“Your soul is the most valuable thing you will ever own. It is as much a part of you as your nose or your hand. If you die without full possession of it, you cannot move on. Your soul is your ticket into the next life, my dear. It is—”
“My room key…” I swallowed thickly as the memory clicked into place.
“Pardon?” Xaphan said, but I barely heard him. Someone else had my attention at the moment, speaking to me in the recollection of a three-day-old conversation.
Let’s just say they lost your room key…Dever—AKA Troy Devich—had said, explaining my prolonged stay in purgatory—the spirit world’s waiting room.
That’swhat he was going to tell me. I was missing part of my soul. My room key. Only it was more like a boarding pass, without which I couldn’t board the Afterlife Express.
That fucking figures.
But on the bright side, I no longer needed Devich’s information, so there was no reason not to kill him on sight—once I figured out how. And…I now knew what had kept me from moving on, and how to rectify the situation. I had to get my soul back—in its entirety—from who- or whatever now possessed it.
But first, the more immediately pressing problem. We had to get rid of both the djinni and the demon before I could concentrate on my personal issues.
“I can save you from an eternity in purgatory. Consider carefully, Lex—or do you prefer Alexandra?”
“No.” Two hundred years ago, maybe, but not since I’d hung from a redcoats’ rope. “It’s Lex. And I’m not afraid of purgatory. I’m not afraid of anything, anymore. Not death, not the afterlife, and certainly not you.” Okay, I was alittleafraid of becoming a wraith, but saw no reason to advertise that.
Xaphan was silent for a long, peaceful moment. So long that I glanced in the rearview mirror to see if he’d fallen asleep. He hadn’t. He was watching me with an alarmingly intent expression. An odd depth to his eyes. Then he frowned and leaned forward again, as if to whisper in my ear. But when his words finally came, they were much too loud to suit me.
“When did you die?” he asked, his too-hot breath scalding my ear lobe.
From the left corner of my vision, I saw Cale glance my way. The car slowed as his foot eased off the accelerator, though I doubt he’d even noticed. He was waiting for my answer. For me to pronounce the djinni wrong. Mistaken.
But I couldn’t.
“Seventeen seventy-seven,” I admitted in a whisper, though I couldn’t have said precisely why. Xaphan had already announced out the important part; the details couldn’t make things any worse.
Cale stomped on the brake. The Corolla veered across two lanes of traffic and into the emergency lane, where the front right tire dropped onto the grass beyond. Behind us, brakes squealed, and tires smoked. Horns honked, and cars swerved all over the road. One small sedan wound up in the median, another on the shoulder fifty feet past us. But by some miracle, there were no collisions, and by the time Cale had regained his composure, traffic was picking up again.
“You’redead?” Cale demanded, staring at me as if I might sprout wings and beat him to death with them.
“Not really. Sort of.”Damn it!I had neither the time nor the energy to explain my strange state of being at that moment. “Iwasdead, briefly, and the consequences of that turned out to be…long term.”
“Iknewyou weren’t human,” he said, staring straight out the windshield. “Humans can’t heal that fast, even with my help—”
His help? What the hell didthatmean? Pouring rubbing alcohol on an open wound did not constitute a miracle.
“—but I was thinking more along the lines of ‘mage’ or ‘empath,’ thandead.”
I shrugged. What could I possibly say to that?
“Were you ever planning to tell me?” His expression cycled through hurt and irritation before finally settling on a blank look, as if my answer didn’t matter. But I knew better.
“Honestly, no,” I admitted. “For this very reason.” My arms spread to take in the car and the emergency lane it was parked across.
He scowled. “I wouldn’t have reacted like that if you hadn’t said it at eighty-five miles an hour.”
“Youwere driving, not me.”
His chin dimple deepened as he frowned. “So, if you died nearly two hundred fifty years ago, why are you stillbreathing?”
“It’s a long story. I’ll explain it when we get rid of our third wheel.”
Cale glanced at Xaphan in the rearview mirror, then at me again. His jaw tightened. “Fair enough,” he said, nodding as he shifted the car back into drive, though he looked anything but happy.
“You’re trapped here, aren’t you?” the djinni said as Cale flicked on the blinker and eased us back into traffic. “Instead of purgatory, you got this. Eternity with the living, right?”
