I scrambled to my feet, my heart thumping. “What’s going on?” I asked, edging away from them toward the stairs. “Where are we?”
“Don’t worry,” Krista said gently, putting out a hand as if trying to soothe a rabid dog. “No one is going to hurt you.”
“I’m sorry it had to happen this way,” Tristan said, the edges of his mouth curving down. I remembered how he’d looked at me right before I’d passed out, and averted my eyes. “We’re in the basement of the police station.”
“You kidnapped me and brought me to the cops?” I blurted.
Mohawk Girl laughed loudly.
“We didn’t kidnap you,” Joaquin said, rolling his eyes. “We saved you. You and your family.”
Krista, Lauren, and Fisher looked at me so earnestly that all the tiny hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. I felt as though I’d suddenly landed in the middle of a cult.
“Well, if I’m not kidnapped, can I…leave?” I said, taking another step toward the stairs.
“Sorry.” Fisher shook his head.
My heart nose-dived. That was the voice. The voice of the person who’d grabbed me on the beach. I took an instinctive step back and crashed into the wall. My pulse thrummed quickly in my veins.
“Will someone please tell me what’s going on?” I demanded.
“We couldn’t let you tell your family,” Tristan replied.
“Excuse me?” I exhaled sharply. “You tell me we’re all dead and expect me not to tell my family?”
“You can’t,” Tristan repeated. There was all this emotion in his eyes. Longing and pleading. Like he was just trying to help. Like he needed me to understand. But at that moment, I didn’t trust it. I couldn’t.
“Try to stop me.”
I turned toward Fisher and jammed my foot down as hard as I could into his instep. He cursed and doubled over, giving me enough time to dodge past him, grab one of the wooden spindles that lined the stairs, and swing myself around and up the first two steps.
“Rory, no!” Joaquin shouted. Footsteps sounded behind me.
I tripped but hauled myself back up and kept going. I could see the light framing the doorway at the top.
“Stop!” Lauren called out. “Rory, they’ll—”
I flung myself forward, reaching for the door.
“If you tell your family, they’ll be damned to the Shadowlands!” Krista cried.
“Krista!” someone hissed.
“What? She was leaving!” Krista replied in a whine.
I paused with my fingers on the doorknob. My chest heaved with each breath. The Shadowlands? As I turned around, Tristan stepped into view at the bottom of the staircase. I stared down at him, barely able to make out his face in the dim light. Behind him on the wall was an old-fashioned painting of a sunset, the golden glow forming a halo around his head.
“What is the Shadowlands?” I asked.
“Will you please come back down here?” he implored softly.
“Not until you tell me,” I insisted. “What’s the Shadowlands?”
“Come down and we’ll tell you everything,” he said, reaching out with one hand. “You’re safe here. I promise.”
I glanced behind me at the door, but my curiosity got the better of me. Ignoring Tristan’s outstretched hand, I edged past him down the stairs and walked to the center of the room, trying to look more confident and in control than I felt. Stone-faced, stoic, shrewd. But inside, everything quivered. Tristan hesitated, clearly thrown that I had passed on the opportunity to touch him. Well, good. He deserved it for letting his friend knock me out.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m listening.”
“Juniper Landing is an in-between,” Joaquin began, crossing his arms over the chest of his formfitting red T-shirt. “A limbo.”
“One of many,” Bea added.
“It’s a place where people go to work through any unfinished business they have from the other world before they move on,” Tristan said. “They arrive on the same ferry you did and stay until they’re ready. Once they move on, there are two possible destinations. There’s the good, which we call the Light.”
“And there’s the bad,” Joaquin put in, a shadow passing over his handsome face. “The Shadowlands.”
“Which was why we had to stop you on the beach,” Tristan implored. “We couldn’t risk your dad and Darcy being sent there.”
“And you couldn’t think of another way?” I demanded.
Tristan’s cheeks turned pink. “I tried, but you kind of called me on it, remember?”
The warmth. The calming warmth. I realized now that I’d felt it twice before—yesterday morning, when I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown about Olive’s disappearance, and again last night when I’d started to realize the disturbing truth about Juniper Landing. Both times Tristan had used his touch, his power, whatever it was, to bring me back from the abyss.
“So why bring me here?” I asked. “With all of you?”
“We wanted to tell you about what we do,” Krista replied. “We’re the ones who usher people to their ultimate destinations.”
“We call ourselves Lifers,” Lauren said. She held up her arm to show me her leather bracelet, which slipped down almost to her elbow. One quick look around the room revealed that every one of my captors wore one. I’d noticed the bracelets when I first arrived on the island and assumed they signaled some kind of club or secret society. I’d had no idea they meant this.
“Lifers,” I repeated, feeling an odd sense of déjà vu. I’d heard that word somewhere before. “So you guys decide where people end up?”
They all laughed. Even Tristan.
“Uh, no,” Lauren said, placing her coffee cup on the bar. “Do we look like gods?”
“Well, some of us do,” Joaquin said, throwing up his hands.
Bea narrowed her amber eyes and shoved him so hard he almost fell over.
“That’s not what we do,” Tristan reiterated. “We simply act as ushers to the next realm. When someone’s ready to move on, their Lifer gets a coin,” He produced a gold coin from his pocket and held it out to me. It gleamed even in the duskiness of the room. I plucked it from his hand and turned it over in my own palm. It was heavy and thick, blank on one side with a sun on the other.
“We take the visitor up to the bridge, hand them their coin, and send them on their way,” Tristan explained. “The coin knows which way they’re supposed to go and leads them there.”
The bridge. Of course. The events of last night filtered through my brain. Mr. Nell screeching and writhing as Fisher and Kevin tossed him into the back of a pickup truck. Krista getting behind the wheel and speeding off into the fog toward the bridge on the north end of the island. His screams cutting off abruptly and the eerie silence that followed. She’d ushered him to the Shadowlands. Right there in front of me. And I’d had no clue.
I studied the coin. How could this little hunk of metal know where I was destined to spend all eternity? With a sudden flinch, I tossed it back to Tristan. Not that I had any doubts, of course. It wasn’t like they were going to ship me off to the bad place, right? Me, my sister, my father…we were all destined for the Light. We had to be.
Tristan stared at me, his eyes suddenly sad, and I felt the mood in the room shift, as if everyone had stopped breathing as one.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” I asked Tristan. The others suddenly became very interested in the crappy oceanic art on the walls. “Tristan, why are you telling me all this? If I can’t tell my family, then why…why can you tell me?”
Tristan took a deep breath. He closed the distance between us and reached for both of my hands. I instinctively froze, waiting for that odd warmth, but this time, I felt nothing. Nothing other than the pounding of my heart.