Prologue

I almost didn't believe him when he said I was dead. I was too conscious to be dead; every one of my senses was sharp and attuned to my surroundings, more so than they had ever been while I was alive.

While I was alive. It still sounds so strange. You'd think that you would get used to being dead after awhile, but apparently that kind of comfort takes millenia to accomplish. That's what the others have told me, anyway.

I don't know if I'll ever be entirely comfortable referring to myself in past tense.

The Boss had sat before me, his hands folded on the desk, and told me with deep severity that yes, I was indeed dead. Orphaned since birth, I'd had no one to lose; with no unfinished business, it had been mostly expected that I would "pass on."

But there had been a mistake. An accident of sorts. The Boss had explained very carefully to me that while I'd been traveling "beyond," a reckless agent from the Paranormal department had been coming "back over." We'd collided, and I had wound up at the company's headquarters.

Now here I was, sitting for the last time on the metal bench in the trainees' locker room. Tomorrow, I would graduate from basic Guardian training, finally entering the field in which I so desperately wanted to work.

When the Boss had told me what I'd become--what had happened when I'd been "brought back"--I couldn't have been anything but excited. I'd beaten death, for Pete's sake. My thoughts immediately jumped to delusions of invicibility.

I now knew better than to feel indestructible. And after a year and a half of strenuous effort, there were only five of us left. Five trainees. We'd made it through, and tomorrow, it would be over.

My life, as I'd known it, was already over. My heart still beat, but I was not alive. I was immortal--caught between the realms of the living and the dead--and the only way I could die was by murder.

The life, the world, the era I'd known was gone. It had vanished completely, without my notice. And now, this brand new epoch, full of intense training and startling lessons, would be coming to a close, throwing me headfirst into a position I wanted more than anything and yet dreaded beyond belief.

I was incomprehensibly terrified.