Hereafter (12 page)

“This isn’t the way,” Val said from somewhere behind me. I’d forgotten about her being here. “Not if you want to leave.”

A dark laugh bubbled from within me. “Leave? I can’t leave now, not when I’ve finally gotten hold of the one person, the one soul, who I’ve longed to torment.”

I thought of all the times when I’d fantasized about answering a calling and finding that it was either Jared or Benny. Out of the two, I’d fantasized more about it being Jared simply because he’d played a bigger part in my death. My jaw tightened as images of the deaths I’d envisioned them both dying filled my mind. Even more anger lapped at my insides as the realization Jared had died and I hadn’t been the Reaper to harvest his soul like I’d always wanted floated to the surface of my mind.

My eyes zeroed in on the darkness that had wrapped around Jared’s neck. I could see it shifting, slowly, becoming tighter as the seconds ticked away. The sweetness of his fear coated the inside of my mouth now. I inhaled sharply, craving its sugariness the way an addict craves their drug of choice. This was what I had become. In a matter of seconds, I had become addicted to the taste of his fear. It filled the hole for vengeance that had been festering inside of me for so long.

“Jet, let him go,” Val insisted as she stepped to my side, placing a small hand on my shoulder.

All along she’d seemed like a girl who could care less about much of anything, but now, when I’d finally found the one soul I’d always desired to find most, she wanted to care. She wanted to be my conscience. How could she care for him? Why would it matter to her what happened to this one pathetic soul?

“Let him go?” I scoffed. “How could you even ask that of me? You’ve seen what he did to me, how big a role he played in my death. How my blood coated his hands. How he smiled while he did it.”

“It isn’t your place to torment him,” she said with conviction, and I wondered if she had switched roles. Was she a Watcher of Purgatory now instead of a Tracker? Were they allowed to do that? “Isn’t it enough that he’s here in Purgatory reliving the very moment that led to his suicide?”

His suicide?
I hadn’t thought yet of the reason as to why he would be here. Suicide seemed fitting, though. In fact, it brought an even wider smile to my face. The thought that my death had tormented him so much in life that he’d felt the only way out was to kill himself filled me with a twisted sense of pleasure. It was almost laughable how he had never been able to escape me and what he’d done, not even in his afterlife. Poetic justice.

“No, it’s not enough,” I said as I stepped closer to him. “Not for what he did to me.”

Val stepped between me and Jared. “This isn’t right. Rowan wouldn’t want you to do this.”

At the mention of her name, Rowan’s face flashed through my mind. Her dark hair, her bright green eyes, her heart-shaped lips. I froze, remembering her.

“She wouldn’t want you to give in to Purgatory like this, to allow it to corrupt your soul,” Val pressed further. “Even though I only spent a little bit of time with the both of you, I know that much.”

Shock rippled through me as the cloudy red rage that had rolled into my mind at the sight of Jared released a little. Purgatory was corrupting my soul. Val was right. That was exactly what was happening.

I struggled to rein in my emotions, to put a box back around all of the vengeance I’d released so willingly. The tendrils around Jared’s neck loosened. He began coughing and sputtering, as though trying to catch his breath. My anger flared up at the noise. Why should this be the only thing that he had to deal with? Why couldn’t physical pain, like the physical pain he’d inflicted on me, be a part of his Purgatory?

I lost myself once more, consumed entirely again in one of man’s strongest emotions—anger. This time, there were no tendrils from venomous words spoken; there was only my hand balled into a fist, connecting with the side of Jared’s face repeatedly.

“No!” I heard Val shout, but it was muffled and faraway sounding. I’d tuned her out completely while I focused on Jared—the way it felt to finally give him the beating he deserved.

I continued in my movements, laying pound after pound to the side of his face. He put up no fight, and this fueled the anger in me even more, but in a different way. I wanted to hurt him, not give his guilty conscience what he thought it deserved. I released the grip my hand had on him and gained control over my fist. Falling to the ground, I hung my head and struggled to catch my breath as I felt the heart created from anger race in my chest.

“Why did you stop?” Jared asked. “Don’t you think I deserve it? Don’t you
want
to continue?
Hit me!
”

I shook my head no, but didn’t look at him.

“Why the hell not? Why don’t you finish what you started?” he demanded. “Continue pounding the shit out of me… I deserve it…
please
.” His voice caught and cracked with emotion.

“Because it’s what you want…that’s why I won’t,” I seethed, my voice barely above a whisper. “I refuse to do even the smallest of favors for you.”

“Do it!” He tossed a stick at my feet. “Please, just do it… Maybe this is how it all ends. Maybe this is how it comes full circle or some shit. I just want it to stop. I don’t want to relive it again. I can’t…” He broke down then, his sobs echoing through the memory like our words before had, only magnified. “
I can’t
…”

“No,” I muttered, wishing I could give back in to all that I’d felt moments before, but knowing I didn’t have it in me anymore. The anger was shifting into something else entirely. The heartbeat in my chest dulled.

“Please, just fucking end this. I’m so sorry. I never meant to hurt you that bad. I swear I didn’t.” Jared continued to sob loudly. “I lost it. After being beat the fuck up by my dad all the time, I just snapped… I just snapped. I enjoyed being on the opposite end too fucking much…and I’m so fucking sorry for it. I’d take it all back if I could.”

I hung my head. His words flowed through me, and I could feel the sadness and sincerity of every syllable. It tore at the edges of my soul and forced tears from my eyes. The heartbeat in my chest ceased.

“This is it,” Val suddenly said. “This is the way out.”

“What do you mean? I don’t understand,” I said, gazing up and into her violently flashing eyes. Excitement burst through me as I suddenly realized what that meant, the sight of her flashing eyes—a choice was to be made, a way out, an escape, was about to reveal itself.

“The way out this time, in this Purgatory, isn’t through a window or a door, it’s not a decision between left or right…it’s a decision on whether or not you forgive him.”

I repeated Val’s words in my head.
Forgive him?
How was that going to be my way out? I glanced at Jared’s broken frame. He’d fallen onto his hands and knees on the grass in front of me while he continued to sob loudly. Saliva hung from his mouth in strands all the way to the ground as his face crinkled with the emotions he felt so deeply. His right hand, balled into a loose fist, pounded against the ground repeatedly.

Part of me had already forgiven him, whether I wanted to admit it aloud or not, but only because of the immense remorse that he seemed to feel for what he had done. However, there was a part of me, almost as big as the other, that would never be able to forgive him.

I wiped away the tears that had tumbled from my eyes with the back of my hand and shifted my gaze to Val. “What if I can only forgive him halfway?”

“I’m not going to say it will be enough and I’m not going to say that it won’t, because I don’t know. If that’s all you can give him, then you just have to see how far it will take you,” Val insisted as she moved to sit beside me.

I thought about her words and what they meant in silence for a while, watching Jared carry on with his breakdown as the scene that had brought us both to this moment in Purgatory continued to play out around us in slow motion. I wondered if it always played out this way—in slow motion so he could see everything clearly. It probably did; Purgatory was a bitch like that. My eyes flicked back to Jared. He was sorry; I could see that clearly.

The pulsating sensation of a calling I’d grown accustomed to since becoming a Reaper rippled through my soul and acquired my full attention. It seemed to stem from Jared. I didn’t understand why I was hearing his soul’s distress signal, the one meant to signify when a soul was in need of harvesting, because he was already dead. He was already a soul. But the fact was, it was there and I couldn’t ignore it.

The sensation ceased just as suddenly as it had began.

This was my cue. I knew exactly what I was supposed to do. The knowledge had been imprinted in my soul the moment I’d chosen to become a Reaper. I didn’t understand how it was supposed to work on a soul that had already been harvested, but I knew it wasn’t something I could ignore. Standing, I took in a deep breath before walking to where Jared lay. I squatted down to his level. Zeroing in on his forehead and the exact place I wanted my fingertip to touch, I extend my right hand outward just like I had done so many times before in this situation. I closed my eyes seconds before comforting warmth passed through my fingertip upon contact.

The anticipated jolt of electricity that reminded me of adrenaline sparked through me, and I felt my lips twist into the ghost of a smile as the sensation gave me a false sense of being alive like always. This was the moment I yearned for. The moment that made me feel even more like an addict than tasting Jared’s fear had, but so much more alive. The moment that not only brought with it memories, but also the emotions attached to them. After all, it’s our emotions that make us feel the most alive. Those who can’t feel are those whose souls have died before their time. This was something I’d learned early on.

I squeezed my eyes shut, remembering whose soul I was harvesting and worrying suddenly about what I would see and feel, just as what I called the Ripple Effect began flashing through my mind.

What happened then was like nothing I had ever experienced before.

It happened all wrong, the entire harvesting. There were no peaceful memories of life flickering like movie clips behind my eyelids. Instead, everything was reversed. All of my memories from that night and each of the emotions entrapped within them flowed from me and into Jared until the entire night of my death vanished. Erased from me completely. All of Jared’s remorse, all of the torment he felt from that moment until the moment of his suicide, poured into me then. It was powerful enough to make my knees buckle and my balance shift just enough that I collapsed in the grass beside him with my fingertip still glued to his forehead.

His touch burned me, and I pulled my hand back just as the scenery from that night began to fade away around us. The three of us were surrounded by a blank canvas, isolated in solid whiteness. The hazy white light that had filled me when I became a Reaper seeped from me in a thick fog. I watched it, mesmerized, as it floated toward Jared.

“A wrong shall be righted…” I heard Val mutter. Her voice sounded far away and muffled.

And then, I heard no more and I felt no more. Everything faded into nothingness. I was weightless as I floated. Closing my eyes, I gave in to the peacefulness that had wrapped around me and a smile twisted my lips.

PART THREE ~ ROWAN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I woke with a start, the remnants of a dream nearly forgotten at the edges of my mind. There was some sort of importance to it; that much I was sure of. Some sort of frightening reality had been embedded within this dream. But the more I thought about it, the further it slipped from my grasp.

Sighing, I ran my fingers through my hair and sat up in bed. It was dark still and the chill from outside had managed to find its way in somehow. I stumbled from bed and padded across the cold hardwood floors toward my window. The first traces of the rising sun had begun to light the sky. In them, I could see tiny snowflakes continuously falling toward the ground. Not enough to cancel school, though.

Knowing I would be unable to fall back asleep and I’d need to get up soon anyway, I grabbed some clean clothes from my dresser and made my way to the bathroom for a hot shower. The water slipped over my skin, warming me from the outside in and waking up my mind. I closed my eyes while rinsing the remnants of shampoo from my hair and caught the faintest clip of my nearly forgotten dream—a dark-haired boy with insanely blue eyes.

I struggled to remember more about him, knowing he was significant somehow. A sudden whiff of my mother’s perfume, or so I thought, tickled my nose and shifted my thoughts. The familiar ache of loss I felt every time I thought of her throbbed within my chest again. Horrific images of what her car accident must have been like, and how terrified she must have felt spinning in those uncontrollable circles across the icy asphalt before her car slammed against the power pole, filled my mind. I turned off the water and my thoughts at the same time, blocking out the unnecessary panic that would come from them.

The room was even colder than I remembered, and I hurried to get dressed. I headed to the kitchen to find something to eat and was startled to see my dad sitting at the counter in the dark, gripping a cup of coffee between his hands.