Afterworlds (55 page)

At last I saw the pattern of shimmering lines crisscrossing the floor. They were threads of memory stretching from wall to wall. Each glistening strand led to the tangle at Mr. Hamlyn’s feet.

“Yama!” I cried, just as the old man’s hand clutched the ball of thread and pulled hard. The crisscrossed lines on the floor sprang into the air, suddenly taut, a shimmering spiderweb leaping into form around us.

One of the strands bit into my thigh, cutting deep. I staggered away, but two more went taut across my path, and I barely stopped myself in time.

I didn’t dare move. The threads were all around me, vibrating with the sound of the airplanes overhead. Yama was trapped in the center of the web. His hand was bleeding, his black silk shirt sliced open in half a dozen places.

“Don’t move!” I cried. These were the same cutting memories I’d used on the bad man’s spirit. The souls of people who’d watched
their entire city burn in one night, countless yards of them wrapped around us.

“You should listen to our young friend,” Mr. Hamlyn said. Blood dripped from his hand that held the ball of thread, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Funny that you haven’t seen this little trick before. I suppose they didn’t have incendiary bombs in your day.”

Yama just stared down at the glittering lines that trapped him, astonished.

“Meet the population of my hometown.” When Mr. Hamlyn spoke, the threads shimmered around us like plucked strings. “Funny what watching everyone you know die can do to a ghost, and what the threads of that ghost can do to
us
.”

The old man pulled the ball of thread tighter. The glowing lines closed around Yama.

He could barely move now, but his voice was steady. “What do you want?”

The old man laughed. “Everything! I want all those ghosts you’ve been collecting for me. Thousands of them! Especially the ones who died young and loved.”

“Stop!” I cried. “Please, don’t hurt him.”

Mr. Hamlyn turned his colorless eyes on me. “You I would never hurt, my little valkyrie. But you heard your friend. He’s very angry with me, and very dangerous.”

“I’ll never bring him near you again, I promise!”

“But I need his people, Lizzie. All those memories tended through the centuries, just waiting for me.” The old man shook his head slowly. “Think of what I could weave from them.”

Yama growled, and a spray of sparks shot from his clenched
fist. The old man pulled the threads tighter, and new cuts opened on Yama’s flesh.

“Stop it!” I cried, and they both looked at me. A glowing strand shuddered inches from my face.

“Get out of here, girl!” Mr. Hamlyn said. “I don’t want to hurt you. I want to teach you things.”

“To hell with you!”

“Lizzie. You should leave.” Trickles of blood were pooling beneath Yama’s feet. He stood in an awkward position, trying to keep the glowing lines from cutting deeper.

“Yes, go,” Mr. Hamlyn said. “Before I get bored.”

I hesitated. Here at the periphery of the glowing spiderweb, there just was enough space to make my way out. But if I did, the old man would slice Yama to pieces.

“Okay,” I said softly. “Just a second.”

I visualized my way through the web before I moved, cataloging every deadly thread. Then all at once I took three steps—each awkward and dangerous—closer to the center.

The old man sighed. “You think you know more tricks than me, girl?”

“I don’t know any tricks.” I reached out a hand and placed it on Yama’s shoulder. “But if you want to kill him, you’ll have to kill me too.”

“Lizzie,” Yama whispered. “Don’t.”

A growl came from Mr. Hamlyn. “What makes you think I won’t?”

I locked my eyes with his. “Because I want to learn from you.”

The words came out as if I meant them, because some part of
me did. I wanted to know how he made the sky burn, and how the razing of a city decades ago could be woven into a deadly web of light.

The old man stared back at me, and he saw that I wanted everything.

“You tempt me, girl.”

“I won’t bring him here again. And even if I did, I’m sure you’ve got more tricks.”

“Flatterer.” He smiled at me. “You’ll keep him under control?”

I nodded. At that moment, I didn’t care about the ghosts the old man had taken. I just wanted Yama to live.

“For you, then,” the old man said. “And because I need him alive to keep his ghosts from fading. Be careful with him. Cuts are tricky, down here in the afterworld.”

I ignored him and snapped my fingers—a drop of oil slipped from them. It fell through the shimmering lines and splashed into Yama’s blood. Slowly it expanded, turning the dusty stone beneath us black.

We began to sink into the floor, and for a moment Mr. Hamlyn looked as though he was about to pull his web tight and cut us into pieces. But in the end he didn’t, and a few long moments later we were in the river.

*  *  *

When we reached his palace again, Yama collapsed into my arms. His shirt was in pieces, and he bled from countless cuts.

I set him gently on the cushions, looking around. No servants in sight, and his sister was gone.

“Yami!” I called, then turned back to her brother. Blood pooled
beneath him, soaking into the gray pattern of the rug. It was bright red, and there seemed to be too much of it. Had the old man’s web sliced open an artery?

Then I felt the trickles on my own body, and looked at my arm. The blood was flowing too fast, like water from my veins. A wave of light-headedness swept over me.

“Yami!” I cried again.

“We have to go,” Yama murmured. “Home.”

“We’re there. But something’s wrong!”

“Not my home. Yours. Quickly.”

A blur of gray servants flickered in the corners of my vision, and I heard Yami’s voice. “What happened? Yama!”

“The old man was setting a trap.” I stared at my arm, from which the blood still flowed. “He cut us. Something’s wrong.”

“Take my brother to the overworld,” Yami cried. “Now!”

I looked up. “What? Why?”

“You can’t heal here, you idiot girl!” She clapped, and black droplets fell like rain from her hands. “Your body is halted!”

I stared at her—and it slowly started to make sense. We didn’t grow old, or tired, or hungry in the underworld, nor could we heal. Our blood wasn’t coagulating.

Yama’s skin was growing pale. We were both bleeding to death.

“But this isn’t even my real body,” I murmured. “I thought this was some sort of astral projection.”

“My brother has been able to travel in his own body for three thousand years,” Yami said. “And you’re much stronger than you know. Now go!”

*  *  *

A moment later we were in the river again, its current spinning out of control and purposeless, a reflection of my panic. I couldn’t think of any hospital I was connected to—all my memories of childhood accidents were too fuzzy, and my head was light from blood loss.

But I remembered what Yama had asked earlier, for me to take him home. I thought of my bedroom, willing us there. Maybe I could stop the worst of his bleeding on my own, and then drive him to a hospital.

At first the current obeyed me, taking us steadily up toward the overworld. My arms stayed wrapped around Yama, protecting him from the river’s needy wisps of memory.

But then, all at once, a new force shook the current, something stronger than my will, and yanked us in another direction.

“Yama,” I hissed in his ear. “What’s happening?”

“The river’s calling you.” As he spoke, tendrils of his blood carried into the raging current. “It’s sooner than I thought.”

I screamed into the river. Whatever disaster was happening in the overworld, it couldn’t happen
now
.

Yama’s head rolled back, and his muscles went slack against me. I held him tighter, as if that would keep his blood inside.

It was long minutes later that the river finally set us down . . .

. . . into chaos.

Gunfire and blinding lights came from every direction, and smoke filled the air. We were deep in a forest, surrounded by pine trees that climbed into the sky, their branches laden with snow. It was nighttime, but searchlights lanced through the smoke and mist. Among the trees sat squat little cabins. Black-clad figures ran among them, stopping to fire rifles into the trees.

Why had the river brought us here? This didn’t look like anyplace I’d ever seen before, or anywhere I’d ever imagined.

But Yama was still bleeding. He had to cross over into the real world now, or I’d lose him. There was only one scrap of safety that I could see—a corner where two of the cabins had been built beside each other. I dragged him across the snow and into the shadows there.

“You have to cross over,” I whispered in his ear.

He didn’t answer. His face was as pale as the snow on the dark ground.

“Yama!” I cried. Still no response.

I remembered what Yami had said:
You’re stronger than you know.
And, of course, I was bleeding too. Which meant my real body had been down there in Mr. Hamlyn’s war zone.

Maybe I could do this. . . .

I wrapped my arms around Yama and shut my eyes, focusing on the crack of rifles around us, the panicked shouts.

“Security is responding,” I muttered to myself.

A moment later I felt it happen, both of us breaking through the bubble of the flipside. The fresh air of the overworld surged into my lungs, along with the half-remembered smell of tear gas and gun smoke. It was suddenly freezing cold, my breath coiling in front of my face. The sound of gunfire turned sharp and deadly. But I had done it, traveled on the river in my real body. . . .

Straight into a battle.

I didn’t have time to worry about bullets. I pulled at the places where my shirt was already sliced, tearing off strips of cloth to bind Yama’s wounds. The gashes looked deep and brutal, but at
last the red was thickening, flowing like blood instead of water.

By the time I had tied his cuts as best I could, I was half-naked. I pressed myself shivering against him, trying to keep us both warm. The gunfire had tapered off, but shouts and the roar of vehicle engines came from all around.

Then I saw the body in the shadows beside us.

It was a young man, probably in his twenties. He lay faceup, both his hands wrapped around his own throat. Blood trailed away from between the motionless fingers, red and thick in the snow. He’d been shot in the neck. His eyes stared straight at me, as if he’d been trying to speak, to get my attention in his last moments.

As I stared back at him in horror, his spirit stirred.

I’d seen this before, when the bad man had died. But I’d been ready for that, and this caught me by surprise. A second version of the young man, pale and stone-faced, pulled itself up from the body on the ground.

He turned and looked at me, strangely calm.

“You’re dead,” I said to him, because that was the only thing I knew for sure.

He nodded, as if this made all the sense in the world.

A shudder went through my frame. The cold was seeping in.

I turned from him, and saw more of them. More ghosts, spirits freshly torn from their bodies and set wandering loose on the snowy ground.

“I think I’m here to help you,” I said.

Psychopomps were needed here, so the river had brought us.

“You’re an angel, then?” the ghost asked.

I had to laugh at this. In my shredded shirt, I probably looked
more like a madwoman than a heavenly creature. I was certainly no valkyrie.

“I’m just a girl.”

“But the prophet said there would be angels to greet us. Angels of death.”

A chill went over me as I realized the obvious. The river had brought me to the mountains of Colorado, to the home of a certain cult with an Armageddon mentality, an isolationist dogma, and a charismatic leader. A place that had been surrounded for the last week by two hundred federal agents—a massacre just waiting to happen.

But right now I didn’t care much about souls who needed guidance to the underworld. What I cared about was keeping Yama alive. And, strangely, the dead cultist had just given me a glimmer of hope.

There were FBI agents here. They had to have doctors with them.

“I’ll be back soon,” I said, pulling myself gently from Yama’s side.

He opened his eyes, nodding weakly, but awake again. The overworld and my crude bandages had helped a little, at least.

The ghost was kneeling now, his hands clasped together in prayer. I ignored him and stepped from the shadows into the searchlights sweeping the compound. My arms were wrapped around me in the cold, but I pried them loose and forced myself to hold my hands in the air. Freezing cold was better than bullets.

“Hello!” I called into the darkness. “I need help!”

A moment later a dozen flashlights pointed at me from the trees, like the glimmering eyes of beasts.

An amplified voice called back at me, “Down on the ground!”

I hesitated, staring at the snow and wishing I was wearing more than a shredded shirt. But the voice had sounded impatient, and I dropped to my knees, then face-first into the snow.

“My friend needs help!” I shouted. “He’s bleeding!”

They didn’t answer, and it seemed to take forever before boots thudded across the hard ground, surrounding me. Rough hands pulled my arms behind me, and the click of handcuffs reached my ears. By then I was too cold to feel the metal against my skin.

They pulled me up into a sitting position, and finally I could see them. Six men and one woman in bulky vests with FBI in bright yellow across them.

“My friend’s bleeding, unconscious, unarmed,” I said through chattering teeth, and jerked my head toward the cabins. “Please help him!”

“Check it out,” someone ordered, and three of the men headed toward Yama.

I looked up at the man who’d spoken, trying to utter some kind of thanks, but the words died in my mouth. Behind him was another agent. He stood among his fellows, looking a little confused. His raid jacket was full of bloody holes, and he cast no shadows in the floodlights angling through the trees.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

He looked at me, a little surprised that I wasn’t ignoring him like all the others.