by Meg Cabot
“I believe you,” John said, in a calm voice. “What about his vehicle?”
I knew what they were talking about. Alex. Frank was defending himself, insisting he’d completed his assignment of making sure Alex got home safely.
I was certain Alex had gotten home safely, but then he’d snuck out again. Why? Why hadn’t he listened to me? Why hadn’t he listened to Kayla?
My heart was thumping as fast as a rabbit’s as we moved along the path towards the Rector mausoleum, easily visible amidst all the tombs, as it was the biggest one in the cemetery. Two stories high and made entirely of shiny taupe marble, it had its own little fence around it, a low chain like the kind at a fancy art museum, warning patrons not to touch. Beyond the chain was a grass lawn, probably one of the only ones in all of Isla Huesos. Tropical climates, my mom’s landscape architect had explained, were inhospitable to grass. The Rectors had to pay a fortune to maintain that grass.
“— however he got here, it wasn’t by driving,” Frank was saying. “I put the knife from my boot into every one of those tires —”
Alex didn’t need a car to get to the cemetery, though. My mom’s house was only a few blocks away from here, and Grandma’s house, where Alex lived, was even closer than that. He’d probably walked.
“— didn’t want to go home.” Frank’s voice drifted towards me, carried by the strong wind that was also stirring the tops of the palm trees around us, planted at periodic intervals between the tombs and the statues of weeping angels.
“What?” John’s voice was sharp.
“She didn’t want to,” Frank said. He sounded defensive. “You know what girls are like these days. They do what they want. She didn’t want to go home. She said it wasn’t late and she wanted to stay out.”
“Then where is she?” John sounded alarmed.
“I don’t know. She dropped me off here. I don’t know where she went after —”
“She dropped you off here?”
I realized they were talking about Kayla. I wasn’t too alarmed. If anyone could take care of herself, it was Kayla. Alex was the one I had to worry about. Wasn’t that what Uncle Chris had said? My eyes filled with tears as I remembered the conversation he and I had had in the driveway of my mom’s house. I was never the one he’d felt he had to worry about, he’d said.
I was supposed to have taken care of Alex, because he was the one Uncle Chris had always worried about. And now I’d let him down.
I saw the birds before I saw the mausoleum doors. They were just like the ones I’d seen in the Underworld, black ones, wheeling around high in the air, dozens of them, circling in a flight path directly above the Rector mausoleum. They were silent as death.
“Oh, God,” I said, and started to run.
John got to the doors first. They were gates, just like on his crypt. But the Rectors’ weren’t scrolled wrought iron, decorative and rusted, and kept closed by a bike chain and lock. They were thick black steel, modern and new, like doors to a prison cell, with the lock built in.
I flung myself at them, gripping them with both hands and shaking them in panic.
They didn’t budge, of course.
“It’s all right,” John said soothingly. “Pierce, it’s all right, I’ll open it.”
“How?” My voice had a hysterical edge to it. “How?”
“Stand back,” he said, and pushed me gently towards Frank, who put his hands on my shoulders and steered me aside.
Then John did something that completely astonished me … but it shouldn’t have, after everything I’d been through with him, and already seen him do. He turned around, and, just as he had done to the cemetery gates that terrible night we’d fought so badly, and he’d thrown my necklace away, he kicked those thick steel doors, causing a noise so loud, I threw my hands over my ears, and turned around worriedly to see if he’d woken anyone.
Of course he hadn’t. We were in the middle of nineteen acres of tombs. There was no one to waken … except the dead.
The gates crashed open.
John strode inside, and I followed, my pulse skittering. The mausoleum was made up of wall after wall of burial vaults, one stacked on top of the other, with shiny brass nameplates beneath each, starting, at the top, with William Rector and his wife, then their sons and their wives, then their children and grandchildren, and so on, six to a stack. The Rectors were evidently as skilled at producing offspring as they were at building profit-making businesses. As the vaults reached eye level, the dates on them became more recent, until finally came a dozen on which the nameplates were empty.
In the center of the mausoleum was an elaborately large fire pit, in which burned an eternal flame fueled by the open air … the building had no roof. A copper hood shielded the dancing flame from the elements. On top of the hood was a hideously ugly bronze statue in the modern style. The statue was of a couple, dressed in togas, wrapped in an embrace. Cupped in their hands was a piece of fruit. I couldn’t be sure, because realism did not appear to be the artist’s specialty, but it looked to me like a pomegranate.
“Good God,” Frank, who’d trailed after us, said when he saw the statue. “Rector’s even sicker than any of us thought. I’ve never wished I was blind before, like Graves, but I do now, because then I’d never have to look at that again.”
“Frank,” John said, his gaze on my face. “Be quiet.”
“But what do they do in here?” Frank wanted to know. “Have picnics with their dead relatives and admire their ugly art?”
Ignoring Frank, I stood in front of all the vaults, my fingers balled into fists. I was having trouble catching my breath. I felt as if the statuary were watching me … laughing at me. “Which one is Alex in?” I asked. “How can we tell?”
John stood at my side, helping me scan the nameplates. “He’s in an empty one.”
My heart lurched. “Of course he is.” If they’d stuffed him into a coffin with a corpse — I didn’t want to think about it. “But there are so many empty ones….”
I became distracted by the fact that Hope was pecking something on the stone floor … something that clearly wasn’t edible, because it was an unnatural shade of red, and not shaped like a poinciana blossom.
“Hope,” I said to her. “Stop that.”
Of course she didn’t. She looked up as I approached to take whatever it was away from her, then waddled out of my reach, as if annoyed with me for disturbing her meal, and began to peck elsewhere. I leaned down to examine what she’d been trying to eat.
It was a long, thin red streamer … exactly the kind that might fall from the pom-pom of someone dressed as a cheerleader, then stick to the bottom of her boyfriend’s shoe.
In front of the streamer was a vault at ground level. It had a blank nameplate.
“This one,” I said to John, pointing. “It’s this one!”
Without hesitating, he ripped open the burial vault door, even though it was locked.
Inside, there was a coffin. Why would there be a coffin in a vault with an empty nameplate?
I stood there with my heart in my throat as John and Frank rushed to pull it out. It wasn’t a homemade, four-by-eight plywood coffin, painted in the IHHS school colors. It was a real coffin, a casket, actually, made of glossy black lacquer, man-sized … and sealed airtight.
I gasped. Was this some relative of Seth’s whom his family had just buried? Maybe the nameplate hadn’t yet arrived. Had we made a mistake? Were we disturbing the final resting place of Seth Rector’s grandfather?
It was too late, though. Because when they finally dragged the coffin all the way out of the vault, Frank accidentally dropped his end. The coffin fell over and the lid came unlatched. There was a hissing sound, like something decompressing….
Oh, no, a voice inside me whispered. Oh, no, oh, no.
Then someone who’d been sitting up inside the casket, the better to lean against the lid and try to suck whatever fresh air he could from the cracks around it, landed on his back on the har
d stone floor of the mausoleum, his dark hair sticking up from his head in sweaty tufts. His eyes were closed.
It was Alex.
He was dead.
Letting out a soft cry, I fell to my knees at his side. Sharp rocks bit into the bare flesh of my knees, but I hardly noticed. Alex’s face was red and burning to the touch.
There’s no air in here, Pierce, he had said. You’ve got to come, quick….
Alex could be a pain, it was true. He’d refused to let me in about whatever it was he was trying to do — get revenge for what he perceived Mr. Rector had done to his dad — until it was far too late.
That still didn’t excuse what they’d done to him. Frank had said the Rectors were sick. But what kind of sickness would make anyone do this?
“Alex.” I grabbed his shoulders and shook them. “Alex!”
He didn’t move.
I was too late, I realized, my heart slowing down to what felt like a beat a minute. I was too late.
“Where’s my cell phone?” I asked, feeling as if I were in a dream. “We need … we need to call an ambulance.”
“Pierce,” John said. His voice was the saddest I’d ever heard it. “I’m sorry, but it’s too —”
I was too late.
“Call 9-1-1!” I shouted at him.
John shrugged, then reached into his pocket for the phone I’d made him put there. My dress had no pockets, and I hadn’t wanted to lug my bag around during a rescue mission.
Except it was no rescue. Because I was too late. Alex was dead.
I turned my attention back to Alex, pounding him on his chest. I knew CPR, of course. You can’t die and then come back thanks to someone performing CPR on you without grasping at least a rudimentary knowledge of what they’d done. I’d taken a first-aid course.
Everything I’d learned during the course fled my mind.
I leaned down to blow into Alex’s mouth, my tears falling onto his face, making new tracks in the dirt stains there. I hadn’t even realized until that moment that I was crying.
I should have been kneeling there thinking of how I was going to explain all this to Uncle Chris, and to my mother, and to my grandmother, of course (although I didn’t owe her anything, certainly not explanations).
I should have been thinking of Alex, of how unfair it was that his life had been cut off so soon, especially when he had been so unhappy for so long. He deserved better than this. This was no way for it all to end.
Instead I was thinking of how he hadn’t said he loved me back. I knew he did love me. Probably. I also knew it didn’t matter. I didn’t deserve his love, because I’d been late. And I was going to be damned — yes, damned — before I let someone else I love die because I’d been too late.
Which was when it occurred to me that I didn’t have to, because I knew someone who could make this go away, without having to count on CPR, or EMTs, or anything … someone who could make it all better with a wave of his hand.
Why hadn’t I thought of it before?
Lifting my face from Alex’s, I turned to John, surprised to find he was already kneeling next to me. He was wearing jeans, so the gravel wasn’t cutting into his knees.
“I called them,” he said, his face pale and tight in the dawn light. “They’re on their way. If we don’t want to be caught here with him, we need to go soon, Pierce.”
“No,” I said, catching his hand. I smiled at him through my tears, feeling suddenly joyful. It was going to be all right. Everything was going to be fine. “John … I had an idea. You can heal him. Like you did me, with my cut, and then my throat. You can make him come back alive, like you did the bird that day.”
He stared at me, seemingly uncomprehending. “What?”
How could he not know what I meant?
“The day I met you,” I prompted him. I reached up to wipe the tears from my cheeks. I didn’t have to cry anymore. It was all so miraculous. “Remember? It was right here in the cemetery. The bird I found the day of my grandfather’s funeral when I was seven, the one that looked so much like Hope. It was dead, and I was crying, and to make me feel better, you brought it back to life. You can do the same with Alex.” I took his hands and put them on Alex’s lifeless body, smiling up at him. “Do it. Do it now, then we can go. We can all go home.”
John left his hands where I’d placed them, but he shook his head, looking at me like I was a bit crazy. That wasn’t unusual, though. Everyone looked at me that way. I was used to it.
“Pierce,” John said, not taking his gaze off me. “I told you that day when you asked me to raise your grandfather, remember? Birds don’t have souls. Humans do. It’s not the same. I can’t do it.”
This was true, actually. I remembered his saying it now. But I wasn’t going to let a minor detail like this stand in the way of something I knew he could do. He could do anything.
“How do you know?” I asked him. “Have you ever tried?”
“As a matter of fact,” Frank said, from the wall of vaults opposite ours, against which he was leaning, “he has.”
I glanced at him, startled. “He has?”
Frank nodded, examining his cuticles. “Quite successfully. I can think of four times he’s done it at least, off the top of my head.”
John whipped his head around to lash out at Frank in a hard voice, “Frank, be quiet.” In the distance, thunder rumbled.
I glanced back at John in confusion. “Well, if you’ve done it before, why won’t you do it now, for me?” I asked. “I know you can do it.” I smiled at him confidently.
“Because it wasn’t right,” John said. His voice was gentle, but I could see the storm brewing in his eyes. He was going to fight me on this. I didn’t know why, but he was going to. “It was when I was first starting out, and I didn’t know any better. I didn’t understand the consequences.”
Consequences again. Stupid consequences.
But if it meant Alex didn’t have to die …
“What were the” — I swallowed, then smiled. I didn’t want to let him see that I had any reservations. Because I didn’t — “consequences?”
Thunder growled again, louder this time. Looking up, I saw that the birds had fled. Where had the birds gone? Only Hope remained, and she’d fluttered over to the grotesque statue and was sitting on the pomegranate.
“The consequences were not worth it,” John said firmly.
“That,” Frank said, “is a matter of opinion. I happen to be grateful I’m still alive, and I think if you asked them, the others would agree.”
I looked from Frank to John and then back again. “You mean —”
“That’s right,” Frank said. “The captain found Graves and Liu and Henry and me, dead as doornails after that October tempest. Felt bad about it, I guess, because he brought us back to life —”
“And they were doomed to spend the rest of eternity with me in the Underworld.” John’s voice was a whip, his eyes looking not unlike twin tempests themselves, they’d turned so dark and furious. “So you see, Pierce? There’s a price to pay. I can bring your cousin back, but not to life as he knew it. Let him go on to whatever is waiting for him on the other side. I’m sure he’ll be happier, and better off.”
I bit my lip. “That’s not for you to say.”
“Actually,” John said quietly. “It is.”
My eyes filled once more with tears. I couldn’t believe this was happening. I had gone from the depths of despair to the heights of hope, only to have him dash that hope the way … well, the way I’d dashed that cup of tea in his face the day I’d run from him.
“Pierce,” he said, in a voice that sounded as desperate as it did determined. “Don’t cry. I mean it. It’s not going to make a difference. I’m not changing my mind. If I had known bringing Frank and the others back to life would mean sentencing them to an eternity in the Underworld, do you think I’d have done it?”
“Why not?” I asked, letting my tears spill over. It was easy to cry. All I had to do was look at A
lex’s limp body, and the tears came effortlessly. “You were happy enough to do it to me.”
There was a beat. Then John asked cautiously, “What do you mean?”
“The consequences, John?” I let out a bitter laugh. “Persephone wasn’t doomed to stay in the Underworld because she ate a pomegranate. She was doomed to stay there because she did with Hades what we did last night. That’s what the pomegranate symbolizes, right?”
John stared, speechless. But I could tell I was right by the color that slowly started to suffuse his cheeks … and the fact that he didn’t try to contradict me.
And of course the fact that the whole thing was spelled out right in front of me by the statue Hope was sitting on. I didn’t get why the Rectors were so obsessed by the myth of Persephone that they’d put a statue of it in their mausoleum, but it was clear enough they were involved in an underworld of one kind or another.
“Don’t worry,” I said, lowering my voice because I didn’t want Frank to overhear. “I don’t blame you. You asked me if I was sure, despite the consequences. I said I was. But I thought by consequences you meant a baby, and I already knew that could never happen. I guess Mr. Smith must have told you last night that he found out the pomegranate symbolized something completely different than babies or death —”
“Pierce.” John grasped my hand. His fingers were like ice, but his voice and his gaze had an urgency that was anything but cold. “That isn’t why I did it. I love you. I’ve always loved you, because you’re good … you’re so good, you make me want to be good, too. But that’s the problem, Pierce. I’m not good. And I’ve always been afraid that when you find out the truth about me, you’d run away again —”
I sucked in my breath to tell him for the millionth time that this wasn’t true, but he cut me off, not allowing me to speak until he’d had his say.
“Then you almost died yesterday,” he went on, “and it was my fault. I wanted to show you how much I loved you, and things … things went further than I expected. But you didn’t stop me” — his silver eyes blazed, as if daring me to deny what he was saying — “even though I told you we could slow down if you wanted to.”