Afterworlds Page 5

  “Okay,” Max said. “I’m just going to introduce you to Oscar and leave. I’m not allowed in there.”

  “You aren’t twenty-one?”

  “I’m twenty-six.” Max gave her an indulgent smile. “But Drinks Night is no agents, no editors, no whatevers. Unless they’re published too, of course.”

  “Ah. Of course.” Darcy took a steadying breath as she followed Max inside.

  * * *

  Darcy had expected Drinks Night to have taken over all of Candy Ruthless. She’d imagined a guest list on a clipboard at the door, or at least a private room separated by bloodred velvet curtains. But now, at ten minutes after six, the reality was a lone wooden table with a drink-ringed, battered surface and three people sitting at it.

  Max ushered her forward. “Oscar, this is Darcy Patel.”

  Oscar Lassiter rose a little and offered his hand, beaming a class-president smile. “Nice to finally meet you!”

  As she took his hand, Darcy realized that the other faces at the table were familiar. She’d seen them in videos, as Twitter avatars, on book jackets.

  “Oh,” she said to the less famous of the two, a man with red horn-rimmed glasses and a tweed jacket. “I follow you.”

  The man smiled at this, and Darcy felt foolish. The last time she’d checked, two hundred thousand people followed Coleman Gayle. Most of them didn’t read the Sword Singer books, he always complained, and were only there for his profane political commentary and profound knowledge of vintage sock monkeys.

  “Good to meet you, Darcy. You know Kiralee?”

  “Um, of course.” Darcy turned to face the woman at the table, but her gaze shied away. She could hear the tremor in her own voice. “I mean, we haven’t met. But I totally loved Bunyip.”

  “Oh dear, Coleman. She’s got it all wrong!” Kiralee cried. “Save her from herself!”

  The others all laughed, but Darcy was perplexed and slightly terrified.

  Oscar softly sat her down. “We were just discussing Coleman’s theory about the proper way to meet famous authors.”

  “You check their sales on BookScan the day before,” Coleman Gayle explained. “And whichever novel of theirs has sold the least copies, you say that one’s your favorite. Because that’s the one they think is criminally underappreciated.”

  “Easy for me, since all of mine sold the least.” Kiralee tipped back her glass until ice rattled. “Except bloody Bunyip, of course.”

  “Dirawong’s my favorite,” Darcy said, though really it was second to Bunyip.

  “Excellent choice,” Coleman said. “Given the criteria.”

  “BookScanning bastard!” Kiralee said to him while toasting Darcy with her empty glass.

  Darcy finally managed to meet the woman’s eye. In a gray hoodie, with twin white earbuds draped across her shoulders, Kiralee Taylor was dressed like a jogger. But she had the bearing of a dark faerie queen, her expression arch, her face framed by gray-streaked curly black hair.

  “Though I’m afraid I haven’t read your books,” she said to Darcy. “So I can hardly be picky about which you like of mine.”

  “No one’s read my books. Book.”

  “Darcy’s a deb,” Oscar supplied. “Paradox publishes her next fall.”

  “Congratulations,” Kiralee said, and all their drinks went up in salute.

  Heat crept across Darcy’s face. She realized that Max had disappeared without even a good-bye, but she was allowed to stay. Here, among these writers.

  She wondered how long before someone figured out she was an impostor and asked her to leave. Sitting here, she felt as though her little black dress didn’t fit anymore. It felt too big on her, as if Darcy were a child playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes.

  “Welcome to the longest year and a half of your life,” Oscar said. “Published but not printed.”

  “Like when you’ve kissed a boy but haven’t shagged him yet,” Kiralee said wistfully.

  “Like you would know.” Coleman turned to Darcy. “So what’s your book called?”

  “Afterworlds,” Darcy said.

  The three of them waited for her to go on, but a familiar paralysis crept over Darcy. It was always like this when someone asked about her novel. She knew from experience that whatever she said now would sound awkward, like listening to a recording of her own voice. How was she supposed to compress sixty thousand words into a few sentences?

  “It’s quite good,” Oscar finally offered. “I’m blurbing it.”

  “So it’s one of these tedious realistic novels?” Coleman asked. “All the rage now, aren’t they?”

  Oscar made a pfft noise. “My tastes are wider than yours. It’s a paranormal romance.”

  “Are those still being written?” Kiralee was flagging a waiter down. “I thought vampires were dead.”

  Coleman grunted. “They’re exceedingly hard to kill.”

  They ordered—Manhattans for Coleman and Oscar, a gin and tonic for Kiralee, and Darcy asked for a Guinness. She found herself glad for the interruption, which gave her time to marshal an argument.

  Once the waiter was gone, she spoke, her voice only trembling a little. “I think paranormals will always be around. You can tell a million different stories about love. Especially when it’s love with someone who’s different.”

  “You mean a monster?” Coleman said.

  “Well, that’s what you think at first. But it’s like, um, Beauty and the Beast. When you find out that the monster is actually . . . nice.”

  Darcy swallowed. She’d had this conversation a hundred times with Carla, and had never once resorted to the word “nice” before.

  “But doesn’t real love work the other way round?” Kiralee asked. “You start by thinking someone’s fabulous, and by the end of the piece you realize he’s a monster!”

  “Or that you’re the monster yourself,” Oscar said.

  Darcy just stared at the pockmarked table. She had fewer opinions about real-life love than she did about the paranormal kind.

  “So what’s the love interest in Afterworlds?” Coleman asked. “Not a vampire, I trust.”

  “Maybe a werewolf?” Kiralee was smiling. “Or a ninja, or some sort of werewolf-ninja?”

  Darcy shook her head, relieved that Yamaraj wasn’t a vampire, werewolf, or ninja of any kind. “I don’t think anyone’s done this before, exactly. He’s a—”

  “Wait!” Kiralee grabbed her arm. “I’m keen to guess. Is he a golem?”

  Darcy laughed, dazzled all over again that Kiralee Taylor was sitting close enough to touch her. “No. Golems are too muddy.”

  “What about a selkie?” Coleman suggested. “YA hasn’t had any male selkies.”

  “What the hell is a selkie?” Oscar asked. He wrote realistic fiction: coming of age and drunken mothers, no monsters at all. Moxie had wanted a blurb from him to give Afterworlds what she called “a literary sheen.”

  “It’s a magicked seal you fall in love with,” Darcy explained.

  “Just think of it as a portmanteau,” Coleman said. “Combining ‘seal’ and ‘sexy.’ ”

  Oscar raised an eyebrow. “I don’t see the appeal.”

  “In any case,” Darcy said, not wanting the conversation to stray too far, “my hottie’s not a selkie.”

  “A basilisk, then?” Coleman asked.

  Darcy shook her head.

  “Best to avoid horny lizards as love interests,” Kiralee said. “And stick with something more cuddly. Is it a drop bear?”

  Darcy wondered for a moment if this was a test. Perhaps if she proved her knowledge of mythical beasts, they would take her through a hidden velvet curtain to the real YA Drinks Night.

  “Aren’t drop bears more your territory?” she said to Kiralee.

  “Indeed.” Kiralee smiled, and Darcy knew she’d gotten a gold star on that one. Or perhaps a gold koala bear sticker. The drinks arrived, and Kiralee paid for them. “A troll? No one’s done them yet.”

  “Too many on the
internet,” Coleman said. “Maybe a garuda?”

  Darcy frowned. A garuda was half eagle and half something else, but what?

  “Be nice, you two,” said Oscar.

  Darcy looked at him, wondering what he meant, exactly. Were Kiralee and Coleman gently mocking her, or all paranormal romances? But the Sword Singer books were full of romance. Maybe Oscar was simply bored with the mythical bestiary game.

  “Darcy’s love interest is really quite original,” he said. “He’s a sort of a . . . psychopomp. Is that the right word?”

  “More or less,” Darcy said. “But in the Vedas, the Hindu scriptures I was using for inspiration, Yamaraj is the god of death.”

  “Emo girls love death gods.” Kiralee took a long drink. “License to print money!”

  “How do you hook up with a death god, anyway?” Coleman asked. “Near-death experience?”

  Darcy almost coughed out her mouthful of beer. Lizzie’s brush with death was the book’s unique selling point, the singular idea that had carried Darcy through last November, and Coleman had just come up with it off the top of his head.

  “Um, not exactly. But . . . kind of?”

  Coleman nodded. “Sounds pleasingly dark.”

  “The first chapter is megadark,” Oscar said. “There’s this awful terrorist attack, and you think the protag’s going to get killed. But she winds up . . .” He waved his hand. “No spoilers—just read it. Much better than your average paranormal.”

  “Thank you,” Darcy said, smiling, though suddenly she wondered how good Oscar Lassiter thought the average paranormal was.

  CHAPTER 8

  I COULDN’T TELL THE FBI anything new, and the doctors had found nothing wrong with me that stitches couldn’t cure, so two mornings after the attack, we left Dallas in a rental car.

  Mom hated road trips, because highways in the hinterlands scared her. But she was worried I’d start screaming if I saw DFW airport again, or any airport. What she didn’t realize was that I was too numb for anything so dramatic.

  It wasn’t just exhaustion. There was a sliver of cold still inside me, a souvenir of the darkness I’d passed through. A gift from the other side. Whenever I remembered the faces of the other passengers, or when a clatter in the hospital corridors sounded like distant gunfire, I closed my eyes and retreated to that cool place, safe again.

  We left the hospital in secret. One of the administrators led us through basement corridors to a service exit, a squeaky metal door that opened onto a staff parking lot. No reporters waited there, unlike the front entrance.

  There were pictures of me in the news already. Lizzie Scofield, the Sole Survivor, the girl who’d sputtered back to life. My story was uplifting, I suppose, the only bright spot in all that horror. But I didn’t much feel like a symbol of hope. The stitches in my forehead itched, loud noises made me jump, and I’d been wearing the same socks for three days in a row.

  Everyone kept saying how lucky I was. But wouldn’t good luck have been taking a different flight?

  I hadn’t read any newspapers, and the nurses had kindly shut my door whenever radios and TVs were blaring near my room, but the headlines had leaked into my brain anyway. All those stories about the other passengers, all those people who’d been strangers to me, just passersby in an airport. Suddenly the details of their lives—where they’d been headed, the kids they’d left behind, their interrupted plans—were news. Travis Brinkman, the boy who’d fought back, was already a hero, thanks to security camera footage.

  The rest of the world was hungry to know everything about the dead, but I wasn’t even ready to hear their names yet.

  No one seemed to know much about the terrorists. They had ties to a cult somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, but the cult’s leaders were denying any knowledge or responsibility. The gunmen themselves had all been killed in the battle—no notes left behind, no manifestos, no clues.

  Wasn’t the point of terrorism to send a message of some kind?

  It was as if they’d simply been in love with death.

  * * *

  We drove all afternoon, eating in the car, stopping only to use gas pumps and restrooms. We passed Abilene, Midland, and Odessa, and then the cities faded into a scrubby wilderness dyed brown by winter. Oil derricks pulsed on the horizon, and dust devils swirled across our path, carrying road trash with them. The highway sliced through outcrops of gray rock that had been dynamited open. The clear blue sky grew huge above our heads.

  Mostly we were silent, and I thought about Yamaraj—his eyes, the way he moved, his voice telling me that I was safe. Those details were fast in my memory, while the rest of what had happened at the airport was an awful blur. The only part of that night that had seemed real was the part that no one would ever believe.

  When Mom and I did talk, our conversation matched the landscape—brittle and withered. She asked about Dad’s new apartment, what I thought of Rachel, and the fancy restaurants where we’d eaten. She asked me what classes I would be starting soon, and even delivered a little speech about keeping up the grades in my final semester of high school.

  I could see that Mom was trying to be kind, talking about trivia instead of terrorism. But as the hours passed, her avoidance of reality started driving me crazy. Like she was gaslighting me, trying to make me think I’d imagined the whole attack. Every time her eyes drifted up to the stitches on my forehead, or the little tear gas scar on my cheek, an expression of confusion crossed her face.

  But nothing that night had been imaginary. I’d gone to another world. Yamaraj was real. I could still taste his kiss, and when I touched my lips, his heat still lingered there.

  Plus, he’d practically dared me to believe in him, which is a pretty good way to get me to do anything.

  Mom just kept talking about nothing, driving us farther away from Dallas, her hands tight on the wheel. The closest she got to mentioning the attack was to say that my luggage would arrive in San Diego soon after we did.

  “They said a few days.”

  No mention of who “they” were. The FBI? The airline? She spoke as if my bag were simply lost, not sitting in a pile of evidence for the biggest Homeland Security investigation in a decade. No big deal.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’ve got plenty of clothes at home.”

  “Yeah. It’s much better to lose your luggage on your way home than going away!”

  As if that was the big takeaway from surviving a terrorist attack.

  “All I need is a new phone,” I said.

  “Well . . . maybe we can stop somewhere and get you one.” She hunched forward, scanning a cluster of passing signs, as if one might lead her to an Apple store out here in the West Texas desert.

  Didn’t she understand that I needed things to make sense right now? I needed my mother here in reality with me, not off in make-believe land.

  We kept driving. Long pauses were easy in this terrain, and it was a while before I spoke up again. “I feel weird without it. That phone saved my life, kind of.”

  Her grip on the steering wheel grew tighter, and her foot must have tensed on the gas pedal, because the car shuddered beneath us.

  “What do you mean, Lizzie?”

  I took a slow breath, drawing calm from the cold place inside me.

  “I was running away, we all were, and I called 911. The woman on the phone said . . .” My voice gave out, not with any emotion that I could feel, but like a ballpoint pen running dry. I’d already told this story, I realized—to Yamaraj.

  My mother waited, staring at the road ahead, the muscles in her shoulders tight, and I heard that calm voice from my phone: Can you get to a safe location?

  “She told me to play dead,” I finally said. “That’s why they didn’t kill me. They thought I was dead.”

  My mother’s voice was tight. “The doctors told me about that paramedic, the one who thought you . . .”

  “He was really sorry about that.” I shrugged against my seat belt. “Guess I fooled him, too. B
ut it wasn’t even my idea. The woman at 911 told me what to do.”

  Well, not quite. She hadn’t told me to think my way to the afterworld, meet a boy, and then come back. And she hadn’t mentioned anything about seeing ghosts, either.

  Tom hadn’t reappeared once they’d given me my own room, so it was possible I’d imagined him. Or maybe he only haunted the ER.

  Mom made a soft sound. She was trying to say something, but couldn’t. The hairbreadth narrowness of my escape was more reality than she could take.

  That was when I realized the weird truth: my mother was more freaked out than I was. And the fact that I was so cool and calm, not sobbing and shuddering, only made it worse for her.

  She didn’t know about my dark place inside, where I could escape anytime. She didn’t know that I’d walked the afterworld.

  I was going to have to take care of her. But at that moment the best I could manage was, “It’s weird not having a phone.”

  “We’ll get you another one,” she said firmly. “Exactly like the old one, so everything feels normal.”

  “I’ll get Dad to pay for it.”

  Her knuckles went white again, and I waited through another long pause, staring out the passenger window at the pulsing highway lines.

  At last she said, “Your father really wanted to come, he told me to tell you.”

  I frowned, because it hadn’t even crossed my mind that Dad would fly down to Dallas. I was used to him bailing when things got crazy. Once when I was twelve, one of our cooking pots had exploded, a grease fire flowering across the kitchen ceiling, and he’d beat the flames down with a towel like a total hero. He probably saved the whole house from going up. But the moment the fire was under control, he’d driven away to spend two nights in a hotel, leaving me and Mom to call the fire department, clean up, and air out the house.

  That was just Dad being normal.

  “I’m glad he didn’t come,” I said.

  My mother let out a half-stifled laugh. “Really?”