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Chapter One

Baxter

There are things no one tells you when you’ve been dead for nineteen years and are suddenly thrust back into the world of the living. No one tells you about reliving your murder every single night in your dreams. That every stage will play out in perfect, crystalline focus, like it’s happening all over again.

It starts with the feeling of pressure on your back. The slow realization that it’s more than someone having bumped into you. It moves on to the attempt to keep walking. Only a few steps. A baby new to walking could manage more.

When your body screams that it’s no longer possible, the slow crumple to the floor is inevitable. Your coffee slips from your fingers, the impact with the ground hard enough to dislodge the lid, the smell overpowering as it spreads outward in a lake.

Sound snaps into sharp focus. Not from you—you can’t manage anything more than a croak—but the sound of footsteps running away might as well be in stereo. No thoughts from them. That’s weird. You try to turn your head to see who did this to you, but the simple action is a mountain to climb. Your own personal Mount Everest.

Then the agonizing pain hits.

Pain, and a feeling of wetness.

You tell yourself it can’t be blood. How can it be when a minute ago you were fine? Fine and walking. Looking forward to the night to come. It’s the coffee. It has to be the coffee. Things can’t change that quickly, can they? It would be like someone clicking their fingers and plunging you into a nightmare—one you can’t wake up from.

Next comes the attempt to crawl, without any awareness of where you’re trying to go. Muscles strain. Teeth grit. The brain struggles to override all the pain receptors screaming their resistance to what must be done. Eventually, you give in and you lie there, because it’s all you can do.

You feel helpless. Scared. Angry. You tell yourself to stay conscious, that surviving depends on it. But telling yourself and doing it are two very different things. No matter how hard you fight, blackness steals over you like sticky tar, impossible to escape. You wonder if that’s it. Game over. The curtain call. The final whistle.

But no. Voices. Urgent, but professional. Telling you that you’re going to be alright. You know they’re lying. But you’re grateful all the same. They give instructions you can’t follow. “Tell us what happened. Open your eyes.” Sorry, I’m not driving this bus anymore. That thought makes you want to laugh, but you can’t do that either. “Hang on.”

You’re being lifted. Pain. So much pain. A stretcher. The back of an ambulance. Blue flashing lights visible through closed eyelids. The wail of the siren. The prick of a needle followed by a delicious numbness. It’s a relief, but terrifying at the same time. Because at least the pain meant you were still alive. More voices. People have a lot to say. Mostly about vitals dropping and how far it is to the hospital.

Too far. I already know that. No point in pretending any more that this is happening to someone else.

Yet, somehow I get to the hospital. Stubborn son of a bitch, aren’t I?

Refuses to die on a parking garage floor.

Refuses to die in an ambulance.

The wheels squeak as they run with the stretcher. Someone should oil them. I’ll tell them that when I can speak. More than one pair of hands on me. Doctors. Nurses. Everyone roped in to deal with the emergency. I never wanted to be an emergency. I had plans tonight with my boyfriend.

I think about him, because it makes me smile. James Osborne. Twenty-two. Two years younger than me. Sweet. Sexy. Thoughtful. Probably still sitting in the restaurant where we arranged to meet, wondering where I am. Sorry, Jamie. I can’t be there due to unforeseen circumstances. Enjoy yourself. Have dessert. Don’t flirt with the waiter.

The beeping of a machine. Beeping is good. Beeping means a heartbeat. Shouldn’t it be faster? I will it to be faster, terrified by the spaces in between, afraid they’re getting longer. I’m not ready to go. I’m twenty-four, for God’s sake. I’ve barely lived.

“The anesthetist is ready,” someone says. More running. More squeaking wheels. More people touching me. A mask fitted over my face. I instinctively try to fight it, but they hold me down, murmuring soothing words my drugged brain can no longer parse.

And then nothing.

Arms braced against the bathroom sink, I stared at myself in the mirror. I looked fine. I turned my head slowly to the left and then to the right, half-expecting my reflection to stay where it was. Of course it didn’t. It turned with me. Because it was me. And I was alive. My lips moved with the words I’d repeated four or five times a day for the last six months. Always alone. Never when anyone else was nearby.

A man appeared behind me in the mirror, framed in the doorway. He leaned against the doorjamb, arms crossed over his bare chest, watching me with lazy amusement. He’d looked younger last night. Fresher. Hotter. Exciting. In the cold light of day, he was just a man I picked up.

“Hi,” he said with a smile.

“Hi,” I replied politely, not meeting his gaze in the mirror.

When his gaze trailed down my body, I remembered I was naked. It didn’t matter. He’d already seen it all. Seen it. Tongued it. Fucked it. I wasn’t a mystery to him.

“I thought we could go out and get breakfast.”

“I have work,” I answered honestly.

“You don’t eat before work?”