Afterlife (Second Eden #1)

by Aaron Burdett

  “Then name it,” Amber said.

  “Unfortunately, Amber, it’s not you I want to ask.”

  Amber blinked, leaning back. “What?”

  Wilhelmina’s gaze glided to Dino. “It’s you.”

  Dino coughed, and it tumbled into a full-throated cackle that turned his cheeks cherry red. He wiped tears from his eyes and slapped his knee. “That’s hilarious. Why the hell would I do anything for you? It’s bad enough I have to take orders from Faye. I’m not getting caught in the Spider’s web.”

  “Oh, well you see, you already are, Dino. You were caught in my web the minute you and Amber crossed paths, and now you can either agree to help me and learn something she so desperately needs, or you can refuse and we can make things painfully messy for you. Your choice.”

  He looked to Amber, then back at Wilhelmina. “What do you want?”

  “It’s a straightforward task, really,” Wilhelmina said. “I need you to assassinate someone.”

  “If I could’ve killed the archduke already, don’t you think I would’ve done it?”

  “Oh no, not the archduke.”

  “Bone Man? Faye?”

  “No,” Wilhelmina laughed. Her smile flattened, and she lifted her chin. “Dino, I need you to kill Ian West, and I need you to kill him tonight.”

  “General Ian West?” Dino snorted and rocked forward. “You want the moon while I’m at it?”

  “You make it sound like such a Herculean feat.”

  “He’s a general on the Iron Council!”

  “And my sinners happen to know his schedule. They also happen to have a map of his estate. It shouldn’t be too difficult to steal inside, do the deed, and slip out unnoticed. It’s the perfect plan for both of us if you think about it. We each get something we want, and you get to walk out of here of your own free will, no blackjackets on your heels, no Bone Man in your shadow.”

  “Why General West? He’s probably the tamest of all the generals.”

  “You and I both know Faye’s not strong enough to stop the archduke. He’ll crush her soon enough, and when he does, he won’t need me anymore. I’m just creating a little manageable chaos to ensure my own survival. With a weakened Council, Faye survives. As long as Faye survives, so do I.”

  “Why don’t your sinners just do this?” Dino asked.

  “Because my hands need to be completely clean of this. I can’t have it traced back to me whatsoever. It’s really a very simple mission. I’ve practically already done it for you. I have a map, I’ve made sure he’ll be vulnerable tonight. All you need to do is the simple deed of dusting him.”

  “And if I get caught?” he asked.

  She flashed a Cheshire grin. “Dino Cardona get caught? I don’t think so. Besides, you’ll have every reason not to.”

  “I’m not going to be your prisoner while he does this,” Amber snapped.

  “Of course not! I’d never ask such a thing. Besides, keeping you here is far too dangerous for me. If the archduke found out, he’d dust me in a heartbeat. No, you’re not what will bring the infamous Dino Cardona back. But I know what will.”

  Dino frowned, leaning on his elbows. “What’re you getting at?”

  “I just need a little collateral to ensure the mission is a success, and there’s only one thing in the world that could keep Dino Cardona in check.” She opened her palm and wagged her fingers. “Zoe Cardona’s ring.”

  Dino paled. A pit of dread opened in Amber’s already queasy stomach. He would never give that ring up for her. People in Afterlife just didn’t do things like that for others. Amber’s shoulders slumped. This would be the end of the trail, and they would have to fight their way out of the steamboat, an act Amber suspected Wilhelmina would make nearly impossible.

  “How do I get it back?” Dino reached into his shirt and pulled out the ring. He unclasped the necklace and handed it to Wilhelmina. “Because if I don’t, it’s you I’ll come for next.”

  Amber’s jaw dropped. “You’re seriously doing that? For me?”

  He turned to her, his face a stony mask. “I told you to trust me. If this helps us, I’ll do it. Zoe would do the exact same thing.”

  Wilhelmina’s hand closed around the ring. “Then we have ourselves a deal. How lovely. Once you complete your mission, I’ll see one of my sinners returns the ring to you.”

  Amber went for his hand. “Dino, I—”

  He slid his hand away and swallowed. “We do what we must. This is Afterlife. Just make it worthwhile, Amber.”

  “Thank you, Dino,” she murmured. Her heart ached for him, and she wanted to hold him and hide from him all at once.

  Instead of doing either, Amber swallowed her feelings and turned to the Spider. “We’ve agreed to your deal, now it’s time to make good. Tell me what you know.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The Agate Necklace

  Wilhelmina sighed and leaned against the back of her chair, flopping her arm over the armrest. “I knew that necklace would bring me nothing but trouble. But it was a relic from the Deep, and the things the Deep spits out are worth far more than gold or diamonds.”

  Amber could hardly contain her excitement. After all this time, she would finally know what the necklace meant. She would finally have a solid clue that would lead her to Toby. She squeezed Dino’s knee, her eyes locked on Wilhelmina.

  “After the archduke crushed the Assembly,” the Spider continued, “he made it known he sought relics and that he would pay a handsome price for them. His insatiable desire for the artifacts was actually the reason why he let my sinners survive the Revolution. You see, no one knows the city better than I do. No one knows its secrets like the Scarlet Spider. So we struck a bargain. I would help him hunt his relics, and in return, he would let my little web continue to flourish.”

  “I remember your sinners around then,” Dino said. “All over the place. You’d try to bid on relics in the Deep Market. But why bid on them if you were just turning them in to the archduke?”

  “It was a clever way to identify his enemies. If you hated the archduke, you wouldn’t sell to him, now would you? There were times, though, that I decided to keep the relics that passed through my hands. The necklace was one such relic. Don’t know why it caught my eye, to be honest. That garish thing was barely fit for a costume. But when I saw it, I knew I had to have it, because I knew it was something special.”

  Wilhelmina chuckled at the memory, strumming her fingers against her chest. “This scrawny thing of a woman found it, some stray decent enough in the spirit curse. She was trying to make a name for herself in the city. I remember meeting her in the Deep Market, poor, poor thing. She dressed like a boy—loose, ratty shirt, this awful vest that was a little too short for her frame and leather breeches riddled with poorly-sewn patches. She looked horrendous. Didn’t seem to bother her, though. Walked right up to Fat Gary, danced right around him, and told me her name was Vera and she had the best deal for me.”

  “Vera?” Dino wrinkled his nose and looked to the side. “Don’t remember a Vera. But there were a lot of relic hunters back then.”

  “Indeed,” Wilhelmina said. “Vera showed me the necklace and said she uncovered it somewhere in the dust dunes beyond Afterlife’s southern borders.”

  “There isn’t much of anything in the south. At least nothing that I found, and nobody went deeper than I did.”

  “I thought it odd as well. No one that pathetic could survive in the Deep far enough to uncover something truly valuable. I had a spirit check her, and the the spirit said she checked out. The Deep had touched her, though, and you could see it in her eyes, in the way she spoke and played with her hands. It was like at any moment she might take off running for the horizon—or leaping from a rooftop, as some Deep-touched souls tend to do. Before she could do any of that, I bought the necklace. I took it back to the Beggar’s Glory, and I put it in a box, and that was that.”

  Amber frowned and leaned back. “That can’t just be that. There’s
got to be more.”

  “Of course there is, dear.” Wilhelmina sighed and stretched. “A few days passed, and I forgot about the vagrant named Vera. At that point, I even planned to give the necklace to the archduke. I was at the Deep Market again when Vera practically attacked me. Fat Gary didn’t let her slip by that time, and no one has since. The Deep’s call had clearly sunk inside the poor soul. Her hair was a knotted mess. Her clothes were disgusting—God, did they smell awful! And she rambled! One nonsensical thing after another.”

  Amber swallowed. “What did she say?”

  “She screamed that the necklace didn’t belong to me. It belonged to the Mother, the bearer of all curses, the buried bride.”

  Amber shot a glance to Dino. “Marina talked about something like that. She told me I carried a curse from the Deep, a curse of all curses or something like that. Who is the Mother? What is this curse?”

  “You mean you haven’t put two and two together?” Wilhelmina smirked, her eye flicking to Dino. “Surely you’re not completely ignorant?”

  Dino shrugged and shook his head. “I guess I am?”

  Wilhelmina sighed and brushed her fingers down the long swoop of golden hair curtaining her eye. “Well, you two certainly are a pair of fools, aren’t you? Let me put it in black and white for you. We are in Afterlife, yes?”

  Amber and Dino nodded.

  “And Amber bears the curse of all curses. The first curse, if you will. Can we agree on this?”

  Amber nodded again. She wiped her sweaty palms on her dress and looked to Dino, but he could only muster another shrug.

  “God, you two are dense.” Wilhelmina bit her lip, savoring the bit of knowledge balancing on the tip of her tongue. “Eve. The mother of all curses, the one who took the serpent’s fruit and took sin into her heart. The buried bride is Eve, Amber, and her spirit is inside you. I imagine she doesn’t plan on staying that way for long. Can’t say I envy you for it, either.”

  Amber blinked. Then, she frowned and started laughing. “You’re saying Eve’s inside me, wanting to get out? That’s insane!”

  “Vera certainly didn’t have her head screwed on too tightly while she rambled on about it. I would’ve let her live if she hadn’t tried to use her spirit on me. Fat Gary doesn’t stand for that, and so we had to dust her then and there for all to see. She died telling me the necklace wasn’t mine to wear. It was only for the buried bride. I got her dust all over me that day. It was so unfortunate.

  “By then the necklace seemed more trouble than it was worth, so I sent word to the Black Palace of the relic. He sent five-hundred blackjackets to the Ruby Ring. Five-hundred! I sent it out with a few of my most trusted sinners. You know the rest of the story from there.”

  “The dust devils stole it,” Dino said.

  “The crazy shits! Fastest phantoms my sinners had ever seen. Faster than even you, Dino.”

  “So it was Eve’s necklace.” Dino’s brows knitted together as he looked to Amber. “Does that—”

  “Help? No.” Amber looked to her lap and began rubbing her temples. “What am I supposed to do with that? How does this help? How does this find Toby?”

  “We know the archduke was buying up relics. We know he was taking souls like your brother before the Census Masters could record them. Maybe the two are linked.”

  “Of course they are,” Wilhelmina sighed. “The relics come from the Deep. What is the Deep but a desert of dust? What is dust, but a soul who’s died? I think it’s fairly obvious the archduke wants to create relics of his own. That requires studying the ones that exist and a steady supply of fresh dust to try and make new ones. Those souls he took vanished in the Black Palace and never returned. I’m sure they were all dusted in one failed experiment after another to make a relic for the archduke. And now you know exactly what happened to your brother,” she said, the gleeful poison in her voice bouncing sharply off the glass walls.

  “What?” Amber’s stomach turned cold and hard, and her hands began to shake. “It’s not true. He didn’t dust all those souls. Not all of them! Toby’s still alive. He … He came to me! He needs me!”

  Wilhelmina clucked her tongue, her lips slowly spreading in a smile. “You wanted answers, Amber Blackwood, and now you have them. You know the story of the necklace, the story of your curse, and the story of your poor forgotten brother. Don’t despair, child, for dust we are, and to dust we all return.”

  “You’re lying.” Amber vaulted to her feet, her entire body trembling. “Toby is alive. I know he is.”

  “Believe what you want. I honestly don’t care. The only way you’ll ever find out is by visiting the Black Palace and asking the archduke yourself.”

  “If that’s what it takes, I will.”

  Dino lurched from his seat, grabbing her shoulder and spinning her to him. “That’s suicide! Don’t you see what she’s doing? She got Zoe’s ring from me so I’d do her dirty work for her, and now she’s said the one thing in all of Afterlife that could get you to waltz right into the archduke’s hands. She’s delivering you to him!”

  “I don’t care. If the palace is where I need to be, I’m going there. You said you’d help me. Are you in or not?”

  “Dammit, Amber!” His jaw tightened, then relaxed. “Dammit.” He groaned, throwing his chin to the ceiling. “Yes, of course I’m going to help you. But we need to talk somewhere private. Somewhere safe from her.”

  Wilhelmina chuckled. Her body shifted to smoke, and she reformed on her feet. The Spider handed a piece of folded parchment to Dino. “Here’s everything you need to know to carry out your mission. You kill General West, and you get your ring back. There’s a secret exit Campbell can show you; we’re docked across the lake so you should be safe to get back to whatever rat’s nest you came from. It was such a pleasure speaking to you both. I’m sure we’ll be seeing one another again, though I can’t promise the circumstances will be as friendly. I am the archduke’s spider, after all.”

  Dino snatched the paper and pulled Amber from the room. Outside Wilhelmina’s office, Campbell led them to the trap door and shoved them through a passage that led onto the docks. The ship was pulling away before Amber could get to her feet.

  Knees weak, thoughts racing through her head, the world began to spin violently. She ran to the docks and bent over, retching the contents of her stomach into the lake’s calm, glassy waters.

  When her stomach finally settled, she looked into the lake at the slobbery, bleary-eyed reflection staring back. “You can’t be dust, Toby. You can’t be.”

  She hadn’t told Dino, but during their entire talk with Wilhelmina, Amber had used her spirit curse. And while the Spider spoke, she prodded the woman’s mind for lies. Not once during the course of their meeting did Wilhelmina Hofmeister speak anything but the truth.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Dust on the Blade

  Dino watched Amber’s balcony window. His body twisted in smoky trails, dancing in invisible tendrils in the light breeze filtering through the street. Strangers passed by, heedless of the ghost in their midst. He watched Amber’s silhouette lingering in the window, a dark form staring out into a vast city she had come too far too early.

  Her room light clicked off, her form vanishing into the darkness. It took a long while before he felt comfortable enough to leave his post outside her window. After what Wilhelmina had told her, he feared she would take off for the palace the first chance she could get, giving the archduke and the Spider exactly what each of them wanted.

  It took some time, but Dino eventually convinced Amber to wait until he finished his own part in the Spider’s plan. But even then, he knew she wouldn’t wait for long. One way or the other, this would all end for them at the Black Palace, and if he didn’t play smart about it, he’d be dust and Amber would be dead.

  “Or would she?” he wondered, cradling his chin. The archduke wanted Amber for the thing inside her. Could it really be Eve? Was Eve even real? He never took much stock in religion. No
one in Afterlife did. For all they knew, this was their Heaven—or Hell—and neither God nor The Devil announced themselves to the souls who lived there.

  He sighed and reached into his jacket, pulling out the folded parchment tucked into his inner pocket. He floated away from the street and unfolded the paper, studying the detailed map of General West’s estate. Patrols were marked, their routes drawn through the halls with accompanying times. West’s blackjackets were mostly poltergeists, but there would be an odd smattering of the other curses in their ranks.

  Dino committed the map to memory. Satisfied he could quickly recall each twist and turn of the estate and the guards who patrolled it, he tore the parchment to shreds and tossed it into a gutter where the sewer would swallow it. With a kick off the ground, he took to the sky, soaring above the city streets, rising into a night awash with the bright and beautiful stars dazzling against the deep black.

  The wind whooshed and whistled around him, toying with his ethereal form. He scanned the inner districts glowing beneath him, a maze of neon jewels and delicate structures crowded with a never-ending stream of people.

  In the distance, he spotted a dark square squatting like a cancer among the lights. It unnerved him. Despite being invisible in his phantom form, he felt as if the archduke’s eyes weighed on him, burrowed in his heart, pried inside his mind.

  Dino shook off the feeling. He turned his back to the Black Palace and raced through the sky until he came to the familiar curling streets of the Grand Braid where General West’s palace sat.

  West’s estate filled a full city block. Massive arches formed its first floor, the second a cluster of elegant domes capped by ornate gold and silver weathervanes. Statues lined the plaza surrounding his estate, each one a figure of antiquity from those earliest days of Afterlife.