He leaned back and gave me the world's most disgusting smirk.

"Oh?" he drawled.

"Why not? Can you think of anyone more qualified?"

"How about the entire human population! Heck! We'll add on all the supernaturals too." I frowned.

"Except Igor." His vehemence was a bit too… intense …to give a level-headed judgment. Northrop said, "You've suffered through the consequences of my actions, you're sympathetic to those who hate me, but you also listened to my story. You asked me questions. You wanted to understand." He put his elbow on the bench's armrest and raised his hand to his face.

"If you put every sentient being in the universe before me and allowed me to choose my judge, I would still choose you."

"Dude, you don't know me." His smirk shifted to a low-key smile. When he rudely and stubbornly persisted in saying nothing, I huffed, "And what do you even mean, 'judgment?' It's not like I can punish you!"

"It's not the judge's job to punish," Northrop pointed out.

"It's the judge's job to decide what punishment is fair." This conversation was going downhill faster than a bullet shot at the ground. At first I'd thought he meant a more twisted, gothic version of the kind of judgment you'd get when you stuck a bunch of snobbish teenage girls in a room together. That idea was bad enough. I had no practice! I was the person the teenage girls had tittered at. But Northrop seemed to be talking about something way more serious. Which was the dumbest thing ever.

I opened my mouth to tell him that I didn't even have an opinion on what to have for lunch—let alone the crazy stuff that he'd gotten up to—but the words never came out. There was a judgment. I could feel it. It made my bones feel heavy and solid, as if someone had filled them with iron. I leaned forward, put my fingertips to my head, and stared at the ground between my feet as I fumbled for the words or thoughts that could help me understand. The only sign of the struggle was my lips moving.

At least a minute passed before I sat up with a sigh and turned to him.

"What's your name?" He blinked.

"I mean your full name," I explained.

"I know you're Mr. Northrop." A wide smile that, as far as I was concerned, didn't make any sense at all spread over his face.

"My Christian name is Grover." I also felt a sudden urge to smile, but at least mine made sense—to me, anyway. Wrangling it back made my cheeks ache and the bridge of my nose wrinkle.

"Grover?" I said while not snickering at all.

"Yes, Grover." I pinched both lips between my teeth, but the snicker I wasn't snickering made my shoulders shake.

"Go on," he said.

"Tell me what you're thinking, Emerra Cole." I grinned.

"I'm thinking of a skinny blue monster in a red cape, hopping around the room, going 'wubba, wubba, wubba.'""Yes," Northrop's smile widened, "I thought it'd be something like that."

"And he's cute too." I took a deep breath and rose to my feet.

"Stand up, Grover Who-Is-Not-A-Cute-Blue-Monster." Northrop stood up.

"Is this ceremony necessary?"

"Hey! You're the one who wanted my judgment! This is what my judgments are like. Apparently. If we're being ridiculous anyway, we might as well go full ridiculous." We stood facing each other. Kappa paused his sunshine hunt to watch us. My smile faded before I spoke, and the words came out a lot more serious than I intended.

"Grover Northrop, you were a dumbass. That's official. You were selfish, and blind, and stupid. Your carelessness caused pain and suffering, and you put the world at risk. But you wanted to fix it. You also died for your crimes, and after you died, you spent a century confined to the passages, alone. Solitary confinement and death. There's no punishment left for you. You've suffered enough. Now you can let it go." There were no tears on his face, but, somehow, I could see him crying.

Flowing from him were quiet streams of an emotion that I was one hundred years too young to understand.

"Thank you, Emerra," he said.

"That was a kind judgment."