Hereafter (Shadowlands 2)

“You know how you’ve felt all along that something was different about the island?” he asked.

My head went weightless. “Yes,” I replied.

“And you asked why you remembered Olive and the musician from the park after they were gone, while Darcy didn’t?” he said.

I blinked, thinking of my first friend on the island who’d disappeared last week without a trace. Where was he going with this?

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s because you are different,” Tristan said slowly, firmly. “You’re not like the other visitors on Juniper Landing.”

My chest constricted. “Different how?”

Tristan gazed down at my fingers for a long moment before looking me in the eye. There was no one else in the room right then. No one else who mattered. “You’re a Juniper Landing Lifer. Like me.”

“Like all of us,” Joaquin put in.

“What?” I breathed. “What does that even mean?”

“It means you won’t be moving on,” he said quietly. “You’re staying here. With us.”

My fingers slipped out of Tristan’s grip, and I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. I had just started to adjust to the fact that I was going to some ethereal place called the Light. That I would never see home again. Would never graduate from high school or go to college or med school or do anything that I had spent half my life planning to do. And now…now I was stuck here? Forever?

“Why?” I demanded, dropping my hands. “What makes me so special?”

“You died an unnatural death,” Joaquin told me, his voice suddenly gentle. “At least, that’s the first requirement you have to meet to become a Lifer. And in the last moment of your life, you achieved the second.”

The room swam before my eyes, a wash of browns and yellows and greens. “The second? What’s the second?”

“You have to prove your selflessness. Either in the other world or once you’re here,” Tristan told me. “You used your last seconds of life to rid the earth of a sadistic killer. Even as you took your last breaths, you managed to make the world a better place.”

One last image came spiraling back to me. A slow-motion reel of me, yanking the knife out of my stomach, turning it on the man who’d murdered my family and so many others, the look of shock on Nell’s face as the blade arced toward his chest. A strangled sort of cackle escaped my throat.

“My selfless act was killing Steven Nell?” I said, aghast. “That wasn’t selfless; that was revenge.”

Tristan’s brow knit. “Maybe on some level, but—”

“This has to be a joke,” I said, looking around at the rest of them. Waiting—hoping—for one of them to crack. To start laughing and shout “gotcha!” But no one moved. “You’re kidding, right? Tell me you’re kidding.”

“I wouldn’t joke about something like this, Rory,” Tristan said. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”

The room blurred in and out around me. The coffee cups scattered on the bar, the plaster cast of a jumping dolphin suspended over one of the couches, all the faces staring back at me—curious, pitying, concerned. I pressed one hand against my forehead and forced myself to focus on Tristan. Only Tristan. His perfect lips, his strong jaw, his kind eyes. Right now he was the only thing that made sense.

I took a breath.

“So what you’re telling me is, this is it,” I said, the air catching in my throat, making my eyes sting. “This is where I’m going to stay.”

“Yes,” Tristan replied, his eyes shining. “This is your new home. Forever.”

So now she knows she’s here—forever. It’s such a pretty word, forever. A promise, really. Found on so many Valentine’s Day and anniversary cards, signed in thousands of yearbooks, uttered in daily prayers. Forever is the greatest promise there is. Who doesn’t want to know that the thing they love, the thing they count on, the thing they believe in will never end? Who doesn’t hope for immortality, for the chance to live on…forever?

Well, I’ve tasted forever, and here’s what I know: It never, ever ends. Every day on this island is an eternity. The sun rises, the clueless invade, the fog rolls in, the clueless depart. It’s the same, day in and day out. The same faces, the same places, the same smells and sounds and sensations. It’s like a never-ending loop of the most boring movie ever made, and I’m forced to live it over and over and over again. There is no end. There will never be an end.

I know I’m supposed to feel pride in my work, understand and embrace that I’ve been blessed with a higher calling, a purpose—that I’ve been given a gift. And I tried to believe that in the beginning. I did. I so wanted to believe it. But it’s been so long now. So very, very long. And what do I have to show for it? Nothing. What will I ever have to show for it? Nothing. Because here, in this in-between, there is nothing to hope for, nothing to strive for, no going forward, no going back.

Or so they think. What no one on this boring rock knows is that I’m already working to change my fate. I will get out of here.

No matter what it takes.