“I wasn’t either, but it turns out that I can. Well, to places and people. I can even go to certain objects, just not to Reapers.” I reached for his hand again and cast my gaze out to the limitless ocean. “There’s still so much that I don’t understand, though.”
“Eh, you’ll get the hang of it,” he insisted. “After all, time doesn’t limit you anymore,” he added with a smirk.
“I really don’t have a choice, do I?” I muttered. “I guess things just seemed less confusing and more bearable when you were with me.”
I thought back to the time we’d shared together after my death, but before I accepted my role as a Council member, back when I was still considered a Reaper in training. Things had been better then and I had been happier.
“I know, but that just isn’t how things work,” Jet said, his features becoming ridged. The sharpness to his words surprised me. It was as though he had thought on the subject too much lately. “You have no idea how badly I wish things could be different for us.”
The sun had begun to set behind the ocean. Oranges and pinks streaked across the slowly darkening sky and sadness burned through me once more, this time for a different reason. It was breathtakingly beautiful, but just like this moment with Jet, it would be gone shortly and become replaced with an endless blackness. It seemed like a foreshadowing to what my afterlife, my hereafter, would always be—sparse moments of brightness with Jet and then endless amounts of blackness until I could see him again.
“What do we do now?” I whispered. We couldn’t run away together now that we’d found each other again. We couldn’t hide out and ignore what we were or our purpose for the sake of being together no matter how much I liked the idea. It wasn’t as though we could meet here at a set time every day either. Jet was assigned to the East Physical Realm. I, on the other hand, had been assigned to everywhere.
Before Jet could answer me, tendrils of blackness swirled around my ankles and a familiar tug began to pull at my soul. I knew we only had mere seconds at most before I’d give in to the intenseness of my beckoning.
My eyes grew wide and I turned to face him. “I have to go.”
“Try to meet me here before sunset tomorrow. I know it’s not the best idea, but at least it’s something,” Jet demanded. His hands cupped my face and he leaned in. I closed my eyes, but before the feel of his lips met mine, his touch vanished. I’d released myself too quickly, giving in to the summoning all too soon.
I opened my eyes and he was gone. The others surrounded me. We stood in front of a teenage girl dressed in jogging clothes alongside a busy street. I clenched my hands into fists at my sides and wept internally. I could not accept that this was my new existence, my new reality. It didn’t seem fair.
CHAPTER THREE
After transforming yet another soul into a Reaper, I found myself burning for the others to leave me as quickly as they had last time, all except for Evelyn. I wasn’t sure why—maybe it was because she was the only other female Council member, or maybe it was because she had been the only one to speak to me. Either way, I wanted to be left alone with her once again so I could ask her some of my questions.
I had no such luck, though. Evelyn was the first to go this time, leaving me with scary Damaris and snobby William. I kept my mouth shut and closed my eyes, envisioning the place that I had just left with the hope that Jet would still be there, warming my soul.
He wasn’t.
I didn’t think I had ever felt such disappointment, not even when I was still alive. Refusing to give the gloominess inside of me anymore life than what it already had, I chose not to visit with my father again, but instead to visit a place I hadn’t been back to in a while.
I stared at the faded pink walls, the ones that I’d helped paint years ago, and thought of how much I missed my best friend. I could have gone straight to her, but seeing her laughing, breathing, living without me was incredibly hard. My eyes shifted to an old photo of Kami and me from the summer of our sixth-grade year that was pressed into the edge of her mirror above her dresser. I assumed she would have taken it down long ago; we hadn’t been the best of friends the last few remaining months of my life, and seeing the old picture still in place surprised me.
“She misses you, you know? A lot actually. Your death is still really hard for her to deal with,” a sweet, soft voice said from the doorway.
I knew who it was. She didn’t surprise me like she used to when I was still alive, just after I had become a Link. In fact, Harlow had sort of become a friend now. I didn’t understand why the little girl, dressed in sixties clothes, was still here in Kami’s house, but in my own selfish way, I was glad that she was. It gave me someone to talk to, someone who understood why I came to visit the places that I did, why I couldn’t let go just yet.
“I’m sure it has,” I whispered, falling back onto Kami’s bed without feeling the blankets beneath me at all and gazing up at the stars and planets we’d put in place together ages ago.
“Did you get to see him yet?” Harlow asked, excitement bursting from her small voice.
She may have only been a six-year-old when she’d died, but in the years that she’d spent within these walls, her soul had aged. During the month that I had been a part of the Reaper Council, I’d come to visit Kami unnoticed quite often and instead visited with Harlow. I’d told her everything about Jet and how much I hated the position I’d been forced into.
I sat up and stared into her doe-like, baby blue eyes. “I did.” I smiled. “Finally.”
Harlow flipped her long brown hair over her shoulder and moved quickly to sit at the edge of the bed. “And?” she prompted. “Was seeing him again as wonderful as you dreamed it would be?”
“Better,” I admitted, enjoying the far away fairytale gleam twinkling in her eyes.
“Did the two of you figure out a way to see more of each other?” she asked.
“Maybe.” I frowned. “We’re going to try and meet up at sunset tomorrow, but I don’t know how well that will work. Most of the time I’m in a different time zone than him, so I’m not sure how I’ll know when the sun is setting there.”
“I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” Harlow said, placing one tiny hand on my arm for reassurance.
I smiled at her touch. It was ironic to think that in the afterlife one of my best friends was the ghost of a six-year-old girl that had frightened me while I was still alive. I glanced down at her petite frame and thought of the questions I’d wanted to ask her since I’d first come back to visit with Kami after my death: How had she died and why hadn’t she chosen to Crossover? I knew of the loneliness that chewed away at your soul firsthand. Why she wanted to stay here in this house all alone baffled me completely.
“Thanks,” I said, taking her hand in mine. “Harlow, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“What happened to you? How did you die?” I asked, glad to finally have the courage.
She pulled her petite hand from mine and drew her tiny knees up to her chest. Slowly, she began to rock back and forth. I stared at her, watching the happy little girl she’d been seconds ago disappear before my eyes and turn into a frightened child.
“You don’t have to answer me if you don’t want to,” I said quickly, wishing I could take back my question.
“It’s okay. It might be good for me to finally talk about it with someone,” she muttered, her lips pressing against her knees. “I was playing outside on the front sidewalk when a man walked up and asked me if I had seen his puppy. I told him no.” Her voice took on a distant tone and the air in the room shifted. It was as though the house were holding its breath, becoming in sync with the terror rolling off Harlow and in turn forcing itself to be still and quiet. “As he started to walk away, he pointed to the trees on the other side of the road and said he thought he had seen her. Then, he asked if I would help catch her. I said yes and when we got into the woods a little ways…he hit me on the head. All I remember after that is darkness.”
I stared at Harlow, taking in her words. Reaching out, I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her into a tight hug. Seeing how much the memories of her life, even after she’d been dead for so long, had tormented her still frightened me. It was proof that memories never faded. Not the ones that involved pain. They stayed alive forever in your mind as well as the emotions attached to them.
“I’m so sorry,” I muttered. “Did they ever catch the guy?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered.
“Why didn’t you want to Crossover? What stopped you?”
“I came back here because this is where my family lived. I chose to stay here, but my parents didn’t. They packed up and moved someplace else after a few years. I could have went with them, but I figured when they die, they’d come here first to find me.” Her body shook and she turned her baby blue eyes on me. “I’ve waited for them to come back, but they never have. They left me, and I didn’t follow because I was too scared. I was too scared of crossing over, of everything, and now I might have lost them forever.”
I bit my bottom lip as her words sunk in. She had waited here alone all these years because she thought her parents would come back for her at some point.
“Do you know if they’re still alive?” I wondered.
“No, I don’t know, but I died in 1961. My parents were in their early thirties, so I don’t think if they are alive that they will be around for much longer.” She smiled a sad little smile and met my stare once more. “I hope that when they do go, they come back here to look for me. Do you think that they will, Rowan?”
I didn’t know what to say. She’d already waited for fifty-one years. I was normally not a pessimist, but that was a long time to wait, especially alone.
“I don’t know,” I whispered into her hair. “I don’t know.”
There had to be a way for Harlow to find her parents again, a way to know for sure if they were living or dead. The thought of never seeing my father again and being utterly alone frightened me and I was seventeen. I had no idea how Harlow had managed to survive mentally for so long without being with her parents in spirit.
“I don’t even remember what they looked like… I couldn’t visit them even if I wanted to,” Harlow whispered.
“Can’t you think of an object that you loved—something they might have kept with them even over the years?” I asked, hoping beyond hope she could. I’d learned one thing since becoming a Reaper and that was that people could haunt objects that had meant something to them when they were alive. Maybe Harlow’s parents had kept some trinket or stuffed animal of hers, and she could find them that way. If nothing, at least it was worth a shot.
Harlow’s face remained blank, her eyebrows barely constricting in thought. It was her eyes that gave her spinning thoughts away. “My locket! For my sixth birthday, mama gave me a locket with hers and daddy’s pictures inside! Mama wore it the day that they moved out. Do you think she still has it, Rowan?”
I smiled at her excitement. “There’s a good chance that she may,” I said, choosing my words carefully, not wanting to get her hopes too high in case she was disappointed once she saw who was in possession of her necklace if it wasn’t her mother.
Harlow closed her eyes and was gone before I could say another word. Fuzzy warmth spread throughout my soul, reminding me of what intense, heartfelt happiness when I was alive had felt like. I sighed, enjoying the sensation. I almost felt alive again. My eyes locked on the smiling picture of Kami and myself, and I was reminded instantly how far from being alive I actually was.
The feeling faded far too quickly with my dark thoughts slowly killing its beauty. How to make it last? That was the question. If I could figure that out, then being a Reaper Council member wouldn’t be so bad. At least I’d feel like I was alive, part of the time.
I waited for Harlow to come back for nearly twenty minutes before deciding to leave and see my father once more. The need to see how far he’d come along in packing up my things was almost unbearable. I closed my eyes and thought only of the familiar hallway to my bedroom I’d walked down a thousand times. I opened them as soon as I felt the cold, recognizable feel of the hardwood floors beneath my bare feet. I padded down the eerily soundless stretch to my bedroom until I reached the threshold. Relief pounded through me like a heartbeat; he’d only managed to pack two boxes since the last time I’d been here.
I stared around the room, wondering how I could possibly keep him here because I was selfish and entirely not ready for him to go yet. For him to move on. I wasn’t ready to let go of this part of myself so soon, ready to leave this room or my home with all the knickknacks and material possessions as nothing but a memory.
“I just can’t do it right now, Karen. I need more time,” Dad said, his voice echoing down the hall to my room. “Please, just tell the movers there’s been a delay. Give me just one more week.”
One more week
? Excitement filled me for the briefest of moments, before it twisted into distress. There was only one more week of this house being my home…one more week of seeing my family’s things here within these walls…of seeing my father within these walls.
You can follow him
, I told myself.
He’ll be taking everything that is yours with him, making it easy. You won’t lose him.
I repeated this conversation with myself in my mind as I rested on the edge of my old bed.