Hereafter

Different

I came to on a dusty couch in a room that smelled like mold mixed with beer and sea salt. My chest ached, and my short fingernails had cut painful grooves in my palm. Nearby, someone laughed.

Tentatively I opened one eye and took in my surroundings. I was in a wood-paneled, windowless basement. The room was decorated with green and orange shag rugs, a dim overhead lamp that looked like a sea urchin, and several saggy plaid couches. Milling near a marble bar with ugly, torn-up vinyl stools were about a dozen kids my age, sipping coffee from paper cups and chatting with one another as if my kidnapping was an everyday social event.

I recognized several of them as Juniper Landing locals, year-rounders in what I’d previously assumed was a vacation town. There was Bea McHenry, an athletic redhead, whose wet hair was slicked back into a ponytail, as though she’d just come in from a swim. Kevin Calandro, whose fire tattoo peeked out from under the arm of a dirty white T-shirt, eyed me curiously over the plastic top of his coffee cup. Next to him was Lauren Caldwell, whose black hair was held back by a plaid headband. Two girls and a guy I’d never seen before hovered in the corner, eyeing the rest of the group as if they didn’t want to be there.

A door on the far side of the room opened, and Joaquin Marquez, the boy who seemed so intent on breaking my sister’s heart, slipped out, followed by Tristan. One of the girls in the corner, a wispy emo chick with a short blond Mohawk, followed him with her eyes, an expression of longing I instantly recognized. It was exactly the way I used to look at Christopher Kane in the halls of Princeton Hills High, back when he was still with Darcy.

Fisher Morton was the last to step out of the back room. He closed and locked the door behind him quickly, then joined the rest of the party, turning his massive shoulders sideways to slip through the tightly knit group.

My lashes fluttered involuntarily. Why had he locked the door?

“You guys, she’s awake,” Krista Parrish announced, emerging from the crowd in a pink-and-white sundress. Her blond hair, the exact same shade as her brother’s, was pulled up in a high ponytail, her blue eyes expertly lined as she frowned sympathetically down at me. Ignoring the pain in my head, I sat up straight, taking in the whole room now. Behind her was a set of stairs leading up. An escape route.

I scrambled to my feet, my heart thumping. “What’s going on?” I asked, edging away from them toward the stairs. “Where are we?”

“Don’t worry,” Krista said gently, putting out a hand as if trying to soothe a rabid dog. “No one is going to hurt you.”

“I’m sorry it had to happen this way,” Tristan said, the edges of his mouth curving down. I remembered how he’d looked at me right before I’d passed out, and averted my eyes. “We’re in the basement of the police station.”

“You kidnapped me and brought me to the cops?” I blurted.

Mohawk Girl laughed loudly.

“We didn’t kidnap you,” Joaquin said, rolling his eyes. “We saved you. You and your family.”

Krista, Lauren, and Fisher looked at me so earnestly that all the tiny hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. I felt as though I’d suddenly landed in the middle of a cult.

“Well, if I’m not kidnapped, can I…leave?” I said, taking another step toward the stairs.

“Sorry.” Fisher shook his head.

My heart nose-dived. That was the voice. The voice of the person who’d grabbed me on the beach. I took an instinctive step back and crashed into the wall. My pulse thrummed quickly in my veins.

“Will someone please tell me what’s going on?” I demanded.

“We couldn’t let you tell your family,” Tristan replied.

“Excuse me?” I exhaled sharply. “You tell me we’re all dead and expect me not to tell my family?”

“You can’t,” Tristan repeated. There was all this emotion in his eyes. Longing and pleading. Like he was just trying to help. Like he needed me to understand. But at that moment, I didn’t trust it. I couldn’t.

“Try to stop me.”

I turned toward Fisher and jammed my foot down as hard as I could into his instep. He cursed and doubled over, giving me enough time to dodge past him, grab one of the wooden spindles that lined the stairs, and swing myself around and up the first two steps.

“Rory, no!” Joaquin shouted. Footsteps sounded behind me.

I tripped but hauled myself back up and kept going. I could see the light framing the doorway at the top.

“Stop!” Lauren called out. “Rory, they’ll—”

I flung myself forward, reaching for the door.

“If you tell your family, they’ll be damned to the Shadowlands!” Krista cried.

“Krista!” someone hissed.

“What? She was leaving!” Krista replied in a whine.

I paused with my fingers on the doorknob. My chest heaved with each breath. The Shadowlands? As I turned around, Tristan stepped into view at the bottom of the staircase. I stared down at him, barely able to make out his face in the dim light. Behind him on the wall was an old-fashioned painting of a sunset, the golden glow forming a halo around his head.

“What is the Shadowlands?” I asked.

“Will you please come back down here?” he implored softly.

“Not until you tell me,” I insisted. “What’s the Shadowlands?”

“Come down and we’ll tell you everything,” he said, reaching out with one hand. “You’re safe here. I promise.”

I glanced behind me at the door, but my curiosity got the better of me. Ignoring Tristan’s outstretched hand, I edged past him down the stairs and walked to the center of the room, trying to look more confident and in control than I felt. Stone-faced, stoic, shrewd. But inside, everything quivered. Tristan hesitated, clearly thrown that I had passed on the opportunity to touch him. Well, good. He deserved it for letting his friend knock me out.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m listening.”

“Juniper Landing is an in-between,” Joaquin began, crossing his arms over the chest of his formfitting red T-shirt. “A limbo.”

“One of many,” Bea added.

“It’s a place where people go to work through any unfinished business they have from the other world before they move on,” Tristan said. “They arrive on the same ferry you did and stay until they’re ready. Once they move on, there are two possible destinations. There’s the good, which we call the Light.”

“And there’s the bad,” Joaquin put in, a shadow passing over his handsome face. “The Shadowlands.”

“Which was why we had to stop you on the beach,” Tristan implored. “We couldn’t risk your dad and Darcy being sent there.”

“And you couldn’t think of another way?” I demanded.

Tristan’s cheeks turned pink. “I tried, but you kind of called me on it, remember?”

The warmth. The calming warmth. I realized now that I’d felt it twice before—yesterday morning, when I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown about Olive’s disappearance, and again last night when I’d started to realize the disturbing truth about Juniper Landing. Both times Tristan had used his touch, his power, whatever it was, to bring me back from the abyss.

“So why bring me here?” I asked. “With all of you?”

“We wanted to tell you about what we do,” Krista replied. “We’re the ones who usher people to their ultimate destinations.”

“We call ourselves Lifers,” Lauren said. She held up her arm to show me her leather bracelet, which slipped down almost to her elbow. One quick look around the room revealed that every one of my captors wore one. I’d noticed the bracelets when I first arrived on the island and assumed they signaled some kind of club or secret society. I’d had no idea they meant this.

“Lifers,” I repeated, feeling an odd sense of déjà vu. I’d heard that word somewhere before. “So you guys decide where people end up?”

They all laughed. Even Tristan.

“Uh, no,” Lauren said, placing her coffee cup on the bar. “Do we look like gods?”

“Well, some of us do,” Joaquin said, throwing up his hands.

Bea narrowed her amber eyes and shoved him so hard he almost fell over.

“That’s not what we do,” Tristan reiterated. “We simply act as ushers to the next realm. When someone’s ready to move on, their Lifer gets a coin,” He produced a gold coin from his pocket and held it out to me. It gleamed even in the duskiness of the room. I plucked it from his hand and turned it over in my own palm. It was heavy and thick, blank on one side with a sun on the other.

“We take the visitor up to the bridge, hand them their coin, and send them on their way,” Tristan explained. “The coin knows which way they’re supposed to go and leads them there.”

The bridge. Of course. The events of last night filtered through my brain. Mr. Nell screeching and writhing as Fisher and Kevin tossed him into the back of a pickup truck. Krista getting behind the wheel and speeding off into the fog toward the bridge on the north end of the island. His screams cutting off abruptly and the eerie silence that followed. She’d ushered him to the Shadowlands. Right there in front of me. And I’d had no clue.

I studied the coin. How could this little hunk of metal know where I was destined to spend all eternity? With a sudden flinch, I tossed it back to Tristan. Not that I had any doubts, of course. It wasn’t like they were going to ship me off to the bad place, right? Me, my sister, my father…we were all destined for the Light. We had to be.

Tristan stared at me, his eyes suddenly sad, and I felt the mood in the room shift, as if everyone had stopped breathing as one.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” I asked Tristan. The others suddenly became very interested in the crappy oceanic art on the walls. “Tristan, why are you telling me all this? If I can’t tell my family, then why…why can you tell me?”

Tristan took a deep breath. He closed the distance between us and reached for both of my hands. I instinctively froze, waiting for that odd warmth, but this time, I felt nothing. Nothing other than the pounding of my heart.

“You know how you’ve felt all along that something was different about the island?” he asked.

My head went weightless. “Yes,” I replied.

“And you asked why you remembered Olive and the musician from the park after they were gone, while Darcy didn’t?” he said.

I blinked, thinking of my first friend on the island who’d disappeared last week without a trace. Where was he going with this?

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s because you are different,” Tristan said slowly, firmly. “You’re not like the other visitors on Juniper Landing.”

My chest constricted. “Different how?”

Tristan gazed down at my fingers for a long moment before looking me in the eye. There was no one else in the room right then. No one else who mattered. “You’re a Juniper Landing Lifer. Like me.”

“Like all of us,” Joaquin put in.

“What?” I breathed. “What does that even mean?”

“It means you won’t be moving on,” he said quietly. “You’re staying here. With us.”

My fingers slipped out of Tristan’s grip, and I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. I had just started to adjust to the fact that I was going to some ethereal place called the Light. That I would never see home again. Would never graduate from high school or go to college or med school or do anything that I had spent half my life planning to do. And now…now I was stuck here? Forever?

“Why?” I demanded, dropping my hands. “What makes me so special?”

“You died an unnatural death,” Joaquin told me, his voice suddenly gentle. “At least, that’s the first requirement you have to meet to become a Lifer. And in the last moment of your life, you achieved the second.”

The room swam before my eyes, a wash of browns and yellows and greens. “The second? What’s the second?”

“You have to prove your selflessness. Either in the other world or once you’re here,” Tristan told me. “You used your last seconds of life to rid the earth of a sadistic killer. Even as you took your last breaths, you managed to make the world a better place.”

One last image came spiraling back to me. A slow-motion reel of me, yanking the knife out of my stomach, turning it on the man who’d murdered my family and so many others, the look of shock on Nell’s face as the blade arced toward his chest. A strangled sort of cackle escaped my throat.

“My selfless act was killing Steven Nell?” I said, aghast. “That wasn’t selfless; that was revenge.”

Tristan’s brow knit. “Maybe on some level, but—”

“This has to be a joke,” I said, looking around at the rest of them. Waiting—hoping—for one of them to crack. To start laughing and shout “gotcha!” But no one moved. “You’re kidding, right? Tell me you’re kidding.”

“I wouldn’t joke about something like this, Rory,” Tristan said. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”

The room blurred in and out around me. The coffee cups scattered on the bar, the plaster cast of a jumping dolphin suspended over one of the couches, all the faces staring back at me—curious, pitying, concerned. I pressed one hand against my forehead and forced myself to focus on Tristan. Only Tristan. His perfect lips, his strong jaw, his kind eyes. Right now he was the only thing that made sense.

I took a breath.

“So what you’re telling me is, this is it,” I said, the air catching in my throat, making my eyes sting. “This is where I’m going to stay.”

“Yes,” Tristan replied, his eyes shining. “This is your new home. Forever.”