“What were you saying?” he asked.
That startled a laugh out of me. “I have no idea.”
He blushed and looked almost shy. “Was that…Is it okay? That we did that?”
I pretended to think. “I think so. Maybe we should try again, just to be sure.”
His mouth met mine again just as an alarm went off.
“Shit,” he said against my lips.
“What is it?” I asked as he pushed off me.
Tolliver did most of his alchemy in my family’s basement. When he first started learning, my parents built him a small lab in the corner. Just a couple stainless steel counters, a few flasks, and a Bunsen burner. Now it took up almost the entire room, with cabinets full of ingredients and potions. He even kept his alchemy prosthesis there, hanging from a hook over his cot. Some nights, like that night, he wouldn’t even go home. He’d just text his mom that he was staying with Dante, and she’d tell him to have a goodtime and that she loved him, and then it’d be a week before she’d text back asking when he was coming home.
Tolliver turned off the timer. “I think…I think it’s done.”
I sat up, basically bounding off the cot. “What? Juliet?”
He nodded, eyes wide as though he couldn’t believe it himself.
“Can we test it?” I asked.
He bit his lip, and I knew what he was thinking. Dante would be furious. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Tolliver’s work. But he’d want to test it first.
Rule #24: Always test new equipment, potions, and spells.
He was the one who was usually the guinea pig. Sometimes CJ. Never me.
Ever since my parents disappeared, Dante had grown more and more protective. It started slowly. I was given fewer responsibilities on jobs, relocated to positions that had fewer risks. Then I was kept in the Beforedeath, stuck with Tolliver in the lab. Eventually, I was cut out of jobs entirely. Dante wouldn’t tell me why, only made excuses about not needing me or the job being too dangerous, even though that had never been an issue before.
But Dante wasn’t here right now. It was just me and Tolliver.
“Please?” I pouted.
Tolliver’s eyes fell down to my lips, and it wasn’t like I was conning him. Not really. No more than people usually con each other. He liked me, so I knew he would say yes. But I hadn’t made him like me just to get him to say yes. So that was okay, then.
In hindsight, this is probably why Dante had the rule about no romantic entanglements.
Tolliver blushed the whole time he prepped to send me into the Afterlife. The process was pretty similar to Miracle Max. I lay on a gurney and Tolliver put the mist mask over my mouth and nose. Hit a few buttons, turned some knobs. But after that, things were completely different.
I was used to a spiraling descent, a rush of sight and sound, thena slow realization of waking up in a place that was almost like where I’d just been, just thinner, a little detached.
But with Juliet, none of that happened. My eyes grew heavy, but no sooner had they closed than they were open again. I was in the same place, as I always was when I went to the Afterlife, but nothing felt different than it did in the Beforedeath. The table beneath me, the mask attached to my face. It all felt as real as it did seconds ago.
At first, I thought it hadn’t worked but then realized Tolliver was no longer beside me.
I pushed off the gurney, removing the mask, and almost stumbled.
I felt…solid. It wasn’t the slightly fuzzy feeling of existing as a living person in the Afterlife. For a moment I considered that maybe Tolliver’s experiment had gone wrong and he had actually killed me, and now I was actually just Dead. But no, if that had been the case, I would have ended up in some sort of liminal space.
My watch beeped, the first marker. Tolliver told me I had ten minutes to walk around and explore, and if I was fake Dead, I was going to make the most of it.
I wandered up the stairs. The house felt just as it usually did, only empty (a feeling I would grow uncomfortably familiar with in the coming months). I walked out the front door and took in my surroundings.
The trees in the cemetery across the street were budding with new growth, even though in the Beforedeath, the graves were currently covered in crisp fallen leaves. A few cars drove down the road, followed by a horse and buggy and one lonely parade float made of beehives and a single tuba.
Across the street, a store sign flickered between a neon beer advertisement and an old wooden sign for Callahan’s Hardware and Supply Co. Through the window, a man was drinking at the bar. Another man walked out the front door, holding a canister of paint.
