* * *
When we reached his palace again, Yama collapsed into my arms. His shirt was in pieces, and he bled from countless cuts.
I set him gently on the cushions, looking around. No servants in sight, and his sister was gone.
“Yami!” I called, then turned back to her brother. Blood pooled beneath him, soaking into the gray pattern of the rug. It was bright red, and there seemed to be too much of it. Had the old man’s web sliced open an artery?
Then I felt the trickles on my own body, and looked at my arm. The blood was flowing too fast, like water from my veins. A wave of light-headedness swept over me.
“Yami!” I cried again.
“We have to go,” Yama murmured. “Home.”
“We’re there. But something’s wrong!”
“Not my home. Yours. Quickly.”
A blur of gray servants flickered in the corners of my vision, and I heard Yami’s voice. “What happened? Yama!”
“The old man was setting a trap.” I stared at my arm, from which the blood still flowed. “He cut us. Something’s wrong.”
“Take my brother to the overworld,” Yami cried. “Now!”
I looked up. “What? Why?”
“You can’t heal here, you idiot girl!” She clapped, and black droplets fell like rain from her hands. “Your body is halted!”
I stared at her—and it slowly started to make sense. We didn’t grow old, or tired, or hungry in the underworld, nor could we heal. Our blood wasn’t coagulating.
Yama’s skin was growing pale. We were both bleeding to death.
“But this isn’t even my real body,” I murmured. “I thought this was some sort of astral projection.”
“My brother has been able to travel in his own body for three thousand years,” Yami said. “And you’re much stronger than you know. Now go!”
* * *
A moment later we were in the river again, its current spinning out of control and purposeless, a reflection of my panic. I couldn’t think of any hospital I was connected to—all my memories of childhood accidents were too fuzzy, and my head was light from blood loss.
But I remembered what Yama had asked earlier, for me to take him home. I thought of my bedroom, willing us there. Maybe I could stop the worst of his bleeding on my own, and then drive him to a hospital.
At first the current obeyed me, taking us steadily up toward the overworld. My arms stayed wrapped around Yama, protecting him from the river’s needy wisps of memory.
But then, all at once, a new force shook the current, something stronger than my will, and yanked us in another direction.
“Yama,” I hissed in his ear. “What’s happening?”
“The river’s calling you.” As he spoke, tendrils of his blood carried into the raging current. “It’s sooner than I thought.”
I screamed into the river. Whatever disaster was happening in the overworld, it couldn’t happen now.
Yama’s head rolled back, and his muscles went slack against me. I held him tighter, as if that would keep his blood inside.
It was long minutes later that the river finally set us down . . .
. . . into chaos.
Gunfire and blinding lights came from every direction, and smoke filled the air. We were deep in a forest, surrounded by pine trees that climbed into the sky, their branches laden with snow. It was nighttime, but searchlights lanced through the smoke and mist. Among the trees sat squat little cabins. Black-clad figures ran among them, stopping to fire rifles into the trees.
Why had the river brought us here? This didn’t look like anyplace I’d ever seen before, or anywhere I’d ever imagined.
But Yama was still bleeding. He had to cross over into the real world now, or I’d lose him. There was only one scrap of safety that I could see—a corner where two of the cabins had been built beside each other. I dragged him across the snow and into the shadows there.
“You have to cross over,” I whispered in his ear.
He didn’t answer. His face was as pale as the snow on the dark ground.
“Yama!” I cried. Still no response.
I remembered what Yami had said: You’re stronger than you know. And, of course, I was bleeding too. Which meant my real body had been down there in Mr. Hamlyn’s war zone.
Maybe I could do this. . . .
I wrapped my arms around Yama and shut my eyes, focusing on the crack of rifles around us, the panicked shouts.
“Security is responding,” I muttered to myself.
A moment later I felt it happen, both of us breaking through the bubble of the flipside. The fresh air of the overworld surged into my lungs, along with the half-remembered smell of tear gas and gun smoke. It was suddenly freezing cold, my breath coiling in front of my face. The sound of gunfire turned sharp and deadly. But I had done it, traveled on the river in my real body. . . .
Straight into a battle.
I didn’t have time to worry about bullets. I pulled at the places where my shirt was already sliced, tearing off strips of cloth to bind Yama’s wounds. The gashes looked deep and brutal, but at last the red was thickening, flowing like blood instead of water.
By the time I had tied his cuts as best I could, I was half-naked. I pressed myself shivering against him, trying to keep us both warm. The gunfire had tapered off, but shouts and the roar of vehicle engines came from all around.
Then I saw the body in the shadows beside us.
It was a young man, probably in his twenties. He lay faceup, both his hands wrapped around his own throat. Blood trailed away from between the motionless fingers, red and thick in the snow. He’d been shot in the neck. His eyes stared straight at me, as if he’d been trying to speak, to get my attention in his last moments.
As I stared back at him in horror, his spirit stirred.
I’d seen this before, when the bad man had died. But I’d been ready for that, and this caught me by surprise. A second version of the young man, pale and stone-faced, pulled itself up from the body on the ground.
He turned and looked at me, strangely calm.
“You’re dead,” I said to him, because that was the only thing I knew for sure.
He nodded, as if this made all the sense in the world.
A shudder went through my frame. The cold was seeping in.
I turned from him, and saw more of them. More ghosts, spirits freshly torn from their bodies and set wandering loose on the snowy ground.
“I think I’m here to help you,” I said.
Psychopomps were needed here, so the river had brought us.
“You’re an angel, then?” the ghost asked.
I had to laugh at this. In my shredded shirt, I probably looked more like a madwoman than a heavenly creature. I was certainly no valkyrie.
“I’m just a girl.”
“But the prophet said there would be angels to greet us. Angels of death.”
A chill went over me as I realized the obvious. The river had brought me to the mountains of Colorado, to the home of a certain cult with an Armageddon mentality, an isolationist dogma, and a charismatic leader. A place that had been surrounded for the last week by two hundred federal agents—a massacre just waiting to happen.
But right now I didn’t care much about souls who needed guidance to the underworld. What I cared about was keeping Yama alive. And, strangely, the dead cultist had just given me a glimmer of hope.
There were FBI agents here. They had to have doctors with them.
“I’ll be back soon,” I said, pulling myself gently from Yama’s side.
He opened his eyes, nodding weakly, but awake again. The overworld and my crude bandages had helped a little, at least.
The ghost was kneeling now, his hands clasped together in prayer. I ignored him and stepped from the shadows into the searchlights sweeping the compound. My arms were wrapped around me in the cold, but I pried them loose and forced myself to hold my hands in the air. Freezing cold was better than bullets.
“Hello!” I called into the darkness. “I need help!”
A moment later a dozen flashlights pointed at me from the trees, like the glimmering eyes of beasts.
An amplified voice called back at me, “Down on the ground!”
I hesitated, staring at the snow and wishing I was wearing more than a shredded shirt. But the voice had sounded impatient, and I dropped to my knees, then face-first into the snow.
“My friend needs help!” I shouted. “He’s bleeding!”
They didn’t answer, and it seemed to take forever before boots thudded across the hard ground, surrounding me. Rough hands pulled my arms behind me, and the click of handcuffs reached my ears. By then I was too cold to feel the metal against my skin.
They pulled me up into a sitting position, and finally I could see them. Six men and one woman in bulky vests with FBI in bright yellow across them.
“My friend’s bleeding, unconscious, unarmed,” I said through chattering teeth, and jerked my head toward the cabins. “Please help him!”
“Check it out,” someone ordered, and three of the men headed toward Yama.
I looked up at the man who’d spoken, trying to utter some kind of thanks, but the words died in my mouth. Behind him was another agent. He stood among his fellows, looking a little confused. His raid jacket was full of bloody holes, and he cast no shadows in the floodlights angling through the trees.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
He looked at me, a little surprised that I wasn’t ignoring him like all the others.
I wanted to tell him it was okay, that there was more beyond the veil of death. That some of the underworld was sane, well tended, even civilized. But the cold had frozen my tongue by then, and a moment later someone shoved me back down into the snow.
CHAPTER 39
“FOR FUCK’S SAKE, PATEL. YOU’RE ten minutes late!”
Darcy sighed. “Nice to see you too, Nisha.”
“This place is terrifying.”
Darcy looked around, shrugged. Penn Station was a bit cold, and crowded, and the marble floors were streaked with rain tracked in from the streets outside, but it wasn’t scary at all.
“Is it the sandwich shop that frightens you, little sister? Or the Lox Factory?”
“It’s everything.” Nisha presented her duffel bag to Darcy, and took the handle of her rolling suitcase for herself. “The general ambiance distresses me.”
Darcy smiled. She’d never thought of herself as tougher than Nisha, or tougher than anyone, really. But it was true that almost ten months of living in New York had left her with no dread of shabbiness, underground tunnels, or crowds.
Then the weight of the duffel bag hit. “What the hell, Nisha? You’re only staying a week. What did you bring, bricks?”
“Books. You know, in case your fancy friends want to sign them. At my cocktail party.”
“What cocktail party?”
“Carla and Sagan got a party.”
Darcy let out a groan. “That was my housewarming. And I haven’t been doing parties lately.”
“All the more reason to have one now.” Nisha headed off through the crowd.
Darcy followed, wondering why the heavy books weren’t in the rolling suitcase, and why she’d been stuck carrying the duffel bag, and how Nisha had, annoyingly, chosen the exact right direction out of the warren that was Penn Station.
* * *
Half an hour later they were in apartment 4E’s guest room. Nisha was unpacking her suitcase, displacing Darcy’s dress jackets from their hangars in favor of a wide selection of gothic attire.
“That looks like a lot of clothes for seven days.”
Nisha paused. “Are you having second thoughts about my visit, Patel?”
“Of course not,” Darcy said, though her conversation with their mother the night before had been somewhat daunting. Phrases like “in loco parentis” had been thrown around. Phrases like “cocktail party” had not.