Afterworlds (58 page)

Yama closed his eyes, his face twisting with pain. A hard and bitter moan seemed to leak out from his whole body.

Yama had sensed murder on me.

I’d become like the stones that smelled of blood, and whispered with the voices of the dead. Stained, like the rest of the world, except for that moon-shaped sliver of island in the great southern sea.

“You’ve never killed anyone, have you?” I asked.

“Of course not.” His eyes opened, glistening with tears. “Don’t you understand, Lizzie? Whatever comes after, life is priceless.”

I stood there, silent. Almost dying had, in fact, taught me that, but it had taught me too many other things at the same time. All of it was jumbled in my brain now, a mess of strange rules and unexpected horrors. In the end, my anger had won out over the rest of what I’d learned.

Yama had kept his hands clean for thousands of years, and it had only taken me a month to kill someone.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Yama gave me one last look of horror, and turned his face away.

“You should go help Yami.”

“Of course.” I would have done anything for him. But when I closed my eyes and listened to the still air of the flipside, there was nothing. “It’s just . . . she hasn’t called me yet.”

“She will soon.” He closed his eyes again. We were done.

I took a step backward, away from his stretcher. A medic rushed past, running to help with a wounded agent being carried through the open tent flaps. As she passed through me, I felt the spark of her intensity, her resolve to save the man’s life.

I turned from Yama and walked away.

Committing murder was so much worse than giving away his name, because it had changed
me
. All he’d ever wanted was a respite from death. For a few hours on a mountaintop, or a few moments when our lips touched. And now that was gone between us.

“Lizzie.” It was the ghost Agent Reyes, following me out of the tent. “Are you okay?”

I nodded, still walking.

“Your friend, I overheard the medics. He’s going to be fine, once he’s got some plasma in him.”

“Thank you.” My voice sounded broken.

Agent Reyes stood in front of me, forcing me to stop. “I heard what you were saying to him, about a bad man. That’s why you called me, isn’t it?”

It took a moment to understand that he didn’t mean a call on the current of the Vaitarna River, or the way this gun battle had called me here to Colorado. He only meant a phone call.

“Right. When I asked you about serial killers.”

He nodded. “That wasn’t hypothetical.”

His gaze was too steady, his gray eyes too sharp, and I had to look away. “I guess you’re not an FBI agent anymore, right?”

“No. The bureau doesn’t employ ghosts.”

I nodded. “Well, there was this serial killer, and I helped chop him into pieces.”

“Is that part of your calling now, Lizzie? Avenging the dead?”

I shook my head. I had no calling, no purpose. I wasn’t a valkyrie or a spirit guide. All I wanted was to go home. “It was just a mistake, an awful one. But it’s okay. My fingerprints are on the murder weapon, and I texted someone from right in front of his house. They’ll catch me.”

At that moment, I wanted to be caught. To be punished, not for what I’d done to the bad man, but to Yama. To us.

Special Agent Reyes’s hand took mine, just for a moment, his expression sad and steadfast.

“We don’t catch everyone,” he said.

*  *  *

I spent all night in the flipside, sleepless, numb, waiting for Yami’s call.

Mindy was still full of energy, and took me on a tour of the neighborhood, regaling me with all the gossip she’d picked up over years of spying. She didn’t notice how quiet I was.

It was unsettling, unreal almost, how much of her personality
had disappeared when I’d killed the bad man. As if the deepest parts of her had been erased.

As if she wasn’t a person anymore at all.

The hours passed and dawn drew near, and I started to worry about Yami. I knew she didn’t like me very much, but I was all she had to protect her brother’s city. Why hadn’t she called by now?

She had died young and slowly in that field of bones thousands of years ago. Maybe Mr. Hamlyn wanted the threads of her life, and had already taken her.

I thought about going back to Colorado, to tell Yama that she hadn’t called. But if his sister was in danger, he would leave his bed in a heartbeat, and that would be the end of his healing. I didn’t want to imagine him guarding his people, pale and stitched and bloodless, like some zombie king in a gray palace.

But finally, just as dawn broke over the Andersons’ yard, I heard a faint call on the winds of the flipside.

Elizabeth Scofield . . . come here.

It was Yami’s voice. She hadn’t said, “I need you,” like the first time she’d called. This was a command.

I didn’t hesitate, didn’t even say good-bye to Mindy, just let the river take me. It was a short and furious trip, much quicker than my first journey down to the underworld. And when the black oil of the river passed from my eyes, there was no gray palace to greet me, no red sky.

Just a too-familiar street in Palo Alto.

Yami was waiting for me on the bad man’s lawn. Around her, the gnarled and stumpy trees marked where the little girls had stood for so long. It was strange to see them gone.

“What is this?” I asked. “What are you
doing
here?”

“I have news for you.” Yami sat down on the grass, cross-legged. “Come and join me, girl.”

I took a few steps closer, but didn’t sit.

“Don’t be afraid, Elizabeth. It’s only dirt.”

“Do you know what’s buried down there?”

“The dead are buried everywhere.” Yami stroked the gray blades of grass. “The earth is a graveyard.”

I supposed she was right, but I stayed on my feet. The place I had dug away with my own frantic fingers was smooth now.

“Yami, what did you do?”

“We buried the past.”

I took a step backward, looking up at the house. The windows of the front bedroom stared balefully down at me. “You buried . . . the bad man?”

Yami let out a sigh. “Don’t be absurd, Elizabeth. He’s far too heavy. And if the police found him in the ground, it would cause a stir.”

“Heavy? But you’re a ghost. You can’t carry
anything
.”

“Of course not.” Yami opened her palms on her knees, as if she were meditating. “Mr. Hamlyn was most helpful.”

My heart beat sideways once. “Mr. Hamlyn?”

“Sit down, girl. You don’t look well.”

I finally obeyed her. I didn’t feel well either.

“After you left Yamaraj, my brother called me to his side,” Yami began. “You managed to save him from the predator, it seems.”

“Um. You’re welcome.”

She arched an eyebrow at this, and continued, “He told me to
return home, and to call you down to help protect our city. Obviously I did not. There was work to be done there in Colorado. Souls to be gathered.”

I stared at the ground, realizing that I’d done nothing to help the ghosts at the gun battle. I was a crappy psychopomp on top of all my other failings.

“There was an FBI agent there,” I said. “Elian Reyes. Did you help him?”

Yami was smiling now. “We helped each other. He told me what you’d done, chopped someone to pieces. It was obvious that the predator had helped you with that. So when I returned to our city, I waited. He came soon enough, hungry, as promised.”

“But why didn’t he just . . .” My voice faded as Yami placed her hand firmly on mine. “Sorry. Go on.”

She set to rearranging the fabric of her skirt across her knees. “Fortunately, Mr. Hamlyn is not the sort of man who rushes things. I was able to explain what Agent Reyes had told me. About your fingerprints, your phone messages, your general incompetence.”

I stared at her. “It
was
my first murder, you know.”

“And a very useful one, Elizabeth. I let Mr. Hamlyn understand that if your crime were ever found out, you would have to flee the overworld. Which would mean you coming to live with my brother.” She shook her head slowly. “Neither of us wanted this to happen.”

I shook my head. “Why does Mr. Hamlyn care?”

“Think harder, girl. If you come to live in the underworld, my brother has no reason to leave his city unprotected. So the predator loses his prey.”

“So Mr. Hamlyn covered up my crime, hoping that I’ll distract Yama?”

“Exactly.” Yami smiled again. “Whereas I know that my brother will stay where he is needed. Because he loves his people more than he loves you.”

I didn’t answer that. After what I’d done, she was probably right.

In the corner of my eye, I noticed the cat, the one that lived nearby, watching us. It was crouched in a hunter’s pose behind one of the gnarled little trees—chest and forepaws down in the dirt, its rear up in the air, muscles bunched and ready to spring. But in that way that cats sometimes do, it just stood there frozen, never coming after us.

I looked at the unsettled ground. “So what did Mr. Hamlyn bury here?”

“A few smashed bottles of pills, evidence of a struggle. When they find your victim, he’ll be an old man who had a heart attack in his sleep, rolled out of bed, and landed hard. Nothing worth investigating, and even if they dust for fingerprints, Mr. Hamlyn polished the shovel. He and I have a wager. Will my brother choose his people, or you?” Yami sighed. “Mr. Hamlyn thinks rather highly of your chances. I’m not sure why.”

I stared at her. “But why did he bother making a bet with you? Why didn’t he just . . . eat you?”

“His tastes are rather specific.” She held out her hand, showing me a soft scar in her gray skin. It was a half-moon shape, and I remembered the shard of bone that had cut through her. “I may have died young, but it was in terrible pain.”

“Right. I’m sorry.”

She nodded, receiving it like an apology that was her due. Then she reached out and brushed my scar, the tear-shaped one on my cheek. Her fingertips had a fiery spark, like a snap of static electricity, sharper and meaner than her brother’s.

“It’s unfortunate, this path you’ve taken, Elizabeth.”

“I didn’t really have a choice.”

“You’ve made a few.” Yami sighed gently. “Sometimes I wonder whether my brother was right to follow me. My parents lost two children that day.”

“But you want him to stay with you now?”

“Lord Yama chose his path.” She stood. “Choose yours, Lizzie. Life is priceless.”

She snapped her fingers, and droplets fell to the grass around us, glittering like black diamonds.

Before she could depart, I said, “You’re probably right. He won’t abandon you, or his people. Not for me, anyway.”

Yami stared at me a moment, then shrugged before she slipped away.

“If I knew the answer for certain, it wouldn’t be a proper bet.”

CHAPTER 41

IT STARTED SLOWLY AT FIRST
, long days of staring at her computer screen with nothing to show for them. But Darcy forced herself to stay at her desk, hour after hour, until the words at last began to come. For a week they dripped, like water from a broken tap, but gradually they came faster, until whole chapters flowed onto the page each day. She reached the terrific speeds she had back in that fateful November eighteen months before, and then surpassed them.

In the end
Untitled Patel
consumed her, drowning out her own dramas in the clamor of Lizzie’s continuing story, and that of a ghost who was mistaken for someone else. Darcy lost herself in scene structure and syntax and semicolons, in plot and conflict and character, the elements of story contesting with each other for space on the page. She sprang up in the middle of the night to write, not because she was afraid she would forget her ideas, but because
her head would explode if she didn’t write them down. She wrote straight through her nineteenth birthday, and hardly noticed.

The month passed quickly in the end, at such a gallop that she hardly felt the absence at the center of her days, the empty chair across from her. She never grew weary of store-bought ramen, or worried about money and the other fleeting details of real life. And as the middle of May approached, she found herself completing the first draft of her second novel, the sequel to
Afterworlds
. It was messy, downright chaotic at the end, and still untitled, but there was time to fix all that.

As far as Darcy could tell, it was a real book, or close enough. There were even flickers of the juice. And a week before BookExpo America, she emailed it to Moxie Underbridge and collapsed into several days of sleep.

*  *  *

Books were free here. It was magic. It was huge.

Darcy had woken up early, anxious about her first public event for
Afterworlds
, a signing of advanced readers’ copies at BEA. Her nerves had only sharpened when a chauffeured car arrived to take her uptown and deposit her in front of the Javits Convention Center.

Inside, the main hall was vast and buzzing. The ceiling was a hundred feet above her head, and the rumble of thirty thousand booksellers, librarians, and publishing pros shivered in the air. Darcy felt small and overwhelmed.

But books were free here.

Some were piled in modest stacks of twenty, and some laid like bricks to form book forts big enough to hide inside. Some were handed to you if you showed a flicker of interest, and some were
arranged in spirals, almost too pretty to ruin by taking them. Almost.

Half an hour before her signing, the empty duffel bag that Darcy had brought was already overloaded, and she cursed herself as a neophyte. She could have brought a duffel bag full of duffel bags instead.

Of course, how would she lift all those books? How would she even read them all?

Still, they were free. Not just the YA novels she’d been able to scam out of her fellow authors over the last year, but historicals and cookbooks and category romances, thrillers and science fiction and even graphic novels. All of their publication dates were months away, and they all had that beautiful freshly printed smell.

By the time Rhea called her and told her it was time to meet at the Paradox booth for the signing, she had almost forgotten to be nervous.