“Because I need you.”
He put his hand on the back of my neck and gently drew me to him.
He kissed me, softly, on the lips.
Then he murmured, “Session’s over for today. Go home.”
9
It happened two days later. I walked Paloma up the hill to the stone lion that sat outside the mansion at the top part of our loop. I reached out to touch the lion’s paw the way I always did—
—when I saw the teenager suspended in the air.
His toes rested on the top of the fence. He seemed to be sitting, except there was nothing to sit on but air. He had blond curly hair and tanned skin, dressed in jeans and a blue hooded sweatshirt. Paloma whined and pulled back on the leash. I only stared, and kept staring.
“...Ricky? Is that you?”
He moved his head. I couldn’t tell if he’d heard me or not. But I was sure it was Ricky Newman, even though I hadn’t seen him since his family moved to Arizona in eighth grade. My mother and Ricky’s mother were good friends. They’d forced Ricky and me to play together as kids, although a real friendship between us had never happened.
“Ricky?” I said again.
He stood up and walked along the fence like a gymnast on a balance beam. Then he drifted down through the air to the road. He turned his face to me, although I couldn’t tell if he was actually seeing me or not. I could only note his troubled expression.
The words rose up through my body, from some deep place of knowing that I didn’t consciously understand. “That way,” I said, and felt my arm lift, pointing to the right. “You need to go that way.” I was pointing off the road, into a cluster of hedges and bright bougainvillea.
An expression of peace settled over Ricky’s face, and he walked off in that direction. He didn’t leave any footprints in the gravel. He didn’t make any sound at all. Sunlight shafted over him—and then through him—and his form seemed to shimmer and dance as it dissolved into the hedges.
And then he was gone.
At dinner that night, my mother said, “Terrible news. Ricky Newman, remember him?”
I’d been pushing pieces of chicken around my plate. I had no appetite. At the mention of Ricky’s name I looked up and said, perhaps a little too sharply, “What happened to him?”
“He died,” my mother said. “Earlier today.”
“He died,” I said blankly.
I felt numb. There was the surreal, impossible knowledge that someone my own age had died, someone I’d known, but there was also the matter of Ricky’s astral projection, soul projection, or whatever it was that I had encountered earlier. My mind touched on the implications, and shied away. I wasn’t ready to go there.
“An asthma attack,” my mother went on. “He didn’t have his inhaler with him, and by the time...”
But I couldn’t listen to the rest. I was pulling on my leather jacket. “I have to go somewhere,” I muttered.
“Sasha—”
“I won’t be long.”
And I was out of there.
10
“Haiden!”
The white house seemed as abandoned as always, but this time I wasn’t having it.
“Haiden!” I banged on the door. I walked around and banged on the shuttered windows. “Haiden!” Where did he come from? Where did he go when our sessions were over?
“Sasha.”
I whirled.
“Sasha, stop yelling, you’ll disturb the neighborhood.”
He was standing beneath one of the palms, his face and body carved in shadow.
“I don’t care,” I said. “Something happened today ... and I need to know....” I could feel my voice falter. I cleared my throat and tried again. “I need answers.”
He tilted his head.
I told him what had happened with Ricky. “And then I found out that he died! Did I do that? Am I responsible for that in some way?” I was thinking about what he had told me the other day, about how easy it is for someone’s ... soul ... to get lost and never find its way back to its body. I had told Ricky what direction to go in, I had even pointed, as if I’d known anything at all about what I was doing.
Had he lost himself, had he ... died ... because of me?
Haiden seemed absorbed in his own thoughts. “So it’s already happening,” I heard him mutter. “I didn’t expect it this soon—”
“What’s happening?”
“Your gift has begun to truly manifest.” Haiden spread his hands. “Ricky was lost, Sasha. You showed him the direction he needed to travel to pass from this world into the next. This kind of thing will happen again. Other lost souls will find you—they’ll be drawn to you—and you will help them find their way.”
“That’s why you’ve been ... teaching me? That’s what you’ve been teaching me?”
Haiden nodded.
My knees felt watery. I stumbled. “You’ve been teaching me to communicate with the souls of dead people.” I sat down—“collapse” is probably the better word—on the doorstep.
“Not all of them are dead.” Before I could respond to that, he said quietly, “There’s more.” He sat on the step beside me. “In order to continue your education, I need you to come with me.”
“Come with you?”
“I live,” Haiden said, “in that other realm I once mentioned. Sometimes known as the Underworld. I kind of ... rule it, actually.”
And something clicked in my head. My voice dull with the shock of it. I said, “You mean ... Hades? You’re, like, that guy Hades?”
“That’s one of my names.”
“You’re the freaking god of the Underworld!”
“If I had a job title,” Haiden allowed, “that would probably be it.”
I could only stare at him. Is that why he had always seemed familiar to me? Memory seemed to be moving around, dislodging the blocked parts: I was a little girl, and he was a crossing guard with vivid blue eyes smiling at me as I trooped across the street. I was ten, and downtown with my mother, and he was a handsome stranger who asked us for the time. I was fourteen, and working at a fast food restaurant, and he was a customer ordering a cheeseburger and fries. And those were only the moments, the encounters, I could remember.
Suddenly I knew that he had always been there, in my life, crossing paths every now and again while I grew up, and he remained the same. He didn’t age. He was constant and unchanging. I was fifteen, and he was the good Samaritan who helped my friend’s hissing black cat out of a tree, even as it flattened against the branch and took swats at his head. “What’s your name?” I had asked in gratitude and now, clear as a streak of birdsong, in my memory I heard him say, “Haiden.”
“Sasha,” he was saying now, “I’ve made mistakes in the past that I would never make again. I want you ... I need you ... to come to my kingdom with me. To be at my side. To be my Queen. There are so many lost ones
