Pete vanishes from the outside in, curling in on himself like a burning piece of paper, until he’s nothing more than a tiny ball of light. In the span of seconds, he’s gone.
And I’m next.
I can’t outrun a hellhound, but I run anyway.
Two
I may not be able to outrun a hellhound, but I can outsmart it. Two paces away is a narrow maintenance tunnel that doesn’t actually exist. I dart in and slam the door behind me, believing with whatever I have that passes for a heart that the door is locked.
Said heart is pounding, and I don’t recognize the ragged sound of my breathing. I rest my head against the door for a moment, but the image of a soul disintegrating burns behind my eyelids. Except it’s not Pete’s soul I see when I close my eyes.
Get it together, Elle.
The disintegration’s not the important part. It’s what happened after. I’m sure I saw it this time. Right before the last of Pete vanished, there was a tiny ball of light right where his sternum had been. And then it went…somewhere. Into the “gun”? Point is, it existed. Still exists, somewhere.
I tuck that realization away, turning my focus back on the present.
As long as no one on the subway platform imagines this maintenance tunnel, which doesn’t actually exist in the real Boylston station, I should be good. Sure, the hellhound would have seen me disappear, but as far as I know, they can’t influence the surroundings in the Afterlife. I concentrate on turning the lights on, but it takes me several seconds to convince myself they exist. Once they flicker to life, I pull my jacket close around me and start heading briskly down the tunnel.
Physics are weird here. The best we can figure, it’s a psychic creation of collective consciousness. It’s the wholepeople see what theyexpect to seething, but here, what people see is a mélange of all the Dead’s memories. Underneath all that is a layer of surreality, and sometimes bits of it creep through the construct. And that’s how you end up with whales swimming down a subway platform. If I were to go up into Boston Common, it would be recognizable but off, because it’s been unconsciously re-created by people from different times and ages and points of view. And then something weird might pop up, like a giant potato in the sky or a swan with human legs, but they usually pass fairly quickly, because people disbelieve them away.
One person can’t usually change much on purpose, but I’m thinkingreallyhard about how there’s a maintenance tunnel here, and lights to illuminate my way back to the basement of an unassuming building one block over.
Plus, I’m not the only one imagining it to life.
Footsteps pick up pace behind me.
“Well, that sucks.” Suit Guy, a.k.a. Vinny, a.k.a. my shill, falls into step beside me.
“You were supposed to win the first one,” I say.
Vinny’s not my favorite person, personally speaking, but in the absence of a crew, he’ll do in a pinch. He has the necessary attributes: the ability to lie convincingly and the willingness to do so for a price.
Oh, and he’s Dead.
“I was distracted,” he responds to my accusation.
I roll my eyes. “Was there a hot guy on the platform?”
There’s a pause before he mutters, “There was a hot guy on the platform.”
I smirk. “Blue button-down and locs?”
He just grins.
“Second pocket,” I say, nodding to the messenger bag slung over Vinny’s shoulder—the one I left behind in the T stop when I fled.
He rips open the Velcro flap and pulls out a baby tooth.Mybaby tooth. I don’t tell him it’s the last one, that I’ve already bartered away the rest of them.
When I was cleaning out the house, I’d found them in a small tin in the attic, my name scrawled across the top in Dad’s handwriting, three layers of spells protecting them. There was one with Dante’s name on it too, but I can’t bring myself to trade those.
Organic material is the only currency here, and none of it is more valuable than bones.
“No possession,” I say sternly to Vinny.
He scoffs. “What do you take me for?” He cradles the tooth. “I’m gonna use this baby to haunt my ex-boyf.”
“Nobody says ‘boyf’ anymore.”
