Kiss Me Deadly: Tales of a Paranormal Romance

1

I’ve always been good at finding lost things, but three weeks after a car accident dumped my best friend in a coma, I was the thing that felt lost. And nobody knew where to find me.

Except for one person.

There’s an abandoned white house on Bel Air Road, two blocks up from where I live. On an afternoon in early March, I didn’t know that I was going there. I thought I was taking the dog for a walk.

“C’mon, girl,” I said. The little red-haired dachshund wasn’t jumping around my feet or straining for the door the way she usually did when she knew we were about to do our loop up the hill to the white marble lion that sits outside the front gate of one of the mansions. I always touch the lion’s paw, as if to tell him “see, we made it,” and also for luck.

But it was as if Paloma knew that things weren’t quite right in her world, that her mistress was still shaken from visiting Josh in the hospital. I took Vermeer calla lilies in a glass vase to put on his windowsill. I wanted them to be the first thing he saw when he woke up. (If he woke up.) The nurses all thought I was Josh’s sister, because that’s what his mother had told them. It was what my English teacher might call a “mythic truth”—even if it wasn’t true on the outside, it felt true on the inside.

I had known Josh since kindergarten, when both of our sets of parents were still together. When we were six, we sat cross-legged in the corner of the tennis court in his backyard and pricked the tips of our little fingers with a sewing needle and squeezed out drops of blood. Then we wrapped our pinkies together and swore we’d be blood-siblings for life. Corny, I know, but what can I say. We were six.

I coaxed Paloma out the door. She shook herself, dog tags jangling, then trotted along beside me as if the lemon-colored sunlight, the flowering bushes and palms and pines and eucalyptus, the sprawling houses set behind walls and gates, were conspiring to make her feel better.

The white house came up on our right. I’ve always been curious about it. I’ve never seen anyone go in or out of it, never glimpsed a car moving through the curve of driveway flanked with drooping palm trees. The house wasn’t gated off from the street, but sat exposed like a bone in the sun. You sometimes see shabby, neglected houses in Bel Air, squatting on lots that have accumulated millions of dollars of value over the decades, belonging to people who refuse to sell them even if they can’t afford their upkeep, who plan to live in those houses until they die.

But nobody lived in this house. The windows were dark and blind.

Today, instead of walking past it, I paused at the lip of the driveway. Paloma took the opportunity to fling herself on her back in the grass and roll around. I listened to the chatter of birds, the roar of a nearby leaf-blower. I didn’t really know what I was doing. It was like an invisible hand reached through my skin, grabbed one of my ribs, tugged me gently toward the house. Trust your instincts, my mother is always telling me, the implication being that if she had trusted hers she would never have married my father.

I walked up the driveway, through the pools of shade beneath the palms, up the three steps to the door. I still didn’t know what I was doing. It was like something my body knew and announced to me, like when it’s time to eat or go to sleep. Except now it was time to knock on the door, so I did, one rap, two raps, three, and then my hand dropped to my side and I thought, Am I crazy? What am I doing?

I turned around to go when a voice from inside said, “Sasha, come in.”

I did not hear that. I did not hear someone say my name.

The dog was sitting on the step, cocking her narrow head at me. The wind pushed a cloud overhead, and the air darkened for a moment and then went bright again.

The door gave a clicking sound, and swung inward.

I saw white walls and a clean hardwood floor and more space than I would have expected. A man was standing in the middle of the hall. The light entering the windows behind him cast him in silhouette. Paloma gave a happy bark and jolted forward. I didn’t realize my hand had slackened on the leash until the end jerked out beneath my fingers and Paloma was hurtling herself at the man. “Hello, Paloma,” he said, and stooped to pick her up. She writhed in his arms and tried to lick his face.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but that’s my dog.”

The man stepped forward. Maybe he saw the way I tensed because he was careful to keep some distance between us. “You’re a little late, Sasha,” he said.

The shadows fell away from him, and I could see that his eyes, even across the space that separated us, were very blue. His face did seem familiar. It was long with good cheekbones and a strong nose. He wore jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, and he was lean and long-limbed. I guessed him to be a few years older than me—nineteen, maybe twenty?

“We have to get started,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Your lessons.”

“My what?”

“Sasha, don’t you recognize me?”

“Who are you?”

“You know my name,” he said. “Wait a moment, and it will come to you. We have an appointment, Sasha. A series of them, in fact. But we don’t have a lot of time. I’ll have to go back soon.”

This had to be some kind of setup. He was too good-looking, for one thing. He belonged on a movie screen or the cover of a romance novel or in someone’s fantasy. Maybe I’d been chosen for some kind of reality show? This was Los Angeles, after all, and every now and then you saw film trucks in the neighborhood, parked along the narrow curving roads while traffic directed around them.

I glanced around, checking for places where cameras might be viewing my every move. But the place seemed ... truly empty, like it was just this guy, my dog, and me.

“Sasha, it’s time we get started,” the guy said. “It’s past time.”

“For all I know,” I said, “you’re a serial killer.”

“I promise you I’m not a serial killer.”

“Like you’d admit it if you were.”

“You know my name,” he said quietly. “Here, I’m going to write it down...” He suddenly had a pen and notepad in his hands—I had to blink, where had they come from?—and scrawled something down. He ripped off the top paper, folded it in half and held it out to me. “Tell me,” he said quietly. “Tell me the name, my name, that I wrote down on this paper.”

“I have no idea who you are.” But I felt something ... shift ... in my brain. And suddenly I knew—knew in a way that went all through my body—that he was right, that I had met him before, and that my whole life had been leading to this moment.

“Haiden,” I said.

He smiled and dropped the notepaper. It fluttered to rest on the ground with the name staring up at both of us in printed block letters:

HAIDEN.

2

So I stood there for I don’t know how much longer, the guy—Haiden—looking at me with those preternatural blue eyes. Part of me was still thinking: reality show. Kind of clinging to the idea. But then I felt that invisible hand tug my rib again.

Trust your instincts. So I stepped across the threshold and into the hallway.

And I swear I felt the air shimmer, as if part of reality had rearranged itself around me. If he does turn out to be a serial killer, I thought, I’m going to feel really, really stupid.

I followed him into a long sunken room with a stone fireplace in the corner. The only piece of furniture was a table in the middle. There was a bowl of fruit on it. Apples. They had the kind of dewy, rounded perfection you only see in magazines.

“What are we doing?” I asked. Paloma trailed behind us, her toenails clicking off the hardwood. “What do you mean by ‘lessons’?” Absently I reached out for the fruit on the table. I was picking out an apple when Haiden barked, “Don’t!”

The apple dropped from my hand, rolled across the table.

“Don’t eat that,” Haiden said, “don’t eat any of that fruit until you’re absolutely sure and ready. Do you understand me?”

“Until I’m ready for what?”

Haiden watched me for a moment. Then, ignoring my question, he said, “What if I told you there was another realm that ran alongside this one?” Haiden had something in his hands—like the pen and notepad, it had just somehow appeared there—and he approached me with it.

It was a black scrap of fabric. A blindfold.

“I’m going to teach you how to see and feel and communicate with it. I’m going to teach you a kind of clairvoyance. Clairsensing.”

“You’re seriously going to put that thing on me?”

“It’s the first exercise,” he said patiently. Then he said, “Sasha, are we going to do this or not?”

“My dog likes you,” I said, “and my dog never likes anybody.”

“Dogs and I understand each other.”

I liked the idea of another realm. It reminded me of the stories I used to write when I was a little kid, back when I had this idea that I wanted to be a novelist.

Maybe that’s why I let him blindfold me. I liked his voice, and his vaguely European accent, and the rich warm sense of his presence beside me. His hands, as he fastened the blindfold, were gentle.

“The point of this,” he explained to me, “is to demonstrate that you already know everything you need to know. It’s all living there deep inside you. What you need to do is focus inward. You need to clear away all the distractions—all the things you think you know—all the things people told you when you were little and didn’t know not to believe them. In a way, you’re not learning so much as un learning.”

“Cool,” I said.

I mean, what else was there to say?

“I painted an X on the floor,” Haiden said, “and it’s your task to find it. I want you to use your inner sense of direction. I want you to feel your way toward it.”

I imagined how ridiculous this would look on a reality show: me stumbling around with a blindfold trying to find some secret X as this awesome-looking actor chattered on about unlearning. I pictured the kids at school howling laughter at me in the hallways. But I also remembered the way Paloma had gone right up to him, no hesitation, and the way his name had surfaced in my brain like that.

He was right. I had met him before. I didn’t understand it, but in that moment I didn’t have to. All I had to do was find the X. That was what mattered.

I could feel that gentle tug inside me, leading me across the room. I stepped slowly, the blindfold dark and silky on my eyes. When the sensation of tugging stopped, I stopped too. I lifted my hands to the blindfold and slipped it off and turned to look at Haiden. He was standing beside the table holding the apple that I had dropped. Paloma was on her haunches beside him, as if she was his dog, not mine.

Traitor, I thought.

“So?” I said.

“Look down,” Haiden said.

He crunched into the apple.

I was standing right on the middle of the X.

3

I wasn’t sure what that proved. My mind went into gymnastics trying to fit this into a rational explanation. Maybe I had agreed to do a reality show and then someone had put me under hypnosis? Maybe this was all some kind of subliminal programming? But that seemed just as nuts as Haiden’s talk about “another realm.”

For the rest of the “lesson” Haiden had me stare into a candle flame. “This is to help you develop your focus and concentration,” he said. “You need a clear mind in order to see clearly.” He gave me the candle to take home. He told me to practice meditating with it for half an hour every day. That was my homework.

And then the lesson was over, and Paloma and I were out on the street again. If it wasn’t for the candle in my hand I would have thought the whole thing some kind of hallucination, a waking dream. Especially when I checked my watch and saw that, from the time I entered the house until now, exactly two minutes had passed. In the presence of Haiden in the abandoned white house, time, it seemed, had stood still.

4

That night, my mother was rushing around to get ready for her date with this Silicon Valley mogul dude who was totally all wrong for her, except my mother hadn’t figured that out yet. Her instincts can be slow to kick in. “Have you seen my black Chanel clutch?” she asked, popping her head into my bedroom. “I can’t find it anywhere—”

I thought for a moment, then felt an image of it surface in my mind, much like Haiden’s name had done. “It’s in the top left-hand corner of the hall closet,” I said, “beneath a balled-up sweater.”

She looked at me for a moment and shook her blond head. “You’re amazing,” she said, and blew me a kiss. Then I heard her clatter down the stairs.

It hadn’t occurred to her to ask what I was doing, standing in the middle of my bedroom and looking around me. I felt like an alien dropped in from another planet trying to put together clues about the locals.

The candle in its little brass holder sat on my desk. The session with Haiden had left me with a calm settled feeling. My room felt different, like it belonged to someone who resembled me but wasn’t ... me. There were posters on the walls of bands I no longer listened to. The rhinestone-studded cover for my iPhone seemed childish and stupid. There were application forms on my desk from colleges that I realized, in a sudden blazing flash, I didn’t even want to go to. I had decided I was going to be a lawyer. Now I found myself wondering why. Because I was good at English lit, because I liked to read and write, because it was so much more practical than trying to be a writer, which was a crazy ambition anyway? Because I wanted to earn lots of money and wear cool power suits? Because it was a good answer to give people when they asked you what you were going to be when you grew up (assuming you ever did)?

Haiden’s words hummed through my brain.

You need a clear mind in order to see clearly.

My life was filled with a lot of noise, a lot of bright lights, a lot of daily drama that, in the end, didn’t add up to much. My grades were slipping because I found it harder and harder to keep still, to absorb what the teachers said in class or to complete my homework. Now, though, with my mother gone and the house quiet and lonely and the image of Haiden’s flame still bright in my mind, and the memory of Haiden’s voice still warm in my ear, I sat down at my desk and pulled out my textbooks and immersed myself in work. Hours slipped by and I barely noticed. Suddenly I was caught up. I pushed back my chair with a rich feeling of satisfaction. Then I noticed the candle....

I hadn’t done Haiden’s homework yet.

I found the silver lighter I used to sneak cigarettes on the back balcony, lit the candle, and stared into the flame for maybe half a minute. Except then I started feeling stupid. It was just a candle, for crying out loud. I could imagine my friend Ashley rolling her eyes at me. I blew it out and went to call her instead.

5

That week I found a lost cat I recognized from posters pinned on telephone poles around the neighborhood and returned her to her owner. Ashley lost her cell phone and I helped her remember that she had left it behind at King’s Cross Café, where the manager was waiting for her to reclaim it.

“I’m good at finding lost things,” I once said to Josh, “it’s like a talent or something.”

“No,” he told me, a little mischievously. “Lost things are good at finding you.”

His condition was unchanging. His room filled with flowers and little stuffed animals and get-well cards. I visited him almost every day and pulled the chair up beside his hospital bed and talked about everything and nothing. I imagined that he could hear me, deep down in his slumber, and that any moment he might stir and open his eyes and say, where am I? like in the movies.

But it didn’t happen.

I told him—and only him—about the episode with Haiden in the abandoned white house on Bel Air Road. “It seems more and more surreal all the time,” I said. “Maybe I dreamed it. Maybe I went temporarily insane and imagined the whole thing. But I keep thinking about him.”

I didn’t mean to say this last bit, it just kind of slipped out. In class, or walking the hallways, or hanging out with Ashley and Steven and the others in the parking lot after final bell, I would flash on Haiden’s eyes, his light golden skin, the shape of his shoulders. I would imagine his breath in my ear or on my neck. I remembered what it was like to stand close to him.

Every time I walked past the white house I went up to the door and looked in the windows. Everything was locked-down, shuttered, and silent. “It’s like it never happened,” I said to Josh, “except I can’t shake this conviction that it did, it really did, and Haiden is real. He’s not just a figment of my overheated imagination.”

I touched Josh’s hand. I remembered the blood-ceremony we did when we were kids, how serious we were. I laced my fingers through his and confessed, “I really want to see him again, but how can I even make that happen? I don’t know anything about him.”

And it was as if Josh’s voice spoke inside my head:

Do your homework, stupid.

That night I lit the candle and did the meditation exercise exactly as Haiden had shown me. I did it every day in the week following. On Saturday morning I woke up to the feeling of that invisible hand on my rib, gently tugging.

I knew where it wanted me to go, and who would be waiting for me there.

6

Haiden said, “Now I need to teach you how to see.”

When Haiden opened the door, the little dog ran into his arms again, and he picked her up and rubbed her behind the ears. It was as if they’d known each other forever. He smiled at me, and my heart did a quick little salsa in my chest. I wasn’t sure I could talk without stammering, so I just smiled and followed him into the sunken room with the table and the bowl of fruit.

We did the candle meditation exercise again. Haiden made a gesture with his hand and suddenly the room went dark, even though afternoon sunshine should have been leaking around the edges of the blinds. I said, “Do you use ... I mean is this...” I couldn’t believe I was even asking this. I took a breath and tried again. “This is about magic, right? You’re teaching me magic?”

“You could maybe call it that,” he said. He tipped his head at me, and his eyes crinkled at the corners. It was a look that made me feel warm inside. I had the feeling, again, that I had met him before. “I’m teaching you to see what most people can’t. Give me your hand.”

He had elegant hands with long tapered fingers. His skin was smooth and cool. “I want you to do this...” He swept my hand through the air. “...and I want you to clear your mind and concentrate on what you see.”

After about fifteen minutes of this, I said, “I don’t see anything.”

“Try again. Keep trying.”

“But this is stupid!”

“Sasha,” he said, “you have to be patient. I know it doesn’t feel like you’re getting anywhere, but your brain...” He touched my temple. “...is making new connections, laying down new neural circuitry. But it takes a bit of time and practice, practice, practice.”

“But what am I supposed to be looking for?”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll see.”

When I shot him a dubious look, he added, “You will.”

Then Paloma and I were on the street again, blinking in sudden light. I checked my watch. I had been with Haiden for what felt like hours, but only two minutes had passed.

7

I may not have known what I was looking for, but I looked for it that night and every night following. All I saw was my hand waving through the air. Maybe I was crazy. Every day I walked Paloma past the abandoned white house and knocked on the door and looked in the windows.

Haiden was nowhere around.

Then one afternoon when I was visiting Josh, I moved my hand across his. I saw golden trails of light stream from my fingertips, hover in the air for several seconds, then fade. My breath stopped.

I swept my hand through the air and the same golden light traced the passage of my fingers. I couldn’t believe it. “Look at that, Josh,” I cried out, “look at that!” Josh slept on, lost in his coma, as I played the light above him.

8

“It’s astral energy,” Haiden explained to me when I saw him at the house one day later.

“Astral energy?”

“Every living thing generates it. And once you can see that, you can see...” He thought for a moment, then said, “Watch.”

He closed his eyes and let his head hang. I had the urge to reach out and brush the dark hair from his forehead. As I watched, he seemed to ... divide. A second version of Haiden slipped out from the first, until it was standing beside him in the same pose, arms limp, head hanging. A feeling like cold electricity passed through me, and I could feel the prickling of goose bumps rising from my skin.

I couldn’t speak. The second version of Haiden had a shimmer to its body, reminding me of the surface of a sunlit lake.

It lifted its head and opened its eyes.

Then it was gone.

The real Haiden said, “You saw that, didn’t you?” There was a kind of urgency in his tone, as if nothing could be more important. “You saw that very clearly?”

My throat felt dry. I ran my tongue across my lips and said, “What ... what was that? What did you do?”

“That was my astral projection. My soul projection.”

“You looked like your own ghost.”

“Ghosts are a slightly different form of energy,” Haiden said, and I didn’t know what to say to that. I had never believed in ghosts, but the whole world was now slanting and tilting around me. If, in that moment, a portal opened in midair and a unicorn came dancing through it, I would not have been surprised. “Astral projection is the art of sending your soul from your body.”

“Will I be able to do that? Will you teach—”

“No,” Haiden said sharply, cutting the air with his hand. “It’s dangerous. Your body is left empty and vulnerable, and your soul could get lost and not be able to find its way back. The only time your soul should ever leave your body is when you die.”

“But you did it,” I said.

“Only for a moment. And I am...” Haiden smiled a little, turning his hands palms up. “I’m not a regular guy.”

I took a breath. “Then what are you?”

Haiden blinked a little, as if the question had taken him by surprise.

“There’s something different about you,” I said. Stating the obvious.

“There’s something different about you, too,” Haiden said. “That’s why I’m here. That’s why you’re here.”

“Do you do this all the time? I mean, do you just appear in random places and teach things like ... astral energy ... to teenage girls with dachshunds?”

“I don’t just appear in ‘random places.’ I came here specifically for you.”

“Why?”

“Because I need you.”

He put his hand on the back of my neck and gently drew me to him.

He kissed me, softly, on the lips.

Then he murmured, “Session’s over for today. Go home.”

9

It happened two days later. I walked Paloma up the hill to the stone lion that sat outside the mansion at the top part of our loop. I reached out to touch the lion’s paw the way I always did—

—when I saw the teenager suspended in the air.

His toes rested on the top of the fence. He seemed to be sitting, except there was nothing to sit on but air. He had blond curly hair and tanned skin, dressed in jeans and a blue hooded sweatshirt. Paloma whined and pulled back on the leash. I only stared, and kept staring.

“...Ricky? Is that you?”

He moved his head. I couldn’t tell if he’d heard me or not. But I was sure it was Ricky Newman, even though I hadn’t seen him since his family moved to Arizona in eighth grade. My mother and Ricky’s mother were good friends. They’d forced Ricky and me to play together as kids, although a real friendship between us had never happened.

“Ricky?” I said again.

He stood up and walked along the fence like a gymnast on a balance beam. Then he drifted down through the air to the road. He turned his face to me, although I couldn’t tell if he was actually seeing me or not. I could only note his troubled expression.

The words rose up through my body, from some deep place of knowing that I didn’t consciously understand. “That way,” I said, and felt my arm lift, pointing to the right. “You need to go that way.” I was pointing off the road, into a cluster of hedges and bright bougainvillea.

An expression of peace settled over Ricky’s face, and he walked off in that direction. He didn’t leave any footprints in the gravel. He didn’t make any sound at all. Sunlight shafted over him—and then through him—and his form seemed to shimmer and dance as it dissolved into the hedges.

And then he was gone.

At dinner that night, my mother said, “Terrible news. Ricky Newman, remember him?”

I’d been pushing pieces of chicken around my plate. I had no appetite. At the mention of Ricky’s name I looked up and said, perhaps a little too sharply, “What happened to him?”

“He died,” my mother said. “Earlier today.”

“He died,” I said blankly.

I felt numb. There was the surreal, impossible knowledge that someone my own age had died, someone I’d known, but there was also the matter of Ricky’s astral projection, soul projection, or whatever it was that I had encountered earlier. My mind touched on the implications, and shied away. I wasn’t ready to go there.

“An asthma attack,” my mother went on. “He didn’t have his inhaler with him, and by the time...”

But I couldn’t listen to the rest. I was pulling on my leather jacket. “I have to go somewhere,” I muttered.

“Sasha—”

“I won’t be long.”

And I was out of there.

10

“Haiden!”

The white house seemed as abandoned as always, but this time I wasn’t having it.

“Haiden!” I banged on the door. I walked around and banged on the shuttered windows. “Haiden!” Where did he come from? Where did he go when our sessions were over? Who was he? Unanswered questions filled my mouth like ash.

“Sasha.”

I whirled.

“Sasha, stop yelling, you’ll disturb the neighborhood.”

He was standing beneath one of the palms, his face and body carved in shadow.

“I don’t care,” I said. “Something happened today ... and I need to know....” I could feel my voice falter. I cleared my throat and tried again. “I need answers.”

He tilted his head.

I told him what had happened with Ricky. “And then I found out that he died! Did I do that? Am I responsible for that in some way?” I was thinking about what he had told me the other day, about how easy it is for someone’s ... soul ... to get lost and never find its way back to its body. I had told Ricky what direction to go in, I had even pointed, as if I’d known anything at all about what I was doing.

Had he lost himself, had he ... died ... because of me?

Haiden seemed absorbed in his own thoughts. “So it’s already happening,” I heard him mutter. “I didn’t expect it this soon—”

“What’s happening?”

“Your gift has begun to truly manifest.” Haiden spread his hands. “Ricky was lost, Sasha. You showed him the direction he needed to travel to pass from this world into the next. This kind of thing will happen again. Other lost souls will find you—they’ll be drawn to you—and you will help them find their way.”

“That’s why you’ve been ... teaching me? That’s what you’ve been teaching me?”

Haiden nodded.

My knees felt watery. I stumbled. “You’ve been teaching me to communicate with the souls of dead people.” I sat down—“collapse” is probably the better word—on the doorstep.

“Not all of them are dead.” Before I could respond to that, he said quietly, “There’s more.” He sat on the step beside me. “In order to continue your education, I need you to come with me.”

“Come with you?”

“I live,” Haiden said, “in that other realm I once mentioned. Sometimes known as the Underworld. I kind of ... rule it, actually.”

And something clicked in my head. My voice dull with the shock of it. I said, “You mean ... Hades? You’re, like, that guy Hades?”

“That’s one of my names.”

“You’re the freaking god of the Underworld!”

“If I had a job title,” Haiden allowed, “that would probably be it.”

I could only stare at him. Is that why he had always seemed familiar to me? Memory seemed to be moving around, dislodging the blocked parts: I was a little girl, and he was a crossing guard with vivid blue eyes smiling at me as I trooped across the street. I was ten, and downtown with my mother, and he was a handsome stranger who asked us for the time. I was fourteen, and working at a fast food restaurant, and he was a customer ordering a cheeseburger and fries. And those were only the moments, the encounters, I could remember.

Suddenly I knew that he had always been there, in my life, crossing paths every now and again while I grew up, and he remained the same. He didn’t age. He was constant and unchanging. I was fifteen, and he was the good Samaritan who helped my friend’s hissing black cat out of a tree, even as it flattened against the branch and took swats at his head. “What’s your name?” I had asked in gratitude and now, clear as a streak of birdsong, in my memory I heard him say, “Haiden.”

“Sasha,” he was saying now, “I’ve made mistakes in the past that I would never make again. I want you ... I need you ... to come to my kingdom with me. To be at my side. To be my Queen. There are so many lost ones whom you could help, the same way you did Ricky—”

The words burst out of me. “Why can’t you help them?”

“Because you bring the two worlds together,” Haiden said, “in a way that I can’t. You are one of them—the lost—in a way that I will never be. Trust me, Sasha, I’ve gone over this in my head. I try to understand it all over again every time you and I go through this, life after life after life—”

“I have to go,” I said suddenly. “This is way too weird.”

“Sasha, I would never force you to do anything. If you come with me, it will be of your own free will.”

“I have to go.”

He didn’t reach out for me or stop me or follow me. I strode away from him, beneath the palms, down the curve of driveway, then ran the rest of the way home.

11

In the blur of days that passed I read up on Hades ... on Haiden. Except the patient, gentle, blue-eyed teacher I knew didn’t square up with the fearsome god of the myths. He seemed best known for the story involving Persephone, the young maiden he fell in love with and took to the Underworld. When she begged him to return to her own world, he let her go—except first, he gave her a pomegranate. She ate half of it, including the six seeds that would forever bind her to the Underworld—and to Hades—for six months of every year.

I remembered reaching for the bowl of fruit on the table, and the way Haiden had snapped, “Don’t!”

I remembered the softness of his voice and the sadness in his eyes when he said, “I’ve made mistakes in the past. If you come with me, it will be of your own free will.”

12

My friend Ashley and I went up to Malibu that weekend after I visited Josh. Ashley’s father had a house on the beach, and Ashley thought I needed some time in the sun. “You’re starting to look really pale,” she complained.

At dinner Ashley’s father talked about the movie he was making and bickered with Ashley’s mother about computer games. Afterward Ashley and I watched a couple of DVDs and drank wine and talked late into the night. When I made my way up the stairs and down the hall to one of the guest bedrooms, I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. There was a piercing ache in my chest, as if someone had run a blade through it.

The only person who could make that ache go away was Haiden, and yet I had been avoiding the abandoned white house on Bel Air Road and trying not to think of him at all.

God of the Underworld. For crying out loud.

Why couldn’t I have fallen for some nice normal boy at my school? Every so often I’d catch myself touching my lips, tracing their outline, remembering Haiden’s kiss. But I didn’t want to deal with lost people, dead people. I didn’t want to sit at some guy’s side in the Underworld. I wanted what other people had, or what I believed other people had, even if I didn’t know any of them. I wanted happy and normal.

I didn’t want to be Persephone. What had happened to her, anyway, that Haiden had to come looking for me? Maybe she had moved on. Maybe the myth wasn’t accurate—it was a myth, after all. Or maybe she was a kind of metaphor for other girls—girls like me—who maybe had some Persephone in them. “Life after life after life,” Haiden had said. Maybe there were a bunch of us Persephones, trailing down through the ages, and every so often Haiden had to come find us.

I changed into my pajamas and threw open the French doors so I could listen to the ocean while I slept. I went out on the balcony. The water glimmered a midnight blue, waves spilling along the private beach.

Someone was walking through the sand.

At first I thought it was Ashley’s father, but the figure was too tall and slender. Then my heart kicked and I thought— Haiden. But it wasn’t him either.

The figure moved into the glow of the security lights. I saw the longish, tousled brown hair, and the shimmer of his body, the way the light seemed to sift right through him.

“Josh!” I yelled. “Josh!”

He paused, and for a moment I thought he heard me and was going to look in my direction. But no. He was simply standing there, the light falling over him, the half-moon high overhead, the waves sliding to his feet and sliding away again.

He wasn’t leaving any footprints in the sand.

I ran out of the guest room. I clambered down the stairs. I spent a few moments trying to find the door that opened onto the beach. And then I was outside, the salt spray in my face, screaming, “Josh!”

He turned to look at me.

“Don’t be dead.” I was half sobbing. “Please don’t be dead.”

He smiled.

And I felt it, that deep sense of knowing that came from inside me but also somewhere beyond me. It felt as cold and ancient as the stars. It moved through my body and I felt my arm lift. I was pointing out into the water. “That way,” I said. I tasted salt on my lips, from the ocean but also my own tears. “That way.” Josh smiled again. His lips moved—I think he said thank you —and he turned away from me and started gliding into the water. His form dissolved into the waves and he was gone.

I fell to my knees in the sand.

I don’t remember returning to the guest room, but at some point I must have. I must have crawled into bed and fallen asleep. Because bright light streamed into my room and Ashley’s voice was in my ear: “Sasha, Sasha, wake up! You have to wake up!”

“Go away,” I muttered. I didn’t want the day to start, because I knew what it would bring me: the news that Josh was dead.

“Josh is awake,” Ashley said. “He’s out of his coma and asking for you!”

13

Three days later I went back to the little white house. I left Paloma at home.

I called out Haiden’s name. No answer.

But the door was unlocked and opened easily.

I walked down the hall to the sunken living room where my lessons had taken place. I listened to the sound of my breath and the rap of my footsteps and the faint strains of birdsong filtering in from outside.

The table was still in the middle of the room.

The bowl of fruit was still on it.

I knew I was alone ... and yet I could feel Haiden’s presence. He was somewhere close. He was waiting to see what I would do, why I had come here.

I wanted to tell him about Josh. I wanted to describe the warm glow of love in my chest when I saw him, awake and alive, sitting up in the hospital bed and poking at the remains of his lunch.

“Sasha,” he said when he saw me. “I’m back!”

“You’re back.” I was laughing.

And I wanted to tell Haiden what Josh had said to me, after we’d cycled through our first rounds of conversation, talking about everything and nothing. Then a pause settled over us, and Josh looked at me with his calm, level gaze that was familiar and strange at the same time.

“Do you know what it’s like to be lost?” he said to me.

“Everybody gets lost.”

“I mean ... really lost.” His eyes searched my face. “So lost you don’t know if you’ll ever find your way back ... or forward. You don’t know where you are. You don’t know where you’re supposed to be. It’s like the universe misplaced you and then forgot you ever existed.”

“It sounds terrible,” I said, “and lonely.”

Josh touched my wrist. “But you were there.” His voice was a rasp. “You were there,” he said again, a touch of awe in his voice, “and you found me.”

I’ve always been good at finding lost things.

Now, in the abandoned white house that no longer felt so ... abandoned, I sifted through the mess of apples until I found the one pomegranate, hiding at the bottom of the bowl. I’d brought a knife for this purpose. I sliced the fruit open and picked out six seeds.

I would live in my world and be a writer, and I would also live in Haiden’s world and be Persephone. I swallowed the seeds one after the other.

“Haiden,” I said, “Haiden.”

I could feel him somewhere close, and drawing closer. I was ready. I stood there and waited.