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.
* * *
At one end of the cavernous hall was the signing area, a cattle yard of stanchions guiding hundreds of people toward a long row of authors. Giant numbers hung above each aisle, lending a stamp of order to the industrial-size muddle of the crowds.
Debut author Darcy Patel, signing her novel Afterworlds, had been assigned aisle 17. She approached the signing area in the tow of Rhea, who had kindly stuffed the duffel bag full of free books into the nether regions of the Paradox booth. Darcy was wondering how many Paradox bags she could scam.
“There are self-pubbed romance writers on both sides of you,” Rhea was saying. “They’ll have long lines, but nothing crazy. You were supposed to be next to this former child actor signing his self-help book, but we managed to get you moved.”
“Because his huge line would embarrass me?” Darcy asked.
Rhea shook her head. “We just don’t like movie stars next to our authors. It’s distracting. Their heads are too big!”
She led Darcy behind a giant black curtain, into the setup area for the signings. Boxes were piled everywhere, and a fully loaded forklift whirred past as they made their way toward the rear entrance to aisle 17. Darcy was wearing the cocktail dress her mother had given her on that first day in Manhattan. The dress had always brought her luck, but it felt out of place here among the freight and scurry of backstage.
“Good news: your books made it.” Rhea pointed at a stack of boxes covered with Paradox logos and the words “Afterworlds—Patel.” “What kind of pen do you sign with?”
“Um.” Darcy tried to remember the sage advice that Standerson had given her last year. “Uni-Ball . . . something?”
“Vision Elite? Jetstream? I prefer Bic Triumphs.” Rhea was rummaging in her bag. “Take three of each, and a Sharpie for casts, show bags, and body parts.”
“Thank you.” Darcy meekly accepted the handful of pens.
“We’ve got five boxes to get through. That’s a hundred copies, give or take.” Rhea knelt and slid a box cutter down a seam of tape. The folds leaped open, revealing the familiar cover, which now wore both Kiralee’s and Oscar Lassiter’s blurbs.
Darcy knelt beside Rhea. A single advanced copy had arrived at apartment 4E a week ago, but it was staggering and wonderful to see her novel in quantity. The real books didn’t come out until September 23, four whole months from now, but these advanced copies were somehow more precious. Each was marked: NOT FOR SALE.
“A hundred of them?”
“Yep. That’s about thirty seconds per customer.”
Darcy looked at Rhea. “Am I really going to have that many people? I mean, who’s heard of me?”
“A ton of people downloaded the galley. There’s buzz.” Rhea smiled. “And these are free, after all.”
Darcy swallowed. What if you gave away your books for nothing, and still nobody came?
The appointed time arrived, and Darcy found herself in front of the black curtain, perched on an unusually high chair behind a signing table. Rhea was at her side, stacking up copies of Afterworlds, and in front of Darcy stretched a line of people who actually wanted her signature.
But it wasn’t a very long line—maybe twenty-five people. Not a hundred, surely.
“Ready to go?” Rhea asked, and Darcy nodded dumbly.
* * *
The strange thing was, a lot of them had already read Afterworlds.
“I downloaded that galley the first day,” said a librarian from Wisconsin. “My teens just love anything with terrorism. Can you sign it, ‘Congratulations Contest Winner’?”
“Great first chapter,” said a bookstore owner from Maine. “But I was hoping there’d be more about the death cult. Those cults are a real problem, you know?”
“I love ghost romances,” said a blogger from Brooklyn. “Lizzie should have got with that FBI agent, especially after he died. Which was kind of her fault.”
There were more comments and suggestions, and much polite praise. But already the reactions were so varied, and sometimes a little strange.
“There’s a sequel, right?” asked a bookseller from Texas. “Lizzie and Mindy should start solving other people’s murders. It would be so cute.”
Darcy smiled and nodded at everything that was said to her, signing her name with the new autograph she’d been practicing all week. The D was huge and sweeping, sprawling across the full title page, swelling with pride.
But signing here in this convention hall somehow had the feel of business, with none of the glamour, intensity, or love of Standerson’s events. Not that Darcy had earned such adulation yet, but part of her was impatient for actual teenagers to start reading her novel. These were gatekeepers. She wanted zealots.
And there weren’t enough of them. Only twenty minutes into Darcy’s hour, the line trickled down to nothing. She tried to keep the last man talking, but he hadn’t even wanted a dedication, only a signature, and soon he was gone. For an uncomfortable moment Darcy and Rhea stared at each other, saying nothing.
“Crap. Should I just sneak away?”
“Of course not! Just don’t sign so fast. More people will show up. They’ll drift over from the other aisles.” Rhea smiled. “In fact, here’s two more.”
It was two of Darcy’s sister debs, Annie and Ashley. They wore matching T-shirts emblazoned: 2014!
“Hey,” Darcy called as they approached. “Sister debs!”
The smile crumpled on Ashley’s face. “My book got bumped till next spring. I’m not really your sister deb anymore.”
Annie put a comforting arm around her. “I told you, you can still wear the shirt.”
“I’m so sorry,” Darcy said. “But thanks for sending me Blood Red World. I loved how complicated the politics were. And those make-out scenes on Mars! Would low gravity really work that way?”
“I
hope so.” Ashley was staring at Darcy’s pile of books. “How was your signing? You must have been mobbed!”
“Mildly,” Darcy said. “But everyone was really nice.”
“Your cover’s so great,” Annie said, picking up a copy of Afterworlds. “I love the whole roiling smoke thing!”
“Teardrops are the new black,” Ashley added.
“Thanks.” Darcy wondered if their covers were out. She hadn’t kept up with any cover releases in the last two months, nor had she ever pursued the promised interviews with Annie, or put anything else on her Tumblr. She was a bad sister deb, and felt a sudden need to make up for it. So she said, “I’m nineteen, by the way.”
“That was my guess!” Ashley began a dance. “Score!”
She looked so happy that Darcy didn’t point out that she had been eighteen back when the sister debs had laid their bets. Instead, she signed their copies of Afterworlds.
As they headed off, Kiralee Taylor and Oscar Lassiter came winding through the empty corral of stanchions.
“I’ve been told there’s some sort of Hindu death-god book available here?” Kiralee called. “Can such a thing be true?”
Darcy laughed. She hadn’t seen Kiralee in person since the blurb had been bestowed. “Very true, and it’s free for famous authors!”
“Having fun?” Oscar asked.
“I was. Then business tapered off.”
“More will come,” said Kiralee. “For the moment, you’ve got some stiff competition down the way.”
“You mean Big Head?” Rhea frowned. “My sister and I always hated his show.”
“Not him,” Kiralee said. She was wearing a mysterious smile. “And don’t worry, I’ve tweeted your august presence. Prepare to be positively swamped.”
Rhea slid Darcy a book, already opened to the full title page. For a moment, Darcy froze, the Uni-Ball Vision Elite a thick and clumsy thing in her hand.
“K-I-R—” Kiralee began.
“Hush!” Oscar said. “She’s thinking.”
This was only partly true. There was a glimmer of cognition in Darcy’s head, which might have been translated as, Oh shit, I’m signing a book for Kiralee Taylor. But really it was nothing but a buzzing in her ears.
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