“In your what?”
My gaze hardened, and I glared at him, summoning anger to drown out the residual confusion and vulnerability that always came with the memories. “I was in my own damned house, in the front room. Just standing there, barefoot, in the dress I’d died in. The same torn dress, caked in blood and dirt. And there was a man in the house with me, wearing a strange gray robe. I could not fathom the material it was made of.”
Devich nodded again, and I hoped he wouldn’t ask me about the man in gray, because I couldn’t have described my odd visitor, even if he were standing in front of me again.
I’d thought the man had his back to me, the hood of his robe pulled over his head. When he didn’t speak, I walked around to face him from the front. Only therewasno front. Both sides of the man looked the same, as if his robe were more like a gray sheet draped over him, cinched loosely around his neck.
I didn’t know which side to address the man from. His arms, assuming he had any, hung straight beneath thick gray folds, and his feet were hidden by the long hem. The result was completely disorienting and might have scared me to death—if I hadn’t already been through that part.
But I couldn’t tell Devich any of that, because if he hadn’t seen the man in gray, he shouldn’t know about him yet. It wasn’t my place to tell tales.
Except that apparently it was.
“What did he say?” Devich asked. I opened my mouth, intending to refuse to answer any more questions until he reciprocated, but he held up one hand to cut off my protest. “Just tell me what he said, and I’ll tell you part of what you want to know.”
The odd expression on his face—sinister curiosity—set me on edge. My hand found the Desert Eagle, and I picked it up, just in case. This new Devich—intense, and less than perfectly poised—was starting to really freak me out.
“He told me I was free to go. He said there was no place for me, nowhere to put me. He said he had returned my body but couldn’t return my life. Not as it had been, anyway.”
He’d said that my heart would continue to pump and my brain to function. I would still need to eat, and sleep, and breathe, just like everyone else. But because I’d been beyond, I would no longer age.
There was more to it than that, of course. Much more. But on the off-chance that Devich didn’t already know every detail of my afterlife, I saw no reason to enlighten him. Knowledge was power, and I wanted my potential enemies—Devich qualified, by virtue of having broken into my apartment and refused to die—as ill-armed as possible. He was officially on need-to-know status.
Among the things he didnotneed to know was the fact that the reanimation process brought with it a number of interesting side effects, most of which I’d discovered on my own, long after I parted ways with the man in gray. The most useful of those were my killer immune system and accelerated healing speed. I hadn’t been sick once since the day I woke up in my living room, staring at the creepy, faceless gray man.
Most critical to my survival in the years after my reanimation was the only piece of true advice the man in gray gave me. He’d said that to survive, I’d have to stay out of the light of humanity for a while, in case anyone from my old life recognized me, but that I would also have to stay out of the true dark, where things bigger and badder than I waited to feast on the defenseless and inexperienced. Namely, me.
I’d have to exist in the places in between. Blend into the shadows, at least until I’d learned where I fit in.
That was the extent of my introduction to the Netherworld. I was tossed into the lion cage and told to eat or be eaten. And eventually I’d learned to bite back.
But Devich didn’t need to know any of that.
“So, what of it?” I asked. “What do you know about my death?”
“Nothing.” He smiled, almost gently. “But Idoknow why you didn’t move on. Or rather, why you came back. For now, though, I’ll tell you what happened between those two events.”
Between. Again with the betweens. Between life and death. Between light and dark. Between a rock and a hard place. Okay, so that last one didn’t really pertain, but I was definitely sensing a pattern.
Twisting in my seat, I grabbed a bottle of whiskey and a short glass from the shelf of the microwave cart. By the time I’d recapped the bottle, he was talking, apparently unconcerned that I hadn’t offered him anything to drink.
“You did pass on, Alexandra. You just didn’t make it very far.”
“Very far toward what?”
He shook his head once, sharply. “That information is not mine to divulge.” Yet the secret of my existence evidently was.
“Fine.” I took a long sip from my glass, glad in retrospect that I’d splurged on the good stuff.
“The shadowy place was Purgatory. Were you Catholic?” Notareyou Catholic.Wereyou Catholic. Because apparently that was no longer an option for me.
I shook my head and took a longer drink.
“Good, because I’m not using that term exactly right, but it’s close enough. It’s a holding pen for souls, if you will. Like a waiting room, without the big glass doors.”
“A waiting room.” The words tasted strange on my tongue; too much like doubt and not enough like whiskey. The term seemed appropriate, though, because it had felt like I’d waited there forever. “So why didn’t they have anywhere to put me? Was the inn overbooked?”
Devich stifled a small smile. “Hardly. But that specific piece of information is only payable upon delivery. For now, let’s just say they lost your room key.”
