Hereafter (Shadowlands 2)

“Oh, will you stop using your drunk father as an excuse, already?” Bea replied. “People make their own choices!”

“You have no clue, Beatrice,” Kevin sneered, looking her up and down.

Suddenly, she took a swing at him, and the situation crumbled. Pete grabbed Kevin, Fisher got between them, and Lauren and Krista did their best to hold back a seething Bea. I flattened myself against the wall as a wayward foot flew toward my face.

“That’s enough!” Joaquin shouted, grabbing Kevin by his lapels and throwing him against the door. The crack brought everyone up short. They froze in the middle of a violent tableau, everyone grabbing everyone else, chests heaving for breath.

Kevin had hit the floor, and Joaquin now leaned down with his arm outstretched to help him up. Amazingly, Kevin took it. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief as he quietly stood, his sheepish gaze on the ground.

“Sorry, Bea,” he said.

“Me, too,” she replied, holding out her hand. After a beat, he shook it.

Joaquin took in a breath and let it out slowly. “Look, we can’t let our emotions get the best of us right now,” he said to the crowd. “What’s really going on here is huge.”

At that moment, the door swung open. Fisher made a move to block the intruder but then backed off. The mayor stepped in from the back alleyway wearing a black trench coat over a pressed white shirt, her blond hair pulled back from her face, as always. I shrank back at the sight of her, knowing in my gut that this was it. Her and Nadia in the same room. They were going to officially accuse me. They were going to send me to Oblivion.

As the door began to close behind the mayor, I stepped closer to Joaquin, closer to the door leading back to the bar. Then a hand stopped the back door before it could shut, and Tristan slipped through.

I froze. His normally tanned skin looked pale under the fluorescent bulbs. His gaze darted around from face to face. I couldn’t tell if he felt guilty, betrayed, or something else entirely, but when he looked into my eyes from across the room, I felt calmer. I felt safe. At least, relatively. Whatever suspicions my brain was entertaining about where he’d been today, my heart was glad to see him.

“Well,” the mayor said, scrunching up her nose at the dusty top of a vodka box. “Isn’t this cozy?”

She looked at Nadia, who lifted her chin and smiled. A shiver went through me. Joaquin took a step closer to me.

“What’re you doing here?” Joaquin demanded.

“We came, Mr. Marquez, to apologize.” The mayor sniffed. “It appears that you and your little friend here,” she said, sneering at me, “were correct about the usherings.”

My jaw dropped slightly. I hadn’t known the mayor long, but she didn’t strike me as the type of person who readily admitted her mistakes.

“So you admit it?” Joaquin said. “You admit that something’s wrong?”

She tilted her head. “Five souls to the Shadowlands in one fog is…”

“It’s unprecedented,” Tristan cut in. “Nothing like that has ever happened before. As long as I’ve been here, the good souls have always outnumbered the bad. Always. And five have never been taken at once.” He looked at me. “Not only were some of those people certainly not destined for the Shadowlands, some of them weren’t ready to go at all.”

I glanced at Pete and Nadia, thinking of the tally from the cave. The good souls have always outnumbered the bad.

Whom did the tally really belong to? I looked around the room. Whoever it was could be here right now, watching. Itching to make five more marks on that page.

“How do we fix it?” Lauren asked.

“That’s just it,” Tristan said. “We don’t know. Until we figure out how it’s going wrong, we can’t figure out how to make it right.”

A disturbed murmur filled the room.

“But we will figure out what, or who, the problem is,” the mayor said. Then she turned and looked directly at me. “You can trust me on that.”

My face burned so hot I could have fainted. So she did still think it could be me. She just hadn’t made her final decision yet. Realizing this, I somehow still managed to muster up enough courage to state the obvious.

“In the meantime, we have to stop ushering souls,” I said.

The mayor looked me up and down coolly. “I agree.”

Nadia’s face went slack.

“We talked about it, and we both think that’s the best plan,” Tristan told the room. “Better this place get foggy and crowded than more innocent souls get sent to the Shadowlands.”