Page 55 of Against All Odds

I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came out.

Before I realized what was happening, Raya lunged forward, throwing herself into my arms.

My first instinct was to freeze. I wasn’t big on physical contact, much less had I expected Raya to have this reaction to seeing me. Over her head, buried into my shoulder, my gaze met Jurrian’s. The man struggled to suppress a smile, giving me an encouraging nod.

After a few seconds, I hesitantly answered the hug. Carefully, I wrapped my arms around the girl who was holding onto me for dear life – afraid she might slip from my grip if I let her come too close. She smelled like cardamom, wild roses and star anise – only now, I realized that despite all those hours I spent watching her, I’d never gotten close enough to smell her.

Resting my chin on top of her head, I closed my eyes, allowing myself to relax into her embrace for a moment before fate could take her from me. With how tightly she held on to me, it was easy to forget everything else – the Court hearing, our final judgment, the ways we’d hurt each other.

Too soon, she stepped back, though her hands kept on firmly clutching mine. I swallowed the lump in my throat as she stared at me, her pupils as wide as they were when she was on cocaine – was it a good thing or a bad thing?

“I’m so glad to see you,” she forced out, her voice hoarse. “I wasn’t sure I ever would again.”

“Glad?” I frowned. “How? You’re dead because of me.” Emotion choked my voice, but I forced myself to keep talking despite it. “I’ve condemned you for being reckless and selfish, while it was my own selfish recklessness that led me to make terribly dumb decisions… and now, we’ll most likely both get sent to Hell.”

I held my breath, half expecting her to be as shocked at the fact as I had been – but if the thought of Hell fazed her, she did a good job hiding it. Instead, her gaze flickered to Jurrian, her full brows furrowing in slight suspicion. “Who is this?”

“This is Jurrian.” I glanced in his direction, wondering how this was her most important question right now. “He’s my… mentor.”

“Not a very good one,” Jurrian muttered before smiling at Raya.

“Well, you tried.” I had never learned to put kindness before honesty.

“Anyway.” Jurrian straightened his posture. “I hate to cut your heartfelt reunion short, but unfortunately, we’re short on time. The Court has requested your presence – and now that you’re both here, I suggest we don’t keep them waiting.”

Chapter 24.

Seren

The realization hit me like a stone to my stomach, so violently, my euphoria about seeing Raya instantly bleakened beside it.

“The—the actual Court?” I swallowed thickly. “Like, right now?”

“What’s the Court?” Raya, blissfully unaware of the celestial bureaucracy, looked from Jurrian to me.

“Unfortunately, there is no time to explain.” Jurrian paused, looking at each of us in turn. “Let’s just say… a guardian physically manifesting herself into her assigned soul’s dreams through astral projection, the assigned appearing to have a thinly veiled connection with the underworld, and these two components resulting in the assigned dying on the astral plane? That’s an unusual situation if I have ever seen one.”

I shuddered involuntarily.

Without wasting further time, Jurrian raised his golden staff. Immediately, the clouds parted for him, revealing a golden-framed portal – its surface made of rippling glass, gleaming darkly.

Raya and I exchanged a glance.

“Come.” Jurrian tilted his head, making it clear we had no choice.

Raya, braver than I was, stepped forward. My mouth opened to protest – ask her to wait, walk through it together – but before I found the words, she had stepped through.

The dark glass surface split soundlessly around her body, parting like silk and swallowing her in one fluid motion. It sealed shut behind her with a faint, shuddering ripple.

Jurrian looked at me expectantly. Swallowing my fear, I followed Raya’s example and stepped through the portal.

Despite how often I had moved between the living and liminal realms now, portal-jumping still felt as surreal as it had the first time. For a few moments, there was nothing but thick glue. The substance pooled around me, feeling sticky without sticking to the skin. Though I could breathe, I still held my breath until the world shimmered into place.

My jaw dropped. I was so taken aback by the courtroom, I didn’t notice Jurrian following behind me until he almost bumped into me.

The chamber stretched out before me – vast, rectangular, made entirely of smooth gray stone, each block seamless, as if carved from a single titanic slab. The ceiling dissolved into a fog-thick sky, where faint silhouettes – symbols, gears, celestial diagrams – shifted lazily behind the mist, as though the universe’s mechanisms lived just out of sight.

A long table of ash-colored marble anchored the room, veined with thin streaks of gold. Behind it sat five figures, elevated on a platform just high enough to force our eyes upward. A smaller pedestal stood between us and them, holding a larger, more intricate version of the three-scale instrument that had once weighed my soul. Runes pulsed faintly along its edges like a heartbeat.