Hereafter (Shadowlands) (4 page)

“Oh.” Now I was the one who didn’t know what to do with my hands. I tucked them under my thighs and cleared my throat. “That sounds rough.”

“Sorry,” he said, his neck turning blotchy. “That’ll kill your conversation, right?” He let out a sharp sort of laugh as the blotchiness spread to his cheeks.

“No, no. It’s fine.”

I had the sinking feeling that I was very out of my element and glanced down the bar toward my sister, as if she could somehow telepathically tell me what to do. But I couldn’t even see her from where I was sitting, the crowd around her was so thick. Brian sighed and shook his head, like he was annoyed at himself. At least we were in this sinking boat together.

“So…uh…what brings you here?” I asked, then immediately regretted it. He had no idea what had brought him here. He didn’t even know what
here
really was.

“I had to get away from my family,” he said, looking away.

“How come?” I asked.

His eyes flashed. “You always ask so many questions?”

My face burned. “Sorry. I just…forget it.” And Darcy wondered why I hated parties.

“Not everyone has parents who like them,” Brian said tersely.

“I know,” I replied, my voice thick. “For a long time I didn’t think my dad liked me. All he’s done for the past four years is bitch at me and my sister, so—”

“I bet he never threw you out of your own house.”

He tossed back the rest of his beer and dropped the heavy mug on the bar like a punctuation mark.

My heart broke for him. “That’s…Brian, I’m so sorry.”

Brian leaned forward and rubbed his palms together. His fingers were dirty, the cracks in his knuckles dark with grime.

“Yep. Nothing was ever good enough for them. I graduated, got a job in a garage…but it still wasn’t enough, so…” He shook his head and shrugged. “Anyway, it’s okay, because now…I’m free.”

He spread his arms wide and smiled. There was a gap between his front teeth that gave him a charming, boyish look.

“I guess there’s always a bright side,” I said, forcing a smile. He had no idea just how “free” he was.

He pressed his lips together, considering this. “Always a bright side,” he said. “I like that.”

A relieved smile crossed my face. Finally, I’d said something right. A pack of raucous guys in the corner erupted in a cacophonous round of jeers and shouts. Brian winced.

“This isn’t really my scene. You want to get out of here for a bit? Go for a walk by the water?” he asked, grazing the center of my back with his hand.

As soon as he touched me, I felt a spark, like static electricity, only sharper—hotter. My back felt prickly even after he dropped his hand—like my skin was vibrating—and a flutter of anticipation sprung up inside my chest. Maybe this was it. Maybe I was about to usher my first soul. I glanced around for Tristan again, but he was still nowhere to be found.

Then I had a thought, an inkling, a suspicion. Maybe this was how they trained the new Lifers. Maybe this was why Tristan hadn’t shown up. I was being thrown into the deep end of the pool on my first day so they could see how I’d react, how I’d handle it. There was a familiar rush inside my chest. The feeling of rising to a challenge. The anticipation of making Tristan proud.

“Sure,” I said, sliding off my stool. “This isn’t really my scene, either.”

Brian smiled and grabbed his rucksack, which had been leaning against the wall. He lifted the strap over his shoulder as he stepped aside to let me walk out first. When I crossed in front of him, I had to bite back a grin.

This was it. My first ushering. My new life was about to begin.

The calm bay water lapped at the sand lazily, thinning out and sloshing back at an even rhythm. Brian kicked at broken seashells, their pale fragments gleaming against the sand, and sighed. Gray clouds flitted across the bright moon, and each breeze seemed cooler than the last. I flipped up the collar on my thin jacket, ducking my chin down deep.

Someone whistled in the dark—a slow, mournful tune—and I shivered. My eyes darted to the black waves; I was half expecting Mr. Nell to rise up out of the bay and drag me under. But instead I saw something gleaming in the moonlight, a long black splotch with a silver streak. I took a tentative step forward and my stomach turned. It was a pile of fish. Dozens of black and silver fish, all washed up on the shore, eyes fogged over. Dead. The whistling grew louder. I froze.

“What’s wrong?” Brian asked.

“Do you hear that?” I hissed, my heart pounding as I whirled around. “Do you—”

A shadowy figure appeared on the boardwalk, and I clutched Brian’s arm. A moment later, the whistler strolled under one of the lights outside the Crab Shack, illuminating the face of one of the Lifers—the guy I’d never met who’d been loitering in the corner of the basement this morning with Mohawk Girl and another nameless female. Relief flooded my body. He stopped momentarily when he saw us, and his whistling ceased. He wore a black sweatshirt with the hood up over his reddish hair, and his pale skin seemed to glow in the darkness. His eyes, dark and fathomless, held mine for several long breaths. Finally, he kept on walking, his heavy black boots crunching on the sandy slats of the boardwalk.

Brian and I both watched until the guy stepped out of sight. Then Brian looked down at my hand, still gripping his arm. Embarrassed, I released him and tucked my hands into my pockets.

“Sorry,” I said.

“No worries,” Brian told me, walking a few paces up the beach, putting distance between us and the fish. “Actually, I wanted to say that
I’m
sorry.”

“For what?” I asked, walking beside him.

“For spilling all over you about my parents.” He dug a groove in the sand with the tip of his sneaker.

My heart thumped with sympathy. “Oh, it’s fine,” I said, then hesitated. “I’m…glad you came over to me.”

“I’m glad I did, too,” he said with a grin.

And then his fingers caught me around the waist. The words
What are you doing?
were still forming in my mind when he leaned down and kissed me. His lips were dry and tasted sour. I yanked my face away as quickly and politely as possible.

“Oh, Brian, I’m so sorry,” I said, taking a slight step back. “I didn’t mean to make you think I—”

“Think what?” he asked darkly. “That you wanted me?”

His hands gripped my waist tighter now, and he pulled me against him, pressing my pelvic bone against his. Then his mouth came down on mine again, his nose pressing mine flat so completely I could hardly breathe.

Panic coursed through my body. This wasn’t happening. This could
not
be happening.

I lifted my hands and pressed them against his chest, but his grip was like a vise. I couldn’t force even an inch of space between us. With a screech, I managed to turn my head away from his, but then he swept my ankle with his foot and sent me sprawling on the sand. My cheekbone hit something hard—a rock or a large shell, and hundreds of tiny dots of light exploded across my vision.

“Don’t be a tease, Rory,” Brian spat, climbing on top of me. He pinned my thigh down with his knee and my shoulder with one hand. With his other he worked the zipper on my jacket, yanking it open with three quick jerks. “You knew what you were doing when you came out here with me. We both knew what you were doing.”

“Get off me!” I cried, kicking my legs.

Brian laughed coldly. He dipped his head closer, and I saw the sharpness in his dark eyes. The determination. “That’s not gonna happen,” he said icily. “So you may as well just relax and enjoy yourself.”

He mashed his lips against mine again, and suddenly my whole body was on fire. My brain exploded with images. Faces. Girls. A blond with terrified blue eyes, blood dripping from her nose and over her lips as she tried to writhe free. An Asian girl with dark, wet hair, a scrape across her forehead, whimpering as she curled into a ball. Another girl scratching and screaming and begging him to stop. A fourth who’d gone catatonic, staring off into space while he had his way. Each memory assailed me with such stark details that my stomach curled and lurched and burned as I recoiled in horror, but I also felt this odd satisfaction, this tingling pleasure. I opened my eyes and looked into Brian’s, and just like that, I knew.

Those positive sensations were coming from him. He’d done this before and enjoyed every minute of it.

I tried to knock him off me with my knee, but it was like he had four legs and ten arms. I felt my jeans unzip, and I did the only thing I could think to do. I screamed at the top of my lungs.

Brian laughed. He was just gripping the waistband of my jeans when all of a sudden something crashed into him so hard he was flung backward into the sand. A bare foot flew by my face and I sat up on my hands, scrambling backward on the cracked shells like a startled crab. In the darkness, I saw Tristan rear up, his blond hair a brief flash in the night. He lifted his fist high over his shoulder and swung. The crack was sickening. Final.

I pulled in a broken breath, fumbling for the zipper on my jeans, but my hands were shaking so hard there was no catching it. Somehow, I pulled myself up to standing and forced myself to take air into my lungs. Tristan’s sandals lay a few feet away, one on the sand, one on the steps, where he’d kicked them off, probably to gain more speed.

“Are you all right?” Tristan asked, approaching me slowly. I covered the V of my exposed underwear with one hand, clutching my opposite shoulder with the other. Brian lay crooked and still behind Tristan, blood dripping from his nose.

“I…I…” It was the only syllable I could get out without bursting into tears. Tristan glanced down, and the rush of heat to my face was so intense I almost passed out. He shrugged out of his sweatshirt and tied it backward around my waist, so that the bulk of it was covering my front.

“Rory,” he said, hands on my shoulders. “Are you all right? Say something. Anything.”

I couldn’t believe how badly I had screwed this up. I couldn’t believe he’d had to rescue me. All this talk about being part of his world, one of the Lifers, having this mission, and I’d already failed.

“I’m so sorry, Tristan,” I said. “I can’t believe I—”

“You have nothing to apologize for,” he said fiercely, one hand moving to cup my face. His thumb traced an arc back and forth across my cheek, and my skin hummed. “This is my fault. I’m sorry I wasn’t here.”

“But you were,” I said, looking up into his clear blue eyes. “You saved me.”

And then I burst into tears, burying my face in his chest. Tristan held me tightly to him, his arms locked around me as my body quaked with each fresh sob. I was still crying when the first fingers of fog rolled toward us with a low hiss, curling over the lights on the buoys, consuming the boats in their slips and finally the shoreline itself. Seconds later, the fog swallowed us whole, leaving me and Tristan alone in its cool, white grip.

“Who the hell do you people think you are?” Brian seethed, kicking his legs as Joaquin and Kevin yanked him out of the pickup. His heels dragged through the dirt alongside the road, leaving two shallow, jagged trails behind him. “I didn’t do anything. She wanted it.”

He lifted his chin in my direction, and I stepped sideways behind Tristan. We had followed Joaquin in Bea’s Jeep, a bright yellow rusted-out vehicle that wasn’t much more than a go-cart with the top down and the doors removed. Tristan and I had huddled in the back, and I’d pulled his sweatshirt on to guard against the face-numbing wind, while Krista had ridden up front, holding her hair in place with both hands as we bounced over every bump and pothole.

I could hardly look at Brian. I couldn’t believe how wrong I’d been about him, how thoroughly fooled. I felt like an idiot, standing there with the others. Like the stupid new girl. I hadn’t looked Tristan in the eye since he’d saved me.

“Dude, just take this and get the hell out of here,” Joaquin said, releasing him and slapping a gold coin into his hand.

Brian looked at it. “What is this?” he asked, his speech slurred either from the drinking or the punch he’d taken.

“Just go, already,” Kevin grunted, pushing him toward the bridge so hard he almost stumbled.

“Go where?” Brian asked, throwing his arms wide even as he backed toward the bridge. It was as if there were a magnet inside the swirling fog, pulling him toward the open mouth of the path. “You can’t pin anything on me. I can stay here as long as I want.”

He had reached the precipice, the seam between dirt road and paved entry, and he paused, eyeing me derisively. My heart rate quickened, half expecting a hand to reach out and grab him and pull him shouting into the abyss. But nothing happened. He simply stood there while the rest of us stared.

“All right. That’s it.” Joaquin bent both knees and grabbed Brian around the legs, lifting him over his shoulder in a firefighter’s carry.

“What the hell, man?” Brian spat, pounding on Joaquin’s back.

Without replying, Joaquin strode toward the bridge and disappeared into the fog, the mist undulating around them. Suddenly we heard a slam and a pathetic-sounding “oof.”

I glanced furtively at the others. “What did he just—”

But then Joaquin sauntered free of the thick, swirling wall, clapping his hands together, a cocky smirk on his face. Behind him, the fog suddenly whipped into a spinning gray vortex, and there was an odd sucking sound. A cold blast of wind nearly knocked me off my feet, its chill creeping around my heart, freezing it solid. Then everything went still.

“Seriously?” Tristan asked Joaquin, gesturing back toward the bridge.

“What?” he said, raising his palms. “I was sick of listening to him.”

“Me, too,” Bea said, unwrapping a piece of gum and popping it into her mouth.

Kevin spat on the ground in roughly the vicinity of Brian’s footprints.

Krista hid a smile behind her hand. She lifted her shoulders at my surprised, somewhat judging look. “What? At least they’re good for comic relief.”

“Is it always like that?” I asked quietly.

“No,” Tristan said, placing his hand on my back. “When they’re going to the Light, it’s really quite…peaceful.”

“And sometimes when they’re going to the Shadowlands, too,” Krista added, reaching back to pull the rubber band from her long blond ponytail and retie it, smoothing the ratty strands that had been tugged free during our off-roading. “Since they have no clue where they’re going.”

“And normally we can each handle these things alone,” Bea said, turning back toward where the cars were parked, their headlights making twin beams on the windswept reeds. “These last two just didn’t want to go quietly, so—”

“When that happens, we bring backup,” Kevin explained darkly.

“So, what do we do now?” I asked the group.

Tristan looked down at my hands, and I realized for the first time that I was clutching his sweatshirt at my sides, my arms wrapped around my stomach like two taut bungee chords.

“Well, you’ve just officially attended your first ushering,” Tristan said, looking somehow proud and nervous at the same time.

“So Steven Nell didn’t count?” I asked.

He shook his head. “You didn’t know then that you were one of us.”

“Consider sending that jerk to the Shadowlands your initiation,” Bea said, stepping up behind me. Somehow, that one action felt reassuring, like by standing behind me, she was saying she would always have my back.

Krista walked around her brother, her hair now smooth, her flowered dress perfectly fitted at the waist, the skirt billowing slightly behind her. She reached for my hand and held it, cupping my fingers in her own. The same warmth radiated off her as came off her brother, except there was a sweeter, less intense quality to hers. Almost tentative. I felt a pulse of anticipation.

“And now that you’re officially one of us,” Krista said with an excited smile, “there’s something you need to see.”