Joshua came and stood beside me. I looked up at him grimly, too spent to even attempt a smile.

“Was that hard?” he asked.

I just nodded.

“If it makes you feel any better, I think you have almost as many books as I do.”

“Had,” I said. “I had almost as many books as you do.”

He frowned. “Amelia, you can have all my books.”

“Which would be awesome, if I could ever turn the pages.”

Joshua ducked his head, and I felt instantly ashamed of myself.

I ducked down too, met his eyes, and gave him a slight smile. “But you know, Joshua, no matter how I feel right now, that’s still very good to know.”

“Hope so,” he said with a timid, answering smile.

I took a huge breath, drawing my shoulders up and then letting them fall back into place. I felt raw, and oddly bruised. Yet there were still more things I wanted to see.

“Mind if we check out the living room real quick? I think . . . my mom used to keep a bunch of pictures in there.”

“Not at all.” Joshua swept his arm toward the living room, so I crossed in front of him and into the room. I scanned the walls until I found it: the little shelf my mother had nailed to the far wall in place of a mantel.

Joshua and I wove our way through a maze of chairs and ottomans until we stood directly in front of the shelf. It was still cluttered with the same pictures, each framed in cheap plastic or wood. A few new items also decorated this area, most noticeably the two large photos now hanging above the shelf.

I recognized the photo on the left immediately. It was my senior picture, the very one Joshua and I had found in the yearbook this afternoon. My living face stared out at us, surrounded by an expensive-looking wooden frame. To my horror, someone had draped wide black ribbons around the perimeter of the frame. The ribbon on the left side had been printed with my name in silver, metallic ink; the ribbon on the right proclaimed the dates of my birth and death. The otherwise pretty picture was thus transformed into the kind of macabre memento you might leave on someone’s grave.

The embarrassing display, however, wasn’t the thing that horrified me most. Instead, it was the other picture hanging over the shelf, the one directly to the right of mine.

The photo itself didn’t scare me. Under any other circumstances, it would have made me smile. The photo was of my father, taken around the time he and my mother had married. Back then my father still had a thick mop of hair. His tan skin was less lined than I remembered, but his green eyes still creased at the corners as a result of his huge grin.

Yet, despite the happy tone of my father’s photo, I began to shiver uncontrollably.

Because, like my senior portrait beside it, my father’s photo was draped in black ribbons.

The ribbon to the left of my father’s picture bore the name Todd Allen Ashley. It glinted out at me in the same embossed silver that surrounded my own portrait. I couldn’t quite read the ribbon on the right, nor did I want to. No matter what the dates printed on the ribbon read, I knew what they symbolized: a birth date . . . and a death date.

At first the individual pieces of what I saw didn’t make sense. But the longer I stared at the photo, the more the details came into horrifying clarity. The moment they all clicked into place, the bottom dropped out from my world.

But I wasn’t scared. I wanted it. I wanted darkness, nothingness. I wanted a nightmare right now. I wanted to let the river suck me down, to make me drown or trap me in Eli’s horrible netherworld.

I wanted anything but this.

No matter what I wanted, I didn’t fall into darkness. I stood motionless in the cramped living room in which my mother probably sat alone, night after night. No daughter to fight with, no husband to talk to.

Because I was dead.

And my father was dead.

I placed my hand over my mouth to stifle a sob. Joshua reached for me, but I pulled away and shook my head.

As if he had just read my thoughts, Joshua whispered, “It’s not your fault, Amelia.”

“It is. I know it is.”

“How?” he urged.

“Look at this place!” I gestured around me, to the ramshackle contents of the room and the entombed bedroom just outside of it. “It all fell apart when I died. It’s all fallen apart.”

“I know, and it’s horrible.” Joshua’s voice was softer, but still insistent. “Terrible. And I’m sorry, Amelia. But—sometimes it happens. And the important part is, you didn’t make it happen.”

It didn’t seem to matter what Joshua said—I couldn’t stop shaking. “I wasn’t there, Joshua. I wasn’t there when . . . when . . .”

I choked on the thought. Joshua rushed over, reaching out for me; but I forced the words out of my mouth before he could touch me. In fact, I nearly spat the words at the floor.

“I wasn’t there when my dad died. Now my mom’s all alone, and my dad could be anywhere. He could be lost, like I was. Or he could be . . . someplace worse.” I shuddered, thinking about Eli’s dark world and the poor, trapped souls there. “And I can’t do a damn thing about it.”

My eyes prickled. I wasn’t surprised when one tear managed to course its way down my cheek. But I was stunned when an entire flood of tears followed.

I looked up at Joshua, my mouth open, my face probably the picture of miserable shock. I wiped furiously at my cheeks and stared down at my hands, which were quickly becoming soaked.

“I . . . I’ve never cried,” I stuttered, staring back up at him. “Not like this.”

He grabbed my arms and practically yanked me to him.

“Whatever you do, Amelia, it’s all right with me.” His voice was rough, deepened by emotion.

I was shocked yet again by what the sound of his voice did to my body, no matter how desolate my mind might be. Suddenly, my arms were wrapped fiercely around Joshua’s neck. Just as fiercely, he wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me to him faster than I could pull myself. Now there was no space between us. We were curved against each other; and when he shifted closer, I thought I might actually stop breathing.

I could feel it all: the pressure of his arms around me, the grip of his fingers at my waist, the warmth of his breath on my skin. Everything I knew about myself and my relationship to the living world told me this was impossible. But that didn’t matter right now. What mattered was that I felt alive. I felt everything.

Joshua stared down at me, and I could feel the heat of his midnight blue eyes on every inch of my body. When I curled my fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck, he moaned. Once the sound escaped his lips, we didn’t even give it a second thought. We leaned into each other and pressed our lips together.

The kiss crashed over me, wave upon wave of fire. The ache exploded across my chest like an atom bomb, incinerating everything in its path. I let it burn me; I let it consume me.

As Joshua parted his lips and moved them against mine, I felt his lips—felt the soft, warm skin of them.

At that moment I was the atom bomb. I was the orange, brightly glowing ball of fire. The exact spot where a lit match touches a pool of kerosene.

Then I was cold. Terribly cold.

I opened my eyes and gasped. I began choking and clutching around me, futilely trying to find something to anchor me. Something to help me claw my way out of here.

Because I was suddenly in the black water of the river. And I was drowning again.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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Chapter

Sixteen

When the oppressive black water finally vanished, I woke up, coughing and sputtering in the morning sunlight. I found myself on my knees, leaning over on all fours and clutching the earth as if it were a life preserver. Which, in essence, it was.