Underworld

by Meg Cabot

  Not that I needed my boyfriend to fight my battles for me, but in this case a little help might have been nice. Where was John?

  This became an especially urgent thought when one of her hands closed around the diamond dangling from my necklace.

  “Still don’t get it, do you?” she asked, almost pityingly, as she began twisting the chain around my neck. “Maybe this will jog your memory. My father once tried to take this necklace away from you, knowing it was much too valuable — and dangerous — for little girls like you to play with. But your boyfriend didn’t like that very much, did he?”

  That’s all it took to make me remember.

  “Mr. Curry,” I gasped. The links tightening around my throat reminded me instantly of the time I’d foolishly shown the Persephone Diamond to a jeweler back in Connecticut. He too had pulled it uncomfortably close around my neck. Fortunately John had shown up just in time and objected.

  Unfortunately, John’s objection had been in the form of stopping the jeweler’s heart.

  “Wait,” I begged the woman, trying to slip my fingers between the links and my skin … anything to ease the pressure on my windpipe. “I saved your father. I stopped John from killing him. He recovered…. The salesgirl in the shop next door … said he retired to move in with … his daughter in … Florida….”

  The chain turned out to be much sturdier than it looked. Hades must have forged the links out of some kind of indestructible gold alloy, because my neck was closer to breaking than the chain.

  I couldn’t believe I was being choked to death with something John had given me so long ago out of love.

  “That’s me,” Officer Hernandez said coldly. “I’m the one he moved in with. Now I’ve got a message for your boyfriend…. Tell him it’s no use. There’s no safe place for you, not even the Underworld. We’ll always find you —”

  The amateur sunsets on the walls were beginning to swim as my vision faded. I heard a strange noise, a sort of drumming in my ears. I assumed that was the blood leaving my head. Pretty soon, my air supply would be completely cut off, and I’d be brain-dead. I reached out blindly to try to gouge my fingers into the police officer’s eyes while I still had control of my limbs.

  And then a miracle happened … several miracles, all at once, actually.

  The first was that I heard John’s voice snarl, “Why don’t you give me that message yourself?”

  Then Officer Hernandez cried out in pain. I couldn’t understand why, since my fingers had barely made contact with her face, but she let go of my necklace anyway, and the pressure on my throat suddenly eased. I clawed at the links, pulling them away from my neck, then gratefully gulped in one lungful of oxygen, then another, thankful for the first time in my life for the cloying odor of potpourri, because the fact that I could smell it again meant that I was alive.

  By that time my vision had returned enough for me to see John standing over me, his expression tender and livid by turns.

  “Pierce.” His voice sounded far away. He was lifting me gently by the shoulders. “Are you all right? My God, your throat … are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. I turned my head and noticed that Officer Hernandez was slumped to the hotel floor beside me. Her eyes were closed. She looked dead. “What did you do to her?”

  John barely spared her a glance. “I didn’t do anything to her,” he said. “Yet. Pierce, I’m so sorry. I was out here waiting for you the whole time, until there was a disturbance in the courtyard … that singer, the one from the stage. She was flirting with Mr. Liu. Then she attacked him.”

  This, more than anything, brought me to my senses. I remembered the sound of the woman’s voice I’d heard from the window while I’d been in the ladies’ room, and the scuffle afterwards. I’d thought it nothing but noises of the street festival. “Mr. Liu?” I echoed in alarm. “Is he all right?”

  “He’s fine,” John said, his tone grim. “Embarrassed, more than anything. I should have known it was all just to distract me from you. I didn’t have any idea the danger you were in until Hope appeared from out of nowhere in front of me, screaming. I didn’t even know doves could scream.”

  Hope. I turned my head and saw her perched on the mantel of the faux fireplace, peering down at me worriedly.

  “Is she all right?” I heard a familiar voice thunder. “Is she —?”

  “She’s alive,” John said to Mr. Liu, who’d come crashing into the lobby through one of the French doors to the veranda, heedless of the patio furniture in his way. There was a fresh set of bloody fingernail marks — feminine, from the look of them — down the side of his face, but Mr. Liu did not appear to be aware of them. “Barely.” To me, John said, “Can you stand up?”

  “Of course I can stand up —”

  But I couldn’t. My hands were shaking, and I felt as if my legs had turned to liquid. If it hadn’t been for his steadying arms around my waist and shoulders, half-lifting me to one of the nearby overstuffed chairs, I’d never have made it.

  It was only then that I began to notice other things….

  The hotel desk clerk peering around the corner from his desk, looking more than a little upset over the disturbance in his lobby. Henry having come in through the veranda doors with Mr. Liu to peer down at me, and Mr. Liu pushing Henry back with a murmur, “Careful!” Henry protesting, crying, “But I want to see the Fury!” The fact that the drumming sound I thought had been the blood rushing from my brain was actually coming from outside …

  It had begun to pour heavily. The storm that had been threatening for hours had finally arrived.

  Perhaps most surprising of all, however, was the sight of Mr. Smith, the cemetery sexton, standing beneath one of the sunset paintings, with his hands on his cheeks.

  “Oh, thank heaven, she’s all right,” he said. “Is there anything I can do to be useful?”

  John set his jaw. “Yes,” he said, a curious note of resentment in his voice. “You can go. You’ve been enough trouble for one —”

  “John,” I said softly.

  I had no idea why John was so angry with the cemetery sexton, but at that particular moment, I didn’t care, because I had noticed something odd about Officer Hernandez’s body:

  It was smoking.

  The policewoman hadn’t sat up and lit a cigarette, but there was definitely steam of some kind exiting a wound I saw in the middle of her palm … exactly where she’d wrapped her hand around my diamond as she’d tried to choke me with its chain. It resembled a stream of black smoke, almost as if Officer Hernandez had been shot …

  … or her soul was departing her body.

  Except that I was fairly certain she hadn’t been shot — not by any of the people gathered in that room, anyway — and I was close enough to see that as she lay on the old-fashioned carpet, she was still breathing. So she wasn’t dead.

  Then, over the steady stream of the rain outside the veranda, I heard what sounded like a shriek, so high-pitched it was barely audible … an angry, hate-filled cry that seemed to be coming from the black vapor streaming from the woman’s hand.

  Neither smoke nor a soul, to the best of my knowledge, was capable of screaming.

  Hope heard it as well, since she tilted her head at the sound and moved, startled, out of the way of the pale apparition as it began to travel towards the wide-open French doors.

  I laid my hand on John’s arm, still around my waist as he knelt beside me, and pointed.

  “John, do you see that?” I asked. “Do you think it’s the —?”

  Instead of answering, he leaped to his feet. For a second I thought he was going to try to catch it, which made no sense to me — how can you catch pure evil, especially when it’s made of something as intangible as smoke?

  But then I saw him hurl a ball of light and energy from his fingertips — exactly as he’d done at my mom’s house — at the black thing I saw trying to escape through the doors to the back porch. Only this time, the power was directed at a single ta
rget: the Fury that had been possessing Officer Hernandez.

  There was an explosive display of sparks, and a much louder scream than the one I’d heard before — and then the voice was abruptly cut off. When I lowered the arms I’d thrown over my eyes to shield them from the brilliant burst of light, all that was left of the black vapor trail I’d seen was a dark smudge on the wood-paneled wall.

  The Fury was gone.

  I turned my disbelieving eyes to look up at John.

  He was out of breath, his chest rising and falling rapidly as if he’d run a great distance, his dark hair sticking to his forehead, his fingers curled into fists … but when his gaze met mine, I saw his face break into one of the broadest grins I’d ever seen him wear.

  I couldn’t blame him. I was fairly certain we’d just destroyed a Fury together.

  “Do it again,” Henry said, bursting into delighted applause.

  “Not tonight, please,” Mr. Smith said. He’d sagged onto the carpet, making it look as if he’d knelt there merely to lift Officer Hernandez’s wrist to take her pulse. But I could tell the fireworks display from John’s fingertips had caused him to lose some muscle control. “Keep in mind there are civilians present. Between Mike and now this, I’ve had about all the excitement I can take for one day. I’m assuming that was the Fury.” He nodded at the dark smudge on the wall.

  “That was the Fury,” John confirmed. He turned back towards me. “How did you make it leave her body?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t,” I said. “The necklace did, I think, when she touched it. Look at her hand.”

  Mr. Smith unfolded the unconscious woman’s fingers. There, in the middle of her palm, was the burn mark I’d seen. It was in the exact shape of my diamond.

  “Well, that’s it, then, Captain,” Mr. Liu said, reverentially. “After nearly two hundred years, we finally know how to get rid of them.”

  “Fascinating,” Mr. Smith murmured. “The diamond not only detects when Furies are present, it forces them out of their human hosts when put in contact with them.”

  “Right,” Henry said, looking at me. “We just let her get choked by them. Then you zap ’em, Captain.”

  “No, Henry,” John said dryly. “I don’t think that’s how we’ll do it. But a variation along those lines might do.”

  “Um, excuse me,” called a tremulous voice from the hotel’s front desk. The clerk waved nervously when we all turned to look at him. “But does that police officer need help? Like an ambulance or something? Because I could call for one. Otherwise, my boss doesn’t like it when people sleep in the lobby.”

  Mr. Smith raised his eyebrows. “What a good idea, young man,” he said to the clerk. “By all means, telephone for an ambulance immediately.”

  “Okay,” the clerk said, and his face disappeared once more around the corner.

  Officer Hernandez had begun to stir. She appeared confused, patting her belt for something, and then, not finding it, searching the ground around her.

  “What’s going on?” she asked blearily, of no one in particular. There wasn’t a hint of any of the hostility I’d heard before in her voice. She actually sounded like quite a pleasant person. When her gaze passed over me, there was no recognition in it whatsoever. “What happened?”

  Mr. Smith, his eyes widening behind the lenses of his glasses, asked, “You mean, you don’t remember?”

  “No,” Officer Hernandez said, reaching up to touch her forehead, then seeing the wound on her hand. “Did I burn myself?”

  “Yes,” Mr. Smith said gently. “I believe you did. If you wait here, Officer Hernandez, an ambulance is on its way.”

  “Oh,” she said, smiling. “Well, aren’t you sweet? Call me Deanna.”

  “We most certainly will,” he said.

  I was reminded, for some reason, of what Mr. Smith had said earlier in the day, about how when people were moved to do good by the spirit of human kindness, that was the work of the Fates, but when they did evil, it was the work of the Furies.

  “I thought you might be interested to know, Miss Oliviera,” he said, in a lower voice, so that the officer couldn’t overhear him, “that my head groundskeeper, Mike, has filed for workman’s compensation after injuring himself in the cemetery today.”

  “Really?” I widened my eyes. This was one of the options Mr. Smith had suggested Mike would take.

  “He was treated and discharged at the hospital,” Mr. Smith went on, “for a concussion after what he’s telling everyone was a fall down the back steps. I don’t think you need to have hit him quite so hard, Pierce. He’s called in sick for the rest of the week, poor man.”

  “Pardon me if I can’t summon any more pity for him than for her grandmother,” John said flatly. “Pierce, do you feel up to going?”

  I nodded. Henry, meanwhile, had found the Taser that had fallen beneath the chairs. It had gotten shut off during my mêlée with Deanna Hernandez, but it took Henry only a few seconds to figure out how to switch it back on. The blue spark brought a gigantic smile to his face.

  “Brilliant,” he said. “Can I keep it, Captain?”

  “No,” John said firmly. “You may not. Mr. Liu?”

  Mr. Liu quickly disarmed Henry, while John helped me back to my feet. I felt steadier now … especially when he slipped a hand beneath my hair and across the back of my neck as he guided me towards the door. Suddenly I felt the same waves of warmth I had when he’d soothed the place where Hope had scratched my hand. Only now that soothing warmth was spreading along my neck and radiating to the front of my throat, where the links from my necklace had pinched my skin.

  He looked down at me, his eyebrows still furrowed with worry for me. “Better?” he asked.

  “Better,” I said, summoning up a smile.

  But in spite of everything, I still heard a small voice inside my head. Hayden and Sons, Hayden and Sons, it whispered.

  “Pierce, if anything had happened to you —” He broke off, unable to meet my gaze.

  Tell him it’s no use, Officer Hernandez had said. There’s no safe place for you, not even the Underworld. We’ll always find you. I gave a little shudder.

  “It’s all right,” I said to John.

  He raised his gaze to mine. “It isn’t,” he said, as if he’d read my thoughts.

  “It’s my fault, I’m afraid.” Mr. Smith’s voice, sounding strangely hollow, startled me. I realized he’d followed us out through the veranda doors.

  I stared at him. “Your fault? How so?”

  I was surprised to see that out in the courtyard, everyone was gone. The canopy of leaves couldn’t offer protection from this sort of rain, which fell in a steady curtain from the sky. Even the band had fled, seeking shelter elsewhere … probably spurred to do so by what had occurred between their lead singer and John and his crew.

  So I was especially surprised when a familiar-sounding voice from the shadows of the back porch said, “No, I was the distraction.”

  I’d thought we were all alone, but a man I’d never seen before stepped out from the corner where he’d been huddling.

  “Patrick,” Mr. Smith said, sounding irritated. “I told you to wait in the car.”

  “I know,” the man said, sounding — and looking — strangely sheepish. He was wearing a pink short-sleeved shirt, khaki shorts, yellow socks, and a yellow bow tie, all drenched from having been caught in the rain. “But I only wanted to say again how sorry I am.” To me, he said, “Hi, we’ve never met before, but I’m Richard’s friend, Patrick Reynolds. I’m the one who took your picture, and I’m so sorry, I realize how uncool that was.”

  “Oh,” I said, realizing why his voice sounded familiar. He’d been the man I’d heard apologizing to John through the veranda doors. “Hello.”

  I remembered Mr. Smith having mentioned his partner, Patrick. The only thing I really knew about him was that he didn’t understand Mr. Smith’s fascination with the dead, and that he liked to knit. He looked younger than the cemetery sexton by abo
ut ten years or so. I wondered if he had the slightest idea what his partner was tangled up in.

  Apparently not, since his next words were, “I was just so excited, because I’ve been following your case in the paper and on the news. It’s so dull in this town, you can’t imagine. I never thought I’d actually get to see you in the flesh, so when you walked by, I couldn’t help it, even though Richard told me not to —”

  Slowly, realization dawned. Now I knew not only who’d taken the picture of me, but why John’s jaw was suddenly so dangerously set, and why there were twin fires raging in his eyes.

  Considering John’s history, it was a miracle Patrick Reynolds was simply soaking wet and not physically maimed or suffering a cardiac blockage or something. I thought that showed real progress on John’s part. Although of course I could feel his fingers tightening on the back of my neck.

  “I mean, to literally bump into Zack Oliviera’s daughter while watching the Busty Bayamos — they’re completely our favorite local band, and we just love Angelica, the lead singer” — Patrick had not stopped talking, even for a second, he was so intent on getting his apology out, even though the rain was beginning to slant past the porch roof and onto us — “I was like, well, it can’t hurt to get a photo, even though Richard was mortified, and I don’t know what came over Angelica, she’s normally —”

  “Everyone is forgiven,” John said unsmilingly. “We have to go now.”

  Mr. Smith’s friend said, looking uneasy, “Oh, my God, I’ve done it again, haven’t I? I’m sorry. Richard says I talk too much. But I think it’s all so romantic, the corporate magnate’s daughter and the —” He looked at John and smiled toothily. “Well, whatever, I just hope everything works out. Richard, did you tell them the good news?”

  Mr. Liu and Henry had followed us out, and now stood on the back porch, as well. Henry, I saw, had found my book bag, and shouldered it.