Alex stood outside of a freshly painted bungalow—white adobe, trimmed in blue. Wind chimes hung from the porch. A stone Buddha held court in the garden, lush with lavender and sage. Her mother sat sipping tea on a daybed heaped with colorful cushions. This was her house—a real house, not a lonely apartment with a balcony that faced the wall of another lonely apartment.
Mira rose and stretched and went inside, leaving the door open behind her.
Alex drifted after her.
The house was tidy, cozy; crystals crowded the fireplace mantel. Her mother rinsed her cup in the sink. A knock sounded. A blond woman stood at the door, a rolled yoga mat slung over her shoulder. She looked familiar, but Alex wasn’t sure how.
“Ready?” the woman asked.
“Just about,” Mira said.
They couldn’t see her.
“Do you mind if my daughter joins us? She’s home from school.”
Hellie stood behind the woman in the door. But not a Hellie Alex had ever known. She looked brave, utterly confident, her arms lean and muscled, her bright hair in a neat ponytail.
“This place is so cute,” she said with a smile.
Alex watched as Hellie and her mother idled in the living room, waiting for Mira to change and get her mat.
“That’s her daughter,” Hellie’s mother said, gesturing to the photograph Hellie was peering at. A photo of Alex in a denim jacket, leaning against their old Corolla, barely smiling.
“She’s pretty,” Hellie said.
“She wasn’t a very happy girl. She passed a few years back. Only seventeen. A drug overdose.” She passed.
Incense had been set before the photo, a white feather tipped in black.
Another photo stood in a frame tucked behind the picture of Alex. A young man with curly black hair that tumbled over his tan face. He was standing on the beach, arm around the surfboard propped beside him. There was a pendant around his neck, but Alex couldn’t make out what it was.
“That’s so sad,” Hellie said. She’d moved on to a deck of cards set out on the coffee table. “Ooh, does Mira read tarot?”
She plucked a card off the top deck and held it up. The Wheel.
For the first time, Alex felt something other than love and regret well up in her at the sight of Hellie, perfect Hellie with her ocean eyes.
“You shouldn’t have let them kill Babbit Rabbit,” she said. “I wouldn’t have let him die.”
Alex watched the Wheel spin, alight with blue fire that consumed first the card, then Hellie’s hand, then Hellie, her mother, the room, the house. The world swallowed by blue flame. All is well.
She was standing on the steps of Sterling, surrounded by fire, and the others were looking at her with pity in their eyes. Alex wiped her tears away, her gut twisting with shame. She’d felt no sorrow at her own death, only relief to see the world wiped clean. She knew her mother had wept over her, but how many more tears had she wasted on a living girl?
And Hellie? Well, that was the worst of it. If Alex hadn’t been with Len that day on the Venice boardwalk, maybe Hellie never would have gone
home with them. Maybe she wouldn’t have stayed as long. She would have made the trip back from hell and returned to the world of softball games and college transcripts and yoga on Saturday morning. She never would have died.
“I’m going to make this easy for you,” Anselm said gently. “Take your place here, Galaxy Stern. Live in splendor and comfort, never want for anything, and see all the damage you’ve done in the world erased. Everyone gets what they want. All will be well.”
What would it mean to become a ghost?
Darlington grabbed her arm. “It isn’t real. It’s just another kind of torture, living with something that isn’t real.”
He wasn’t wrong. She’d known Len’s love wasn’t real. She’d known her mother’s protection wasn’t real. That knowledge ate at you every day. You lived on a tightrope, waiting for the moment the rope would vanish. It was its own kind of hell.
“I can make it easier still,” said Anselm. “Stay or your lovely friend dies.”
In the shimmer of the fountain that would have been the Women’s Table, Alex caught a flicker of movement.
She recognized the man approaching Mercy in the courtyard. Eitan Harel.
As if from a great distance, she heard him ask, “Where is that bitch?
You think this is a joke?” He’d
found her.
“He’s going to hurt her,” Anselm said. “You know that. But you can stop it. Wouldn’t you like to save her? Or will she be one more girl you failed?
One more life taken because you’re so determined to survive?” Another Hellie. Another Tripp.
Alex met Dawes’s eyes and said, “Find a way to shut the door behind me.
I know you can.”
Turner stepped in front of her. “I can’t let you do that. I’m not unleashing a tide of demons to feed on our misery. I’ll kill you before I let you doom our world for the sake of one girl.”
He wasn’t much of an actor, but he didn’t have to be.
