Only the Good Die Young

3

One second I was by the swimming pool; the next—

I popped out of nowhere, rolling over the ground, everything around me a vicious tumble of confusion until my momentum stopped and I was lying on my back, out of breath, staring skyward until my vision adjusted.

But all I saw was darkness. Pure, spreading, unending deep purple.

What just happened?

As my brain tried to catch up, I angled to my side, planting one of my hands on the ground.

That’s right. It was planted. As if I’d become solid for some reason…

I quickly glanced around, but I didn’t see my old boyfriend anywhere. Had it even been Dean?

If not… then what the hell?

When nothing attacked me—no Dean, no more truly messed-up supernatural surprises—my pulse finally slowed, my lungs filling with crisp air as I seriously took in my location.

At first, everything above and around me didn’t register very well.

It all seemed to be a purple haze, like layer upon layer of the gaseous clouds you’d see in middle school science textbooks when you studied astronomy and celestial bodies. And there were stars dotting the plane.

I thought that maybe I was still stunned and my head wasn’t working right, so I closed my eyes and opened them again to get rid of the haziness and starriness. But the twinklers were still there, hanging in the midst of the purple, most of them far enough away so that you could almost wish on them, but some near enough so that they seemed like shapes that should’ve been familiar but weren’t.

Then I looked down to where my palms were plastered to the ground.

Damn!

I jumped away from the sight, because, fuck, there was nothing there. Just more sky, almost like a glass ceiling that was holding me up over a gazillion miles of empty, purple space.

Skittering backward, I tried to distance myself from all of it, even though I couldn’t. It’s just that my adrenaline was ruling me.

Yes—I had adrenaline again. Why? How?

I was solid here, in heaven, or limbo, or wherever Dean had taken me.

When I crashed into something behind me, I startled, jumping away from that, too. But when I faced it I discovered it was only a knee-high, circular wall of white that glowed ever so slightly.

It looked like… a fancy aboveground pool? Something that belonged in a Roman villa?

Peering around me again, I saw that I was just as alone as I’d been before. Still nothing but sky and stars.

If I hadn’t known I was dead before, this was the clincher. I had to be in heaven, right? Maybe I had only been cheating mortality for nearly thirty years, and when Amanda Lee had pulled me out of my time loop in Elfin Forest, she’d put into motion my true demise.

Had the powers that be finally sucked me into oblivion?

Gradually, an even more disturbing question dawned on me. If this was genuine death, then what had “Dean” been?

Was he the Angel of Death, disguised as my old boyfriend, luring me to its arms only to deposit me here?

I grabbed the edge of the circular wall, dragging myself upward, only to stare at what I saw below me in the pool.

Glowing, swirling, the water or whatever was absolutely beautiful. If I had to describe it, I could only say that I was watching a bunch of flowing, liquid, filmy, white-winged lotus leaves waving in water, serene and welcoming.

Real and unreal, I thought, leaning over it more, a little lulled, suddenly not afraid of where I’d landed.

Finally feeling a bit of peace in all this chaos.

The leaves kept opening, then closing, and I started to feel heavy.

Heavier.

You have found us, they seemed to say. Come in. Reach down your hand. Feel the warmth… .

I smiled. Who cared about solving those mysteries back on earth? Who needed justice?

Not me. Not when I had the ultimate Jacuzzi.

I leaned even closer, the lotus’s sweet scent infiltrating me, the leaves beckoning—

When a neon white hand clawed out of the water, grabbing at me, I screamed, falling backward, my ass smacking the ground just in time to avoid getting pulled in.

As the fist disappeared below the wall line, milky light splashed up, and everything around me was placid again.

My pulse was back to tearing through me, and while I stood, I pressed a hand against my chest, almost like I could stuff my heart back into its place.

Then I heard laughter.

When I turned around, I knew whom I was going to see, and as I caught sight of that surfer-boy smile, the straight, chin-length blond hair, the lanky, young body of my old boyfriend, I gritted my teeth.

“You’re not Dean,” I said through them.

“Just repeat that a thousand times, and maybe you’ll believe it.”

That voice—untouched by age, heart-wrenchingly vivid, like he wasn’t a lie at all.

“You’re… ,” I said. “Hell, I don’t know what you are, and I’d hate to guess.”

“Why don’t you do it anyway?” He was wearing a white T-shirt, faded jeans, blue Vans. How had this thing found out Dean’s usual wardrobe? “Tell me—what do you think I am?”

Was he flirting? “I’m not going to play games with you. I just want to know why you brought me here.”

He glanced around, like he’d never seen this star place before. Or maybe he was just like a guy who was admiring his first apartment when he’s finally brought his girlfriend there.

“You don’t like it?” he asked in the exact same charming way Dean would’ve. I would know, because charm was what had gotten me into his first apartment all those years ago. And it was what had gotten him into my . . .

Like it mattered right now.

“Are you expecting me to like it here?” I asked. “Maybe you should know that something in your pool just tried to molest me. Plus, any second, I feel like I’m going to drop through this weird floor.”

I motioned below me, to the clear purple expanse of nothing. It made me a little sick to be suspended in space like this.

“Yeah,” fake Dean said, following my gesture. “Most ghosts take a few to get used to these digs.”

I couldn’t stop looking at him. My Dean. But I forced myself to not care.

“It’d be nice if you’d just tell me why you kidnapped me,” I said.

He shrugged. “It’s what I do.”

“Kidnap ghosts?”

“Sure.”

I glanced at the purple haze, the stars, the glowing lotus pool, which was also starting to make sense.

Come to me, it’d said.

Was it the thing we call “the light”? The pathway to a real heaven since I was starting to think that this was just some kind of way station?

If it was the light, then humans had been right about it all along. The light wasn’t just a cliché or a story to tell ourselves on earth so we could comfort our what-comes-after-this fears.

I thought I should’ve been happy about solving such a great mystery. But it wasn’t easy to be happy when I just wanted to run.

When I looked back at the fake Dean, he mildly stuck his hands in his jeans pockets. I remembered those jeans. He’d ripped off a back pocket once since it was already loose, and he’d given it to me in a moment of odd romance, just as if it were a bunch of roses.

“To remember me by,” he’d said, kidding around. But I’d kept it in a drawer in my room, never letting go of it after he left for school.

He grinned. “I can tell your active mind has already got some theories about all this.”

“You’re the Grim Reaper,” I blurted. “And you caught me.”

He didn’t say anything to that, just took a couple of steps closer. I stood, totally on guard, my hackles raised. When he saw how defensive I was, he stopped and held his hands up, like he was showing me he was harmless.

“Whoa, Jenny,” he said. “Out of everything you’re thinking, I certainly didn’t bring you here to hurt you.”

Jenny. If a ghost—or whatever solid form I was right now—could melt, I would’ve been another lotus pool.

“You’re the Grim Reaper,” I repeated, getting back on track, “and you came here to get me into the light.”

“Not unless you want to go.” He tilted his head. “But I’m getting the feeling that you’re more tied to earth than most. Some ghosts are like that, though, at first. It takes some time for them to get bored with what’s down there.”

“So you’re going to let me go now?”

“Damn, Jenny. You talk too much.”

He took another easy step closer, and with the sound of my nickname still rolling through me, I actually allowed it.

And he took another step—he was so close now, I could catch the scent of the soap he’d always used. Something clean that had mixed with the sea salt on his skin.

I could almost feel his warmth, too.

But if he was something spiritual, how could he be warm? Was coldness reserved just for garden-variety ghosts like me?

My breathing was coming faster, and for a moment I could almost believe that this really was Dean, maybe because I wanted to believe it with everything I had. Everything I’d lost.

His smile grew as he saw how he was affecting me. “Looks like I sure picked the right identity to interest you.”

And—bam—just like that, I was back to being defensive.

But he clearly liked playing around with me, this guy. And he didn’t give up just because of my mood change; he only looked into my eyes, his own gaze going as soft as a tough guy’s gaze ever could.

“Come here, Jenny,” he whispered. “You know you want to. You’re curious. You’re thinking, ‘Is he really Dean? If not, just how well can he imitate everything about him?’” Another grin. “I can assure you that I don’t disappoint.”

I shook my head, recalling what’d happened when I gave in to him back at the Edgett mansion.

“Remember the last time I kissed you?” he asked.

Not fair.

“You aren’t Dean,” I said, like these were magic words that’d shoo him off. “You never kissed me.”

“Why don’t you come here and find out for sure?”

“No.” I kept shaking my head, lowering my gaze so I didn’t have to look at him.

Too tempting.

Too much.

When I felt his fingers on my cheek, I nearly jumped out of my body because of the heat of him, the sparks he created inside me.

How could this be happening, though? Whenever I made contact with anyone as a ghost, I gave them chills.

What kind of place were we in that the rules didn’t apply anymore?

Shivers cascaded down the skin that I had in this place—shivers of longing that I thought I’d never be able to feel again.

“That’s right,” he said quietly, even closer now. “You can feel this way for the rest of your existence. For a ghost, there’s only coldness, isn’t there? You’ll never be able to touch anyone like this again—especially not the real Dean. Besides, you saw him today, and he was old, not the same boy you remember. He was nearly unrecognizable.”

“So are you.”

He only laughed at that.

When his fingers trailed down my cheek to my jaw, my stomach tumbled, bringing the heat to the same rogue places that’d gotten so excited when I saw Gavin earlier tonight.

But this was… different. This was my Dean.

Or the closest I’d ever get to him again.

“I could make you so happy,” he said. “Just like you should’ve been. You only have to say yes to me.”

Yes, I thought, because somewhere deep inside, I still loved him.

And it was this part of me that started shooting off silent questions: So what if this version of Dean wasn’t real? Wasn’t I feeling something that felt better than anything I had now, down on the earth? Wasn’t that a far improvement from coldness and invisibility and nothingness?

He was offering me something so much better… .

As he stroked my skin, that yes was on the tip of my tongue.

But, out of the corner of my eye, the twinkle of one of those stars kept me from answering.

There was something… off… about those stars. Something about the shapes that I wasn’t quite understanding yet.

There was something very wrong about all of this—

I jerked away from “Dean,” wiping my jaw on my shirt, like that was going to erase him from me. It didn’t—my skin still burned where he’d touched me—but it was a good show.

“No,” I said.

He didn’t look disappointed as I took a couple of steps away from him. In fact, he seemed cockier than ever, with an expression that said, “You’ll come around.”

I almost expected him to pursue me as I increased the distance between us, but he was just standing there, as cool as shade.

And that’s when I realized that this… thing… might not be as powerful as I’d feared.

“You can’t force me to do what I don’t want to do,” I said, “can you? You can’t force me to kiss you, to give in to you… or to go into the light.”

He hooked his thumbs in his belt loops, his T-shirt slumped just over his hands. He grinned that arrogant “I’m still not worried” grin.

Then I found out why.

A rumbling shook the nonexistent floor, and I wobbled down to my knees, off balance. When the clear floor began to crack, fragmenting around what seemed to be the center of the quake, Dean or the angel of death or—hell, what should I call him?—merely turned around and walked away from me, one hand up in a casual farewell.

“Another day, Jenny,” he said as a hole wrenched open and I dropped through it.

I grasped onto the edge, swinging in space.

Was he trying to kill me?

If I could even be killed?

As I dangled in the sky, watching him through the clear floor, praying that I wouldn’t fall farther, I noticed that the back of his jeans was missing that pocket Dean had once given to me.

Dean.

Stupidly, automatically, I found myself reaching up my free hand in his direction, like I wanted to stay with him.

But then I focused on a star that was closer than the others, and just as I was beginning to see a certain shape to it, the hole snapped open wider, and I lost my grip, tumbling down into a travel tunnel.

And going fuck knew where the Grim Reaper was sending me this time.