Afterlife

by Merrie Destefano

  All the while, the River Styx patiently lapped at the edge of my boat. Waiting for me to die.

  If only I could dip my hand in the water.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  Chaz:

  The hospital lights were turned down low and everyone spoke in hushed tones, as if that would make everything easier, like it could somehow soften the blow to the gut that was on its way.

  He was dying. My brother was dying and I had to talk to him. Even if he didn’t answer me. I asked Mom to give us a few minutes alone. She floated into the hallway, took holo Dad on some sort of glowing leash. I closed my eyes when he drifted past. Still can’t bear to get too close to that thing.

  We were alone now. Russ and I. He was breathing, ragged and rough. The doctor said he’d had some sort of allergic reaction to the dart. It wasn’t a strong poison, but for some reason, maybe because of his weakened state from the spikes…there was no definitive answer for what was happening to him, but he probably wouldn’t make it through the night.

  He would never see his daughter again. Even if we could find Isabelle, right now, he wouldn’t see her.

  “Russ, it’s Chaz.”

  His body lay still, arms tucked close to his sides. His eyes blinked open as he struggled against the darkness that surrounded him. “Isabelle,” he whispered. Then a long minute later, “My baby girl—”

  I held his hand. He was looking at me now, one of those brief coherent moments before the curtain comes crashing down and the lights go out. I could barely hear his words, so I moved closer, caught him in mid-sentence.

  “—that monster took her,” he murmured, “I couldn’t move, I couldn’t stop him—”

  “Who was it, Russ? Tell me who took Isabelle—”

  “—didn’t you smell him that night?” He struggled to grab my shirt and pull me closer. “Didn’t you smell him when everybody was chantin’ and throwin’ rocks? I can smell him, all the time—”

  Rocks. Chanting. A stench wrapped around my intestines, soaked through my lungs. I could taste it in the back of my throat, heavy and sweet, like swallowing a mouthful of rotting honeysuckle. The night Dad was murdered. The nightmares. Somebody laughing in the darkness.

  “Russ, are you saying that the guy who took Isabelle was there when Dad died?”

  “—he’s gonna put her on the flyin’ horses—”

  “Who? Tell me his name—”

  He stared at me, as if he saw some dark terror in the distance, something approaching faster than he expected. He took one last jealous breath, then exhaled, long and slow. He fell still, all the answers I needed still locked inside.

  There was a moment when all the lights in the room seemed to dim, when the darkness came on leather wings. It sat beside me, nameless and faceless, a beast all claws and teeth. I recognized the presence. Remembered a time when we met before.

  Right now, more than anything I needed closure. And accountability.

  “I’ll get her back, Russ,” I said, my words catching in my throat. I had to pause, had to ignore the gen-spike stench and the black slithering shadows. “No matter what it takes, I promise, I’ll get Isabelle back.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  October 14 • 4:59 A.M.

  Chaz:

  Midnight poured down into my gut, cold and stark. The monster that took Isabelle hadn’t contacted us yet. I had a team of people searching the Grid for any clues. I hated to admit it, but my niece would probably turn up in the Underground Circus. I had to have people in place, watching for her.

  All of them would be watching for a five-year-old, almost six-year-old, girl who would be sold in a few hours to the highest bidder.

  Right now Angelique and Pete were sleeping off the venom that some punk had shot into their veins. In the morning, they’d help put together the disjointed pieces of this puzzle. Somehow they’d each played a part in this and it was time for them to confess.

  Whether they wanted to or not.

  But I didn’t know if I would survive that long. Isabelle was out there somewhere, scared and alone. Waiting for someone to rescue her.

  I stood on a wrought-iron balcony, overlooking the French Quarter. The day had been sliced neatly in half, divided down the middle into dark and light and I was poised on the edge of both, wondering what would happen next. I felt like I had been in this position all of my life. Waiting for a bolt of lightning to shoot down from heaven. Hoping that someone would expose the evil that had taken up residence all around me.

  It was finally time for me to make a decision—to fight, to die if I had to, risk everything to stop this madness. I didn’t even know what the kidnappers wanted or who they were.

  But I knew what I wanted. I could feel it boiling in my blood like a virus.

  Revenge.

  I wanted to see some monster’s head on a pike, hear the beast drowning in the moat just outside the castle walls, and then bring the princess home, safe.

  When had I turned into a warrior with barbed-wire flesh? I never asked to play this part. This was my Gethsemane, my rocky garden crucible. And I could tell a sacrifice was coming.

  It was an hour before dawn.

  Below me the streets flowed heavy with fog, a river of hazy gauze, a mist that stalked the city every night on panther paws. A cotton-like silence filled the sky. It ate sounds and spit them back out, half-born. Streetlights curved overhead; they winked and then went off. Suddenly the whole world narrowed down to the single street, covered with cobblestones and lined with double gallery houses, stunningly beautiful in their decay.

  A phantom light danced through the mists. A precursor to the sun.

  The City That Care Forgot began to reveal itself when a man on the street started to play a trumpet, the soft, haunting melody stirring ghosts from the mists. Shrouds and skeleton-like creatures emerged from the vaporous mists; they danced and swayed. People dressed for Carnival, high on life, high on black-market alcohol, high on whatever illegal drug they could afford. Like sinuous snakes they followed the music, hips swinging, arms lifted high in mock worship.

  I watched as they shifted through white shadows, until finally they disappeared through a doorway.

  And then I was alone.

  Is this what purgatory used to be like, back before God emptied it of the dead, before there were no more souls left? No one prayed for the dead anymore. The Pope forbade it twenty years ago.

  Pray for the living, that was what he said we should do.

  But nobody listened. Instead we all forgot how to pray.

  I fell to my knees then as the damp, dark fog swirled around me; I lifted my hands to the heavens that I could no longer see.

  In the dark night of the soul, faith feels as dry and brittle as autumn leaves.

  Spare Isabelle, I prayed. Please. If there must be a sacrifice here, then let it be mine.

  This time, let it be mine.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  Neville:

  My boss stood bathed in his own circle of light in the center of the room. As always, he wore one of those vintage virtual reality suits, the kind that masks your face and garbles your voice. A couple of gutter punks lay on the floor, feet twitching like they were having puppy dreams. The room was littered with empty bottles that once had held a homemade concoction of bliss and jive-sweet and black-market rum. Strips of century-old wallpaper sagged in the corners of the room, revealing water-stained battle wounds from a war this shotgun cottage fought and lost, long ago.

  I waited for the argument I knew was coming. I didn’t have to wait long.

  “This isn’t going to work,” my boss said.

  I grinned. “Trusts me,” I said. “This here will works just fine. All pretty-pretty, likes I told ya.”

  “No, it won’t, you idiot. Russell Domingue is dead! I told you not to kill anybody—”

  “I didn’t kills nobody, that Domingue was pumped up with spikes—”

  “Then how are you going to get the serum now?”

  “
I works magic, I always does. I gots voodoo in my blood—”

  “You’re high.” The VR image fluttered and sizzled, transmission fuzzy.

  “Still, I knows what to do.”

  “What? Tell me, how are you going to fix this mess?”

  I picked up a tray filled with jars of cosmetics: powder, rouge, lipstick. I balanced it in one hand and gestured with the other. “I’s gonna paints the little girl. Just like I plans all along. Gets her ready for the flyin’ horses.”

  “But her father’s dead and he’s the one who knew where the—”

  “The uncle’s the one we wants now. Him and his Newbie. They’ll gets us the stuff.”

  “How can you be so sure you can manipulate the uncle as easily as the father?”

  I set down the tray, then flicked on a VR screen on the far wall. “Remember them surveillance tapes from the night we breaks into their house? Just watch and you’ll sees.”

  Like a vintage film noir, a gritty sequence of images flashed across the screen. It was a copy of a copy and all the color had been washed out. Black-and-white digital photography had been shot in the little girl’s bedroom, the sound muffled. According to the digital clock readout in the lower right corner, it started when three people walked into the bedroom at 5:56 P.M. Isabelle, Chaz, and the Newbie. The Newbie sat in a corner, silent, looking almost like a mannequin. Chaz played with his niece, talked to her, helped her decide what to wear.

  I glanced at my boss. He wasn’t convinced. Yet.

  The video jumped ahead to 7:08 P.M. A blinding flash washed out the screen and erased everything. The liquid light. The tape had been tampered with, a scene removed—the scene that showed me breaking through the window, tossing in a ball that rolled across the floor, then ignited. The light faded.

  The room was now filled with blackened bodies, all children.

  My boss looked away for a moment.

  I’s not afraids to look. I’s never afraids of what comes next. I stands with open eyes and I waits, always I waits for what needs to happen…

  “Watch it!” I commanded.

  He turned back, VR head facing the screen.

  Chaz was in the room now, frantic. Looking for something, weaving his way through the puzzle of dead children. Then he turned toward the bathroom door. “Isabelle!” he cried, his voice echoing on the recording, “Isabelle, are you in there?”

  “Uncle Chaz—” The little girl’s voice was almost lost beneath the roar of the crackling fire.

  “Watch his face,” I said.

  The video skipped again. To the part where the broken door was peeled away. Russell and Chaz glanced at each other for a brief moment.

  Here the video had been enhanced to show a close-up.

  Something blazed in Chaz’s eyes, settled on his brow, almost as if he thought about pushing his brother aside, going in and rescuing the little girl himself. Then Russell shouldered his way through the door and picked the child up, carried her out to safety.

  I paused the video.

  And there, frozen on the screen, was a close-up of Chaz’s face. He could no longer hold it in, tears spilled down his cheeks, revealing the secret he had tried for years to conceal.

  “Do ya sees it?” I asked.

  My boss nodded.

  “Then tells me, what does ya see?”

  “The uncle, Chaz, he…” He paused for a moment, stared into the black-and-white face as if he recognized the emotion, as if he could relate to the hidden longing. “He wishes that the little girl was his.”

  “Exactly.”

  I is the silver wind that rushes through the night trees, the invisible river that changes the course of life and death. I is the bright star that burns forever.

  I is the one that brings immortality to the gutter.

  Where it belongs.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  Angelique:

  The dart shot poison through my system. My flesh burned. A virus rushed through my veins, my blood turned into blistering, smoldering magma. I felt like I would melt, my skin was wax and it was peeling off my bones in layers. I fell on the floor of the elevator and I was on fire.

  I lost consciousness.

  I woke up for a brief moment. Chaz was holding me. I felt safe then. For one instant, I felt safe.

  Then I slipped away again. And the nightmares began.

  It felt like I was going mad, my life became one long lucid dream and I couldn’t break free. Sometimes I was aware of what was going on around me, sometimes I was sure that I was dreaming, but at other times reality seemed to take on a new meaning.

  I was in a hospital and Chaz was with me. I couldn’t see him, but I could sense his thoughts, pushing through the membrane of my mind.

  I was falling in love with him.

  But I couldn’t.

  I was standing in the hills of Scotland, beside William, his dark hair laced with silver, the lines on his face deeper than when we first married. He laughed, a thick, rich, boisterous sound, and he took me in his arms. We danced in the long grass while our herd of sheep watched. He kissed me and I leaned against him, hungry for his touch.

  “It’s been so long, Will,” I said.

  “Long, my love?” He laughed again. “Have you already forgotten this morning?”

  I couldn’t remember anything but this moment on this hill, this now. I wanted to stay with him forever, then I remembered. The dark cloud. My rebellion.

  I had taken the Fresh Start chip.

  He pulled away from me then, his touch cold, as if he had just remembered it too.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “You’ve damned yourself now.”

  “That’s not true,” I argued. “The Pope said—”

  “And now, Miss High And Mighty herself believes everything the Pope says.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant.”

  “It isn’t too late,” he whispered, now from a distant mountaintop. He was growing smaller and smaller, traveling farther away by the second.

  “Too late for what?”

  “To pay a penance for your sin.”

  Don’t go, don’t leave me alone, I don’t want to be damned. But he faded away and I was alone in the dark, in this horrid unending hallucination.

  And I knew there would be a reckoning soon.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  Chaz:

  The hospital came alive with a clatter and a rumble, like a trolley car rolling down broken tracks. Gurneys and medicine carts wheeled through once empty corridors, the stench of antiseptic ratcheted up a notch. White shoes and white coats and a herd of would-be saviors jostled for placement in a morning rush hour.

  Skellar and I each held a cup of strong coffee as we huddled together in Angelique’s room. Our voices collided with each other, sometimes hushed when we remembered the danger involved, sometimes close to shouting when we tried to focus on what needed to be done.

  “We caught one of them gutter punks last night, hidin’ in the stairwell,” Skellar said. Steam rose from the coffee as he leaned nearer and took a sip.

  “Did you find out who took Isabelle?” I asked.

  “Eventually.” A crooked grin slid over rugged territory, creased one side of his face. “After I gave that punk one of those ‘spill-your-guts’ cocktails that you liked so much.”

  Angelique blinked and rubbed her forehead. She was waking up.

  “And?” I prodded him.

  “And suddenly he remembered a lot more. Like who took your niece.” He pulled a photo from his pocket. “You know this guy?”

  I stared at the picture. Icy fingers slid down into my gut.

  It was that joker from the bar, the one who’d tried to take Angelique.

  Skellar seemed to enjoy my reaction. “After talkin’ to that gutter rat, I ran a background check on this goon and found out he was in Marguerite’s sous-terrain société,” he said. “This guy was one of her surrogate brothers. He has been for over five years. Maybe that’s why he got called
in for this job. Or maybe this is a setup that’s been planned for a long time.”

  “You’re sayin’ this maggot had been crawling around my family for five years? Why?”

  “That’s Neville Saturno,” Angelique said, her voice raspy and low.

  I reached one hand out, touched her cheek. It still felt hot. “You okay?”

  “I think so.” She gave me slow smile, one that made my heart skip a beat. Made me feel alive again.

  “You’re pretty lucky you got to a medic so quick last night,” Skellar said. “Your friend Pete got the same dart as you and he ain’t doin’ so great.”

  “What happened?” She pulled herself into a sitting position, sluggishly ran her fingers through her hair.

  “Gutter punks broke into our hotel suite.” I frowned. “They shot darts—”

  “But Isabelle’s okay, right?”

  I glanced down at the tile beneath my feet, tried to imagine where my niece was right now, felt the surge of pain return like a cannonball through my chest.

  She was holding my hand. “Chaz, she’s okay, isn’t she?”

  “We don’t know.” Skellar spoke the words that I couldn’t bring myself to say. He tossed the photo in her lap. “What’s your connection with this guy?”

  “I—I’ve known him a long time,” she said, a dark expression in her eyes. “Since my last life.” She looked hesitant to say more in front of Skellar.

  “He’s the one that has Isabelle,” Skellar said.

  Angelique stared into space for a moment, a terrified look on her face. “Has he contacted you or Russ yet? Did he tell you—did he say what he wants?”

  “Russ is dead.” My voice cracked when I said it, the words made it more final, more real. “And nobody’s contacted us yet. What do you know about all this, Angelique?”