“Be nice, you two,” said Oscar.
Darcy looked at him, wondering what he meant, exactly. Were Kiralee and Coleman gently mocking her, or all paranormal romances? But the Sword Singer books were full of romance. Maybe Oscar was simply bored with the mythical bestiary game.
“Darcy’s love interest is really quite original,” he said. “He’s a sort of a . . . psychopomp. Is that the right word?”
“More or less,” Darcy said. “But in the Vedas, the Hindu scriptures I was using for inspiration, Yamaraj is the god of death.”
“Emo girls love death gods.” Kiralee took a long drink. “License to print money!”
“How do you hook up with a death god, anyway?” Coleman asked. “Near-death experience?”
Darcy almost coughed out her mouthful of beer. Lizzie’s brush with death was the book’s unique selling point, the singular idea that had carried Darcy through last November, and Coleman had just come up with it off the top of his head.
“Um, not exactly. But . . . kind of?”
Coleman nodded. “Sounds pleasingly dark.”
“The first chapter is megadark,” Oscar said. “There’s this awful terrorist attack, and you think the protag’s going to get killed. But she winds up . . .” He waved his hand. “No spoilers—just read it. Much better than your average paranormal.”
“Thank you,” Darcy said, smiling, though suddenly she wondered how good Oscar Lassiter thought the average paranormal was.
CHAPTER 8
I COULDN’T TELL THE FBI anything new, and the doctors had found nothing wrong with me that stitches couldn’t cure, so two mornings after the attack, we left Dallas in a rental car.
Mom hated road trips, because highways in the hinterlands scared her. But she was worried I’d start screaming if I saw DFW airport again, or any airport. What she didn’t realize was that I was too numb for anything so dramatic.
It wasn’t just exhaustion. There was a sliver of cold still inside me, a souvenir of the darkness I’d passed through. A gift from the other side. Whenever I remembered the faces of the other passengers, or when a clatter in the hospital corridors sounded like distant gunfire, I closed my eyes and retreated to that cool place, safe again.
We left the hospital in secret. One of the administrators led us through basement corridors to a service exit, a squeaky metal door that opened onto a staff parking lot. No reporters waited there, unlike the front entrance.
There were pictures of me in the news already. Lizzie Scofield, the Sole Survivor, the girl who’d sputtered back to life. My story was uplifting, I suppose, the only bright spot in all that horror. But I didn’t much feel like a symbol of hope. The stitches in my forehead itched, loud noises made me jump, and I’d been wearing the same socks for three days in a row.
Everyone kept saying how lucky I was. But wouldn’t good luck have been taking a different flight?
I hadn’t read any newspapers, and the nurses had kindly shut my door whenever radios and TVs were blaring near my room, but the headlines had leaked into my brain anyway. All those stories about the other passengers, all those people who’d been strangers to me, just passersby in an airport. Suddenly the details of their lives—where they’d been headed, the kids they’d left behind, their interrupted plans—were news. Travis Brinkman, the boy who’d fought back, was already a hero, thanks to security camera footage.
The rest of the world was hungry to know everything about the dead, but I wasn’t even ready to hear their names yet.
No one seemed to know much about the terrorists. They had ties to a cult somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, but the cult’s leaders were denying any knowledge or responsibility. The gunmen themselves had all been killed in the battle—no notes left behind, no manifestos, no clues.
Wasn’t the point of terrorism to send a message of some kind?
It was as if they’d simply been in love with death.
* * *
We drove all afternoon, eating in the car, stopping only to use gas pumps and restrooms. We passed Abilene, Midland, and Odessa, and then the cities faded into a scrubby wilderness dyed brown by winter. Oil derricks pulsed on the horizon, and dust devils swirled across our path, carrying road trash with them. The highway sliced through outcrops of gray rock that had been dynamited open. The clear blue sky grew huge above our heads.
Mostly we were silent, and I thought about Yamaraj—his eyes, the way he moved, his voice telling me that I was safe. Those details were fast in my memory, while the rest of what had happened at the airport was an awful blur. The only part of that night that had seemed real was the part that no one would ever believe.
When Mom and I did talk, our conversation matched the landscape—brittle and withered. She asked about Dad’s new apartment, what I thought of Rachel, and the fancy restaurants where we’d eaten. She asked me what classes I would be starting soon, and even delivered a little speech about keeping up the grades in my final semester of high school.
I could see that Mom was trying to be kind, talking about trivia instead of terrorism. But as the hours passed, her avoidance of reality started driving me crazy. Like she was gaslighting me, trying to make me think I’d imagined the whole attack. Every time her eyes drifted up to the stitches on my forehead, or the little tear gas scar on my cheek, an expression of confusion crossed her face.
But nothing that night had been imaginary. I’d gone to another world. Yamaraj was real. I could still taste his kiss, and when I touched my lips, his heat still lingered there.
Plus, he’d practically dared me to believe in him, which is a pretty good way to get me to do anything.
Mom just kept talking about nothing, driving us farther away from Dallas, her hands tight on the wheel. The closest she got to mentioning the attack was to say that my luggage would arrive in San Diego soon after we did.
“They said a few days.”
No mention of who “they” were. The FBI? The airline? She spoke as if my bag were simply lost, not sitting in a pile of evidence for the biggest Homeland Security investigation in a decade. No big deal.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’ve got plenty of clothes at home.”
“Yeah. It’s much better to lose your luggage on your way home than going away!”
As if that was the big takeaway from surviving a terrorist attack.
“All I need is a new phone,” I said.
“Well . . . maybe we can stop somewhere and get you one.” She hunched forward, scanning a cluster of passing signs, as if one might lead her to an Apple store out here in the West Texas desert.
Didn’t she understand that I needed things to make sense right now? I needed my mother here in reality with me, not off in make-believe land.
We kept driving. Long pauses were easy in this terrain, and it was a while before I spoke up again. “I feel weird without it. That phone saved my life, kind of.”
Her grip on the steering wheel grew tighter, and her foot must have tensed on the gas pedal, because the car shuddered beneath us.
“What do you mean, Lizzie?”
I took a slow breath, drawing calm from the cold place inside me.
“I was running away, we all were, and I called 911. The woman on the phone said . . .” My voice gave out, not with any emotion that I could feel, but like a ballpoint pen running dry. I’d already told this story, I realized—to Yamaraj.