“Absolutely not,” I said. “You’re not coming with me. We’ve already covered this, Joshua.”

“But—”

“But no,” I interrupted him. “I can’t give in on this one, Joshua, I’m sorry. Eli wants me. Just me. He wants to love me, or own me, or whatever . . . but I don’t think he’d actually hurt me. At least, not in a permanent way. He wouldn’t hesitate to hurt you, though, if it meant getting to me. So you can’t be there. Period.”

“You’re right,” Joshua muttered. “I know you’re right.” He frowned and stared down at his lap.

His apparent surrender surprised me, and it momentarily caught me off guard. But when Joshua looked back up at me, I could see that he wasn’t surrendering. Not at all. His eyes showed nothing but absolute resolve.

“You are right, Amelia,” he repeated with an air of finality. “Which is why I’m going to do my damnedest to make sure neither of us goes to see that guy.”

Joshua clasped his hands back around my waist. I couldn’t feel his arms, but I could see them tighten around me. His grip on me, and his hard gaze, made his point perfectly clear: he would do anything humanly possible to keep me with him, and away from that graveyard.

So I would have to resort to inhuman tactics.

I gave him a soft smile. “Can you promise me something?” I asked quietly.

“Not if it has anything to do with you trying to go out there.”

I shook my head, still smiling. “Joshua, please. Just listen. I need you to make me a promise. If you don’t see me again, I need you to promise you won’t come looking for me, okay?”

“Amelia, what are you—,” he began in a panicked voice, but I cut him off with a firm kiss.

This kiss was entirely different from our first two. Now I kissed him roughly, moving my lips against his with a force that belied my desperation. Joshua was so surprised by this attack, he couldn’t help but kiss me back. And, of course, his reaction just made me kiss him more fiercely.

Then, without warning, I jerked away and shut my eyes tight. Before Joshua could pull me back to him, I concentrated on difficult thoughts.

Thoughts of my mother, lonely and alone inside her worn little home. Thoughts of my father’s face—a face I may never see again, in any of the afterworlds. And thoughts of Joshua. Not the happy thoughts of the last few days but thoughts of forever, as only my kind could understand it. Forever, spent without him.

On top of all these sad thoughts, I forced an overlay of one image: that of the graveyard in which I awoke after each of my nightmares. I squeezed my eyes tighter, burning the image onto the backs of my eyelids.

And suddenly, I couldn’t feel the pressure of Joshua’s arms around me.

My eyes shot open.

At first I couldn’t feel or see anything. Everything was numb, and black. Then, painfully, my eyes began to adjust to their new surroundings.

Wherever I now sat, it wasn’t entirely black, as I’d originally thought. This new place was just very, very dark.

A bird called out somewhere to my right, and my head jerked toward the noise. The movement brought into view dark shapes amassed all around me. As my eyes adjusted more, I could just make out the structure of the shapes. The tall ones were trees, drooping toward the ground. The shorter ones were less uniform: some of them, although wide at the base, narrowed into obelisks at the top; some formed squat half circles above a field of grass. Whatever their form, all of these shorter shapes were unquestionably gravestones.

I’d done it.

I’d willed myself into the graveyard a few hours before dawn.

A sharp, bitterly cold wind slammed into me, whipping against my cheeks and whirling my hair up in the air. When the wind died down, a dry voice slithered out from the darkness.

“You’re early, Amelia Ashley.”

“Well,” I said shakily, trying my best to sound calm as I pushed myself upright. “What can I say? I’m a punctual girl.” Then I paused and frowned. “Wait . . . you just said my last name, didn’t you?”

Eli stepped out from the shadow of a tree, coming into dim view.

“Quite right, Amelia,” he said. “How do I know your last name? And how do I know this is the graveyard where you wake up after your accidental materializations?”

I felt my stomach drop.

In my haste to get this over with, and to spare Joshua in the process, I hadn’t even considered that detail. Your graveyard, Eli had said. He shouldn’t have known about my graveyard. Unless . . . .

“You’ve been lying to me again, haven’t you? You know more about my life than you let on.”

“Only a little bit.”

“How much is a little bit?” I demanded.

“Well, why don’t you turn around and look at the gravestone you’re practically lying on? That should provide some explanation.”

I didn’t want to look away from Eli’s face. I didn’t want to lose sight of him in the great likelihood that he had another nasty surprise planned for me. Yet my head seemed compelled by other forces. It turned slowly until I faced the grass and dirt just behind me.

I’d never wanted to stay in this graveyard long enough to study its headstones or search for my own grave. I merely assumed I’d been buried here, and the assumption was reason enough for me to run away from this place each time I entered it.

I also assumed that, should I stumble upon my grave, I would likely find it overgrown. I don’t know why I’d made this assumption. But in the long years since my death, I’d forgotten my parents and their love for me. To my depressed, lonely mind, it only made sense that whoever I left behind wouldn’t remember me or my grave.

The little, well-tended patch of earth I now faced proved this last assumption wrong. And despite that fact—despite the obvious love that went into the grave’s care—its very appearance broke my heart into a million pieces.

Behind me, a concrete slab lay flush to the ground. Concrete, I suppose, because my parents couldn’t have afforded much else. Someone had carefully cleared away the grass from the concrete slab and wiped it clean of dead leaves. A ceramic pot filled with silk daisies sat at the base of the stone.

Simple block letters were imprinted on the stone’s surface. Apart from the epitaph, the letters read much like my senior yearbook inscription:

AMELIA ELIZABETH ASHLEY

APRIL 30, 1981—April 30, 1999

BELOVED DAUGHTER FOREVER

Seeing those words, all I could imagine was my father’s face as he chose that concrete stone at the funeral parlor and my mother’s hands as they gathered up those daisies in the fabric store.

My dead and unbeating heart could still ache with grief, so it seemed. Fiercely so. I wiped at the one tear that had coursed its way down my cheek and turned back around to stare up at Eli. Even his unpleasant face would be better to look at than the last gifts my parents had left me.

Meeting my eyes, Eli nodded grimly. “So, now you see why I know your last name, Amelia Ashley.”

“How did you find this?” I asked.

“I was here myself only a month ago, wandering a bit and thinking. When, lo and behold, who did I see appear out of thin air? My little Amelia, choking and gasping right on top of that grave. You must have materialized here without meaning to. By doing so you solved a great mystery: where does Amelia go when she disappears? After answering that riddle for me, you ran away, not seeing or sensing me.”

I nodded absently, processing this information. So, Eli had watched me wake up from a nightmare. That explained how he knew about “my” graveyard and how he’d discovered my last name. Yet, another question remained.

“Why were you here in the first place, Eli?”

Eli frowned heavily. “It may surprise you to know, Amelia, that I find this place as distasteful as you do. But, just like you, I return to it occasionally, for reasons even I don’t fully understand.”