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“You’re going to get everyone killed,” said Carter.

So he hadn’t changed his mind. Fine. Surprise revoked. “Wanna come in?”

Jack escorted Carter into the kitchen. Everyone around the island looked up at their entrance, and Jack did his best to repress the chill threatening to run through him. They were all here, gathered together the night before a job. It felt so right. But Carter wasn’t gonna make it that easy. Jack would have to win him over.

“Carter,” Greer said, pulling herself upright from where she’d been leaning on the marble island. “Are you—”

“Eli told me what you guys are planning to do,” said Carter. “It’s insane.”

“We’ve done crazier,” said Jack.

But Carter didn’t look at him. He was gearing up to plead his case, and apparently he’d decided that Jack was off the jury.

“Look, Greer, I know how important this is for you, for your kid, but you’re about to walk into a building swarming with people who deal in death. You have no idea what they might be capable of. Hell, until Jack came back from the dead, none of us even knew there was an afterlife. Don’t you think you’re out of your depth here?”

“Jackie knows what’s up, though,” said Dale. “His whole job is this shit.”

Jack quickly relayed this input to the group. Sure, his day job was death, but that didn’t mean he knew much about it. Still, this was just another job, wasn’t it? And hadn’t he always figured things out as he went? Besides, he bet the Bleak Market was nothing but a bunch of rich goths with more knowledge than was good for them.

Greer barely seemed to hear anyone’s arguments. She was too busy looking at Carter, hazel eyes flashing with determination. “It’s worth the risk.” Then she turned to the others. “For me. But Carter’s right, this could be dangerous. The rest of you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. The last thing I’d ever want is for anyone else to…” She didn’t finish her sentence. She didn’t have to. Everyone in Margaret’s kitchen could finish it for her. It started and ended with Jules, just like so much of their lives had.

“I’m already dead,” said Jack.

“Same,” said Dale.

“At least the law won’t be on my ass for this,” Eli said with a shrug.

Greer lowered her eyes, but not before Jack caught the sheen of tears building in them.

Carter looked from one to the other. “You’re actually going through with this?”

No one replied, which was enough of a reply for him.

“Fuck,” he said.

Jack knew that “fuck.” “Yeah?”

Carter’s hands were balled into fists. He was fighting himself, but it was a losing battle. As far as Jack was concerned, from the moment he’d entered Margaret’s house and seen the group, he’d already lost. “Somebody’s got to keep you idiots out of trouble.”

Jack swallowed his grin and opted instead for a sage nod. This had always been the way, and as far as he was concerned, it always would be. Jack came up with the schemes, Dale followed enthusiastically, Eli took things too far, Greer talked him down, and Carter smoothed things over. This was the You Again gang, and it always would be. No matter how hard the others might have tried to fight against it.

“Tomorrow night, then,” Jack said, trying to keep the thrill from his voice.

Carter’s nostrils flared in annoyance, but it was too late. “Tomorrow night, then.”

• • •

“Tomorrow night” slipped into “tonight” with the easy flow of a tide pool’s still waters peeling back into the reckless sea, and soon the gang was gathered back around the kitchen island as though the hours between the evenings had never occurred. A muted hum filled the room, the bees of anticipation under everyone’s skin buzzing just enough to become a palpable note in the air. The preheist jitters had only intensified over the decades, it seemed, an odd sort of stage fright for a performance that, if it all went according to plan, no one but a select few would ever see. Even Jack could feel it. This job was different, after all. It wasn’t just a broken bone or a stint in jail at stake here; it was Greer. He forced a steadying breath and scanned the room.

It had been years since Jack had looked over the faces of the You Agains on the evening of a job. Now, as they stood around the kitchen, all he could see were the kids he’d once tackled the world with. The lines drawn across Greer’s face had receded, replaced by freckles and heavy eyeliner. Carter’s sharp cheeks had plumped. Dale’s fullness grew lanky. Eli’s curls were untamed. Even Jack, for only a breath, was in his own skin again. He blinked and the mirage faded but didn’t fully disappear. It never would. This was who they all were at their core. It was like he could see through to their souls, and no matter the years that passed or the experiences that filled those years, their souls would never change.

“Ready?” he asked no one in particular. Everyone turned to him, expressions ranging from excitement to trepidation to full-on dread. Oh yes, they were ready.

They parked several blocks from their destination, as Eli had been instructed, and filed out of Margaret’s Mercedes onto the curb. Despite the apprehension written across everyone’s features, Jack was mostly at ease now. His work was almost done. All they had to do was go in there and sell a piece of paper. They could handle that. But that thought wasn’t what mattered to him in this moment. What mattered was that everyone was here, together, and soon they’d have one more job under their belts. One last job.

The late spring air held a touch of coolness left over from a long and uninspiring winter, but every inhale was perfumed with notes of lilac and freshly mowed grass, while the full moon hung silver and wise in a cloudless purple sky. This is what being alive feels like, thought Jack.

He led his merry band of thieves toward the abandoned factory. It took a decent amount of scouring in the dark to find the heavy metal door around the side, on which Eli rapped in a sequence of knocks that might have been Morse code or possibly the opening notes of “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” by Blue Öyster Cult, or maybe both. A slat in the door slid open, revealing a set of bronze-brown eyes framed by heavy brows. Whoever the eyes belonged to greeted Jack and his friends with a grunt. Eli leaned in and whispered something that seemed too long to be a password and was more of a pass-sentence or even a pass-paragraph, gauging by the amount of time Eli was over there. The whole process was unnecessarily dramatic and secretive and reminiscent of criminal underworlds of old, all of which Jack couldn’t help but be a little impressed by. Another grunt preceded the clicking of metal, and the door swung open. The owner of the bronze eyes was taller than anyone in the group, bald-headed, and pierced along his left ear.