Just… just…"

"Go," I said, smiling.

"And be careful."

"I will," I said, then turned and opened the door.

Chapter 41

I STEPPED INTO A SAGE-AND-GOLD MEADOW POLKA-dotted with jewel-toned wildflowers dipping and swaying in a warm summer's breeze. Overhead, the sun shone from a perfect aquamarine sky, marshmallow clouds drifting past, but never blocking its bright rays. Birds sang from the treetops. A butterfly fluttered past.

"Serial-killer hell, huh?" I muttered. I started turning around. "Trsiel! You sent me to the wrong—"

The door was gone. In its place was a dirt road, lined with tall grass and more wildflowers. The road led to a cluster of picture-perfect stone cottages.

"Trsiel," I sighed. "When you screw up, you go all the way, don't you?"

I took the vial of hellsbane potion from my pocket and peered at the clumps of tarlike ooze suspended in a muddy brown liquid. Yummy. I'd really rather not drink this stuff, only to have Trsiel do a mental forehead smack ten seconds later, realize his mistake, and reopen the door. In the meantime, no harm in checking out this village, seeing what kind of afterlife he had sent me to.

As I approached the village, I was struck by the stillness of it. Though the birds continued to chirp and trill, not a glimmer of movement came from the collection of tiny houses. I shivered, reminded of some long-forgotten TV movie from the seventies, one of those Cold War nuclear-disaster flicks. After the bomb went off, the camera had panned around a pretty little town, devoid of life, only the cheerful tinkle of wind chimes breaking the silence.

That's what this looked like. A ghost town. Only not like any real ghost town I'd ever seen. Walk down any street in our world and, even if you happened to arrive at the rare moment when no one was out-of-doors, you saw signs of life everywhere: a folded paperback under a shade tree, a pair of gardening gloves draped over a bush, an empty coffee mug on a porch railing. But here I saw none of that.

I walked past the first pair of houses, gaze tripping from one to the other. The houses stared back with empty eyes, windows with no curtains or blinds, no hanging plants or gaudy sun-catchers… just blank, dead stares.

I counted eight houses on this street, four to a side, perfectly spaced on postage-stamp lawns. There were no side roads, just this street petering out after a hundred feet to either side of the village, one side ending in the meadow, the other in a forest.

I turned to the house on my left and narrowed my eyes to zoom in on the front windows. Nothing happened. I tried again. Still nothing. Damn.

I looked around, but the caution was more instinctive than intentional; there was no one here. I headed up the walk. The house sat at ground level, with no front porch or patio, just a gravel path leading to a door flanked with empty gardens. Above each garden was a single window. I tramped across the dirt garden and peered inside the left one. A bedroom… or so I assumed from the furnishings. Make that furnishing—singular. The only thing in the room was a twin-size bed. Not much of a bed, either, just a bare mattress on a frame. Cozy.

I walked to the window on the other side of the front door. A living room—dining room combo, with a sofa, a dinette table, and a single chair. A crumpled throw rug in the corner caught my eye. No, not a rug… bedding. A sheet and a blanket lay near the corner, rumpled into a makeshift sleeping place, like a dog's bed.

I looked back at the street. If there had been any dogs here, they were long gone. Not just the dogs, but all animals. The ghost world was like most urban areas—not obviously teeming with animal life, but if you looked close enough, you always saw it—a rabbit darting across a lawn, a gopher peeking from a ditch, a dog stretched out on a front stoop. But here there wasn't so much as a phantom squirrel scampering past. I could still hear the birds, but caught only the occasional glimpse of one, high above in a tree. An empty world. Maybe an afterlife town in the making, awaiting a population spurt, some disaster in the living world. Yet that didn't explain that nest of bedding…

As I turned back to the house, I thought I saw a face reflected in a window of the house across the street. I swung around, but there was nothing there. Instinctively I tried to sharpen my sight, then swore when it didn't work. I scanned the two windows, watching for a shadow, a flicker of movement. Nothing.

Where the hell was Trsiel? I reached into my pocket. As my fingers closed around the vial of hellsbane potion, something rustled beside me. I spun to see a big ornamental bush at the corner of the house, a couple of yards away. The breeze whispered through the leaves. Was that what I'd heard? Must have been, but—

A floorboard creaked. My head shot up and I peered into the house. No way I'd hear a floorboard creak through those thick stone walls. So where… ? My gaze traveled to the wooden porch on the neighboring house. Empty. I listened, body tense, but I heard nothing. Nothing. Not even the birds. I turned toward the window again.

"Was sie sind?"

I wheeled. A man stood behind me, a small man, no taller than five foot four, and thin, with skin that looked like it had been left out in the sun and shrunk, tanned and leathery, stretched taut against his bones. His face was a flesh-colored skull topped with sparse tufts of iron gray hair. As he studied me, he tilted his head to one side, then the other, the movement jerky, birdlike. His eyes lifted to mine, dull gray disks, like worn metal washers. He stared at me, unblinking, head jerking up and down now, taking me in from head to toe.

" Was sie sind?" he said. "Answer. Now. What are you?"

I blinked. As the words switched to English, his lips didn't follow, moving out of sync, like a badly dubbed movie.

At a noise behind me, I glanced over my shoulder and found a man standing in the living room window.

Average height, young—no more than early twenties—with dirty-blond hair that flopped over hooded blue eyes. Those eyes traveled over me, then up to mine, and his upper lips curled back to reveal canines filed to points. He ran his tongue over his teeth.

Another rustle to my left, and a third man stepped off the porch of the neighboring house. He was chubby and baby-faced, with large brown eyes, a small nose, and a receding chin. A huge carved wooden club dangled from his hand. He lifted the club and smiled at me.

"Guess Trsiel didn't screw up after all," I muttered.