“Okay, so let’s do it. You’re a ghost, so you contact Jaime—”

“It’s not that easy. First, we have to find her.”

“Find her? She’s in Miami.”

“Obstacle number one, though it’s not as bad as it seems. Miami exists here, too, only it’s not quite…well, it’s different. Distance isn’t a problem. It’s all very…relative.”

“Uh-huh.”

Eve shook her head. “I can’t explain. Even I don’t understand it all yet. Obstacle number two, though—” She looked down at Lucas. “We can’t carry him.”

“I’m not leaving him here.”

“Well, then we have a real problem. He’ll wake up in a day or two, but by then, the Searchers will have found us, and once they do, you’re taking up permanent residence. Now, we can—” She stopped and looked up at Kristof, then nodded. “Kristof is offering to stay here with Lucas.”

When I hesitated, she looked back toward Kristof. “You ripped the poor girl’s life apart. That doesn’t encourage trust, Kris.” She looked at me. “It’s okay, Paige. If Kristof says he’ll watch Lucas, he will. He has nothing to gain if you and Lucas don’t make it back to Savannah. He knows now this is what I want, what I wanted from the start, for Savannah to be with you. He won’t interfere again.”

Eve stood. I squeezed Lucas’s hand, took one last look at him, then followed Eve across the rocky plain.

Primeval Swamp

WE HIKED ACROSS THE ROCKY PLAIN FOR WHAT MUST HAVE been two hours. One problem with the ghost world? Serious lack of public transportation. Yet, even with all that walking, I didn’t suffer so much as sore feet. I suppose that renders motorized vehicles unnecessary. That and the fact that, here, you have all the time in the world to get wherever you’re going.

Normally, I guess, travel in the ghost world is like a Sunday stroll, relax and enjoy the scenery. Where we were, though, there was no scenery to enjoy, unless you were a geologist. Rock, rock, and more rock. Not exactly the Elysian fields I’d hoped for. Of course, this was a temporary stay—the more temporary, the better—but I couldn’t help being curious, if only to take my mind off the worries that were gnawing through my gut. This was the afterlife, the greatest mystery in the world unfolding before me. Yet my attempts to get more information from Eve were blocked with witticisms and non sequiturs. I can, however, be somewhat persistent, and finally she was forced to address the issue.

“I can’t tell you anything, Paige. I know you’re curious, but if we’re going to get you out of this world, then the less you know—”

“The better,” I finished.

“The better for me, too,” she said.“I’m already in the Fates’ bad books, and once they find out—”

“So the Fates are real?”

“Oh, yeah, only they don’t just sit around spinning yarn—” She shot me a mock glare. “Stop that. You’re going to trick me into talking, and then they’ll find out and I won’t just be up to my neck in shit anymore, I’ll be drowning in it. Believe me, they will find out—hopefully just not until you’re gone.”

“How will they find us? Those Searchers you mentioned?”

Eve kept walking.

I continued, “If I need to be on the lookout for these things, then I have to know what to look for.”

“No, you don’t. If you see them, they’ve already seen you, and we’re both going down. Not a whole lotta laws in this place, but we’re breaking most of them.”

“What if—”

I stopped and stared. The rocky plains ended less than a dozen yards in front of us. Beyond that was…nothing. They didn’t end in a cliff or a wall of darkness or anything so dramatic. They just ended, like hitting the last page in a book. I can’t describe it any better than that.

“Well, come on,” she said.

I couldn’t move. There was something indescribably terrifying about the view in front of me, the yawning nothingness of it.

“Oh, hell,” Eve said. “It’s just a way station.”

She grabbed my elbow and propelled me forward. When we reached the end of the plain, my brain went wild, digging in its mental heels. That response shot down to my legs and they stopped moving. Eve sighed and, without a word, stepped behind me, and pushed.

I’d been tricked. In that last second before Eve shoved me through, I realized the truth. Eve wasn’t helping me. She didn’t want me going back to Savannah. She hated me, hated what I was doing to her daughter, hated how I was raising her. This was her revenge. She was—

“There,” Eve said, stepping beside me. “That’s not so bad, is it?”

I looked around. Fog surrounded me, a strange, cold, bluish mist.

I rubbed my upper arms. “So what is this place? A way station between what?”

“Between planes, the nonearthly realms of the ghost world, like where you landed. From here I can transport us to another plane, or to any place on earth. Well, our version of earth.”

“But how—”

“Think of it as a cosmic elevator. A modern one, though. No elevator attendant on duty. Can’t just walk up and say ‘Miami, please.’ Don’t I wish. No, it’s strictly do-it-yourself, and you have to figure out the right incantation to get to each place, like breaking a code. Different place, different code.”