“No, but I’ll have to stay in my city now. The predator won’t leave my people alone.”
“You’ll have to stay there . . . all the time?”
“Every minute I’m away, he’ll hunt them.”
I shook my head. All those hours we’d spent together, on bleak mountaintops or his windy atoll, were suddenly precious.
“And my sister was right,” he said. “I’ve been lazy.”
I swallowed something hard in my throat. “But it’s okay if I visit, right?”
“Lizzie, you can do more than visit. You can come and live with us.” A slow and beautiful smile overtook his face as he spoke, but I couldn’t answer it.
Yama’s city was magnificent, but also gray and silent, and I was already so cold inside. I could think myself into the afterworld, and smell rust and blood in the air. Death had been with me from the day I was born, and on top of all that, I was a murderer now.
What would living in the underworld do to me? Would I forget what sunlight felt like? Or start to hear the voices of the dead in every stone?
There was so much I’d meant to tell Yama tonight, but there hadn’t been time. Around us, the medical tent was growing busier as more wounded were brought in.
I reached out my hand and brushed his cheek. With him in the real world and me on the flipside, the electricity of his touch was only a fleeting thing.
“My mother needs me now.”
“There’s no rush for you and me,” he said.
Of course not. Yama planned to live forever. He could wait a hundred years, until my mother was a distant memory, my oldest friends all dead and buried.
But I couldn’t wait for him. Not for a hundred years, not for a hundred days. Since when was love something you didn’t rush? I leaned forward and kissed him, and the spark of his lips was still there, even through the veil of the flipside.
But when I pulled away, he let out a gasp.
“Lizzie. What happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“You did something.” His voice had gone soft and harsh, and the shouting and bustle of the medical tent came rushing into the quiet.
He knew. He had tasted it on me.
“The bad man. I went back to his house.”
Yama shook his head. The color was draining from his face, as if his wounds were flowing again.
“He was keeping those little girls there. And his memories were inside Mindy, making her scared all the time. But I fixed it. He’s gone, cut to pieces.”
“By the predator?”
“Yes, by Mr. Hamlyn.” My gaze fell to the dirt floor again. It was glistening beneath my feet. The space heaters in the medical tent were melting the frozen ground. “But it was me who killed him.”
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.