“I don’t understand,” Kevin said. “What the hell is going on?”

Tristan moaned again and turned on his side. The back of his head was a crater of blood and hair and shards of bone. I swallowed back a heaving breath.

“Pete knew what we were going to find in that room,” I said grimly. “He left the door open so he could run.”

“I don’t understand. If Pete had already found them, why didn’t he just tell us when we bumped into him on Magnolia?” Lauren wondered as we trudged across the sopping grass toward the mayor’s house. She had just radioed all the Lifers, telling them to be on the lookout for Pete. “Why did he let us walk in there all clueless?”

“Because clearly he had something to hide,” Kevin said. “He had his walkie-talkie. If he wanted to, he could have reported it right away. But instead, he attacked them and left them for dead.”

Dead. My brain still couldn’t wrap itself around the fact that we were using that word. Nadia was dead. And Tristan…

I looked ahead at Joaquin and Bea. Tristan’s body hung limply between them as they shoved through the back door of the house. Cori, Kevin, Lauren, and I hung back while Fisher walked past with Nadia slung over his shoulder. Cori’s head was bowed and her shoulders shook. I barely knew her, but I put my arm around her as we followed the others inside. She’d lost her best friend. I knew the sucking void that opened inside you—I was experiencing it right now with Darcy gone—and I wished there was something more I could do.

Every light was on in the kitchen and the wide-open great room beyond it, making for a blinding contrast to the dark night from which we’d come. The clinic had officially closed down now that the last patient had checked out, and the beds had been replaced with the original, beach-chic couches and chairs. The mayor was sitting in the living room in conference with Dorn and Grantz, while Krista stood in the kitchen wearing a yellow dress, making some kind of smoothie with a very loud, very grating blender. She blanched when Joaquin and Bea tromped past her, and the noise died.

“Tristan?”

Her eyes fluttered closed and she leaned forward, her hips pressing against the kitchen island as her hands flattened against its surface, as if she was clinging to this place, willing herself not to faint.

Fisher trudged across the hardwood floor, his massive boots leaving muddy footprints, and gently deposited Nadia onto the one empty couch. Joaquin and Bea shuffled toward the opposite one, which was occupied by the mayor and Dorn, who both stood up to scuttle out of the way, startled into motion. Neither could take their eyes off Tristan as Joaquin and Bea laid him down. His skin was noticeably paler than it had been at the gray house. When his head fell sideways, exposing his wound, the mayor’s mouth set in a grim line.

“What happened?” Dorn asked.

“Nadia’s dead,” Fisher said in his blunt way. He stepped to the side of the couch and took a wide-legged stance, like a soldier reporting for duty. I was starting to notice that when things got hairy, he reverted to this no-nonsense posture, his own personal defense mechanism.

“What?” Grantz snapped.

“And Tristan’s just barely alive,” Joaquin added. He shoved his hands through his wet hair and flung his bloodstained jacket onto the floor. It slid across the wood planks and gathered in a heap near the wall. Joaquin braced his hands on the mantel over the fireplace and leaned into it, blowing out a loud breath. Then suddenly he turned on the mayor, his eyes as fierce as a rabid dog’s. “Do you want to tell us what the fuck is going on?”

The words hung in the air as we each struggled for breath. In the distance, thunder rumbled. The only other sound in the room was the incessant even ticking of the elegant grandfather clock.

The mayor turned away from us and stood as still as granite.

Chief Grantz was the first to speak, rising slowly from his chair for the first time. “She’s dead? She can’t be dead.”

“I was afraid of this,” the mayor intoned. Joaquin and I looked at each other.

“What are you talking about?” Lauren asked shakily. She and Kevin still hovered near the front door, the raindrops from their jackets forming a lake around their feet. “Did you know this was going to happen?”

The mayor turned. “I wasn’t certain. I was hoping we would be able to find out what was happening—who was to blame—and fix it before it went this far.”

“Okay, enough with the vague,” Joaquin snapped. “You’d better start explaining right now.”

The mayor took a deep, audible breath and stood in front of the fireplace next to Joaquin.

“Here’s what I know. Once innocents started being relegated to the Shadowlands, the balance of the universe began to shift, which is why we saw the island become infested with bugs and death and storms. When we couldn’t find the culprit, our only answer was to stop the ushering entirely. It was the only way to guarantee we didn’t tilt the balance even further off its axis.”

“Of course. We know this,” Fisher said, his hands behind his back. “What does it have to do with Nadia?”

The mayor’s eyes grew hard. “Well, what you don’t know is that your immortality, as it were, is contingent upon your continuing to fulfill your purpose. That is, continuing to help souls find their redemption and move on. So when we stopped ushering souls…”

“We made ourselves vulnerable,” I said, my mouth dry. I leaned into the back of one of the taller chairs, gripping its brocade fabric for dear life.

“Yes, Miss Thayer,” the mayor said. “The longer you refrain from fulfilling your duty, the more…expendable you are to the universe.”

“So we can die now?” Krista asked shrilly, her voice filling the long, wide room. “Any of us?”

The mayor turned an inappropriately wry eye on her pseudo daughter. “Let’s just say I wouldn’t go cliff diving anytime soon.”

Krista sat down heavily on a kitchen stool. Bea leaned into the island, her head in her hands. No one else moved.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Bea asked quietly, her eyes wide and trained on Tristan’s wound. “Why didn’t you warn us?”

The mayor lifted her chin and cleared her throat. “It was a judgment call,” she said. “I already had a hundred extra panicked visitors on my hands. I didn’t need you panicking as well.”

“That wasn’t your call to make,” Joaquin spat.

“Excuse me?” the mayor asked indignantly.

Joaquin took one step and got right in her face. The mayor was so startled she staggered back, her shoulders colliding with the mantelpiece. The framed photos set up at careful angles along the expanse of the shelf rattled.

“You put us at risk! This? This is your fault,” Joaquin said, flinging a hand at the couches where Nadia and Tristan lay. “If they’d known, they might have been more careful. Or they might have come back to us sooner. Nadia might still be alive!”

“Back off her, Marquez,” Dorn said.

“Let’s stop focusing on what we can’t change and focus on the problems at hand,” the mayor snapped.

“Do we know who did this?”

“Tristan said it was Pete,” Bea replied. “He said Pete killed Nadia.”

“Pete?” Krista demanded. “Are you serious?”

“What would Pete stand to gain from this?” Chief Grantz asked. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Unless he’s the one who’s been ushering people and they found out about it,” Lauren said.

I felt as if something inside me snapped, like a guitar string plucked hard, the reverberations vibrating throughout my body. “So you think…you think Tristan is innocent?”

Joaquin looked me in the eye and my throat closed. If Tristan was innocent, everything changed. If Tristan was innocent . . .

“No,” I said out loud. “It can’t be. He had the coins. The picture of my family. He…he ran.”