Only The Young | ✔

Chapter Fifteen

"I'm not letting you die to save us." Tehani exploded, shaking her best friend in manner that she was half worried she'd pass out.

"Technically, it's the only way well ever be free from this monster." Castor pointed out, with a shrug. It was hard to take him serious, not when he looked like a drowned rat — Tehani would have laughed if tears weren't streaming down her face.

Yurika choked a laugh, Pollux was silent, standing besides his twin with his lips pursed. They were all ignoring the dead body in the circle of sand, of all the desperate things Tehani had had to do in her whole seventeen years of living, it hadn't included digging a body out of a grave and summoning its spirit. She didn't even want to think of what how they'd return it back into the dug grave.

"You think I want to die?" Yuri scoffed. "I'm just tired of this nightmare and I want to go home."

"We all want to, but like Tehani said, we aren't letting you die for us." Pollux spoke for the first time, his voice was a quiet whisper.

"So we die," Castor said. "Because we aren't returning home alive, so we either kill ourselves and trap this thing here or wait for it to kill us and get out." His words were harsh but his voice was soft. Tehani knew he was right even though he was pessimistic.

"We can trick it, find a way to kill it in another host." Pollux murmured but cast his eyes to the wet sand, embarrassed by his suggestion because killing the Yako in another host meant taking the life of the host along with the spirit. Tehani wasn't sure if she could take a life, not even to save hers, she glanced up at the moon as if searching for answers.

"We are not killing anyone." Yuri was quick to rebuke him. She signed at the wounded look that crossed his face then moving so she could place a hand on his shoulder. Tehani watched them.

"I won't lie and say that thought didn't cross my mind in the past minutes, but even thinking of it makes us no better than that thing." Yurika said vehemently, pointing ahead at nothing.

Pollux snorted. "So what are we? Heroes?"

"I hope not, because we are shitty ones." Tehani said lightly.

"For God's sake, we are trapped in an alternate universe that is almost nothing like ours, we aren't even sure if these people are real people." Pollux snapped.

"They are real enough for the ritual the Yako has been using their dead for." Tehani fired back, at once the twin deflated.

"I'm sorry, that was out of line." He apologized. "I'm just sick of this place."

"We all are . . ." Yuri was telling Pollux but Tehani was looking at Castor who seemed to be fighting off a chill.

"Are you alright?" She asked him lowly.

He seemed to snap out of whatever he had been staring and blinked, turning to look at her.

"I can sense it." He said, voice a quiet whisper but they all heard. Pollux and Yuri quieted and stared at him with wide eyes filled with fear.

"Its nearby and I can see the tracks of its step." Castor said, looking down at the ground then far ahead at the wide open cemetery gates. Tehani made a note to remind her father to enforce the locking of the gates because those wide open gates where the reason they were in this situation.

"Can you trace it?" Tehani asked him, an idea forming.

"Yes, why?" Castor asked.

"Because I have an idea to trap it, I will be needing that knife again." She said, despite knowing the consequences of blood magic, despite knowing that she would very well pay for it later.

***

They had bound Yuri with ropes from a clothing line and placed her in the same broken octagram, Castor redrew the line again with chalk — they didn't bother with salt for protection, they were basically asking for trouble with the ritual they were about to perform — while Pollux stood by Tehani, grim and avoiding Castor's gaze when he tried to catch his eye.

"You okay?" Castor rose, ignoring the urge to itch his wet body. Yuri nodded even though fear shone in her brown eyes, it was almost dawn and the nogitsune was supposedly a spirit of the night, if they weren't quick, Tehani's so called plan might not work and it would all be in vain.

They had left the grave of Mathilda Keye and were now standing in a wide space in between several other headstones.

"As okay as I'll ever be." Yurika said quietly, snapping him from his trance. He blinked and tried to remember what he had asked her.

Castor gave her a thumbs up and weak smile, thinking that maybe he had judged Yurika too harshly, she clearly had balls if she was willing to potentially sacrifice her life for theirs and most likely, Eden too.

He stepped back, and the three of them outside the octagram spread out then linked hands, both he and his twin stood on Tehani's side and she broke the link to slice through her palm, wincing in a manner that told Castor that it wasn't physical pain that made her do so, every time she performed blood magic, she seemed to grow older and hollower as if it was sucking out life from her. Right now, under the moon, she looked like the ghost of Mathilda Keye.

She squeezed her cut palm and let the blood flow down to the sand, and it began to spread around the triangles as if were alive. Try hard as he might, he couldn't help but be fascinated by her type of magic, the type that had life of its own not like his cold like abilities.

"This kind of magic could kill you, Yuri, but it is our best choice." She had warned. Her plan involved putting Yuri under a coma, hoping it would summon the trickster spirit — since it probably could sense when Yurika was in any trouble of sorts — and when it possessed her unconscious form, they would then perform a ritual that would separate the spirit from her and trap it like it had been in their timeline and maybe they would return home.

Castor could count many flaws in her plan but because he didn't have any better one, he went along with it.

Tehani's chanting snapped him from his reverie, at first it started out low, then her voice grew, thickening her faint accent, Yuri began to convulse, thrashing around the bonds around her body.

Castor snuck a glance at Tehani to see that her nose was bleeding, oozing blood like it was water and his heart jolted in fright.

Nonetheless, she continued, until her voice was almost a scream and only stopped when Yuri's jerking stopped, her eyes rolled to back of her head and her body slumped on the sand.

Tehani broke the link, stumbling into Pollux's arms, spluttering blood from her mouth.

"Did. . . did it work?" Tehani murmured sleepily as they helped her up, Castor barely noticed that his dirty shirt was stained with her blood, he already had graveyard dirt sticking to his shirt thanks to the rain, he couldn't be bothered by blood.

All three pairs of eyes turned to Yuri's unconscious form as dread filled Castor's stomach so thick that it made him want to puke and run far away from the cemetery, away from the evil that permeated the cool air. No, no, It was here.

"No," the words escaped his lips in frustrated shout. "It didn't work."

Silence, deafening one.

Then Yuri jolted awake, a sneer on her lips, no, It wasn't Yurika, it was the Yako.

Castor couldn't think, couldn't feel as a bright light blinded his sight, he could vaguely hear screams and something else like a growl, before everything went dark.