Free Such Sweet Sorrow by Jenny Trout Page B

Hamlet’s eyes widened at the sight of a naked man dyed blue with woad and an Egyptian Pharisee strolling side by side, attempting to speak to each other.
    “My God,” Romeo said, and crossed himself as naturally as breathing. “ Purgatorium .”
    “Is it?” Hamlet glanced about. It certainly didn’t seem like any Purgatory he’d read about. “I’d assumed there would be fire…scourges…”
    “Look.” Romeo pointed straight ahead. The souls wandering beneath the lush green foliage seemed out of sorts, but calm enough. Their gazes would meet, and they offered each other hesitant polite smiles before turning their attention back to their strange surroundings.
    All but one, a young woman in a blue velvet gown who seemed to move a bit faster, to show more panic the other souls about her. She pushed between two of them, murmuring frantic apologies as she turned this way and that.
    “She knows where she is,” Hamlet realized, and a sick feeling gripped his stomach. “My god, she…she knows she’s dead.”
    “And all the others don’t seem to,” Romeo continued, pointing to an old man who rested against a potted lemon tree. “They’re waiting. But she knows.”
    The woman grew more frantic now, racing down the neat rows, shoving others aside. “Help me!” she screamed, clutching the front of her torn dress. Golden curls spilled down her back from an elaborate braid coming undone, a tower of hair falling to a ruin in time with her own slipping sanity. “Please, someone, you must help me!”
    Something detached itself from the darkness above, drifting down slowly like cloth sinking in water. The woman in blue looked up, and her face contorted in terror. She ran from the thing, which now took a vaguely phantasmal shape. Long, drifting tendrils of arms, a hood of darkness for a head, the thing was not so much terrifying as unsettling, but the woman seemed to take a far different view of it. She ran from it, pleading, screaming.
    “I had no choice!” As she fled, another dark form appeared to pursue her, and she begged it in turn, “He had to die! I had to kill him! He was the only one who knew!”
    “They’re herding her,” Hamlet observed, watching as the two specters moved purposefully toward the woman, backing away to let her escape them in one direction, then closing her off from another.
    Romeo gestured forward. “Come on.”
    Hamlet had no choice but to follow him. If they became separated in the Afterjord, there was even less chance of either of them getting out. “Wait! I wasn’t finished, when I told you about my father. I believe spirits can return to Midgard only when they have unfinished business. My father has involved me in his…Did Juliet ever charge you with hers?”
    Romeo’s eyes widened slowly.
    “You won’t be able to return without me.” Hamlet knew it as certain as he knew they should not interfere with the shades’ pursuit of the woman in blue. “That’s why the Valkyrie blocked your way. You’re not allowed to use the corspeways, because you don’t have unfinished business. Avenging my father, that’s mine. If we’re parted, you may never make it back to our world.”
    Romeo’s eyes were still wide, his hand on the hilt of his sword. “Look out!”
    Hamlet turned as a flurry of black materialized behind him. This shade was far different from the ones pursuing the woman in blue. Smoke-gray teeth, long and pointed as needles, dripped liquid that turned to noxious vapor as it splashed on the stones. He stepped back, barely missing a long, clawed appendage as it flashed out to grab him.
    Romeo drew his sword, and the shade shrieked, the piercing cry startling even the calm souls around them.
    “Put that away!” Hamlet shouted. “Everyone is already dead, what good will it do?”
    “Then what do you suggest?” Romeo snapped as they continued to back away from the advancing ghost.
    Two large stone archways stood at either side of the plaza. At their peaks, they bore