A shudder went through the sand beneath me, but I didn’t startle. I calmly breathed in the smell of gun smoke, and let the squeak of running shoes on tile pass over me. The tear-shaped scar on my cheek began to pulse.
I knew what to say next: “Can you get to a safe location?”
The changes came fast—the flat and metallic taste in the air, the silence of the wind, the sudden cold wrapped around my heart.
When I opened my eyes again, color had been sucked out of the world. The sky was huge overhead, as gray as polished gunmetal. There was no sun, only a scattering of red stars, like eyes peering down. Flowing rivers of black oil snaked among the dunes, the air above them wavering with heat. A sugary smell washed over me, sweeter than boiling maple syrup. The dark rivers below were rippling and shivering like a live thing, and my hands and arms were shining.
“Yamaraj,” I whispered. It was the first time I’d said his name out loud, but it felt natural in my mouth. Like a word from a language I’d learned a long time ago and only half forgotten.
A shiver went through me, and my grip on this gray place slipped a little. Back in the airport, panic had almost thrown me out. But this time it was excitement, a current that ran along my skin.
I closed my eyes again, shutting out the huge gray sky. I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for, but then another shift passed through the air. The scents of blood and gun smoke changed to something sharper, like a burning field of black pepper. And then a wave of heat . . .
“Elizabeth,” came his voice, and the cold inside me began to fade a little.
I opened my eyes and Yamaraj stood there, halfway up the dune, a dark figure against the white sand.
I didn’t know what to say at first. “Hello” seemed insufficient, ridiculous.
“It worked, didn’t it?” I managed. “This is real.”
He took a long, careful look at me, until a smile crossed his lips. “Very real, Lizzie.”
Him saying my nickname—my real name—made the edges of my vision pulse again with color, as if the daylight world were trying to break through.
Yamaraj was as beautiful as I remembered. He still shone, as if lit by the missing sun. He climbed the dune and knelt a few steps from where I sat.
“I’m impressed.” His voice was soft, serious.
“What do you mean?”
He spread his hands at the desert around us, the gray sky. “You crossed over on your own. You called me, and so soon.”
I shrugged, trying to look casual. But at my sides, my palms had closed around cool fistfuls of sand. “You said I could.”
“I said it would be better not to believe, Lizzie. Safer too.”
“It’s not like I had a choice.” With Yamaraj this close to me, the sharp, cold place inside had softened, and the words came easier. “There was a ghost in the hospital, a little boy. Which means I can see spirits now. Did you know that was going to happen to me?”
“I knew it might, but . . . How did you know it was a boy?”
I blinked. The question made no sense. “Um, because he just was?”
“You could see him that well?”
“Sure. I didn’t even know he was dead at first. He just looked like . . . a kid. He said his name was Tom.”
Yamaraj sat a little straighter, as if I were suddenly something dangerous.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“It never happens this fast. At first, you should only see wisps of light, or hear stray noises. You talked to him?”
I’d been so proud of myself for crossing over to the afterworld, for calling Yamaraj. But now it felt like I’d done something wrong.
I tried to smile. “Quick learner. That’s what my Spanish teacher always says.”
“This is serious, Lizzie.”
“I know that.” My mouth went dry, the taste of anger sudden and bitter. “Did you think I missed the serious part of watching eighty-seven people die?”
“No,” he said simply, looking away across the desert. “But I hoped you’d forget. The changes fade, like scars, if you don’t believe.”
I took a few slow breaths. I wasn’t angry at Yamaraj, but at the four men who’d broken my reality. “That’s not going to happen. If I curl up and pretend none of this is real, then I’ll always be scared. Because I’ll still know.”
“I see,” Yamaraj said, still watching me carefully. “Then you’re going to become one of us, and very soon.”
I stared back at him, my skin restless and tight. The numbness I’d felt since the attack was melting, like when you put your ice-cold hands under running hot water, and the cold turns into itches and sparks.
“What the hell are we?” I looked down at the glimmer that lay on my pale hands, a fainter version of Yamaraj’s shine.
“There are many words,” he said. “Soul guides. Reapers. Psychopomps.”
I looked up. “Um, did you just say ‘psychopomps’?”
“Some names are more graceful than others. I don’t like ‘reaper,’ myself.”
“Too grim?” I asked.
As he smiled, I noticed that his eyebrows had a natural arch in them, a crook in their curve. It made him look like he was teasing me, despite the topic of conversation.
“You can give yourself any name you want,” he said. “What matters is, when we’re brushed by death, we change. Some of us can see the dead and walk among them. Some of us even live in the underworld. But most of us take longer than a few days to see ghosts clearly.”
I didn’t know what to say. I had seen Tom only hours after the attack.
“Unless . . .” He paused. “Has anything like this ever happened to you before?”
“Are you serious? Not a chance. But you said guides. So where did your sister take all those people?”
“To our home.” Yamaraj looked down at the rivers of black oil that coursed among the dunes. “Down to the underworld, where they’ll be safe.”
“Safe from what? They’re dead.”
He hesitated, then said softly, “There are predators.”
The last word sent a trickle down my spine. Suddenly this all felt vast and paralyzing, like realizing for the first time that death was real, and scarier and more complicated than I’d ever imagined.
Yamaraj leaned closer. “You’ll be okay, Lizzie. I can help you understand.”