“That’s nice of you guys. But my friend saw something about that death cult on the news. Like, the FBI is going to raid their headquarters or whatever.”

“That’s a rumor, Miss Scofield.”

“Right.” I smiled. “Which you can neither confirm nor deny.”

“One I can’t give you any inside information on. Down here in Southern Cal we mostly deal with drug trafficking. A little high-glamour terrorism is always exciting, though.”

“Glad I could help with that.” Behind me, the first bell rang. I turned to look back, and saw Jamie watching us with widened eyes. “Oh, crap.”

“Friend of yours?” Agent Reyes asked.

“Yeah. And now she probably . . .” I groaned at my own stupidity. “She probably thinks that you’re my new boyfriend.”

He lowered his sunglasses a little, his brown eyes narrowing. “Your new boyfriend?”

“My secret boyfriend that I just told her about. Long story, highly awkward.”

“I agree. Feel free to disabuse her of this notion, Miss Scofield.”

“I’ll get right on that.” The beginnings of a blush were creeping across my cheeks. “Um, that was the bell. I have to go to school now.”

He nodded. “Let me know if you see anything unusual today.”

“I already put your number in my phone.” I saluted and turned away.

As I started back toward the front door, I noticed that more people than just Jamie had watched me talk to Special Agent Reyes. Just perfect.

“Hot indeed,” Jamie said as I reached the door, a leering smile on her face. “But you said you hadn’t been practicing your Spanish.”

“No way! I mean, maybe he is kind of hot. But he’s not . . .”

“Hispanic?”

I groaned. “You’ve got this all wrong.”

She hooked her arm through mine and led me inside. “Right. He’s some other hot secret guy in a totally government car who happens to be following you around.”

“Yes! That’s it exactly.”

“Sure, babe.”

A clump of sophomores was watching a little too keenly as we walked past, and I heard my name whispered, but Jamie silenced them with a hard glance.

“Neophytes,” she muttered.

I thought about trying to convince Jamie of the nonboyfriend status of Special Agent Reyes again, but there was no point. She’d seen him with her own eyes, after all, which beat an invisible psychopomp any day. At least now she wouldn’t think I was crazy enough to make someone up.

“Thanks, Jamie.”

“For what?”

“For listening to me. For trusting me.”

She squeezed our linked arms tighter. “I repeat: just be careful.”

I nodded, content to let Jamie guide me to our first-period acting class.

It was strange. Our conversation might have been littered with half-truths and misunderstandings, but talking to Jamie had helped me make sense of everything that had happened. I’d never understood why Yama had been so hesitant at first, saying that I should forget him. But maybe brand-new ghosts became attached to him all the time, like ducklings imprinting on their mother. And he’d been worried about those little girls imprinting on me. . . .

But that wasn’t what had happened between us, was it?

From the first moment I’d seen him, Yama had been so beautiful, so necessary. Not because I was traumatized, but in spite of the awful things happening around us. From our first kiss in the airport, he’d become a part of me. I could still feel his lips against mine, and he’d heard me when I’d called his name.

Our connection was real, and talking about it with Jamie had only made it more real, no matter how many times I’d had to lie.

CHAPTER 21

IT WAS ONLY TEN DAYS after her first real kiss that Darcy Patel received her first real editorial letter. It seemed fitting that she share both with the same person.

“It’s here!” she shouted into her phone.

“Hang on,” came Imogen’s sleepy voice, then the sound of teeth being brushed, then spitting. “You mean your ed letter? About time.”

“I know, right? This book comes out in 428 days!”

“How do you even know that?

“Nisha texted me this morning.”

Imogen laughed. “That’s handy. What did Nan say?”

“I haven’t read it yet. I need you here!” Saying this made Darcy feel pathetic, and a little annoyed that she had to ask: “Can you come over?”

“I might be able to squeeze you in,” Imogen drawled, but then added: “Forward the letter to me. See you in five.”

* * *

Fifteen minutes later, they sat on the roof of Darcy’s building, phones and muffins in hand. Darcy was still in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, but Imogen wore a crisp white shirt and a full complement of rings on her fingers, having proclaimed that editorial letters were serious business. She’d brought two coffees and muffins from the Chinese-Italian café downstairs.

“So far, so good.” Darcy was scanning the letter’s opening paragraph. “She still loves the first chapter.”

“Nan always starts with praise.” Imogen flicked her thumb across the screen.

“Hey! That’s my praise. Don’t scroll past it!”

“Save the praise till you need it. Dessert goes last.”

Darcy rolled her eyes. “Says the person eating a muffin for breakfast. Why are we doing this on the roof, anyway?”

“To maintain perspective,” Imogen said, gesturing toward the skyline.

Darcy didn’t even ask what that meant. She had eyes only for the email. The next paragraph was about chapters two and three, when Lizzie was in Yamaraj’s underworld palace after the airport attack.

There was a distinct lack of praise.

“Crap. She hates it.”

“No she doesn’t.”

“She says it’s all exposition!”

“Well, that’s kind of true.” Imogen wadded up her empty muffin paper and placed it beside her coffee. “But I like Yamaraj’s origin story. Revengeful donkeys are awesome!”

“Thanks,” Darcy said softly. The donkey story was one of the few things in the book that she had come up with on her own. It had nothing to do with Yamaraj of the Vedas, or her mother’s murdered friend. It had come out of nowhere, it seemed, a tale from another era.

But Nan had a point. For two whole chapters Yamaraj and Yami sat in their palace explaining the rules of the afterworld to Lizzie, a giant block of exposition, just like every writing how-to book told you not to do. How had Darcy not noticed it before now?

She felt a tremor in her hand, and a fight-or-flight reflex in her stomach. Suddenly she hated those two chapters.

“Maybe if they explain things later,” she said slowly, keeping the quaver from her voice. “Then Lizzie has to figure the afterworld out on her own, and it makes Yamaraj more mysterious at first.”

Imogen nodded. “Mysterious is good. He’s a death god, after all.”

“Yeah. About that . . .”

It took a moment to say more. Darcy wondered when exactly she’d decided to borrow a character from her religion. Maybe those stories from the Vedas had always been in her head. Maybe it hadn’t even been conscious.

But at some point Yama had gotten mixed up with all the other stories in her head, and he had blended with Bollywood actors, manga boyfriends, paranormal romance hotties, and even the handsome princes from Disney movies. . . .

“Shit. That’s it.”

“What is?” Imogen asked.

“The fact that Yamaraj takes Lizzie to his palace. It’s dorky. Dudes with castles are so Disney.”

“He’s a raja of the afterworld,” Imogen said. “What else would he live in, a bungalow?”

Even in her anguish, Darcy made a note to herself that she liked the word “bungalow,” even if she wasn’t quite sure what it meant.

“Okay, he does have a palace,” she admitted. “He’s got a whole city. But Lizzie can’t just hang out there and drink tea. Not till later, when everything’s going wrong, and the underworld is serious and scary and weird. Yama has to be a proper death god.”

Imogen looked up from her phone. “Does this have to with what Kiralee said?”

“Not just her. My friend Sagan kind of freaked me out.” The Angelina Jolie Paradox seemed too silly to explain to Imogen, but Darcy had to try. “By making Yamaraj a character, it’s like I’m erasing him from scripture. But getting rid of him would erase him too. So all that’s left is making him real. I owe him that much.”

“You owe every character that much,” Imogen said simply.

“Right, sure.” The strange thing was, from that first day of writing last November, Darcy had imagined Yamaraj’s beautiful underworld palace. But she’d never been to India, and her vision had been cobbled together from movies, cartoons, and websites for fancy hotels in India. “I really loved that palace scene. But it’s too dorky, isn’t it?”

“Kill your darlings,” Imogen said, reaching out to trace a line down Darcy’s bare arm. It sent a shiver through her, a kind of relief, the feeling of a broken darling leaving her system.

She switched her phone to a notes app and typed with one thumb: Exposition later. Palace scarier. Yama more mysterious. Her hand still trembled a little, and her breath was short, but it was no longer a fight-or-flight reflex. It was the buzz of ideas burning in her head, and of being here with Imogen in the spot where they had first kissed.

Canal Street rumbled with authority below, and the city seemed huge and steadfast around Darcy.

She kept her voice even. “This was a good idea, working on the roof.”

Imogen answered with her lips, brushing them lightly against the side of Darcy’s neck. She smelled of coffee and ginger, and a touch of starch from her crisp white shirt.

The kiss set off another shiver in Darcy’s stomach, which tangled with the flutter of anxiety and caffeine. She wanted to turn and kiss Imogen full on the lips, but there was a momentum in her thoughts, and in her body, that she couldn’t squander.

“So I have to figure out where Yamaraj takes Lizzie. Where would they go, if not the underworld? Somewhere dark and scary.”

For a long moment, neither of them said a word. Darcy thought of all the settings in the book—the ghost school, the windswept island, the mountaintop in Persia. Which was the bleakest and scariest, most befitting an introduction to a death god?

It was Imogen who broke the silence. “Why do they have to go anywhere?”

“You mean . . .” Darcy’s voice faded. Everyone loved the airport scene, so maybe she didn’t have to leave it behind. “But there’s a terrorist attack going on.”

“If you want scary, that’s a good thing. And if Lizzie’s thought herself over to the flipside, she’s invisible, and bullets can’t touch her.”

Darcy closed her eyes for a moment, imagining the scene: Lizzie waking up with bloody bodies on the floor around her, the terrorists blazing away at TSA agents and SWAT teams. She’d panic and bounce back into the real world. And get shot.

Unless, of course, Yamaraj was there to keep her calm.

“Of course, Lizzie has to know she’s in another world,” Imogen said. “Otherwise there’s no genre transition.”

Darcy’s eyes opened. “No what?”

“You know, that moment when Lizzie realizes she’s not in Kansas anymore, and the reader does too. Your book starts as a terrorism thriller, but then Lizzie wills herself into another genre. For me, that was the first moment that had the juice.”

Darcy felt herself relax a little, happy to be back in the land of praise.