“The City of Death…” he says carefully.
“Yes,” she says. “You know I’ve never actually been? Only my father and his right-hand men can go. Even my fucking brother can go, and he’s useless. Anyway, jokes on them, they don’t know that I sneak out to the Upper World every now and then. Once I spent a whole summer in Paris and they never even knew. Winters in Copenhagen. New York in autumn. I absolutely adore where all you mortals live.” She pauses and I can feel her energy at my back. “Hey. Girlie. What was your name again?”
Oh fuck. I turn my head and look at her over my shoulder. “Ephemera.”
“Neat name,” she says. “Doesn’t that mean like scrapbooking junk?” Then she lets go of the paddle and places her hands on either side of the skull. “Can I ask you something? Am I intimidating at all?”
I swallow hard. “Yes.”
“Is that why you’re scared?”
Am I scared? I must be. I nod.
“Good. I’m supposed to be scary. I’m supposed to intimidate everyone I give a ride to, something about how it makes them behave. But honestly, if they don’t behave, it’s their loss. I’m ferrying you to your afterlife and you don’t want to get in the way of that, believe me.”
Rasmus clears his throat. “Has anyone tried to?”
“Oh yeah,” she says with an exaggerated sigh. “The shamans are the worst. They’re always finding their way here through one of their portals, poking around for magic plants or buying spells from some of the less honorable Gods before heading back to the Upper World. And sometimes there’s a recently deceased person who decides they’d rather be running around the Hiisi Forest instead of having their allotted afterlife, but that’s not a fate I would choose for myself. I usually let them go.”
“Usually?” Rasmus asks.
“It depends on my mood.” I can almost hear her smiling beneath the mask, and once again I’m praying that it really is a mask and not her actual face. “Anyway, the name’s Loviatar but you can call me Lovia. Oh look, I can see land.”
I turn my attention back around to see low white hills poking through the mist and the water narrowing until it becomes a river, the water black as ink and flowing quickly inland. The hills are barren, save for a few low bushes scattered about, bright red berries appearing on the branches like drops of blood.
“You’ll have to excuse me, I like to pretend I’m a safari guide,” Lovia says to us before clearing her throat. “As you can see on the right we have frost berries just ripe for the picking. The crimson berries are found all over Tuonela, but proliferate in the Frozen Void because both the white reindeer and the ice deer have learned the berries are poisonous.”
Her words are strangely familiar. The frost berries sound similar to the frost flowers I had in my tea, while the white reindeer remind me of the painting my father did. Then again, my father painted that waterfall and that ended up being real. What if the white reindeer are too?
“Ah, we are in luck,” Lovia says from behind us. “There’s a snow fox just to your left.”
I look in that direction and see a small white fox sitting on an icy riverbank watching us float past, its fluffy tail curled up around its body. At first it’s cute…until I get a closer look. Its eyes are completely black, with no whites showing, and when it flicks its tail, I see bones where its furry legs should be. It’s only then that I realize it doesn’t even have eyes at all, and what I’m looking at are empty sockets.
Oh hell no.
I gasp in horror, unable to help myself, my hand reaching over for Rasmus.
“I know, he’s super cute isn’t he?” Lovia says. “I used to have names for them all, but I forget things all the time. I think that one’s name was Socket, though.”
Rasmus squeezes my hand back in an attempt to be comforting, but I’m starting to feel like we’ve graduated from elaborate cosplaying to a full-on bad acid trip. I mean, what I just saw can’t be real, can it?
None of this is real, I tell myself, closing my eyes. None of this is real. There’re a million explanations to be had but you’re not in the Land of the Dead.
And yet repeating that to myself is starting to lose its hold on me, like reality is slowly losing its grip.
Oh god, I wish I had my Ativan.
“Ah, there’s the herd I was looking for,” Lovia chatters on. “The one at the front, that’s Celes. You can ride her sometimes, if she’s feeling charitable.”
I reluctantly open my eyes to see a herd of white reindeer standing by a few golden pink flowers, delicately plucking off the petals and chewing. The one that Lovia is talking about looks majestic with ice-blue eyes and a thick white coat. But her antlers are like twisted branches, like she has a tree growing out of her head, and the rest of the reindeer match the ones my father painted in his sketchbook—half skeleton, with a milky white gaze. On one of them I can see straight through her ribs and to the snow on the other side.