Page 91 of Aftertaste

I had to do something. To make it stop.

So I begged you to bring Everleigh back.

I should have told you then. All the things Ev said when she returned.

How her Hunger had been my fault. How my Hunger had been hers. How when we don’t let go, it starves the ones we love. How the Hunger pulls us toward each other because it craves a last goodbye. How that’s what all your ghosts want, too.

She said that what we had to do to feed it was to let each other go.

So we did.

But once Ev disappeared, I still didn’t feel full. Only empty. Only Hungry.

I wish I’d put it together then. I wish I’d guessed. That there was something off with what you were doing. But I just thought the flaw was me—all the times I’d died; all my bad decisions. I’d messed up everything else, so why not this?

I told myself I’d find some other way to feed it. That it could still be okay. That Everleigh was safe now. That most of all, I still had you.

And then, a few weeks later, I started slipping through the veil.

It happened without warning. Without my meaning to. In the middle of a card reading. Halfway through a video game. That night at the opera.

It was like the Hunger finished what it started in my sleep. Like it had found a way to drag me, briefly, through the veil.

And what I saw? Things were messed up in the Afterlife.

Food was burning in the Hall. Stalls were closed, or cooking things no one would eat. The souls on Frankie’s tour were crazed, like any minute they might bolt.

There were signs on our side, too. Like a fungus, spreading from the Dead.

Cold spots in your apartment. Lights that glitched. The thermostat. Food rotting for no reason. Your fridge—it isn’t broken, Stan; it’s haunted.

In the hospital, when you said you tasted Everleigh? I started thinking that your closure wasn’t really closure. That maybe you were tasting her again because she hadn’t actually moved On. Only, if that was true, then where the hell was she? Back in the Afterlife? Somewhere else? Somewhere worse? Where, for that matter, were all the ghosts that you brought back?

This morning, I found out.

Here, Stan. They’re still here.

They never left.

PERISHABLES

MAURA ELIZABETH STRUKtraced her trembling fingers over the lettering on the smooth black door.DUH.An unforgivably stupid name, and yet she could feel the energy in the etching, like a living frost. A restless soul, swirling within.

Or maybe it was her own pulse.

Her head spun. Dizzy. Hot. Every inch of her trembled. It felt exactly like it had on the Met steps, just before she fell. Hypoglycemic. Half-dead.

She was so fucking Hungry.

She pushed open the door and made her way into the foyer—dim, cool, a body cavity—to wait by the host stand, where Konstantin said he’d meet her. Her heels echoed across the floor, the pale silk of her skirt swirling like a phantom over all the shiny surfaces, her face reflected, ghostly, in the mirrored glass.

She drank in the space, feasting her eyes.

DUH was breathtaking, the stuff of designer dreams and architectural hard-ons. But Maura couldn’t shake the feeling it gave her—the feeling it was intended to give—like she was surrounded by Death here. By spirits. By places so thin you could slip right through the barrier to the other side without even realizing you’d gone.

No, she warned herself.Don’t you dare.

She chewed her lip, studied the gauzy curtains, the way they floated over her reflection, a corridor of apparitions.

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