Upon the moment of death, Carey became a spirit in another world.

He possessed no earthly form and existed simply as an awareness that transcended time and space, his purpose being to observe and no more.

He was no longer in Astros.

Instead, he was back in his apartment—but not the apartment he called home, in Manchester, New Hampshire, where dishes were still piled in the sink, pizza boxes stacked on the dining table, a pee spot in the corner between the kitchen cabinets.

No, this was a much smaller apartment he’d once shared with his best friend, Ben, north of Boston, where a commute into the city wouldn’t be too rough and they wouldn’t have to pay Boston rent, though someday, they wanted to move down to the city and create the company they’d always dreamed of having.

Carey studied the two figures seated before him, each sitting at a separate desk, facing two separate computer screens in their cramped living room. One was his past self, and he’d been slimmer then, maybe forty pounds lighter. Seated hunched at the other desk across the room was Ben Lukas, his partner in a business endeavor known as FlameFyre Studios that was barely in its infancy, as they had yet to complete the game their company would be known for.

“Dude, we’re out,” Ben was saying. “This is the worst possible time to be out. Can you call your guy?”

“He’s in Mexico,” Carey said. “Come on, we don’t need it.”

This was Old Carey, the one who’d been, back then, almost a totally different person. Not an alcoholic internet troll, but an aspiring game designer with a vision.

“Maybe you don’t need it,” Ben said, irritation clear in his voice. “But you’re not the one who spent last night at his sister’s wedding. I’ll be hungover ’til the cows come home.”

“That’s your fault, cowboy. No one forced you to do five Kamikaze shots at the reception.”

“Come on, man. I need this. If you’re serious about this thing, then you’ll do what you have to do. We’re in this together, bro.”

That was all it took. Old Carey was serious about this thing, this videogame, this dream.

With a sigh, he took out his cellphone.

“I know another guy. He’s a real sketchball, but he might be able to hook us up.”

Spirit Carey watched with growing dread as the scene faded to black, and then he was flung to another place, same night, in the back seat of a parked Toyota where the seats reeked of years-old cigarette smoke and the only light came from sodium lamps in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart.

The driver sat patiently waiting. He was some guy from college who had lived down the hall from Carey and Ben during their junior year. Paul Durvin. That was his name.

Old Carey opened the passenger-side door and slipped in, rubbing his hands together from the cold outside, or maybe the cold within.

They made small talk for a few minutes, caught up on life after college, reminisced about the old days of partying and socializing and girls. Then it was down to business.

“I’m out of Adderall,” Paul said. “But I got something better.”

“What is it?” Old Carey asked, nervous but slightly excited. “You said you had a surprise.”

“It’s coke. But laced with something a little stronger. Pressed in a pill, because if you snort it…” He made a slicing motion across his own neck.

“Is it safe?”

The dealer held out a bag containing six pills. Tiny capsules of death.

“Yeah, it’s safe. Would I sell you something that wasn’t? But like I said, don’t snort it. You need a tolerance to this stuff before you—”

“I got it,” Carey said. “But what’s it laced with?”

Even if the guy had told him the truth—fentanyl, he would have said in that case—Carey wouldn’t have reacted any differently. He’d heard that name before, but this wasn’t the time for research. It was cold outside, he’d driven forty minutes to get here, and if he didn’t return home with something, he’d have Ben on his ass all night.

“It’s this pain med that’s been approved by the FDA. They use it in hospitals. Lots of fun, man. Tons of fun. Basically, speeds you up for a few hours, then takes you to dreamland. La-la land.”

“I’ve never done coke before,” Carey said, nervously accepting the bag of pills.

“Like I said, don’t snort it. Coke, Adderall, same thing at the end of the day. Because it’s your first time, I’ll give you a discount.”

“How much?”

He quoted a price.

“Not bad,” Old Carey said. “I’ll take it. Just this once.”

Another fade to black. Spirit Carey felt like he was watching a movie, or a theatrical production where he’d be assigned a special seat on the stage, right near the action.

He found himself back in his apartment with Ben, hours later. Ben and Old Carey fervently tapped away on their keyboards, trading tips and ideas, rambling almost deliriously at some points, laughing more often than not.

“It’s two in the morning,” Old Carey said. “You know what that means.”

“Beer o’clock?”

“Exactly, my man.”

Old Carey got up to grab two cans of beer from the fridge. He stopped at the bathroom first.

Ben watched him go. Alone now, Ben opened the drawer in Old Carey’s desk and took out the bag. He grabbed two capsules, stuffed the bag back inside, and proceeded to open the capsules on his desk.

Tap, tap. He used a credit card to break apart the powder and cut it into lines.

The sound of their refrigerator shutting, a beer can popping open.

Old Carey’s voice: “Ben, what are you doing in there?”

“Nuthin’.”

Ben, leaning over his desk, a rolled-up dollar bill in hand.

“I’m heating up a Hot Pocket,” Old Carey offered. “You want one?”

“Nah, I’m good.”

Snort went the first line, down Ben’s nasal tube. Another snort as a second line was consumed. Ben tossed his head back, eyes snapping all the way open.

A beep as the microwave finished.

“Ow, ow,” Old Carey said, handling the hot snack.

When he returned, Ben was on the floor of their living room, twitching and gagging, foam bubbling over his lips.

Old Carey dropped the Hot Pocket and wasted no time calling 911.

The next scene took place several hours later, a few hours past dawn. Old Carey hadn’t slept at all, his system wrecked from just one of those pills, the jittery high from the cocaine gone, the sleepy effect of the fentanyl having turned him into a zombie.

They were in a police station now, just Old Carey and a female police detective, seated across from each other in a tiny interrogation room. The detective was nice enough, though it was clear she didn’t trust Carey one bit.

“Your friend’s in the hospital,” she told him. “He might die. Do you want to be the one to call his mother and father? His younger brother, age fourteen, and younger sister, age eight, and tell them he died because the two of you made a stupid mistake? Because you made a mistake?”

“I had nothing to do with it,” Carey said, trying to hide the way his body was shaking, his fingers ice-cold. “Ben was the one who bought them. I didn’t know what was in them.”

“Cocaine laced with fentanyl,” the detective said, as if Carey hadn’t already heard it a dozen times already. “The latter a synthetic opioid fifty to a hundred times more powerful than morphine.”

“I didn’t know,” Old Carey whispered, ever the good liar, even then. “Ben, he… he didn’t tell me that.”

“What did he tell you?”

“That it was Adderall,” Old Carey lied, “which we’ve done a bunshh… a-a bunch of times already. He used to get it—I dunno, off some friend with a pers… per-scrip… pre-scrip-shun.”

He could barely speak, the mixture of fatigue and opioids making his head loll, his lips feel like flimsy rubber strips. A Styrofoam cup of cold coffee sat in front of him, but he’d barely touched it.

“If we find out you were the one who purchased the pills,” the detective informed him, “you could wind up facing a mandatory prison term. Manslaughter, at least, if your friend dies.”

“I just… need to sleep,” Old Carey said, his head hanging over the table, a line of drool escaping his mouth, descending until it touched the table.

Spirit Carey wanted to scream at Old Carey to wake up, just wake up, asshole, and tell her the truth, the whole truth.

You deserve to go to prison, he wanted to say. You killed him. You bought the stuff. It was your fault. Your fucking fault, you coward.

But I told him what it was. He knew the risk!

As Spirit Carey tried to assuage his guilt, his conscience wasn’t letting him off so easily.

It doesn’t matter. You knew he was an addict. He was the one who got you into drinking, remember? You knew he had a problem.

But I didn’t mean to kill him. I didn’t want him to die!

Doesn’t matter. You deserve prison—or worse. Maybe you’re the one who deserves to die.

No!

“We could just finish you right here,” Sam told him.

It was Sam’s voice—he would recognize it anywhere, any time, at the bottom of the ocean, from across the entire sky. Only now, Carey stood in a vast desert lit by the midday sun. Solemn gusts of wind blew tendrils of sand about. In the distance, what appeared to be the tilted head of a statue stuck out of the sand. Only its forehead, left cheek, nose, and one of its eyes were visible, and just that part alone was as large as a football stadium. Who knew what lay beneath the surface? Carey had never seen a manmade work of art so enormous before. It reminded him of Michelangelo’s David, if a desert had spent thousands of years gradually tipping and swallowing it up, leaving only the top half of its face exposed to the sun.

A dark smudge shimmered in the air. It hung like a dirty thumbprint, but only for a second, after which it twisted and shuddered—a portal much like the one Sam had used back in the cathedral to summon the three-headed dog from hell.

He stepped right out of it, landing in the sand, and the portal dissolved out of existence. Carey found himself staring right at his pale, disgusting face—Sam Solsteim.

He was dressed in the silvery, shimmering robe of his Riven Xor persona, his dark eyes soaked in hatred beneath his hood. Gripping a staff with a blood crystal embedded in the tip in one hand, Sam held his other, claw-shaped hand in front of him as if ready to launch a terrible spell.

“You,” Carey said. “What are you doing here? What the hell’s going on? I thought I was dead.”

“Not dead enough,” Sam said, and even his voice sounded withered, laced with poison. “But I’ll fix that.”

Something wriggled behind Carey. His tail. He curled it around his body, wrapped his right hand around its furry thickness. He was a Feral once more, his vision as sharp as an owl’s, ears as sensitive as a bat’s, and a sense of smell good enough to put any bloodhound to shame.

“This is where you die,” Sam said, and his hands ignited with dripping red energy that looked as though it could eat through flesh and bone.

Carey made his bow appear in his hands. He envisioned the way his fire-, shock-, and frost-laced arrows would split, hitting Sam with triple damage.

Then something strange happened.

LEVEL UP!

Congratulations, adventurer!

LEVEL UP!

LEVEL UP!

NEW FERAL SHELL LEARNED:

Dreadbat (Tier I Animal)

LEVEL UP!

NEW FERAL SHELL LEARNED:

Viperhowl (Tier I Animal)

LEVEL UP!

Congratulations, adventurer!

LEVEL UP!

LEVEL UP!

LEVEL UP!...