“Walked the other side?” Zane asked, his attention skipping between Jude and Rawls with periodic trips toward Faith.
Rawls ran a hand over his head and shrugged. “He means Faith and I both died and then returned to our bodies, while the rest of you managed to avoid that particular nasty journey.”
“Died?” Zane shot a glance at Cosky. “Admittedly, from what Cosky and Kait said, Faith didn’t have a pulse back there in the tunnel, at least not until Kait did her thing. But you—” He shook his head, his green eyes almost regretful. “Sorry buddy, you had a heartbeat.”
“Did I?” Rawls turned his head to stare at Cosky. “I watched everythin’ you and Kait did from outside and above my body. Watched you two heal me. Felt myself sucked back into my body. That’s how I ended up with Pachico, he hitched a ride back into this world when you healed me.”
Silence fell, and every eye turned to Cosky.
“Hell.” Cosky stirred and shook his head. “I don’t know. I thought I felt a pulse, but it was faint, erratic. There one moment, gone the next. It could have cut out when I lifted my fingers.”
A memory slipped through Rawls’s mind.
“What the hell do they think they’re gonna do?” Pachico asked. “Bring you back from the dead?”
Cosky hissed. “I got a pulse.”
Pachico laughed again. “Wishful thinking on your buddy’s part. If you had a pulse, you wouldn’t be all floaty beside me.”
His heart had stopped beating several seconds before Cosky’s arrival on the scene, as evidenced by Rawls’s front-row seat in that silvery otherworld. He wouldn’t have been watching the drama, all disembodied there beside them, if his heart had still been beating—would he?
He frowned, the question a sharp itch. Hell, he couldn’t make the assumption that he’d been dead. Maybe Cosky had felt a pulse. Despite the fact that he’d spent several minutes there, he didn’t know much of anything about that eerie netherworld. Maybe a borderline pulse was enough to get the soul—or essence, or whatever the hell people called that transparent, incorporeal state—ejected from the corporeal body. And then there was Faith. She didn’t have any recollection of dying or playing voyeur outside her body, yet she’d still seen Pachico.
Who the hell knew what the rules were? As Pachico had complained, death didn’t come with a manual.
“Look,” Rawls said after a few seconds of uneasy silence. “All I’m sayin’ is that I was outside my body, in a transparent state, watchin’ everythin’ that was happenin’ there on the ground. I heard everythin’. Saw everythin’. At least until I was dragged back into my body . . . everythin’ gets hazy after that.”
“Take us through what you saw and heard,” Zane said calmly.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Mac snapped, disbelief flashing across his face. “We’re wasting our time with this shit.”
Zane shot Mac another of those quelling looks. “We were all there. There’s no harm in comparing his version to ours.”
Cosky nodded in agreement.
Well . . . hell . . . Rawls rocked back slightly in surprise. They were actually taking his story under consideration . . . maybe.
With Faith’s hand still warming his palm and fingers, he briskly recounted what he remembered from that night, a week earlier, when he’d died. He skipped telling them about the weird snake of energy that had impaled his transparent chest and pulled him back into his body. From what he remembered of the conversation back then, as they circled his splayed, still body, they’d seen the energy as a glow, or a shimmer, but nobody had mentioned that weird tentacle. If they’d seen it, sure as hell someone would have mentioned it.
After he finished, an edgy hush seized the cavern.
“What he described is pretty much what I remember,” Zane finally said. He shifted to scan Mac’s and Cosky’s faces, as though looking for confirmation.
A round of uneasy agreements lit the tense silence.
“Which doesn’t mean shit,” Mac interrupted, although a troubled expression had settled on his face. “He could have heard everything we said.”
“While unconscious?” Zane asked with raised eyebrows.
“We don’t know that he was unconscious,” Mac fired back. “But hell, even if he did step out of his body like he claims, to play voyeur on us, that has no bearing on the damn ghost he claims tailed him back.”
Rawls locked his instinctive protest down. Arguing wouldn’t convince anyone that he was sane.
“Your belief holds no weight,” Jude announced in his habitually expressionless tone. “The biitei existence is not conditional on your acceptance.”
Another thick silence fell.
Once again Zane was the one to break it. “Biitei?”
Rawls turned to Jude, but the big Arapaho had stilled and was staring at the ground, his long, graying braid dangling over his right shoulder and swaying slightly. As paranoid as he was about the whole ghost thing, he must have decided to go back to ignoring the topic under discussion.