Even here in his arms, my thoughts were so grim.
“What if it’s too scary?” I asked.
“Then we’ll go to my island,” he said simply.
“But what if it’s all too much? Ghosts, predators, the dead in every stone. What if one little stretch of sand isn’t enough?”
“Then we’ll find somewhere else. Somewhere you feel safe.”
My heart faltered a little as I realized what Yama had said. After a thousand years searching for his island, he’d just offered to set it aside and find another place for me.
Yama came closer, his voice a whisper. “This is all happening so quickly, Lizzie. I wish I could slow it down.”
“I just wish I could fall asleep.” The thin edge of panic was still in my voice. “The old man said I didn’t have to anymore, because sleep is a slice of death. So I stopped, and now I can’t.”
“Ah. That happens sometimes.” He put his arms around me. “Take me home, and I’ll show you a little trick.”
* * *
It was strange seeing Yama in my room. I’d been with him in a bloody terrorist attack, in a river made of dead memories and the places it had carried us, but never anywhere so mundane, so much a part of my real life.
Thankfully, I’d cleaned up the mess on my bed, not wanting my mother to see piles of research about serial killers and missing children.
“Here we are,” I said, wishing I’d also shoved the school clothes hanging across my chair into the laundry hamper.
Yama was gazing at the pictures over my desk. “You have so many friends.”
I sighed. “Not these days. Since Dallas, not everyone gets me anymore.”
“Death shows you who’s real,” he said simply, and turned to me. “This works better in the overworld.”
“What does?”
A smile flickered on his face. “Sleeping.”
“Oh. Right.” If you couldn’t get tired or hungry on the flipside, then sleeping there would be pointless as well.
I was already nervous having him here, so a few quick breaths was all it took to throw myself back into the real world. The streetlights coming through the windows showed color spilling across the room.
Yama closed his eyes and took a slow breath, as if savoring the air.
I reached out and touched his face. He felt solid, not like a ghost.
“Wait,” I whispered. “You’re here too? I thought you never left the afterworld.”
His eyes opened. “Call this an extravagance.”
I looked at my bedroom door. “But my mother . . .”
Yama pressed close, until he was near enough to whisper, “Don’t worry, Lizzie. We’ll be very quiet.”
His breath brushed my ear with fingertips of air, and a little shudder went through me. For a moment, nothing pierced the sound of the blood rushing in my veins.
A little dizzy, I sat down on my bed. Yama settled beside me, and I leaned against him. Here in the overworld he wasn’t sparks and fire dancing on the wind, but he was still warmer than anyone I’d ever held.
I turned. “Okay. What now?”
“Do you usually sleep in a jacket?” His voice was still a whisper, sharpening every word.
“Oh.” I unzipped it, let it fall from my shoulders.
Of course, I didn’t sleep in sneakers either. I pulled off my shoes and socks. And I never slept in jeans. I stood up and let them slip onto the floor. Then I crossed the room and drew the curtains tighter.
In the darkness, the psychopomp shine on our skin seemed to grow stronger. The night air felt cool on my arms and legs.
I settled back onto the bed, stretching out beside where Yama sat, basking in his warmth.
“Somehow this doesn’t feel very . . . sleepy.” There was a quaver in my voice.
“There’s no rush.” He was looking down at me, his brown eyes glittering in the dark.
I reached up and touched his right eyebrow, the little crook of it warm beneath my fingertip. I traced the curve of his shoulder, the hardness of bone and muscle beneath silk. My fingers prized open his top button, widening the triangle of luminous brown skin.
In one supple motion, he slipped the still-buttoned shirt off over his head.
My breath caught. I’d never been with him in the real world before, without the soft gray light of the flipside, or the fire and spark of the river’s currents. There was no light except the shine of our skin, as if nothing existed beyond the edges of us.
He leaned forward and held his lips against mine with an impossible stillness, as if the moment had frozen, time itself unraveling. The only thing moving in the world was the breath between our lips. Suspended in that perfect instant, I ached for more.
He brushed a fingertip feather-light against the side of my neck, and I felt my own pulse rise up to meet his heat. My heartbeat gradually steadied in that long, still kiss.
When finally our lips parted, my breath shuddered a little. He stayed close, his eyes locked with mine, and for a moment the spell was too intense. I had to break it with a whisper.
“Do you ever sleep, Yama?”
“Sometimes.”
I swallowed. “What do you dream about?”
“This,” he said.
A soft cry stuttered out of me. It felt as if his fingers had found a loose thread inside me, and were pulling, making me fray and unravel. The leftover nervous energy from all those sleepless nights went scattering across my skin.
My hands reached up, my fingers deep in the thick waves of his black hair. I held him there, his eyes meshed with mine, his gaze sinking deeper into me every time a sigh trembled in my lungs.
Soon the loose thread had tangled into a knot, which Yama drew slowly tighter and tighter. The fear that had wound itself into my muscles was burning away at last, turning to something bright and sharp and hungry. The weight of all those undreamt dreams pounded in my head, crashing and breaking apart, my whole body arching against him.
In the end I nearly came apart, and for a moment all of me was lost, shattering into countless pieces like the memories of a ghost on the river. And I didn’t care if I’d been born cursed, sullied and marked by death, because it had brought me here into Yama’s arms.
He showed me how to sleep again, like Prince Charming in reverse, though back in the airport he had woken me with a kiss as well.
Maybe his lips cured everything.
CHAPTER 29
THERE WAS ANOTHER PRESENTATION AT Avalon High, and then another at a different school ten miles away, the entrance of which was also tricky to find. So it was late afternoon when Anton drove the three of them back to the hotel for a rest before the bookstore event that night.
Perhaps it was jet lag, or the adulthood-lag of having been in high schools all day, but when Darcy reached the hotel room she fell onto the bed, fully clothed.
It was a solid hour later that she awoke to find Imogen beside her, stripped down to a tank top and boxers and banging away at her laptop.
“You didn’t sleep?”
Imogen’s fingers kept moving. “Are you kidding? Book birthday. Must blog. Must tweet.”
“Oh, right.” With all her morning’s labors, Darcy had somehow forgotten that Pyromancer was sweeping into the world today. “You’re in print, Gen! You are a legit published and printed author.”
“I know, right? Can’t quite believe it.” At last Imogen’s typing paused. “I mean, there were those copies at the schools today. But do you really think there are thousands of them sitting on bookstore shelves? What if there was some kind of glitch? What if it isn’t really happening?”
Darcy put a hand on Imogen’s bare shoulder. “It’s real, Gen.”
“But how do I know?”
“Um, because your publishing company told you? And they have this, like, huge building in Manhattan.”
“Good point. That building is pretty big.” Imogen pushed a stray strand of hair out of her face and looked up at Darcy. “It’s probably just a passing case of impostor syndrome.”
“Is that a real thing?”
“Of course.” Imogen typed a few keystrokes and spun her screen around. Among the clutter of a dozen open windows was a Wikipedia article.
Darcy scanned the first few paragraphs. Impostor syndrome was pretty much what it sounded like—believing that everything you’d accomplished was luck, or cheating, or fraud. Dreading that it would all be taken away once your fakery had been revealed.
“Crap. This isn’t you, Gen. It’s me!”
“It’s every writer.” Imogen turned the laptop toward herself again and stared at the screen. “Okay, reading this was a bad idea. Can you get a syndrome just from looking it up?”
“This one, you can.” Darcy reached out and gently pushed the laptop closed. “But the cure is to go onstage in front of a hundred rabid Stanley David Anderson fans. They don’t let impostors do that.”
Imogen nodded at this simple wisdom. “After all, how bad can a roomful of Standerson fans be?”
“Never bad.” Darcy pulled Imogen closer to kiss her, and whispered in her ear, “Just intense.”
“Oh, Stanley texted while you were asleep. He wants to meet for an early dinner downstairs.”
Darcy looked at her own phone. Nisha had texted with the message: Hope you’re having a good tour—364 days till publication!
She sighed and jumped up from the bed. Her clothes felt sticky from having been slept in. “I’ll shower first.”
They cleaned up and dressed, Imogen in a crisp white shirt and leather jacket, lots of metal on her fingers. Darcy lofted onto her toes to straighten the shirt’s collar, which had crumpled in the suitcase. She wore her little black dress, the one she’d been given the night they’d met. Surely there was some good luck left in it still.
* * *
The hotel restaurant was decidedly nonillustrious. TVs hung from the ceiling, blaring sports in all directions. The vinyl seat of the booth squeaked like a baby seal as Darcy slid into it, and the menu was full of dishes grandiose and generic, like “the International Cheese Experience.” This phrase, Standerson pointed out, was more than half a haiku.
After they’d ordered the least greasy food they could find, he asked, “Had either of you ever done a school visit before?”
Imogen laughed. “I never thought I’d be in a high school again, and Darcy’s barely out of one.”
“Well, I salute you both.”
“Much as I love praise,” Darcy said, “I’m still mad at you for volunteering me.”
Standerson held up his hands. “That was your publicist! You think she emailed the librarian by accident?”
“I can be mad at you both equally,” Darcy said. “But it was fun, kind of. I liked the battle of the story elements.”
“Because you won,” Standerson said.
Darcy made a pfft noise. “You got way more applause.”
“Nobody won,” Imogen said. “Because the victory didn’t go to plot, or character, or conflict. It was all about setting.”
The other two stared at her.
“High school,” Imogen explained. “Where else would the interlocking, interdependent elements of narrative be reduced to adversarial comparisons, when in practice they rely on each other to make a coherent whole?”
Darcy shrugged. “In every love triangle ever?”
“Both your points are valid,” Standerson said. “And you should keep doing the school events with us, Darcy. There’s no better research than interacting with our constituency.”
Imogen laughed. “Darcy was our constituency, like, five months ago.”
Darcy ignored this and asked, “What’s the worst question you ever got?”
Standerson gave this a moment’s thought, then said in a theatrical voice of doom, “ ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ ”