One year later.
One year since the accident, and I was still scrubbing toilets for a living.
I pushed my cleaning cart down the hallway of the Grandeur Hotel, my shoulders aching from four hours of changing sheets and wiping down bathroom mirrors. The wheels squeaked obnoxiously, announcing my presence to anyone unfortunate enough to be trying to sleep at two in the afternoon.
Not much had changed, I told myself. Same job. Same apartment. Same grandmother who still made too much food and worried too much about my nonexistent love life.
Except everything had changed.
Alec had broken up with me while I was still in the hospital. Turns out he'd been trying to meet me at that diner one year ago to end things, not to celebrate our three-month anniversary like I'd thought. He'd had the decency to wait until I was off the ventilator before delivering the news, at least. Small mercies.
"It's not you, it's me," he'd said, standing by my hospital bed like he couldn't wait to leave. "I just... I can't do this anymore."
I'd been too exhausted to cry. Too broken to fight. I'd just nodded and watched him walk out of my life while my cracked ribs screamed with every breath.
But that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was that I could see them now.
Souls.
The dead who hadn't moved on, lingering in the world like afterimages burned into film.
I'd tried telling people at first. The nurses, the psychiatrist, my grandmother. They'd all given me the same pitying look, the same gentle explanation about trauma and hallucinations and how the brain sometimes creates false memories to cope with near-death experiences.
I'd almost started to believe them.
Then I saw the old man.
I'd been walking home from physical therapy, still limping slightly, when I heard him—an elderly man in a faded brown suit, standing on the sidewalk and crying. Not quiet tears, but gut-wrenching sobs that made my chest hurt.
"Please," he kept saying to the people passing by. "Please, I just want to go home. Can someone take me home?"
But no one stopped. No one even looked at him.
Because they couldn't see him.
He was translucent, shimmering slightly in the afternoon sun, and when a woman walked through him without breaking stride, I knew.
He was dead. And I could see him.
I'd run home that day, locked myself in my room, and tried to convince myself I was losing my mind. Maybe the accident had done more damage than the doctors thought. Maybe I had brain trauma they'd missed.
But then it happened again.
At the mall. A small girl, maybe seven years old, clinging to an older woman's leg. The girl was transparent, weightless, her face buried in her mother's jeans. The mother stood frozen in front of a children's clothing store, staring at nothing, grief etched so deeply into her features it was like looking at a sculpture of sorrow.
The dead daughter. The grieving mother. And only I could see both of them.
After that, I stopped trying to tell people. What was the point? They'd just look at me with that same pitying expression, recommend another therapist, maybe suggest medication.
So I kept it to myself.
I learned to look away when I passed the transparent figures on street corners. Learned to ignore the whispered pleas and the confused souls wandering through grocery stores and coffee shops. Learned to function in a world where death was no longer invisible.
It was exhausting.
And lonely.
And absolutely terrifying.
My cart squeaked to a stop outside Suite 412, one of our VIP rooms. Mr. Patterson, the guest staying there, had called down twenty minutes ago requesting warm towels. He was in his seventies, in town for some kind of business meeting, and had been nothing but polite during his three-day stay.
I knocked twice. "Housekeeping."
"Come in," a weak voice called from inside.
I found Mr. Patterson sitting in the armchair by the window, looking pale and tired. A glass of water sat untouched on the side table, and his hand trembled slightly as he gestured toward the bathroom.
"Just the towels," he said with a thin smile. "Thank you, dear."
"Of course. I'll be right back."
I left my cart in the hallway and headed toward the housekeeping closet at the end of the corridor. The warm towels were kept in a heating unit there, stacked and ready for guests who requested them.
The hallway was quiet, that peculiar afternoon silence that settled over hotels when most guests were either out or napping. My footsteps echoed softly against the carpet.
I gathered four towels—Mr. Patterson seemed like the type who appreciated extras—and made my way back to Suite 412.
That's when the temperature dropped.
It happened suddenly, like walking into a freezer. My breath misted in front of my face, and the warm towels in my arms did nothing to fight off the sudden, bone-deep chill that swept through the hallway.
I stopped, confusion rippling through me. The hotel's air conditioning had been broken for days—we'd been getting complaints about how warm the rooms were. So why was it suddenly so cold?
I looked down the corridor, half-expecting to see maintenance working on the vents, but the hallway was empty.
The cold seemed to radiate from Suite 412.
Curiosity pulled at me, mixing with something I couldn't quite name. Not quite fear, but... awareness. Like some part of me recognized this cold, even if my conscious mind didn't understand why.
I approached the door slowly. It was still slightly ajar from when I'd left.
I pushed it open.
And my heart stopped.
He was there.
Sitting on the edge of Mr. Patterson's bed, exactly as I remembered him from the ambulance one year ago—draped in that black cloak that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. The hood was up, casting his face in complete shadow, revealing nothing but darkness.
The scythe rested against his shoulder, ancient and gleaming.
The figure from the ambulance. The one everyone said was a hallucination.
He was real.
Mr. Patterson sat frozen in his armchair, his hand clutched at his chest.
The towels slipped from my arms and hit the floor with a soft thump.
The figure's head turned slowly toward me.
Even though I couldn't see anything beneath that hood—no eyes, no face, just shadow—I felt his attention lock onto me with an intensity that made my skin prickle.
"You again."