Excerpt: These Trials Three

Eric reached out for us as his feet drug the ground, trying to float away from us. There was panic in his eyes. I reached for my cousin, and our fingers brushed...and passed through each other.
“No!” Eric's form started to drift away, and it was completely out of his control. I ran after him, trying to keep up; I could hear Dira running behind me. We weren't going to lose him this easily! We chased the fading ghost in front of us. I wasn't going t be able to keep up, he just kept sliding away. Now we were in the grove of trees at the edge of the cemetery. They looked like the type of woods Jason would hang out in, but I didn't care. I was too busy chasing the small point of light that was my cousin and best friend. And then he stopped
I almost didn't notice at first, but then I realized his blur of a shape was getting bigger, and I was still running at mach five.
When I'd finally stuttered to a halt, I stormed up to Eric. “What the hell was that?! What's going-” He put his finger to my lips. I stopped talking and looked around the clearing we'd stopped in. I hadn't known the woods back here went so deep. I thought it just ended in houses after a couple of yards. It was eerie. The sounds of traffic were gone, and all I could hear was the dripping sound as rain sloshed down from higher branches to the ground.
Eric looked so scared there, his eyes flicking around like a trapped animal's. A hush fell over us, and I realized something. There weren't any sounds. Well, nothing alive. There was the water dripping sound, and that seemed to get louder, like a drippy faucet you can't get out of your mind. But I couldn't hear anything moving; I couldn't even hear my own breathing, or Dira's. It was like the calm before a storm, or so I'm told.
And the storm came. Out of nowhere, flames leapt up to engulf Eric. His eyes bugged in panic, and his mouth stretched in silent screams. I didn't know what to do. What COULD I do? Despair flooded over me, and I couldn't move. But then something flickered in the corner of m eye. Dira was soaked; it looked like she had stood under one of the big evergreens and pulled on the branches. She was now headed straight for Eric, attempting to knock him out of the flames. That put my head back in its place, and I went after her. The whole thing probably took only seconds, but to me, it seemed minutes passed in those few seconds between him and us.
And then the fire came. It seared my pores, and I felt it eating me alive. But when I looked down at my hands for a second, I just saw my hands. No charred flesh or blackened stumps. Dira was clinging to Eric, or rather, she was trying to cling to him.
“It's not real!” I yelled, and they both looked up at me. I don't know how they could hear me over the roar of the flames, but they did, and took a second to look down at themselves. I hardly felt the fire anymore, and even the warmth of it was ebbing from my bones. The flames shrunk, sputtered, and died.
“What was that?” Dira asked cautiously, looking down at the leaves and pine needles on the ground. “What if there are land mines down here or something?”
“What for? To keep out grave robbers?” I didn't mean to snap like that, but I didn't get it. Nothing like that hurt so bad without doing SOMETHING to you physically. I was about to apologize when a voice snaked through the trees. A strong smell of some sort of herb flooded my senses...what was it? I remembered the one time my mother had experimented with a new recipe, the whole house had smelled like this stuff for days because she'd used too much... Rosemary! That was it. All I could smell was rosemary!
I turned in the direction the smell seemed to be coming from and gasped. A lady seemed to be melting from the trees. She carried herself like a Lady, capital L, and was elegant as the breeze. She was astoundingly beautiful, but something about her ate at me. She seemed too proud, too cold. Her robes were a dull gray that intensified her beauty, rather then dimming it. When she spoke, it seemed as if wind itself was whispering in my ear.
“My, you three have some real devotion for each other, don't you?” Her voice crackled a bit. There was no way this ethereal being was human. “That amuses me. Not many would go through such torment for a dead man. I think I'd like to play a game with you.”