Hereafter

New rule

“I’m not going to usher him,” I hissed to Joaquin as we followed Bea, Fisher, and Krista through the crowded Thirsty Swan toward the back hallway. “He’s not going. Not now. Not when everyone’s going to the Shadowlands.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Joaquin whispered back, tugging me toward the wall. “No one will expect you to usher him. I can’t even believe he’s your charge. It’s like the universe is trying to mess with you.”

I scoffed. Like the universe gave a crap about me. But Joaquin fixed me with a stare that made me shrivel inside. Could the universe really be messing with me?

“You should have seen Darcy, though,” I said, trying to think about anything else. “She was sure Steven Nell was out there, ready to grab my father, and she just ran out there to save him. It was intense.”

Joaquin’s eyebrows darted skyward. “Really?”

I laughed under my breath. “Yeah. I’ve never seen her do anything like that before. She was, like, Super Darcy.”

“Interesting,” Joaquin said, stepping sideways to let a visitor pass by with a mug of beer. “Sorry I missed that. I was busy serving chicken soup to my ‘grandma.’”

“Right!” I brought my hand to my forehead. “How is Ursula?”

“She’s…sick,” Joaquin replied, sighing. “I’d say she’ll be all right, since it doesn’t look that bad, but with everything else going on around here, what the hell do I know?”

Bea, Fisher, and Krista were all waiting in the hall, eyeing us expectantly. Joaquin fumbled in his pocket for a set of keys, then opened the door to the stockroom and backed up against it, holding it for us. I stepped through first and slid aside to make way. The room was long and slim and cramped with boxes and barrels, old wooden things with iron clasps that looked like they’d been there for centuries. The air smelled of stale beer and sawdust, peanuts, and salt. The others filed in silently, their sneakers and sandals scraping on the wood floor. Krista hoisted herself up onto a barrel, and Bea leaned back next to her against a shelf full of condiment bottles and coffee mugs. Fisher took a spot by the back door, squaring his shoulders like a bouncer. A moment later Kevin appeared, and right away he began pacing and muttering to himself, as if hopped up on too much Red Bull. Then Lauren slipped through, shooting me an unreadable glance as she squeezed by me.

“What’s up?” I asked.

Her eyes darted to the door. Joaquin had just started to let it shut when a hand stopped it. I held my breath, expecting to see Tristan, but it wasn’t him. It was Pete. A moment later, Nadia and Cori joined him. They walked along the near wall until Pete’s shoulder knocked into a stack of boxes taller than him, and they stopped. Nadia shot me a piercing look as she settled back against the shelves.

My stomach clenched, and the temperature in the room seemed to spike. Joaquin gave me a look that was somehow alarmed and soothing all at once. Like, Yes, this is not good, but it will be fine. I pressed my sweaty palms together and hoped he was right.

“Everyone here?” Joaquin asked.

“Not Tristan,” Krista pointed out.

Joaquin glanced back toward the noisy bar. A loud cheer went up, as if the home team had just scored a goal on TV. Except there were no TVs here. No home team to speak of.

“I don’t think Tristan’s coming,” he said, closing the door.

Everyone looked around nervously.

“What the hell is going on?” Bea asked, cracking her knuckles.

“What’s going on is, I just sent someone to the Shadowlands,” Kevin blurted out vehemently. “Someone who was not supposed to go there.”

“Me, too,” Krista said quietly.

“Anyone else?” Joaquin asked, stepping farther into the room.

Nadia raised her hand, staring straight at me until I had to look away.

“Me, too,” Cori said.

That made four.

“Who else? There were five,” Joaquin said. His question was met with silence, apart from the laughter out in the bar. “Who else?” Joaquin shouted.

“Pete!” Cori said through her teeth.

“All right! I brought someone up there, but if he went to the Shadowlands, I got no beef with it,” he said. “That guy deserved it.”

“All right, fine,” Joaquin said. “That’s four out of five gone to the wrong place.”

“And three of us had one, too,” Fisher said. “Me, J., and Rory.”

All eyes flicked to me.

“There’s a shock,” Nadia muttered.

“Nadia, don’t even start,” Bea said.

My legs trembled. My eyes darted to the door.

“Oh, please! Do you people really not see what’s going on here?” Nadia said, gesturing at me with an open hand. “She’s doing this! First the dying and the insects and the sickness, now this! All of it started when she got here, but somehow she’s got all of you snowed! Even Tristan! It’s just like Jessica all over again.”

“Shut up about Jessica!” Joaquin shouted, his voice ringing loudly through the room. “You don’t know anything about her!”

The room went silent. I held my breath, startled. Joaquin’s chest heaved, his face a hardened mask of fury. He pressed his fist into his other hand and clenched his jaw. Suddenly I remembered what Nadia had said the other night at the cove, about a pissing match over a girl. Jessica. It had to have been.

“Were any of you here when the Jessica incident happened?” Joaquin asked. “No! You weren’t. I was, and this is nothing like what Jessica did. What she did was the fault of one person, a result of an error in judgment.”

Kevin scoffed.

“Okay, a huge error in judgment, but still…” Joaquin continued. “She made a choice and acted on it. This is nothing like that. This couldn’t be perpetrated by one person and especially not by one person who just learned our ways five days ago.”

“I don’t know,” Kevin said, looking me up and down. “She did kill someone in the other world.”

My jaw dropped. “He was a serial killer!”

“She was only defending herself, Kevin,” Krista put in. “And he killed her first.” She cast me an apologetic look. “Sort of.”

“Yeah, and you’re hardly one to throw stones, Slimy, considering your life,” Bea added.

“Screw you, Bea! Not all of us grew up in a perfect house with perfect parents and crazy athletic genes!” Kevin shouted, getting right in her face.

“Oh, will you stop using your drunk father as an excuse, already?” Bea replied. “People make their own choices!”

“You have no clue, Beatrice,” Kevin sneered, looking her up and down.

Suddenly, she took a swing at him, and the situation crumbled. Pete grabbed Kevin, Fisher got between them, and Lauren and Krista did their best to hold back a seething Bea. I flattened myself against the wall as a wayward foot flew toward my face.

“That’s enough!” Joaquin shouted, grabbing Kevin by his lapels and throwing him against the door. The crack brought everyone up short. They froze in the middle of a violent tableau, everyone grabbing everyone else, chests heaving for breath.

Kevin had hit the floor, and Joaquin now leaned down with his arm outstretched to help him up. Amazingly, Kevin took it. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief as he quietly stood, his sheepish gaze on the ground.

“Sorry, Bea,” he said.

“Me, too,” she replied, holding out her hand. After a beat, he shook it.

Joaquin took in a breath and let it out slowly. “Look, we can’t let our emotions get the best of us right now,” he said to the crowd. “What’s really going on here is huge.”

At that moment, the door swung open. Fisher made a move to block the intruder but then backed off. The mayor stepped in from the back alleyway wearing a black trench coat over a pressed white shirt, her blond hair pulled back from her face, as always. I shrank back at the sight of her, knowing in my gut that this was it. Her and Nadia in the same room. They were going to officially accuse me. They were going to send me to Oblivion.

As the door began to close behind the mayor, I stepped closer to Joaquin, closer to the door leading back to the bar. Then a hand stopped the back door before it could shut, and Tristan slipped through.

I froze. His normally tanned skin looked pale under the fluorescent bulbs. His gaze darted around from face to face. I couldn’t tell if he felt guilty, betrayed, or something else entirely, but when he looked into my eyes from across the room, I felt calmer. I felt safe. At least, relatively. Whatever suspicions my brain was entertaining about where he’d been today, my heart was glad to see him.

“Well,” the mayor said, scrunching up her nose at the dusty top of a vodka box. “Isn’t this cozy?”

She looked at Nadia, who lifted her chin and smiled. A shiver went through me. Joaquin took a step closer to me.

“What’re you doing here?” Joaquin demanded.

“We came, Mr. Marquez, to apologize.” The mayor sniffed. “It appears that you and your little friend here,” she said, sneering at me, “were correct about the usherings.”

My jaw dropped slightly. I hadn’t known the mayor long, but she didn’t strike me as the type of person who readily admitted her mistakes.

“So you admit it?” Joaquin said. “You admit that something’s wrong?”

She tilted her head. “Five souls to the Shadowlands in one fog is…”

“It’s unprecedented,” Tristan cut in. “Nothing like that has ever happened before. As long as I’ve been here, the good souls have always outnumbered the bad. Always. And five have never been taken at once.” He looked at me. “Not only were some of those people certainly not destined for the Shadowlands, some of them weren’t ready to go at all.”

I glanced at Pete and Nadia, thinking of the tally from the cave. The good souls have always outnumbered the bad.

Whom did the tally really belong to? I looked around the room. Whoever it was could be here right now, watching. Itching to make five more marks on that page.

“How do we fix it?” Lauren asked.

“That’s just it,” Tristan said. “We don’t know. Until we figure out how it’s going wrong, we can’t figure out how to make it right.”

A disturbed murmur filled the room.

“But we will figure out what, or who, the problem is,” the mayor said. Then she turned and looked directly at me. “You can trust me on that.”

My face burned so hot I could have fainted. So she did still think it could be me. She just hadn’t made her final decision yet. Realizing this, I somehow still managed to muster up enough courage to state the obvious.

“In the meantime, we have to stop ushering souls,” I said.

The mayor looked me up and down coolly. “I agree.”

Nadia’s face went slack.

“We talked about it, and we both think that’s the best plan,” Tristan told the room. “Better this place get foggy and crowded than more innocent souls get sent to the Shadowlands.”

“And what about the souls that are already there?” Joaquin asked. “Can we get them back?”

There was a long, heavy silence. No one moved. No one breathed.

“You already know the answer to that,” Tristan said finally. “No one ever comes back from the Shadowlands. That’s why it’s imperative that we all understand what we need to do.” The mayor took a step back as he commanded control of the room. “From this moment on, no matter how many coins we each have, no matter how strong the call, no one is to leave this island. Are we clear?”

“Yes,” the room said as one.

“Good,” Tristan said.

Then he looked me in the eye, his gaze so intense it took my breath away.

“Rory,” he said firmly. “We need to talk.”