2

Vic

Nothing felt broken, but it hurt to breathe. Vic decided it was the hot air blistering his lungs. It wasn’t dry. There was steam in it. Lifeless, it tasted ashen, damp and gritty in his throat.

Still, he wasn’t sealed in. The breeze said there was a way out of the darkness.

He palmed the ground. Hard rock coated in sand. Nothing slithered or skittered at his touch. Good. He wasn’t much for horror movies.

Vic found his phone in his pocket, but the battery was dead. He had his sunglasses, the ones Argent had enchanted to protect his sanity in case he saw an immortal naked, but his gun was missing. So was his baton, and that was much more important. Twice now, the Reaper in him had surfaced, and both times the baton had acted as its scythe. It had also been part of how he’d landed here, so it made sense that he’d need it to get back.

Vic reached out, feeling for it. His hand landed on a shoe.

“Watch it!” a voice barked.

Jodi.

A familiar scraping noise, a spark, and then a lighter blazed to life. It should have been tiny, a candle flame, but it lit the perfect darkness like a flare.

Vic lay in a cave, surrounded by rough rock. There were train tracks to his left, so it wasn’t somewhere completely wild.

Jodi sat on the ground. The flickering light cast her pale face in red.

Adam’s stoner goth cousin looked worse for wear. At least she appeared sober, no longer shrill and on whatever had driven her to attack him, but her makeup was smeared and streaked like she’d been crying and her black-dyed hair was out of its pigtails. Tangled, it shot in every direction.

He couldn’t look much better. At least she didn’t have his gun or baton. Jodi was too unstable for him to trust her with any kind of a weapon.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Waiting for you to wake up,” she said.

“Why?” he growled. He was here because of her.

He’d made a quick decision and pulled on the magic linking him and Adam. It had opened a portal, a hole. The druid had fallen in, according to plan, but then Jodi had knocked Vic in too.

“I thought you might have some ideas on how to get out of here,” she said, folding into herself, looking small.

Vic knew better than to fall for that.

“We wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t pulled me in.”

“I know,” she said, deflating.

“Why did you try to save him? He was going to kill you, remember?”

“I wasn’t—couldn’t think straight,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you?” Vic asked. “Adam was trying to help you. Bobby was trying to help you, and you stabbed them in the back.”

“I am,” she whined. “Really.”

Vic nodded, but he could still taste the musk of the rattlesnakes, see the slash of red when John had cut Adam open, and the sickle, dripping with blood. “Have you seen him?” Vic asked.

“Who?”

“Who else, your great-grandfather?”

“No,” she said, flinching at his tone before her expression fell.

“Don’t look so disappointed,” Vic said.

The man was dangerous, a murderer. He’d nearly killed Bobby. He’d hurt Adam.

Oh, Adam!

Vic closed his eyes, reached inside. The thread was still there. It wouldn’t be if Adam were dead, right?

It felt faint, too thin, like it did when they were worlds apart, which Vic assumed they were.

Whatever this place was, it wasn’t the spirit realm or Alfheimr, the two other worlds Vic had seen. They’d fallen through a portal that he’d opened with the Reaper. Wherever they were, this place belonged to her, to Death.

“We should get out of here.” Vic pointed his head in the direction of the breeze. “Try to figure out where we are and if we can get home.”

“You don’t know?” she asked.

“Not in the slightest,” Vic said. “I have no idea where we are, only that it can’t be good.”

He pondered leaving her behind or at least threatening her with it, but decided to tamp down the anger. Holding back a sigh, he said, “If we’re going to survive, we should probably stick together.”

Jodi nodded sulkily, and Vic almost asked her how old she was. Adam’s age, maybe a year or two younger, but not much younger than himself. Maybe the backwoods life most of the Binders lived had a way of keeping them from growing up, slowing their development, like a tree that didn’t get enough light.

“Are you hurt?” he asked her.

“No,” she said, eyes narrowed.

“Good, then let’s go,” he said, using what Adam called his cop voice.

“Where? Where, exactly?”

“I don’t know,” Vic repeated, waving to the tracks. “But outside sounds nice, anywhere but where a train might come along and hit us.”

Vic found his feet, glad he could stand straight without hitting his head.

“You coming?” he asked when Jodi didn’t follow.

“What do you care?” she spat.

“I don’t, much. But you’ve got our only light.”

Vic didn’t really need it. His eyes were starting to adjust to the red glow ahead of them, but only darkness lay behind them.

He walked on. Jodi could catch up if she wanted. A moment later, the lighter’s flame bounced along behind him.

Vic took further stock of what he knew and what he didn’t.

They couldn’t be anywhere close to Guthrie. If they were, Adam would have found him by now. If he could, if he wasn’t too hurt.

Vic hadn’t had a chance to take stock of Adam’s wounds. There had been a lot of blood, but Adam had friends, powerful friends. He was important to the elves. They wouldn’t let him die.

Then again, Vic had no idea how long he’d been here. A spike of worry slid into his gut.

“How long was I out?” he asked Jodi.

“I don’t know. I can’t tell time here.”

“Long enough for my phone to die. What about yours?”

“Yeah. It was that way when I woke up, but it’s shitty, so there’s that.”

It wasn’t like the signal would reach across worlds.

Vic closed his eyes, took a long breath. They had air. He wasn’t thirsty or hungry, which was important. They may not starve or die of thirst. He needed to know a lot more, but he at least knew that food in the spirit realms was dangerous to eat. Vic shuddered. He and Adam had fought about Vic’s ignorance, and just when they’d agreed that Adam would help explain magic and its risks, this happened. Not knowing had been dangerous before. It might prove fatal here.

“What do you have in your purse?” Vic asked. “Any food or water?”

Jodi shrugged. “Just makeup. Some tampons.”

The breeze grew stronger. Red-tinted night poured in through the tunnel entrance, a square cut shape, another sign of civilization.

“You really don’t know where we are?” Jodi demanded, putting the lighter away.

“No,” Vic said.

“But you opened that hole—that portal.”

“Not on purpose. John forced it, and I don’t know how it happened.”

“But I saw you. You’re a Grim Reaper.”

Her eyes were wide with a bit of awe.

“The scythe didn’t come with an instruction manual,” Vic said.

Even if it had, he couldn’t imagine the hole the Reaper and Adam’s magic had ripped open was standard operating procedure. It hadn’t felt anything like when he’d reaped Mercy or Jodi’s boyfriend Billy. In those moments, something had passed through him. It hadn’t been external.

The portal, or whatever it was, hadn’t been anything Vic had controlled.

Thinking of Billy, Vic remembered that Jodi had lost someone to John. She’d lost several someones, including her grandmother and mother. It didn’t excuse what she’d done, but Vic’s tone softened when he spoke again.

“You’re the witch. Does your Sight tell you anything?

“How do you know about that?” Jodi demanded.

“Your cousin, Adam.”

“No,” she said. “I’m not getting anything. Sorry.”

The wind tasted like salt and smoke, like the mesquite woodchips his dad had liked to grill with.

“Let’s keep going,” Vic said, picking up the pace.

“What’s your hurry?”

“Let’s just say that I watch enough sci-fi to know that hanging out in a mysterious cave is a bad idea.”

He wouldn’t tell Jodi that he could feel Adam. He knew better than to trust her with that.

“What made you think you could hand your cousin over to your great-grandpa anyway?” Vic asked.

“It felt like a good idea at the time,” Jodi said. Then, in a smaller voice, “I was scared.”

Vic didn’t say anything. He had to put up with her for now. Fighting wouldn’t help either of them survive, but she’d shown her ass. He knew better than to fall for that innocent tone.

The light grew brighter, but not better. Red and black covered everything, like a heat mirage on a highway.

Something burned, mixing a bitter taste with the savory smoke. Vic sniffed, trying to find the source, and decided it was the outside air. He kept going and a tinny sound started, something metallic and rhythmic.

“Is that music?” he asked, cocking an ear.

They walked faster.

It was music, something old and with lots of horns, the kind of thing his grandmother had enjoyed. It grew louder when they exited the tunnel.

They were near the ocean, or at least some kind of ocean.

The water was inky and slow, darker than any Vic had ever seen. Even the Caribbean at night wasn’t like this. But it was liquid. It flicked a few white caps at them in the constant, almost scouring wind.

Another sound spun Vic around. A train was coming up the tracks. He pulled Jodi to the side. The train exited from the tunnel, which Vic now saw was cut into a hill, one among many, tall enough that people not from Colorado might call them mountains. They were lined in gravestones, pale and tilted, like row after row of crooked teeth.

The train itself was at least a hundred years old. Probably more. His mom would know.

It looked more like one of those trains from the zoo or an amusement park, open to the air. The conductor was a skeleton. The passengers were flesh, but their skin and clothes were bleached, like driftwood or old bones.

Vic watched the train pass and stop at a pier that extended far into the water. Roller coasters and amusement rides stretched along the wooden planks. A Ferris wheel spun slowly against the black sky, the neon tubes on its spokes shone bright yellow, pink, and green.

The same figures as the ones on the train rode the rides. Gray-skinned, gray-clothed, they looked like pencil sketches, flickering in and out of sight.

The red and green lights should have lent it a festive air, but everything was twisted, bent as if by a funhouse mirror. Pieces were broken off. Ferris wheel spokes and roller coaster cars floated in space, close to their proper position, like the gravity didn’t matter, like they were caught in time, frozen in place. Vic could hear faint screams, echoes that could be joy or terror, though the ghostly riders didn’t appear to be moved by the thrills.

Occasionally one would fall, pass through the car or the pier, falling into the sea without any look of alarm on their expressionless faces.

The roller coaster cars skipped the gaps in their tracks and kept going. The Ferris wheel turned, and the untethered cars followed along, going through the motions as if still attached.

“It’s an amusement park,” Vic said, eyeing the merry-go-round. “An amusement park at the end of the world.”

The music came from one of the buildings along the shore. Huge and wooden, it sported domes like minarets, and it was on fire. It burned, but the flames didn’t consume it. Nor did they stop the party as the couples he spied through the large, open doors continued dancing in a style he didn’t know. It wasn’t a waltz but something more frenzied.

“We should go see,” Jodi said, eyes wide with curiosity.

Vic stiffened. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. We need to find a way out of here.”

The train had vanished, and Vic didn’t see anything, or anyone, traveling in the other direction.

He didn’t like the look of the water any more than he liked the look of the hills.

Something about them felt hungry and watchful, like a lurking predator waiting to pounce.

Vic would prefer not to head toward the carnival of the damned, but Jodi had already started that way, marching forward.

He could let her go. He didn’t owe her anything. She’d nearly gotten Bobby killed. She’d shot Adam’s car, and he had no doubt she’d have let him die to save her own skin.

To serve and protect . . .

Wasn’t that the job he’d signed up for, no matter how much he’d been starting to doubt it?

Didn’t it apply to even the people who broke the law, even the dangerous idiots?

Were all the Binders this way?

Adam seemed to be the sanest of his family.

“How did you even turn out halfway normal?” Vic muttered.

“What?” Jodi demanded, turning back to face him.

She would have good hearing.

“Nothing,” Vic said.

He swallowed a relieved smile even as he reached for the connection between him and Adam, grabbing it as hard as he could and trying to pull on it like he had before.

That was how he’d opened the way here. Maybe he could open another hole, a way home.

The connection thrummed, but nothing happened. Vic’s head started to ache.

It was like trying to start a car with a dead battery. There was a scrape and a spark, but the engine wouldn’t turn over.

“Adam?” he thought, sending it out along the line, thinking it as hard as he could.

No answer. They were too far apart.

Vic let out a long breath. It would be okay.

He wasn’t alone. That was the important thing. Adam was out there, alive. Adam would come for him.

For now, Vic only had to survive this place, wherever it was.

A whole town stretched along the beach.

Like the large building with the domes, most of the place was on fire, but it didn’t collapse. The town stood through it, like it had been burning forever.

It was old, not ancient, and not the Wild West. Vic guessed it was a century back, maybe a little more.

The front of the dance hall was open to the beach, and the people, the spirits inside, danced to some old big band number. Laughter mixed with the tune. The rush of wheels and the screams from the roller coaster blended with it all.

Vic moved closer, eyeing the ghosts. Their clothes were old-fashioned, which didn’t surprise him, but they flickered between bones and flesh as they danced, looking more real and then less so as they whirled, stomped, and shimmied. He’d already guessed they were dead, but the skulls and bones fading in and out of their clothing and flesh made him swallow hard.

“You here, boss?” he asked.

This looked like Sara’s kind of scene, a place she’d rule. Death didn’t answer, and the Reaper slept inside him. It didn’t wake when Vic mentally prodded it. He wasn’t certain it was even there.

“Sick,” Jodi said.

Vic turned to see her poking an old man, one of the dead.

His eyes were distant, focused on the black sea and its thick, slow waves. He wore a sailor’s uniform, crisp and whiter than his gray skin. It contrasted with his bony body and weathered face.

Jodi poked him again, sinking her finger in all the way.

“Ugh. It’s like Jell-O,” she said with a look of disgusted fascination.

The ghost didn’t react.

“Stop that,” Vic said. “What are you, twelve?”

Jodi pulled her hand free.

“What do you care?” she spat. “He’s dead. He didn’t even notice. See?”

She flipped the old man off.

Vic ground his teeth, but she wasn’t wrong. The ghost didn’t respond to the gesture.

“That means you don’t have to respect him?” Vic asked. “And you don’t know how this place works. I don’t know how this place works. You could get a virus or something.”

“You’re not in charge,” Jodi said.

“Just leave them alone. What if he went solid and took your finger off?”

Jodi scoffed, but Vic caught a blink of concern in her eyes.

He turned to apologize to the old man but the spirit had started walking, taking steady steps toward the water. He entered the sea.

Vic didn’t call out or try to stop him. The old man was waist deep. He glanced back once, and for a moment he was young, a boy on the edge of manhood, filling his white uniform. He smiled at them, his face full of promise. Then he dissolved. Turning as dark as the waves, he sank into them.

The Reaper stirred then, shifting like a contented dog dreaming of rabbits. Vic could feel the rightness in the act, in the old man’s dissolution. The Reaper approved. This was right.

The Reaper settled back into place, but Vic felt like it had opened an eye to stare him down and growl a warning.

Beneath the satisfaction was something else, a cold, hard certainty, like the barrel of a gun pressed to the back of Vic’s neck. They did not belong here. This place was not for them. They should run.

“We need to go,” he said, eyeing the burning building and the carnival.

“Where?” Jodi waved a hand at the pier, at the shattered amusement park. “Where else is there to go?”

She sounded demanding but also scared. She was a Binder. She had some magic, some sense of these things. She must feel it too.

“East,” Vic said, listening to the thread, his tie to Adam.

“Why?”

“That’s the direction you’re from, right?”

“Yeah, so what?”

“You have a better idea?” Vic asked, waving at the water. “I don’t want to end up like him.”

“It doesn’t sound very smart,” she said, narrowing her eyes before looking around, scanning the pier and the buildings. “There’s got to be someone we can ask, right?”

“The ghosts aren’t talking. Let’s keep going, see if we can find a road out of here.”

“There’s always the tunnel.”

Vic shook his head and suppressed a shudder. He didn’t like that he hadn’t been able to see the exit on the other side of the hills, and he didn’t think they should try to climb them. The graves had gotten closer, or they’d increased in number, but it was hard to tell through the red haze and the moonless, starless night. Maybe it was all a mirage. Maybe they were moving. After all, the ground felt unsteady. This whole place felt slightly unreal, like a dream right before you woke up.

The rock and the hard place, he thought.

The hard place was the water.

Staring at it, Vic could hear something on the edge of his senses. Beneath the other sounds, dozens of voices whispered, calling for him to walk into the waves, to sink into their depths, to dissolve, and simply let go.

Jodi shuddered.

“You hear it too,” he said.

She swallowed hard.

“Away from the water then?”

“Yeah,” she agreed.

They walked faster, trying to find a line between the grave-lined hills and the black ocean.

Vic looked back once and saw the whole pier aflame. Then it went out and started again.

“It’s a ghost,” he said. “This whole place is a ghost.”

“Ghosts do that?” she asked, jabbing a finger as the park flew apart again.

“According to every horror movie I’ve ever seen,” Vic said. “They’re like a film, looping over and over, living out their final moments.”

Wherever this was, whatever it had been, it had died in a fire.

“Buildings aren’t alive,” Jodi scoffed.

She was wrong. His mom’s house had a feeling. It was warm and lived in. Home. It had felt sad when Vic’s dad had died. Not the people, the house, like it too, grieved Eduardo’s passing.

Adam’s brother’s house, where Vic had dined once, was sterile, like the hospitals Bobby worked in.

And there had been the hospital itself, Mercy, where Vic had met Adam. It had always felt off, even before he’d been shot.

Maybe places soaked up something from the people who lived in them. After all, they lasted longer than their occupants. Maybe they could miss them too.

Maybe we’re like pets to them, Vic pondered.

He shook it off. Now wasn’t the time for philosophy.

All he knew was that he wanted to avoid that water and whatever lurked in those hills.

Jodi made a choking sound.

Across the beach, down from the buildings, several figures drifted toward them.

These weren’t ghosts or people, just vague shapes you could call humanoid.

Vic had been to Alfheimr. He’d seen life in a dizzying variety of forms. He’d scuba-dived in the Caribbean and seen fish and coral of every color, but he’d never seen beings like these. He could not even tell if they were alive.

They were mostly smoke, compressed together, and wholly naked except for their horned masks. Cracked and old, like bone or alabaster, they depicted grins, giving them a sinister air.

Green embers drifted in the smoke of their bodies, making constellations of color and light. The sparks gathered in their eyes, giving them a glowing sight that fixed on Vic and Jodi. It looked—it felt—like hunger

There were dozens of them.

Vic checked his six and saw that it was too late to run. The creatures made a broad circle that was already tightening as they drifted closer.

“What do we do?” Jodi demanded, eyes darting around them.

“We run,” Vic said, hoping to squeeze by.

He was nearly to a gap when one of the smoke devils flickered, flashing out of sight and reappearing right in front of him, too fast to follow.

Vic skidded to a halt as it raised its hand. The devil only had three fingers. It drove them into his skull.