afterlife

Chapter 5

"Alex?"

He flashed a bashful grin at me.

"Welcome to the land of ghosts," he said in a spooky voice, raising his arms above his head like claws.

I smacked him.

"You better not tell me that my hell is an eternity of the punishment of your company," I said. "Because I'd rather- oh." I hesitated, frowning. "That might be an issue."

"This isn't hell, you idiot. Any girl would think of me as heaven, you know."

While Alex was indeed physically attractive to all, knowing how much of an absolute baby he could be made me baffled as to how anyone could possibly think of him as divine in any way.

"Still doesn't answer the question of where the fuck we are," I replied petulantly.

The tall, kind-eyed woman whose voice had woken me cleared her throat.

She was homely and her eyes, blue as the summer sky after rain had washed away the heat, filled me with an indescribable warmth that made me subconsciously want to trust her without any logical reason to do so.

Of course, I didn't, for what kind of crazy idiot trusts a presumably dead stranger?

"Who are you?" I demanded. "Where am I? Am I a ghost?"

"Me?" Her gentle voice sounded out like wind chimes, unaffected by my relatively justifiable rudeness. "I'm Dinah."

She extended a slender hand, which I ignored.

"And of course you aren't a ghost, silly," she giggled, as if it was the most ridiculous thing in the world. "You'd have to be dead to be a ghost."

"I'm alive? Seriously?" I growled.

"You don't remember?" Alex gasped, clutching his chest with mock indignation.

"Remember what?" I hated being so pathetically clueless. My life was supposed to be over. How could it not be?

Alex shook his head with overly exaggerated disapproval and sighed.

"Dinah? Care to do the honours?" he gestured to me.

"What are you talking about?" I demanded.

Dinah sent a reassuring smile at me and pressed a finger against my forehead.

My eyebrows furrowed.

"What exactly are you trying to achieve here?" I made to duck away from Dinah, but she gently stopped me.

"Just wait."

"What am I waiting for?"

As the last word left my mouth, I was hurled into a memory with such force that the whiplash flooded through my senses long before anything else.

Graveyards aren't usually particularly crowded, so my brother and I would often have the place to ourselves.

It was a serene Monday morning and both of us were currently supposed to be enduring the academic horrors of an AP Biology lecture.

I inhaled a breath of crisp, fresh air as I gazed into the vivid, cloudless blue above. The symphonies of songbirds and rustling of leaves in the wind wove themselves into a gentle tapestry of sound. I had never been more content to lay in the grass by the headstone of a certain Lady Honoria Fell (Alex and I had indeed been delighted to find this grave and re-enacted Stefan's scene from TVD countless times) without saying a word.