“So how sick is Anna?”
“I’m not sure.” It occurred to me that I could have spent the morning googling MDS instead of my own crimes. But I was about as good a daughter as I was a criminal. “Her blood’s messed up.”
“Like leukemia?”
I shook my head. “It’s something I’d never heard of before. She says it’ll take a long time to treat it. And a long time before we know if she . . .”
My voice faded. Saying all this aloud had made me unsteady on my feet. The second late-bell rang, and the hallway emptied around us.
Jamie put a hand on my shoulder. “Should you even be at school today?”
“Mom was pretty sure,” I said.
“Oh. You must be totally busted.”
“Yeah.” We hadn’t had any specific conversation about punishment, but Mom had taken my new car to work today. I was fairly certain that I wouldn’t be driving it anytime soon. “But, whatever. Even if she grounds me till I’m eighteen, that’s only three months.”
Jamie smiled. “Your rebellion was well timed. She must want to meet your mysterious boyfriend.”
“Thanks to you.”
“Does that mean I get to meet him too? Finally?”
I stared at her. “So that’s why you told her?”
“Never.” She crossed her heart. “But I’m glad I did. Anna needs to know stuff like that, especially now.”
“I guess so.” I wondered what the chances were of Yama sitting down for dinner with us. Especially after I’d confessed my murder to him.
Jamie took my hand and led me toward my first class. “You two need to stop hiding stuff from each other. You know that, right?”
I nodded, unable to say more. There was so much now that I would never tell my mother, or Jamie, or anyone else here in the overworld. It didn’t feel as though I could ever be completely honest again.
* * *
That night Mom and I cooked together, and we talked a lot too. Not about her disease, but about my father, the person he’d always been. The odd thing was, we hadn’t talked about Dad in any serious way since he’d left us.
“He sees people as pieces in a game,” I said at one point, thinking of Mr. Hamlyn, too. “Like we’re here just to amuse him.”
Mom frowned at this, almost as if she wanted to come to Dad’s defense. But she only shook her head and said, “I’m sorry. I was young.”
We wound up staying up late, my mother sharing a glass of her wine with me. We toasted to how great the rest of the year was going to be, because we’d clearly had our share of disasters already. Mindy watched us from her corner the whole time, happy to be part of the family, so I didn’t bring up anything about my mother’s childhood. Now that Mindy had finally forgotten what had happened thirty-five years ago, it seemed cruel to remind her.
By the time Mom sent me off to bed, Mindy was full of energy. She wanted to take the river to New York City and spy on my father.
“Some other night. I need to see someone.”
“You mean your pomp boyfriend?” She shrugged. “He can come too if he wants.”
It took me a moment to understand—this was the new Mindy, unafraid of bad men. But the things I had to explain to Yama weren’t for her ears.
“Not tonight. I’ll be back before dawn.”
Mindy grumbled a little, but finally headed off to roam the neighborhood by herself, a fearless little ghost.
I stood in the middle of my bedroom and slipped across to the flipside, ready to face Yama and confess what I’d done. But as the magic words from the 911 call faded in my mouth, I heard a voice floating on the rust-scented air of the afterworld.
“Elizabeth Scofield . . . I need you.”
It sounded like a young girl, maybe Mindy’s age. My heart froze—what if one of the five girls I’d freed still existed, and still wanted me? But then the words came again, and I heard the faint accent in them, like Yama’s.
It was the ghost of his sister Yami.
* * *
The river knew what to do.
I’d always wondered how Yama arrived so quickly when I called him. But the river’s current was driven by connections, by desires. The Vaitarna was roiling with my need to know why Yami’s voice had called me instead of her brother’s. The moment I released myself to the current, it took me, furious and spinning.
It had to be a simple reason, nothing horrible. Hadn’t my mother decreed that there would be no more disasters this year?
I swirled to a halt in a part of the river that I’d never seen before. The familiar formless plain stretched in all directions, but the sky was wrong. Instead of starry black it was the red of a fading sunset, rusty and muted. It was strange seeing a wash of color above the boundless gray.
Yami stood there waiting, her large eyes dissecting me.
“Long time no see,” I said.
“We’ve both been occupied.” Her hands adjusted the folds of her gray skirt. “When my brother chooses to neglect his people, someone has to take his place.”
“Right.” Yama had said something about his sister not approving of us. “Sorry if I’ve been distracting him.”
“I doubt that,” she said.
I frowned. “I haven’t been a distraction?”
“You have. But I doubt you’re sorry.”
All my clever rejoinders foundered on the fact that she was right.
“Yami, why did you call me? Is your brother okay?”
“He regrets that he can’t come to you. His people need him.” She paused a moment, weighing her words. “They are besieged.”
“Wait. You mean, there’s a battle down there?” I shook my head. “The underworld has wars?”
“Something smaller than a war, but equally deadly. A predator.”
It took a moment to understand the word. But when I did, monsters came to mind. “Okay. That’s scary.”
“Lord Yama is not afraid, but perhaps you can . . .” She held out her hand. “My brother will explain.”
“You’re going to take me to the underworld?”
Yami’s reaction was to raise an eyebrow, as if I wasn’t worth a yes.
Yama had told me about his home, how beautiful it was. But the thought of going that far down into the underworld scared me. The few stray ghosts at school still made me uneasy. I couldn’t imagine a city of thousands.
I looked up at the strange bloodred sky. “We’re close, aren’t we?”
“This is the deepest part of the river.” When I still hesitated, Yami snapped the fingers of her outstretched hand, and a single drop of black oil fell from them. “Come, girl. Or don’t you want to go to hell?”
“Nice of you to put it that way.” I stared down at the spreading black pool between us.
“Pardon my English,” she said with a smile. “Do you prefer ‘Hades’? It isn’t a bad place, you know. Just a quiet one.”
“With predators.”
She nodded. “At the moment. But my brother seems to think you can help.”
It was hard to argue with that, and I needed to see Yama and tell him everything that had happened in the last two days.
I reached out to take her hand.
* * *
We went farther down, deeper than I’d ever gone.
The light was different here. A ruddiness infused everything—the sky, the ground, Yami’s skirt and blouse—the color almost vivid compared to the endless gray of the flipside. The air was different too. My lungs had to work hard to take it in, like being in a small room full of cut flowers whose scent was rust and blood.
We alighted on a balcony that overlooked a skyline of jumbled shapes. The buildings didn’t match, more a collage than a city. They seemed to have been plucked from every epoch, from stone hovels to columned mansions to towering modern apartment blocks. A panopticon of windows stared back at me, reflecting the bloodred sky.
It was magnificent, like a city constructed over thousands of years with nothing ever torn down. Like every city that had ever existed on earth put together.
“Who built all this?”
“It is remembered, not built.”
Ghost buildings. Of course.
I stepped to the edge of the balcony and leaned out over the city of the dead. We were only a few stories up, and I could see that the edges of the structures were blurred, the details indistinct. Faded memories given form.
And it was lifeless. The wide avenues stretched out empty in all directions. No litter stirred in the low and constant wind. There were no vehicles, no traffic lights.
“Where are all the people?”
“Where they usually are when there’s a wolf at the door. Inside.”
I turned to her. “A literal wolf? The ghost of an animal?”
Yami shook her head, but didn’t speak, as if she wanted me to guess.
I wasn’t in the mood. “Where’s Yama?”
“Yamaraj is out there, where he’s needed. He’ll return when he can.”
“You said I could help. How?”
Yami thought about this for a moment, and then she said, “Shall we have tea?”
She went inside through the balcony doors, which were as wide and tall as a soccer goal, leading me into a room as big as my entire house. A huge patterned rug lay at its center, surrounded by dozens of cushions. Candled chandeliers hung above us. As we entered, men in knee-length robes and loose trousers stepped forward from the shadows, lighting the branches of the chandeliers with smoking tapers. These servants were as gray-skinned as Yami—ghosts, of course. They didn’t talk, though one met my eyes with an expression of disquiet, then looked away.
Yami settled on one of the cushions and pointed to the one across from her.
“Sit, girl.”
“My name is Lizzie.”
“You should show more respect for your name, Elizabeth. Names are important here.”
I didn’t sit down, taking in the beauty of the room around us. The arched ceilings were painted in russet curlicues, held up by carved and fluted columns, and the candles in the chandeliers flickered like stars above us.
Then Yami said, “The predator takes only children.”
That made my knees buckle. I sat, unable to speak for a moment, staring at the rug, which was woven in a pattern of zigzags, diamonds with interlocking vertices. It made my vision pulse with my heartbeat.
Only children.
Yami clicked her fingernails, and two servants stepped forward again. Instead of burning tapers, they had silver trays in their hands, each with a steaming teapot and a small porcelain cup with no handles. Yami watched them work, thanking each by name as they served us. A smell like roses and burned sugar filled the room, making the air even thicker.
“The predator,” I said. “It’s one of us, a psychopomp.”
She nodded, waiting for more.
“And the children . . . they all died peacefully, with their parents caring for them. Back when they were alive, I mean.”
“So it’s the man who troubled you before.” Her words came slowly, clearly. “The one who sent my brother a message.”
I nodded. I’m hungry—a warning.
“How did you lead him here, girl?”
“Why would I do that? I’ve never even been here before!”
“How else would he have made a connection to my brother?”
“A connection?” I tried to remember what had happened in the basement, the night Mr. Hamlyn had given Mindy back. “I kissed his hand, but I told Yama about that.”
“Think harder, Elizabeth.” Yami pronounced every syllable of my name.
I closed my eyes, and heard Mr. Hamlyn’s voice again.
I want you to tell your rather impressive friend something. What’s his name again?
And I’d answered.