Read Online Hereafter by Jennifer Snyder - Free Book Online Page A

around us, encasing us in the very center. It was an old room with rustic wood flooring and dingy white walls. A rickety dresser, its top covered with a thick layer of dust, stood just beside a dinged up, closed door. An old-fashioned bronze medal bed rested along the wall behind me, and one single wooden chair sat beside the only window to the right of the bed.
    “What is this place?” I asked, my voice sounding nearly frantic as Purgatory continued to pump the adrenaline I would have expected to feel had I been alive through my soul.
    “You tell me,” Val said calmly. “This room has some sort of significance to your mother.”
    I glanced around once more, looking for some sort of clue as to where I was. Nothing jumped out at me. “How? I don’t even know this place.”
    Val traced her index finger along the edge of the dresser. “The fear you felt back there was Purgatory weaving its way into your mind. It found who you were searching for and now it’s connecting you to the darkest parts of your mother’s soul, her experiences in life that made her afraid of what she was. This room must’ve been one of them. It’s part of her sequence, part of her Purgatory somehow.”
    Jet moved from my side to the window. “So what are we supposed to do, go through each little scene until we meet up with her?”
    “Something like that.” Val flopped down across the dusty bed and began playing with her hair. “This moment was pivotal—a moment that led up to her suicide. There were a series of moments like this in her life that occurred and led her to the point of suicide. It’s those moments that make up her personal cycle, her very own Purgatory.”
    “She’s here somewhere, in this room?” I shifted my eyes around the room, looking past the poignant gloominess and focusing solely this time on searching for my mother. She wasn’t here. We were the only ones in this dust-filled room.
    “No, we’ll catch up to her eventually. We’ve just entered her loop and have to make the right choices in order to catch up—which is why you have me, a Tracker, to make the right ones for you.”
    I shook my head in confusion. “I don’t understand. If I’m waiting for you to make a choice and tell me which way we need to go next, then why are you sitting on the bed doing nothing?”
    I couldn’t be sure if it was my own fear of not catching up with my mother in time before she Crossed Over that caused the iciness of anxiety to twist my mind and panic to beat steadily inside of me, or if it was simply Purgatory messing with me again. Either way, I felt as if I had to get out of this room. Now.
    “Because there’s nothing I can do until we see what this moment is. We’ve been entrapped in her cycle,” Val answered, the toe of her boot tapping against the metal bed frame. “And now we’re stuck until this moment plays out.”
    The icy hands of anxiety twisted into burning hands of horror. It flamed within my soul as Val’s last words looped through my mind on repeat and birthed more concerns. How long would my mother’s cycle be? How long would it take us to catch up to her? Would it be long enough for Purgatory to corrupt our souls like Jet had mentioned before?
    I crossed the room, headed toward the door and jiggled its knob only to find that it was locked. I spun around the room, searching for another way out, but there was nothing besides the window that Jet stood in front of.
    He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair, his frustration of the situation matching mine. I watched as he reached out and attempted to open the window he’d been gazing out of. It wouldn’t budge. Val had been right; we were stuck. We were caged in.
    “How long are we supposed to wait?” Jet asked, irritation lacing each of his words heavily.
    A noise outside the door silenced us all before Val had a chance to answer. It was a tiny voice, a little girl, and she sounded as if she were arguing with someone.
    “When I tell you to wash