Max paused, his hand on the pub door. “How old are you again?”

“I’ve been to bars before.”

Max only shrugged at this vaguery. Darcy was a published author, after all, and had a reasonably convincing Pennsylvania driver’s license saying she was twenty-three if it came to that. Even so, she found herself grateful to her mother for the little black dress. In the mirror, it had made Darcy look positively adult, and fit perfectly.

“Okay,” Max said. “I’m just going to introduce you to Oscar and leave. I’m not allowed in there.”

“You aren’t twenty-one?”

“I’m twenty-six.” Max gave her an indulgent smile. “But Drinks Night is no agents, no editors, no whatevers. Unless they’re published too, of course.”

“Ah. Of course.” Darcy took a steadying breath as she followed Max inside.

* * *

Darcy had expected Drinks Night to have taken over all of Candy Ruthless. She’d imagined a guest list on a clipboard at the door, or at least a private room separated by bloodred velvet curtains. But now, at ten minutes after six, the reality was a lone wooden table with a drink-ringed, battered surface and three people sitting at it.

Max ushered her forward. “Oscar, this is Darcy Patel.”

Oscar Lassiter rose a little and offered his hand, beaming a class-president smile. “Nice to finally meet you!”

As she took his hand, Darcy realized that the other faces at the table were familiar. She’d seen them in videos, as Twitter avatars, on book jackets.

“Oh,” she said to the less famous of the two, a man with red horn-rimmed glasses and a tweed jacket. “I follow you.”

The man smiled at this, and Darcy felt foolish. The last time she’d checked, two hundred thousand people followed Coleman Gayle. Most of them didn’t read the Sword Singer books, he always complained, and were only there for his profane political commentary and profound knowledge of vintage sock monkeys.

“Good to meet you, Darcy. You know Kiralee?”

“Um, of course.” Darcy turned to face the woman at the table, but her gaze shied away. She could hear the tremor in her own voice. “I mean, we haven’t met. But I totally loved Bunyip.”

“Oh dear, Coleman. She’s got it all wrong!” Kiralee cried. “Save her from herself!”

The others all laughed, but Darcy was perplexed and slightly terrified.

Oscar softly sat her down. “We were just discussing Coleman’s theory about the proper way to meet famous authors.”

“You check their sales on BookScan the day before,” Coleman Gayle explained. “And whichever novel of theirs has sold the least copies, you say that one’s your favorite. Because that’s the one they think is criminally underappreciated.”

“Easy for me, since all of mine sold the least.” Kiralee tipped back her glass until ice rattled. “Except bloody Bunyip, of course.”

“Dirawong’s my favorite,” Darcy said, though really it was second to Bunyip.

“Excellent choice,” Coleman said. “Given the criteria.”

“BookScanning bastard!” Kiralee said to him while toasting Darcy with her empty glass.

Darcy finally managed to meet the woman’s eye. In a gray hoodie, with twin white earbuds draped across her shoulders, Kiralee Taylor was dressed like a jogger. But she had the bearing of a dark faerie queen, her expression arch, her face framed by gray-streaked curly black hair.

“Though I’m afraid I haven’t read your books,” she said to Darcy. “So I can hardly be picky about which you like of mine.”

“No one’s read my books. Book.”

“Darcy’s a deb,” Oscar supplied. “Paradox publishes her next fall.”

“Congratulations,” Kiralee said, and all their drinks went up in salute.

Heat crept across Darcy’s face. She realized that Max had disappeared without even a good-bye, but she was allowed to stay. Here, among these writers.

She wondered how long before someone figured out she was an impostor and asked her to leave. Sitting here, she felt as though her little black dress didn’t fit anymore. It felt too big on her, as if Darcy were a child playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes.

“Welcome to the longest year and a half of your life,” Oscar said. “Published but not printed.”

“Like when you’ve kissed a boy but haven’t shagged him yet,” Kiralee said wistfully.

“Like you would know.” Coleman turned to Darcy. “So what’s your book called?”

“Afterworlds,” Darcy said.

The three of them waited for her to go on, but a familiar paralysis crept over Darcy. It was always like this when someone asked about her novel. She knew from experience that whatever she said now would sound awkward, like listening to a recording of her own voice. How was she supposed to compress sixty thousand words into a few sentences?

“It’s quite good,” Oscar finally offered. “I’m blurbing it.”

“So it’s one of these tedious realistic novels?” Coleman asked. “All the rage now, aren’t they?”

Oscar made a pfft noise. “My tastes are wider than yours. It’s a paranormal romance.”

“Are those still being written?” Kiralee was flagging a waiter down. “I thought vampires were dead.”

Coleman grunted. “They’re exceedingly hard to kill.”

They ordered—Manhattans for Coleman and Oscar, a gin and tonic for Kiralee, and Darcy asked for a Guinness. She found herself glad for the interruption, which gave her time to marshal an argument.

Once the waiter was gone, she spoke, her voice only trembling a little. “I think paranormals will always be around. You can tell a million different stories about love. Especially when it’s love with someone who’s different.”

“You mean a monster?” Coleman said.

“Well, that’s what you think at first. But it’s like, um, Beauty and the Beast. When you find out that the monster is actually . . . nice.”

Darcy swallowed. She’d had this conversation a hundred times with Carla, and had never once resorted to the word “nice” before.

“But doesn’t real love work the other way round?” Kiralee asked. “You start by thinking someone’s fabulous, and by the end of the piece you realize he’s a monster!”

“Or that you’re the monster yourself,” Oscar said.

Darcy just stared at the pockmarked table. She had fewer opinions about real-life love than she did about the paranormal kind.

“So what’s the love interest in Afterworlds?” Coleman asked. “Not a vampire, I trust.”

“Maybe a werewolf?” Kiralee was smiling. “Or a ninja, or some sort of werewolf-ninja?”

Darcy shook her head, relieved that Yamaraj wasn’t a vampire, werewolf, or ninja of any kind. “I don’t think anyone’s done this before, exactly. He’s a—”

“Wait!” Kiralee grabbed her arm. “I’m keen to guess. Is he a golem?”

Darcy laughed, dazzled all over again that Kiralee Taylor was sitting close enough to touch her. “No. Golems are too muddy.”

“What about a selkie?” Coleman suggested. “YA hasn’t had any male selkies.”

“What the hell is a selkie?” Oscar asked. He wrote realistic fiction: coming of age and drunken mothers, no monsters at all. Moxie had wanted a blurb from him to give Afterworlds what she called “a literary sheen.”

“It’s a magicked seal you fall in love with,” Darcy explained.

“Just think of it as a portmanteau,” Coleman said. “Combining ‘seal’ and ‘sexy.’ ”

Oscar raised an eyebrow. “I don’t see the appeal.”

“In any case,” Darcy said, not wanting the conversation to stray too far, “my hottie’s not a selkie.”

“A basilisk, then?” Coleman asked.

Darcy shook her head.

“Best to avoid horny lizards as love interests,” Kiralee said. “And stick with something more cuddly. Is it a drop bear?”

Darcy wondered for a moment if this was a test. Perhaps if she proved her knowledge of mythical beasts, they would take her through a hidden velvet curtain to the real YA Drinks Night.

“Aren’t drop bears more your territory?” she said to Kiralee.

“Indeed.” Kiralee smiled, and Darcy knew she’d gotten a gold star on that one. Or perhaps a gold koala bear sticker. The drinks arrived, and Kiralee paid for them. “A troll? No one’s done them yet.”

“Too many on the internet,” Coleman said. “Maybe a garuda?”

Darcy frowned. A garuda was half eagle and half something else, but what?

“Be nice, you two,” said Oscar.

Darcy looked at him, wondering what he meant, exactly. Were Kiralee and Coleman gently mocking her, or all paranormal romances? But the Sword Singer books were full of romance. Maybe Oscar was simply bored with the mythical bestiary game.

“Darcy’s love interest is really quite original,” he said. “He’s a sort of a . . . psychopomp. Is that the right word?”

“More or less,” Darcy said. “But in the Vedas, the Hindu scriptures I was using for inspiration, Yamaraj is the god of death.”

“Emo girls love death gods.” Kiralee took a long drink. “License to print money!”

“How do you hook up with a death god, anyway?” Coleman asked. “Near-death experience?”

Darcy almost coughed out her mouthful of beer. Lizzie’s brush with death was the book’s unique selling point, the singular idea that had carried Darcy through last November, and Coleman had just come up with it off the top of his head.

“Um, not exactly. But . . . kind of?”

Coleman nodded. “Sounds pleasingly dark.”

“The first chapter is megadark,” Oscar said. “There’s this awful terrorist attack, and you think the protag’s going to get killed. But she winds up . . .” He waved his hand. “No spoilers—just read it. Much better than your average paranormal.”

“Thank you,” Darcy said, smiling, though suddenly she wondered how good Oscar Lassiter thought the average paranormal was.

CHAPTER 8

I COULDN’T TELL THE FBI anything new, and the doctors had found nothing wrong with me that stitches couldn’t cure, so two mornings after the attack, we left Dallas in a rental car.

Mom hated road trips, because highways in the hinterlands scared her. But she was worried I’d start screaming if I saw DFW airport again, or any airport. What she didn’t realize was that I was too numb for anything so dramatic.

It wasn’t just exhaustion. There was a sliver of cold still inside me, a souvenir of the darkness I’d passed through. A gift from the other side. Whenever I remembered the faces of the other passengers, or when a clatter in the hospital corridors sounded like distant gunfire, I closed my eyes and retreated to that cool place, safe again.

We left the hospital in secret. One of the administrators led us through basement corridors to a service exit, a squeaky metal door that opened onto a staff parking lot. No reporters waited there, unlike the front entrance.

There were pictures of me in the news already. Lizzie Scofield, the Sole Survivor, the girl who’d sputtered back to life. My story was uplifting, I suppose, the only bright spot in all that horror. But I didn’t much feel like a symbol of hope. The stitches in my forehead itched, loud noises made me jump, and I’d been wearing the same socks for three days in a row.

Everyone kept saying how lucky I was. But wouldn’t good luck have been taking a different flight?

I hadn’t read any newspapers, and the nurses had kindly shut my door whenever radios and TVs were blaring near my room, but the headlines had leaked into my brain anyway. All those stories about the other passengers, all those people who’d been strangers to me, just passersby in an airport. Suddenly the details of their lives—where they’d been headed, the kids they’d left behind, their interrupted plans—were news. Travis Brinkman, the boy who’d fought back, was already a hero, thanks to security camera footage.