Till the Last Beat of My Heart

by Louangie Bou-Montes

Genres: YA Contemporary; YA LGBT & Pride; YA Paranormal

Synopsis

In this YA contemporary fantasy, the teen son of the local mortician accidentally reanimates the dead body of the boy he had more than friendly feelings for, but can he keep him alive for good before their time runs out? Perfect for fans of Cemetery Boys and The Taking of Jake Livingston! 

When you grow up in a funeral home, death is just another part of life. But for sixteen-year-old Jaxon Santiago-Noble, it’s also part of his family’s legacy. Most dead bodies in the town of Jacob’s Barrow wind up at Jaxon’s house; his mom is the local mortician, after all. He doesn’t usually pay them much mind, but when Christian Reyes is brought in after a car accident, Jaxon’s world is turned upside down.

There are a lot of things Jaxon wishes he could have said to his once best friend and first crush. When he accidentally resurrects Christian, Jaxon might finally have that chance. But the more he learns about his newfound necromancy, the more he grasps that Christian’s running on borrowed time—and it's almost out.

As he navigates dark, mysterious magics and family secrets, Jaxon realizes that stepping into an inherited power may also mean opening up old family wounds if he wants to keep the boy he may be falling for alive for good.

Release date: September 10, 2024

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 384

Sample

One

Christian Reyes is dead, and he’s in my basement.

I had nothing to do with either of those things. I’m . . . still processing. Yesterday afternoon, Christian was trying to invite everyone in our math class to the party at the Davies twins’ house that night while me and Regan pretended to be too sucked into our work to talk to him. Tonight, he’s on the steel table in my basement while I’m sitting on the blue and bronze patterned Persian rug in the parlor right above him, staring at my chemistry textbook.

My mom runs a funeral home, so we’re always among the first to know when someone’s died in Jacob’s Barrow. We also live here; Mami apprenticed under the last guy who owned it and he let her stay in the upstairs apartments when she and my dad were broke, new parents. When she took over the business, we kept the apartments, so I’ve had all sorts of dead people in my basement. From grandparents to teachers to neighbors. It’s not unusual to know the person on my mom’s worktable in a town as small as ours.

This is my first time having a classmate down there, though.

Mami can be kind of stoic, but I know she likes her job. She talks to me about it all the time; I know she prides herself on mixing skin pigments that suit bodies better than the three or four shades suppliers have available, and I know she finds purpose in providing comfort and closure to people in their darkest time. She doesn’t hide any part of her job from me, ever.

So when she spent a solid ten minutes blocking me from the basement doorway, evading my questions about the body delivered to us today, looking at me with tears welling in her dark brown eyes, I knew something was wrong.

“Jaxon, baby,” she’d said after I insisted that she tell me what was going on about a hundred times. Though she’s always been soft-spoken, her voice wavered like it almost never did. “It’s Christian. Conce’s boy. He got into a big accident, and he . . . he didn’t make it, mijo.”

Since then, the inside of my head has felt like a crystal ball: foggy, swirling, full of pictures and ideas that don’t make sense.

It’s weird. I want to text Regan and tell her, but how do you tell someone that the kid we used to watch horror movies with in elementary school is dead? Christian’s not even our friend anymore; now he’s a guy from our neighborhood who hangs out with the crew team at school and wanders around on his own at night trying to get pictures of cryptids. I could go on a walk to try telling her face-to-face but I would have to pass Christian’s house, and I don’t know about all that.

The whole thing feels surreal.

Mami comes up from the basement, her heels clicking on the wooden steps before she comes through the door. She always looks regal, with her hair shaved almost as close as mine, her neck and shoulders upright, adding as much height as she can get on her short frame. Today, her face looks drawn, the deep brown of her cheeks gone ashen. She looks at me, sitting in the middle of the parlor, shaking her head.

“I’m not sending you to school on Monday,” she says, coming over to sit on the floor beside me. “I can’t even get work done right now. He’s a little more cleaned up, but . . . I don’t know. I might call Monica in and oversee instead.”

Monica is my mom’s apprentice; she does good work. She took care of my dad when my mom was too messed up to go anywhere near him but wanted him done here with us.

“That’s probably a good idea,” I say, closing my chem book. “Are you gonna be okay? I’ve never seen you this upset even when you worked on people you knew.”

She smiles, a soft, sad smile that doesn’t reach her eyes, and pulls me in by the shoulder, leaning down to press her lips against the top of my head.

“Me and Conce were pregnant at the same time.” She brushes her fingers over my tight fade, probably trying to rub the lipstick off my hair. “It was my first time ever, and she was having her first boy . . .

I don’t know. Maybe I should have said no. I think it means a lot to Conce that he’s here. Like he’s with family.”

I don’t know what to say to that. Christian’s never felt like family to me, even when we were friends. First of all, I had a huge crush on him . . . not that my mom knew. Second, he was always loud and kind of annoying, which never really changed as far as I could see. It just got less cute to me after middle school, I guess. If anything, he’s more of a nuisance.

Was more of a nuisance.

A wave of dizziness hits me out of nowhere and I press the heel of my hand against my forehead. Mami rubs circles between my shoulder blades, sighing.

“Oh, baby,” she whispers, pressing her cheek against my shoulder. “It’s gonna be okay.”

“No, I’m fine.” And I am, I think. There’s no reason for me to be this upset, really. “I think I’m still . . . shocked.”

Mami tries to look into my face, her eyes searching, thin eyebrows drawn together in concern. She pulls away after a moment, squeezing the nape of my neck.

“I need to take a drive. You wanna come with me? We can get something to eat.”

I shake my head. Mami takes comfort in food when she’s upset, but I can’t think about eating. My stomach feels like a dank old cave, cold and empty. I’m pretty sure it’s gonna feel that way until Christian’s out of our basement and in the ground.

“Nah . . . I’ll stay.”

Mami looks at me like she’s gonna try to change my mind, but instead she pulls me in to kiss the top of my head again. She stands up, brushes her hands over her dark, high waisted pants, and looks at me.

“You’ll be okay? I can order in instead.”

I nod. “I’ll be fine. Bring me back some fries?”

“Sure thing, mijo.” She pats her pockets for her keys, then looks at me as she grips the keys in her palm. “Don’t go down there. Alright, Jaxon? Kids shouldn’t have to see their friends like that.”

“I know, Mami.” I resist the urge to roll my eyes. I’m turning seventeen next weekend, I’m not some impressionable little kid. Anyway, I’ve been around dead bodies since before I can remember. They haven’t messed me up yet; one more’s not gonna do it.

She pauses for another moment, looking like she wants to say more, but she gives me a sad smile before heading out through the foyer.

We both know I’m going down there. How can I not? And it’s not morbid curiosity, really. It’s a need to make this . . . real. Christian Reyes, the occult-loving nerd from elementary school who got too handsome to stay uncool, dead?

I know death 

 can feel unreal. After years of helping my mom choose options for tiny baby coffins to attending my father’s funeral, I know how hollow and fucked up death can be. Processing that someone who shouldn’t be gone has gone anyway is like watching an asteroid approaching earth. There’s nothing you can do. You know it’s happening. All you can do is sit there bracing for impact.

Seeing the body speeds up the process. So that’s what I’m gonna do.

Grimalkin, our cat, comes down to the parlor when she hears Mami’s heels clicking against the stone path leading to our driveway. She meows at the door, then turns her big orange eyes on me and stalks over to bump her head against my arm. She sits down primly on my chem book, looking like a smug, slate-gray gargoyle. I pet her head while I wait to hear the car engine start and the crunch of the tires rolling over the asphalt.

It’s time. I walk through the parlor, past the small showing room into the kitchen. The downstairs kitchen, like the rest of the first level of our house, isn’t for daily use. At most, Mami makes tea to comfort the bereaved as they make funeral decisions, and at some wakes, they have small food platters that we keep in here. More than anything, the downstairs kitchen holds the gateway to the basement.

Grimalkin follows my heels only to meow in annoyance when she sees where I’m headed. The cat, obviously, isn’t allowed in the mortuary. She hates not being allowed anywhere.

“Sorry, Grim,” I say, shooing her away from the basement door as I go through it. She tries to squeeze through with me, but I manage to get in, shutting the door before she can poke her head through. She wails at me from the kitchen, accompanied by the gentle thumps of her head and the scritch of her paws trying to open the door. “I’ll be back; be patient.”

The light in the staircase is a single, dim bulb, but the lights are on downstairs. In Mami’s mortuary, she’s got bright overhead lights that gleam off the white and steel surfaces of the room. It’s a harsh, unforgiving brightness, and as soon as I get far enough down the stairs to see the steel table in the center of the room, the glare feels like an icy stab to the chest when it reveals Christian’s body lying prone on the table.

It doesn’t look like him. Under the cold light, his skin looks gray, traces of dried, brown blood matting the curls on top of his head. It takes me a while to come any closer than the foot of the stairs. From here, that body could be another boy that looks like my classmate—another lightskin boy with big feet and curly hair.

But I know it’s him. The weirdest thing is that it’s not because Mami told me, or because I can kind of see his face under the glare of the light. It’s like the air itself down here is thick with Christian’s

absence. It’s the feeling of knowing down to your bones that someone is in the next room, so you start talking to them before you even get in only to find that they’re not there after all. Christian’s as much on the table as he is nowhere at all.

When I finally come up to him, it’s weird how much it does and doesn’t look like Christian. The sharp, handsome lines of his jaw and the manicured shape of his eyebrows are distinct, but the grimace left across his face by the rigor makes it hard to recognize him.

He’ll be easy enough to make look good for the funeral, at least. The brunt of the damage is on his chest: a dark, massive bruise that spans from the edge of his collarbones to the top of his stomach and a caved-in sternum. Most of the lacerations on his face are thin, weblike scratches I can barely see now that he’s been cleaned up and livor mortis has pulled his blood to the back of his body. The only injury that will take my mom a little more wax to cover up for the viewing is the gash stretching from above the arch of his left eyebrow to the highest edge of his cheekbone. His neck’s broken, but Mami’s fixed up about a thousand broken necks.

“You know something,” I start, my voice too loud in the sterile silence of the room, “I never thought you were such a dumbass. Mami told me the hospital said you were texting and driving.”

Mami broke most of the rigor setting into Christian’s limbs. I pick up one of his hands, cool to the touch, turning it over to look at the crescent-shaped indents on his palms left by his fingernails. I imagine Christian, slumped dead over his steering wheel, then alone in a hospital morgue before they called his mom.

Christian and I . . . our friendship ended kind of abruptly. After the stuff with my dad’s passing, we never really recovered. He got involved with sports, I didn’t, and we drifted apart. My painfully huge crush on him didn’t help either; that’s not Christian’s fault, obviously, since he didn’t even know. All the same, it made it twice as hard to find my footing in our relationship again.

My chest aches for him, naked and mangled on a table in the basement of the guy he fell out with. Who would want that? A smart kid like him—even a weird and kind of annoying one—dying for such a stupid mistake feels so wrong.

I place Christian’s hand back in the position I found it in, his cold, stiff fingers curving gently over the reflective surface of the table.

“Christian . . . it felt so impossible before to approach you and try to be . . . friends again. Forget actually telling you how I felt about you. It really is impossible now, and I wish I’d known we were gonna run out of time.” I keep my eyes on his pale gray nail-beds as I whisper. It’s painful, and embarrassing, to stand here knowing I’ll never know what could have been if I’d swallowed a little pride instead of holding grudges. “If I could breathe you back to life right now, I would. Not just for me. You deserve better than this.”

My head swims for a second, and I grip the edge of the table to hold myself steady. In the next moment, something drips out of my nose, but before I can plug it with my wrist, two red drops of blood land on Christian’s arm.

I curse under my breath and use the edge of my sleeve to wipe the blood off his skin, glancing up at him apologetically as if he felt it. 

Christian’s face moves then, which isn’t as weird as it sounds. People think dead bodies fall prone and never move again after death, but it’s not true. Mami must not have gotten through massaging out all of Christian’s rigor mortis, so his body’s in an awkward state of half-stiff and half-slack; it’s not unheard of for muscles to shift after death, especially in this state. A soft huff comes through his nostrils, and his expression changes, his eyelids going smooth as if he’s only sleeping.

With his pale face strangely tranquil, I feel like I’m trespassing on him as he tries to rest from his injuries.

“I should go,” I tell him, backing up toward the foot of the stairs again. “Promise we’ll give you a good funeral. It’s the least I can do.”

I walk backward until the backs of my heels touch the lowest step. I look up to see Christian one last time before he’s dolled up to look a little less dead.

And he’s looking at me.

Clumsy as ever, I stagger back in alarm and trip over the stairs, falling so hard on my butt my tailbone rumbles against the wood. My hands scrabble over the thin carpet lining the steps as I try to climb backward, getting a full three steps up before I realize he’s not looking at me. His eyelids have flipped open, and his head is tipped sideways, which . . . well, that happens sometimes too.

It’s never happened to me . . . and my mom’s never told me about something like that happening to her, but . . . Mami says bodies do crazy things. Even from here, I can see the dull haze beginning to creep over Christian’s unfocused eyes.

It’s probably nothing. All the same, a cold wave of dread raises goose bumps all over me. Staying down here doesn’t feel right. It feels stupid to say goodbye, but it also feels wrong to say nothing at all.

“I’m . . .” I straighten up, climbing the stairs step by step, backward. “I’m gonna go.”

It takes twice as long to go backward up the stairs, but the thought of turning my back on Christian’s restless body makes the hair on my arms staticky with anxiety. I’m used to dead bodies, but I can’t shake the image of Christian crawling up the stairs after me like something from The Exorcist. It’s only when I’m back at the top of the stairs, listening to Grimalkin still trying to force the door open, that I turn around. I nudge Grim away with my foot and shut the door behind me, keeping it pressed closed with my hand flat against it until I turn the lock on the knob in place.

“Let’s get out of here, huh?” I say to Grimalkin, who stares up at me for a beat before meowing in response. I stoop down to gather her in my arms, and she nestles against the thick black sleeves of my hoodie. We duck back into the parlor to grab my phone, then make our way upstairs.

The second floor is where most of our living spaces are: the small landing with a fireplace we use as our living room, the secondary kitchenette installed back when my parents first moved in, and one large

 bedroom Mami and Dad transformed into a personal library, shelves stuffed with books he’d written. When my dad was alive, and home, he usually did his writing in there. Guests, even grieving ones, are nosy, however, so our bedrooms are all the way on the third floor.

By the time I make it to the third-floor landing, Grimalkin is squirming in my arms. I put her down, letting her lead the way, slinking along the runner lining the hardwood floor.

Grimalkin stops in front of my door, marked by the vintage Night of the Living Dead poster taped over it. I turn the doorknob as Grimalkin, impatient as ever, presses her face against the crack in the door until it’s wide enough for her to dart through.

I follow her, shutting the door behind me. In my room, more vintage horror posters line the walls in shades of black, yellow, red, and green. I have everything from Creature from the Black Lagoon to Them! to Mothra. Every year, Mami finds me more. The hardwood floor is bare, but it’s early enough in October that the chill doesn’t reach the third floor yet. Grimalkin walks up to my tall oak bureau and rubs her face against the edge of it, sitting back on her haunches, considering the height she’ll need to clear to jump to the top.

“Grim,” I groan, coming over to shoo her away, “not up here, okay? This stuff can break.”

Most of the things in my room are pretty benign or at least cat-proof. I’ve got a collection of weird rocks from the woods scattered around different corners of the room, a bookshelf packed with books and movies, a couple spiritualist knickknacks that don’t work—Ouija boards, pendulums . . . shit like that. On the bureau, though, I’ve got a few cool bones I picked up in the woods. The owl skull I found the morning before my father died, the fox skull a few weeks after that. I cleaned them up and set them on my bureau to flank the only thing my father left me: an old, broken pocket watch that I don’t know how to fix.

Dad was . . . distant. Literally, he was physically distant, often gone for weeks on end. When he was home, he was quiet and withdrawn, holed up in the library writing most of the time. Sometimes he joined us for meals or go out on a drive with me or something, but as I got older, we saw him less and less until we barely ever saw him at all. And then he died.

He was like a ghost to begin with. A faint presence, more felt and talked about than.

 seen.

I tear my eyes away from Dad’s watch, shaking off the memory as I head to my bed tucked into the far corner of the room. I drop down onto it on my back, shuffling on the mattress until I can pull my purple comforter with black bats over my head. A moment later, Grimalkin hops up onto the bed, climbing on top of my stomach and kneading her paws over the comforter.

I should tell Regan.

There are no messages on my phone, which is typical but also tells me that word hasn’t spread about Christian yet. I open Regan’s texts, though I can’t think of anything to say. The last thing Regan texted me was a long rant about how she ate shit on her longboard and almost lost a tooth. The last thing I said to her was: one day you’re gonna kill yourself on that thing.

It’s too weird. I call her instead.

She picks up after one ring.

“Hello?” she answers, her voice lilting up with surprise. “Jax?”

“Um . . . yeah. Hey.”

“Hey! You never call!” She pauses. “No one ever calls. What’s up?”

“Um . . .” I push the covers off my head and sit up, which earns me a soft, irritated growl from Grimalkin, who refuses to move. “Something happened. Something bad happened.”

“What?” Regan’s voice goes sharp and clear. I can’t see her, but I can tell she’s frozen wherever she is. “Are you okay? Is Tessa okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine, Mami’s fine.”

“Is Grim, okay??”

“Yeah, Regan, Grim’s good.” I reach down to scratch the top of her head, but Grim swats my hand away. “It’s . . . there’s a body here. It’s—”

“A body? Who died?”

“It’s Christian.”

“Christian?” she echoes immediately, like she thinks she’s misheard. “What?”

“It’s Christian Reyes from school. He’s here. He’s . . . he’s dead. In the basement.”

Regan stammers for a second, no words forming. Then she falls silent. She takes so long to respond that I pull my phone away for a moment to check that the call hasn’t dropped.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Regan says, breathless like she’s been punched in the stomach. “Jesus Christ, Jaxon. Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“What happened to him?”

I close my eyes, squeezing hard, trying to block out the mental image of Christian’s chest sunken in and marbled with bruising.

“Crashed his sedan into a truck. No seatbelt. Airbags didn’t deploy.”

Regan hisses on the other line. “Oh, Christian . . . oh, God. God. I can’t even believe that!”

“I know. I’m really sorry to tell you.”

“God, Jax . . . man. We never really made up with him.”

I rub my fingers against my temple, leaning back against the wall. “Nah. I never really made up with him. You were nice to him sometimes.”

“Sometimes,” she agrees, not sounding convinced.

I let my head drop

back against the wall with a dull thud. “We didn’t know something like this was gonna happen, Regan.”

“Yeah . . .” She exhales hard. “I gotta tell my family.”

“Okay. I’ll let you go. You can call me later if you want. Or text, whatever.”

“Thanks. And thanks for telling me.”

“Yeah,” I mutter for lack of anything better to say. There’s no one else I would tell. “Bye.”

“Later.”

I spend the rest of the afternoon in my room, trying to fight off the sharp spines of anxiety digging into my chest. Lying in bed keeps me from getting lightheaded, and Grimalkin’s warm weight and purring is comforting against my stomach. Through the window next to my bed, I watch the light filter through the bright yellow leaves of the giant elm tree in our yard, the blue of the sky between the gaps deepening into pink as evening comes closer.

I don’t know when I fall asleep, but when I wake up again, it’s almost pitch black in my room except for the pseudonight-light on my bedside table, a mason jar of sheep eyes preserved in formaldehyde sitting on top of a small grid of purple LED lights. Grimalkin paws at my closed door across the room and I sit up, turning on the actual lamp at my bedside. I can’t tell what woke me—the dull ache in my head and limbs or the butter, garlic, and onion smell coming through the floorboards.

Of the two, the smell interests me more. Mami must be home.

I roll out of bed, let Grim out through the door, and the smell hits me harder in the hall. The garlic and onion joined by the sweet smell of chicken and the achiote-cumin scent of habichuelas guisadas is enough to make me rush down to the second-floor kitchen.

Mami’s standing at the stove, barefoot, switching between checking the chicken in the oil and stirring the thick, red sauce the beans cook in. At the square table on the other side of the kitchen, she’s already laid out a plate of fried tostones, steaming and glistening, fresh out of the frying pan. Beside it, there’s a small bowl of mayoketchup.

I know I told her I wasn’t hungry, but I can’t help smiling.

“Mami . . .”

She looks over her shoulder and nods me over, a small smile gracing her lips.

“Hey, baby. I was going to wake you when it was done.”

“I thought you were gonna get fast food? You’re throwing down in here.” I come over and pick up the fork for the chicken, standing in front of the sizzling pan to take over for her.

“I thought it’d inspire a little appetite in you.” She wraps her arm around my shoulders and kisses my cheek, shaking me gently. “¿Qué te parece? Family dinner? You can even call Regan over, si quieres.”

Mami, despite being Dominican and knowing a wide breadth of Dominican and, thanks to my dad, Puerto Rican dishes, speaks very little Spanish. I speak even less. I only ever try with her.

I lean my head down against hers. “Nah. Mejor solo nosotros.”

Mami turns off the burner, bringing plates over to scoop white rice onto, then

beans. She glances at me, raising an eyebrow. “¿Encima o al lado?”

I roll my eyes. I haven’t asked for beans on the side since I was like ten, but she still asks. “Encima is fine.”

I grab a plate, cover it with paper towels, then fish the fried chicken out of the oil, setting the pieces down on the table to finish popping and sizzling as they cool. Mami sets our plates down as I fill cups with water. It’s comforting, falling back into a routine after a day so out of the ordinary.

“Pues, go ahead,” she says.

I grin, dropping a drumstick on my plate quick before it burns my fingers. I didn’t realize how hungry I was until this moment. Eating a forkful of rice and beans, salty from the tocino but sweet from the tomato sauce, my mouth waters, and my stomach growls with sudden awareness of how long it’s been since I put anything in it.

Mami points her fork at me, smirking triumphantly.

I point my fork back at her, dabbing my eyes with my sleeve as if crying in defeat.

“It’s really good.”

Even if it wasn’t, I’d tell her it was just for the way her chin lifts, eyes gleaming with pride. She eats in delicate forkfuls, the triumphant look staying fixed on her face, pushing more food onto my plate whenever it starts clearing up. It feels weird to smile and laugh over dinner while Christian is two floors below us—I can’t push him out of my mind; he’s like a constant fog over my brain—but I’m warmer and lighter knowing that my mom’s happier.

It isn’t until we’ve scraped our plates clean that her face fades from pleased to gray with exhaustion. She leans her head on her hand and rubs the space between her eyebrows, sighing through her nose.

“You should get some rest, honey. And try to be out of the house tomorrow. I don’t want you here while me and Monica are . . . working. Okay?”

I stand up, gathering our plates. “Yeah. I’ll clean up if you wanna take the first shower?”

Mami squeezes my elbow as I pass by, then scrapes her chair back, getting up.

“Alright—but don’t you dare go back down there again, you hear me?” She holds her finger up at me as I open my mouth to lie. “I know you went. You moved the body around.”

“I didn’t move it around,” I say, placing the dishes in the sink as she narrows her eyes at me. “It just moved . . . while I was down there. I’m sorry.”

She shakes her head and waves a hand in my direction, heading for the doorway. “Don’t do it again.”

“It was like a weird rigor thing, I swear.”

“Ya te dije. Seriously, Jaxon.”

I turn on the tap and start washing. “Yeah, okay.”

I can’t lie; I feel a pull to go back to the basement. I know Mami’s probably wrapped Christian up so it would be way more trouble than it’s worth to look at him, but it’s like there’s a wire pulling me from the pit of my stomach down through the floorboards into

the morgue.

I ignore it, scrubbing the plates and pans, leaving the kitchen as orderly as I can before heading upstairs. The pull in my stomach stays; like a dog on a leash, tugging against it makes my insides constrict.

Mami really will kill me, though, if I do. It’s not an option.

At my door, I click my tongue a few times, calling for Grim. Now that I think of it, I haven’t seen her since dinner, which is strange. She usually likes to eat her meal along with us, but I don’t see her for the rest of the night, even after my turn in the bathroom.

I leave my bedroom door open in case she shows up.

 

Two

Consciousness hits me like a meteor to the chest in the middle of the night. The first sound I hear before my eyes open is my voice leaving my throat in a strangled cry. I roll onto my side, nauseous, breathing so hard I cough and choke on the air. The first coherent thought that manages to filter through my brain is: Christian.

He’s dead. I didn’t dream that . . . right? No, he’s dead. But he floods my every thought even as I try to regain my bearings. The image of him on the table, the darkness of the morgue, the frigid stiffness of his fingers, the mottled coloring of his bruised, sunken chest.

Trying to shake the images out of my head, I reach for my phone. The screen is blinding in the darkness of my room. I can’t focus on the numbers or the tiny letters on the push notifications filling the lock screen, so I drop my phone on my comforter, reaching to turn on the light instead.

Was I having a panic attack in my sleep? Is that possible?

I stumble out of my room, legs shaking hard enough to make my knees buckle as I crash my way into the bathroom. I flip the lights on and drop down onto the cool tile floor, pressing my hands against it, blinking hard to try to stop the spinning in my head.

I barely register that I woke Mami until she’s in the bathroom with me, kneeling on the tile in her white nightgown. She presses her soft, warm hands to my cheeks, my neck, and the top of my spine as she pulls me into her. She smells like lavender vanilla lotion; it’s familiar enough to quell some of the lurching in my stomach.

“Breathe, Jaxon,” she murmurs, rubbing wide circles over my back and holding my head against her shoulder. “I told you not to go down there, you see?”

“I feel—” I say, sitting up straighter, trying to shake my head clear.

I stop then because Mami clamps her hand over my mouth, her entire body suddenly as straight and rigid as a gravestone. Her expression is tight, her eyes wide, nostrils flared. I freeze with her, straining to hear something beyond the autumn wind outside and faint creaks of the house settling in the cold.

Then, I hear it.

It’s a faint but distinct crash. A clanging clatter from somewhere downstairs. My stomach strains, like it’s trying to find its way outside of me. Grimalkin meowls from downstairs.

“Someone’s in the house,” Mami whispers, cupping a hand around the back of my head. “Come to my room. I’m calling the police.”

I feel sick. Grimalkin yowls again.

“It’s coming from the morgue,” I say. I don’t know why I’m certain about it. It’s like the wire I felt pulling me down there earlier has become electrified. “It’s Christian.”

I expect Mami to clamp her hand over my mouth again, but instead she stares at me, her eyes flitting back and forth between mine. She looks down like she’s trying to see the morgue through the bathroom floor, her arms tight around me to keep me from moving.

“What did you do?” she asks.

I stammer at her for a moment. She thinks I caused this? How?

“I . . . I . . . I don’t know! I feel it . . . it’s him, he’s—”

I stop because I don’t know what he is. He’s down there, he’s dead, and he’s calling me.

“Get your father’s watch.”

“What?”

She wraps her hands around my upper arms and stands, looking into my eyes as she hauls me up with her.

“Your father’s pocket watch. Did you lose it?”

“No, but—”

“Grab the watch and

 come downstairs.”

“Mami, what’s going on?”

She shakes her head, lips pulled thin in impatience as she turns me around and pushes me through the door.

“Don’t go down there without me,” I tell her over my shoulder, staggering toward my room.

“Jaxon, baby, get the watch,” she orders sharply, already running downstairs.

I almost trip over my own feet running back into my room. Crashing into my bureau, I brace myself against the drawers as the fox skull goes clattering onto the floor. I grab the pocket watch, cold in my tight fist, and run, taking the stairs two at a time until I make it to the kitchen.

I hear him. I know Mami does, too; her hands shake as she unlocks the basement. The sound coming from downstairs is disturbingly human, wheezing cries, scraping coughs, and choking sounds. When Mami finally pulls the door open and flips the light switches on, the voice downstairs yelps in surprise, then lets out a scream that rattles my teeth in my skull.

We scramble down the stairs, but I trip over the last few steps as soon as I see Christian. My legs give way beneath me. I land hard on the concrete floor, my father’s pocket watch skittering away from me, but all I see is him.

Christian’s sprawled on his stomach on the ground, the steel worktable spilled over on its side behind him. He’s pale, his lips and fingers and eyelids tinged with blue, his entire back still deep purple from the livor mortis, skin drenched with sweat. He looks at me, and his eyes—dull and filmed over earlier this afternoon—are bright with tears and bloodshot, wide with desperate fear.

“Jaxon?” he cries, lungs wheezing audibly.

I don’t have to look to know the state his lungs are in.

“It—it’s okay, Christian,” I stammer, voice shaking as I look to my mom. Her face looks blurry. I squeeze my eyes shut for a second to try to bring the world back into focus.

Mami rushes over to kneel by Christian’s side, placing her hands over his hair and on his back, shushing him. He clutches at the skirt of her nightgown, trying to breathe through his gasping and choking.

“Get the pocket watch,” she says to me, pointing her chin to where it landed on the ground. “Grab the watch, baby. Avanza.”

I crawl across the floor as my mom tries to soothe Christian with soft reassurances, brushing her fingers through his curls. Even on my hands and knees, my limbs tremble like they can’t bear to support my weight, but I make it far enough to grab the pocket watch again and sit on my knees.

“Mami . . . what do I do?”

“Open it,” she instructs, pulling Christian up into her lap by his shoulders carefully and running her hands over his back to calm his shaking. “Then touch him and turn the hands back.”

My first thought is that sounds ridiculous. But I go with it, stumbling over to them and taking Christian’s frozen hand. His fingers clench around mine so tightly my knuckles grind together. The look in his eyes—wild, alert, alive—makes the bile rise in the back of

my throat.

I flip the watch face open, the inside of the cover flashing Jadiel, my father’s name, carved into the metal under my grandfather’s name. My fingers still shake, but Christian’s vise grip and shuddering, reedy breaths keep me focused on the task at hand.

Dad taught me how to do this once, weeks before he died. I imitate the motions now, tracing my thumb along the edge of the dial, swinging the lever away from it with my nail, and twisting the crown at the top with my thumb and forefinger. I open my mouth to ask my mom what I’m supposed to set the watch to, but before I can get a word out my body shudders hard and I cry out, tightening my grip on Christian’s hand.

Blood pounds in my ears, my arms are vibrating, and my heart is banging against my sternum. My breath stutters out of me, lungs struggling to inflate as my vision flashes with black.

It burns. Everywhere, every inch of my body inside and out, feels sharp and hot and alive.

I can’t hear anything. The rushing sound in my ears blocks almost everything out. Only Christian’s screams, sharp and piercing, cut through the static. I grit my teeth, molars grinding hard against each other, squeezing my eyes shut as I keep turning the crown of my father’s watch, faster now, trying to stay focused. The pain ebbs, gradually dulling into a sharp ache in my chest and the side of my head. A sharp crack and a yelp from Christian prompts me to open my eyes.

He’s changed. His brown skin is still pale, but now it’s even and unmottled, the white lights gleaming off the sheen of sweat covering his body. He takes a deep, rattling breath and coughs. Blood splatters from his mouth, bright red, spraying my mom’s nightgown and dripping from the end of his chin, but his next breath sounds normal. When he groans, it’s clear, no reedy wheeze.

“Set it there, Jaxon,” Mami says to me, turning Christian’s face delicately with her fingers. The gash across his eye is bleeding anew, deep red.

I push the lever back in place, then shut the watch. When I let go of Christian’s hand, I sway, head swimming, but Mami reaches out to steady me. Her hand feels cool and soft against the back of my neck.

“You’re right here with me,” she murmurs. “Breathe.”

I do, my breath shaking with the trembling rocking my whole body. My face feels wet, and touching over my lips, I find my nose has started bleeding again, profusely this time. Christian’s out cold, draped over my mom’s lap, his back rising and falling with new, steady breaths. She keeps running her other hand through his hair and across his shoulders as if he might still be in pain, but her face is sober and thoughtful.

“What’s happening?” I ask her, my voice coming out higher and thinner than I expected.

“Let’s talk about it in the morning, Jaxon,” she says, turning her face to me and squeezing the back of my neck. “You should clean up 

and get some rest.”

“Rest?” My voice cracks, I sway back like I might fall over even on my knees. “I can’t go to sleep! Did you see what I did? We have to call Christian’s mom! We have to call her right now!”

“No, we . . .” She stops, letting go of me to pat Christian’s face, testing how passed out he is. “Let me think. Let me think what to tell her.”

“What are you talking about? You can tell her whatever, nothing makes sense! Tell her it’s a miracle; they’re Catholics!”

In the end, Mami calls Christian’s mom while I turn on every light in the house on my way upstairs to grab clothes to put Christian into. I can’t stand the dark right now; I keep seeing Christian’s sweat-drenched face and horror-stricken eyes in it. By the time I get back downstairs, Mami’s already put on a pot of coffee and laid Christian out on the couch in the receiving room.

I don’t know how she carried him up here alone; he’s huge. I go over and wrestle him into a pair of gray sweatpants and a blue hoodie, feeling like I’m in a weird dream all the while. My brain feels like it’s been pierced by a thousand tiny needles; my hands are numb. Christian is like a rag doll in my arms, groaning, his eyes moving behind his eyelids as I dress him.

The sweatpants leave a solid three inches of ankle showing but that’s the best I can do. I notice belatedly that the hoodie I put him in says The Evil Dead in bright red lettering with a hand bursting up behind it as if coming out of the ground. I consider swapping hoodies with him, but before I can make a decision, there’s frantic knocking at our main door.

“That’s Conce,” says my mom, as if it could be anyone else at this hour. “Get the door, honey.”

I get up, watching Christian as I move to the door, mentally begging him to wake up. He’s warm, he’s got a pulse. Even though I can see and feel he’s alive, I can’t help worrying his mom’s gonna come in and he’ll be dead, and she’ll think we’re crazy. Or cruel. Or both.

I open the door.

Christian’s parents are on the other side, along with his older sisters. His mom, Concepción, or Conce for short, is a small lady with bronze skin and long, pin straight black hair with premature gray streaks in the front. She takes my hands as soon as I open the door, eyes red and swollen.

“He’s here? He’s alive?”

My mouth opens and closes. I nod, stammering. “Uh, he . . . he’s . . . yeah, he’s asleep.”

Christian’s dad, a man who looks like a surlier version of his son with a serious mustache and deep brown skin, pushes his hands back into his close-cropped hair and blows out a sigh. Christian’s sisters, both of them tall and curly haired like Christian but darker like their father, look at each other in bald-faced shock. I can’t blame them.

Conce kisses my hands and pulls me down to squeeze her arms around me, kissing

my cheek too. “¡Gloria a Dios!” she cries, letting go of me to wipe her eyes and making the sign of the cross before heading inside. “Where is he?”

The rest of the family rushes in past me into the main receiving room. When they go through the doorway, Conce cries out and dissolves into sobs, rushing over to drop on her knees beside Christian on the couch. One of the sisters kneels beside her and the other leans over the back of the couch, the three of them pressing their hands to Christian’s face, neck, and hands. Mr. Reyes stands behind Conce, his hands on her shoulders as if anticipating having to comfort her when it turns out Christian’s dead after all.

“He’s warm!” gasps one of the sisters.

“Ay, mi niño,” Conce moans in her song-like Central Mexican accent, circling her hands around Christian’s face and stroking her thumbs across his cheeks. “Despiértate, mi nene precioso, por favor.”

My mom comes into the room with a tray of coffee cups and a plate of sliced pound cake. She sets the tray on the low table, coming to stand beside me, slightly off to the side.

“He was awake earlier,” says my mom, wrapping an arm around me. “When Jax found him, he was awake but confused. I think the shock of everything wiped him out.”

“How does something like this happen?” asks Mr. Reyes, still staring down at his son.

“Yeah,” the sister behind the couch chimes in. She looks up at us, her eyebrows knitted together. “Amá said . . . she said his chest was caved in! He couldn’t have lived!”

“Bodies are pretty incredible,” my mom explains, squeezing me a little closer to her. “Sometimes they handle trauma that seems impossible. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened to a mortician, actually.”

Conce runs her hand over the lettering on Christian’s chest. My mom’s fingers tighten around my arm when she notices what it says, but Conce doesn’t say anything about it. She gazes at Christian, willing him to wake up.

I stand up, jittery with the anxiety that he’ll drop dead if I don’t do something, and edge up beside Conce, leaning over to pat Christian’s cheek lightly. Dried blood still clings to my fingers in streaks from my nosebleed, some packed under my nails. I hope his family doesn’t notice. “Come on, man . . . wake up, please.”

Almost the same moment as I say it, Christian’s eyes open. He looks up at his mom, dazed and lost for a moment before recognition sets into his eyes.

“¿Amá?” he mumbles drowsily, reaching up a pale, shaking hand and touching it to her cheek. He looks around to the other faces around him. “Apá . . . Alondra, Rosa . . . ¿dónde . . .?”

All of Christian’s relatives make a clamor of voices at once, Conce wailing louder than all of them and pressing her head against Christian’s, her long black hair making a curtain around his face.

They stay a while after that, Christian surrounded by his family on all sides as they nurse coffees and talk with my mom about the miracle of 

Christian’s survival, what they’ll have to say to the priest after they’d called on him to deliver Christian’s last rites, and what they need to do when they report back to the hospital and the authorities about the mistake they made. She offers to go along with them, and Conce trips over herself thanking her and calling me a sweet, beautiful boy for being the one to find Christian still breathing.

Christian keeps looking at me when he thinks I’m not looking, which has my stomach in knots. I wonder if he remembers how he came back, but I don’t get a chance to ask him. By the time they leave, the sun is coming up over the rooftops and trees on our street.

I’ve never felt so awake.

Three

Grimalkin shows up late in the morning. I don’t know where she’s been lurking, but she’s twitchy and wary, her orange eyes flitting from corner to corner as she creeps into my room and hops up on the bed beside me. I haven’t slept. My brain feels like thick sludge pushing against my eardrums and the back of my eyes. Grimalkin curls up next to my face and I push my nose into her fur, patting her head.

“I’m freaked out, too,” I tell her.

Even with Grim here, I can’t sleep. When I close my eyes, I remember the deep pull of panic and dread that shook me into consciousness in the middle of the night. I picture Christian mangled, in pain, staring up at me for help. I’m wired, skin prickling from all the excitement.

Without my mom here, I don’t have anyone to answer the million questions I have about all this. I’d call Titi Clío, my dad’s sister, but how would I begin explaining the situation to her? The only thing I can say for sure is that my dad must be involved since it was his pocket watch Mami told me to use on Christian. I feel like Titi Clío must know something if he’s tied up in all of this. They were close in age, they seemed to be able to communicate through eye contact sometimes. If my dad had secrets, Titi Clío is definitely the person most likely to know them, along with my mom.

But if I’m wrong and she doesn’t know, then I don’t want to be the one to get her involved either.

I lift my head, looking at Grimalkin. I gotta do something else until Mami comes back, at least.

“Wanna go see Regan?”

She runs her sandy tongue over my short hair, which I take as a yes.

“Come on, then,” I say as I pick Grimalkin up to pack her in my bag. She’s a good sport about it as usual. I think she enjoys getting a chance to take in the sights and smells on the walk to Regan’s place.

Regan lives in a rectangular white house with a black roof and a wooden porch. She’s a few streets away from me, but the houses in her neighborhood are more isolated than mine, with short stretches of trees between each. When we were little, we used to peel strips of bark off the birch trees in her yard and pretend they were magic scrolls while her dad watched us from the porch. Her dad’s there now, sitting in one of the plastic chairs having coffee and bread.

Grimalkin pokes her head out of my backpack, meowing as if in greeting. I raise a hand, as he nods at me.

“Hey, Carlos,” I call to him.

“Hey, Jaxon.” He smiles. He has Regan’s dimples and sunny brown skin, but his hair’s gone salt and pepper, lines forming around his eyes when he smiles. “Go on in. Regan’s still in her pajamas, but she’ll want to see you. You holding up okay?”

“Uh, yeah,” I say, grimacing. “Actually . . . Christian’s still alive. He woke up in our morgue.”

Carlos’s eyes widen and he raises his thick eyebrows at me.

“What?! They sent you that kid alive?”

“I know, right?”

Carlos lets out a low whistle, shaking his head. “Anything like that ever happened to one of my girls . . .”

I laugh nervously, heading for the door. “As long as you took it out on the hospital, not us.”

I leave Carlos on the porch, shaking his head at the shame of someone pronouncing a kid dead before checking well enough, and I try not to look suspicious. Inside, Regan’s mom, Simone, is in her scrubs with her bag slung over her shoulder, running around to kiss her daughters goodbye.

Regan is lying on the couch in her gingham pajama pants and an oversized shirt with her legs over the armrest. She’s sucked into whatever’s happening on her phone, so Simone and Regan’s kid sister Robin notice me first. Robin’s fluffy brown curls have been wrestled into twin braids tied off at the ends with bobble hair ties that clack when she leaps out of Simone’s arms and runs

to me.

She’s eight now—way too big for this—but I still catch her when she takes a running leap into my arms.

“It’s Jaxon!” she announces.

Simone’s already at my side, all frantic energy. I’m sure she’s running late to get to the nursing home; that’s usually the case.

“Hi, hon,” she greets, placing her hand on my shoulder as she kisses my cheek. “I gotta go, but if you’re hungry there’s still arroz con gandules and chuletas from yesterday. You know you can have whatever’s in the kitchen.”

She kisses the top of Robin’s head again for good measure and looks back at Regan, who’s sitting up now, her sleep-rumpled ponytail sticking up on one side, her edges starting to curl out of their formerly flat-ironed state.

“It’s almost noon,” she says to Regan, giving her a pointed look as she pushes the door open. “You better not be wearing those same pajamas when I get home tonight.”

“Okay, Mamá. Bendición.” She sighs, raising a hand to me in greeting.

Simone huffs a fond sigh, hurrying outside as she tosses a “Dios te bendiga,” over her shoulder. I hoist Robin higher up as she begins to slide out of my grip, walking over to Regan.

“How are you guys?” I drop Robin carefully on the couch beside Regan and sit on the other side of her. “Me and Grim came to give you guys some updates.”

“Lemme see Grim!” says Robin, already unzipping my bag. She laughs as Grim hops out and brushes her big fluffy tail against her face before jumping off the couch.

“Updates on Christian?”

Even as Robin’s making to follow Grim around the house, she looks back at me when Regan says that.

“Is there gonna be a funeral at your house?”

“Uh . . . no.”

Robin takes that answer with a shrug, stalking after Grim, who keeps moving out of her reach. Regan, however, frowns and shakes her head like she didn’t hear me right.

“No funeral? Can the Reyeses not afford it? We can start a fundraiser if we need to.”

It’s just like her to jump into problem-solving mode. Regan’s always been bad at sitting idle and amazing at tackling issues relentlessly. Even now she’s already whipped out her phone and started googling “funeral financing options.” If it were something like that, I’m sure Regan would have a full-service funeral funded by Monday afternoon.

“No, that’s not it.” My stomach churns. In my head, I can hear my mom telling me to tell people as little as possible about Christian being alive but it’s Regan.

I glance over at Robin, following Grim into the dining room, then I wince at Regan. “He woke up in the morgue, Reg.”

Regan’s dark eyes go wide. She lifts her gaze from her phone to blink at me in shock.

“He what?”

“He woke up.” I lean in to lower my voice. “It was freaky. I wanna tell you how it all went down, but . . .”

Regan is still staring at me like I’m speaking a language she doesn’t understand. Her eyes flicker over to Robin sitting on the dining room floor, letting Grim rub herself against her hand. Regan starts getting up, tucking her cellphone into the waistband of her pajama pants, and nods for me to follow.

“Robin, watch the kitty. Jaxon’s gonna help me with something.”

“Okay!” she calls, wrapping her arms around Grimalkin despite the low growl Grim lets out.

“Be good, Grim,” I call over my shoulder as I follow Regan down the hall to her room.

When we enter her room, Regan snaps the door shut behind us, pulling out her phone to connect to her speaker, playing some lo-fi beats to drown out our conversation in case Robin gets it in her head to eavesdrop. Regan backs into her bed, dropping onto the tangled pile of her lavender comforter and sunset-pink sheets. I sit in her computer chair, stark black against the twilight pinks and purples she liked as a kid, rubbing a hand over the top of my head as I figure out what to say.

“So he’s alive,” she prompts.

“Yep.” I take a deep breath. I know I can trust Regan. “But he was dead when he came to us. He woke up, Regan.”

Several different expressions pass over Regan’s face in the span of a second. Her eyes widen in shock, her eyebrows furrow in disbelief, her head tips in confusion. Finally, she stares at me while shaking her head.

“Okay, slow down, Jaxon. What are you saying? Like . . . you guys resuscitated him?”

“No,” I say, feeling a little crazy. “More like . . . resurrected him.”

She blinks at me. The set of her mouth and the small wrinkle between her eyebrows tell me she doesn’t believe me.

“Maybe they got something mixed up at the hospital. I’ve heard that can happen—people waking up on autopsy tables and stuff like that.”

“No,” I insist, looking down at my knees to avoid looking at her face. The doubt in Regan’s eyes is hard to look at; I already feel insane. “I know a dead body when I see it, okay? His chest was all . . . it was like punched in by the steering wheel. No one could’ve survived what his body went through. Seriously, Regan.”

“But he’s alive now?”

“I know how this sounds, but I swear I resurrected him or—or something. I touched him, and he woke up.”

“Well, where did you touch him?”

I look up at her, puzzled. “His hand. Why?”

“Well, I don’t know!” She shrugs helplessly, rubbing the heel of her hand over

her forehead. “Maybe you touched a pressure point or something that, like, jolted him out of, like, a coma.”

“I don’t think that’s how that works.”

Regan sucks her teeth, rolling her eyes at me. “Okay, well, resurrection is a lot to swallow, too.”

Logically, Regan’s trying to rationalize something totally fucking nuts. But I really want her to make me feel like I’m not the one who’s nuts.

“Look, I wouldn’t bullshit you, okay?” I snap, getting up out of her chair and moving to the door. “And I’m not crazy either.”

Regan hops off her mattress, bounding over the laundry on the floor to reach the door before me with her long legs. She stands in front of it, holding her hands up peaceably.

“I know. I’m sorry . . . I’m just trying to make this make sense.”

“So am I!”

“Okay . . . okay.” She puts her hands on my shoulders, walking me back to sit on the computer chair. She sits on her bed again, crossing her legs under her. “So how did it happen?”

I explain it to her from the beginning. I tell her how I went into the basement when I shouldn’t have and how Christian turned to stare at me with his dead, unseeing eyes. I tell her how I woke in a panic in the middle of the night and how, when I went down there again and found him writhing on the floor, his eyes were clear.

“How did you know?” she asked.

“Know what?”

“To turn the watch back?”

“My . . . my mom told me to.”

Regan rubs the space between her eyebrows, frowning at her lap in thought. “Tessa hasn’t said anything else? Since it happened?”

She hasn’t had a chance to, but this is also the first time I’m clear-headed enough to think about it. From the moment I told her I could feel it was Christian crashing around in the morgue, she’d known exactly what to do.

“Not yet. We had to get Christian dressed and call his parents and all that stuff. She’s with the Reyeses right now, sorting Christian’s shit out at the hospital.”

I press the heels of my hands against my eyes, exhaling through my nose slowly. Panic twists my stomach into a hard knot, sour bile climbing up the back of my throat, and I don’t want to go there. Not right now.

“I’m so tired,” I sigh, rubbing the sleepy itch out of my eyes. “I haven’t slept in like . . . I don’t even know, a day, I guess?”

Regan isn’t ready to drop this subject. She leaves a long, tense pause before she speaks again. Her eyes are torn, ...