Afterworlds Read Online Free PDF Page A

my mouth. “This isn’t fair.”
    “Close your eyes,” Yamaraj said.
    My heartbeat pounded in my wounded head, and the world started to shift around me, normal colors shimmering through soft gray. The mass of ghosts flickered for a moment, transparent, andthrough them I could see the flash of gunfire. The hideous roar grew sharper in my ears.
    Yamaraj grasped my hand. “Stay with me here. Just a little longer.”
    I shut my eyes, but only for a moment, willing my heartbeat slower. When I looked again, the gray world had steadied, and I could see the crowd of ghosts perfectly, Yami at its center.
    “Where’s she taking them?”
    “Somewhere safe.” He squeezed my hand again. “We’re here to guide the dead. It’s okay.”
    “It’s not okay!” I pulled my hand from his, my voice breaking. A single teardrop squeezed from my left eye. “Those men with guns . . . they had no right .”
    Suddenly the thick glass between me and my panic was gone, shattered by anger. I could smell blood and gun smoke, and an acid scent that made the back of my throat tickle. The real colors of the airport were bleeding into the grays around us.
    “Something’s happening,” I tried to say, but my throat closed on the words. The air itself had begun to burn my eyes and skin. As my grasp on the afterworld failed, the gas was leaking through to me. I could feel my cheek burning where the single tear had squeezed out.
    Yamaraj stood up. “I have to take you back.”
    He took my hands in his, which suddenly weren’t warm and living anymore. I felt a coldness rushing into me. I realized that he wasn’t taking me back to the real world, but to the dark place I’d passed through while playing dead.
    “Wait,” I tried to say.
    “It isn’t safe here, Lizzie.”
    I tried to protest, but my lungs stilled once more. My eyelids fluttered closed, and I felt myself falling away, spiraling back down toward the silence.
    I’m dead again. I’m dead.
    I had a vague sense of Yamaraj lifting me from the airport chair and carrying me back the way we’d come. I could see and hear nothing, but felt him watching over me.
    Finally, a long time later, he whispered in my ear.
    “Believing is dangerous, Lizzie. But if you need me, call me. I’ll be there.”
    His lips pressed against mine, and a wave of heat flooded into me. Not only warmth, but energy, a force that stirred every muscle in my body. The cold inside me turned sharp and buzzing. Electricity coursed through my nerves and across my skin.
    The heat built, pushing against my heart and lungs, the power of it coiling around me and squeezing tight. My eyes sprang open, but there was only darkness rushing past me, and then something sharp and jagged burst from my lungs . . .
    I was breathing , coughing and sputtering, spasming on cold hard ground. There were spinning lights in all directions—the metal flash of badges, the dull glint of body armor.
    I was lying on the sidewalk outside the airport. Fluttering yellow tape marked off the sidewalk around me, a corral of motionless bodies under white plastic sheets. Red and blue lights pulsed from every vehicle, sending shadows swinging, as if the bodies were twitching beneath their covers.
    There was so much color in the world, everything bright andalive. The crackle and hiss of radios electrified the air.
    I became aware of people suddenly gaping at me—two paramedics, a police officer with a hand on his holstered gun and terror in his eyes. A plastic sheet was wrapped tight around me, its edges fluttering in the freezing wind, and I wanted to yell at them to set me free. But it was all I could do to keep breathing, to keep that fire that Yamaraj had relit inside me burning.
    I was alive.

CHAPTER 5
    MOXIE UNDERBRIDGE LIVED IN A tall and curvaceous tower on the south side of Astor Place. The neighborhood was full of weathered colonnades and arched windows, but Moxie’s building was shiny-new and wrapped in sinuous reflective glass. The