Hereafter (Shadowlands 2)

“I noticed it, too,” Krista said. “Yesterday when we were working together, she kept zoning out.”

“Do you think something’s wrong?” I asked, glancing over at the counter, where Ursula was pouring coffee for a couple of guys. The yoga woman from the park was sitting on the stool at the very end, glaring at me. I turned around again, my heart in my throat.

“What could possibly be wrong? She lives with me,” Joaquin said, lifting his chest.

I stared him down, trying to ignore the feeling of the yoga woman’s eyes boring into the back of my skull.

“Can we get back to the reason we’re here?” I asked. ?

??So no one got ushered yesterday. What about today? I didn’t have a coin this morning. Did any of you?”

“Nope,” Joaquin said.

“I did,” Krista said, raising her hand slightly.

“Me, too.” Fisher placed his coin on the table. Joaquin picked it up and studied it.

“Do you think they could be tampered with somehow?” I asked, thinking of Nadia’s theory—that I was purposely ushering people to hell. If someone wanted to do that, wouldn’t they have to somehow “fix” the coins?

“It looks normal to me,” Joaquin said, placing it in front of me and Krista, sun-side up, so we could see it. “They’re all the same. When the person who’s moving on touches their coin, it basically turns depending on whether the person is good or evil. Until that moment, the coin is nothing but a hunk of gold.”

The door chimes tinkled, and I looked over my shoulder. Yoga Woman had just exited the building. I sighed with relief.

“Okay, so maybe I was right,” Krista said as Ursula delivered our coffees. She pushed the coin back across the table to Fisher and waited for the waitress to walk away before continuing. “Maybe it’s the weather vane that’s gone all freaky.”

“I guess it could be,” Joaquin said.

“Why not? Maybe it got bent in one of the storms,” Fisher suggested, pushing the coin into his back pocket and reaching for his smoothie. “There’ve been a lot of them lately. Maybe it just keeps pointing south because it’s off-kilter.”

“We should keep an eye on it,” I said, hope springing up inside my chest again. “If it never points north, we’ll know something’s up. I mean, it’s not like every single person coming through here right now is inherently evil.” I paused and looked around at them. “Right?”

“Right,” Joaquin said.

“No way,” Fisher put in.

I spun the saltshaker between my thumb and forefinger, hesitant to make my next suggestion. “What if we stop ushering souls?”

For a second, Krista, Joaquin, and Fisher just sat there, looking at one another.

“We can’t do that,” Krista said finally. “If we do, then the fog will roll in and never roll out again.”

“Plus, it’d get pretty crowded around here,” Fisher added, sipping at his smoothie.

“What’s a little overcrowding compared with sending a bunch of good people to the Shadowlands for all eternity?” I said harshly.

Ursula placed two plates heaping with food in front of Joaquin. Steam rose from the omelet plate as if the eggs had just been removed from the pan, and the smell of the fried onions and spicy peppers filled my nostrils, making my empty stomach growl. As Ursula turned away from the table, she let out a huge sneeze.

The shop fell silent. Krista tensed up next to me. I looked over at Joaquin. His face had gone ashen.

“Bless you,” one of the visitors called out.

Joaquin got up and put his hands on Ursula’s shoulders. “Are you…what are you—?”

Then Ursula burst into tears and fled the restaurant. Some of the diners exchanged baffled looks. Krista and Fisher stared at each other as if they’d just seen a news report of a terrorist attack.

“What just happened?” I asked, flattening my palms against the edge of the table.

“Ursula sneezed,” Krista whispered, looking up at Joaquin warily.