Page 17 of Aftertaste

“How come you wanted it?” Maura asked cautiously. “The candy?”

There was a strange tone to her voice, like she’d guessed the answer and didn’t like it.

“I just—I wanted to try something.”

“What happens when you make the stuff you taste? If you eat it?”

Well wasn’t that the million-dollar question, the peanut-butter-cup-shaped elephant in the room?

“I don’t really know.”

She raised one incredulous brow. “You’ve never tried it?”

“Well, notnever. I did it last week. With a drink.”

“And?”

Kostya’s head gave the tiniest shake, more reflex than response.

“Konstantin, look, you don’t have to tell me—”

“It’s going to sound crazy—”

“—but maybe if you do, I can help you. We can figure out what they want. And if I help you, maybe you can help—”

“Oh, I know what they want.” He gave a desperate, manic, half laugh. “Isn’t it obvious? They want to come back.”

Somewhere inside, in that chasm he tried so hard to keep shut, to block out with binge-eating and heavy drinking and dead-end jobs and women he didn’t love and parties he didn’t want to go to, maybe he’d always known. If he didn’t admit it to himself, maybe he could have unknown it, or convinced himself that there was nothing he could do but taste what they sent through and be on his way. But he’d proven that more was possible, hadn’t he? He’d brought someone back, pulled a spirit through a loophole across a plane she was only supposed to have crossed once, in a one-way trip.

“What happened,” Maura asked slowly, “when you made that drink?”

Kostya picked at a gash on the surface of the table.

“At first, nothing. It was just a cocktail. But when her husband drank it, she—the ghost it belonged to—she came back.”

Maura’s eyes grew round.

“Cameback?Did she stay? Is she still here?”

The mood in the room was different now, colder, the air contaminated with something.

“No. When the drink was done, she disappeared.”

Maura closed her eyes and released a breath.

“Thank fuck. Okay. Listen to me. You need to treadverycarefully.” She spoke softly, as if afraid someone would overhear, but her voice was serrated, dangerous. “You’re dealing with hungry spirits and capital-DDeath and the Hereafter. That’s not stuff you just casually mess around with.”

“I know that—”

“There are balances involved,” she continued, “and systems that’ve spenteternities calibrating themselves. You got lucky once, but that was just dumb luck.”

“It wasn’t luck,” he protested. “It was instinct.”

“You got lucky,” she repeated. “Because no one got hurt.”

“How could anyone get hurt? The ghost was already dead, and raising the Dead isn’t exactly—”

“You’re not listening!” Madame Everleigh—Maura—shouted. “Let me be as idiot-proof as I possibly can here. Don’t ever make their food again.”

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