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what I wish?’
    ‘What? That we had longer?’ Two months of Beautiful Dead reunions was all we had left. Eight and a half weeks.
    ‘That I could put it in a bottle and keep it. I don’t want a moment of it to slip away, not ever. I want your voice with me wherever I am, your eyes looking at me the waythey do right now, arm in arm, side by side.’
    ‘You never told me this before.’
    ‘I never put it into words,’ he whispered. ‘But you already knew.’
    I nodded. ‘Let the heart speak – that’s what you once told me. But hearing the words is good too.’
    Phoenix’s smile grew warmer, got right behind his eyes and made them sparkle in the soft light. I felt myself melt as I leaned my head back and he kissed me.
     
    ‘Darina, I want you to meet Dean.’ Hunter introduced the new guy over the kitchen table, calling Phoenix and me down from the bedroom soon after Summer and Dean came back to the house. ‘Dean, Darina is the only person from the far side who gets to know about the Beautiful Dead. We trust her with our secret.’
    Was he mocking me, or was he genuine when he used the ‘trust’ word? I glanced at him but couldn’t tell, so I switched my attention to the newcomer – a heavy-set guy with a shaved head, whose open-necked shirt showed his death mark: the dark-blue angel-wing tattoo in the angle between his neck and his collar bone.
    ‘Dean is an ex-cop,’ Hunter went on. ‘A hundred punks and dope-heads wanted him dead.’
    ‘How did it actually happen?’ And why was he here?I knew you only got to be Beautiful Dead if there was a mystery that needed clearing up. You had to deserve to come back.
    ‘Car crash,’ Dean told me. ‘Severed the top of my spinal cord. Drunk driver.’
    I shuddered, wondering whether or not Hunter would want me to work for Dean on the far side and exactly where he was on the list – before or after Phoenix, Donna and Iceman? All I knew for sure was that Summer was next.
    ‘The culprit was never traced,’ Hunter said. ‘Dean had been following the car out by Amos Peak, ready to pull him over. The driver refused to cooperate.’
    ‘Which is the last thing I remember.’ Dean spoke like a cop – like he’d seen every bad thing a person can do and then some.
    I don’t know why but I felt that helping him might be harder than working for the others. Maybe it was the generation gap, or my particular problem with authority figures.
    ‘Except that Dean radioed in the car registration plate before the crash,’ Hunter added. ‘Which means the details should’ve been on record, but evidently someone in the office got careless.’
    ‘That piece of data was wiped from the computer, or itnever got recorded,’ Dean said between gritted teeth. ‘No driver was ever traced.’
    ‘So Dean gets to come back and set the record straight.’ Hunter rounded up the discussion. ‘Keep it in mind, Darina. And remember, he died doing his job.’
    I frowned. ‘Summer is still priority, though? I mean, how many days do we have – twenty, twenty-one?’ Searching for her among the quiet figures in the room, I saw her standing by the doorway and went to join her. ‘I drove to your house, did you know?’
    She took a deep breath. ‘How was it?’
    ‘There were people there – Allyson and Frank Taylor, some others. A party.’
    ‘For my birthday?’
    ‘Yeah. They were cool, though. I can honestly say that no one cried while I was there.’
    ‘Mom?’
    ‘She held it together, even though she didn’t expect to see me.’
    ‘Dad?’
    ‘Cool. He’s strong. I really like your dad, Summer.’
    What else could I tell her? That they hadn’t moved a single object in her room since she died, that her mom wasn’t painting any more. I avoided the deep stuff because there was no comfort there.
    She probably delved into my mind and saw it anyway.
    ‘So now we need to focus on you, Summer.’ This was Hunter speaking, and it was weird because he’d done one of his sudden shifts