Hereafter (Shadowlands) (14 page)

I ran for home as fast as I could, my pulse throbbing in my eyes, my ears, my fingertips. The chill ocean breeze did nothing to cool my overheated skin. Had that call been intended for me? Had it been placed by someone who knew Tristan and I were there, or was it just a random coincidence? A crow cawed overhead as I raced across the square, and I got this awful feeling in my gut. A feeling that on Juniper Landing, there were no coincidences. I tore through the park, turned the corner onto Freesia, and smacked right into someone.

“Where’re you going in such a hurry?” Officer Dorn asked, staring down his nose at me with piercing eyes.

I took a step back, shaking like a leaf. “Nowhere,” I said automatically. His eyes narrowed. “Home.”

He moved, infinitesimally, out of my way, and I took off again down the hill. When I got to the bottom, I checked back over my shoulder, and my heart thumped. Dorn hadn’t moved; his suspicious glare was still fixed on me.

I clenched my jaw and kept moving.

“Rory!”

I collided with Joaquin’s shoulder so hard he had to grab the trunk of the nearest peach tree to keep from going down. A startled bird flung itself from the tree’s branches, raining dozens of shriveled brown and gray leaves onto our shoulders. It swooped across the street, disappearing behind the flowery hedge on the opposite side. Joaquin reached for my arm, but I wrested it away.

“I don’t want to talk to you right now, Joaquin,” I said, pushing past him. “I just want to be—”

“Stop!” he shouted. “I need to know why you were asking about people being ushered to the wrong place.”

I froze in my tracks. The breeze lifted my hair from my neck and sent chills down my arms. Slowly, I turned. Joaquin was gasping for breath, like he’d just been sprinting. Sweat dotted his upper lip and hairline.

“Why?”

“Because I just ushered that girl—Jennifer? The one with the pixie cut?” he said. “And she went to the Shadowlands.”

I blinked “Wait. How is that even possible?” I asked. “You were with us when the fog rolled in.”

“I…
got the call
about two seconds after you left, so I went over to her room and got her,” Joaquin explained. “I wasn’t that surprised, because she was so simple. There was no unfinished business there, so it wasn’t like she’d need my help to get ready to move on. I just picked her up and brought her to the bridge. But then, when I got back to town…”

“The weather vane was pointing south,” I finished flatly.

“Yeah.” Joaquin tipped his face toward the ground for a second, his hands on his hips. When he looked up again, his normally cocky gaze was searching, almost pleading. “What you said before at Krista’s, about someone going to the wrong place… Why did you ask us that?”

“Oh, that was just—” I looked away. My knee-jerk reaction was to keep the peace, to not make any more waves than I already had.

“Rory, don’t mess with me right now. Please,” Joaquin said in an urgent voice that cut me to the core. “Jennifer didn’t…she doesn’t deserve what she’s getting.”

He was desperate. I could see it in his eyes.

“Aaron was sent to the Shadowlands last night,” I told him. “And I know for a fact that he doesn’t belong there.”

Joaquin dropped my hand, his eyes going flat. “And let me guess, Tristan told you that’s just the way it is. That you had to accept it and move on.”

“He did,” I said.

Joaquin pivoted and took a few steps away. His fingers curled into fists, then stretched. Finally, he took a deep breath and faced me.

“There’s something you should know,” he replied. “All this?” He looked down at the leaves that blanketed the sidewalk. “It shouldn’t be happening.”

I squinted, confused. “What? You mean the leaves changing? I know it’s early, but—”

“No! You don’t get it. This stuff never happens,” he said, pacing the width of the sidewalk in front of me, the dry, dead leaves crunching beneath his feet. “Leaves don’t turn, flowers don’t die, birds don’t drop out of the sky, fish don’t pile up on beaches, and there are definitely,
definitely
no hornets.”

I shook my head. “But the other day, you got stung right outside—”

“I know, Rory. And in almost a hundred years on this island, that was the first hornet I’ve ever seen,” he said vehemently. “We have bees because we have flowers, but no hornets, no wasps, no other insects, nothing like that.”

“That’s insane. It’s—”

Then, ever so slowly, realization began to dawn. Joaquin’s weird reaction to the hornet sting. The marigolds withering in their pot on the porch—alive one minute, dead the next. The reeds near the bridge that had made Tristan go pale.

“And these things…when did they start happening?” I asked, Nadia’s accusations ringing in my mind. “Was it when I got here?”

“I don’t know,” Joaquin replied. “No one really knows
exactly
when it started, but it’s definitely been recent. They think that it might be because the balance of good and evil around here has been thrown off somehow. That maybe a Lifer has—”

“Gone bad,” I breathed. My gut twisted as I thought of Jessica. “Joaquin, the other night Nadia accused me of being responsible for all this strange stuff that’s been going on around here. Does that mean she thinks
I’m
the reason things are
dying
?” I demanded. “Does she think I’m pure evil or something?”

Joaquin just stared at me. I felt like I was going to throw up. What if Nadia took her suspicions to the mayor? What if the mayor believed her?

“She’s going to get me sent to Oblivion,” I said under my breath, my vision blurring.

“No,” Joaquin said. “Rory, she’s not. No one thinks she’s right about you.”

“Dorn does!” I insisted. “And maybe Grantz, too. What if she starts convincing other people? What if she convinces everyone?”

Joaquin reached for my shoulders and held on tight. “That’s not going to happen,” he said, looking me in the eye. “I won’t let it. Tristan won’t let it. Nadia is just grasping at straws. Now, take a deep breath.”

I did, and blew it out slowly through pursed lips. I felt slightly better. But only slightly.

“Okay?” he asked me.

I nodded. “Okay.”

“Good.” He released me. “Look, I know you’re not the cause of all this, but there’s definitely something up. And now, on top of everything, good people are going to the Shadowlands. Whatever it is, it’s not good.”

I cleared my throat. “So what do we do?”

“There’s only one person to talk to around here when something’s wrong,” Joaquin said, starting for town. “And whatever Saint Tristan thinks, something is clearly wrong.”

“We’re going to the mayor?” I asked tremulously
.

Joaquin nodded, his fists now tightly clenched. “We’re going to the mayor.”

Joaquin walked right into Tristan’s house without knocking. Somewhere nearby I heard voices whispering urgently, but they fell silent when I closed the door. Joaquin was already striding toward the mayor’s office.

“Just go,” I heard Tristan’s voice hiss.

A female voice answered. “But, Tristan, you have to understand—”

“I don’t want to hear it! Go!”

I was still trying to figure out who the girl’s voice belonged to when Tristan and Krista appeared from around the corner in the living room.

“J.,” Tristan said, his eyes smoldering. “We need to talk.”

I hesitated in the center of the entryway. Krista fidgeted with her bracelet. A door near the back of the house banged shut.

“Not now, man,” Joaquin replied. He walked right over to the mayor’s office and rapped loudly on the door.

“What the hell are you doing?” Tristan demanded, following him.

“Reporting a problem to the mayor,” Joaquin replied.

Tristan got between him and the door, pushing him backward. “You can’t just storm in here like that.”

“Get off of me!” Joaquin yelled, windmilling his arms to throw Tristan off.

“This is my house!” Tristan yelled.

Joaquin laughed in a sarcastic way. “Don’t even start with that shit, Tristan.”

“What shit?” Tristan countered, shoving Joaquin in the chest. “What do you mean?”

“You
know
what I mean.” Joaquin shoved back.

Tristan’s nostrils flared.

“Rory, do something,” Krista pleaded, hugging her arms to her chest.

“Guys! Cut it out!” I shouted, trying to get between them. “We didn’t come over here to fight.”

“Well, then get him out of here,” Tristan spat. “The mayor’s gonna kill us. You know she hates it when we—”

The door behind him suddenly flew open, and the mayor stepped out. My heart seized up at the sight of her. She wore a crisp blue pantsuit, a light pink shirt, and a politician’s smile. Her blond hair was pulled back so tightly from her face it made her skin appear stretched. She seemed taller somehow. Broader. More intimidating.

This woman could send me to Oblivion. She could send all of us there if she felt like it.

Tristan slid out of the way, taking position behind Joaquin like he was getting ready either to back him up or throw him out. The mayor started to close the door, but not before I saw that someone was sitting in the chair across from her desk, tucking two black Converse sneakers out of sight just before she banged it shut.

“Can I help you, Mr. Marquez?” the mayor asked, clasping her hands together in a patient way. When her eyes flicked to me, I felt a chill in my bones.

“Yeah. There’s something going on around here, and I think you should know about it,” Joaquin said, his chest heaving. “Something aside from the obvious.”

Tristan shot me a betrayed sort of look, as if asking whether this was about what he thought it was about.

“All right, then,” she asked. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Tristan said, trying to drag Joaquin away. “It’s nothing.”

A tiny crack snaked through my heart. He really didn’t believe in me. In Aaron. He truly thought the coin was in the right. He was embarrassed that Joaquin and I were wasting his “mother’s” time.

“It’s not nothing,” Joaquin said, staring the mayor in the eye with impressively unyielding determination. “I just sent a girl to the Shadowlands, someone who didn’t belong there, and Rory did the same last night. The weather vane has been pointing south a lot more often than it ever has before. All these people can’t belong in the Shadowlands.”

The mayor glanced at me over Joaquin’s shoulder, then tilted her chin toward the floor and chuckled. My palms went slick.

“Mr. Marquez, the coins are never wrong,” she said simply.

My fingers curled like claws, red-hot adrenaline rushing through my veins.

“They were this time,” I said, my pulse pounding in my ears.

“Excuse me, but you don’t know anything about this,” she replied condescendingly. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you haven’t even done a solo ushering yet, have you?”

She looked at Tristan. He shook his head, mute.

“But I do know that Aaron was a good soul,” I protested, my voice quaking. “I
felt
it. Doesn’t that mean anything?”

The mayor’s blue eyes crackled with anger.

“It means you’re still new here,” she said sharply. “And you have no clue what you’re doing.”

“Now, wait a minute,” Tristan said, squaring off next to Joaquin.

“Maybe the weather vane’s wrong,” Krista piped up suddenly, her voice reed thin. My heart swelled both with gratitude toward Krista and with hope. The weather vane being wrong would mean that Jennifer and Aaron had actually gone to the Light and the vane had simply indicated the opposite.

Another chuckle from the mayor. “Sweetie, the weather vane is never wrong.”

“Well, it is now,” I said, stepping toward her as calmly as I could. “Please, if we could just talk about this,” I implored. “Something is wrong. I know what I felt. I know that Aaron was a good person. If you’d just—”

“Stop!” the mayor thundered. She stepped around Joaquin and Tristan like their wall of muscle was nothing more than a puddle on the floor and came to a stop right in front of me. Terror seized my gut, and I staggered back a step. “Do you even hear what you’re saying? Weren’t you some sort of scientific genius in your former life?”

I said nothing. At that moment it was hard enough to breathe.

“What do you think is more likely? That a system that has been in place without a single hitch since the dawn of time has suddenly gone haywire, or that you, someone who has existed in this realm for less than a gnat’s blink, has made an error in judgment?” Her lips curled into something that resembled a smile but felt more like a threat. “What do you say, Ms. Miller? What’s your hypothesis?”

My whole body shook under her scrutiny as she looked me slowly up and down. I clamped my teeth together and held my tongue.

“That’s what I thought,” she said smugly.

“Look, we all know something’s off,” Joaquin said calmly, patiently. “Flowers and animals dying, leaves changing, hornet stings… Did you know Kevin found a nest of worms in his yard this morning? And there are spiders and flies and—”

“I’m well aware of what’s going on, Mr. Marquez,” the mayor said tensely. “I don’t need you of all people coming in here to tell me.”

“So you won’t even listen to what we have to say?” Joaquin asked. “You won’t even consider the possibility that people are being misplaced?”

She lifted her head and looked at Joaquin and Tristan. “I think you’ve wasted enough of my time. I’d like you to leave now,” she said, striding back toward her office, back to whomever was waiting in that chair. She paused next to Tristan and looked down her nose at him. “
All
of you.”

Next to me, Krista made a sound somewhere between a squeak and a squeal.

“Let’s go,” Tristan said to the rest of us. He walked over to the door and held it open. Krista was the first one through, fluttering like a startled butterfly. Joaquin hesitated for just a moment but eventually tromped out.

I was just passing by Tristan when the mayor’s voice stopped me.

“Oh, and Ms. Miller?”

I stopped and looked at her. In the shadows cast by the curtained window next to her, her face looked like a skull.

“Don’t come back without an appointment.”

Then she walked into her office and slammed the door.