Queen of the Dead

  Dogs barked, and I tripped repeatedly over garden hoses, kids’ toys, and lawn chairs. But I stayed on my feet and kept moving. The historical society apparently forbade fences in this part of town, thank God.

  After about six blocks, I had to stop. I bent in half in the side yard of a Victorian monstrosity that had boarded-up windows, trying to breathe without throwing up. The cuts on my back from my earlier encounter with Mrs. Ruiz throbbed and burned.

  What was Mina doing?

  Leaving you to fend for yourself now that she has what she needed. Duh. The Alona-like voice in my head was dismissive.

  I tried to listen for the sound of anyone behind me, but I couldn’t hear anything over the pounding of my heart and my panicked panting for air.

  Apparently, my arrangement with Mina, what there’d been of it, was now over.

  Never trust a mysterious girl who shows up in your room in the middle of the night, no matter how much you may or may not have in common. It seemed a simple—and obvious—conclusion now, standing here, alone, in the dark, miles from home.

  I waited another long few moments, still catching mybreath and trying to pull together my thoughts. The dogs in the neighborhood quieted down, and I didn’t hear sirens.

  Not this time. Either they’d caught Mina or given up looking for me.

  She’d lied about giving me a way to contact the Order. Which, now that I thought about it, only made sense.

  The version of Alona in my head made another disdainful noise. Of course.

  Mina had risked a lot to pass this test, and would she really chance it on me, a stranger, keeping his promise to keep his mouth shut?

  Crap. Alona would have seen that coming a mile away. She schemed like this in her sleep…or whatever it was she did now.

  Hell, for all I knew, Mina had lied about everything, including the existence of the Order. But she belonged, or wanted to belong, to something. That much was clear. And her conviction about serving the living and not the dead had certainly seemed genuine enough. Then again, maybe I wasn’t the best judge of sincerity at the moment.

  Lucky for me, I had one very long walk back to my house to begin sorting out fiction from possible fact.

  I was used to seeing Will in all sorts of disarray first thing in the morning. Hair standing up, covers in a tangle, arms flopped wide, eyes half-open, and a grumpy expression. Very grumpy, usually. (He is not a morning person. I had never had that luxury in life—zero-hour gym waits for no woman—and didn’t now, either. I couldn’t have been killed on my way out to lunch?)

  This morning, however, was different.

  He was laying facedown on the bed, on top of the covers, fully dressed, Chucks still on with fresh grass clippings all over them. In short, nothing like how I’d left him last night.

  It was enough to stop me in my tracks, distracting me momentarily from my goal of getting him up and moving immediately.

  “What happened to you?” I asked.

  He jumped a little, like the sound of my voice had startled him, and then groaned in response without lifting his head.

  “What time is it?” he muttered.

  I rolled my eyes, even though he couldn’t see me. Like I’d suddenly start showing up at noon. “What time do you think it is?”

  He shifted onto his back and raised his hand to block the light coming in the window. “Too early.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. Something had happened. “Did Liesel come here last night? Because I told her—”

  “What? Liesel? No.” With an effort, he managed to push himself up into a sitting position. “I’m fine. I just need to wake up.”

  “You look like you barely slept.” I might have taken credit for my exemplary make-out skills, except he’d also been wearing fewer clothes the last time I’d seen him.

  His pale blue gaze, bloodshot around the edges, met mine. “It’s nothing. Just…I heard a noise outside last night.”

  “So you got dressed to go check it out and forgot to get undressed when you came back in?” I asked in disbelief.

  “Something like that.” He rubbed his face with his hands.

  Wait a minute…“Did Erickson stop by?” I demanded. The strain of tuning out spirits for all the years before I’d come along had given Will a couple of bad habits I hadn’t been able to break him of yet. The first was his tendency to stick his earbuds in whenever he was being pissy and didn’t want to hear what I had to say. The second was his occasional “smoke away your troubles” attitude when his friend Erickson was around, which, thankfully, wasn’t all that often. I mean, whatever, but after watching my mother lose herself in the bottle in an attempt to forget, I was a little leery about seeing someone else, who I might also care about a little bit, showing some of the same tendencies every once in a while.

  “No, he’s in California, remember?” Will stood up slowly, like he ached all over, and shuffled to his closet. Why, I don’t know, since half his wardrobe still needed to be put away after its most recent trip through the laundry and stood in piles on his desk, as usual.

  I moved around the bed to follow him. “You just seem out of it,” I said with a frown.

  “I didn’t sleep well.” He raked a hand through the mostly empty hangers, making a loud, crashing racket. “What’s going on?”

  I frowned. Something was still not right here, but I could feel time slipping away from me. I’d already lost all of last night, and every minute that passed, more of my life was being pitched to the foot of the driveway in a Hefty bag, and my dad was growing more and more attached to Gigi’s replacement spawn.

  “I need you to talk to my parents,” I said.

  He went very still. “What happened? Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah, it’s fine. They’re just being dumb, and I want to remind them I used to exist,” was what I intended to say in a very cool, nonchalant voice.

  But what came out was, “She threw away my Homecoming Queen sash!” and I could barely squeeze that out over the unexpected lump in my throat. Crap. I’d thought I was past the point of being upset about it…at least in front of someone else.

  Will turned around. “She did what?”

  That he took it so seriously (though, it might have been more that he didn’t quite understand what I’d said) broke whatever little bit of restraint I had left and tears leaked out…again. Damn it.

  He looked alarmed. “It’s okay.” He reached out and laid a hand on my shoulder hesitantly. I leaned into his touch, and he wrapped his arms around me.

  He smelled faintly of outside, a little of sweat, and something else, almost like cinnamon but not quite. It made my nose itch like a trapped sneeze. Which was annoying, to say the least. But I wasn’t about to move away from this unexpected bit of comfort.

  “Your mom did this? Threw your sash away?” he asked. I could feel his voice in his chest against my cheek. He was evidently still trying to piece together what I’d said to him.

  “Well, it wasn’t the whole thing,” I said, trying to catch my breath between sobs. “Just this little scrap that I cut off before I had to give it back. No one gets to keep the sash.” And now even the bit of it I’d had was gone. A fresh wave of tears started.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured, stroking my hair, which felt so good it was almost worth losing some—not all, though—of my treasured possessions. “What else?”

  “What else did she throw away? Like, everything that wasn’t nailed down.”

  “No, I mean, did something else happen?”

  I pulled back to look up at him with a frown. “Is that not enough?”

  “Yes,” he answered quickly. “Of course. I just thought—”

  “My dad is having a baby.” I sniffed. “Not him directly, of course. My step-Mothra.”

  “Step-Mothra?” he asked, and I could hear the repressed laugh in his voice.

  I nodded against his shirt. “Because she swoops in and destroys everything.”

  He was quiet for a long moment. Then he s
aid, “You do know that in some of the movies Mothra is actually kind of the hero, right?”

  I jerked away from him. “So not the point.”

  “Okay, okay.” He held up his hands in defense. “You’re right.”

  Slightly mollified, I allowed him to pull me close again and resume that soothing stroking of my hair. “Gigi is her name. My stepmother, I mean. And she’s pregnant.” The last word escaped like an exhausted sigh.

  “I would think that might be a good thing,” Will said cautiously.

  “You’d think so, maybe, if Gigi wasn’t this total bitch, and if you didn’t know that my dad always used to tell her he didn’t need more kids because he had me. And now he doesn’t have me anymore.”

  “Alona, I’m sure—”

  “He took the ultrasound picture and covered up my photo with it.” The words came out in a humiliating rush, and I buried my face against his shoulder so there wasn’t even a chance of meeting his gaze. I didn’t get into the whole thing about how mine was—or used to be—the only photo in his office. It was just too sad and pathetic.

  His fingers stopped in my hair. “You know they still love you. They always will, no matter how many rooms they clean out or kids they have.”

  Yeah, right. He didn’t know my parents. “So, you’ll talk to them?” I asked.

  He stiffened.

  “I don’t mean you have to talk to them directly.” He hated the face-to-face missions. I could be flexible, though. “Just send them a letter or whatever, like we usually—”

  “Is your mom drinking again?” he asked quietly.

  “What?” I pulled back to look up at him. His expression was too serious. It sent a spike of inexplicable fear through me. “No. Not that I know of.”

  “And your dad is happy?

  “Only because he doesn’t know,” I argued. “He probably thinks I’m off learning how to play the harp or relaxing on a cloud or something.” We have the most ridiculous ideas of the afterlife.

  He let me go and turned to his closet again. But he didn’t take anything out, just stared into like it held answers to questions I didn’t even know.

  “What is your problem?” I demanded. This wasn’t anything different than what we did for other people every single day.

  “How will it help them?” he asked.

  “What?” I asked, certain I’d heard him wrong.

  “If they’re finally getting to a point where they can move on and—”

  “Finally? It’s only been two months!”

  He faced me, his expression tight with frustration. “And what if it makes it worse for them? What if your mom falls off the wagon because she feels guilty about you still being here, or what if your dad decides he can’t love this new kid as much because it might hurt your feelings? Then what? How many people end up worse off than they were before?”

  I resisted the urge to scream, “So?” because I didn’t really want any of those things to happen, but some acknowledgment that I’d been there, that I’d mattered, would have been nice. Instead, it felt like everyone was better off without me. And Will was just not getting it.

  “Since when do we even worry about this?” I demanded. “How many letters and phone calls and whatever else have we done without even thinking about the people on the receiving end?”

  He flinched. “Maybe we should have,” he said.

  “No,” I said with exaggerated patience. “Our job is not to worry about the living. They can still change things for themselves. It’s the rest of us who need help.”

  “Says who?” he argued. “The light? You can’t even tell me for sure what happened while you were gone, can you?”

  I gaped at him. “Who are you? Since when do you even think like this? It’s like you transformed overnight into some kind of—”

  I stopped. Pieces tumbled and clicked in my brain. Will, in bed and happy when I left. Will, dressed and crazy when I came back this morning, and smelling like some kind of night time adventure and unfamiliar spicy-girlie scent, and asking questions about my very purpose here, his purpose, our work together.

  “Oh.” The word escaped involuntarily, more like a rush of air to accompany the socked-in-the-gut sensation I was currently feeling.

  His eyes widened, and he knew right then. He knew that I knew.

  “You met up with her again, didn’t you?” I asked. Just saying the words felt like bleeding.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” he said quickly. “She found me. She came in my window and—”

  I shook my head. Of course. Stupid, Alona. A total beginner’s mistake. I’d underestimated my enemy. I’d thought I wouldn’t have to worry about him here at home, just when we were out and about together. She didn’t know his name or his address. But it occurred to me now she could have gotten his name from any number of spirits around town. Will was relatively famous, at least among the dead-but-not-quite-gone community. I wasn’t used to there being other people around with access to that particular population.

  After that, it would just be a simple matter of Googling him on her phone or even going old-school and finding an actual phone book. The Killians were probably listed, and I didn’t think there were enough to make it a very long task to find the right one.

  I stepped backed from him slowly, not sure what I was going to do, just that I couldn’t stand this close to him right now.

  “It wasn’t like that,” he insisted, following me. “She needed my help to box Mrs. Ruiz.”

  I froze. “Box Mrs. Ruiz?”

  Color rose in his pale cheeks. “She wasn’t gone. She was too powerful for the disruptor. So we…contained her, so she wouldn’t hurt anyone again.”

  “And then?” I asked with a calm I did not feel.

  “Then what?”

  “And then what did you do with Mrs. Ruiz?”

  He grimaced. “Mina took her. The boxes, I mean. The pieces of…never mind.”

  I felt like I was going to be sick.

  As someone who’d been knocked around by that particular spirit, I could fully understand the motivation behind stopping Mrs. Ruiz, but to just give a spirit over to someone he didn’t know? Someone who might or might not—and I was leaning toward the latter—share the same concerns about Mrs. Ruiz’s fate. Someone who boxed her…in pieces? Not that she was any great or wonderful person, but I didn’t think it was our decision as to who gets to go to the light and who’s trapped in some kind of box. How would we know where to draw the line? More importantly, where would he draw it?

  And what about me? All that about not wanting to change things, about not wanting to do this with anyone but me?

  What if he decided I belonged in a box?

  Will stepped toward me, and I backed up immediately, my hands up in front of me, like he might lash out at me. “I don’t know you,” I said.

  He paled. “I didn’t…she didn’t…we just talked. She said she could tell me more about people like me. But it turned out she was just using me to locate Mrs. Ruiz. Once she had Ruiz, she left.”

  But she would be back. Or, he wouldn’t stop until hefound her. She’d almost guaranteed that just by leaving. I could tell already.

  “Now I don’t know how much of it was a lie and how much of it was—”

  “Wait.” I couldn’t believe this. “Are you actually expecting me to feel sorry for you?”

  “She lied, but I don’t know—”

  “So did you.”

  “No,” he said emphatically, shaking his head. “No, I wasn’t trying to change anything. I just wanted to know more about who I am, what I’m supposed to be doing.”

  “You know what you’re supposed to be doing!” Even I could hear the shrill-sounding panic in my voice.

  He just looked at me, and through the blurry veil of tears I refused to shed, I could see he wasn’t so sure anymore. Whatever she’d said to him last night, it had planted a seed of doubt in his mind. And that was more than enough to ruin everything.

  He wasn’t going to h
elp me. He might not help any of us anymore. If he had Mina the Magnificent with all her little toys, he wouldn’t need to. And he wouldn’t need me.

  I angled away from him, narrowly avoiding the edge of the desk, searching for the place where that field around him would give out and I could pass through the wall. I needed to get out of here before I started crying.

  “Alona,” he said. “Please don’t.”

  I ignored him and kept going.

  He sighed. “I’m not saying I’m going to stop what we’re doing, just that maybe we need to think about it from another perspective.”

  “The living perspective,” I said.

  He cleared his throat. “Yeah.” His gaze pleaded with me to understand.

  Outside, I heard the distinctive rumble-thump of a garbage truck making its rounds in the neighborhood. It was trash day in Groundsboro. If my mother had been motivated enough to drag all those bags down from my room to the curb, my whole life was about to disappear into a landfill forever.

  “I just need time to think about all of this,” he said.

  I nodded fiercely. “I guarantee you’re going to have a lot of time to think and a lot more stuff to think about.” In less than a day, I’d been crapped on by just about everyone who’d ever claimed to care about me. So, it was going to take a lot more than a heartfelt plea for understanding to change things now, and I wasn’t about to wait for whatever that might be. No, I was done with waiting. My afterlife was in my hands now.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked, looking alarmed.

  He knew me too well. Good.

  “It means that since I’m pretty sure I don’t meet your definition of ‘important,’ as in ‘living,’ it’s none of your damn business.” Then I turned and walked through the wall.

  If nothing else, you have to love being dead for the dramatic exits.

  There’s always that one thing, right? A particular action thatis your own personal line in the sand. The nuclear threat youkeep in your back pocket, never even mentioning it because itwill escalate any conflict beyond the chance of reconciliation.