Hereafter

  “You’re wrong about that,” he said offhandedly.

  “Oh? And what exactly am I wrong about?”

  “About the loneliness of this place. It’s meant to be shared, you know.”

  “By whom?”

  “My masters have always wanted two ghosts to work together, pulling new souls into this world.”

  “Two ghosts?” I raised one eyebrow and looked meaningfully around us at the otherwise empty forest. I knew Eli wanted me to join him, but it struck me now that he had spent an awful lot of time on the job without help.

  A strange look passed over Eli’s face, one I couldn’t quite place. A number of emotions might have explained that look: defiance, arrogance . . . and even a little bit of fear. Before I could decide whether it was one of those or all of them, Eli gave a curt reply.

  “I had a mentor once. And now I don’t.”

  He turned away quickly, so that I couldn’t read his expression. Obviously, he meant to end this topic of conversation, and fast. I blinked back, startled by this evasion.

  “Um . . . where’s your mentor now, Eli?”

  With his face still turned away from me, Eli shrugged. “Gone. And that’s that.”

  I could sense there was more to it—much more. I had the sudden, overwhelming urge to find out what had happened to Eli’s former mentor; if I had to guess, I’d have bet it wasn’t anything pleasant. I opened my mouth to push the issue, but Eli’s dismissive wave stopped me.

  “I’m not going to talk about the time when I played apprentice, Amelia, so don’t bother to ask. What I’m more interested in is the subject of my own apprentice.”

  “Oh, and I’m the current winner of that prize, right?” I twisted my mouth disdainfully to show Eli exactly what I thought of that honor.

  “Actually,” Eli said, giving me another strange look, “you weren’t the first helper I chose out of the souls I’d brought to this world.”

  “Huh?” I asked. “Who are you talking about?”

  His face changed then, shifting from smugness to some other expression, one I couldn’t identify at first. Then it struck me—Eli was sad. Not snide or condescending, or even angry. Just sad.

  Slowly, he walked over to a low-lying tree branch—one that curved up, looped around, and then extended into the gray air like a misshapen J—and sat down on the makeshift bench it created. He removed his hands from his pockets and placed his palms on his knees. When he spoke again, he stared at a fixed point in the moss beneath his feet.

  “Melissa.” He said the name tenderly, mournfully, as if each of its three syllables was precious.

  “Who’s Melissa?”

  “She is . . . was . . . my first real taste of life after death.”

  Eli’s head suddenly jerked upward. He caught my gaze and held it, his own eyes glowing with a near-violent intensity. I felt as though I were hypnotized by the power of that stare. Eli didn’t even blink when I folded my legs beneath me and sat down on the moss in front of him.

  “The best night of my death,” Eli whispered, still staring hard at me, “I stood on the bridge, preparing to collect a soul. Just business as usual; all I had to do was wait for her to fall off of it.”

  I made a small choking sound, but Eli didn’t seem to hear me.

  “While I waited, I watched her,” he went on. “She was beautiful, with bright auburn hair that floated around her in a halo. She looked like an angel set on fire. I tried to reach out to touch her, but of course I couldn’t yet. I was dead, and she was still living.

  “Part of my mission consisted of listening, waiting until her heart thudded to a stop and then pulling her soul from the river so I could take her to the darkness. But the moment before she fell, I caught a glimpse of her eyes. They were green, and as bright as yours. She looked straight at me, and I could have sworn she saw me, even before she’d died. At that moment I was hers. Immediately and completely.”

  Eli paused for a moment, studying my face—for what, I wasn’t sure. Then he went back to staring at the ground, the faraway look of remembrance in his eyes as he spoke.

  “I had to have her. I had to. After she died, I pulled her from the river and begged my masters to let me keep her as an assistant. To my surprise, they agreed.

  “Because I’d woken her immediately after her death, the girl never experienced the fog like you and I did. She retained all of her memories of life, and seemed more than willing to share them with me. She told me her name was Melissa and the year was 1987. In her life, Melissa had been a student, studying nursing at that little college off of the highway. And although she had died violently, she was still . . . cheerful. Sometimes joyful even.

  “She was everything I wanted in a companion: smart, beautiful, full of fire. I loved her immediately.

  “But, maybe because of her nature, Melissa quickly grew unhappy with our existence. Unlike you, I didn’t exactly give her my detailed job description. Still, it wasn’t long before she realized what my mission consisted of and expressed her distaste for it.

  “For a few weeks she tried to convince me to give it up—to let go of my power and set all my followers free. When she saw that approach wasn’t working, she began to disappear for days at a time, materializing away and then reappearing with little explanation for her activity.

  “Then one autumn morning less than a year after her death, she came back to me looking . . . different. Her skin still glowed like ours; but it was brighter, warmer. Like real fire . . .”

  Eli trailed off, frowning at the moss across which he absently raked his shoe. Small sparks of ice drifted up in the air and hung there, stirred up by his feet. I waited for almost a full minute for Eli to go on, but my impatience eventually outweighed my empathy.

  “What did she say to you then?” I pressed.

  He shook his head. “She told me I couldn’t trap souls in darkness for eternity. She said the dead are meant to decide for themselves where they go. She said that, by forcing them into this world to serve me, I wasn’t helping them at all. I was supposed to let the newly dead wander lost, because only after they wake up from the fog should they choose which of the afterworlds they wanted to occupy.”

  “Afterworlds?” I breathed. “What other worlds are there?”

  Eli shrugged, not fooling me with his forced nonchalance. “According to Melissa, she’d been someplace . . . else. Better. She asked me to go with her, but I refused. There’s too much for me here. I’m too important. I’m obeyed here.”

  The prideful glint returned to his eyes, sparkling with an almost unnerving intensity. I could read his thoughts perfectly in those eyes: Eli was obsessed with this place. He would do anything his masters asked, capture and command any soul, to retain his supposed power.

  “What happened to Melissa after that?” I asked carefully.

  Eli sneered. “She vanished for the last time. I haven’t seen her since, not that I’d want to.”

  As he spat out the final words, his lips curled into a snarl. He now looked savage, almost feral. But I saw human emotions skirting the edges of his mouth and his eyes. Buried beneath his sneer were desolation and deep, profound loneliness.

  Lost in thought, I ran my fingertips in circles on the strange moss beneath me. So many details from Eli’s story were important. So many things cast light upon what I was, and what kind of choices I had.

  But another aspect of his story saddened me—the part of it that had absolutely nothing to do with me. Because, however much I might dislike him, I couldn’t ignore an important theme in his narrative: despite Eli’s fervor for this world and its dark imperative, he didn’t want to be alone.

  Seeing the misery in his face, I felt another surge of pity for him. I felt the strangest compulsion to help him, to pull him out of his mood, so I asked the only diversionary question I could think of.

  “You kind of implied that you moved on after Melissa disappeared for the last time. So, what did you do next?”

  His eyes flitted up to mine, and
the ghost of his old smirk twitched at the corners of his lips.

  “Well, I found myself another pretty assistant.”

  “Me, right?”

  Eli nodded slowly, still smirking.

  “So, what did you do: find me after I died and decide you wanted me to help you?”

  “No, Amelia.” His grin widened into something foreign and slightly wild. “I choose you before you died.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  .....................................................................

  Chapter

  Twenty-One

  I felt my vision narrow to a black pinpoint and then expand uncomfortably.

  “You were there when I died?”

  Eli moved suddenly, lurching off the tree branch toward me. His eyes were fierce, once again filled with that fervor. He spoke in a dizzying rush of words.

  “I was, Amelia. I was there when you died, but I didn’t wake you up like I did Melissa. I didn’t even take you into the darkness like I do all the other souls. Don’t you see what that means? Don’t you see what I’ve done for you? I let you escape for a while. I allowed you your freedom. And you owe me for it.”

  Eli grasped for my hand, but I yanked it out of his reach. I couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. Yet, somehow, I forced the words from my lips.

  “What do you mean, you were ‘there’? How . . . how long were you there?”

  “Just like with Melissa, I was there even before you fell,” he said with a tender smile that made me go cold. “I saw you hit the water and go unconscious. I saw your eyes open and saw you struggle against the current. And later I heard your heart stop. After the last beat, though, I left. I couldn’t let you see me. I had to materialize somewhere else so your death would have meaning.”

  “Meaning? What meaning?” I stared at him, enthralled and horrified.

  “Obviously, something went wrong with Melissa, otherwise I’d still have her. I had to behave differently with you in order to keep you. If I woke you up immediately, like I did with Melissa, then you might miss the significance of my mercy in letting you be my assistant; you’d have remembered your life, maybe even missed it. So you had to experience the fog to truly appreciate when I brought you out of it.”

  The image of Joshua’s face flashed into my mind again.

  “But you didn’t bring me out of it,” I whispered.

  Eli smiled widely, his expression suddenly animated. “No, I didn’t. I didn’t even need to. You did it yourself.”

  I shook my head, uncomprehending.

  “I was on High Bridge last week, waiting for a new soul to acquire,” Eli explained, “when I saw you in the river beneath me. Just as a car approached, you started to flail, distracting the driver so I could spook him into the water.”

  I nearly gagged.

  Joshua. Eli was talking about Joshua, and his car accident.

  “You . . . you did what?” I finally managed to gasp.

  “No, we did something. Together,” Eli said with an excited gleam in his eyes. “Like a team. I mean, we obviously weren’t successful, since I saw the boy make it out of the water. But even so, I watched you follow him, still trying to go in for the kill.”

  Eli beamed as if his misinterpretation of my actions actually made him proud of me. “You were a natural, Amelia. A perfect lure.”

  My head swam, and I had the strangest suspicion that I might just pass out if I didn’t keep it together.

  So . . . what? Eli thought I’d intentionally lured Joshua off High Bridge when I was really just reliving my death in the river? And then, while encouraging Joshua to swim for safety, Eli thought I’d actually been exhibiting some innate signs of evil?

  I had to remind myself to focus on the most important detail of this revelation: all along, the real watcher—the real villian—had been Eli himself.

  The thought of Eli playing an active role in Joshua’s accident made me reimagine my own death scene, inserting Eli’s figure above the greenish black swells of the river. Eli, watching me choke and struggle, grinning his arrogant grin. Perhaps a crowd of black shapes at the periphery, watching him watch me.

  The reimagining made my death seem even more horrible, if that were possible. But really, I shouldn’t have been surprised, considering what he’d just told me about his role in Melissa’s death.

  “You said . . . you s-saw my death too,” I stuttered, swallowing back the great wave of rage that threatened to pour out of me. I had to. It was the only way I could learn about my death, from the only person—the only creature—who had witnessed it. “Did I jump, like you did? Or did I fall, like Melissa?”

  He raised one pale eyebrow. “You don’t remember?”

  I simply shook my head.

  Unexpectedly, Eli sat back upon the curve of the tree. The hint of fanaticism left his eyes, and the familiar smirk crawled across his face. Now I could see the expression for what it really was: the look of someone who believes he holds all the cards.

  “Maybe I’ll tell you about your death someday,” he said. He leaned forward and traced his narrow fingers across the air above my cheek. “But I want that to remain a mystery for now. So you’ll understand how much you need me.”

  I shuddered and then jerked away as if he’d tried to touch me with a branding iron.

  “I’ll never ‘need’ you again, Eli,” I growled.

  Eli’s smirk vanished. “What do you mean, Amelia? We’ve been called together. We’re fated.”

  “We. Are. Not. Fated.” I pronounced each word carefully, individually, so he couldn’t miss my meaning.

  “But I . . . I saved you,” he sputtered.

  That one word—“saved”—demolished whatever small amount of self-control had been holding back my fury. I flattened my hands against the ground and shoved myself up into a standing position.

  “Saved me?” I screamed. “You didn’t save me! You did the exact opposite of saving. I know for a fact that you could have helped me. You could have done something before my heart stopped. But you didn’t. You let me die.”

  Eli started to speak, but I went on, furious and loud.

  “I don’t care if it was part of your supposed ‘mission.’ Because that’s not all you did to me. Even after your sick part in my death, you didn’t stop there. You’ve been waiting the whole time I wandered lost and scared, ready to pounce on me. All because your masters told you I could be yours?”

  “Amelia, I—”

  “And I bet you didn’t try to ‘save’ my father, did you?” I cut him off with a growl, my rage growing. “I bet you threw him into this forest with all your other victims.”

  Eli had the audacity to look confused. “Your father?”

  “Spare me.” I laughed. “You can’t pretend to be innocent any longer. And I couldn’t care less about whatever grand plans you had for our future. Oh, pardon me—my future. Whatever your plans are, they have nothing to do with my future at all.”

  “Our future,” he snarled, the tenderness now absent from his voice.

  “No. My future.”

  It was now Eli’s turn to jump to his feet.

  “You’re mine!” he shouted into my face. His hand shook violently as he reached for me, but I took two quick steps backward.

  I didn’t even take a last look at him before I spun around on my bare heel and ran into the woods. I had no idea where my feet led me, nor did I care. I only cared that my feet slid across the icy purple moss with a speed they’d never shown before.

  Unfortunately, no matter how fast or how far I ran, the sinister landscape around me never seemed to change. I kept passing what looked like the same mangled shrubs, the same glittering trees.

  As I ran, I saw other things too: dark shapes in the forest, flitting among the trunks and branches like wild animals following my path. Maybe I was so scared I’d begun to hallucinate, but I could swear the shapes had faces. Human faces, watching me run through the woo
ds but not moving to stop me.

  Were these the lost souls, biding their time until Eli gave them the order to attack? Was my father among them, watching me too? Part of me wanted to stop and hunt for him, but another part kept my legs moving, dragging me forward in terror.

  Then, at the moment I was about to give in to full panic, the gray began to shimmer and shift. Like some massive drape over a theater set, the dark netherworld floated and fell away until I stood, panting, in the middle of the sun-filled woods of the living world.

  Something about a hundred yards ahead caught my eye. I squinted and realized it was the river, glinting orange in what looked to be the late-afternoon sun.

  I started running again, moving as though my very existence depended upon my speed. When I crested the hill above the river and stepped onto the asphalt of High Bridge Road, I paused only long enough to say a prayer.

  “Please, God,” I begged aloud. “If you like me at all, please, please, show me the way back to the Mayhews’ house. I could really use the help.”

  I nodded once for an amen and then tore off again down the road.

  My sense of direction would be the death of me. Metaphorically, at least.

  By sunset I’d made one too many wrong turns, and my confidence unraveled a little more with each inch the sun dipped below the horizon.

  At last, at the end of what felt like the hundredth road, I saw the front porch of an unmistakable house. I raced down its driveway toward the backyard, my feet flying over gravel. But as I left the gravel and crossed onto the grass, I found the Mayhews’ backyard empty and dark. All the lanterns, now unlit, looked gray in the night. No light shined from the back windows of the house, nor did Joshua wait for me on the darkened porch. I slumped against the trunk of a cottonwood, exhausted and defeated.

  “Amelia?”

  The hushed voice came from somewhere farther back into the yard, away from the porch.

  “Joshua?” I whispered. I heard a tiny click, and a small circle of light appeared more than fifty feet behind the house. Within the circle was Joshua, standing in the entrance of the gazebo I’d noticed the first night he’d brought me here.