Hereafter

The balance

Wrong. Everything was wrong. I had just started to believe in this place, started to believe what Tristan had said about us playing an important role, somehow helping maintain balance. I’d begun to believe in our purpose. But if Aaron could be relegated to the Shadowlands, then the balance was seriously off.

I plodded around the corner onto Magnolia Lane, then hid in the shadows cast by a huge peach tree, waiting to make sure the house was silent. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, afraid that I might break down and say things I shouldn’t, or start crying with no good explanation and never stop. When I finally entered the house, I opened the door slowly, to keep it from creaking, then held the knob so the catch wouldn’t click. When I let it go ever so carefully, the bolt silently slid into place. I was sure I was home free. Until I turned around and found Darcy standing at the bottom of the stairs with Fisher.

“Sneaking around?” she quipped.

“God! You scared me,” I said, my eyes darting between the two of them. Her hair was disheveled, and his T-shirt was on inside out.

“Sorry,” she said.

I started past them up the stairs, which forced Fisher to stumble down the last two steps to the floor.

“Rory, wait,” Darcy said. “Are you all right?”

I paused, wishing I could tell her everything—wishing I could tell her anything—but I couldn’t. I couldn’t even whitewash it and tell her I was sad because Aaron had left the island, because she wouldn’t remember that Aaron had ever existed. This was what our relationship was going to be like now. Me keeping secrets and trying to keep track of what she could and couldn’t remember.

Unless she became a Lifer. Please let her do something selfless and earn the damned bracelet she wants so badly so I won’t have to deal with all this alone.

I looked into Fisher’s eyes, and he shot back a questioning glance of concern. I saw his hand move to his bracelet, and he turned it around and around. He could tell something had spooked me, and he was worried about me. I would have loved to talk to him just then—to talk to any other Lifer and find out what they thought. But I couldn’t exactly ask Fisher up to my room with Darcy standing right there.

“I just have a headache,” I told her, staring at the floor. “I’m gonna go lie down.”

She started to say something else, but her words were drowned out by my heavy footsteps as I raced up the stairs. By the time I got to the third floor, the tears had started to fall. I threw myself onto my bed, pressed my fists to my temples, and tried to breathe.

“It’s okay,” I told myself aloud. “It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”

But I was lying to myself, which just made the frustration burn hotter beneath my skin. Aaron was suffering. Right now, at this very moment, he was suffering in the Shadowlands. What if souls were tortured there? Or what if it was one, big, yawning nothing—a vast empty plane of loneliness? Was he in pain? Was he scared? Was he wondering why I did this to him?

Of course he was. He had to be blaming me, because I was the last person he had spoken to, the last person he had touched, the one who’d sent him off to eternal damnation with a tearful smile and a wave.

I rolled over onto my side, clutched my pillow to me, and cried. My stupid imagination went wild, conjuring images of fire and demons, Grim Reapers and cold graves, whispery taunting voices and empty eye sockets and yawning dead mouths—slime, muck, and tears. I pressed my eyes closed and tried not to see it, but I couldn’t. As bad as my theories were, I would never know exactly what was happening to Aaron, and that was the worst part of all. The not knowing.

“No.”

I sat up in bed, pulling the pillow onto my lap, and gritted my teeth together. There had to be a way to reverse this. It was a mistake, and it needed to be rectified. I was not going to let Aaron suffer forever, thinking I had sentenced him to a fate worse than death. I was going to make this right.