“What’re they doing here?” I asked Joaquin, stifling a yawn.
“They wanted to come,” he replied.
“Hi, Rory!” Krista patted the blue vinyl seat next to her, and I slid into it, while Joaquin squeezed in next to Fisher, the two of them taking up the entire bench. There was a half-full glass of orange smoothie in front of Fisher, but Krista had only water.
“What’s up?” Fisher asked, his light green eyes almost startling so close up.
“No one else has been ushered since yesterday morning,” Joaquin reported.
“And I got to sleep in my bed last night,” Krista assured me, touching my leg, as if her and Tristan’s getting back into their house had been weighing on me all night long.
“Um, good,” I said. I reached for the saltshaker, just to have something to do with my trembling hands. “That’s good.”
“Fisher brought someone over two days ago, and they ended up in the Shadowlands, too,” Joaquin explained.
“No way Alec should’ve gone there,” Fisher said, taking a long pull on his straw. “No way. Dude was a priest.”
“Really?” I asked, passing the glass saltshaker back and forth on the table’s surface.
Fisher squirmed and cleared his throat. “No, I mean, not literally, but in his life he sure as hell acted like one.”
Krista giggled, and everyone stared at her. “Sorry.”
“What’ll you kids have?” Ursula asked, appearing at the end of our table. She looked at Joaquin as if the rest of us weren’t even there.
“Good morning, Ursula,” Joaquin said with a smile. “You’re looking rather fetching today.”
Ursula sniffed. “Don’t even try it. You left the seat up again this morning.”
Fisher chuckled and shook his head.
“Did I? I’m sorry. I swear I’ll make it up to you,” Joaquin teased.
“Yeah, yeah. I’ve heard it all before.” She sniffed again. This time her gaze flicked around the table. “So what’ll you have?”
“Um, coffee?” Krista said.
“Coffee’s fine,” I added. Ursula glared down at the still-moving saltshaker, and I stopped, blushing. “Sorry.”
She cleared her throat and looked at Joaquin.
“I’ll have the Spanish omelet with extra peppers, a side of fries, and a short stack of pancakes,” Joaquin said. “Oh, and chocolate milk.”
“It’s your intestines.” She shoved her pen behind her ear and started to turn. “And don’t forget to pick up some tea bags on your way home.”
“What’s your obsession with tea lately?” Joaquin asked. “I’ve never seen you drink tea before this week.”
Ursula scowled. “Just get the tea.”
“Slave driver,” Joaquin said with a grin. For a split second, I thought she was going to smile, but then she was gone.
“She’s in a mood,” Fisher commented.
“Right? She’s been like that for a few days,” Joaquin replied, rubbing his palms on his thighs. “Like instant personality shift.”
“I noticed it, too,” Krista said. “Yesterday when we were working together, she kept zoning out.”
“Do you think something’s wrong?” I asked, glancing over at the counter, where Ursula was pouring coffee for a couple of guys. The yoga woman from the park was sitting on the stool at the very end, glaring at me. I turned around again, my heart in my throat.
“What could possibly be wrong? She lives with me,” Joaquin said, lifting his chest.
I stared him down, trying to ignore the feeling of the yoga woman’s eyes boring into the back of my skull.
“Can we get back to the reason we’re here?” I asked. “So no one got ushered yesterday. What about today? I didn’t have a coin this morning. Did any of you?”
“Nope,” Joaquin said.
“I did,” Krista said, raising her hand slightly.
“Me, too.” Fisher placed his coin on the table. Joaquin picked it up and studied it.
“Do you think they could be tampered with somehow?” I asked, thinking of Nadia’s theory—that I was purposely ushering people to hell. If someone wanted to do that, wouldn’t they have to somehow “fix” the coins?
“It looks normal to me,” Joaquin said, placing it in front of me and Krista, sun-side up, so we could see it. “They’re all the same. When the person who’s moving on touches their coin, it basically turns depending on whether the person is good or evil. Until that moment, the coin is nothing but a hunk of gold.”
The door chimes tinkled, and I looked over my shoulder. Yoga Woman had just exited the building. I sighed with relief.
“Okay, so maybe I was right,” Krista said as Ursula delivered our coffees. She pushed the coin back across the table to Fisher and waited for the waitress to walk away before continuing. “Maybe it’s the weather vane that’s gone all freaky.”
“I guess it could be,” Joaquin said.
“Why not? Maybe it got bent in one of the storms,” Fisher suggested, pushing the coin into his back pocket and reaching for his smoothie. “There’ve been a lot of them lately. Maybe it just keeps pointing south because it’s off-kilter.”
“We should keep an eye on it,” I said, hope springing up inside my chest again. “If it never points north, we’ll know something’s up. I mean, it’s not like every single person coming through here right now is inherently evil.” I paused and looked around at them. “Right?”
“Right,” Joaquin said.
“No way,” Fisher put in.
I spun the saltshaker between my thumb and forefinger, hesitant to make my next suggestion. “What if we stop ushering souls?”
For a second, Krista, Joaquin, and Fisher just sat there, looking at one another.
“We can’t do that,” Krista said finally. “If we do, then the fog will roll in and never roll out again.”
“Plus, it’d get pretty crowded around here,” Fisher added, sipping at his smoothie.
“What’s a little overcrowding compared with sending a bunch of good people to the Shadowlands for all eternity?” I said harshly.
Ursula placed two plates heaping with food in front of Joaquin. Steam rose from the omelet plate as if the eggs had just been removed from the pan, and the smell of the fried onions and spicy peppers filled my nostrils, making my empty stomach growl. As Ursula turned away from the table, she let out a huge sneeze.
The shop fell silent. Krista tensed up next to me. I looked over at Joaquin. His face had gone ashen.
“Bless you,” one of the visitors called out.
Joaquin got up and put his hands on Ursula’s shoulders. “Are you…what are you—?”
Then Ursula burst into tears and fled the restaurant. Some of the diners exchanged baffled looks. Krista and Fisher stared at each other as if they’d just seen a news report of a terrorist attack.
“What just happened?” I asked, flattening my palms against the edge of the table.
“Ursula sneezed,” Krista whispered, looking up at Joaquin warily.
“So?” I asked as the conversations around us started up again.
Joaquin turned and pressed his hands into the side of my bench, leaning all his body weight into it. “So Lifers don’t get sick, remember?” he said through his teeth. “We can get hurt by, like, falling off a bike and scraping our knees—”
“Has to look authentic for the visitors,” Fisher interjected.
“But we don’t cough, we don’t sneeze, we don’t even hiccup,” Joaquin finished.
“Maybe it was just a random itch,” I suggested.
Fisher shook his head. “Doesn’t happen.”
I shakily folded my napkin in my lap. Another facet of Juniper Landing life gone awry. Another hitch in the system that was supposedly hitch-free.