Queen of the Dead

whole thing about how mine was — or used to be — the only photo in his office. It was just too sad and pathetic.

His fingers stopped in my hair. “You know they still love you. They always will, no matter how many rooms they clean out or kids they have.”

Yeah, right. He didn’t know my parents. “So, you’ll talk to them?” I asked.

He stiffened.

“I don’t mean you have to talk to them directly.” He hated the face-to-face missions. I could be flexible, though. “Just send them a letter or whatever, like we usually—”

“Is your mom drinking again?” he asked quietly.

“What?” I pulled back to look up at him. His expression was too serious. It sent a spike of inexplicable fear through me. “No. Not that I know of.”

“And your dad is happy?

“Only because he doesn’t know,” I argued. “He probably thinks I’m off learning how to play the harp or relaxing on a cloud or something.” We have the most ridiculous ideas of the afterlife.

He let me go and turned to his closet again. But he didn’t take anything out, just stared into like it held answers to questions I didn’t even know.

“What is your problem?” I demanded. This wasn’t anything different than what we did for other people every single day.

“How will it help them?” he asked.

“What?” I asked, certain I’d heard him wrong.

“If they’re finally getting to a point where they can move on and—”

“Finally? It’s only been two months!”

He faced me, his expression tight with frustration. “And what if it makes it worse for them? What if your mom falls off the wagon because she feels guilty about you still being here, or what if your dad decides he can’t love this new kid as much because it might hurt your feelings? Then what? How many people end up worse off than they were before?”

I resisted the urge to scream, “So?” because I didn’t really want any of those things to happen, but some acknowledgment that I’d been there, that I’d mattered, would have been nice. Instead, it felt like everyone was better off without me. And Will was just not getting it.

“Since when do we even worry about this?” I demanded. “How many letters and phone calls and whatever else have we done without even thinking about the people on the receiving end?”

He flinched. “Maybe we should have,” he said.

“No,” I said with exaggerated patience. “Our job is not to worry about the living. They can still change things for themselves. It’s the rest of us who need help.”

“Says who?” he argued. “The light? You can’t even tell me for sure what happened while you were gone, can you?”

I gaped at him. “Who are you? Since when do you even think like this? It’s like you transformed overnight into some kind of—”

I stopped. Pieces tumbled and clicked in my brain. Will, in bed and happy when I left. Will, dressed and crazy when I came back this morning, and smelling like some kind of night time adventure and unfamiliar spicy-girlie scent, and asking questions about my very purpose here, his purpose, our work together.

“Oh.” The word escaped involuntarily, more like a rush of air to accompany the socked-in-the-gut sensation I was currently feeling.

His eyes widened, and he knew right then. He knew that I knew.

“You met up with her again, didn’t you?” I asked. Just saying the words felt like bleeding.

“It wasn’t my fault,” he said quickly. “She found me. She came in my window and—”

I shook my head. Of course. Stupid, Alona. A total beginner’s mistake. I’d underestimated my enemy. I’d thought I wouldn’t have to worry about him here at home, just when we were out and about together. She didn’t know his name or his address. But it occurred to me now she could have gotten his name from any number of spirits around town. Will was relatively famous, at least among the dead-but-not-quite- gone community. I wasn’t used to there being other people around with access to that particular population.

After that, it would just be a simple matter of Googling him on her phone or even going old-school and finding an actual phone book. The Killians were probably listed, and I didn’t think there were enough to make it a very long task to find the right one.

I stepped backed from him slowly, not sure what I was going to do, just that I couldn’t stand this close to him right now.

“It wasn’t like that,” he insisted, following me. “She needed my help to box Mrs. Ruiz.”

I froze. “Box Mrs. Ruiz?”

Color rose in his pale cheeks. “She wasn’t gone. She was too powerful for the disruptor. So we…contained her, so she wouldn’t hurt anyone again.”

“And then?” I asked with a calm I did not feel.

“Then what?”

“And then what did you do with Mrs. Ruiz?”

He grimaced. “Mina took her. The boxes, I mean. The pieces of…never mind.”

I felt like I was going to be sick.

As someone who’d been knocked around by that particular spirit, I could fully understand the motivation behind stopping Mrs. Ruiz, but to just give a spirit over to someone he didn’t know? Someone who might or might not — and I was leaning toward the latter — share the same concerns about Mrs. Ruiz’s fate. Someone who boxed her…in pieces? Not that she was any great or wonderful person, but I didn’t think it was our decision as to who gets to go to the light and who’s trapped in some kind of box. How would we know where to draw the line? More importantly, where would he draw it?

And what about me? All that about not wanting to change things, about not wanting to do this with anyone but me?

What if he decided I belonged in a box?

Will stepped toward me, and I backed up immediately, my hands up in front of me, like he might lash out at me. “I don’t know you,” I said.

He paled. “I didn’t…she didn’t…we just talked. She said she could tell me more about people like me. But it turned out she was just using me to locate Mrs. Ruiz. Once she had Ruiz, she left.”

But she would be back. Or, he wouldn’t stop until hefound her. She’d almost guaranteed that just by leaving. I could tell already.

“Now I don’t know how much of it was a lie and how much of it was—”

“Wait.” I couldn’t believe this. “Are you actually expecting me to feel sorry for you?”

“She lied, but I don’t know—”

“So did you.”

“No,” he said emphatically, shaking his head. “No, I wasn’t trying to change anything. I just wanted to know more about who I am, what I’m supposed to be doing.”

“You know what you’re supposed to be doing!” Even I could hear the shrill-sounding panic in my voice.

He just looked at me, and through the blurry veil of tears I refused to shed, I could see he wasn’t so sure anymore. Whatever she’d said to him last night, it had planted a seed of doubt in his mind. And that was more than enough to ruin everything.

He wasn’t going to help me. He might not help any of us anymore. If he had Mina the Magnificent with all her little toys, he wouldn’t need to. And he wouldn’t need me.

I angled away from him, narrowly avoiding the edge of the desk, searching for the place where that field around him would give out and I could pass through the wall. I needed to get out of here before I started crying.

“Alona,” he said. “Please don’t.”

I ignored him and kept going.

He sighed. “I’m not saying I’m going to stop what we’re doing, just that maybe we need to think about it