Page 105 of Aftertaste

Everything about her made Kostya cold except her eyes. They were so familiar that for a moment he couldn’t breathe. Chocolate brown, flecked with gold. Wide set. Strange and beautiful and hungry. Just like her sister’s.

“Everleigh?”

“Konstantin Duhovny.” She inclined her head, her voice nothing like he expected, not gravel but velvet. “Just the guy I’ve been looking for.”

He backed away, slow, broken glass crunching beneath him.

“Oh, um, yeah? Well, you found me.” His back hit a wall, sitting duck confit. “Please don’t hurt me.” In a crisis, his inner hero really shone through.

“Hurt you?” Everleigh rolled her red-rimmed eyes. “You’re the only one who can fix things. We need you.”

“I—what?” He blinked at her. “Aren’t you, like, some bad spirit? You haunted your sister!”

“Wrong again.Shehauntedme.”

“But all those Reese’s, every time I tasted one—”

“—was because Maura was hurting,” Everleigh supplied. “And starving me in the process. When the Living don’t let go, the Dead go Hungry; we can’t move On. Which is why I was looking for a way to see her again.”

“But how did you—”

“Look, we don’t have a lot of time. The short version? Your food brings spirits back, but it also tethers us to you, which basically traps us here. To rot. To go Hangry—which is like Hungry, except a whole lot worse. Only, the Hangrier we get, the stronger we get, too. Which is why you can see us now. Why we can move things. Why all the smashing and pillaging. And once we realized we had some power, a bunch of us figured we’d just”—she hand-waved—“pop a little hole in the veil. Sneak back through. Save ourselves. But it turns out—funny story—just going back doesn’t do the trick. We broke through to the Afterlife last night, but we still couldn’t move On. Which, I think, is because we’re still attached toyou. And now the veil’s busted and there’s a whole bunch of other spirits using the hole to pour out of the Afterlife, and the longer it stays open, the more Hell’s gonna break loose, and—”

Just then, a chandelier crashed down, illustrating her point. The spirits in the dining room cheered, shrill laughter rising like steam.

“Slow down,” Kostya said, trying to follow her panic attack. “Are we talking, like,actualHell here, or more like a metaphorical Hell, or—”

“Focus, Konstantin! We don’t want to keep going all poltergeist, but we don’t have much choice. The Hanger’s driving most of us now; it’s chaos. You have to get everyone back to the Food Hall before it fully sets in. All the spirits here. You have to move us On.”

“Yup. Okay. I can do that!” He was nodding. “How do I do that?”

“You brought the Dead here, to the Living world, so I’m betting you can do the same thing in reverse. Pied Piper us back with a meal.”

“You mean the aftertastes.”

She nodded.

“Only—you can’t do it from this side. To pull us into the Afterlife, you’d have to beinthe Afterlife.”

“So…?”

“So, if you want to help, you have to die.”

“Wh-what?” He heard the startle in his own voice.

“I’m sorry.” She looked it. “I wanted Maura to tell you; I warned her last night on the platform, when it was clear that the whole ‘tear the veil’ thing didn’t work out. I thought you might help us, but she didn’t want you involved.”

The platform. Those last words he’d said to her, just before she went, about how there was nowe. Her radio silence after. And the recipes she’d taken. Her note.

“No.No no no.”

“Yeah.” Everleigh nodded. “She said she was gonna try and fix this herself.”

“We can’t let her! It’smyfuckup. Just tell me what to do,” he said quickly, and Everleigh floated closer, whispered in his ear, her breath like ice around his neck as his dining room crashed down around them.

“Go,” she said, pulling away. “Out the subway. Hurry.”

And Kostya wove his way back in the dark, toward the staircase to the kitchen, his fingers sliding over broken glass, smashed mirrors, countless years of bad luck, the sheer curtains shredding beneath the palms of his hands, just like the veil between the Living and the Dead.

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