Chapter Two
Two
I may not be able to outrun a hellhound, but I can outsmart it. Two paces away is a narrow maintenance tunnel that doesn’t actually exist. I dart in and slam the door behind me, believing with whatever I have that passes for a heart that the door is locked.
Said heart is pounding, and I don’t recognize the ragged sound of my breathing. I rest my head against the door for a moment, but the image of a soul disintegrating burns behind my eyelids. Except it’s not Pete’s soul I see when I close my eyes.
Get it together, Elle.
The disintegration’s not the important part. It’s what happened after. I’m sure I saw it this time. Right before the last of Pete vanished, there was a tiny ball of light right where his sternum had been. And then it went…somewhere. Into the “gun”? Point is, it existed. Still exists, somewhere.
I tuck that realization away, turning my focus back on the present.
As long as no one on the subway platform imagines this maintenance tunnel, which doesn’t actually exist in the real Boylston station, I should be good.
Sure, the hellhound would have seen me disappear, but as far as I know, they can’t influence the surroundings in the Afterlife.
I concentrate on turning the lights on, but it takes me several seconds to convince myself they exist. Once they flicker to life, I pull my jacket close around me and start heading briskly down the tunnel.
Physics are weird here. The best we can figure, it’s a psychic creation of collective consciousness.
It’s the whole people see what they expect to see thing, but here, what people see is a mélange of all the Dead’s memories.
Underneath all that is a layer of surreality, and sometimes bits of it creep through the construct.
And that’s how you end up with whales swimming down a subway platform.
If I were to go up into Boston Common, it would be recognizable but off, because it’s been unconsciously re-created by people from different times and ages and points of view.
And then something weird might pop up, like a giant potato in the sky or a swan with human legs, but they usually pass fairly quickly, because people disbelieve them away.
One person can’t usually change much on purpose, but I’m thinking really hard about how there’s a maintenance tunnel here, and lights to illuminate my way back to the basement of an unassuming building one block over.
Plus, I’m not the only one imagining it to life.
Footsteps pick up pace behind me.
“Well, that sucks.” Suit Guy, a.k.a. Vinny, a.k.a. my shill, falls into step beside me.
“You were supposed to win the first one,” I say.
Vinny’s not my favorite person, personally speaking, but in the absence of a crew, he’ll do in a pinch. He has the necessary attributes: the ability to lie convincingly and the willingness to do so for a price.
Oh, and he’s Dead.
“I was distracted,” he responds to my accusation.
I roll my eyes. “Was there a hot guy on the platform?”
There’s a pause before he mutters, “There was a hot guy on the platform.”
I smirk. “Blue button-down and locs?”
He just grins.
“Second pocket,” I say, nodding to the messenger bag slung over Vinny’s shoulder—the one I left behind in the T stop when I fled.
He rips open the Velcro flap and pulls out a baby tooth. My baby tooth. I don’t tell him it’s the last one, that I’ve already bartered away the rest of them.
When I was cleaning out the house, I’d found them in a small tin in the attic, my name scrawled across the top in Dad’s handwriting, three layers of spells protecting them. There was one with Dante’s name on it too, but I can’t bring myself to trade those.
Organic material is the only currency here, and none of it is more valuable than bones.
“No possession,” I say sternly to Vinny.
He scoffs. “What do you take me for?” He cradles the tooth. “I’m gonna use this baby to haunt my ex-boyf.”
“Nobody says ‘boyf’ anymore.”
Vinny shrugs. “They did when I was alive.”
“Yeah, well. They also said ‘YOLO,’ and look how that turned out.”
He cuts me a sideways glance. “You’re in a good mood for someone who just lost their payout.”
“Did I?”
Vinny points in the direction of the subway platform. “Yeah, you fumbled the switch and dropped the bone. I couldn’t grab it, by the way. Someone had already nabbed it.”
I cluck my tongue, shoving my hands into my jacket pockets. “Oh, Vinny, my sweet, dumb Jacob Marley. How little you’ve learned.”
Raising one hand, I flick my wrist, and the fake star obol appears between my fingers.
It’s a little shaky, because, again, small hands.
Another flick of the wrist and the star is replaced with the bull.
And then, because I’m not skilled enough to palm a third item, I raise Pete’s watch with my other hand.
“The job went off exactly as planned,” I say.
“Minus the almost getting reaped,” Vinny points out.
I hum noncommittally. “Even that ended up in my favor. Now Pete won’t be missing his watch.”
“All that for a watch?”
I grin. “Poor Infamous Pete is infamous for his poor memory and computer skills. Rumor has it, he keeps his PINs scratched into the band of the watch.”
The botched coin switch was just a cover for me to get close enough to Pete. Light pressure on the wrist while his focus was on the bone in my other hand. A slip of the clasp with my thumb, a pinch of the band between middle and ring fingers, and the watch is now mine.
I flip it over and sure enough, several lines of letters and numbers are scratched clumsily into the leather.
“You can’t take the watch back with you,” Vinny points out. “You can only take back what you brought yourself, and that watch hitched a ride on the Dead guy.”
I shoot Vinny a flat look. “I’m going to memorize the numbers, Casper.”
“Oh.”
We reach a door at the end of the tunnel, and just like I’ve convinced myself, there’s a room beyond with a hive of Orpheus chambers built into the wall on the far side.
They’re little more than bunks, like train sleeping compartments, with a tank above them and tubing leading to a mist mask.
A light flashes on a monitor in one of the bunks.
I take my bag from Vinny and stuff my knit hat into it. “Well, gotta go.”
Vinny leans against the nearest chamber. “How long have you got?”
I flip over and shake my hair out, even though it doesn’t matter in the slightest. It’ll look how it looks when I get back to my body. “No idea.”
Alchemy and magical gadgets aren’t my forte, so the technical part of this con has been all guesswork. I’m betting I have only a few minutes left, so I’ll have to do my memorizing quick. I lie down in the lit chamber.
This is the second difference between me and my brother. He never would have done a job like this alone. It was one of his rules.
Rule #4: Never do anything without your crew.
Dante lived by that rule, until he didn’t, and that’s what got him killed.
I’m halfway through another recitation of the passwords when I catch a shift in the air. The scent of rotten meat and garlic that’s been following me begins to fade. The world around me starts to shimmer. This is it.
Clouds fill the space, starting as a translucent fog, then growing more real until I can feel the cold and damp cling to my skin. My vision fills with a bright light, and suddenly I’m zooming away from it. Faster and faster, the entire universe spinning around me.
And then I suck in a breath.
A real one.
With my real lungs in my real body.
My real eyes fly open.
I’m in a chamber like the one I’d just lain down in, a silicone mask strapped to my face. My body feels drained and sore, though I haven’t moved in at least an hour. I just want to lie there, but it looks like I might have to start running. The lights are flashing, and an alarm is blaring.
I’m not supposed to be here, and I’m about to get caught.