The Ferryman Institute (18 page)

Pockets of fear were slowly being burned up by a welling anger as this guy continued to talk about her supposedly unavoidable death, the heat of her growing rage mostly fueled by the shame of not actually being dead. There was an intrinsic embarrassment in botching this one final thing that would have taken all the pain away. Though she tried to steel herself, she could hear her voice waver on the verge of tears as she interrupted him.

“All right, you know what? I'm done talking about this. I'm really sorry you came here for nothing, buddy, but as you can clearly see, I'm not dead. Now, you have ten seconds to leave before I call the cops.” Alice desperately wanted to wake up in her bed, sad and alone, but generally in good shape. She screwed her eyes shut and tried to force herself to wake up.

“Whoa . . . Wow. I mean, that's warranted and I'm sorry—I really am—but you don't understand—” Charlie began, but Alice cut him off again.

“Of course I don't understand! Why the hell would I understand?! What is there for me to fucking understand?!” The anger
had well and truly taken over now, the crippling fear relegated to just a distant whimper in the back of her mind. She stood and stepped out of the closet, seething. “I don't care who you are or how you got here, but please leave before I decide to test whether or not a second bullet wouldn't have a much different effect than the first.”

She looked into his face and realized that he was very taken aback by her outburst. Not angry, not afraid, just . . . surprised? He sat still in the chair, observing her with a mix of pity, shame, and burning curiosity. He looked down at the two sheets of paper in his hands again, one of them her note, then sidelong at her. With a fierce glare, she consumed his glance. A moment later, he was standing up as well.

“Sure,” he said, “that's a good idea.” He took a few measured steps that brought him to her desk, then set both pieces of paper he'd been holding down on top of it. He started to reach for a golden key that was sitting on her desk—
Was that what I saw a minute ago?
—but stopped.

“I don't mean to pry,” he said, “but by any chance, did your mother pass away a year ago tomorrow?”

The flicker of surprise momentarily swept across her eyes; she felt it fly by, barely there, but there all the same. She hastily replaced it with cold indifference. “What does it matter to you?” she asked.

He shrugged. “To be honest, I already know your mother passed away.” The Ferryman reached inside his jacket and held up a different piece of paper, a small paragraph no more than a few lines long adorning the top of the page. “Says on the sheet. Just figured I'd ask for the sake of conversation.”

“I don't want—”

“Conversation, I know. I know a lot of things. Part of the job
description,” he added. “But that's not why I brought it up. You just remind me of someone I met about a year ago. Somebody who was pretty tough to forget. If I'm honest, you two look so damn alike it's kind of scary, so I figured maybe there was a connection.”

Alice's breath caught in her throat. How many times had she heard that line before?
Alice, you look just like your mother did when she was your age. You two could be sisters!
Her determined defiance remained, though. “Great, so you've stalked other members of my family. Do you watch my sisters take showers, too?”

The dig didn't bother him, she noted. In fact, he didn't even seem to notice it. He responded without missing a beat, as if Alice hadn't spoken at all. “When she passed away, she was bald. I remember, because her spirit had this absolutely gorgeous, flowing head of brown hair, and there was such a striking juxtaposition between the two that it was hard to believe. She had a birthmark, right here.” He gently tapped the right side of his neck with two fingers, a few inches down from his jaw. “And it was . . . Well, as Ferrymen, we're trained to talk things out—to form a connection as quickly as possible. However, when she passed, we stood there in silence for a solid minute, at least. I don't know why, but we just did. Standing there, not saying a word, was one of the most nerve-racking things I've ever done in an assignment. It was like we just looked at each other, and I knew that she knew, but something told me I needed to wait. Finally, I asked her if she was ready, and she said yes, could she just have a moment to say her good-byes. I said sure. That never happens, which I think is why I happen to remember it.”

His voice seemed to flow from word to word in a way that had her spellbound. Some of what he said made no sense, but the mention of the birthmark in particular had caught her attention. Lucky guess? What would the odds on that be—two different,
older bald women with noticeable birthmarks on the right sides of their necks who died almost exactly a year ago? It wasn't impossible, but at the same time, her heart was willing to accept the other possibility, the one that suggested that maybe this guy wasn't totally full of shit. Like the greatest magicians, he'd earned just enough credibility for her to start wondering if he was actually for real.

Before she even realized it, her eyes had softened dramatically and were now intently focused on the man in front of her.

“What did she say?” she asked, and though Alice had intended for her voice to maintain its stoicism from moments ago, she found it replaced by an uneven tenderness. As soon as the words were out, she cleared her throat.

He smiled at her—a broad, disarming grin in all its glory. There were two things she immediately noticed in that moment. The first was that his smile was just incredibly striking. The second was that, for all its breadth, it betrayed a depth of sadness that she simply couldn't even begin to fathom.

“I don't know,” he said with a shrug.

She opened her mouth to reply, only to taste something salty on the edge of her lips. Tears? When did she start crying? But she knew why—she desperately wanted to believe that this man had known her mother. Had met her. Had remembered her. She wanted that
so badly
that she was willing to entirely suspend her disbelief for those few moments. So, instead of biting back with the arsenal of sarcasm at her disposal, she pressed her lips together and said nothing.

Alice knew he could see this—it wasn't hard to trace the lines of guilt on his face.

“I've said too much. I'm sorry about everything,” Charlie finally said. “Trust me when I say I didn't mean to upset you, but
for what it's worth, this whole thing has thrown me for a loop, too.”

Alice composed herself by clearing her throat several more times. “Don't worry about it . . . I'm pretty convinced this isn't real anyway. Actually, I'm not sure which would be worse—if this is or isn't real.” She took a moment to look over her suicide note from afar, trying to make out her fairly neat handwriting. “And, um, sorry for shooting you in the head, I guess.”

“No worries,” Charlie said. “I feel bad you wasted a bullet on little old me. There's nothing in here anyway,” he joked, knocking on his skull.

“So that's your secret,” Alice said. “Now that I would believe.”

“You and me both.” He reached out his hand to shake. “Thanks. For this. It was—”

She pointed the gun at him. “Please get the hell out of here before I really do call the cops.”

His laugh that followed caught her completely off guard. It seemed honest, so loud and cheerful, like he'd been holding on to it for years. He seemed nice enough, even if he'd entered her life with all the subtlety of a steam locomotive bursting through her bedroom door. Yet there were other things about him—things she couldn't quite put her finger on—that didn't scare her, per se, but made her . . . curious. That laugh, for one. It was always slightly off-putting to be around someone who was laughing at something that you weren't a part of, doubly so if you had a gun leveled at them.

A knowing smirk appeared on his face, a true debonair twist of his lips. “Sure,” he said. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Alice.” He gave a short two-finger salute, then picked up the key off her desk. As soon as his fingers touched it, he disappeared in a blink. Poof—gone, just like that. Alice's mouth fell open. When, after
two minutes, he failed to reappear, she lowered the pistol. Her fingers went weak, slowly unraveling themselves from it until it fell from her hand. Then, like the gun, she, too, crumpled to the ground.

She sat on the floor, legs splayed out underneath her. “What the fuck just happened?” She said the words aloud, but there was no one else there to hear them.

W
hat the fuck just happened?

For the umpteenth time since leaving Alice Spiegel's room, Charlie ran his fingers through his hair. He walked with a slow, deliberate pace down the hallway that temporarily connected her room to the Ferryman Institute. Even allowing for his sluggish pace, the journey felt much longer than normal. The reason for that was obvious enough.

Save the girl . . .
He certainly hadn't been expecting that, not even in his wildest imagination. He never saved the girl.
Watch girl get hit by bus
or
watch girl drink herself to death
, sure, but never
save the girl
—shit, it was never
save
anything: save the date, save your money, save the fucking whales.

Except in this case.

That wasn't completely right, though. The assignment had specifically read,
Be a Ferryman or save the girl. Your choice.

Charlie glanced down at the sheet of paper in his hand. For the first time in his career, there was no check mark in the box labeled
Assignment successfully ferried
.

He'd always known this moment would come eventually. Two hundred and fifty years was too long to go without messing
up at least once. It was bound to happen sooner or later . . .
law of averages, nobody's perfect, you'll get 'em next time, Tiger, yada yada.
Now that it had happened, however, it didn't feel anything like Charlie had imagined. Maybe that had everything to do with the circumstances—after all, it wasn't like he'd failed the assignment. Plus, the mounting pressure for him to succeed was always an internal drive stemming from what failing would mean for the subject of his assignment. In this case, though, Alice was still very much alive. No reason to feel guilty, nothing to beat himself up over. On the other hand, maybe the reality of being perfect minus one just hadn't set in yet. It was certainly too soon to rule that out, but for the moment, Charlie found himself far more concerned with the array of questions bouncing around his head.

Why had the president of the Ferryman Institute given him this assignment in the first place? On top of that, why even give him a choice? Was it some kind of test?

And why Alice Spiegel? With all due respect, Charlie hadn't found her even remotely remarkable. Interesting, maybe, but in addition to being punctual, Death had always been unequivocally impartial. At least, it used to be; now he wasn't so sure.

The most important question, however, was the one he was continually asking himself but was as of yet unable to answer.

Why had he saved her?

Truth was, he didn't know. The timing of everything had been so incredibly fast that his brain had just shut down and instinct had taken over. It was like some dormant part of him had been waiting for that moment, completely prepared to act in the unlikely event of such a scenario. And act it had. He'd willingly committed what was widely considered to be the most heinous violation of Ferryman Laws possible. The “death penalty” didn't
exist in the world of Ferrymen—if it did, a wayward employee determined to get out of their service could simply commit a reprehensible crime and then be rewarded with the desired escape. That was why Purgatory existed. Though rarely used, it turned a Ferryman's greatest asset—immortality—against them. It made solitary confinement—the human kind—look like child's play, a punishment prize package capable of leaving even the most gratuitous masochist in tears.

Even with that hanging over his head, Charlie had saved Alice anyway.

The strangest part of it all? He didn't care. In fact, he felt
good
about it. God, when was the last time he'd said that after an assignment? Actually, had he
ever
said that after one? Was this the start of something new, something worthwhile? Were things maybe, just maybe, starting to turn around for him?

The answer, it turned out, was a resounding no. He opened the door back to the Institute with a firm push, only to find Fate, eternal bastard that it was, gleefully waiting.

“Welcome back, Mssr. Dawson.”

Javrouche's coldly articulate voice slid through the air as the door swung open to reveal the Inspector's smiling face about six feet away. Charlie needed no other sign to know straightaway that something was wrong.