The Cost of Living (ARC)

by Emilie Lucadamo

  “She’s a psychic, not a witch.”

  “Psychic’s good enough, right?” Beck can see on Adam’s face that it is not. “What about Sophie’s friend? Allie, or Ashley, whatever her name was—”

  “Alyssa can’t help us either. She’s just like you.”

  Beck stares at Adam for a long moment. Realization settles upon him, creeping into his body like a winter chill.

  “Just like me as in, ‘has no clue what the hell is going on’ or just like me as in ‘not dead’?”

  Adam sighs, and it’s all the answer Beck needs. “Sophie found her a night before we found you. They were college friends. Alyssa’s been dead for just a few months. How do you think we knew what to do with you?”

  A tiny, half-hysterical laugh bubbles up Beck’s throat. So that’s why Sophie kept looking after Alyssa like a concerned mother. Knowing there are other people like this is a relief, but…

  “Does she remember how it happened?”

  “I don’t know, Beck.” Adam holds up his hands, defensive. “I don’t know. Alyssa’s Sophie’s responsibility, and somehow you’ve become mine.”

  The words cause indignation to glare up in Beck’s chest. He’s no one’s responsibility but his own. “Then why won’t you help me?”

  “I want to!”

  “But you’re not! Why? Are you scared, or do you just not care?”

  Adam opens his mouth, ready to fire back—then he pauses. He takes a deep breath, jaw clenching and unclenching, before replying in far a calmer tone, “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

  Beck knows exactly what he’s asking. He’s asking for his goddamn life back.

  This is the first time he’s been so close to answers about his death. He can’t walk away now, not when he’s just a spell away from figuring out what’s going on. The chance to find answers is within arm’s reach, and he can’t let it slip through his fingers. No one else seems to get it, but there is a desperate need to know burning inside Beck’s chest, growing fiercer with each second.

  If Adam could just understand…

  Thirsty for empathy, Beck looks to Adam—who has his frown trained down at a book on the counter, studiously avoiding his gaze. Beck feels a burst of desperation.

  “Adam, I can’t give up on this. I just—can’t. I don’t have a life anymore, and I don’t even remember what happened. I’m never going to be able to live until I remember how I died. Not knowing—God, it’s eating at me, and I can’t stand it for much longer. Everyone’s acting like I shouldn’t know, but I have to. So, I’m asking you—please. Help me. Isn’t there anyone else we could call to do the spell? Someone else you know, anyone—”

  Adam cuts him off by turning, abruptly, and opening the door behind him once more. He doesn’t look back at Beck as he slips into the hallway. Baffled, Beck trails after him, and his eyes widen once he realizes where Adam is headed.

  “Uhh—” Adam pauses, his hand on the doorknob to the room. The Room, the one that Beck was under the assumption he should never look at again. Suddenly he’s not sure if he should have followed Adam at all. “What’re we doing?”

  Adam’s dark-clad shoulders heave with a sigh. “Well, Beck,” he says, turning to face Beck again. “I’m gonna help you with this. So you can hang out in the hallway, or you can come in here; it’s your choice.”

  Beck can’t help the massive grin that spreads across his face, like a flower opening up to the sun. At once the world around him seems that much brighter, and the man in front of him even more amazing. Instinct drives him forward before he can stop himself, and he catches Adam up in a tight embrace.

  “Thank you,” he exclaims against Adam’s shoulder. For several long seconds, Adam is stiff in his arms.

  Then Adam’s shoulders relax, ever so slightly. Only when Beck catches a glimpse out of the corner of his eye does he realize Adam is smiling too.

  “Come on,” he says, voice low and warm. “You want that spell or not?”

  ONCE THE SPELL gets underway, Adam reveals himself to be scarily competent at this whole magic thing.

  Beck thinks he could watch Adam draw chalk circles on hardwood floors for days. It’s not just how good he looks hunched over (though he does) but Adam’s hands work with a smoothness Beck could never hope to emulate. Every movement is sure, every twitch of a finger precise and unfaltering. Adam had beautiful hands, and Beck is so caught up watching him work that he doesn’t realize the circle is done until Adam stands up and says to him, “All right, hop in.”

  Beck does so, stepping over the runes on the ground and standing awkwardly in the epicenter of the circle. Adam gestures for him to sit; he does, frowning in bemusement. With Adam rushing around lighting candles and sprinkling water along the ground, Beck doesn’t know why all he’s being told to do is sit right. He feels useless and doesn’t like it. Every time he opens his mouth to help, however, Adam just shuts him down with a shake of his head and another firm order to stay inside the circle.

  It’s not easy to argue with Adam when he’s taking charge, so Beck doesn’t. The magic Adam is working is fascinating to watch, even if he doesn’t understand a bit of it.

  The last candle to be lit is a large, heavy, white one. Adam takes a moment to carve sigils into the side before taking a flame to it (and his hands again—Beck might have a problem), and once the flame has caught he sets it down in the circle, right in front of Beck. Beck is busy trying to study the inscriptions on the sides when the lights suddenly go off.

  Startled, Beck looks up to find Adam stepping back into the circle, a large bowl in his hands. The bowl looks like it’s made out of some sort of crystal, but the water in it glimmers like stars in a pitch-black sky. Candlelight enables Beck to see the expression on Adam’s face. He looks calm as he ever has, and self-assurance ebbs some of the anxiety gnawing at Beck.

  “Here’s what we’re gonna do,” says Adam, kneeling in front of him. “I’ll hold this bowl over the candle, and all you have to do is look into the water. Look into the water, let your mind go, and you’ll remember.”

  Beck feels underwhelmed. “That’s it?”

  “It ain’t gonna be magic wands and fireworks, so yeah, that’s it.” The exasperation in Adam’s tone sounds almost fond, and Beck huffs a laugh in spite of himself. “It’ll be a vivid memory, and it’s gonna feel real. Don’t worry. I’ll be right here the entire time. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  The idea of Adam staying with him is more than a relief. “So you’ll…wake me up if anything happens?”

  “You should come out of it on your own, but if you need me to, of course. I’ll wake you up.”

  There’s no time to be nervous about this. He can’t wait any longer. Adam’s here—nothing can go wrong. He trusts Adam, whether Adam likes that or not, and knows he won’t let any harm come to him. He can do this. They’ve got to do this.

  Now’s the moment he finds out how he died.

  “Are you ready?” Adam asks, and Beck nods his head. He’s never been more ready in his life.

  Adam raises the bowl of water over the candle flame. Immediately, flashes of reflected crystal dance all over the room, filling the circle with light. Beck tries to marvel at them, but his attention is stolen by something else. The flicker of the flame within the water is hypnotizing. Beck finds himself drawn in, leaning further over the bowl as the water in front of him burns.

  The light draws him in. It isn’t long before it’s all he can see, dancing flame filling the darkness in his vision. He couldn’t tear his eyes away even if he wanted to, and he’s not sure he wants to.

  “Good,” Adam praises, rich voice making his words drip like honey onto Beck’s skin. “Great job, Beck. Focus on that.”

  Beck focuses, and he tries to let his mind wander in the way Adam told him to. He’s not sure it’s working until Adam starts to speak again in a low murmur.

  “For what you seek,

  Your mind holds fast,

  Draw you back
r />   Into the past.”

  The incantation only sticks in Beck’s mind the first time. Though he is conscious of Adam repeating it, over and over, it is suddenly impossible to focus on anything. His mind is being consumed by candle flame, and all he can see is its brightness, its flicker, its shadows—

  He’s caught in a free fall, with nothing to catch him, and no panic to freeze the blood in his veins.

  He feels…

  Snow.

  Snow crunches under Beck’s feet, his light sneakers leaving imprints with each step. He’s goddamn freezing. Not that he’s about to admit it, because he’d die before he gave James the satisfaction of being right (“You go out in those and you’re gonna be walking on blocks of ice. They’ll have to cut off your damn feet!”), but maybe it wasn’t the best idea to wear these shoes today.

  He’d thought he and Dylan would be able to run to work—it would be faster than fighting James’s ancient Jeep through streets that haven’t even begun to be cleared yet. The lash of ice and wind across his face, however, makes it clear he isn’t running anywhere.

  “We shoulda just taken the car,” Dylan yells over the storm, pulling his parka tighter around his shivering frame. “Why didn’t we take the freaking car?”

  “We’re the ones dumb enough to leave the house,” Beck hollers back, though they both know it’s not really their fault. Their boss couldn’t let them off from work on New Year’s Day—with the city being wracked by the biggest snowstorm it’s seen in years. Aside from them, the streets are deserted. No one is going to be buying CDs today, but Mr. Eberly had made it very clear that if they didn’t come into the shop today, they wouldn’t be welcome tomorrow.

  Dylan stumbles over the curb and slips. His arms flail, and he almost goes down. For a moment he is pinwheeling, suspended in midair like a building during the split second it implodes.

  Beck’s arm lashes out at the last instant and seizes his brother before Dylan can land on the icy street. Wide-eyed, Dylan huffs a breath and turns to look at Beck.

  “Thanks.”

  He is pale against the backdrop of white. All his color is washed out—his face looks bloodless, making the dark freckles on his skin stand out with sharp clarity. His eyes, usually a warm chestnut, now seem pitch black, and the shock of messy brown hair upon his head reminds Beck of a sharpie scribbled on blank paper. He looks like a kid again, the same annoying middle schooler who used to hang around Beck’s room and bug him while he was trying to get his homework done. Dylan gets on his nerves a lot, but Beck feels a sudden rush of affection for him so strong that it surprises even him.

  “Stay on your feet, Dyl,” is all he says, clapping his brother on the shoulder as they both step off the curb. “I ain’t haulin’ your ass off the street if you decide to slip and—”

  He doesn’t see headlights. He doesn’t hear a shriek of tires, or a grinding of brakes, because the car isn’t stopping. It certainly isn’t looking out for two dumb kids crossing in the middle of the road, right in its speeding path.

  Dylan is one step ahead of him, and Beck doesn’t think before he acts. He throws himself forward, body-slamming Dylan with all the force he can put behind him. Dylan goes skidding across the street, hitting a nearby light pole hard, but he catches himself before he can fall—

  Beck feels the impact slam into the left side of his body.

  For a moment, there is nothing. There is pain, so blinding that he cannot think. The world seems to explode in a white-hot flash, and everything fades out. There is no sound, no feeling, no life flashing before his eyes. There is only pain.

  The first thing he feels, when he remembers how to feel anything, is cold. Iciness is seeping into his skin, and he realizes he’s lying in the middle of the street. When he tries to take a breath, he gets a lungful of slush. Beck chokes on it. He opens his eyes. Instinct tries to get him to turn his head from its awkward angle, but he hasn’t so much as twitched before a sharp pain in his neck causes him to freeze.

  He’s facing Dylan. He can see his brother crouched on the safety of the sidewalk. Wide black eyes, depthless pools in a colorless face, staring at him. Dylan’s gloved hands twitch. His chest is heaving, but he doesn’t move. He stands, frozen, like the rest of the world around him, and watches Beck. Though Beck tries to focus on his brother, Dylan is blurring away into the white around him.

  The next thing he knows, hands are on his face, on his shoulders, and someone is shouting in his ear. Dylan’s right next to him now, lifting him off of the snowy street. Beck can feel his head land on Dylan’s bony knees, can hear Dylan urging him to “stay with me, dammit, come on…”

  None of it feels real. This isn’t real.

  He can’t feel his body, and that’s how he knows he is only dreaming. In dreams, you can’t feel anything, so that’s how you know it isn’t real. He can’t feel his own injuries, or Dylan’s desperate hands. All he feels is the cold seeping into his skin.

  When that melts away too, Beck realizes he must be waking up.

  “Beck!”

  There are hands on his shoulders, shaking him. Beck jolts awake as if he’s been underwater and comes up for breath. A desperate gasp fills his lungs with air, and he immediately chokes on it—it feels so wrong to be breathing when he just felt the life seeping out of him. Eyes wide, he reels back from Adam and lands hard on his hands. As pain rockets through his wrists, he is dragged back to reality once again.

  It was a memory. He died, out there in the snow. He died, but now he’s alive, and he can remember everything.

  “Oh God,” he gasps. “Oh my God.”

  “Beck, look at me. What did you see?” Adam says, reaching out to him. He looks as startled as Beck has ever seen him, eyes wide with concern. Beck can’t focus on Adam now. He can’t escape the memory of the car plowing into him, of his hands on Dylan’s back as he pushed him out of the way.

  Those same hands now press to his face, a weak barrier between himself and the world. Panting raggedly into his palms, Beck squeezes his eyes shut and fights the overwhelming urge to sob. “A hit-and-run,” he moans instead, and laughs out loud. “Oh my God. It was a damn hit-and-run!”

  His eyes are stinging. It’s hard to breathe past the burning in his throat, and he wishes he had a pillow, either to punch or to hold tight. “I died in Dylan’s arms. After pushing him out of the way. Stupid kid wasn’t even looking, he didn’t see… We didn’t… I died.”

  He opens his eyes at last, lifting his face to meet Adam’s own. Adam has crawled closer; at the sight of the tears streaming down Beck’s face, he visibly recoils.

  “I’m dead, Adam,” Beck says. “I’m actually dead.”

  And for the first time since he woke up, everything is real.

  Chapter Seven

  THE PILLOW IS soft beneath his head, pliant no matter how hard he tries to press his face into it.

  Maybe if he holds still for long enough, he’ll fall asleep. Maybe he’ll get lucky and wind up smothering himself into unconsciousness. It is preferable than having to lie awake with his roiling thoughts, fighting to suppress the unease bubbling up every few seconds.

  Beck pulls the covers tighter around his body and inhales the rich scent of a body that does not belong to him. Everything in this room smells like Adam, from the tables to the floors, but especially the bed. This is the place Adam sleeps every night, and now Beck is smearing tears all over his pillows. Jesus, he’s a mess.

  Faced with a semi-hysterical Beck, Adam had found himself at a loss. He didn’t know what to do, so his best idea was to bundle Beck up with blankets and tea before imploring him to “get some rest.”

  There was no reason he had to lead Beck all the way up to his room and let him curl up in his bed, but Beck is more than grateful that he did. If Adam hadn’t been so kind, he probably would have wandered off and done something stupid, like gone home a wreck, or called his family—who still have no clue he’s back.

  (There’s a conversation that’s goin to go over
well. Hey, Mom, don’t freak out, it’s just your son, back from the dead! He’d wind up giving his poor mom a freakin’ heart attack.)

  Instead, Adam parked Beck in his room and gave him some space. It was a gesture Beck couldn’t appreciate more if he tried. He’s had time to pull himself together (he’s failed) and try to gather his thoughts (he doesn’t like any of them).

  Of course, that doesn’t make things any better. He’s still dead, and now he can remember every second of his death in vivid, painful detail.

  A large part of him wishes he’d never gone through with the spell. Another part is grateful. At least he knows now, no matter how much it hurts him. At least he knows.

  (Knowing is the problem too. He knows.)

  The memories resurface once more, as vivid as the first time he lived through them. Beck recalls the feeling of the car slamming into him and can’t help whimpering as he hugs himself closer. Of all the ways to die—like, it wasn’t as if he’d hoped to go out in a blaze of glory, but hit by a car—

  And Dylan. Poor, poor Dylan. No wonder the kid wouldn’t talk to him. Beck died in his little brother’s arms, and he’s spent the past few months torturing himself over it. Now Beck is back, and Dylan has no clue how to deal with it.

  It explains so much—hell, it explains everything. Beck almost wishes he still had no clue what was going on.

  “Beck.”

  The voice at the door startles him. He jolts up in bed, fighting out of his blanket cocoon. He knows the only person he’ll see is Adam, but he isn’t about to ignore the guy when he’s done so much for him.

  (The malicious voice in the back of his mind whispers that Adam is a researcher; of course he’d want to learn more about the kid who came back from the dead. Maybe all Beck is to Adam is an experiment, something to be observed…)

  Adam looks hesitant, hovering in the doorway like he doesn’t quite know what to do. “Are you…feeling better?”

  Beck opens his mouth to speak and lets out an animalistic moan instead.

  Oh God, he’s a mess. He’s a total mess. Unable to look at Adam, he presses his face in his hands as the waterworks start up all over again. He can’t face him (or anyone, but especially him) when he’s so pathetic.