by Meg Cabot
“I was hoping you’d be able to tell me. Did we awaken the ancients, or create an imbalance, or some mumbo jumbo like that? That’s what Mr. Graves thinks.”
Mr. Smith shook his head before slipping his glasses back on. “I don’t know who Mr. Graves is, nor did I understand a single word you just said. Go back to where your teacher tried to kill you.”
“He was pretty specific that if I didn’t get out of the car, he’d kill everyone else inside it to get at me,” I said. “So we ran him over. Then lightning hit a tree, and it fell on him.”
Mr. Smith stared at me.
“Oh, dear,” he said. “John still hasn’t learned to control his temper, I see.”
I stared back, confused. “Why would you say that?”
He blinked at me through his spectacles. “Didn’t you tell me that when John gets angry, he causes it to thunder and lightning?”
“Yes,” I said. “He does. I mean, he did. But John wasn’t there.”
“He wasn’t?” Mr. Smith knit his gray eyebrows with concern. “Where is he?”
Tears filled my eyes once again, only this time, it wasn’t because of how touched I was by the shelter Mr. Smith was providing us — and others — from the storm.
“John’s dead,” I said, my voice breaking.
This time, I didn’t try to stop my tears, not even when I saw the look of incredulous shock — and sorrow — that spread across Mr. Smith’s face. My tears came spilling out of me as quickly and as hotly as my story. I found myself telling him everything that had happened, from our having brought Alex back to life that horrible morning in the cemetery, to the awful moment I’d seen John’s lifeless body in the waves. I left out nothing ….
Well, almost nothing. I saw no reason to let Mr. Smith know that my relationship with John had reached a more intimate level. Some things are private, after all. And I didn’t think that could have anything to do with all the unfortunate events that had been going on in the Underworld.
I did tell him other things, though, even things that might have seemed inconsequential, like Hope’s being lost. I don’t know why, except that the words Mr. Liu had spoken to me right before I’d left the Underworld kept running through my head: I really was a kite fueled by anger, with no one to hold my strings now that John was gone. I had killed a man and felt no remorse whatsoever about it.
Mr. Smith, though, was one of the most grounded, compassionate people I’d ever met … despite his somewhat morbid interest in death deities. If anyone could help figure out a way to save us — to save John, and perhaps, through saving John, save me — it was him.
He listened intently as I spoke, ignoring the muted sound of the laughter and music coming from down the hall, his expression troubled, tears glittering in his own eyes, as dark brown as the leather on which we sat. When I was finished, he lowered his hands, which he’d kept pressed to his cheeks from the time I’d said John was dead until I finished with, “And … well, then we got here. That’s it, I guess.”
To my surprise, he said none of the things an ordinary person might say, like, Oh, Pierce, I’m so sorry for your loss, or You have my deepest sympathies.
Instead, he said, his dark eyes still glittering compassionately behind the lenses of his glasses, “My dear. You’re wrong. So, so wrong.”
I stared at him. For the first time all evening, I actually felt something. What I felt was probably what Mr. Mueller must have felt when I’d rammed Kayla’s car into him.
“Wrong?” I echoed. “About what? There’s no such person as Thanatos?”
“Oh, no,” he said dismissively. “Not about that. About hope. Hope is not lost.”
I took a deep, disappointed breath.
“I told you,” I said. Why had I thought coming here was such a good idea? Alex was right. We ought to have gone straight to Uncle Chris — although, of course, Uncle Chris lived with my grandmother, so this would have been risky, considering she was possessed by a Fury. But Mr. Smith was usually so on top of things. Not anymore, I guess. “Hope is gone. I haven’t seen her since all of the ravens fell to the ground after the boats collided —”
Mr. Smith was using one of his old-school handkerchiefs to scrub at his moist eyes.
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean your bird,” he said. “Although I don’t believe she’s lost, either, at least, not forever. She’ll come back, as pets often do after the storm, when the worst is over and the sun has come out again. She knows her way home.”
I sat and stared at him. What was he talking about?
“What I meant,” he went on, after tucking the handkerchief away, “was hope. You said you feel as if all hope is lost, and that the Fates have deserted us. But I don’t believe that’s true, not for a second, any more than I believe John is dead.”
Suddenly the pleasant white walls of his library became pink-tinged. Uh-oh.
“Mr. Smith, I’m sorry, I know this is difficult for you,” I said, keeping my voice controlled with an effort. There were a number of knickknacks on his shelves, little glass ornaments shaped like boats and shells. I didn’t want to snatch up any of them and throw them. But the part of me fueled by anger felt like doing so. “Believe me, it’s difficult for me to accept, too. But I listened to John’s chest myself. There’s no heartbeat. I performed mouth-to-mouth on him. He never started breathing again. I even pressed my necklace against him, the way we did with Alex. It didn’t work. Nothing worked. Trust me, he’s dead. There wasn’t anything anyone could do —”
Mr. Smith waved his hand in front of his face, as if my words were a bothersome gnat. This didn’t help alleviate the red glow in my eyes. If anything, it intensified.
“Oh, I know. I believe his body is dead right now. But John’s spirit isn’t. Why else do you think that bolt of lightning came out of the blue and struck that tree, causing it to fall on that teacher of yours? That was pure, vintage John. He was trying to help you, in that overly dramatic way of his.”
The minute he mentioned the lightning, the red pulled back from my vision the way an ocean wave receded from a shoreline. What he was suggesting was crazy …
… crazy enough to be true.
The lightning had been an odd coincidence, considering the fact that my boyfriend had always been able to control the weather with his mind and the way he’d always showed up whenever someone was threatening me.
Except that John was dead.
“Thunder and lightning were a signature trick of John’s,” I heard myself murmur, despite the fact that I refused to allow myself to hope.
“So you told me,” Mr. Smith said, rising from his chair and going to his bookshelves. “It makes sense that he’d try to protect you in the afterlife as he did in life … whatever afterlife he’s experiencing right now, that is.”
“But,” I said. No. I wasn’t going to hope. “That’s impossible. Unless … ”
“It’s no more impossible, I should think, than anything else you’ve experienced so far, such as finding yourself in an underworld that exists beneath our world, and discovering that you, a fairly below-average student, are the co-regent of it. Now, where did I put that book?”
“You mean … ” I was starting to feel something other than anger. It felt, dangerously, like optimism. “ … you think John is around somewhere? Like in spirit form?”
“More than in spirit form,” Mr. Smith said. “I think your friend Mr. Graves is right about there being an imbalance in the Underworld. I have my suspicions about what caused it, but more important, I do believe it caused an opportunity for the death god, Thanatos, to capture John’s soul. The question is, how are we going to save him?”
14
The Guide and I into that hidden road
Now entered, to return to the bright world …
DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto XXXIV
There are other questions, of course,” Mr. Smith was saying as he stood with his back to me, scanning his floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. “And other pressing concerns. How are
we going to help all those poor souls you left behind in the Underworld? And how are we going to defeat the Furies and return the Fates, and thus restore the balance so that this fair isle doesn’t turn into a flaming ball of magma? But,” he added lightly, “I believe once we’ve located and recovered John, those other things will be a bit easier to manage. I hope so, anyway. All of the bridges are shut down due to the storm, so it’s far too late to evacuate.”
I was barely listening to him. Instead, I was glancing around the room, my mind spinning. Mr. Graves, the man of science, had been right? There was a Thanatos keeping John’s soul from reentering his body, holding him captive between life and death?
Had John really caused that lightning bolt to strike that tree and kill Mr. Mueller? If he had, that meant he’d been with me the whole time. Was he here with me now? If so, why couldn’t I feel him? All I could hear was the insistent howl of the wind outside, sucking and banging the shutters against the windows, a strange contrast to the cheerful music playing down the hall.
What if it was true, and John had become some kind of guardian angel to me? In a way, the thought was oddly comforting. But I didn’t want a guardian angel. What good would that do me? Guardian angels couldn’t hold you in their strong arms and tell you everything was going to be all right. They couldn’t eat breakfast with you, or tease you, or tell you that you looked beautiful even when your hair was piled on top of your head because you’d just washed your face and you knew you didn’t look beautiful at all.
I wanted John, the boy, not John, the angel. I wanted him whole, back the way he was, not some stupid angel ….
John? I asked with my mind, looking cautiously around the room. Are you here? If you’re here, give me a sign.
“Ah,” Mr. Smith said, after having stepped onto a small library ladder to find the tome he’d apparently been looking for. “Here it is.”
He walked over to a wide mahogany desk and opened the book to the appropriate page. I rose from my chair to take a look.
On the page before me was a photo of an ancient Greek statue. It showed a winged boy mounted on a galloping horse, swinging a sword over his head.
Well, some of the legs of the horse were galloping. The others had fallen off in an earthquake or something. So had the boy’s face, and most of his wings.
“Thanatos,” Mr. Smith said. “The Greek personification of death.”
I looked down at the photo. “He’s just a kid.”
“I suppose you could say that. The Romans did view him as a child of the dark night. It was said even the sun was afraid to shine upon him. But that kid, as you refer to him, destroyed whole armies with a single swipe of that sword. He killed without a thought to his victims. He was said to be without mercy, without repentance, and without a soul.”
“So in other words,” I said, “a typical teen boy.”
Mr. Smith frowned at me, then read aloud from the inscription beneath the photo. “Here’s what the poet Hesiod wrote in Theogony about Thanatos: ‘His spirit within him is pitiless as bronze: whomsoever of men he has once seized he holds fast. He is hateful even to the deathless gods.’”
“Because he was shut up in his room all day,” I said, “sexting and playing video games.”
Mr. Smith frowned. “They didn’t have video games in the years before Christ —”
“You know what I mean,” I said. Something about the statue bothered me. It reminded me of something or someone, but I couldn’t figure out who, especially since the form had no face. “If the gods were deathless, then how did he manage to kill John?”
Mr. Smith raised an eyebrow. “Miss Oliviera, I told you upon one of our very first meetings, John isn’t a god. He’s simply an unfortunate young man who was thrust into a position of great responsibility at a very young age —”
“How come there’s nothing about this Thanatos guy in the Hades and Persephone myth?” I interrupted. I already knew how great John was. I didn’t need to hear it.
“Because he doesn’t figure in it. He’s a minor player in Greek mythological literature, considered more a spirit than a deity. The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, believed we all have a little Thanatos within us. He called it the death drive and claimed it’s what makes us engage in risky behaviors from time to time.”
I raised an eyebrow, remembering the way John had clung to the wheel of the ill-fated ship until the last minute. “That sounds like John. So how do I get him away from this Thanatos, once I figure out who he is? I’m guessing he wasn’t Mr. Mueller, or John would already be back.”
Mr. Smith shook his head and closed the book.
“I ought to have known, given our past conversations,” he said tiredly, “that you wouldn’t understand. You can’t literally engage Death in a fight to the death for the life of your boyfriend, Pierce.”
“Whatever, I get it that this Thanatos freak is probably a metaphor,” I said, beginning to pace the room. “But in case he’s not, I’ve already killed one guy tonight. What’s to keep me from killing another?”
Mr. Smith regarded me helplessly from behind his desk. “Because that is not who you are. I understand that with your teacher, you were acting in self-defense. But the entire reason John was so drawn to you is because you are the spring to his winter. You are the water to his fire. He is the storm. You are the sun that appears after the storm.”
I stopped pacing to stare at him. “Are you purposefully trying to make me throw up?”
“Miss Oliviera, please,” Mr. Smith said, opening his arms wide as if to say, Why are you blaming me for stating the obvious? “I know that to you I must seem sometimes like the silly old man who loves to talk about death deities, but give me some credit for having lived a bit longer than you and having seen a few more things. Yes, storms are damaging, but we need them because they clear away the bracken that prevents new flowers from having a chance to grow. And of course we need the sun to shine on those new flowers that without the storm might never have had a chance to bloom.”
Tears formed again in my eyes. “Stop it.”
“Now you’re the one who’s being silly,” Mr. Smith said. “It’s good to be the storm and be able to defend yourself and others when you have to, but it’s just as good to be the sun … maybe better.”
“I’m not the sun,” I said, reaching up to wipe my tears. “Or springtime, or water, or any of those things. I’ve been told on pretty good authority that I’m a kite with no strings, fueled by anger.”
“Of course you are,” Mr. Smith said, “when John isn’t around. I believe I mentioned that he wasn’t particularly enjoyable company before you came into his life. That’s why it would be nice to get the two of you back together. You really only function well as a pair.”
“Right,” I said in a not very steady voice. “So maybe we should concentrate on figuring out what’s happening in the Underworld.”
“What’s happening in the Underworld is fairly obvious,” Mr. Smith said, peeking inside my tote. My cell phone had begun to ring. “The goal of the Furies has always been to destroy the Underworld. And now that they’ve killed John — or believe they’ve done so, anyway — and crippled the transportation of souls, the only thing that stands in the way of their goal is you. Once you’re gone, there’ll be nothing left of the Isla Huesos Underworld, and your friend Mr. Graves’s prediction will come true: Pestilence will reign here on our once fair isle.”
“So I was right,” I said. “There really is a Fury convention going on out there.” I nodded towards the shuttered windows. “Except the only activity on the agenda is killing me.”
“I would imagine so,” Mr. Smith said, reaching inside my bag. “Unless, of course, we can throw a spanner in the works.”
“What does that mean?”
“Throw a —” He heaved a sigh as he drew out my cell. “Good God, do they teach children nothing in school these days? In olden times, the only way workers in factories could get breaks was if one of them threw a tool into the ma
chinery, causing it to break down. A spanner is a type of tool. The only way we’re going to stop the Furies is if we —”
“I already know,” I said. “Kill Thanatos, bring back John, then find boats to replace the ones we’ve lost.”
“You do understand Thanatos is only a symbol of death, much in the way a white dove is a symbol of hope, or a pomegranate is a symbol for fertili —”
“Someday you and I are going to have a long talk about pomegranates, but not now.” I extended my hand, palm out, towards him. “Give me my phone.”
“Someone named Farah Endicott seems to need you quite urgently,” he said dryly, having glanced at my screen. “Apparently there is a party and you are missing it. She’s attached a very rude photo. Pardon me for having looked, but she uses a font that is extremely large, and quite a lot of what I believe your generation calls emoticons and what my generation calls an inability to conduct face-to-face conversation.”
“Yeah,” I said, taking my phone as he passed it to me. “There’s a Coffin Night party at Seth Rector’s dad’s place in Reef Key. I thought it would be canceled due to Hurricane Cassandra. I guess not.”
“Oh, no,” Mr. Smith said. He was still poking through my bag. “Master Rector’s party appears to be quite the rager, as you people call it. I won’t, of course, mention to you that it seems a bit coincidental to me that you received an invitation to his party after you dispatched a Fury, and that I’m quite certain you’re being lured into a trap so that you can be killed. You’ll have figured that out yourself.” He pulled out my copy of A History of the Isle of Bones. “I didn’t give this to you, you know,” he griped. “I only loaned it to you. It’s out of print. It’s not like you can download copies on the Internet.” He flipped through his precious book like I might have hurt it. “Did you actually read it?”
“Of course I read it,” I said, glancing up from my phone. I was looking at the photo Farah had sent. It was of her and Seth and their friends. They were all giving the camera the finger. Classy. “Well, the parts about John, anyway.” I paused, looking around nervously for signs, like flickering lights, John might be eavesdropping. “It was good,” I continued. “I promise to give it back later. And of course I know this party is a trap, I’m not stupid. And quit going through my stuff.”